Self-Assessment

On Monday of this week, I had a conversation with a client about the normal stuff we talk about on a regular basis. Of course, the panic was a topic, as every business is figuring out what they need to do to keep the doors open in the panic. This person is generally sober minded and skeptical about most things. He is one of those guys, who can get wound up over little things, but those little things are stupid things. Otherwise, he is not the sort to mindlessly join the herd in the latest fads.

Anyway, I just assumed he was as skeptical as I was about the panic, so I said something along the lines of this being madness. To my surprise, I got a lot of push-back about how this is super serious. He did the old “my wife knows a doctor at some hospital and she said 70% of people will get this.” It is the Ferris Bueller gambit, in which a mythological expert several steps removed from the person, is the most reliable source of information on the planet about the subject.

Of course, I made the mistake I often point out in politics and that is I countered his claim with actual facts that anyone can look up. I pointed out that there are eight billion people on the planet. I told him more people have died from suicide in China than from this plague and China is the epicenter. My client listened, but it was quite clear he was on the side of strangers he reads on-line. Those people are much more convincing to him, because of something called abductive reasoning.

Abductive reasoning is where you start with an observation or set of observations and then you find the simplest and most likely, or what feels like the most likely, explanation for the observations. Greg Johnson talked about this in his review of Ben Novak’s Hitler & Abductive Logic. In this case, my client sees the panic and the outlandish actions of government officials and thinks, “What could be causing this?” The best answer, the one that is the simplest, is that the virus is the Plague of Justinian.

Later in the week, I had an e-mail exchange with someone, who is most certainly on this side of the great divide. The e-mail was about the cancellation of this year’s American Renaissance and other dissident events due to the panic. I once again assumed he was on the sober minded side of this issue, so I freely called it a panic. What I got was the old line about “If we can save just one life.” In this case, he thought staying home for a couple of weeks was a perfectly reasonable measure.

The mistake I was making here was in not talking to someone where they are rather than where I would like them to be. That is, this person is a non-technical person working in a non-essential part of the economy. He will get paid to stay home for two weeks, so this is a nice unexpected vacation. He also has kids, so he feels he has to be extra cautious, as people literally count on him for their existence. He’s never going to respond to facts and reason on this issue. He’s being justifiably selfish.

Both of these examples are useful in thinking about politics. The whole point of politics is to persuade people. Being right is a nice side benefit, if you are into that sort of thing, but it is rarely an essential element. People, even smart people, respond to emotional appeals and moral appeals before appeals to reason. Critically, only left-wing lunatics put politics ahead of their personal safety or the well-being of their family. “For the children” is a cliché because it was highly effective.

In this case, after the panic has subsided and we are evaluating the wreckage, most of the people who supported these measures will be right there with extreme solutions to remedy the fallout. The curve flatteners will be demanding a New Deal to restore the economy and boost the stock market. Many may even howl about the foolishness of destroying the global economy to save a few extra people this year. People are funny that way. They forgive and forget their errors first.

It will be tempting to remind these people that they were warned about the trade-offs, but supported the panic anyway. In six months, a lot of curve flatteners are going to be complaining about the downstream consequences to this. Just as facts and reason are of no use in this panic, they will be of no use in the aftermath. It is a lesson dissident need to take from this current crisis and put to use in the next. Like animals, people must be led, exploiting their naturally tendencies, not their reason.

That’s the hard part of politics for the sorts of people that naturally find themselves on this side of the great divide. The bigots and anti-Semites, of course, end up over here because they have nowhere else to go, but most people are led here, because this is where the facts led them. It is the rejection of emotional appeals and herd thinking that opened their eyes to alternative explanations for observable reality. It’s asking a lot to then resort to emotional appeals in order to do politics.

That said, it is not impossible. Midweek I had a chat with another client and this subject naturally came up. This person is a self-actualizing beautiful person. Having been bitten twice earlier, I was prepared this time. I mentioned that I was worried that about how the lock-down would keep the tens of millions of diabetics from getting their insulin. This person then told me their mother was on insulin. We chatted a bit about how shutting down the economy would stop all sorts of essential items.

I could tell his sense of well-being shifted on a dime. He went from being comfortable with the lock-down to suddenly being worried it would cause him real harm. The number of insulin users is less ten million. The number is less than half that, but we all know someone that takes the needle. We can feel that without thinking about it. The ten million number is meaningless. What resonates is the one, the one person we know, who is dependent upon insulin to remain on this side of the grass.

Ultimately, this is the age-old lesson of politics. Politicians are trained to personalize issues as best they can, because that resonates with people. The town hall debate is really just a form of the AA meeting. The politician is the counselor, leading the participant in telling their story. The politician provides affirmation and encourages the groups to share in that affirmation. This is the ideal environment for the relatable sociopath, which is why democracy loves the town hall style debate.

For dissidents, there will be loads of open doors in the coming months, as the public comes to terms with what has been wrought. Suddenly, there are going to be a whole lot of people looking for the simplest and most likely explanation for what they see happening around them. The normal political construct is not going to be enough to explain it. That means there is an opportunity to provide a personal and reasonable sounding answer that emotionally connects with them.


For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!


340 thoughts on “Self-Assessment

  1. The biggest red pill I’ve observed and one that brings it down to a very personal level, similar to the diabetic, is the anger and confusion you see among the elites when suddenly their kids, despite impeccable credential can’t get into the colleges of their choice or have trouble finding jobs because blue chip employers have standing orders to hire “vibrant” candidates first. And in the latter case, when their competent kids do manage to shoehorn into employment–they find themselves doing their jobs + the jobs of the un-fireable vibrant hires.

  2. What’s not being discussed with lockdown in Europe is who’s going to harvest produce this season? In the same way the US has seasonal Mexican workers, we have Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Albanians, etc. Now with the borders shut, our farmers are faced with a complete lack of manual labor to harvest the crops.

    Trucks at the Polish borer are backed up 40-km with 18-20 hour waiting time to cross. Even if the trucks can cross borders, empty trucks without food are less than helpful.

  3. @ Z Man
    “The bigots and anti-Semites, of course, end up over here because they have nowhere else to go, ”

    Yes, it’s odd, isn’t it, how people are just born, or maybe become, anti-semitic for no particular reason and then, searching in vain for a place to go, join the dissident right. They’re losers just like all the bigots who end up over here.

  4. Talk about a false set up. Yes zman, those of us who have been pounding the table about this since january are just fooled by anecdotes and hysteria or just so emotional about it. The way this article is set up is so ridiculous. Again, for one who thinks highly of his own intellect perhaps some real reflection is due.

    Now, even i am questioning these measures. But you frankly can get bent by suggesting that anyone on this side of the argument hasnt thought this through very carefully and probably is relying on a lot more facts than you know. Who is rhe ignorant one here? Who is the hysterical one? Perhaps some actual self reflection is in order instead of just attacking those you disagree with, which is what youve done here.

  5. I know I’m a jerk for this, but it turns out Christian conservative commentator Mark Tapscott’s son is the proud possessor of an Asian virtue-signal adoptee. Only he went David French one better and got a defective one. Apparently the kid has a genetic disorder and needs regular blood transfusions, and the Tapscotts are just fine with burdening everyone else to tout their special virtue. They’re worried that due to the coronavirus blood donations are down and the tyke might not be able to get her transfusion.

    So if there is a blood shortage, who do you prioritize — the person who needs a life-saving one-time transfusion, or the little vampire who’s going to be suckling off the supply for the rest of her life?

    ETA: The kid needs a transfusion every three weeks. A transfusion is, on the very, very low end, more than $1500 — easily more than twice that. Suppose the Tapscotts are springing for that more than $25k per year out of their own pockets? Did anyone ask the citizenry how they felt about being on the hook for that before the kid was brought into the country?

    • Vizzini – I’ll happily join you in jerkdom. That’s precisely the sort of thing that I mentioned earlier that drives me batty. Stop the whole world because some people are extra special. Except they’re not, and hell no I would not. Way back, before we were insane, even during the days of mass immigration via Ellis Island, they held people there and/or sent them back if they failed a health test. Now the only reason to keep out anyone is if they’re a notsee.

  6. just got in from the salt mines on the west coast. this includes spinning wrenches in midrise and low-rise buildings in LA while still holding a union card that means something as far as pay and benefits. I’ve avoided talking with the few other members that still talk with me up until today. same old story. “you buying gold?” no. “you buying stocks?” no (too hard you have to be right twice) “good thing orange man bad is taking the bull by the horns” sure…
    if we get killed at work they send our wives 40,000 (before tax man),price of a life in my world. I know guys who have motorcycles that cost more than that. “what are you going to do with your chi-chang money?” not getting a check as far as I can see. and so on. talked to the boss everyday this week, never a mention about a virus. we have work to do. work we like doing. and we don’t live check to check so no need to freak out.
    on the other hand, they were going on and on on the radio about the fact uber driver had to sleep in their cars that are full of virus germs from passengers because many gig workers are HOUSELESS. and that SOME (not MOST @ 75% sounds like a bunch more than SOME) of the kids relied on the school system to eat 2 or even 3 of their meals daily. all this with the normalcy of talk of the weather. so I’m not sure this “situation” is going to change much. I do hope the zman is right and it nudges some folk this way a bit. sounded like the same old shit to me.

  7. To your point on the post carnage deflection from culpability, the globalist moral betters crowd will simply shift back to their Climate Change doomsdayduumb. That is if Greta survives the V.

  8. When you live in a town where the Jews come in, buy up everything not nailed down with dirty money, sue everybody, jack up the taxes and fuck the natives, get back to me on “anti semetism.

  9. One of the big ones people are waking up to is just how bad China is, and just how precarious our position was after 30-odd years of unrelenting globalism. A close second is the importance of borders and nations. This little dust up is a watershed moment.

    The disease itself is going to roll through in pretty short order. Far fewer lives will be lost. As I’ve read here many times the number one job of government is to protect its citizens. Quite frankly, that is happening. Who cares if it’s overblown? That only makes the achievement that much better.

    If I had told y’all 6 months ago that a national emergency would erupt that would fully discredit globalism, destroy the tattered remnants of China’s hegemonic goals, create national agreement on closing the borders, discredit government rules and regulations which very clearly have been put in place at the detriment of the people (and which are being torn down), and that the government would be sending direct aid to Main Street citizens, I would have been called insane.

    Yet here we are.

    How much more personal can you get than that the good things done saved your grandmother’s life, and the bad things being torn down are what put her in that situation to begin with?

    if you’re an accelerationist, this is what good acceleration (vs total anarchical collapse) looks like.

    We can’t persuade the suicidal maniacs who are trying to wipe out our country. But that means 75% of the country CAN be won.

  10. When I speak to normies they are all shit scared
    Electric jew has said last night that all are going to die
    That is why they are hoarding toilet paper
    My love for humanity is on its record low falling down faster than dow jones

    • while the very idea that earth flatteners oh pardon did I say earth I meant curve will come back to their senses once plague is over is a very doubtful one
      They are going always be right the curve flatteners, that is the very essence of their being, being always right

      “But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is one of knowing whether two and two do make four”
      ― Albert Camus, The Plague

  11. People are led to (what are referred to as) bigotry and antisemitism by facts. You, Zman, are both – according to popular definition. Your attempts to separate yourself from people with whom you are in basic agreement always jump out at me and stand in stark relief to the rest of the piece, which is always rational.
    Other than that, a fantastic column, as always.

  12. Went out today to buy some food and toilet paper (only 2 rolls left)
    Three stores, could not find single one
    Toilet paper hoarders are the lowest life that earth has ever seen and poor earth has seen many
    This looks more and more like
    Life During War Time

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER0vQssXUrg

  13. This was a thought-provoking entry, even for those of us who (at least partially) disagree with your panic diagnosis.

  14. So we are going to crash the economy, throw a lot of people out of work, destroy a lot of small businesses.
    Not like the stress will cause a lot of suicides, stress related heart attacks and strokes, and opoid or some other addiction…
    Would we leave things alone and deal with only those at risk (e.g. elderly COPD) if “IT WOULD SAVE EVEN ONE LIFE?”

    The economic dislocation is likely to kill more than the virus itself.

  15. It’s on. The magic number is new cases. Last weekend it was 500/day in the US.

    Yesterday it was almost 3000. That’s a third of the total cases to that point, with 2000 reported today thus far.

    Obviously, more testing is being done, but most of the testing so far seems to be on people with a high pre-test probability (Beyes theorem at work). The drive-thru testing being touted all seems to come from one place as every photo I’ve seen was the same two portly women.

    The growth is proven exponential at this point.

    The hotel I’m staying in offers free USA Today. I’ve been very impressed with it. They do full-page articles on things, even things that aren’t named COVID-19. They have different people writing on the same topic, not necessarily point-counterpoint style but certainly not top-down editorializing.

    There is a graph today on the front page. Starts from each country’s tenth case and overlaps the curves. We look to easily double total cases this week, probably in more like three days. This puts us parallel to and tracking Spain and Italy pretty darn close.

    Shit’s gonna get real, as they say.

    I’m been too busy to post. Will try to update you from the front lines. Im seeing patients in my full kit.

    Haven’t worn this stuff since sleeping through Scud alerts during Desert Storm.

    Then, one landed two miles away from us. This one is much closer than that.

  16. If we can say we saved (and say it with a straight face)….random number…7,654,321 lives and change that many, or more votes for bad orange man to dementia man – then it will have been worth it. Special bonus feature is that anyone who wore a white uniform, surgical pants, or came within 100 yards of a hospital, get to be – as Zman commented already – ‘a hero and victim in full public view. Every hospital is now the set of The Hunger Games’. Extra special bonus feature, wreckage of the economy destroys lives of lots of male WASP’s.

  17. Rest easy, fellow Americans. When they open the courts again, the legal profession will be here to pour salt in every grievance and gas-can every smoldering resentment.

    Last Man Clown World couldn’t have a more appropriate bunch of pallbearers than our Last Responders.

    Get some where you can and put it to better use than the banksters and swamp lords.

  18. What catches my attention today is how many old geezers and bitties are shaming the Spring breakers down in Floriduhh for having fun. God forbid these people have fun during this “crisis” and flaunt their healthy bodies in front of decaying old boomers. They may even fornicate without needing 15 Viagras. Shame! Shame!

    • The problem is that if they catch the disease, they spread it—albeit, they may feel little effect of the virus themselves. On the other hand, I refuse to ask folk to sacrifice for me. I’m kind of Randian in that way.

  19. Watching the financial channels over the last few days, you need a heart of stone not to laugh like a supervillain. Our plan to take over the world is ahead of schedule and Bad Gaia did most of the work.

    Don’t light any tiki torches just yet but this is the kind of thing we were talking about recently re: how the USSR fell.

    It’s not accurate to call a pandemic a Black Swarn – it’s hardly an unknown risk. It’s just one we’ve chosen to ignore. Think ostrich, not swan. But like the sudden deflation of Russia’s Commie Bubble, it’s still something few planned for, even among the dissidents whose raison d’etre was to pop that bubble.

    This situation also shows how diversifying our groups and strategies makes you less fragile. Current Week, muh prepper-separatists are topping the leader board. When the electoral chaos hits in six months, the work-the-system memers & poli-geeks may get some licks in.

