Has the world gone mad? It certainly seems that way to some of us. Even the most cynical never imagined the government shutting down the country for fear of a virus, but it has suddenly become the new normal. The cynical, if they thought of it at all, would have thought the opposite. Instead of a great lock down, the response would have been for the beautiful people to insulate themselves from harm, while abandoning the rest of us to the plague. Instead, we have all gone mad together.
Not everyone has got the fever, that is this panic fever, not the one caused by the Chinese coronavirus. Our world is now firmly divided into two camps. There are those fully invested in the great panic over the virus and there are those who look at the other camp, gobsmacked by what appears to be a general madness. Those in panic look at the rest of us the same way preppers look at normal people. They just assume the gods will strike us down for doubting the virus
Of course, the people in the skeptic camp could be the ones suffering from some form of madness that prevents them from seeing the threat. The trouble is, the great plague is not exactly lighting up the scoreboard. America has tested over 600,000 people suspected of having the virus. Over 500,000 tested negative. Of the positives, 12,000 needed hospital care. In a country of over 320 million people with 200,000 empty hospital beds at any one time, that’s not much of a crisis.
Yet, despite the numbers, formerly sober-minded people continue to carry on as if there are bodies in the streets. Steve Sailer, a man not known for excitability, is calling this virus a great adversary of the human race. Greg Cochran has completely lost his marbles over this thing. Geneticist and HBD enthusiast Razib Khan is in hiding, convinced the end times are upon us. In fact, the whole HBD community is a click away from fleeing to Antarctica to wait out the end of civilization.
Of course, part of the panic, a symptom of that particular virus, is a set of abracadabra phrases that have become so common they seem like something from a secret society, understood only by the initiates. The duller sorts chant about “exponential growth” while others talk about “the hospitals being overwhelmed.” That’s why we have to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread.” These incantations are to chase away doubt and reinforce the belief that people are dying in the streets.
The dying in the streets bit is not much of an exaggeration. A popular bit of folklore now among the panicked is some version of the anonymous ER doctor or nurse relaying how they are overwhelmed and letting people die in the hallways. This urban legend turned up in China, Washington, Italy, New York and now New Orleans. Formerly sensible people now pass these whoppers around on-line, never bothering to think that maybe they are being fed a just-so story by people seeking attention.
One emerging aspect to the madness is the moral dimension. The HBD crowd seems to have been hardest hit. They spend a lot of time contemplating nature and their fellow man’s refusal to respect it. Part of what is driving them now is a sense that nature is going to finally exact some revenge. In other words, this panic is part of a strange revenge fantasy, where they are finally vindicated by biological reality. This sudden sense of moral purpose has made them immune to reason.
Another aspect to this general panic, unrelated to the virus itself, is a different type of revenge fantasy. Many people are cheering the collapse of the economy and civil life on the mistaken belief that what emerges from the rubble will have them at the top of the social hierarchy. This is a phenomenon shared across the political spectrum. It seems to be most popular with young people unhappy with the status quo and far too caught up in purge fantasies to be reached with facts and reason.
Probably the most salient aspect to this panic is the role of women. As has been noted too many times to count, the West is now a gynocracy. It is not a matriarchy, as women have stopped bearing children and stopped caring about children. Look around and you see childless women in positions of authority all over the West. In fact, these are women who reached their status by rejecting every aspect of womanhood. The West is now a world run by middle-aged childless women.
Anyone who has been around women in a crisis has observed a strange phenomenon among childless adult females. Some switch gets flipped in a crisis where their protective instincts get misdirected at the adults in the room. This part of their nature was never allowed to mature in the raising of children, so it comes bursting forth in an incoherent desire to help when their help is not needed. They become like mother ducks loudly herding the brood to safety.
For a society run by such women, every crisis is met with demands that everyone shelter in place. Notice how over the last few decades that public officials no longer call for volunteers or tell people to pitch in and work together. Such independent action violates the frightened female’s sense of duty to her brood. Instead, mild weather events now close the schools and force people to work from home. This virus scare is every middle-aged women’s Hunger Games moment.
Mass panics are a known phenomenon. The general panic that took place in France between July 22 and August 6 1789 is known as The Great Fear. It was a period of rural unrest, driven by both a grain shortage and rumors of an aristocrats’ “famine plot” to starve the peasants. The exact reason for this panic is in dispute. Ergotism is a favorite reason for those with a certain sense of humor, but most historians consider it one of the primary causes of the French Revolution.
At some point, the bloom comes off this lock-down rose once people start to feel the real cost of listening to madmen. People will remember that the same folks who swore Boris and Natasha had used their mind control devise to install Trump in the White House are the many of the same people peddling this panic. Necessity will force a lot of people to stop going along with what they have suspected from the start is nothing more than a mass panic. Soon, this all comes to an end.
Like the Great Fear, the Great Madness will leave a mark, or at least it should leave a mark on our society. You never can be sure about these things, as the West seems to be unusually immune to learning from these events. Two centuries ago The Great Fear meant the end of the feudal order and eventually a revolution. It was not the sole cause of the revolution, maybe not the main cause. It was certainly an example of how the old order was no longer able to maintain order.
It is too soon to know what this panic means for us. Perhaps it further undermines the legitimacy of the system and the people that profit from it. Perhaps it sets off social changes that slowly transform our society in ways we have yet to imagine. Maybe the fever breaks and this event, like the Russian hoax, gets forgotten. Given what most likely awaits on the other side of the lock-down, it is hard to imagine this great madness being forgotten. There’s always a price to be paid for following madmen.
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Normally I agree with you but you’re dead wrong on this one.
A failure to lock down society to contain COVID-19 would likely mean 3-4%+ of your civilization dead (and who knows how many more permanently disabled), rather than the commonly touted 1-2% when your medical system isn’t overwhelmed and is functioning perfectly.
The CCP, one of the most sociopathic governments on the planet, didn’t lock down 770 million of its citizens for ‘just the flu.’ And if you think every country’s footage of body bags + overflowing ER rooms is a hoax, then you’re even more irrationally conspiratorial than I’d thought.
Half of Americans are diabetic. One third are obese. COVID-19 will devastate the unhealthy, carbed out fatsos in this country if severe lockdowns aren’t undertaken and maintained.
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Two camps? Extremes are nearly always wrong, why man must continuously seek the extreme to find the middle ground perplexes me, use your imagination!
Destructive fantasy to come out on top of the social hierarchy, how about a fantasy without a social hierarchy where you can be left %+*#% alone from these sick over social individuals that can’t bring a hammer to a nail, so productive people can just get on with business.
You are revealing your cards in what you write!
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The herd mentality is scary. I keep waiting for one chain to break and bring this train to insanity to a halt
Don’t discount boredom as a major factor behind the Great Panic of 2020.
We say all the time that we are in an era of decline. There’s no need therefore to turn our heads away when the evidence for such a judgment forces its way into common sight.
As Kenneth Clark said in “Civilisation,”
“Fear, stultifying boredom, exhaustion. These are what characterize a civilization’s collapse.”
