sinnycool
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@ Kimo
I’ve long thought – tongue in cheek – that all the irreconcilable differences between us, all the inter-personal hostility, the family fights and all the “irrationality” has been man’s saving characteristic – up till now.
How else do we leave home and colonise crazy unlovable places, or, more to the point:
The Heaven’s Gate sect appear to have been outwardly rational people yet they died attempting to leave earth for a spaceship hidden in the tail of the Hale-Bop comet that had been sent to rescue them from the impending destruction of the planet…
If they’d have been correct they would have lived and the rest of humanity would have been destroyed.
If we all happily lived in peace in the same place we’d have been wiped out by any number of things ranging from meteor strikes through plagues and famines etc etc.
The sad part is that now when we are supposedly global citizens there is no way we can or will cooperate even if it means our destruction.
Re “Is there anyone that reads this site that actually believes humans went to the moon?”
Count me in and thanks to the other two replies.
I wonder which of the six manned Apollo landings is in question?
—
During those events I was and still am a fairly passionate and active amateur radio operator and along with many of other similarly interested hams and short wave listeners I followed with interest the US ham who listened live to Apollo I, here https://www.arrl.org/eavesdropping-on-apollo-11 and listened to his recorded clips. There was no doubt he and his gear were the real deal, it was fascinating.
I have visited the Australian site at the Parks CSIRO Observatory on several occasions, it was the actual listening post for the Apollo I when the moon was on the wrong side of the earth for the US mission control. Much of the live traffic went through that site.
There were many many people who, like me, have listened to their recordings and looked at the huge collections of data and “stuff” that arose from the Apollo missions, one example was the original ink pen chart showing Armstrong’s heart beat and blood pressure which was recorded in real time from his suti monitor was rather nice.
Again all this was the real deal, the levels of detail and complexity, the blotches and errors, the extra voices in the commentary, every tiny part added together to create an overwhelmingly non-disputable body of evidence involving hundreds of clever, credible and talented people.
It was a great time in human history to be interested and alive.
As to the level denialism on this site, it is very disheartening. All part of the sad mad patchwork called the Human Condition. It’s no wonder we’ve not been able to improve our lot since pre-history, humans are a waste of space – pun intended.
re. carbon dioxide is not a pollutant
Water cannot harm you, you cannot drown and waterboarding is a fabrication.
“Without it trees and plants would die and so would you.”
—
Can we please have less of the blatant crap masquerading as fun?
@ D Benton Smith
I’ve been reading Tom Murphy since he started posting very many years ago. If you take the trouble to look at some of his earlier work you will see he has completed a 180 degree turnaround over that time as he came to realise that the original hopes and dreams he had back then – of finding technological solutions to our major dilemmas – was simply not possible.
So many ‘Greens’ (and I was one) thought the world could be saved by screwing in a bunch of govt subsidised fluro light bulbs and using recycle bins, and so many remain fixated on continuing business as usual by driving a MuskMobile – moving along from the Prius – and charging it and running their multi-multi-kilowatt house from a dozen solar panels and a 2KWHour battery made from stuff we choose not to care about.
Technology as we know it is a large net CONSUMER of energy and every technological step we take, starting from the single copper wire telegraph line across the country which gave us a massive return on investment, to 3G, 4G and now 5G, adds further layers to the complexity onion that offer almost zero extra return on massively complex and fragile systems we completely depend on for everything including war.
There is no fallback. If it goes there is no neat downward staircase, it’s straight collapse of everything exactly as Joseph Tainter describes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
Your emotional and bitter denial of Tom Murphy is understandable when you find yourself facing what is going to be faced, same as the rest of the planet’s population.
The *real* problem is Maslow’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow’s_hierarchy_of_needs. To even spare the few minutes necessary to worry about the future of civilisation requires people to be at least five levels from the bottom. As people’s needs grow along with conflict and overpopulation and climate impact and food impact, they discount the future.
When you are physically facing no food and no shelter all you care about is now, you are willing to burn cow dung for energy, forget about coal, and do whatever is needed to survive. That is our future.