    With apologies to Adam Smith and Rowdy Roddy Piper, there is a great deal of ass to kick in a nation and Shlomo’s running out of bubble-gum.

    Start wherever you are with whatever you’ve got to fight with. We’ll meet in Weimerica’s Berlin, wherever that ends up, however long it takes. For now, focus on the opportunities Bad Gaia is handing you and your mannerbund and run with them.

  20. At risk of duplication (I think I got caught in the spam filters), one can have great fun with the “Agree and Amplify” tactic. Tell your hysterical normie interlocutor that the government isn’t doing *nearly* enough. Get creative with it — an army-enforced curfew, quarantine camps, etc. Get them nodding happily along — the goal is to get them supporting total, indefinite martial law — and then say “yeah, I sure wish **President Trump** would do all that. He’d have it all straightened out by 2023, 2024 tops.”

  21. Whenever I hear the phrase “If it saves only xxx lives” the German word
    Backfeifengesicht springs to mind. A couple of decades ago I was in conversation with a Civil Engineer about a pretty shitty bit of new road, he said that the alternative was too expensive then took me through what the alternative was and where the (not obvious, to me at least) costs were. I asked what “TOO” expensive was. The working rule then was $300k in additional expenses had to save at least one expected death per year. There are, naturally, lots of databases with fatalities associated with gradients, curves, lane widths etc.not commonly known for some reason.
    So that’s the value of a life.

    The German means “A face in search of a Fist” The current Premier owner of one in the US is Mitch McConnell.

  22. Thanks for calling attention to Novak’s excellent book and Greg’s review thereof to your readers. If I may, I might suggest that in your presentation you make Abduction seem like simply the fallacy of Appeal to Emotion; some commenting here certainly think so. Abduction is rather (with apologies to Karl Popper) the logic of scientific discovery, as well as medical diagnosis and Sherlock Holmes’ “deductions”.

    “Abductive reasoning is where you start with an observation or set of observations and then you find the simplest and most likely, or what feels like the most likely, explanation for the observations”. True, but the process does not stop there, one then seeks evidence to confirm it, or not. An abductor would not dismiss your “actual facts that anyone can look up” unless they had, in fact, considered them already. What if the “strangers online” include The World’s Leading Epidemiologist?

    Abduction supplements reason with emotion and imagination, it does not replace reason with emotion.

    Combining the last two examples, consider an episode of House (i.e. “Holmes”): a mystery presents itself, and over the course of an hour of screen time various trial solutions are proposed AND tested AND all rejected until one finally works, Usually House wins (like a casino) not because he’s read more journal articles or has a higher IQ, but because of his genius, which Aristotle defines as the ability to see connections.

    Because abduction calls on non-rational powers, it can have an “uncanny” effect, and this is why “conspiracy theorists” hold onto their ideas despite lack of evidence, or counter evidence, or because they hallucinate their own evidence; it appears to them like a divine revelation, not to be tested or questioned. The people in your examples may be such cases.

    I’m not sure any of your examples involve abduction. They seem to assume that you, of course, have all the facts, and your interlocutor is simply guided by emotion. Most people are, of course, and you are right to suggest (as you have before) that that needs to be taken into account, especially what you call “justified selfishness.”

    Allow me to perform an abduction, and suggest an alternate picture: you are Holmes’ antagonist, Inspector LeStrade, a trained professional in command of all the “facts” on the scene; chuckling good-naturedly as the amateur “consulting detective” Holmes looks around, spins a wild yarn out of his “imagination” and departs, seeking another shot of the needle.

  23. Forget the diabetics, they get to die with dignity. What about the gym bros who can’t get their weekly testosterone shot? Bitch tits and suicide. Sad way to go.

  24. Last night I listened to Z’s podcast from March 13, titled “Pandemic”. There was a difference in tone and content between that podcast and his March 18th column titled “It’s Just the Flu Bro”.

    During a segment of the podcast from 29:54 to 31:40~, he out-does our politicians in emphasizing the risk of contracting Coronavirus in public spaces.

    Z: “Hotels, restaurants–you know, that’s a thing you really shouldn’t do. If you’re actually a prepared person…you’re not going to go eat at a restaurant. Because guess what, you’re inadvertently interacting with a lot of different people. HUNDREDS of different people…it’s a petri dish in there…”

    Fast forward 5 days and Z gives us: “The government is willy-nilly telling businesses to shut down.”

    I don’t point this out as “gotcha” nit-picking against our Zbro. But his change of tone was a bit jarring. Something changed his view in that 5 days. Or he simply chose to emphasize one aspect of the current situation over another.

    Probably just his instinctual distrust of our rulers burst out. And his inclination to think long term-big picture in dramatic fashion.

    • I won’t speak for him but I know from my own perspective it’s “don’t be stupid”. For instance, I thought some of the early precautions taken in Ohio (longer spring break for schools, etc) were good since they were relatively benign. However, the wholesale shuttering of the food and entertainment sector smells of desperation. Yes, I’d agree that going to restaurants is a bad idea, but you know who doesn’t care? The white-haired crowd who doesn’t cook, the exact people who shouldn’t go out to eat. Solution to the idiocy: shut everything down. F’ that.

    • There is some zigging and zagging going on, a lot of it has to do with leaning against the “prevailing wisdom” of the moment. We also have a tight set of numbers from the Corona Cruise, and 20%\1 to 2% of those seem to be the numbers, which wasn’t available then. I know my response has evolved. I am washing my hands long and often, and somewhat segregating myself from people and public places. But I am not wearing a mask or going around scared of my own shadow. I figure I will get exposed, but it will not take me out. That’s my take.

      • I’m totally resigned to exposure – frankly I’d volunteer for it so long as we have reasonable expectations of acquired immunity to the active strain(s).

  25. No matter how this falls out, here’s the opportunity for us to exploit:

    Globalization caused this (where ‘this’ is either plague or economic distress, or both).

    If we didn’t open our borders..
    If we didn’t depend on foreign supply chains…

    You get the idea.

  26. I got some math.
    The crisis will continue until a plucky little country ‘miraculously’ comes up with a very profitable vaccine.

    We’ll need a new shot every year.
    Available at your CVS or Walgreen’s.

  27. I have fun with the trick the “Game” / PUA guys call “Agree and Amplify.” I say that what we’re doing battle COVID-19 isn’t nearly enough. We should go to total lockdown, mandatory testing, national curfew, roll the tanks down Main Street, quarantine all suspected infected in FEMA camps, call off all elections, etc. They start enthusiastically nodding along, and then I say “Yeah, I sure hope PRESIDENT TRUMP does all that. That might get it all under control by 2023.” The look on their faces is priceless.

  28. Z Man;
    I’d propose that one not-so-obvious factor in the hysteria is the actual possibility, probability even, that we really *could* do something to make it all go away fast. I say this because I remember Polio as a boy, pre-vaccine. Had a playmate end up in an iron lung, another with leg braces, etc.

    I recall that there was no hysteria then because there was, so far as anybody knew, nothing that anybody could do about it. Polio just showed up every summer. Municipal pools were closed and some parents kept their kids inside if there was a local outbreak. But that was about it.

    When it appeared, the Saulk Polio Vaccine was seen then as a literal miracle. And it was. We evil Boomers (and you-all too) suddenly got to grow up un-crippled and un-paralyzed. Give’s me a chill of gratitude to think of it, even now. Wow, just wow, in the really good sense of the usage.

    Now, we just assume that we’re entitled to a 100% effective flu vaccine every fall. And I’m that way too, most of the time. These unreal expectations are really due to a high class problem that’s sadly morphed into a contributing factor to the present hysteria, I’d say.

    And I’m gladly accepting ‘OK Boomer’ for celebrating the end of Polio, aka Infantile Paralysis, as it was also known at the time.

    • Most likely, we’ll have a vaccine in a year, as we have one for SARS and this new virus is very similar. That means the same techniques developed to create the SARS vaccine can be used in this case. If our leaders simply levels with people like in the days of polio, we could mitigate this as much as possible and still have food on the shelves.

      Sadly, the America that beat polio is being whipped handily by Chinese Flu.

      • Similar graphs are made for gun violence. Was sloping negative way before draconian laws passed. We see this deception often with graphs of climate as well. Select a period in time and claim what follows is caused by CC—ignore prior trend and voile, proof.

      • I notice that site seems to be going for the Guinness World Record for most logical fallacies packed into a single page.

  29. Call me simple minded but there is one thing I don’t understand. For example, we have a pro sports team where I live. One of the players has just tested positive for the virus. How can that be? Who did he come into contact with and where? How did that basketball player test positive? Where did he go and who did he come into contact with? Is there that many Chinese from Wuhan that left to travel just after it started? How did it get to Iran? Did some Chinese from Wuhan travel there? I don’t think any of these questions have been answered, at least I haven’t heard these questions. Makes on wonder…

    • The rich don’t live like you and I.

      Pro sports stars aren’t the actual “rich” (in the global elite sense) despite their wealth. They’re mostly the rich’s intriguing mascots. The rich travel all over the world and thy either take their mascots with them or the sufficiently rich mascots do their own world traveling.

      A notable amount of the transmission vector for this stuff is elite globalist jetsetter types.

      So, maybe the player himself hasn’t been overseas lately, but I wager the team owner has, and so have the sorts of people he invites to cocktail parties where he shows off his mascots.

  30. In case you missed it, 500 people in Italy died today. That’s 500 people. IN. ONE. DAY.

    That’s like all the employees at Reddit in San Francisco dropping dead at the same time. Now imagine the public response if that actually happened.

    At first when I saw “500 dead in one day” I thought they were talking about a shooting in a Detroit Walmart over toilet paper.

    Don’t judge me.

    • 500 a day, with a population of 61 million of mostly lingering 90 years olds breathing out of one nostril.

    • Under ideal conditions, 2,000 people die every day in Italy. Often more. Imagine five Reddit offices dying and no one noticing.

      • Something like 130 people commit suicide every day in the US. When they all do it by themselves, nobody notices. When they get together and make a big Kool-Aid party out of it, we call it “Jonestown.”

        People are very vulnerable to large, contextless numbers.

    • Right, that still does not compete with the 1000 that die from the seasonal flu per day or the 3200 that die from tuberculosis per day or the 2400 that die from Hep B per day or the 2200 that die from pneumonia per day (probably mostly old folks) or the 2000 odd people that die from AIDS/HIV per day. I get that those are worldwide numbers but that’s what this coronavirus is competing with.

  31. As an anti-Semite who used to donate to Magen David Adom (Israeli Red Cross), I’m glad to know we didn’t come to our conclusions based on facts or reason- that we are brainwashed, entirely incapable of reason.

    Still, this blog is focused on the future, not the past. Point taken.

    The past takes far too long to explain, “in not talking to someone where they are rather than where I would like them to be.” Because, people do tend to forget their errors.

    • (PS- sorry we’re cranky, spent all nite in a line in a snowstorm, didn’t sleep much last nite or the nite before)

  32. How many young, or middle aged white men have died from opioid overdoses, caused at least semi-purposely by the Jewish Sackler, the Mexican cartels and China pumping in fentanyl?

    This is a true national emergency that has been going on 15 years. Over 500,000 white people are dead. Mainly non boomers. Trump is quietly improving on the issue.

    This is the real national emergency.

  33. The week before this hit, I remarked to my wife that by next week (This past Sunday) we’d have to shop armed. She kinda laughed. I shopped armed Friday, in Texas. Now Ive been prepping since January so it was this was less shopping and more temperature taking. People have lost their minds. I saw this in Baghdad in 2003 after we dissolved the military and life was already cheap over there so it may take some time. I’m not worried about the virus. I’m in good shape, my wife is a crossfit competitor, I’m armed and trained and have enough supplies…I’m worried about everybody else.

    We bought and completely remodeled a house in our town. The vibrants who owned it prior had destroyed the place. Our neighborhood is now mostly remodeled and white as is the case city wide. The town fathers allowed a certain number of mexicans to come in and build out the town and are now pushing them out. Our only issue is that the last section 8 apartment complex lies tucked away across the street from us. We have a huge fence, large dogs and cameras but we know if things go south, that’s where our issues will come from.

    Somebody is tanking our economy. I can’t reconcile the limited number of cases and deaths with the share amount of cash that is being lost on a minute by minute basis. We’re trying to support all the small businesses we normally frequent in our small Texas town…a town that is built on vacation income. Bars/Restaurants – two rivers and a large amusement park. I’m not so sure this is whole thing is as organic as it seems.

    Anyway….Z and everybody stay healthy, I need the sanity check.

  34. Here are the actual numbers from the hospital I work at, as of this morning.

    Updates:
    • We received 5 COVID test results came back today; 3 negative and 2 positive.
    Total tests sent: 73
    Positive: 3
    Negative: 60
    Pending: 10 (8 sent today)

    This is a major west coast VA medical center. One of the biggest and busiest in the country. All procedures and appointments other than emergencies are on hold for now. That may be the reason for the low positive #s or it may also be that it’s not as bad as we’re being led to believe. I guess we’ll know in a week or 2.

    • I’m not sure who or why they decide to test someone but I assume it is patients with actual flu type symptoms.

      • Doctor said on the radio that they first test for flu, which takes minutes in house. If negative, then COVID-19, but the result takes up to three days, so they are admitted as presumptive Corona virus victims. Therefore the numbers are always fluctuating.

      • That’s very interesting. Keep us updated. Hard facts are not easy to come by these days.

  35. Yesterday we laid off 45 people from our restaurant bakery operation which ground to a halt despite being in a city without a single confirmed case and no one dead as far as I know. We don’t have any debt so we’ll likely see another day without the banks taking everything in the meantime. But, as Z implies above, this guy’s view based on real immediate experience is our mid-wit leaders are crashing the economy into a depression to save against an unknown that probably can’t be stopped. The actions are guaranteeing a lot (double) mayhem.

  36. Hyperventilating can be fun. It gets the heart-rate up, causes the face to flush, and even stimulates a dopamine rush. People who like movies and Broadway plays are really into this.

  37. Wouldn’t it be convenient if we had a major re-occurrence of Corona-chan in the fall, just before the election.

    Justinian’s Plague had re-occurrences for 200 years; some might find that useful.

    • Politically, this far exceeds just the 2020 elections although they are a part. The Cloud People are going for all the marbles. The more I think this through, it becomes obvious they are intentionally ditching globalism. Good there, but revenge is being extracted since they have to give up their religion.

      • You offer Brandon Smith’s arguments. He has been banging his drum for years, but he is not necessarily wrong about any of it. What sounds like crazy talk from him seems to evolve into the things we come to live in, over time.

  38. The infighting among the hard right on this issue has been pathtic. This issue has exposed so many targets among the globalists and whole anti-white cabal, and we’re still friendly-firing at each other. Shakin’ me ‘ead.

    • I think it’s explained by Z-man…emotion trumping reason and thoughtful action. The bottom line is the DR is composed of human beings.

      I believe Exile put it best yesterday, some disagreements are best left to another day. Focus on the big picture. This crisis will subside and Sailor, Cochran and others will still be on or side and useful.