You’ve got to admit that there is a highly dramatized, enthralled element in the Corona coverage. Finally, people seem to be feeling, we have a chance to deal with something meaningful, something real, instead of just politics all the time.
In my prepper group, (small but reasonably well informed) we really never were too concerned about the virus.
We were however very concerned about the reaction to it by governments and easily medial led public.
The hysteria in the public, created and nurtured by the media hasn’t peaked yet. But its pretty evident in Canada, that the federal government was waiting for an event like this to go completely socialist.
I also see the Democrats were able to pull an addendum (1800 pages worth) out of nowhere, to spice up an emergency spending bill. Shocker.
Drove to a local park yesterday. There was a small army of orange cones across the entrance and a huge highway sign flashing ” Park Closed “. Pedestrians simply walked around this ridiculous display however since there was no place to park turned around and headed to the beach .
It was crowded like a weekend in July. Lots of people smoking weed, dogs running around pissing on anything that didn’t move and not a cop in sight.
It’s clear no one is taking this “sheltering in place ” thing seriously. Today the local Walmart was packed ,plenty of weekend traffic, oh and the invasion of New Yorkers remains unabated.
The media have been a disgrace throughout all of this. Now that the new case numbers in this part of the world are starting to decrease and the death count is nothing like they had hoped, are they reporting this? Hell no! Now we have to cop Italian coffins stacked atop each other and nightmare predictions of economic destruction. I’m sick of all this crap. It’s a nice day outside, I’m taking a VERY essential walk.
“Maybe the fever breaks and this event, like the Russian hoax, gets forgotten. Given what most likely awaits on the other side of the lock-down, it is hard to imagine this great madness being forgotten. There’s always a price to be paid for following madmen.”
Agree with the first full sentence, vigorously disagree with the second, and agree with the last full sentence.
This era is one of transitioning from one moral panic to another seamlessly and without institutional memory. Within a span of three years, the United States has experienced a blatant coup attempt, a political impeachment, and now this panic over a virus somewhat worse than seasonal flu. How many even remember the first two? Yes, this one will result in a financial debacle both short-term in the form of a severe recession and long-term in the form of currency devaluation. People next will panic over the economic displacements without any context or thought about causation, though. Numerous Western countries, usually in relation to Climate Change or some such nonsense, experience nearly identical sequential panics. If the contemporary West falls into revolution, will anyone even be able to cite why? It is doubtful and that’s a big difference with what happened in France no matter how spurious the motivations for the Paris Commune.
These panics once were successfully orchestrated and managed by the Cloud People through their propaganda organs. Not only have those lost the ability to shape any type narrative, the Cloud People themselves fall prey to the very panics they spawn, which may be the most bizarre aspect. Is it due to rapid communications through social media? Loss of family and community structures? Your suggestion about feminization of society rings true.
There will be long-lasting economic downturn after the dust clears from this one, and that indeed is a steep price to pay to follow madmen. But there won’t be a causal link drawn between what precipitated the economic devastation and the collapse, and the stampede from the next panic will await and happen regardless of what is happening in the moment.
Is any herd beast even aware of what caused the stampede, much less remember it? I doubt there will be any “lessons learned” because mobs possess no herd memory.
I think you’re going to wind up looking pretty foolish on this one Z. And at the rate this outbreak is expanding, we’re going to know who’s right soon. It isn’t as if a dangerous infectious disease outbreak is some sort of historically-unknown or novel event, just because we haven’t faced a really bad one in a century or so. Deaths from this thing are increasing fast, about 20% per day. Good bet it’s going to kill a lot of people in the next few months.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
At the rate that tree is growing in my yard, it will reach the by by the end of summer.
Shameless shill for a 2007 vintage Gates foundation research brothel.
At least I get boobie-pics with quality end-of-thread spam.
Watch out: he’s got a link!
Thanks for the graph. There still seems to be a large uncertainty range. Also, I understand that current measures are based on “flattening the curve” which is intended as a means (1) to buy time to mobilize heath system resources rather than (2) to effectively suppress the virus. And, of course, it does not factor the economic and social costs (which are viewed as being of little importance by the political class).
Superb post. Unfortunately men now are starting to act like childless women as that has been presented as the ideal human behavior. Where are the male leaders who are looking at this and saying “nah bro. It ain’t worth destroying the economy over.” The only examples in the West I know of male leaders acting like men are the Netherlands and Mexico. Even those insane cat ladies in Sweden are dealing with this more sanely than male leaders in the West.
I don’t think very many people truely appreciate the power of the modern media. And I don’t think the limits of it’s power are known yet…
Two centuries ago The Great Fear meant the end of the feudal order and eventually a revolution.
I disagree. The Protectorate’s execution of King Charles Stuart marked the end of the feudal order in Western Europe.
I don’t think you guys are crazy and I don’t feel panicky. But there is one major difference between climate change, formerly known as global warming, Russian hoax and then this virus. That difference is tangible evidence. On March 1, the first patient in NYC was diagnosed. Two days ago there were 23,000 diagnosed cases, in New York City alone.
At Elmhurst Hospital in Queens they had to store bodies in a refrigerated truck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE68xVXf8Kw
Older Italians are dying like flies from this thing and some of their hospitals are overwhelmed. I heard the same is true for Spain but I don’t know the situation as well down there.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8095835/Overwhelmed-Italian-hospitals-running-200-cent-capacity.html
In London, which had the most restrained approach initially, there’s just over 5,200 cases now
https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/london-coronavirus-map-boroughs-most-18001254
342 ppl dead in London alone, >1,000 for the country, and so far it seems this virus isn’t even done warming up in Britain. And bear in mind, Britain followed restraint, ‘remember to wash your hands but let’s not overreact’ at first
https://www.mylondon.news/news/health/london-coronavirus-london-hospitals-96-18000085
I am working under the assumption that these stories are not a giant hoax. I suppose that theoretically this could be a giant dyzinformazia operation but I don’t see how ppl wouldn’t get wise about that pretty soon. And I don’t think that’s what you think either, I don’t think that’s your argument, that this is a hoax.
My argument, in a nutshell, is this: the economy is going to get whacked, no matter what strategy is followed. If nothing is done officially you might really see riots, when every vibrant, and most whites too, want to get to the hospital as soon as they have a cough and they are out of beds, or docs or nurses. Or they start burning the city b/c Tyrone died from a burst appendicitis that they didn’t have an anesthesiologist to handle. Soon every inner city patient, or his gang bros, will be packing when they go to the ER. And after that, the doctors and nurses go home in protest. And also the fear of the virus, ppl will stop going to work on their own. You CAN’T save the economy before this bug is tamed. And you could lose control of society as well if it is not. If nothing was seen to be done, ppl would get really nervous about food supplies. Based on what I’ve heard this micron has done so far, when it had the advantage of surprise, that’s what I think, on cool contemplation, not ‘panic’ (personally anyway, society can clearly panic).
So WITHOUT claiming that I’m right to support lockdown or that you guys are nuts, what do you guys suggest should be done about this thing running wild? Let nature take its course? ‘Say goodbye to granny’? Or you think advice to wash your hands is gonna stop this? So far that’s worked disasterously in Italy, Spain, now London and New York. Between lockdown, ‘remember to wash your hands’ admonitions from the surgeon general and CDC and then ‘let it burn itself out’, what other options are there? I don’t believe there are ANY ‘good’ options here, only different kinds of ‘very bad.’