@ aspnaz
It would be much better to do a bit of homework perhaps starting with something simple like the effect of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere before working your way up to methane, or even working your way up to a polite reply.
The existence of the greenhouse effect, while not named as such, was proposed by Joseph Fourier in 1824.[6] The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838. In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated that the warming effect of the sun is greater for air with water vapour than for dry air, and the effect is even greater with carbon dioxide. She concluded that “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature…”[7][8] John Tyndall was the first to measure the infrared absorption and emission of various gases and vapors. From 1859 onwards, he showed that the effect was due to a very small proportion of the atmosphere, with the main gases having no effect, and was largely due to water vapor, though small percentages of hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide had a significant effect.[9] The effect was more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who made the first quantitative prediction of global warming due to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.[10] However, the term “greenhouse” was not used to refer to this effect by any of these scientists; the term was first used in this way by Nils Gustaf Ekholm in 1901.[11][12]
Two things that make me really think hard
1. The nature of this Nord Stream action was designed to be deliberately in Germany and Russia’s face and on the Richter scale in a relatively protected and difficult to get at position.
– a land based act on a smaller scale could surely have been easier to accomplish and with plausible deniability for Poland and the US.2. Biden has consistently telegraphed many of the grandest actions since before Russia’s invasion eg. the repeated claims that Russia would invade Ukraine. “We” almost universally thought Putin would not invade because it was felt he did not want to, it was not in Russia’s interest.
– we now know that the US knew Russia would act because it was the US that forced Russia to do it.Putting just those two things together raises the question of Biden’s telegraphy. My current thought is that it is deliberate.
– why would he be told these things when his handlers had to keep walking them back? It makes a for an extra big emphasis and they can use his dementia as a foil, what a ruse.They don’t care that he looks stupid, in the end he’s the US’s bag holder and fall guy so its part of the plan.
– what else is he telegraphing? Tactical nukes, Taiwan?
– why is he telegraphing?That’s the biggie question and the Occam answer is America is going all in and they want everybody to know that resistance is futile both domestically for the mid term elections and on the international stage.
The EU, Russia, China, everybody should give in now and suck up the Second Coming of America … Make America Great Again in the Democrat WEF(?) Image.
That Twitter link to the tallest trees needs a revision, this particular 100m eucalyptus is only a couple of hours away from where I live, though I guess the vid is presented on a genus rather than an individual tree basis.
@ Oroboros re “It’s time to start talking Death Penalty” for the ex NSW premier.
From where I sit in Australia my view is that is a very sad statement and an indictment on the frenzy whipping deliberate mis-characterisation of the Australian situation.
FWIW here is my view of Australian reality today
1. Australia is very late to the Covid party. We watched the chaos and deaths in Wuhan, then the US, Italy, Britain – and the Australian population got very frightened indeed. Then the first few cases arrived here and we had some very bad experiences with the Ruby Princess cruise ship and the first local deaths in different States.
2. The reaction of our state leaders was exactly what their population demanded – close borders, restrict travel.
3. The popularity of those state leaders has soared over time as the international scene became ever more grim and is still at record approval levels today.
4. The Premier of NSW Gladys Berejiklian – in the eyes of the majority of the Australian population – was the one who f*cked up and didn’t lock down soon enough. She let Covid loose in Australia. She then capitulated, threw in the towel and eased restrictions , trying to persuade other state leaders to open up sooner, rather like the bad kid at school trying to share the evil. The other state leaders have very openly and vocally resisted and are still resisting, even despite the prime minister withdrawing financial support in an effort to force them to do so. He’s a member of the same political party as Gladys, his electorate is in NSW and has been long accused of openly favouring her, so it’s a significant thing that his and her views are being thwarted by the other state leaders.
5. West Australia, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and Victoria are still exactly the same as NSW was: border restrictions and tight controls with the full approval of their residents and except for a small percentage of disaffected the voters approval rating of the leaders of those states is more than favourable, in WA and Tasmania it’s wildly favourable.
6. Dan Andrews premier of Victoria, despite the worlds longest lockdowns still retains immense popularity and the majority of his state’s voters blame Gladys for infecting them via several major incidents in which infected NSW workers flouted restrictions and travelled into and through Victoria.