  39. This is Propaganda 101, but our side needs to take that class.

    The truth is on our side, but that’s not enough. The truth has a force of its own, but the other side’s wishful thinking has a force of its own.

    We have to personalize, narrativize, and religionize our thing. We have to become “propagandists for truth”–strange to say–to counter the propagandists for lies on the other side.

    • Yep, don’t let your virtues be used against you. We must learn the language of subtle duplicity to promote our side. Yep, sounds harsh—and a few years ago I’d argue for the high road. But a few years ago, I was a loser (of the argument) but didn’t know why. Today I know why and am willing to change tactics.

      If you have better suggestions, please share.

    • I am glad you see the point. Long ago as a dumb-assed tween I thought THE TRUTH would win out in the long run. Ha!

      Reality is that almost everything you believe is based on lies, distortion, misunderstanding, and delusion. Even the gold-standard “germ theory of disease” is not completely true; at least not as most understand it.

      The Z-Dude wrote an essay a while ago and asked “what if you are wrong?” What if you don’t catch the flu but already have it and the damn bugs are just waiting for your immune system to allow them to proliferate? What if we need a lot of sunshine to generate vitamin D?

      They treated people in outdoor hospitals with sunshine and fresh air in 1918. It worked to a large degree. Why? And why stay inside in recycled air now?

      What if the medical establishment is wrong about a lot of things?

      • The name “Semmelweis” has been recently mentioned. You are correct to be a skeptic. Science (and medicine should be science) done correctly will use the scientific method and thus produce results reasonably close to reality. 🙂 On the other hand, even educated men (Doctors) and such can have their herd beliefs. It took the Good Dr. Semmelweis’s ideas decades to be adopted, and this in the 19th century, when science should have been well-established. In conclusion, may I say that I wash my hands of the whole affair? 😀

  40. Given the size and scope of the economic interventions on the table, it’s clear that Bernie dropped out because he already won. It’s a Bernie world around the corner. Our purchasing power will ultimately be berning. A lot is being exposed right now. So called “libertarians” who pretended to be for freedom of association, then spring out of the closet as germaphobes who want vast quarantine powers. So called “conservatives” proposing stock market interventions by the government because “it’s not really a free market, if it only was we wouldn’t have to do this.” Suddenly, all over the political spectrum, the kimonos are opening in the Kabuki theater. It’s not pretty.

  41. One thing that will be lost on history to this is that the economy, in its last few quarters, was a tinderbox of bd debt waiting on a match. That match may very well have been that Jew war we were pushing in Iran. But orange man blinked. Thank God that deep down, he’s a coward. So it turned out to be a virus instead. This was never going to be a normal bear market, but the lockdowns have accelerated the damage. If Orange Man can use this virus as a fig leaf for all the brewing problems. “We had a beautiful economy…the best economy….but the virus…” He may actually have a shot at re-election. He would have to play it perfectly, and know that the Alzheimers patient will stumble badly, forgetting Klobuchar’s name when he’s asked about his own VP pick, etc….

    • Yes. I think this was orchestrated by the banksters and the Deep State, at least in part, to camouflage the impending meltdown. This is far larger than just the 2020 election. Biden obviously is just packaging and easily could be supplanted at the drop of the dime. It’s his puppetmasters we need to watch. Hell, what was coming likely was so bad this may actually have mitigated an even worse panic. Regardless, the world’s wealth has been reduced greatly for everyone other than the Cloud People, of course.

      • I don’t think it was “orchestrated” per se. I think it’s the logical conclusion of a system corrupted by special interests (foreign and domestic) that is basically legalized bribery. Too bad we can’t elect anyone willing to stop it.

    • vmax, trolling, yesterday: when Iran sent the Saudi hijackers in 911

      Epic. Epic troll. I almost got kicked out of Belmont Club for pointing out that Saudi Arabia, at that time, was the #1 state sponsor of terror, not Iran (the Narrative was being revised yet again).

      People do indeed forget their errors.
      The Narrative masters all.

      The Zman is absolutely right that today’s Crashers will tell us they were right all along, as I’m listening to a bit of FISAgate right now.

  42. I dunno. If the mortality from Chinese Flu is 2% and if 70% of everyone can be expected to get it, we’re looking at 4.5 million dead. That’s on top of the normal 2.8 million we get in a regular year.

    Take the mortality up to 4% and the number climbs to almost 9 million.

    That’s a lotta stiffs.

    The Civil War killed around 2% of everyone in the country and created profound social changes. 9 million dead is around 2.8% of our population. If that is what we are looking at, then maybe this isn’t an over-reaction.

    • Modern medicine created vast amounts of grey haired people shuffling around The Villages (not saying that’s bad). Fire goes to the dry timber. Italy is a graffiti covered conversant home staffed by muslims.

    • BTP. The dead in the Civil War were the cream of American youth. As in countries like Russia in WWII (1920 cohort, 80% males died), the effects can be profound for society.

      Now with the present Chinese Flu (I like that term) we have most of the 1-2% mortality in the 60 and above range. A previous statistic I heard a week or so ago was that no one has died here under 50 yo. In Italy, it has been reported that the median age of folks dying is 80 yo. My actuary table has my predicted age of death (median) at 84. In short, our passing (cost/benefit) has to be considered in relation to the nation as a whole.

      9M dead retirees is not the same as 9M dead in general of the population. So far no one has challenged those facts, while there is much to challenge your assumption that death rates will approach 4%. Your posting is simply more FUD, as it is extrapolations of the worse case, without evidence and without taking into balance the current cost of preventing such—which may also entail future misery and death.

      If we are talking over-reaction, how is a known plunging of society into a depression and then borrowing trillions of dollars to mitigate such rash actions a prudent precaution against unknown societal change you write about—nor for that matter do not describe.

      • Compsci – I agree that the social calculus should decrease the weight of deaths among those who don’t have much life left. And we don’t really know the mortality rate in the population, overall. Italy’s rate is considerably higher, but that may well be affected by the selection of who gets the virus.

        So, considerable unknowns – I agree. And like someone said here, it’s possible for the situation to be serious and also to overreact to it – I agree.

        Still, the Chinese lost their fracking minds over this thing. Does it seem logical to you that they reacted that way because they were at risk of losing 2% of their retirees? What sort of mortality rate among the economically viable would concern you enough to risk the entire economy to stop it?

        • BTP. The numbers I speak of are also replicated in more normal countries like Japan, GB, and Korea. I will never believe anything the Chinese say or do. So in that, you are correct and I won’t dispute you. And I won’t say such numbers won’t change a bit—we have variables across countries such as population age, general heath, medical facilities, and yes, genetics.

          As to the Chinese government, I believe they rely heavily on an omnipotent appearance to the people and will book no challenge to such. Their first response is always to deny they may be fallible and corrupt and screwed the pooch. Sometimes I applaud their actions. Nothing makes me smile more that taking corrupt officials and businessmen to the nearest stadium and putting bullet in their head. ;-).

          However, as you sagely note, they screwed up big time here. But I would also note, that is to the better for us when this blows over—if it draws us away from them and globalism.

    • That’s exactly Zman’s point. Your alarmist assumptions about morbidity and mortality rates are unfounded and unsupported by historical probabilities. GIGO.

    • Sure, 9 million dead. Where are the bodies? That’s extremely unlikely.

      Also, the dead, such as they are, are mostly old and/or sick people who probably would have died sooner rather than later without corona. The Civil War, on the other hand, resulted in a lot of deaths of young men. Certainly, the deaths of millions of old and sick people would create social change but probably much less than caused by Civil War deaths.

      • One can read a bit regarding the Black Plague in Europe. The depopulation was a 100+ year boon for them. Nothing in my present knowledge says a few million less boomers would be catastrophic. That sounds harsh and it is, but I can say so as I am in that cohort. That’s just the way it is. Life has a finite value, we are just arguing how much.

    • BTP the mortality rockets up at 80+; risk to under-80’s is night vs. day. Significantly more dangerous than the flu for that cohort. If you’re <60 and don't have respiratory problems, you're very likely OK, 60-80 less so, 80+ stay worried.

      We have around 8 million people 80+, around 28 million 60-79. Assuming 70% of them get infected, that's about 25 million.

      Worst-case-ish, I'm using Karlin's "Russian Roulette" fatality analogy for elderly infected, 1 in 6 fatality rate. About 4 million dead above the age of 60-ish. Not sure if he's considered a nutjob or solid on this particular question but he strikes me as fairly skeptical on most things.

      The impact on a nation losing an unusual number of people far past child-bearing age is much less than losing fighting-age men in their prime.

      The Zoomer jihadis hailing the Boomer Remover aren't entirely wrong.

      • Exile. Well I won’t go as far as hailing anyone’s death. But when you run a nation, you put your “for-the-national-good” hat on. And that hat tells me a few million Boomers have less national impact than a few million workers in their prime contribution years. And if that’s the case, screwing those workers with loss of jobs and income and an increased debt burden makes me want to carefully evaluate recent government actions.

        So you are spot on here.

  43. Panic or not, Greg Johnson notes that there are some salutary results to be had out of the current coronavirus conundrum (his column can be found at https://www.counter-currents.com/2020/03/how-coronavirus-will-change-the-world/). Among them: “Even if the Globalvirus stops today, we are looking at a world in which nationalism is stronger and the anti-nationalist forces of globalism, democracy, liberalism, conservatism, and the diversity cult are weaker.” And then, “After Globalvirus, charges of racism will no longer be moral kill shots.” So there’s that, assuming he’s even partially accurate.

    • The most obvious sanity check once we begin to return to normalcy is whether the unrestrained mass flows of people continue between China and the West. So much of this could have been avoided by simply shutting down flights to China in late January. There needs to be more sensitive circuit breakers to lock out traffic from epicenters of disease. Limit the downside quickly.
      If we don’t get at least new protocols for insta- flight restrictions from regions known for Zoonosis and outbreaks, this will have been all for naught. Don’t let politicians create the equivalent of a repeat of 2002 when they began increasing immigration from terrorist-rich N. Africa & the Middle East.

    • Johnson’s piece lost me with
      “Because businessmen care only about profit”

      What a dipshit.

  44. Z writes that “in the coming months, as the public comes to terms with what has been wrought,” “suddenly, there are going to be a whole lot of people looking for the simplest and most likely explanation for what they see happening around them.”

    I tried to list those explanations and came up short. Then I read Greg J’s latest piece, where he criticized Z, and got his list:

    Globalism is bad, Global “free trade” is bad
    Democracy is bad
    Liberalism is bad, Conservatism is bad
    Diversity, multiculturalism, open borders, & anti-racism are bad

    Are these the lessons and if so, what are we advocating?

    • Self-reliance, community reliance, trust and work with small and local, because you have the power to accept or reject at that close-in level.

    • I think the Zman is cautioning us to not expect too much. The Revolution isn’t here, and the DOTR is beyond fantasy.

      I know I’m getting pissy with him over the JQ, but he’s trying to steer a wide circle around things that drive away much-needed allies…

      Because, man, are we gonna need them.

  45. Rationalization is not reason. Reason is that rare commodity that is dependent upon a well tested external feedback loop, experimentation & observation, for which no one can posit a better explanation. Reason, which includes all scientific theories, has a half-life.

    Rationalization has more to do with group cohesion and group identity than it does with how nature, which includes all of human civilization, actually works.

    The need for group cohesion is what drove the increase in human intelligence during Pleistocene and the Holocene. Cold Winter Theory and Adaptability to change are too far removed from immediate group needs. Primitive man was short tempered and extremely violent. Anything out of the ordinary would fragment a group and lead to a violent outbreak. A small tribe would continually butcher itself, often its most physically capable members. This shattering of group cohesion would leave the group even more vulnerable to the elements and the continually changing environment as they wandered through the northern latitudes following the herds of red tailed deer and woolly mammoths.

    Intelligence developed as a way of enhancing group cooperation. It gave humans a way to come up with an idea that could appeal to most of their immediate members and unify them in action without slaughtering half the tribe… at least until the next crisis. More successful rationalized strategies became ritualized and slowly developed into culture. These group cohesive pressures probably always exist even in lower herd animals but it ratcheted up when humans wandered into the temperate zone. This ability to build cohesive human communities through being rational was a long slow process. If your rational explanation paralleled nature you had a better chance of surviving if it didn’t your tribe was done for. It took us at least 40,000 years to manage to build up enough rational culture to live in small urban pockets. Another 10,000 to build large sustainable cities. Ironically, domestication required not only rationalizing but the killing off of those who couldn’t adapt to the evolving domestic needs of the group. The genetic distance in this conflict was close.
    The migrants now flooding our civilization are the very kinds of people our ancestors found necessary to kill off. Except the genetic distance is now much larger which makes them even more disruptive.

    Rationalization is largely emotional because it is herd mentality. If rationalization were reason civilizations would only fall due to natural catastrophe. The closer to nature a form of rationalization is the more likely it is to survive and prosper. But as the group dynamic changes rapidly – almost always due to external and foreign influences – that cohesion begins to fragment. Eons to build, a century or two to destroy. If the fragmentation goes on long enough then the groups either separate or devolve back into the chaotic primitive violence of their early ancestors. All elements of our past are always with us. They simply manifest themselves into other forms.

    Rationalization which gave us civilization is group emotion tempered by a workable intelligence. Modern civilization has taken this biologically dependent cohesiveness of a people and set it back to an earlier epoch. A period when the group dynamic was too volatile to build and sustain a closely packed high-functioning civilization. Rationalization is now in the service of sub-group survival: tribal identity parallels nature, ideological identity doesn’t. One of these isn’t going to ride out and survive the coming convulsions.

  46. Was thinking about the Derbyshire quote and it dawned on me . That stuff about wanting to be well-liked by other people tends to go to the wayside after you’ve seen real death and crisis. Reality has a way of cutting through all the emotional nonsense. Death is death.

    We are very fortunate to live in these modern times. It’s allowed us to ignore reality.

    When death smiles at a man all a man can do is smile back

  47. Pretty sensible piece on the Wuhan flu from Angelo Codevilla…

    “Our 21st-century “developed” world, which so touts its own rationality, is now engaged in the historically unprecedented attempt to shut down most social and economic intercourse for the sake of mitigating the effects of a virus the lethality of which is far more like recent strands of the flu than that of the plague. One reason we do not know how many persons have been infected by this virus is that most infections in most people are so mild as to be unnoticed. That is also why we do not know the virus’s true lethality. Of course it is especially lethal to the old and otherwise infirm. What isn’t?

    “Hence, we really have no basis for believing that, left unchecked or dealt with as just another round of seasonal respiratory diseases, the Coronavirus would devastate modern life. After all, having no cure for it any more than 17th century Europeans had for the plague, the only real weapons we have against it are the same that served long ago: heightened hygiene, social distancing, quarantine and self-quarantine. It is not clear what good the rest of the restrictions do.“

    https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/18/fear-makes-power/

  48. >Of course, I made the mistake I often point out in politics and that is I countered his claim with actual facts that anyone can look up. I pointed out that there are eight billion people on the planet. I told him more people have died from suicide in China than from this plague and China is the epicenter. My client listened, but it was quite clear he was on the side of strangers he reads on-line. Those people are much more convincing to him, because of something called abductive reasoning.