How did Japan and South Korea handle it? Japan especially has an aged population.
I think that wearing masks is the solution. Masks work. Of course, we outsourced that to China, and apparently we can’t even make them anymore? (so much for the free market solving every problem, BTW).
Anyways the government is now lying about the utility of masks. I know y’all hate masks but that is the answer. 1) lock down NYC and other hot spots 2) enforce it with national guard 3) give everybody masks 4) quarantine the elderly 5) everybody goes back to work with the option of working from home.
Nope not me, I’m pro-mask too. I don’t think that alone will do it. What we need more than anything is good testing, to find out how prevalent it is and how fast it’s growing. There are some medical problems w that, on top of the logistical and other problems.
But this thing is running crazy right now and that is happening no matter how much we would like to go back to ‘normalcy’ or not.
Define “elderly”, junior. I’ll be 69 in 4 months. Do I qualify? How about you let ME decide when to quarantine MYSELF!!! For the nonce I’m going to keep delivering food and generally mixing it up with the gen pop. I’ve had the grim reaper breathing down my neck enough times to know that if it isn’t my time I’m not going and if it IS my time then it doesn’t matter what I’m doing at the time. This huddling in fear of SARS/MERS is for cravens.
No reasonable person is saying that COVID isn’t bad. The question is how bad and for whom? The most important question is, given a bad situation what steps can be taken that do not compound a bad situation by making it worse?
Your statement that “In London … there’s just over 5,200 cases now” illustrates the problem we have when trying to understand covid. The statistics and data are very complicated and do not lend themselves to simple statements. Your statement is not, in fact, true. Those are the reported cases, not the actual number of cases. The stat we actually care about is the infection fatality rate (IFR)–deaths per total cases–not the much quoted CFR. But it gets worse. IFR tells us the average fatality rate and for covid that rate is distributed unequally across age groups. The morbidity rate for a 20 year old is not the same as for an 80 year old. And then, there is the pre-existing health condition factor to make it even more complicated. If you are 70 and have no underlying health issue, your chance of dying is different than someone of the same age with an existing condition. And then there is the ventilator issue…
So here is where the rubber hits the road. What if, and I speculate, covid has an IFR like the flu for those under 60 but an IFR of 5 to 10 percent for those 60-80, and an IFR of 20% for those above 80? What is the right balance between compassion for those who are the most vulnerable and devastating the country as a whole? I don’t know.
I don’t think the stories are hoaxes but all viruses have exponential rises. The flu has 38 million cases, 390,000 hospitalizations, and 23,000 deaths just this year. We see 40,000 to 60,000 deaths annually from it.
Coronavirus is up to 2,000 deaths. The media reports every case of Coronavirus, but not others. I’m highly skeptical of reports that the morgues are overwhelmed by 2,000 bodies over a month when annually the flu season is surging deaths into tens of thousands. And likely these are people that would die from catching either due to compromised immune systems.
Parts of this panic is the cat that got out of the bag.
Although merely opportune for some, other aspects were intentional.
Some are taking very careful notes as this unfolds. We’ll undoubtedly see more as those notes are used again in the future.
In the long run this might all be beneficial. It will be harder for the ruling class to claim that borders don’t work. The flaws of globalization and diversity have been laid bare. Serious shit is going down, giving people a reality check and actual problems for a change (disease, unemployment, real or quasi martial law, and even lack of food and supplies vs. pronouns and gay wedding cakes). Perhaps there will even be an increase in birth rates.
It’s also possible that people are so far gone, so deeply indoctrinated, that even this will not snap them out of the trance they’re in, and soon enough they’ll be clamoring for open borders, diversity and cheap Chinese products again, and seeking therapy because they played a video game and there was a lack of trans representation.
I don’t see it snapping anybody out of their trance in Canada.
Most white people are still brainwashed sheep. More angry at my “racism” for calling it the Chinese virus than they are about, well, the Chinese virus.
I’ve given up on the majority of whites. Most just don’t seem to have the tools to survive. A greater % of young white men do seem to have knowledge but are quiet about it. It’s still the vast minority anyways.
Mass immigration and ethnic replacement of white Canadians will continue immediately after this pandemic is over.
Banned Hipster tilts at the Z-Man in a self-admitted epic rant: “Z-Man is an Economic Illiterate; Let the Cannibals Eat Him.”
https://bannedhipster.home.blog/2020/03/27/z-man-is-an-economic-illiterate-let-the-cannibals-eat-him/
A post that spends the first several paragraphs doing an amateur Sherlock Holmes bit to build a fantasy story about who the Zman is doesn’t impress me.
Regarding UBI, the idea that UBI won’t result in higher prices is the fantasy story. It can only be maintained by someone who thinks the economic cycle begins and ends with Tyrone and the convenience store owner. The money for UBI has to come from somewhere and THAT is what will raise the prices, not an arbitrary price hike at the convenience store because Tyrone has more money to spend.
This guy also doesn’t seem to understand that dollars and wealth are two completely different things, and that, certainly, we can have as many dollars as we want, but we can’t arbitrarily create more wealth. Can someone source for me where the Zman is in favor of printing more money to pay the debt? I mean, it’s an argument and the guy is right that there are two choices, and it’s not totally clear which option is the more destructive, but I really can’t remember the Zman’s position on the subject.
“People like him voted for inflation as opposed to default.” Remind me, who was the “default” candidate? I don’t think I ever heard that guy’s speeches.
“The entire bubble was caused by George W. Bush and his war.” This guy isn’t serious.
What in the world? Seriously, in what weird fantasy world is this a thing? I presume he’s talking about mortgage defaults, but nobody blames that solely on “black people” and is he really trying to say that mortgage defaults weren’t a major factor?
I, personally, have no idea what the Zman does with his money. Has he ever said? But this guy is, apparently, omniscient.
Worker wages going up. If toilet paper costs a wheelbarrow of money, some consumer must have a wheelbarrow of money to set this price.
This is working so well for Venezuela.
Barring Civil War, supply chain collapse is not realistic either. Ironically, US is a service economy, haircuts do not require complex supply chains, so even a Civil War will have minimal impact on haircut prices.
OK, I’m losing my patience with trying to take apart this guy’s insane ranting. That previous sentence is among the stupidest things I’ve ever read. Do I really have to explain why a breakdown in the supply chain would affect haircut prices, even though you don’t need a lot of supplies to give a haircut?
Thank God his TL;DR encapsulates the stupidity:
Anyone else want to take it from here? This guy believes wealth is magic.
Reading more of this guy’s stuff, I see what he’s about. It is like two competing schools of magic.
He’s fighting against the investor magicians — those who think they can keep earning more and more money without creating wealth by leveraging debt. I’m with him there.
But his own brand of magic is that since we have a fiat money system, we can simply give people the money they need via a UBI by creating all the dollars we want to do so.