Which takes us to the demonstrations and police violence…
Perhaps you might call it the Tyranny of the Majority but we have the situation where, as I’ve been at pains to point out, the premiers have broad majority support for the police crackdowns.
Where “laws” are disobeyed by a what is seen by the rest of Australia as a small minority regardless of the reason then it’s just as simple as not putting money in your parking meter, you have to face the consequences especially where “gatherings of people” are the very essence of the problem.
By comparison think of the objections to the Vietnam War where people like me were being conscripted and forced into uniform and sent overseas to fight an illegal and unjust American war and to give their lives. The anti-lockdowners are very removed from having to face that sort of extremity.
All law rests on force. Sadly. From arrest to handcuffs to standing in a lonely dock and submitting to a red clothed man in a wig and incarceration. The police “force” uses force and where that happens on the public streets anywhere in the world injustices and excesses are an inevitable by product of what human beings are so good at doing to each other.
In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut “So it goes”.
Clive Palmer is a dickhead. Worthless. Dross.
Gladys Berejiklian (pronounced “Bin-chicken” see ref below) is in it up to her eyeballs.
But “it” is nothing to do with money from Big Pharma, her sin of fame is to have connived with one Daryl Maguire MP with whom she had a secret affair since 2015 and funnelled money to in the form of grants and favours – there are some truly wretched tape recordings of conversations between the two.
All of that finally came to a head via an ongoing investigation by the Independent corruption watchdog ICAC, an inevitability foreseen by most many months ago.
A Bin Chicken:
Re. the Victorian Heath minister and the supposed 95% vaccinated in hospital.
As per the NSW Heath Minister video the other day, I checked and found the Victorian situation as cited in the article above is not true either.
From here
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-01/coronacheck-martin-foley-vaccination-gaffe/100504420
“Anti-vaxxers revel in slip up from Vic. Health Minister
A slip of the tongue by the Victorian Health Minister has provided fodder for anti-vax activists who have shared footage of Martin Foley wrongly suggesting that 95 per cent of hospitalised COVID-19 patients were partially or fully vaccinated.
“Of the people who were in hospital yesterday, 78 per cent were vaccinated, and 17 were partially vaccinated,” Mr Foley said during Tuesday’s COVID-19 press briefing.On Twitter, videos of Mr Foley’s statement have been viewed at least half a million times.
“So 5% are un-vaxxed? Wow,” wrote one Twitter user. “These numbers are the opposite of what we’ve [been] told will occur.”
Here is the correction:
A spokeswoman for Mr Foley confirmed to Fact Check, however, that 78 per cent of those in hospital were unvaccinated, while 17 per cent had received just one dose. That means a mere 5 per cent of hospitalised COVID-19 patients in Victoria were double-jabbed.
His incorrect statement, meanwhile, has spread globally, with a US-based conservative website reporting that the “truth [was] being ignored” and that “95 per cent of the COVID patients in Victoria hospitals are vaccinated”.
Sadly, the level of misinformation is such that the damage to credibility it causes – even on sites like this – is out of control.
Thanks guys, thanks Ilargi.
The entire world is now siloed into a giant non-overlapping Venn diagram. Different nations officially pursue different narratives. Internally each national set of ‘facts’ has fragmented with different fragments in conflict and discrediting and undermining the other and nobody reads anything outside their own sources.
Watching the speed of descent is breathtaking, what a marvellously rapid path for reasonably cohesive populations to disorder and civil collapse and what’s to stop it?
Ironically the fact checkers can’t agree whether Mark Twain said “A Lie can travel halfway around the world while the Truth Is putting on Its shoes” but Swift’s longer version says it better
Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…
It hard to think it’s not all too late.
Re. 100% of NSW hospitalisation cases were vaccinated.
To put that 100% hospitalised figure in perspective only 50% of the entire NSW population is fully vaccinated and 75% have had one dose so the claim is risible on that basis alone.
Digging deeper…
The tweet is dated 25th September and the “Breaking News” banner claims 141 new cases presumably for the previous day or at least contemporaneous with 25th.
141 is incorrect, there were in fact 1,007 new locally acquired cases on 24th Sept NSW.