    —————————-

    1st order thinking is predicting the outcome. the 2nd order is predicting how people will react., sorta like te Keynesian beauty contest concept. We may very well be right about the outcome of this virus not being that bad, but we failed to see how this would spiral out of control into a panic, business closures, and massive market losses. The past 2 weeks has been a total SHTF situation.

  49. Prior to this catastrophe we already had the opiod epidemic and “deaths from despair”. The decline in real wages and the inability to form and maintain marriages have left so many with very little to live for.

    There will be more white suicides from a 2nd Great Depression than there will be from direct coronavirus deaths.

    • Yes. I initially thought the Deep State had not done a cost/benefit analysis, and then realized, duh, yes they did.

  50. Here in NYC, most people think this scale of shutdown is highly suspicious. Everyone is in awe of the scope of it, and no one around me has personal contact with someone who has been hospitalized for this. This scale of forced paralysis can last about 2 weeks, 4 weeks max, in a city this size before the fault lines start cracking.
    In my daily routine, black people seem to be the most openly suspicious of this entire event, at least on the ground here, but a lot of people are murmuring.
    Of course, there are plenty of true believers, but the immediacy and size of this shutdown has stunned people here, and that includes plenty of people making well into six figures who are now out of a job.
    There are several thousand restaurants in NYC, and at least 2/3 just laid of the bulk of their staffs. Bars and lounges are in total shutdown.
    I estimate at least 100,000 people are not collecting a paycheck right now, and that’s a low end estimate. That can’t last for any extended period of time before the city would have a far worse problem than a virus on it’s hands.
    Our elites have taken a serious gamble, and I don’t trust them to make the right decision.
    I firmly believe there are several other layers underneath the mainstream narrative to what is happening, and while the virus is real, I believe they intend on instituting a major economic reset, and locking a radical extension of emergency powers into place when the smoke clears, as they did on 9/11, only this time far more so.
    Most average people here are very uneasy with what’s going on, and there’s no hiding it.

    • I’ve noticed the same. Otherwise government-compliant, nice liberal white types realize this isn’t adding up. That almost never happens. The nascent police state cannot be ignored.

    • Wow! I am unsure how much the ruling classes are playing a multidimensional chess power grab or they are simply incompetent.

    • Maybe some shadowy cabal took a look at the conditions that foster Communist overthrow and wrote up the playbook du jour? I’m guessing, much like Muellergate, that the virus was intended to be much more impactful than it turned out to be… but the script was already in motion, so they are editing on the fly.

  51. All I know is that as of right now, the news is still reporting stories on one or two people testing positive in various areas, which feels like is no where near the amount of cases they thought we’d be at by now.

    The number of positive tests / hospitalizations better increase in number quickly or people are going to get antsy sitting around in the homes in quarentine for these relatively small numbers.

    • Our Smart People have busted the world economy over a disease that, to date, has killed world wide, about 6,000 people. Meanwhile, back in the real world.

      CDC estimates that so far this season there have been at least 36 million flu illnesses, 370,000 hospitalizations and 22,000 deaths from flu.

      That’s in the United States alone, friends. Mostly pneumonia and old folks (God bless them). Worldwide at least ten times that number.

      https://wmbriggs.com/post/29830/

      There had better be a really good explanation pretty damned quick for going nuts over the Coronavirus.

    • Not only has the massive spike they predicted not arrived, every news story from every outlet uses the word “soaring” to describe the latest cases or deaths.
      It’s always “soaring” or “spiking”, no matter how insignificant.
      Every new case is treated as if 10,000 people just died.
      It really is panic politics all day, every day.
      I was already disgusted by the mainstream media before this, but they have taken the hysteria to an entirely different level, and have half the population wound up so tight that the spring could burst at any moment.

      • From the globalist perspective, if the deaths and human suffering don’t materialize but our economy gets shut down and the government changes over next year, it is still a job well done and a victory for them. Remember what matters in their shabby little hearts.

        • I gave that an upvote because it is well-reasoned, but no longer think this is to maintain globalism. The Cloud People intentionally are ditching globalism and will use a planned economy to reduce the masses to serfdom, or further to serfdom. Yet your larger point is correct. Mission accomplished.

    • Younger urban dwellers have started to ignore the restrictions, and suddenly we get breathless reports about how even they are in danger, maybe more in danger than anyone else!!!

      • Young people love to live “dangerous” lives, especially when it is easy to get away with it and then be able to brag about it.

  52. Instead of using their imagination to imagine the worst case scenario they can muster of the virus, they should be using it to imagine the worst case scenario of economic collapse.
    I heard on Tucker that in the 50s there was a major Chinese flu that spread around the world and killed quite a few Americans. But because there was no panic, I had never heard of the pandemic he was talking about. Despite the panic already happening, the press seem to all be in competition with each other to see who can print the most hysterical headlines.
    The people who lie their asses off about us and who spread anti-white hysteria are doing everything they can to maximize the damage. Whether or not it is on purpose is besides the point. They need to be round up, arrested and tried as traitors.

    • Women didn’t enter the workforce in serious numbers until the 1980s. That workforce including the press.

  53. One thing to consider as the result of Winnie the Flu: how smart was it to off shore production of essential medical supplies and medicines to China and India. This outbreak could be the beginning of the end for the globalization experiment.

    • In a rational society, this would mean the end of globalization, but we are not rational, and if we were, we wouldn’t have off shored the bulk of our manufacturing to China in the first place.
      As 9/11 saw an increase in immigration, I am sure we will see more, not less, globalization and outsourcing, because that’s how our leaders role.
      I hope I’m wrong.

    • I think this is the end of globalization.

      It won’t be long before boycotts of Chinese-made products become part of the virtue signaling. Good.

      • Jack – I’d like to hope you’re right but I think you’re placing far too much trust in even semi-rationality. Anyone looking at the facts logically would see the connection between globalization and Chinese corruption and American insufficiency and economic disruption. You’d be lucky if 5% of the people truly made those connections. I’m not one to gently lead people to reality; perhaps others can do so.

        • I think this, 3, because it certainly seems the Cloud People themselves have decided to ditch globalism and move toward a planned economy to impose feudalism. This is not being done because the masses suddenly have become rational.

      • A quip at Kunstler:

        “wondering whether those supply-chains from China will come back. It’s no different than the cargo cults of the Solomon Islanders circa 1947”

    • Ray;
      It already just happened, I think. During the Cold War (CW) there used to be pretty strict ‘made in America’ requirements for *any* govt. procurement contract, particularly any DoD related. After the CW ended, the the globalist owned US Chamber of Commerce got to work eliminating or at least diluting these rules by buying Congressmen and Representatives to create industry-specific carveouts. After a while, the many, many carveouts made enforcing ‘made in America’ impossible.

      I just read that one of P. Trumps executive orders snapped those rules back into place (why he invoked the Defense Production Act). If true, the there’s been a giant positive step taken in the shadows. The much maligned J Kushner is reported to have said that P Trump was using the media circus to keep the cat ladies focused on superficial scandals while important stuff was being done out of sight. One of those things you *hope* is true.

      • If true, chalk it up to someone actually looking out for all of us. So rare in politics these days.

    • Let’s hope. Everyone will at some point need medicine and/or hospitalization. It’s optimal to have drugs developed and produced here stay here. Along with every other industry that’s been outsourced.

      • The Chinese know that money and access talk. They know how to work the clouds. The clouds will ditch the Chinese only if they think Xi’s crew is refusing the clouds their gibs, or Xi has no more gibs to offer.

  54. It’s true but hard to square “(w)hat I got was the old line about “(i)f we can save just one life”’ with “(m)any may even howl about the foolishness of destroying the global economy to save a few extra people this year.” It does show a complete lack of rationality in the political realm. We can exploit this by appealing to emotions, as you pointed out, and the facts as they emerge will be devastating to the old order and bolster our arguments.

    I still expect a slide into totalitarianism from all this, but there is an outside chance this can be turned our way.

  55. The strangest part of all of this is the sudden China-shilling by some of the louder voices on the dissident right. I guess if you think you can score some points against the neocons by praising the Chinese, it is worth it.

  56. Line I’m using that people seem to like: “We need to end all immigration until this coronavirus thing is over.”

    • I like it. It makes me wonder how things would be different if the bug was from the south, say Guatemala.

      I can’t got to my strip mall gym to stay healthy, but I can go to a filthy grocery store full of bare-handed produce all day long.

      The Mexican border is still wide open while Canadian is shut down. At least in this time of solidarity we can pretend we have a southern border.

  57. Our society seems more neurotic than it used to be, or perhaps, it’s just that the neurotic elements in society have more influence than in the past.

    Draw your own inferences as to what constitutes “neurotic”.

    • The average person has very little in the way of actual useful knowledge and believes she can look up anything she needs to know on the internet. The hive mind problem Zman mentions is another big part of it. We are seeing some signs of the worst impulses being checked. Cuomo shut De Blasio down when he floated the idea of a shelter in place order in New York City. This can’t continue for months on end.

  58. From the beginning the propaganda machine linked Trump to carelessness and thereby solidified half of America siding with the panic party. How does ZMan keep clients in such an atmosphere? I got my Millennial kids talked off of the ledge no problem. Meanwhile, my Nor Cal in-laws pass emails touting the latest medical analysis with “Brilliant” added on.

    Then I send Toilet Paper memes ridiculing their beloved devotion to the party line and don’t get so much as a laugh. Yesterday’s essay here is beyond their vision. I even got banned from American Partisan and Raconteur Report for telling them how they are fueling their enemy’s agenda. I stopped believing that they were intelligent blogs.

    • People get set on what they think, and then become impervious to different ideas or contrary evidence. These days, people are taught to do that. Feelz and all…

  59. There will also be a lot of unprovable “just imagine how bad it would have been” if we didn’t overreact assertions. It’s like the guy whose favorite player has a horrible game proclaiming his team would have lost by more if not for him.

    • It’s starting now. Fauci basically has been saying how much better overreaction will be. I’m also getting the vibe that the low morbidity rates are starting to evoke an “oh shit” reaction among the sincere panicmongers.

      • The justification for the panic isn’t falsifiable. If a lot of people die, it’s not going to be that shutting everything down didn’t work. It will be that we didn’t try hard enough and it would have been even worse if we didn’t shut everything down. If there are few deaths, it won’t be that the shutdown was unnecessary. It will be “Yay. It worked.”

      • The awkwardness will continue as the quant-media split screen the death count next to the economic numbers to all the couch-locked proles.

        If the deaths don’t penetrate into the six-degrees very soon, as all the shit-scale charts clearly show they will, the emotional beast switches teams.

        It will be “give me my goddamn job back right f’n now.”

        They need “my girlfriend’s nanna died of the corona (at 88 in a care facility)” to keep the “laid off and can’t make rent” at bay.

        The question is (T). There is a lot of stock in 15 days but most closures extend to 30.

        So it seems they have baked in enough time to for bodies to stack up in aggregate (on their shit scale), but will it be enough to keep the emo scales tipped in the shutdown camp?

        And if so, well that probably means a tighter, longer lockdown is mandated and thats the end of the economy as we know it.

        IOW the premise is the number of acceptable deaths is Zero, relative to economic strife of “X”. This either breaks soon or it goes downhill toward full retard.

        Walking back an acceptable number of deaths from zero and/or an acceptable rate of spread based on the “successful” soft lockdown is putting toothpaste back into the tube. Not impossible, but messy. Much will be lost even then.

        A lot of focus on the front end of the curve, but the reality is that the curve – regardless of slope, goes along the X axis for a long time.

        At some point the requirement to be “ok” with some number and imputed rate of death is required to get off the train.

        At which time we can have our “mission accomplished” moment and ignore the subsequent deaths.

        Or we end up with actual data that says “oh shit”. Factoring in orange man bad and the suicide cult of the left and media, i am not sure sure they will give DJT his five minutes in a flight-suit.

        The problem is that no matter how steep the curve, the death count is only going to get further away from zero. People will have to reconcile some number of dead nannas with food and shelter for their kids.

        So when the media politik start talking about the 20 million lives we all saved by going broke, we know the charade is over and we can get in line for bread.

        The reorganization of everything motive has my antennae twitching as the real objective in all this.

  60. Well, I hope you’re right that it’s overhyped. They seem to be having trouble in Italy, but not so much in other places. Can you explain, in detail, what “flattening the curve” means? What the logic is there, and why you conclude that it’s wrong?

    While you’re absolutely right that our rulers are evil filth and the crisis won’t go to waste, that doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not it’s a real crisis. Nor does the dependence of diabetics on a functioning supply chain.

    It’s better to lose a chunk of your population than to lose your whole country to foreign rulers: That’s why peaceful nations have armies. But for me sitting here today, that’s not the choice I personally get to make.

    • It’s putting the virus on the payment plan instead of getting it over with. Months, maybe years of dealing with it, long after the pandemic has, or should have, subsided.

        • Letting the virus run its course would produce a steep but short curve. Everybody who’s going to die will die in a short period of time.

          Flattening the curve spreads that out over a longer period of time. The idea is to not overwhelm the health system, which in theory will save lives and prevent infection.

          Flattening the curve assumes the collateral damage, including unnecessary death, from prolonged economic disruption will be less than the damage from letting the virus run its course.

          The payment plan, in other words.

          • You flunked.

            If you’re bright enough to understand (and you certainly sound like you are), you’ve got no excuse not to. People not bright enough are a lost cause.

            I urge you to understand the issues here.

        • I hear China is starting up again. Not sure how reliable that is. If true, they must not be worried about reinfection.

          Besides, I’m not sure you can get reinfected by a virus. Or get sick anyhow. If so, vaccination would be pointless. Your immune system remembers how to defeat the virus. It would have to be constantly mutating, like the flu, and we would just have to live with it. Or it could be latent like herpes, but again, that’s something we would have to live with.

          Then again, that’s at the limit of what I know about viruses, so I could be wrong.

          And it’s important to remember there’s only about 10000 deaths worldwide (supposedly).

        • Are we sure of reinfection. Last I heard, there were at least two strains identified. Could one be caught after the other?

    • Can you explain, in detail, what “flattening the curve” means?

      What? You haven’t read the explainers on every single mainstream news site?

      • I understand it perfectly. I was asking Z man to explain his understanding to me. I’ll settle for yours.

        Edit: I don’t pay much attention to mainstream news. I would expect the “explainers”, so-called, to be vague generalizations directed at low-information folks.

    • “Flattening the curve” means preventing the hospitals from becoming overwhelmed by slowing the spread of the infection by shutting down public spaces.

      • Without numbers, that sounds like it’s just an opinion, or a nice idea. But you didn’t get anything wrong. Very good.

      • Thanks, Line, I was wondering myself.
        (And thanks, Wilbur, for asking.)

        I hate it when snob-signallers say “bonds are inverting the yield curve” instead of “bonds cost more”.

  61. Agreed. The herd is being driven to the cattle chute. Unfortunately, survival will mean, in part, assuming management of the herd. I get a slimy feeling typing that, but thems the breaks.