For some reason it doesn’t occur to him that the reason his magic doesn’t work in the long run is the same reason the other kind of magic won’t work in the long run
Like all magical thinking, both have their roots in a fundamentally irrational view of the universe. Both also rely on a fundamental lack of understanding of human nature: everybody can play make-believe only as long as nobody tries to take advantage of the fact that it is make-believe.
You see this when kids play make-believe and things are going nicely until one kid gets the bright idea of one-upping every one else “I have a gazillion dollars! I”m the richest!” “Oh yeah? I have eleventy gazillon dollars!” And so on.
This guy’s problem is that there are too many people that won’t play nice in his game of make-believe. They are the same people that are not playing nice in our current game of make-believe, and they will always be with us.
Don’t just downvote, douchebag. Make an argument.
Not me downvoting and I appreciate your incisive comments.
Thanks. Didn’t think it was you.
That post is the Platonic ideal of infighting. Just let it go by. Leave the poor man alone to his screaming.
I have a hard time not lashing out when someone starts blathering about UBI.
This period will be known as “cat lady fever”.
Total meltdown of reason.
And we all knew this was coming.
https://www.amren.com/news/2020/03/reparations-debate-resurfaces-as-america-gets-a-2-trillion-coronavirus-bailout/
I expect patience for black’s antics to go down during an economic downturn. Putting up with their nonsense is a luxury.
Just curious Z, what is your prediction for how many Americans are going to be killed by Coronavirus by, oh let’s say, the end of the year?
I ask because I don’t share the enormously high confidence you seem to have in your own judgement, and it would be helpful if you would actually commit to a number, so we could come back later and see if you were at least in the right ballpark.
Of course if you can’t come up with a number then maybe you aren’t really as confident as you sound. Knowing that would be interesting too.
“Of course if you can’t come up with a number then maybe you aren’t really as confident as you sound.”
What a retarded statement.
There’s a 3rd type of person. Those who are keeping the gears running while the rest lock themselves down afraid of their own shadow. Who know they could get sick, could die, but would rather do the right thing.
Rogo!
A succinct description of our current situation.
I have nothing against women. I think every free white man should own at least one.
Lease.
Rent
Word.
Hey zman!
We readers are crowd source u a 10 day Caribbean cruise leaving from New orleans! What a way to lead from the front!
Many people are cheering the collapse of the economy and civil life on the mistaken belief that what emerges from the rubble will have them at the top of the social hierarchy.
If you feel that you’re getting effed under the current regime, and that your democratic options have run out, maybe throwing the dice is an appealing proposition – you might throw a full cup of sixes.
The French Revolution certainly brought some unlikely people out on top, at least until The Emperor put things back on track. The plan was that Louis’ uncle, the Duke of Orleans, were to be king instead of the king, instead you had an unruly bunch of sansculottes and thespians lording it over everybody.
Or darker still: if you’re taking it up the crapper no matter what, your annoying rich cousin with his ridiculous Porshe may as well get some too.
Felix, astute observation. I’ve always said, votes for candidates like Sanders and AOC are symptoms of a society not in balance. I’m not a fan of socialism, even as in your country. But it is at least a balance of sorts among your general population. I think you termed it sort of a social contract.
Here in the USA, wealth and power are way too much in too few hands. We leave the lower classes to eke out a living as best they can at our peril.
But it is at least a balance of sorts among your general population. I think you termed it sort of a social contract.
Our Dear Leaders call it “The Flexicurity Model” on festive occasions: it’s easy to fire people, but the welfare system makes losing your job all but a minor inconvenience.
My impression is that most people on our team are some variety of social democrat: they wouldn’t mind paying taxes if they knew it went towards helping a tribesman in trouble. Don’t quote me, but I struggle to find a denomination that doesn’t involve “national” and “socialist”.
There are only a few ways an entrenched elite like globohomo gets “circulated.” I see the status quo as a downward spiral.
For those tired of my “chemo or hospice care” concept, look at it like “hold em” poker. There’s a certain point in any game where short-stackers have to start betting “against the odds” or fall to attrition by the blinds.
Globohomo has most of the chips and if we play the percentages, it’s increasingly possible that we’ll bleed out. I’m not asking anyone to go “all in before the flop” just yet, but betting a low flush our chip-rich grandpas could have passed on might be the only thing that gets us back in the game.
There’s always a fine line between a successful surprising tactic and one so dumb that it was unanticipated for good reason.
Let us not go gentile into that Goy Night.
Chimp, chimp like Nogs against the dying of the White.
Globohomo has most of the chips
But we have the numbers.; for the moment, we’re all bust and no flush but when there are 300 million players at the table, buying to an inside straight is bound to work for some of us.
I see it as more of a power elite that’s passing away. It doesn’t matter whether you root for it or not. If an elite isn’t overthrown by violence, it eventually goes crazy and the same happens anyway. It’s an era we have to live through, and if you root for collapse you’re actually rooting for your country and humanity itself to get on with it, to get past it, as post crisis times are generally mini, fleeting golden ages for society. So the best thing to do is buy stock in major, diversified energy companies, open a bottle of wine, and enjoy the show, rooting for the inevitable consequences to happen sooner rather than when we’re old and decrepit. And one day we’ll all laugh about the time when trannies were reading to kids in libraries. If you look at Russia as an example. We’re in the late Gorbachev era, we’ll soon be in our Yeltsin era (when the AOCs and other crazies reach their peak in a dangerous, chaotic place) and then we’ll have our Putin, whomever he is. It won’t be bad having a Putin after all the chaos and destroyed lives. Countries have a similar general pattern over time.
So the best thing to do is buy stock in major, diversified energy companies
The problem is that that is an investment in enemy infrastructure.
I’d recommend real estate – it’s the only asset that can’t easily be pilfered or debased by shysters and politicians, and if worse comes to worst, you can use it for growing potatoes.
Real estate is great. But as for rentals I’m worried about eviction policies through the crisis. Our governor CA has put a temporary ban on evictions through this. Who’s to say that as we go through the depression these “temporary” policies don’t become permanent or with 10 hoops to jump through. So I said to myself, “what would Greta do?” You would then do the exact opposite of that.
The antifa types around here are already circulating info on how to organize “rent strikes.”
The Kulaks have too much grain!
You’ll notice that no corresponding ban on foreclosures has been issued. The banksters won’t allow it. If they don’t watch out the banksters are going to be up to their eyebrows in rental property and foreclosed-upon single family homes that nobody can afford to buy. We’re making the mortgage payments but it’s definitely a stretch with my school bus-driver wife sitting idle.
As Adam Smith should have said “there’s a lot of crazy in a nation.”
If we can do anything to help nudge Team Gynocracy down the stairs, let’s lend a hand.
The ruling elite have been given license by Congress to cash in all of their chips.
From the emergency relief bill:
“(b) TEMPORARY RELIEF FROM CECL STANDARDS.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no insured depository institution, bank holding company, or any affiliate thereof shall be required to comply with the Financial Accounting Standards Board Accounting Standards Update No. 2016–13 (‘Measurement of Credit Losses on Financial Instruments’), including the current expected credit losses methodology for estimating allowances for credit losses, during the period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act and ending on the earlier of— (1) the date on which the national emergency concerning the novel coronavirus disease (COVID–19) outbreak declared by the President on March 13, 2020 under the National Emergencies Act (50 16 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) terminates; or (2) December 31, 2020.”