Here is the actual video on 25th September of the same health officer clearly stating that the 24th daily figure was 1,007 at the start of the video near the 7 second mark.
Given the obvious intention of the author of the tweet it seems to me it’s sheer invention and designed to deliberately mislead anyone ignorant of the true situation in Australia.
As an Australian I’m mightily interested in the vaccination status of the hospitalised in this country and as a very long term reader of this blog I’m equally interesting in trying to get real figures out of the mass of misinformation.
I can’t quickly find the actual % vaxed in hospital in NSW on that date but at a guess it would be no more than 5% at the very most. When I get time I’ll see if I can come up with something better than a guess. Regardless, that tweet about 100% is utter crap.
I suppose it’s natural to turn to astrology as the next step downwards along the progression from The Guardian and NYT through Facebook and Twitter.
Is the destination chicken entrails? Do crystal balls actually come in there somewhere or is it all finally outsourced to a bunch of old ladies sitting around a Macbeth cauldron I wonder.
I had thought Matt Savignar’s descent from “Life After the Oil Crash” to “Hexagon Astrologer” online as an earner was sort of a joke but seems I was wrong.
So who we gonna believe, John Michael Greer or the next Joan Ceciel Quigley?
Ilargi’s recent featured quote from Carl Sagan was rather prescient.
Re Judge Emmet Sullivan finally discharging General Flynn.
Among Sullivan’s comments:
the pardon “does not, standing alone, render [Mr. Flynn] innocent of the alleged violation” of 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2). Schaffer, 240 F.3d at 38.
Zero Hedge comment of the day:
“I thought Americans STARTED innocent. But what do I know?”
Re. John Michael Greer
— Life of Brian, scene one. The Birth. —
MANDY COHEN: Ohhh! Who are you?
WISE MAN #1: We are three wise men.
MANDY: What?!
WISE MAN #1: We are three wise men.
MANDY: Well, what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o’clock in the morning? That doesn’t sound very wise to me.
WISE MAN #3: We are astrologers.
WISE MAN #1: We have come from the East.
WISE MAN #2: We wish to praise the infant.
WISE MAN #1: We must pay homage to him.
MANDY: Homage? You’re all drunk. It’s disgusting. Out! The lot, out!
WISE MAN #1: No–
MANDY: Bursting in here with tales about oriental fortune tellers. Come on. Out!
WISE MAN #2: No, no. We must see him.
MANDY: Go and praise someone else’s brat! Go on!
WISE MAN #2: We–
WISE MAN #1: We were led by a star.
…
MANDY: So, you’re astrologers, are you? Well, what is he then?
WISE MAN #2: Hmm?
MANDY: What star sign is he?
WISE MAN #2: Uh, Capricorn.
MANDY: Uhh, Capricorn, eh? What are they like?
WISE MAN #2: Ooh, but… he is the son of God, our Messiah.
WISE MAN #1: King of the Jews.
MANDY: And that’s Capricorn, is it?
WISE MAN #2: Uh, no, no, no. That’s just him.
MANDY: Ohh, I was going to say, ‘Otherwise, there’d be a lot of them.’
“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.”
― Aneurin Bevan
The redundant word is ‘conservative’. He was too influenced by party affiliation. ‘Politics’ alone is the current art form and it’s practiced exquisitely.
China has just destroyed America.
Are we looking at the turning point of world history?
This chart shows the country of origin of all tested COVID cases in Australia.
From here: https://www.covid19data.com.au
We have many many more Chinese visitors, immigrants and tourists than we do from the US; Chinese students at our universities are the backbone of our university income making the infection differential even more disturbing.
If iPhones were ever a barometer of anything they are now “exclusively produced in China for Chinese” with all the Chinese Apple stores open and all America’s shut. What an irony
Italy might have a problem with a sightly older population but how about its personal space habits?
“Personal Space – Why Italians Seem to Require Less of it”
Oh dear, I keep forgetting my .png uploads fail, here goes a .jpg
Edit: nope, failed again.
OK, here it is on one of my servers
The ordinary flu sure gets around.