  62. I agree that the panic and “lockdown” are doing incredible damage and that we will be paying for this for years. What I am not sure about is what would happen if we adopted a “business as usual” model. Would there be a total disease-driven meltdown, or would the death rate spike for a few weeks then return to normal as the plague burnt itself out? We don’t really know, because everywhere the virus has hit, our Masters have instituted pretty strict measures to limit the spread. The test case may be coming in Brazil, which is apparently taking a “what, me worry?” approach. If so, it will be interesting to watch how that plays out.

    Despite the hype and the panic, Wu-flu is (a) relatively mild for most people and (b) probably a product of Mother Nature doing her thing in the wet markets. What happens when/if there is a really lethal version, either courtesy of the wet markets (again) or designed in a lab. ? Our enemies — and they do exist — are surely asking themselves the same thing. Paranoid? The stuff of science fiction? Maybe, but I don’t think so.Interesting times indeed.

    • What I am not sure about is what would happen if we adopted a “business as usual” model.

      This is the salient point. We are reacting as if we do know. More precisely, we are reacting as if this is a once in a history of the planet event. No pandemic has ever behaved as they are predicting. We have no records of anything reaching 70-80% infection levels. Not even the black death.

      If a guy knocks on your door and says you must buy his special insurance policy, because a flying dinosaur from another galaxy will smash your new Mercedes, you want to see some proof. Maybe you park it in the garage for a while, but you are not buying flying space dinosaur insurance, not without more evidence.

      I know, I know. There are no flying space dinosaurs. Well, as of now, there is no death virus that infects 80% of the population. There could be such things, but let’s not assume they must exist, because we fear them.

      • Most humans hate uncertainty and appreciate kindness. Our Masters therefore exude certainty and kindly concern in order to remain in power — even if (as usual) they really haven’t got a clue about what is actually going on and care less about what happens to the hordes of peasants outside their gates.

        Knowing all this, the question becomes, what, realistically, should I and my family do to survive? That’s my take on it anyway.

      • “We have no records of anything reaching 70-80% infection levels.” Are you sure? Can you provide a source? Genuinely curious. One thing I’ve learned from this thing is how flimsy much of the epidemiologic data is. Even the annual flu death estimates are just that, and are really ranges with large error bars (e.g. 20-50,000 deaths, 30-40 million ill). Most people who have the flu never get tested, some may not know they got anything, and some may know they had something but wasn’t necessarily the flu. Good data like in Vo or the Diamond Princess, where everyone is tested, is rare.

        • I’ve spent a fair bit of time looking for an example of a pandemic reaching 70% of a large, dis-aggregated population. You have to rule out examples of a small town all getting sick. America is a continent sized nation. The closest is the Black Death, which infected 40-50% of the European population. There have been small pox epidemics that have infected half a city in the medieval and ancient times.

          The thing is, we have that cruise ship, which was a great real world test case. Infection rate was 20%. That’s a good number to use when thinking about this virus, as it track other pandemics. The Hong Kong Flu, The Asian Flu, Swine Flu and the Spanish Flu all failed to infect more than 20%, with most down near 10%.

          That’s still a lot of people and it warrants a response, but it is a far cry from 70% and the predictions that come with it.

          • I’m anything but an expert on the subject, but most sources I’ve seen estimate that 30-60% of Eurpoeans DIED (rather than were infected) in the Black Death.

            Further, according to this article, the bubonic plague is fatal without treatment in 50-70% of cases:

            http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/plague.html

            Assuming mean of these numbers, (45% dead & fatality rate of 60%), then 75% of Europeans were infected with the bubonic plague during the Black Death.

            If you assume the values that will result in the lowest infection rate (30% dead & fatality rate of 70%) then 43% of Europeans were infected, so it is possible that the 40-50% number is correct, but…

            At any rate, all of this is largely irrelevant to today, because the plague during the Black Death was far more contagious, particularly because of living conditions and medical knowledge, and as a result this virus is NOT going to reach those numbers, either in infections or in deaths per infections…

          • That’s the thing. People were dying from broken legs and bad teeth, while living in filth. Our guesses about infection rates are not terrible important as a result.

          • Didn’t new disease wipe out 90% of the population in both North and South America?

            The bubonic plague approached those rates three times in historical China, I’ve read.

            90% seems exaggerated, but David Goldman also used it in one of his articles.

            Could it be the diversity of European populations, and their exposure through travel and trade, perhaps.

            Have any other peoples kept the historical records that whites have? (Arabs and Chinese tend to burn theirs.)

            As you say, though, the relevant recent cases “all failed to infect more than 20%, with most down near 10%.”

          • Smallpox was the big one. Entire villages destroyed. There’s some evidence that the east coast of the USA was actually more populated, but ~50-100 years of European disease (brought by traders and then colonists) left entire nations without 70-90% of their populations. That’s a special circumstance of an isolated population for *thousands* of years, however.

          • Living conditions in 1348 London would make the hardest Section 8 dweller swim back to Africa.

            I’ll bet my future Chancoin fortune on that cruise ship being the worst-case scenario for infection rates. Short of deliberately infecting them, it’s hard to create an environment more conducive to spreading a respiratory virus.

  63. The political class (including many of the celebrity doctors and academics) fear the apparent death-to-confirmed-case ratio, which currently stands at ~4.5% across the countries most affected (Korea, China, Iran, US, Italy, France, Germany and Spain). Under this assumption, if even 10% of Americans were infected (~30 million) we’d be looking at ~1.35 million deaths. That would be not good.

    Of course, there are good reasons to be skeptical of that ratio, but the political class is acting as the weatherman for this event:

    If the weatherman predicts a huge storm that never happens, everyone has a laugh at them and then forgets about it. But if the weatherman predicts a nothingburger, and your family gets trapped on the highway in a snowbank, you will never trust him again.

    In this case, the politicians calculated that if viral doomsday never occurs, then they will be able to claim vindication. What they didn’t consider, at least until recently, is that while everyone was sheltering in place, all the snow would cause the roofs of their homes, i.e., the economy, to collapse on them.

    Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…

    • Sleepy;
      Good point re the futility of expecting politicians to be heroes by refusing to ‘do something’ in the face of a hostile and hysterical media drumbeat. People seem to have forgotten the daily media drumbeat coverage, daily body count, etc. of every War on Terror (WOT) casualty while Bush II was in office. And he was a fellow member of the ruling elite doing what their elite masters wanted done, FGS_! Nearly ran him out of office early.

      So can you imagine the shrieking coverage of any and every death that could possibly be attributed to COVID-19 had P. Trump not ‘gone big’. All they’re left with right now is carping about testing numbers and using the wrong virus pronouns. Makes them look pretty stupid for anyone with eyes to see. This, along with their H1N1 non-coverage ought to be an attack point on their credibility as Z Man mentions.

      Also, to complete the thought, just as soon as our mulatto messiah ascended the throne, the daily casualty count stories all went away, although the dying and maiming didn’t stop. So the media had no traction to restart the WOT daily casualty update once P. Obama left. A press actually on America’s side would have been on this story to some degree or other all along to keep on pressure for resolution.

      I mention this because that cognitive dissonance is what it took to snap me out of some kind of NeoCon mindset re WOT. I’m ashamed to admit how long it took and I actually studied how tribal societies worked and the ruthlessness required to make them into a state back in the day in Big U before the Poz took over.

    • > The political class (including many of the celebrity doctors and academics) fear the apparent death-to-confirmed-case ratio, which currently stands at ~4.5% across the countries most affected (Korea, China, Iran, US, Italy, France, Germany and Spain). Under this assumption, if even 10% of Americans were infected (~30 million) we’d be looking at ~1.35 million deaths. That would be not good.

      It’s not even close to that for most of the countries mentioned.

      • I’m not if you saying I am mistaken or that you believe that the count of confirmed cases is way lower than the actual number of cases (confirmed and unconfirmed/unknown). In case it is the former, here are the latest numbers from Johns Hopkins:

        Country Cases Deaths D/C
        Korea 8565 91 1.06%
        China 81155 3249 4.00%
        Iran 18407 1284 6.98%
        US 9415 150 1.59%
        Italy 35713 2978 8.34%
        France 9058 243 2.68%
        Germany 13979 42 0.30%
        Spain 17395 803 4.62%

        Total 193687 8840 4.56%

        Numbers from here: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

        You can find similar (though never exactly the same) numbers other places, since they are all relying on the same sources (CDC, WHO, etc.).

        I just don’t want anyone to think I’m making things up.

        • I figured that’s what you did. I just wanted to state many countries have a far lower rate.

          Thanks for the clarification.

        • The numerator on Sleepy’s figures is somewhat accurate (were there deaths associated with c-virus infected people who died of other causes? Did some die of undiagnosed c-virus somewhere?). The denominator is a complete unknown (most people haven’t been tested). When the denominator (cases identified) has some measure of accuracy and completeness, then we can get to work with the numbers.

          • As I said in my initial post:
            “Of course, there are good reasons to be skeptical of that ratio…”

    • The “confirmed case” statistic is completely meaningless, though. Nobody knows how many unconfirmed cases there are. Plenty of people are like me and figure that the last place you want to be is a hospital or testing center until you have no choice.

      As I said the other day, being confirmed with coronavirus doesn’t change your home treatment plan at all.

  64. I had my first, similar experience yesterday. Typically, a sober-minded investment person with 40 years experience and semi-retired, he was moved by an on-line video of someone in Italy reading obituaries in the paper. When I asked if the number of dead (obituaries) was out of the normal, he could not respond, but assumed it was al Coronavirus related.

    “You don’t know that,” as a response did not sit well with him.

    When I asked why a single mother waiting tables in Sheboygan should be unemployed and her child go hungry because the elderly may or may not be experiencing a higher death rate in Italy, he had no response?

    “Just look at the video.”

    It’s all emotion for some people and it is difficult to determine who those people are in advance.

  65. It’s been known since WWl that Biological Warfare is very effective. It’s why it was “outlawed” over a 100 years ago. The only questions left right now are:

    #1 “Who initiated the BW attack(China, Deep State, alliance of same, etc.)?”

    #2 “How far will the world’s economies collapse?”

    Answer to #2 should become apparent by May.

    • I have a feeling this is Chinese sloppiness being exploited. Just my suspicion. We’re not dealing with competent people. A bunch of tricksters, not villains.

      • It’s another thing we’ll never know. I suspect incompetence being the most likely explanation, but the other is not unheard of either.

      • I know that some of this guy’s videos have been referred to here before but I just want to recommend him again. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB_A2HKmZgI

        He’s a white South African who ended up in China. This is just a link to his C-19 video but he does all kind of travelogues around China and doesn’t show the Chinese in a very positive light at all. Watching his videos gives you a very dark view into the twisted, corrupt, and soulless place that we now rely on for almost all our physical goods. It’s not just the totalitarianism either, it’s – everything. You see right up close how the Chinese treat each other, nevermind outsiders. It makes you really wonder how anyone thought these people could make good business partners or how Americans fool themselves into believing that they’re all just proto-Americans yearning for corn dogs and riding lawnmowers.

        • Spent quite a bit like time in China for work though it’s been 8 years since my job changed and saved me from ever returning. The two things I learned – they have no concept of good vs evil, only rich vs poor. 2. They hold the West in bitter contempt, and are certain that they will conquer us one day, soon.

    • Flu not that effective in terms of killing people compared to cancer and heart disease. it is effective though for stirring panic. that is a modern phenomenon exacerbated by the media.

  66. In a rational world, a prudent response would be to isolate vulnerable people; otherwise, business as usual.

    But we do not live in a rational world, and I suspect there are other agendas at work.

    • Saw that Cramer guy said Boeing needs a handout. Grandma’s got the sniffles— better save the corporations!

      • Boeing blew $43 Bn on share buybacks while outsourcing it’s engineering to $9/hr Indians. The conditions for any bailout s/b 1) Reissue the stock and make the officers and board eat it. I don’t care if they’re all bankrupted. 2) Replace the officers and board “pour encourager les autres.” 3) No more foreign visas. Bring the jobs back. Americans are sick of socialism for the oligarchs and capitalism for the productive.

      • nakedcapitalism: “Boeing spent *$43 billion* on stock buybacks, helping more than double its stock price in 2017-2018, enriching shareholders, only to meltdown from its mass produced faulty planes and the current coronavirus crisis. Now they need a bailout?”

        Dave Ramsey: “The market crash is 5%, for cripesakes, a correction.”

        • Goody for the shareholders. That’s who this economy is for. You didn’t address the buy-backs, debt, outsourcing, or for that matter 737s falling out of the sky (or the ensuing lawsuits.) I’m sorry for Boeing’s remaining US employees. Truly I am. I don’t see why kids should become debt-slaves for it.

    • Just as soon as the actual data revealed the vulnerable population to be rather specific and thus manageable, the agitprop started appearing to counter the “false” idea that the risk to younger, otherwise healthy people and children was very low.

      The “don’t be fooled, this can kill your babies” pieces started coming out.

      And even when that data became obviously dubious to the few who actually went beyond the headline or soundbyte, the convenient overarching “asymptomatic carriers” dangers are turned up to 11.

      Don’t be selfish! Just because you may not die doesn’t mean you can’t give it to someone who will.

      Which is true. But convenient how they can simultaneously admit that there is a massive disparity in symptoms and risk while also downplaying this fact to create disproportionate fear for the kids while then circling back to rationalize total lockdown because the high risk group needs to be protected from the huge group of low risk. Wtf?

      Who is on first?

    • The sensible way to “flatten the curve” without flattening the economy would have been to make an effort to classify people as potential vectors, potential victims, or “neutrals”. Have you been flying around China, Northern Italy, or Iran recently? We’ll call you a class 1 Potential Vector. Maybe you didn’t visit a hotspot but simply traveled through a notorious hive of villainy and globalism like NYC recently* – you’re a class 2 Potential Vector. This pattern is extended to local traffic hubs like state capitals or a big city in any given state. If you live in OH did you just get back from Cleveland? class 3 then, etc…

      Potential victims are easy to classify. Basically, age is the main factor, along with any pre-existing condition that weakens the immune system. Now your policy task as the mighty Civic Father is to keep the potential vectors and victims apart. You can do this by putting out PSAs using this scheme, maybe colors instead of numbers or something. It doesn’t matter, you can treat people like (sort of) adults and ask them to self classify and modify their activities accordingly. Obviously things like nursing homes need to be extremely restrictive about visitors in general and especially anyone who is in a Potential Vector class.

      Do this and the virus is mostly forced to “hover” among the vector classes while burning itself out. This could prevent a breakout into the “neutral” population who aren’t likely to have or be vulnerable to the virus.

      Well, I made a mistake above of course. There are no Civic Fathers left, only screaming Den Mothers and Girl Governors with PhDs in Panic Studies. Then of course all those people have teams of professional schemers and wanna-be totalitarians behind them helping them salt in pre-existing nefarious agendas like gun control and restrictions on freedom of assembly. It’s a perfect storm of weak men, crazy women, bad faith, greed, incompetence, and good old fashioned stupidity.

      * My wife recently returned from a trip through NYC and came home sick. After a week she was getting better but I was getting sick. I eventually went to the hospital and got a diagnosis of “probably Covid-19” (of course there were no test kits to verify this). I’m still home in self-quarantine but getting better with some antibiotics (for a secondary infection) and pills for the severe cough. So she was a class 2 vector using my scheme above.