They can now empty their reserves to prop up their earnings reports and boost their stock price on top of the effin bailout. To do this would only make their longterm position even more volatile. They are expanding some credit lines to cover exiting obligations but anything new is off the table at this point. This is probably some sort of exit strategy so they can fatten up even more before they have to make a quick exit. There is no reason to do this on top of the bailout if they are playing the long game.
Oligarchy Accelerationism.
President Cuomo will do a great job of turning the screws on everyone. Good old Italian family values. Remember, too, where fascism got its start. It wasn’t Germany.
As the OP reports, the West is a gynocracy, has been for decades, and so its nations follow after whatever fear trends the moment. Females are collectivist creatures, and respond to fear with collective hysteria carrying self-serving undertones. The AIDS hysteria was an excellent example.
The Demoncrapic Party is just an extension of the collective feminine in America, and that Party (and its agenda) was in decline, with the economy soaring, Trump (imago of the Hated Masculine) on the way to a certain second term, Britain and the West chafing against globalism/collectivism, and criminal leftist leaders of America finally in the sights of prosecutors.
That all = FEAR to the female mass-mind. She sees her careful plans going amiss, and she demands a return to total control, at any cost. She talks safety and concern, but always it is about control.
How does the collective feminine respond to any and all threats? No different than the U.S. courts and corrections institutions: lock down. They won’t do as I say? Then lock them all down! Off with their heads! Something Must Be Done! REEE REEE, and doubtless was.
China, the main adversary of America, is the political aspect of the Red Dragon. China has many Dems and Leftist operatives in its pocket, and it is from China (likely, a bio-tech firm) that the ‘plague’ emerged.
Now that’s a LOT of coincidences all scrunched together in one tidy event. Investigators don’t like coincidences.
The virus strain is real, and folks surely do sicken and die from it, but this ain’t anything close to the end of the world. Makes a good test-run though.
Talib’s Precautionary Principle is nothing but a soyboy academic’s version of that feminine principle you described. It is well known that a diet heavy in certain soy products results in feminization of males. Talib and his hyper-cautious ilk are living demonstrations of that.
One of the interesting things about the current hysteria is how easily autocratic rule was embraced. I always figured Caesar or Napoleon were embraced when things got bad enough but it doesn’t appear to require things be very bad at all.
NC’s governor issued a mandatory stay at home order. Similar orders can be seen across the United States. Almost nobody asks on what authority such power was given to the governors. In fact, many people scurry to condemn anyone not following the orders with glee.
There’s some lesson for our side. First libertarianism is dead in the water. As soon as the social pressure meant being outside of the “acceptable” many libertarian types embraced any, and every autocratic order. Second, nearly the entire nation of “freedom” loving Americans dropped everything for some safety. This is just how humans operate. Proving why a nation of self reliant independents would last right up until the first scare.
I don’t know about in NC, but in Texas that power was given to the Governor and County/City chief executives way back in 1975. In the County Judge’s (the County Judge is the chief executive in Texas counties) edict he referenced some emergency act of 1975 as being his authority to issue the edict. I doubt anybody ever envisioned the act being invoked under circumstances such as we are now experiencing but I DO suspect that 1975 was before Texas went Republican. The DemonKKKRats always did love gathering power to themselves.
I would suggest you search your state’s code for some sort of emergency act. I would be very much surprised if such a law was not put on the books several decades ago.
Let me be the latest commenter who reports that where I live, in a mid-sized city in the Midwest, daily life does not look much different. There is slightly less traffic and the schools and restaurants are closed, but otherwise it’s hard to tell that anything is awry. I take this as a good sign that many people (if not most) are fearless, at least in my area.
I live in a very large southern metropolis and one can still go out. Drive the streets. Get take out. Buy groceries and hardware. Construction and road work goes on as normal. Buses running. Mail delivered. Etc. Except that the roads are 25% of normal. Great for the Amazon & UPS trucks. Bad for restaurants. This mind you is a shelter in place curfew with a ‘million’ exceptions (but not restaurants). There has been a world-wide jihad on restaurants. What did they do to deserve this?
We should have and could have cut off travel sooner, quarantined known infected and contacts of known infected. We should have immediately ramped up mask production and asked people to wear them, instead of lying to the public that they do no good whatsoever, don’t even try.
What we’re doing now is an over-expensive alternative to what we should have done in the first place. But what we should have done in the first place would have been un-PC, it would have been inconvenient, and it would have run afoul of all the people who appointed themselves in charge of preventing a panic. Least of all this blog, mainly the media pundits and politicians who’ve had to reverse themselves and hope noone notices.
Lesson – sometimes throw the alarmists a bone in time to prevent having to do something, anything, for the children! later down the road.
Never let a crisis go to waste jLeft edition:
this is a take I’ve seen 3 times in the past 2 days.
The reaction to the corona pandemic has led to a re-fetishizing of the nuclear family as we retreat into our homes. The mystification of the couple form, the romanticization of kinship ties and the sanitization of the fundamentally unsafe and oppressive space that is private property.
This particular take was from OpenDemocracy. Expect to hear this again and again in various forms. Your kids returning to college will be the first to get an earful of this.
One of the best if not the best resume of the Great Lunacy I have read
Long term consequences?
There will be many but let me focus on one them, I will call it the open heart surgery syndrome
It is said by those were unlucky to undergo it that the feeling is the one utmost vulnerability that could not precisely described
Man whose very being (his heart) has operated feels the absolute and total dependence on the other (whom does not know) resulting in the ultimate weakness that a human being could possible reach that is having his COMPLETELY in the hands of a stranger.
They never feel the same afterwards no matter how successful the surgery was
Thinking men after this madness is passed will never look at world with same eyes
Realization that no matter, how intelligent, reasonable, hard working “self-reliant” you are your fate is decided/sealed by by crazy mobs and scoundrel utter mediocre effeminate politicians
You will forever remember the irrational fear that you had seen in their eyes understanding that these people in a few years from will be performing another open heart surgery on your heart and there is nothing you can do about it
Usual suspects gearing up for Meme War 2.0, whether anyone else is or not.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/covid-19-coronavirus-pandemic-extremism-white-nationalism-southern-poverty-law-center-969079/
Hey I’m ready for a second Meme War!
https://youtu.be/jGKNaIXtBZQ
Had a little league coached that used to blast this out of his hatchback during batting practice.
Who gives a tinker’s dam what the Southern Preposterous Liars Association thinks?
“Viruses don’t spread over time. If anybody has it, everybody gets it at once. Italy is a figment of your imagination. Spain is a figment off your imagination. All diseases are equally harmful. If you don’t die of it, nothing happened. All hospital beds are ICU beds. Arithmetic isn’t real. Doubling is linear. The number of confirmed cases is <1/8 of what it actually is, because numbers aren’t real. It’s just like the 1965 immigration act: If it’s not a disaster immediately, it can’t ever be any kind of a problem.”