Here’s a map of today’s flu spread in Australia, its figures derive from self-reporting individuals in the community though a fortnightly email questionnaire but clearly shows the trend aggregated in our major population centres but still spread to the most remote areas
To my mind it shows
a) how pervasive virus spreads are even before we start our flu season and in areas of Australia that are tropical or semitropical, even with decades of herd immunity and free vaccinations for large sectors of the population
b) comparing flu attack and death rates with covid confirm what we see emerging from previously below the radar uncontrolled spreads in countries that considered themselves somehow impervious to the Chinese Peril and as per Ilargi’s Italy is a Time Machine can clearly perceive our potential
c) given that our Australian political and health systems fall far short of being able to even get close to the Chinese model of containment and resourcing, together with an astounding level of denial and ineptitude and almost insane messaging from our the majority of our leaders designed to sustain our wonderful economies, much of our population is following them right into the cannon’s mouth.
Hi John, yes, a self-declared curmudgeon and cognitive dissident, he must have been one heck of an ad-man in his time. I don’t relate to his climate line but he’s a worthy read as an erudite social commentator that is for sure. 🙂
Dr D.
I reckon you’d get along really well with the Slog. He has a blog and a way with words that might appeal to you…
“I fell out of a Wuhan lab
my mother was a bat
I’m partly made of AIDS rehab
or not at all like that.
I’m either son of ’64
along with LBJ
Or mutant bio-dog of war
made by the CIA.
My deadliness is one in ten
if you are 93
or Black Death raised from way back when –
let’s have some certainty…..
for as you quiver in your beds
and shrink from every sneeze,
washing hands and taking meds
to still the knocking knees,
it’s time you worked out what I am
by giving up on theories
and screened out all the processed spam
to view the data series.
Scourge of mankind or Superflu,
grown wild or manufactured –
have I arrived to murder you
or keep the plebs distracted?”~ the Slog
Hi WES. The thing is I wasn’t being sarcastic or ironic.
I can’t see any alternate reality.
Given everyone aged between 0 and 50 years appears to have a fatality likelihood of around 0.4% max. it’s not a white flag.
Its quite clearly the best option for the vast majority of people, particularly the well off, as well as our leadership and that will increasingly become the realisation.
Those who don’t feel personally threatened into taking a dive and who have the means to take advantage of all the many brilliant economic dip buying opportunities, large and small, will do so.
That will in turn cause a rebound to happen faster than many might think as the usual FOMO bubble gradually builds a head of steam.
The answer is very obvious. The world and in particular our leadership is quickly waking up to the fact that
a) +80% don’t get it badly enough to warrant closing anything down whatsoever
b) the leaders need that 80% to shrug and get on with life ASAP because *they* are the economic engine which sustains everything including said leadership
c) the rest *need* to go to hell-home in a handcart as politely as possible with much feigned caring and relieve the world of their burden. Right now.
There really is nothing more to see.
So lets move this thing along as faaaassst as freaking possible and get it over with. Use whatever opportunities get thrown up to send the most infected to the opposing ideologies camps, withdraw economic support from naughty regimes and use ownership of capital to exploit the returning boom after the giant dip.
It’s over folks!
My nomination for The Word of the Times
triage ►
n. A process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment. Triage is used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be allocated.
n. A system used to allocate a scarce commodity, such as food, only to those capable of deriving the greatest benefit from it.Sadly from a personal point of view my dear wife and I are on the wrong side of the progressing triage along with all the rest of a rather large cohort of newly awakening disposables.
1. get off my lawn ok boomer 8% mortality liable … check
2. economic supplicant with a trending claim on financial and health services … check
3. occupying land and house while those upcoming deserve it more … check
4. waning political influence … check
5. almost universally despised as in the way and a waste of space to all the things that make the world go round like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and phone and shiny sales … check@ FinalGravity
I used to think along those lines but I got better. (with apologies to you, and Monty Python)
From ‘Burnt Norton’, TS Elliot
“Go, go, go said the bird, human kind cannot bear very much reality.”