      • “It’s a perfect storm of weak men, crazy women, bad faith, greed, incompetence, and good old fashioned stupidity.”

        Perfect storm is a good metaphor for the current situation.

  67. Thanks again to Z-Man. We seem to be living in a bizarro world where there is more “common sense” from (certain) people on the dissident right than the so-called “normies”.
    The lack of push back by the likes of the Wall Street Journal, National Review and Reason is amazing. Governments are seizing powers of which AOC would have only dreamt a couple months ago. All this upheaval and eventual suffering is based on the known fact that there are about 8,000 confirmed deaths from the virus worldwide!

    • Amazingly, The Federalist is posting some excellent articles on the panic, and their reason is not libertarian nonsense.

  68. Very good points. I even found myself going back and forth on this virus thing but ultimately looked at the numbers of deaths and compared them to past pandemic events and the total population.
    It’s a mathematical equation
    and we should not be in the panic we are living in.
    But it is what it is.
    The persuasion of panic in the media and panic among our friends is a powerful force.
    The societal and economic repercussions of this thing are gonna be long lasting.
    If a nation like China observes what the result of this panic is to a potential enemy why would they not do it intentionally next time?
    If they didn’t this time?

  69. Did you see RamzPaul’s livestream yesterday with Tiina? This issue has divided us on the right also. The green eyeshades by the numbers guys and the, even x number of deaths are too many. We may have tabled the socialism vs capitalism debate for now due to immigration but these differences are always there subjugated for a while.

    Trump is Yang now is a meme currently.

    • I think the divide is this. On one side are the positive identity types. On the other are the negative identity types. The former takes a comprehensive view of politics. Identity is one part of their general outlook. The negative guys are reactionary. They cheer the collapsing stock market, because they think it hurts the Jews or damages globalism. They don’t think about how it will harm them or their interests.

      This virus panic has revealed a lot of fault lines. This is just one of them. There’s also the great divide between those who are comfortable with math and those who are not. There are a lot of people who carry on as if numbers matter, but in a crisis, they reveal that they are not comfortable at all with the stark reality of mathematics.

      Might be good to keep this Derb quote in mind:

      “The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”

      ― John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism

      • I think there’s a further fault line within the group that’s comfortable with math that’s been showing itself lately with Sailer’s hysteria in particular. Guy’s like Sailer seem to have fetishized math a bit and they’re willing to swallow the claims of pointy-heads uncritically if they’re based on the output of some kind of mathematical model. I am NOT any kind of expert on epidemiological modeling, but one of my thesis advisors at college was a published expert in the field so I’m vaguely aware of the types of models in use. They typically consist of systems of non-linear differential equations which require a lot of parameters as inputs – things like transmission rates, length of time for which someone is contagious, fatality rates, etc. Since they’re non-linear, they’re also highly sensitive to starting values – how many are sick or contagious at this instant. For this latest virus, none of these parameters or initial conditions can be accurately estimated and it’s the nature of models that produce exponential growth like these that tiny tiny differences in values can mean huge differences in forecasts. If a parameter is 0.1% then only 10,000 people get the disease. If the parameter is 0.8% then 10 million are hospitalized. It’s probably only possible to accurately ballpark the parameters after the disease has run its course and we know the final outcomes for everyone that has gotten sick.

        Not to pick on Derb who has mercifully avoided weighing in on this nonsense to his detriment, but he’s an example of this too because he’s openly bought into the global “warming” nonsense because people have told him – MATH! There’s a tendency with math nerds to forget that there’s a distinction between mathematical TRUTHS like 2+2=4 which are inarguable and mathematical MODELS which can be horrendously wrong in terms of what they predict.

        • Exactly!!! Biological scientists have become modelers. It’s much easier to plug some numbers into an equation than to measure something rigorously. Thus, Tony Fauci can go on the corporate media shows and say it’s possible that 500,000 Americans might die from the virus. All he did was pick a number. Some modelers tried some different inputs and produced a list of possibilities. They kind of liked the assumptions that gave 500K, so Voila!!! That’s the story and we’re sticking to it.

          The way to measure the transmissibility, severity, and direct death rates would be randomly to test a significant part of the population with the test kits, and to follow the positives. That won’t ever be done. When it’s all over, someone will take the final data curves and model them, and then try to convince us of what the parameters were.

          • Often Rigorous measurement is nearly impossible, so they measure a “proxy” and then pretend they didn’t. Like how psychologists call asking a bunch of questions to college students “administering an instrument to a group of adults”.

        • maybe Sailer’ wants to build his math and science cred

          >Since they’re non-linear, they’re also highly sensitive to starting values

          the sensitivity to the input has less to do with the type of equation but rather the solution.,exponential functions are sensitive to inputs. you see with with IQ at extreme tails. The difference between a mean of 100 or 95 becomes huge in terms of relative frequency when you go way out

      • Regarding math, I’d argue there’s an even finer distinction. There’s a great divide between those who are comfortable with probabilities and statistics (related but not the same thing) and those who are not.

        I’ve known plenty of engineers who aren’t comfortable with probabilities. Now, uncomfortable doesn’t mean lack of understanding. Can they do the math? Of course, they’re frickin engineers. But are they comfortable with that type of thinking? No. They crave certainty. The problem should have a concrete solution. Probabilities are squishy.

        I’d argue that comfort with probabilities and statistics requires both some math chops but, more importantly, a certain mindset, a willingness to accept uncertainties about a give course of action but to go with it because the odds are on your side.

        What’s more, you need to accept that losing a bet where the odds were on your side doesn’t mean that you made the wrong decision, what Annie Duke calls “Resulting.”

        Most people can’t do the math involved in probabilities and statistics (not that the math is that hard but most people are average to stupid). Of those that can, most of those hate the uncertainty (both on a philosophical level – engineers – and from the career risk perspective – politicians, corporate executives, coaches, etc.) that comes with the territory.

        • Probabilities create a lot of poisonous problems in our political discourse too because there are two distinct types of probability. There are “frequentist” probabilities that almost have the force of mathematical truths. If I flip a coin hundreds and hundreds of times, I can be fairly confident that it will come up heads about half the time so a probability of 50% for heads is a reasonable assumption that everyone can base decisions on. On the other hand there’s a statement like there’s an 80% probability that 10 million Americans will be die from the Coronavirus. That’s a Bayesian probability because it’s only based on assumptions and estimations and the event itself will only occur once. There’s nothing wrong necessarily with Bayesian probabilities if you understand their limitations, but they allow phonies and grifters to essentially get away with saying anything to garner attention. If I say there’s an 80% probability of 10 million Americans dying and it turns out that in fact only 200 Americans die, I can just say – “There was a 20% probability that 10 million WOULDN’T die so we were just lucky this time.” Then I can continue spouting bullsh*t on TV indefinitely into the future because I haven’t been proven wrong in my statement.

          • I call it the “red light, green light” effect. People want to know whether to stop or to go. Probability sets don’t work like that. Instead, there is an array of outcomes, and one has to decide how to position oneself to maximize the benefits of a likely outcome and minimize the risk. Given that there are identifiable but not really measurable “long tail” outcomes also baked into the array of identifiable outcomes, one needs to decide whether the magnitude of the harm done by a very low probability outcome makes playing the game at all worth the effort. The flip side is buying that lottery ticket, even though the odds of winning are so infinitesimal, because the payoff is so big.

            People who can work with probability sets can really help out those who don’t get it. However, the problem is when the most appropriate positioning doesn’t work out, because those same people don’t understand that good reasoning can still lead to bad outcomes.

          • This here particular thread is fantastic.

            I never loved math, but through brute force acquired a deep appreciation for its ability to steward certain truths while allowing for exploration. Even though DE still make me queasy.

            Statistics, in some odd fancy, made more sense to me from the start.

            Perhaps because growing up with an insane mother had me primed at an early age toward understanding the probability of bad outcomes, relative to various inputs, than say to the purity of maths.

            IOW, to me math works toward resolving dissonance, while stats works toward accepting it for what it is.

            When chaos rules and ones mental energy is under constant triage conditions, accepting that a string of good- as in the best available, choices can still result in a bad outcome, is more important than plotting the precision of a curve through space.

            So in our clown world, discussions like the one laid out here are spiritual salve against the brutalism of dissonance packaged as truth.

            Thanks all!

          • Frequency is not probability though. In a few cases (casinos, etc), it sems that the variation in causes of coin flips, die rolls, card deals, etc all follow a pattern with a certain relative frequency. But almost always folks forget that the die roll or coin toss had specific physical causes, and instead act like the bell curve has some physical meaning.

        • Poker teaches one a
          appreciation of probabilities. I think to understand what is going on you must place yourself in the position of a college president or conference organizer. shutting it all down is very low risk. if you keep it open, however, and a outbreak occurs…. and a couple of old geezers kick the bucket…. we are seeing the fruits of the pussification of America. on the other hand I doubt the farmers will stop farming and the miners will stop mining.

        • depends how you define good at math. That leads me to the joke:

          How does a mathematician calculate 3×3? He immediately says “9”

          A physicist? Same as above.

          Ask an engineer to calculate 3×3? He gets out his scientific calculator, inputs 3×3, and read off 9.0000000000000 until reaching the end of the screen

      • everyone thinks they are on the side of math, truth, logic, rationality, science, reason, objectivity, etc. even if to an outsider it is anything but. You can have two opposing opinions originated by individuals who equally believe their opinions are rooted in objectivity.

      • Negative identity risks being another “racist” or “fascist” basket where we toss those we disagree with and chest-thump about our nuance vs. their over-simplification.

        Almost every example of positive or negative identity can be described the other way without arguing in bad faith. There’s a core truth in the concept but the devil’s in the details.

        Most accelerationists are well-aware that they and theirs will suffer blowback as the system crashes. Speaking for myself I’m rooting for a net postiive long-term outcome, not expecting a utopia. Black-pilled nihilists cheering for Corona are a convenient straw man for the post-nihilist accelerationists who are simply seeing opportunity in crisis.

  70. Two things can be true at once: that the virus is a serious problem, and that we might overreact. The problem is in fact that there probably is no easy solution unless we get lucky (e.g. chloroquine actually works).

    • I return to something I have been saying for a long time. The hive mindedness of the Left has polluted all dialogue. There is never a middle ground. It’s all black hats and white hats, good guys and bad guys. You either support a global quarantine or you want to see millions of bodies in the streets. There is a vast middle ground between those two poles.

      In fact, I am deliberately staking out the midpoint in this crisis. Yes, we should have ramped up prevention through public information and some mild restrictions. Playing sporting events in empty arenas, for example, is something we have done for prior pandemics, even mild stuff like the common flu. Closing schools when someone in the community gets the bug. That would be wise for even the common flu. The top priority should have been maintaining calm, instead they did the opposite.

      • Over 90% of mitigation will come from washing hands, assuming everyone you interact with is sick, and sheltering the old and vulnerable. All the rest is just wrecking the economy so we can feel we are doing something.

      • That’s what I got out of your comments yesterday, Z. Those who say “it’s just the flu, bro” are as out of touch, in their own way, as those who see a raging pandemic. It sort of is “just the flu”, but the environment we live in makes it worse than that in a lot of weird ways not directly related to the flu, and we need to ride with that.

        There will be a lot of things damaged and bent, and a lot of things knocked over. This is a time of the fraying of things and people, around the edges. We need to be the ones to straighten out the things and people, where we can, every day, starting right now. Part of that is acknowledging and respecting where people are right now, and working from that to take them where they need to be. When this is all over, people will remember who took them to a better place when times were bad. We can do that.

      • Z;
        Re hive mind dualism: You either get to sit at the mean girls lunch table or you eat in the outer darkness 😉

        • It would appear I’m being cast into the void by the witch hunters. “A prophet is without honor only in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own household.”

  71. It’s disappointing to see that even normally rational people like Greg Johnson are buying the GloboHomo frame on this “crisis.”

    We won’t be able to reach those people until a massive amount of damage has been done – but that’s something we on the Dissident Right are used to.

    • I added the above after my original comment went missing, then mysteriously showed back up – would delete dup if I could – damn you Internet!

    • Zman was quite generous with the “everyone has a bad day” take on Johnson. Z or someone else wrote the other day you see how people actually are when there is a crisis, manufactured or real. Johnson always will have an asterisk beside his name with me now. The morbidity stats are available on line from the CDC and stand at less than 160 this morning. The Deep State, and that includes the hideous failure that is the CDC, certainly isn’t adjusting the numbers downward. If Johnson can’t fathom why that number is important–the bottom line, actually, it’s all you need to know about him.

      • At this point everybody is desperate to get the numbers up. Did they die of anything – heart attack, stroke – while infected? Chalk one up for Coronavirus! Were they presumptive positive when they died? Presume no more!

        What happens in 2 weeks, when people have lost their businesses, their retirements, their modern world, and it starts to become clear we’ve lost our old world, perhaps forever, and NOBODY knows anyone firsthand who was sick?

      • True. I can handle my wife’s fear mongering. That’s how she’s wired, and I know that as persuasive as I am there’s only so much effect it’ll have. But many other people don’t have that excuse. Scorecards need to be filled out today and kept for the very near future.

        • Once the Chinese “get back to work”, reoccurrences will start popping up.

          Update: Lorenzo, below-
          “370,000 hospitalizations… from flu”

          Still, doesn’t Corona reinfection leave one disabled?

  72. I’m on your side of the divide but I have a neighbor who is prone to extreme interpretations of anything. One of his sales clients is a nurse who says the hospital system in our mid-sized Georgia city is on the verge of being overwhelmed. Currently, we have five known cases. I need to see more before I get excited.

    • My daughter’s hospital isn’t overwhelmed. They’re just acting overwhelmed. They’ve seen zero coronavirus cases, yet they’re taking drastic measures. My daughter is a highly-skilled surgical technician and she’s being forced to take a week off. Meanwhile people who need surgeries aren’t getting them — all non-critical surgeries have been canceled.

      Healthcare is a female-dominated field and this is the perfect storm of female hysteria.

      Interesting to note that my daughter’s hospital is a non-profit. The two nearest for-profit hospitals and surgical centers are still chugging right along: “other peoples’ money.”

      • The girls get to be hero and victim in full public view. Every hospital is now the set of The Hunger Games.

        • That’s the script of every NWL movie and series for the past 20 years. There’s a reason AWFLs are the most disliked contingent in the Coalition of the Fringes.

        • Every day decision-making – from the auto industry to every battalion commander – involves acceptable casualties.

          We do not drive around in cars with factory 4-point harnesses and full roll cages.

          CO’s don’t make plans based on ZERO casualties or we all put out the white flags.

          FDA – every single pharmaceutical they blast at us 24/7 has a percentage of people that have side effects including, “sudden death…”

          Yet this panic is being managed as an expression of our FEMINIZED society now. So we will crush our economy, cause untold damage – so NO ONE DIES. No one. And like these incentives in the Occupied State of New York, legislation and executive orders are made on emotions – NO BAIL, JUST LET THEM WALK … then, “oops, we did not consider the collateral damage…. blah-blah”.