That was ZMan. And now, back to planet Earth:
The right in America gave away their country because they’re too stupid to live. Just because the left is evil and largely stupid doesn’t mean the good guys can’t be too stupid to win. If they had the brains to win, they wouldn’t be losing.
We do have some smart, well-informed people. Sailer and Cochran are smarter than you, for example. Khan isn’t of the right, as far as I can tell, or at least not our right. But he’s smarter than you, and well-informed.
Guys, you have permission to do your own homework and ignore this guy. Get out of the echo chamber. Echo chambers are how people just like you come to think communism and diversity are good ideas.
Where are all the dead homeless in LA?
Walking Dred. “Change… More change…. We wuz kangz…”
Good strawman argument made in first paragraph. But unfortunately, not one made them here. Perhaps you meant to troll another group?
Excellent counterpoint.
Nobody here is saying this, least of all Z. The argument is that people are overreacting and panicking and justifying it all based on a highly improbable worst case scenario which has never happened before.
“Viruses don’t spread over time. If anybody has it, everybody gets it at once”
This is precisely why shutting down the world is a dumb idea. Whatever happens, the one thing we CAN NOT DO, is shut the world down long enough to completely eradicate the virus. Everyone does not all get sick at once. Is there anyone at all that thinks putting the world on lock-down for 18 months is a viable strategy?
Yes, it would be irresponsible to do absolutely nothing. But it is equally irresponsible to close all public businesses and enforce a stay at home order for months on end.
The government doesn’t have this power. It is basically making it up as it goes along. They are rapidly throwing our most basic constitutional rights into the trash. Several states are now saying anyone with a foreign tag from a hot zone state will be subject to stop by cops and quarantined. This is blatantly unconstitutional. They are also claiming the right to stop at homes where they suspect foreigners (to the area) may be inside. I have heard the ATF is not performing the legally necessary background checks in an effort to stem the sales of guns from licensed dealers and some municipalities around the country are claiming the ability to completely shut down gun sales.
All these people who absolutely hate us are the most fanatical about it. The press we normally understand as the lugenpresse, is now suddenly a great source of rational information?
Get real.
I don’t agree w Z’s take on this issue but I don’t think there’s any reason to put it so mockingly. It’s not as if he doesn’t have a point about the economy or state power vs civil liberties.
I think that the culture of teaching women to “reject every aspect of womanhood” is the great crime of the age.
No, worse than a crime, a blunder.
Never attribute to incompetence that which can be adequately explained by malice.
Early in my life I accepted the maxim “never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence” and throughout my life this maxim has caused me to be blind to a whole lot of malice.
That maxim may have been a useful heuristic in an older time but it is strongly misleading and disarming in ours.
Tars and Line, embrace “both”.
So, the CARES package passed and was signed, and it includes loans for small businesses harmed by the
panicvirus. Loans. I saw this movie.Guido: “Shame how your shop keeps gettin’ broke into, eh? Tell ya what, for just a little off the top, we’ll make sure that don’t happen again.”
They destroy your business, then act like they’re doing you a favor by allowing you to become indebted to them to build it back up. If this were a movie plot, we’d know damn well whose head Clint Eastwood was going to put a bullet through by the end of it.
It’s nuts. Let me destroy your life, but here’s a fair interest rate on a loan. I literally can’t hike in a park by myself because the authorities have chained it off due to the “shelter in place.” You know what? Maybe I’ll jump over that chain to hike on property maintained by MY tax dollars and was put there for the benefit of ME. I think the founding fathers would already be on that hiking path. Or possibly shooting at the Governor’s mansion (I won’t go that far).
(I won’t go that far)
Of course. None of us will. We’re all good citizens, here.
The $1,200 for “taxpayers” is an advance on 2020 tax returns aka a “tax-credit advance” on your own future tax payments, which will then be clawed back out of your 2020 return. Winning!
The $1,200 amount also reduces between $75k and $99k AGI for individuals. The child credit and married/HH income thresholds are similarly constrained. $6-700 max for non-taxpayers.
Pretty tight bandwidth for a relief package. I am curious to see just how much of this “cash” gets disbursed. Not exactly a middle-class windfall.
Also interesting how the magic $100k income number hangs around these things – and has for decades! “Six figures” still reigns even with all this real income growth we may or may not have been experiencing.
I could be wrong, but this is what I have been able to gather so far.
I have tried to locate and read a coherent breakdown of the devilish details of this law. Perhaps somebody can post a link if they find one.
The very people the press constantly lies about are spreading the junk in the press as if they weren’t known liars.
To keep our guys out of it, Sam Harris knows just how dishonest our press is. The guy spends 1/2 of his public air time denying the lies told about him in the press. But when it comes to lies in the press about other people, he believes them without hesitation.
It takes quite a bit of narcissism to see the world like this. The press is honest and competent in all matters except YOU and the subjects you just happen to know well.
“high risk category”? …. pass the Kool-Aid please.
I don’t know about Razib Khan, but you might want to consider that Steve Sailer and Greg Cochran are in the “high risk” category for COVID-19. That would explain their panic
Steve Sailer is at high risk for a bad case of the brown nose if he doesn’t extract his head from his @$$ before the year’s out.
I’ve recently caught up on Cochran’s blog and I must say I’m shocked. I thought Z-man perhaps exaggerated. No. At this point, I’m inclined to no longer follow him. You can be the sharpest knife in the drawer—Cochran is—but you can’t be correct 100% of the time. Shouting down, insulting your detractors and repeating your epidemic modeling formula as if handed down on Mount Sinai does not impress me as a reasonable way to convince others of your truth.
I have no patience anymore for people who claim to be on our side going off the reservation to support the Left’s latest hoax/power grab. The Trumpening has exposed so many so-called “conservatives” as being nothing more than dishonest grifters that it’s just not worth following anyone anymore after the onset of hysteria. You can’t tell if it’s symptomatic of temporary derangement that might improve, or evidence that someone’s been running a long-term con.
Agree.
Z-man is, sadly, correct about Cochran. Cochran has completely lost his sh**t. His site is now like reading Nassim Taleb on Twitter; all froth and spittle. It isn’t helped by his terrible writing style and apparent lack of the ability to explain his position with anything approaching clarity. I would have thought he could look at it dispassionately given the very real level of uncertainty with our current data. But no. I wonder if the cause isn’t due to the fact he has been arguing against reality deniers for so long that he is stuck that mode: “Anyone who disagrees with me is a dirty, reality denier.”
Steve Sailer had cancer about 15 years ago. He may have experienced collateral damage from the cancer treatments that may increase his risk with COVID-19.
Still doesn’t justify hysteria or making everyone else pay for his heightened risk. See Compsci’s peanut allergy anecdote. Admitted, I’ve been a Sailer detractor for a few years now, but he’s still being hysterical.
At least he has some reason for preaching caution. What’s Talib’s excuse for outright cowardice?
Taleb’s “precautionary principle” is a debateable approach to low-probability severe impact risks, but it’s not “cowardice.” All-caps Trumperism aside, lets you and him fight or settle down a bit.