Here is Elliot’s take on time which I’ve lovingly adopted
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”Best regards, Phil
PS. The bard helps too
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”or this, sung by a character named Fool
“What is love, ’tis not hereafter,
Present mirth, hath present laughter:
What’s to come, is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”Mine sure didn’t – but I am still dancing 🙂
I’m not sure the attached PNG spreadsheet clip made it so here is a jumbled text version
4 23 Feb 8 March 22 March 5 April 19 April 3 May 17 May 31 June 14 June
Tasmania total 1 4 16 64 256 1024 4096 16384 65536
Launceston @ 20% 0.2 0.8 3 12 51 204 819 3276 13107A trivial spreadsheet for what its worth.
I live at the other end of the universe in a ‘first world’ city in a tiny State of Australia with a population of around 540,000 people.
The illusion of prosperity papers over the fact that our state’s two major hospitals are so underfunded that our ambulances in the normal course of business are ‘ramping’ with patients unable to be admitted for hours while waiting for beds and people every now and again are dying in corridors and waiting rooms for want of treatment.
Lets suppose just one single person is currently infected in our State today and that the virus works its magic as per the South Korean experience but with really conservative figures.
Lets give R0 a value of 4 and lets say it spreads at the modest rate of R0 x 14 days, ie cases increasing at the rate of a multiplier of 4 every 14 days, then right bang in the middle of our normal flu season we have 12% of our total State population infected with coronavirus.
My nearest city has a population of 20% of the State total, bringing infections near me to 13,107
It would be helpful to see some really well thought out projection models, then again maybe not.
Hi Ilargi, I think the flu situation posted above is really interesting.
a) it shows where we are possibly headed
– the flu has been with us since before 1918 and countless millions have been spent on developing vaccines and yet look at those huge numbers for a good old “non severe” flu season
– death rate of the flu is said to be around 0.39% and thats increasing, ref https://tinyurl.com/y2pradry and that is potentially diddly squat compared to what we seem to be seeing from COVID-19
b) the flu season complicates detection and surely must sooner or later engender panic
– the flu is accompanied by a fever with a temperature of up to 41.1°C and so far temperature has been the bar below which anyone and everyone has been allowed to wander anywhere.
– even though Western populations are getting very nervous they seem content to not panic at the moment. But just wait until-if we start getting community clusters and every sniffle cough and sneeze creates fear uncertainty and doubt.
– for example (Australian) friends of ours just went on a long booked cruise albeit with misgivings. What happens if somebody on board starts complaining of a fever with all the same symptoms that can accompany infection from either virus? Would the captain opt for quarantine and lockdown with all that entails, or opt for quiet isolation and silence given that it is the flu season, and financial interests on that scale sure trump caution and the wrath of one’s owners.
c) because this is truly “novel” as well as fear inducing people’s brains respond to the situation differently from the same-old resignation that greets the flu. If a true global COVID-19 pandemic was to play out on a similar scale as the flu it would surely take a couple of years and we would be looking at what? Ttwo years of economic disruption until apathy returned?
The thing I love most about the updated Chinese figures is the unexplained increase in death count.
Occam suggests they were so rushed by trying to figure out how to rework their numbers they forgot to invent a changed diagnosis-of-death criteria. Perhaps they just forgot to tell us they did a ring-around of the local crematoriums for a head count.
Either way they have turned a shocking situation into a risible farce.
So it’s looking like a tacit agreement among nations then, to add the costs of COVID-19 on human individuals to the costs of BAU.
Looking at the rapidly growing emergence of virus and bacteria taking advantage of their golden age of host abundance means it really doesn’t matter much whether this instance was human engineered or not.
Chump change in the BAU cost tally…
The 6th great extinction plus insects – ever more destructive climate – wild fires – ocean acidification – food and water insecurity for billions – economic peril including inequality – global conflict – the rise of the surveillance state – nothing matters and anything goes democracy – loss of the rule of law – your entries go here – coronavirus.
As if a virus was ever going to get in the way of Human Progress!
There are 3 notions going round in my head that I’ve always marked as rather clever but it’s finally dawning on me they were not in fact prescient – they have been our really-truly-reality for quite some time now.