          The country is now run on the concepts of emotional women, and our “male” leaders are falling right in line. I saw it years ago – when they brought in “zero tolerance” in the schools. So one of my kids – now a successful young man but then a new kid in school is sitting at the lunch table … and a kid shoves him off then end, on his ass … along with his books. My kid reflexively comes up and punches the other kid in the throat. Dare I mention that I had my kid working on the heavy bag at 10?

          Other kid goes down, and has to go to the nurse, tears, red face, red throat.

          So my kid is going to be suspended. I arrange a meeting with Asst Principal. They think my kid is to attend, the usual litigating with dimwit members of the bureaucracy, “is he required to attend?”

          “Well, akshually, no, but we prefer…”

          Yeah, just me. I meet with male Asst. Principal dork. Close door, and ask him what he would do if I shoved him on his ass, right then. I get up, just stand up. He shows the fear of the modren Asst. Principal (back in my day they were tough). Agrees to my demand – formal deletion of any written record and no detention.

          Last word – you can let the defeated get the last “word” in – as long as you get the ACTION needed … is, wimpering, “b-but he didn’t have to hit him so hard….”

          We still laugh about wimpy old Mister C@#$!%.

          We also laugh about how the same kid – throat punch – and my son ended up playing high school football together and being pals. This last on the subject of why women should not run the world – they can NEVER get over a slight – let alone a punch.

          • What the heck happened to the Assistant Principal? His whole job was to be the sports coach and the man who administers beat downs to the misbehaving boys. I went to high school in the 90’s and our AP was a force of nature (though they did not let him beat kids by then).

          • I hear you. The 90’s was a long time ago. I am talking about more recent years, and the creatures of the public school no longer included men. Males, yes. Lesbians in high places, yes.

            Men? No. But off label negotiating techniques can be used vs. girly men, they are weak once they cannot hide behind “the rules”.

          • yep. i work in another post. the system is indeed subverted. the few nongay males sometimes know, but prefer to be quiet, or sell themselves to the poz-soy. of course, none are in authority. principals are all being replaced by diverse strong lesbians. janitors are still the one manly occupation, if all bean-lovers now.
            a successful assistant principal would have stood up to you and told your kid doesn’t have to have a record due to him being the aggrieved party in self defense, but still your kid would have to go to detention because he didn’t have to waste your school nurse’s time. of course, the other kid is meant to get worse punishment; however, like you say, an old school AP may have even put both kids to do stuff together so they get along.
            after all, childhood and adolescence are full of petty fights, because kids don’t know better. perhaps the proneness of millennials to break down stems from the fact that their boomer parents (and liberal gen xer aunts and uncles, of which are many) wanted to cuddle them so much and took them to imagine their children had to live in a Barney the Dinosaur world… talmudvision had a role in creating this fantasy for these kids, and the non-trad Christians that enabled it, the brave new consumer globalist world… wonder if you guys ever heard Milo yap about how the 90s were the best decade – it was indeed the decade of the shopping mall, videogames, vhs, utter consumption amidst bright hopes for the future.
            no wonder Osama thought in his wickedness he was striking at Babylon on that fateful day. except he did not purge it; but like the Mohamedan demon he was, he unleashed the demons, by starting the toppling of the dominoes.
            why indeed have we not nuked Mecca. if i were Putin i would claim tsardom and nuke it on principle as defender of the Faith. hell, even the stupid Queen technically should, the royal title of Defender of the Faith was the excuse used by the British to set up the current Jewish state all those years ago. wouldn’t even talk of the theoretical royal defender of Jerusalem, the useless globalist king of Spain. seems i sound truly like De Maistre now lol…
            seems like the Lord wants the anointed nationalist leaders we need to surge from the Peoples and Nations and their efforts; or else the Truly Anointed One won’t be long…
            be safe when around the elderly, stay focused and prayerful, enjoy your women when possible.

      • Yes, the medical field is feminized, but so is the rest of our culture.

        Out fem-fetish for credentialed “experts” on the megaphone to validate our badfeels is a big part of the spiraling hysterics as well.

        Like climate mythology, 97% of “doctors” agree that their fear is justified.

        The female-dominance in “government” bureaucracy means social communication and organizing also works to filter out any masculine intervention that might threaten the narrative.

        The narrative being anything that keeps maximum dependency on that bureaucracy.

        Properly identifying the problem and then taking action to solve or mitigate is not the point. In a gynocracy its not about the nail. (Search it)

        Any man attempting rational skepticism and pragmatism in assessing the complex array of trade-offs in public policy and social protocol is easily outgrouped as cold, heartless, or greedy like how it is done with the various -phobic or misogynist tag-lines constantly dragged out to marginalize the masculine impulse toward observable physical reality.

        Just as a father might object to drag queen story hour only to be shouted down at the school board meeting.

        Everything is politics now and in a gynocracy politics is about the tide of the female tingles: arousal, fear, safety, and power.

        Indeed our era is a golden throated psychopaths playground.

        And like the dystopian mating grounds, social commentary of our most pressing issues is gynocentric in its authority, while retaining the put option on male responsibility.

        When things of course go as pear-shaped as a DMV clerk, as they always do when chasing the feels, they demand real men to fix it yesterday.

        This is another yoke most men care not to don and so most males choose to cheer on the female concerns while demanding the only man in the room, the government!, fix everything. This is what I see on the only social platform I have, nextdoor.

        The fact that what needs fixing is moving the focus from appealing to female feelings to solving actual problems is blasphemy. That is until the whole charade goes tits up.

        So like the political divide, men quietly carry on to do the best they can to provide and protect while the bugmen males and their homo histrionic keepers shovel finite resources into the insatiable furnace of feelz.

        • One more point of data to add to the feminization of this moribund culture… two days ago LA mayor Garcetti gave an address on the tube about this panic. Others say crisis, but panic it is. At any rate, he closed his predictable remarks with a very telling interjection. He said “I love you.”

          Finally, this virus event has managed to make me feel sick.

        • The nail:

          Girlfriend: “My head really, really hurts.”

          Boyfriend: “You’ve got a nail in your forehead. Why don’t you pull it out?”

          Girlfriend: “Why do you always interrupt me when I’m talking about my feelings!!”

      • I went to the dentist this AM. They said they had about half of their appointments cancel on them! No trouble, easy cleaning, the hygienist said she was required to ask me if I had been traveling recently. Normal life is still going on while all around people are going nuts. They didn’t take any extra precautions other than the normal ones – gloves and masks as usual.

        • Huh. My dentist has cancelled all but emergency care until April, and I was forced to reschedule my husband’s cleaning set for 30 March.

    • I have read several anecdotes like that about overwhelmed medical systems in areas with a very low positive test count. Rod Dreher has been posting rants from a guy who claims to be a doctor in Wyoming that are downright unhinged. I could see the workers who take samples and process the tests feeling overwhelmed, but most health care workers aren’t being inundated with patients for this.

      • Rod Dreher has spiraled into a state of pathological panic over this. He is holed up in his house, he says he won’t leave under any circumstances, and anyone who questions the numbers is castigated as a denier, or worse.
        He sits at home generating multiple posts a day, each one more terrified than the last. For him, the apocalypse has truly arrived, not that he would know it directly because he’s hiding under his bed most of the day.

        As with Sailer and other conservative writers, this crisis has given us a real look at their personalities under pressure, if even just the psychological pressure produced by reading media scare stories.

        The conservative side of the aisle is filled with hysterics and ninnies. Seriously.

        • Agree. I am disappointed in a number of dissident bloggers that have hit the panic button. I’ve seen 2 year-olds exhibit more calm and rational thought.

          • Bloggers? Heck, we’ve seen commenters right here in panic mode. But in fairness we’ve also seen many more with considered and nuanced insight into recent events.

          • Meanwhile our central bank that backs our currency is going underwater in an attempt to save every bank on the planet. Misplaced panic if you ask me.

  73. I’ve been wondering about the insulin issue lately. We’ve had a huge problem (heh) with obesity that has only been worsened by the easy availability and use of insulin. I mean, why bother changing your lifestyle when a simple shot can enable you to keep your unhealthy habits? Life has become way too easy.

    When the insulin runs out, it will be too late to change and the obese will start dropping like flies. As for triage, giving the remaining available insulin to the type 1 diabetics will be an easy decision.

    • A major reason for the moral rot of recent decades is that inbetween affluence, the welfare state and modern medicine, people don’t have to suffer the negative consequences of self-indulgent and self-destructive behavior.

    • Outdoorspro – an easy decision for you or I perhaps, but the obese who ride the little electronic grocery carts will demand “their fair share,” and they will be echoed by many – even by some here. Being rational in an age of drama and equalitarianism and individualism is akin to being disabled.

      • Interesting. I saw your quote, “their fair share” wrt to a fat diabetic in a electric grocery card and immediately thought, “what is their fair share”? For that manner, what is anyone’s fair share in a “just” society?

        —stop reading here if you are a bleeding heart—

        Plato defined “justice” as that virtual which apportions every man his “due”. So in your hypothetical, this person’s fair share would have to be proportional to his contribution to society. And what is this obese, sickly person’s contribution to society? Any thoughts here?

        Basically, my stereotype is a low functioning, none tax paying, welfare (in many forms) beneficiary who is alive at all because of society’s beneficence. And yet, they think by simply drawing breath they are entitled to a (fair) share of any and all society has produced and will produce.

        This thinking must eventually lead to societal collapse as consumers will always outnumber producers. And when the producers figure this out and decide to hang it up we all suffer. Such inevitably ended the USSR.

        • Compsci – I tend towards Aristotle more than Plato, but you raise a good point. I would emend it, I think, by more narrowly defining their contribution to their community, and what we on our side usually mean by that. I’m constantly smirking at calls to “care for our community” anywhere in ‘murrica. Frankly, the whole idea anyone is ‘entitled’ to anything rubs me the wrong way. God gave us life and free will. He didn’t guarantee fairness or health or happiness or freedom from random tragedy. That’s the human condition. Those that can’t deal with it are now running things, and the only solace I can take from it is schadenfreude.

    • It hasn’t helped that the US culture, aided by Big Pharma and Big Insurance have trained everyone to believe their health problems can be fixed by a magic pill or procedure and most people have swallowed that hook, line, and sinker. Taking responsibility for one’s health is ignored, and natural/home remedies are trashed as voodoo because there is no money in them for Big Pharma or Big Insurance.

      • “… fixed by a magic pill…”

        Prescription has come to mean drugs instead of a treatment plan which may or may not include drugs. Pharmaceutical profits would drop by half if doctors gave the proper prescription: get your fat ass off the couch away from the talmudvision which normalizes and celebrates your obesity and sloth and get some exercise.

        Websters 1828: “a medical direction of remedies for a disease and the manner of using them”

        Websters 1913: “A direction of a remedy or of remedies for a disease, and the manner of using them; a medical recipe; also, a prescribed remedy.”

        Websters 2020: “1. a direction, usually written, by the physician to the pharmacist for the preparation and use of a medicine or remedy. 2. the medicine prescribed”

      • To be honest, for most people their health problems actually CAN be fixed by a “magic pill”…As long as that pill is available. Once it is no longer available, their health problems once again become very, very real problems.

        As for deciding who gets insulin in a time of shortage, here’s an example: I work with a young woman who is a Type 1 diabetic. Totally genetic and not even remotely her fault. She watches her diet religiously and eats carefully. She works hard and contributes. Compared to a 300-pounder eating shit with welfare money, there is no doubt about the choice.

        After all, someone has to play God. Can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be me.

  74. I detect a note of LARPing in all this. The citizens, accustomed to video stars and virtual reality, imagine they are in a movie, the kind that NETFLIX informs me is trending these days. Which means the ratio of drama to reality is badly out of whack, at least on the surface. In reality? In reality, I think many of the outraged and excitable don’t take this as seriously as they would like to think they do. If this really were a Black Death bring out your dead sixty percent mortality of the entire population, they would not be making a song and dance over what to call the thing? Of course not. If, however, you are actually in the virtual writers’ room laying out the story line for a new thriller coming soon to a theater near you, thei situation changes. In this new production, the work of journoes, bureaucrats, Facebookers and other instant experts, is to convince people that the rather small numbers are not small at all, or a tip of an iceberg, and most of all that the fool Carrot-top is doing what he should not be doing (closing borders) or not doing what he ought to be doing (closing borders) and let’s not forget to put in the sub-plots of brave commandos standing up for the peculiar rights of marginalized groups who will be hit harder than anyone else (not the elderly, NB, there’s some ambivalence over their fate). A little romance would be nice. Italian Glenn Millers on Neapolitan balconies. Greatest Generation folk displayed safely behind plate glass (while the Chicago penguins roam free). We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

    If this were a real Pearl Harbor or War of the Worlds situation and not the movie version, the adults would getting on with Slapping the Jap or Kicking the Kraut, and the cranks and malcontents would express themselves at the corner bar and in letters to the editor that would never be published. The more useful excitables would put aside all personal grievances and smile on their brothers and come together right now.
    Then again, maybe not. Lindbergh stepped up after Pearl Harbor and FDR told him to stick it in his ear. Personal pettiness can be remarkably durable. With this one? As others have said, how many must die for people to believe that it will have been worth it? If that number is not reached, how convincing will the arguments be that it would have been worse had we done nothing? Look for the film to spot light medical heroes and ignore decision makers and rumour mongers.
    Point two. Out of the wreckage, and with the destruction of many 401ks, expect a bunch of age of retirement folk to be standing in the job lines. How well that works out will be another interesting thing to see. Sure, they all say they don’t discriminate by age, and the law says they may not, but honestly, who really believes that? As to the market rebounding, a thing one hears a lot – the Dow took thirty years to recover after the ‘29 crash, thirty again to recover after the peak of 1966. How many years do you have left?

    • There’s quite a bit of cosplay involved, and many are acting like they have a bit part in a zombie flick. But God knows an actual crisis awaits them, and they won’t be so down with the economic consequences of losing jobs, houses, and retirement savings, and the draconian police state that is likely to emerge.

      • The Z-blog was epic yesterday.
        Everything will change, forever.

        The 9-11 attacks were brought up.
        Millions, for years, repeatedly pointed out that “the hijackers were Arab”.

        Yet Mecca remains uncratered to this day, and nothing changed, except that the global Swamp grew richer and more powerful in spades.

        We couldn’t even take back the oil infrastucture we built over there. FDI always seems one way. Heck, my dad was building those oil refineries, after serving in WWll.

        • Not only did Mecca remain UN-cratered but immigration from the Muslim world increased in the years following 9/11. That was the insanity of the neo-cons. We’re going to drone you on Monday and kill your wife and children, but then we’ll stick you on a plane headed for the States as a refugee on Friday. It was the damnedest thing.

  75. saw a study over at peak prosperity on youtube day before yesterday and that said 50 to 75% of the people who get this are asymptomatic, and it has a 14 to 28 day incubation period, and it’s airborne. that makes it one stealthy flu. It seems to be hell for some people, but for the vast majority of us it’s going to be nothing. However, something I learned from 9/11 is that most people are prone to panic. Still it’s better to keep your older parents and grand parents away from it, if possible.

    • NY Times:
      “38% of Coronavirus patients who were sick enough to be hospitalized were were between the ages of 20 and 54. Roughly half of those were between 20 and 44.”

      Recurring. That’s the word that might haunt us.