Could not disagree more. From where I sit Talib’s principle smacks far more of cowardice than caution. Oh, and for the record I am anything but an “all-caps Trumperist”. I just tend to call things as I see them. I have downloaded and read Talib et al’s papers and they appear to be outright cowardice wrapped in academic gobbledygook and collectivist nonsense. You and I will have to agree to disagree WRT Talib and his lily-livered ilk. I despise cowards even more than I despise ivory-tower academics. Both groups are culls and should be treated as such. Talib’s PPwould have stymied every advance our species has achieved since before we left Africa. Damned good thing there wasn’t a Talib around in power to stop the original diaspora. Doubtless there was one of Talib’s ilk around nay-saying when Kennedy gave his speech putting the U.S. into the “space race”. Microelectronics came about SOLELY because the U.S. couldn’t build big enough boosters and so had to shrink the guidance packages. Try to imagine our present world WITHOUT microelectronics.
FAUGH!!!
Brilliant, Zman!!! Of course, part of that is because we are in complete agreement on this, but part of it is that you are a far more skilled wordsmith than I, putting my thoughts and often incoherent rage into a thoughtful, logical, and rhetorically persuasive form. Long past time, I’m upping my monthly donation.
Perfect post.
ZMan asked
The short answer is (IMNSHO) “Yes”. Between the proponents of Talib’s cowardly and insidious “Precautionary Principle” and those who would do literally ANYTHING IN THEIR POWER to bring down the President, I believe that the world has gone stark, staring bonkers! At least temporarily.
I suspect that Covid-19 is about as much of a crisis as SARS, or MERS. Remember them? From where I sit, the biggest difference between SARS and Covid-19 is the occupant of the White House. When O’Bozo was in the White House, coronavirus was something to be ignored lest it sully the “Light Bringer”. Now there is no trick so base or falsehood so scrofulous that the left will not try to use it in their never-ending quest to bring down a lawfully elected POTUS. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the hype mutated into full blown hysteria and the assholes may well have succeeded in bringing down the world’s economy around everyone’s ears! The law of unintended consequences is an iron law! It does not discriminate.
The ZMan wrote, “There’s always a price to be paid for following madmen.” I disagree. The fact is that there’s always a price to be paid for following INCOMPETENTS. The status of their sanity is irrelevant.
The definition of Gynocracy is my esteemed congressional representative screeching in front on congress, fovever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMN8h0ahUvA
The panic is media driven, Just like the lead up to the Iraq war and before that they did it with the AIDS outbreak… Every day on TV we are subjected tp medical experts who say that cv-19 is as bad as the 1918 Influenza outbreak and that millions will die and our hospitals will collapse under the patient load.
Everyday there is the demand for more ventilators despite the fact that most people put on them who have cv-19 will die anyway.
That idiot Cumo is on every morning proclaiming gloom and doom in NY and it also freaks people out.
And WHY? Most I suspect is pure TDS and these people are willing to destroy our economy to take down Trump. Also the MSM LOVES TO GASLIGHT US.
Think back of all the MSM generated panics/scares
McMartin Preschool molestation
The outbreak of Satanic cults molesting kids in the U.S.
Global Warming
That Iraq was responsible for 9/11
AIDS hysteria
The Cholesterol scare – beware of kjiller eggs
The Russiagate hoax
Re Meat is bad for you
The Real Estate Frenzy of 2002-2008
The data from the most tested country; Iceland indicates this virus isn’t as deadly as thought. Apparently being cooped up concentrates the mind; I have seen now MSN, the Telegraph and even Cuomo question a total lockdown of everyone.
Why is this so much deadlier than SARS?
Well; Wuhan is the replacement for Detroit in its peak. More. Just in time supply lines being cut when you have razor thin heavily indebted margins= panic. When you own the media; and banks Do you get to pick the hype.
They wanted QE. They wanted a bailout.
Instead they set off a full scale panic and attendant global shut down. That is BAD for Finance – as is a suspension of debt slavery. So now they want it lifted.
And its not so easy to stop panic.
Yelling fire in the crowded theater isn’t as easy as stopping the rush for the exits.
Another humiliation we have in store: the vibrants of all countries basically just ignored the lock-down orders and continued to do their hang-out-unproductively-outside thing.
If the virus turns out to be not so bad, we’re going to be seen as a bunch of pussies who follow the anarcho-tyranny rules, while it will be plain as day to them that they’re above the law.
Bad for morale, bad for precedent–and didn’t even take out any vibrants. Sheesh.
Creeping optimism here: We know our society/nation/country can’t go on like this. We know a political, social, financial, even civilizational “correction” is coming. And the longer we wait, the bigger the smash-up. So if the virus brings it on now…is that necessarily bad? Besides, are we not in the middle of a 4th Turning?
I’ve been pointing this out as well. The main thing to keep in mind is that whenever and however it comes it’s most assuredly not going to be painless. Good people are going to get hurt. That’s just the way the world works.
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: Civ insulates people from consequences, which over time makes people immoral and crazy.
Future belongs to the barbarian. Or the hick, redneck, dirt person, what you will. Paradoxically, these are the most capable of being civilized today. Society people are more worried about wiping their butts.
Our society has too many vertical layers. The quality of information that trickles down through each layer gets worse the higher we stack it. Likewise with wealth distribution, social affinity, etc…
For all that right-wingers appreciate hierarchy, we could do better with a more horizontal society in many ways.
“Future belongs to the barbarian” is right in tune with my listening for the weekend – REH and James LaFond would agree with you.
Yeah the trickle-down effect. Turns out gynocracy isn’t as non-heirarchical as advertised. May be worse for all I know. Gossip, etc. Hard to say because I’ve never known patriarchy.
Agreed about horizontal structure. If we’re going to have leaders they shouldn’t be out of touch. Federalism was a great idea. Sort of a hybrid.
Anyone who’s ever worked in a hen-party office environment can attest that every gal there knows where she fits in vis a vis every other woman in the joint.
Gotta say something funny. We interviewed for a receptionist – we have five who work in a common area. Our male office manager explained the process to me: the other workers get a vote. All are women.
We hired a woman who is working out fine. The manager was perplexed at the time, telling me that there was a better candidate who was also a stand-out beauty but they didn’t like her.
I laughed and said, “I get it. You don’t.”
He’s gay. He thought for a minute and said, “Now I get it.”
These are all symptoms of a low-trust society led by unreliable or downright bad actors.
First of all, it’s hard to teach people how to cope with this kind of society when you aren’t allowed to discuss these problems without risking internal exile or imprisonment.
Normies aren’t to blame – they’ve been taught to Trust the Planners. We abnormies aren’t immune – we just tend to trust different planners.
The HBD crowd isn’t herd immune to herd mentality. I suspect a lot of those smart guys are following a fellow smart guy’s lead. This demonstrates Mosca and Pareto’s “inevitability of the elites” dilemma. Something like global-scale epidemiology isn’t a subject most of us can realistically be good at. It has to be left to specialists, a very small number given the niche subject matter and its difficulty level.