Mr Kunstler:
1. The Long Emergency
2. This is exactly what you get in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters.Mr Carlin:
3. It’s a Big Club, and You Ain’t in It.Apologies Ilargi your writing is filled with truisms as is Dmitri but my poor brain won’t summon them up.
Phil
Almost forgot to post this screen dump from the free Flightradar24 app showing the usual jolly old air traffic floating about our skies this very morning.
Hi Bosco, I can see you waving down there!
They have a nice website too as many would be aware:
To quote Ilargi
“The big lockdown has just begun. Because once you start it, you can’t go back until you can prove that everything is safe. And that will in all likelihood take a long time, months. When will absolutely everybody have faith that everything is safe? When nobody falls ill anymore, when nobody can infect other people anymore.”
That is a hugely significant concept, thank you for it.
From the moment this started I’ve been troubled by the fact that Xi and Co were willing to shut China down.
I’ve sat in boardrooms and weighed existential business decisions and there is always somebody, a partner or fellow director, even in my small businesses who has had sufficient mental scope to ask that sort of question.
There is no doubt in my mind that question was asked and considered as part of the giant shitstorm they were going to unleash by starting down the road to shuttering China.
The only conclusion I can draw is that THEY KNEW even way back then WITHOUT ANY DOUBT that alternative was worse – and that thought is rather frightening.
Chris Martenson’s entry on Wikipedia as been removed:
I find that really really amazing. And equally distressing. And equally disturbing.
I ask myself why I (and we) are wringing our hands about the things above that we perennially stress about?
Gaius Cassius Longinus, Marcus Junius Brutus, Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus and over thirty other Senators of the Roman Republic got together and assassinated Julius Caesar.
Are we not sitting here full of animation and angst fretting over a bunch of people – no different to them – in the hope of saving civilisation and fixing the planet? I mean, WTF.
Half of me says Hey, why are we fretting over the finer points of capitalism and democracy fiddling while Rome is about to burn? Surely, looking at China we should be all out supporting the CIA and the FBI and rooting for the US Military Industrial Establishment, crossing our fingers that they can capture for us the oil fields of Syria. Who wants to become a vassal of the Chinese Borg? Not me! Go for it and save us whatever it takes. USA USA USA.
The other half of me says we are so stuffed why bother. Our politicians are the fleas on the collar of the Gatekeeper in Kafka’s Trial, being entreated by us to gain entry.
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The moving finger writes and having writ really does move on quickly so I’m cheating by posting a variant of what I posted there in the spirit of Ilargi’s new enlarged consciousness mode.
From the “Things” post of November 8 2019.
“Humans may owe their place as Earth’s dominating species to their ability to share and cooperate with each other”
That’s just fine at the tribal level but at the global level it would be easier to argue that humans more likely owe their survival to uncooperative diversity.
That is our ‘dispersal mechanism’ that causes us to be driven – not just by the force of arms or pressure of competition for resources but because of our inability to cooperate and our ideological differences (for want of a better word) – to even the toughest places on earth to survive where we form specialised subsets of humanity.
The size of these subsets ranges from big, eg. Australian aboriginals or Eskimo people amazingly adapted to their environments, to the really tiny.
The most profound example for me is the Heaven’s Gate sect. Outwardly normal yet conceiving that the earth was to be destroyed and they were to be saved by an interstellar space craft following the Hale-Bopp comet, they willingly killed themselves in order to pass up to the space craft.
The point being no matter what change or catastrophe has befallen our planet in the past somewhere there has been a bunch of humans ready, prepared, willing and at least partly pre adapted to best suit the new arrangements.
That’s what we’ve evolved to and how we’ve dodge famines and pestilence and wars and meteors and climate change, that is our inheritance and that is what causes us to quarrel and hold differing and seemingly irrational beliefs. Whether we call it wokesterism or trumpianism it’s true name is diversity.
Ironically that’s also why this civilisation won’t survive our current global predicament – we are incapable of cooperating at that level. So the vast majority, as always, will perish, but living somewhere right now are those whose descendants will be equipped in unguessable ways to survive the next bottle neck.
Just as in 1945 at the end of a world war while the planet lay in ruins, who would have conceived that the first man to walk on the moon was already a fifteen year old boy.