      I honestly don’t think anybody panics- except the media.
      Update: (Oops- and Rod Dreher. Whoever he is. Is he gettin’ paid?)

      • 38% is a big number! How many, in *real* terms, were “sick enough to be hospitalized”? And compare that number to other diseases as well. Percentages and ratios are very often used to mislead by Journos on purpose.

          • Indeed. WE. DON’T. KNOW. any statistics (even if we did have a protocol for collecting and analyzing them) because testing is both unreliable in the USA and apparently limited to celebs and the Utah Jazz.

        • 20 to 54 is also a huge sample range. And how does one qualify “sick enough to be hospitalized”? Did these people have pre-existing conditions?

          • not to mention, under 40 drops down to 19% or less.
            i can imagine these being the the smokers (and vapers) and diabetics and fatties and lower-defenses kinds among the young (asthmatics, sex workers, homos). some of these will suffer at least some strong colds… or more. we shall see.

            the genetic ideas of Lance Welton also make sense. seems Mongoloids and Caucasoids (specially the Aryan/Semite/Medi ones) will be hardest hit in that sense; then later the browns, who may not be genetically as predisposed, but then the southern hemisphere will hit winter later, and their own lower hygiene may cause a second wave there. but who knows.

            it is still a strong flu, no more and no less. if Trump and the nationalist movement weren’t afloat, everyone would have just handed out masks and sanitizer, and closed borders with China and other few countries a couple weeks in February for the duration of their peak outbreak. instead, a mass panic has been created by the uniparty, creating the need for even more overblown measures.

            do hope malaria meds can nip the wuflu in the bud like they say, so we can attempt to restore order and ridicule globohomo for their actions. either way, whatever happens… prepare.

          • i can imagine these being the the smokers (and vapers) and diabetics and fatties(emphasis mine B_M)

            Exactly! I delivered a load of groceries to a young man Tuesday afternoon who HAD to have weighed 500 lbs if he weighed an ounce. There is no way that youngster did not suffer from cardiovascular disease, pulmonary issues and diabetes (type 2 at least) at the very minimum. Among the order was a couple of cases of some sort of soda and a couple of gallons of “fruit juice” none of which was labeled “zero calories” or sweetened with any artificial sweetener. If that man gets sick – WITH ANYTHING – how the hell are they even going to be able to transport him? Fortunately he lives alone (his mother passed on before Thanksgiving) and thus is isolated. He lives alone with two small dogs (and, yes, the house reeks) and so the only human contact he has now is an Aunt and 3 cousins who visit him periodically to make sure he is still “alive” – assuming you call that living. I’m enough of a lower case”L” “libertarian” to say that we each have the Creator-given right to go to hell in whatever conveyance we choose but that guy is pushing it.

            Had an interesting conversation with my cardiologist yesterday about whether or not government ought to be able to fekking ORDER so-called “non-essential” businesses to close and people to stay indoors. The Doc’s worry seemed to be that without such measures the healthcare system (meaning folks like him) would be overwhelmed and providers needlessly exposed to the virus. He was not at all swayed by arguments that the computer models being used to predict the course of the disease cannot even predict the past and so aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. In my defense, I had not yet had the opportunity to read ZMan’s discussion about such efforts and the futility thereof. Clearly my Doc was coming from an emotional place. Also, his accent betrays the fact that he is an immigrant either from Spain or South America and thus is conditioned to accept rather more government control of the masses than many of us here.

        • No, it’s not a big number. It’s 38% of patients, but how many people infected are asymptomatic? Currently we have no way to know.

          • Well, sarcasm is hard in print. So many subtle cues that print doesn’t convey. The tone of the voice and facial expression, and there are crazy people out and about. Sorry I missed it.

  76. A sober analysis that makes Greg Johnson’s extremely disappointing column from yesterday (in which he calls out Z by name!) easier to swallow.

    The issue we sane folk run into is that 99% of the social media buzz on this topic accepts the deep state framing of the issue. We won’t be able to reach people until after the damage has been done.

    • That’s some rather lame stuff, to be frank, but everyone has their bad days. I still count Greg as a friend.

      • Good example for a post I’m grinding on re: how to handle disagreements and in-fighting. Greg has a catty style that rubs me the wrong way but he’s still an ally. 9 out of 10 times it’s better to take the high road and ignore the personal beefs. It’s just the right thing to do, the manly thing to do, and from a practical standpoint, it keeps your record clean when people are keeping score later.

        I say this as someone who loves social blood-sport too much and has talked as much trash as anyone. It’s something I’ve learned through some trial and a lot of error, and I’m sure I’ll f*ck up and lose my temper soon now that I got preachy about it.

        Triggering taunts in 3…2…

      • Someone can disagree with you and you can remain friends, wow what a big concession on your part. Jesus Christ man, do you even hear yourself? Check my past comments, I bet I was the first one of your readers to ever mention what was happening in china.

      • Greg is right and you are wrong. The thing is, with suicides or the flu we know, by experience, that the number of victims stays within a limited bandwidth (barring exceptions like the Spanish flu). *They don’t have the potential to explode and cause millions of deaths. A new and highly contagious virus like this DOES HAVE that potential.* During the first days of the Black Death, the Justinian Plague etc., any one could have said: “Commonly occuring diseases X, Y and Z cause more deaths than this new bug!” – and be right. But only at the beginning.

        • This is so dumb that I really wonder if it is serious. All of this has been addressed in great detail here and many other places. Seriously, no one can be this dumb.

          • It has been addressed alright, just not convincingly. Look, I am a fan, and will remain one even if you call my comments dumb. But, as Cromwell said, “I Beseech You, in the Bowels of Christ, Think it Possible You May Be Mistaken”. Of course, you might be right in the end, after all. There is a lot if uncertainty. But the situation is not nearly as clear cut as you believe and erring on the side of caution is better.

          • Ok, very interesting article, thank you for sharing. A sober and cautious assessment, astute observations and judiciously brought up data points. I will show up here again to apologise if this turns out to be much ado about nothing. However, my dumb mind couldn’t help but noticing 3 things. (1) Notice how Ioannidis also feels the need to hedge: “In the absence of data on the real course of the epidemic, we don’t know whether this perspective was brilliant or catastrophic.”; (2) The situation in Italy has not been mentioned, and it’s very serious; in Spain it might get even worse… who will be next?; (3) All big pandemics took place a century ago or more ago… and they did not have mass airplane transit back then. I don’t think this ‘detail’ should be disregarded. We shall see. Keep up the good work.

    • Apropos of nothing — I was trying to find the column you mention — I like how Johnson’s Wikipedia entry is “Greg Johnson (white nationalist).”

      For some reason Bernie Sanders isn’t “Bernie Sanders (socialist),” and Bill Ayers isn’t “Bill Ayers (terrorist).” I’m sure that’s just an oversight….

      • Found it! I’ve just skimmed it so far, but I think the part that references Zman, about “the Republican dad script” is weak. Trying to read peoples’ minds and attribute motives to them is a pretty error-prone business. Some of us are countering panicked reactions to the virus because, you know, we actually think people are over-reacting.

        “The market will come back. The people who will die because of Republican greed and complacency will be gone forever.”

        The people who die because of damage to the economy will also be gone forever.

        • I respect Greg for all he’s done for our movement, but it’s clear his homosexuality is showing in the article in question.

          • https://nypost.com/2020/03/18/how-to-handle-coronavirus-tension-with-relationships-and-roommates/

            This article from the local bs joke rag, speaks to the “people” that the Z blog today addresses IMO. These are, after all, The People.

            From the article – an unintended parody:

            “Michael Day, 36, says his partner Byron Regej, 35, is “more alarmist” than him. While Regej was working from the couple’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment last week, Day, a furniture contractor, was still out and about taking business meetings.

            “He kept on saying to me, ‘If you keep doing this, do not bother coming back,’” says Day.

            At first, they butted heads. But after his last client lunch — “at the Garden at the Four Seasons, on Wednesday” — Day decided to defer to his partner. He canceled all of his meetings for the coming week, and the couple booked a beach house in Mattituck, New York, to ride out the pandemic.”

            Some thoughts. One does not have to go to the NY Times to find the obligatory “gay couple”. Now even the tabloid low IQ papers toe that line.

            Is the guy on the bottom considered to be “riding out” the situation, or is he being ridden. Maybe they swap, back and forth. I just came from one of my vendors – I am the longtime owner of a small mfg company – and business as usual there – machines running, repairman was on site. We talked about a price quote for an upcoming job. We joked about going off grid, stockpiling ammo – you gather that my business’ money goes into the hands of red-pilled vendors by choice so we can speak as men when in the company of one another.

            Meanwhile, the one neurotic gay citizen quoted in the above article – made an emotional appeal to his significant other to cease working. Not MADE to cease working. ‘Jutht stop now, my feelz!’ And just what income bracket is this DINC “family” in that they can just pull up stakes and head to The Hamptons (Mattituck, NY – a very expensive enclave) to do what gay men do out there (hint: it happens in the dunes off the beaches at night and definitely goes against the 6′ foot minimum ‘social distance’).

          • In general, Greg reads as if he has a lot of semi-reconciled liberal-libertarian priors.

            Judging from my exchanges if you piss him off online, his default setting is to psychoanalyze you and impugn your motives. He also seems to nurture enduring grudges.

            Note I’ve always been respectful in dialogue with Greg, I didn’t personalize anything. I counter-signal him occasionally on his Wignat pearl-clutching and his weird alliance of convenience with Anglin vs. the TRS guys, Hunter Wallace etc… as well as his wahmenism.

            These are gay things, OFC, but I don’t go there in debating him. It’s a low-blow strategy in that context and it comes off like you’re status-flexing rather than beating his point. That said, these things are related.

        • Casualties from the economic fallout by suicide and possibly street violence will dwarf the nursing patients who go to their sweet rewards.

        • Vizzini – Whether people die because of “greed and complacency” or “damage to the economy” or corona virus or the flu or diabetes doesn’t matter – that was my point the other day that some took issue with. We will all die, one way or the other. The fact that someone over 80 with emphysema dies from the latest ailment of the day rather than an older and more familiar one is irrelevant. But, as repeatedly noted, people are not rational creatures and operate on emotion and a herd mentality.

          I’m not one of those “if it saves even one life” folks; I’ve never been. That does not mean I’m hard hearted or immune to concern about my loved ones – it just means that I am far less likely to suspend my rationality in response to appeals to emotion. Certainly, if one of my children became deathly ill with whatever, I’d do all I possibly could to save them, but would still stubbornly recognize that it would not justify shutting down the world or putting everyone else at an extreme inconvenience.

          It’s that overemphasis on extreme individualism we’ve all come to know and loathe – if one’s child is allergic to ‘x’ then the whole school and all airlines and public places must stop making ‘x’ available to anyone anywhere ever again. That sort of thinking makes me batty and I constantly push back against it. I can and will offer sympathy and even empathy to people, but I just cannot suspend my rationality to help them justify their own emotionalism. It’s not in my nature. I know, way to make friends and influence people, not (particularly as a woman). Whatever. It’s my operational hardware.

          • 3g;
            A strong Christian faith helps a lot too. If you know you’re going to a better place, it greatly quells the hysteria.

          • It’s that overemphasis on extreme individualism we’ve all come to know and loathe … [that] makes me batty and I constantly push back against it.

            I’m with you 100%. I can see people taking reasonable precautions but a mayor shutting down what he (and progs like him) considers to be non-essential businesses – bars, lounges, nightclubs, taverns, indoor commercial amusements businesses, theaters, gyms, bingo parlors and bowling alleys in this case – is just plain WRONG! IM-NS-HO it’s downright UN-FEKKING-AMERICAN in point of fact! Governments OUGHT to exist to PROTECT (secure?) our rights not to willy-nilly VIOLATE them. Shouldn’t they? I believe that adults should be allowed to be adults. I don’t need some bureaucrat or elected leftist know-it-all to tell me how to live my life. My cardiologist and I were on opposite sides of whether the government should be able to take such draconian measures. I told him that I believe more could die from the effects of the enforced measures to control the spread of Covid-19 than from the virus itself. He is an immigrant from either Spain or Central America so we have differing views about the purpose and proper powers of government.

    • People are easily led to the disaster narrative, because they love a good panic. Think about how giddy and chatty people get when a huge snowstorm is forecast. Complete strangers will talk about it like they’re old friends

      • DLS said, “people love a good panic”

        I think part of this is modern life is so dull a little danger is welcome. Triggers deeply buried genetic memories.

    • That Johnson column was freaking appalling. It’s not a time for division, but to see thought leaders buy into what is an obvious op and propaganda merits criticism. It was this mentality that enabled the criminal ruling class.

      • I found the column quite illuminating with respect to what lessons we should draw from these times. While you may disagree with Greg’s policy recommendations, do you disagree with the lessons he draws?

        • For those who have already come to those conclusions, this panic merely confirms them. Whether or not everyone else draws those conclusions is far less certain. Greg may simply be singing to the choir. For example, we have brown people demanding in Trump’s pressers that people stop calling it the Chinese Flu. The multiculturalists, I suspect, will prove to be much more resistant than to eradication efforts than the coronavirus.

        • My response to Greg would be (and best in mind he’s one of our best thinkers and someone I deeply respect):

          Never, EVER accept our enemy’s framing of an issue. EVER!!!!

          The moral assumptions in Greg’s piece do just that.

          • Greg accepts the framing that WuFlu is a public health crisis to the level that our social betters tell us it is.

            Accepting that this is a crisis on that level is like accepting that White self interest = bad. You have to break that conditioning first.

      • I do not make it a habit to read “columns” be neurotic gay men. Why do you? Isn’t it a case of magical thinking to assume they can be one of “the guys”?? Is there not a parable involving a frog and a scorpion – applicable when say, Lindsey Graham does something disloyal – ‘but wait, I thought he was on our side….’ wail.

    • Those who dont really have much of an argument hide in the needlessly large or opaque words. Lol. Zmans approach to the lie of evolutionary theory, which is a joke scientifically and mathematically, also displays this flaw. Again, self reflection is in order.

  77. Most people don’t think, they feel, and then use reason to justify their feelings.

        • Emotion is like intuition. Useful as a motivator to investigate, but horrible as a decision maker.

          We cannot, nor should we want them not to pipe up, but they must not be let to run the show of our “thinking”.

    • The limitations of reason as they have been observed since Plato and Aristotle

      Logic–The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

      Reason is an historian, the passions are the actors.

      Few can reason, all can feel; and such an argument is gained, as soon as it is proposed.

      You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

      All theory is against freedom of the will, all experience for it.

      Man’s sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest are signs of a strange disorder.

      Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

      This creature was, by all human standards, inside out–its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart.

      The weakness of the practical mind is that while it clearly sees the existing circumstances of the case, it has small power of foresight.

      Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

      It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

      It takes a nonentity to think of everything.

      A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

      It is necessary to guard ourselves from thinking that the practice of the scientific method enlarges the power of the human mind. Nothing is more flatly contradicted by experience.

      You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.

      If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.

      That cannot be reasoned down which was not reasoned up.

      Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate instrument for revealing truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that intellect, observing their supremacy, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator.

Comments are closed.