Advisors aside, political leaders could and should have imposed travel restrictions and closed borders months before they did. Responsible leadership also would not have permitted our societies to run so close to the margins in terms of infrastructure, over-reliance on China to make all things material, etc…
Every society rises and falls based on the quality of its elites as much or more than the quality of its huddled and befuddled masses. Our masses are panicking and confused because their leaders are crooked, soft and/or deluded.
Our pretend rulers have lost the Mandate of Heaven. Time for new dynasties.
The lesson our pretend rulers will take away from this may very well be how easy it was to manipulate the huddled and befuddled masses. They stumbled into this with the WuFlu but this lesson now learned won’t go unused by them in the future. The silver lining for us is that fool me once, twice, thrice requires more and more effort for diminishing returns.
Perhaps the American populace has lost the Mandate of Heaven and we have been given the rulers we deserve?
Comp, We are not part of the “we” that chose this. Get used to making the distinction between Us and “Americans.”
All of us, and I bet you too, were once upon a time part of the problem—however small—and in that have a hand in events. I know I was for the majority of life. In that manner, I accept the inclusive “we” in the above. All here posting I agree are attempting to rectify such past mistakes.
Another problem fueling the panic is the automatic triggering of downstream actions by “emergency” declarations from above. Tying respective layers of government together absolves public officials from acting responsibly while serving as a force multiplier for the madness. The only thing spreading exponentially is the panic itself.
Small businesses in places like CA and NY have been devastated by this. All because these degenerate governors and mayors pounded their scepters to the floor and decreed “This shall be done!” A freedom loving America (which no longer exists and hasn’t for years) would turn to them and say, “Who the hell are you anyway?” How dare these civil servants order livelihoods to be destroyed by some slightly stronger flu?
Well put Tim.
Yeah. So, look: I remain concerned about this whole thing because a high transmission rate coupled with a relatively high mortality rate can be real trouble. The problem is that we are not seeing what was advertised on either count and the lack of these results doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone in charge. Literally, the one person I know who had the virus – the adult daughter of a friend, works in healthcare – quarantined herself for a couple weeks and was last seen out on a boat with her dog and some friends. Tom Hanks remains un-ventilated. My state of Alabama reports four (4) deaths to this thing, and the city of Birmingham is shut the hell down.
So, while nobody can report transmission rates or mortality rates (the basics for doing simple models on how many people might die from this), we do have weird facts.
1. China genuinely lost their shizz over this. They must have thought the situation was grave, right? If you are doing intuitive Bayesian thinking, like we all are, that’s a pretty big prior for this thing, right? In a situation without many facts, that’s a real fact: it terrified the Chinese.
2. Italy really is stackin’ bodies. Sorta. They had 1,000 people die yesterday, which is around a 50% increase over the average Italian day. Any system will get overloaded if it has a 5 standard deviation increase in volume, so this doesn’t answer whether the situation is serious or grave. Nobody seems to be able to say how serious that problem is, beyond noting that a profoundly overloaded system is profoundly overloaded right now.
3. That damn cruise ship where everyone was exposed and which generated an embarrassingly small number of deaths.
What to make of it all.
Wuhan is the Richmond to Beijing’s Washington. They also had a Hong Kong problem. China is in a rare spell where the worlds opinion is important. I am able to make something of that.
So, M.B. Lamar, what do we make of their reaction? Was it false flag? Over-reaction on a massive scale?
I think it was purge under cover of virus. I cannot in even the slightest way substantiate that, other than familiarity that Wuhan has been a hotbed of rebellion going back to Chiang Kai-Shek, and that Xi was clearly on shaky ground by November. I can’t believe they wanted to spread it to the west given the egregious harm to their economy and reputation. I think outside leftists got in on the action as a means to achieve New Green Deal Round 2, through Stalinist crisis exploitation tactics. The House Stimulus points to that, That would be the 5-eyes, up to their usual dirty tricks.
This also explains why it isn’t all that deadly, they wouldn’t want to actually wipe out their population.
I’ve been wondering the same thing M.B. How much of the Chinese reaction was directed towards arresting “undesirables” and purging Communist party apparatchiks who weren’t sufficiently supportive of Xi? I think the provincial leader of the Wuhan area got sacked and is probably shoveling sh*t on a collective farm somewhere while Xi appointed one of his buddies to take over the response in the area. We haven’t heard much from Hong Kong lately either. How many of the protesters there were “quarantined” in some mainland gulag as part of the virus response never to be seen again?
ok, so you think China was a false flag or some sort of operation to disguise a purge. I don’t know that that’s a more logical explanation than that the Chinese let loose the Pale Horseman on the world, to be honest.
It’s not a false flag – the disease exists and they know to be cautious from the SARS outbreak. I think though it could have been a matter of “never let a crisis go to waste”. Might as well throw all these troublemakers into the gulags while we’re busy quarantining people.
I saw the explanation for the Italy thing the other day in a Telegraph article of all places and they’ve been one of the biggest boosters for shutting down the world economy forever. What’s caused the Italy panic is their general incompetence at keeping medical records. Basically what happens is someone is in the hospital because they are in the final stages of terminal lung cancer or they’ve had their leg amputated because of complications from diabetes. They pass away in their hospital beds at which point they are THEN tested for coronavirus. If the test comes back positive, then guess what. The cause of death is listed as coronavirus! As you might imagine, terminal hospital patients tend to be exposed to all sorts of pathogens that they might test positive for upon death because hospitals are full of them. Until now, they’ve never been recorded as the cause of death because usually they quite clearly aren’t. In Italy, nearly 90% of those who have supposedly died from the coronavirus in fact were in the hospital with other serious if not terminal conditions. I think they said that about half actually had several terminal conditions – cancer AND diabetes for example. I think it’s quite possible that the number of deaths in Italy would have been exactly the same this month WITHOUT any coronavirus panic.
Worth considering the relationship too. If the CCP tells Italy to fudge the numbers, they’ll fudge em.
I don’t thing you can discount the possibility that the Italian government is looking for handouts from the EU either. Didn’t they almost go belly-up like Greece during the 2008 panic? I can see them threatening the EU to give them billions else they’ll be unable to stop the spread of the virus and it will sweep across Europe. It’s the same game Turkey plays with their excess of Exploding Muhammads.
@RDittmar – I don’t find that compelling as an explanation for Italy. If it were compelling, then the Italian ERs would not be overloaded, especially in the north of the country, where all the Chinese settled to make “Italian” textiles.
Are you suggesting the reports of the Italian healthcare system being completely overloaded and entirely fabricated? Serious question.
I am certainly not an expert on the Italian healthcare system, so my opinion is the metaphorical equivalent of the you-know-what that everybody has. I did see the other day however that apparently Italy doesn’t have the same system of primary care that we do in the United States. In the U.S. if you get sick you might go to your family doctor and get some prescription antibiotics to clear up whatever you have. In Italy, if you get sick you go to the emergency room. There are no family doctors that operate like family doctors do here – prescribing treatments so people can recover at home. If that’s an accurate picture of the Italian system, then it’s possible that Italian ER’s get “overloaded” several times a year depending on how you define it. We are never given any basis of comparison for all the hysterical claims being made by people with dubious motives, so for all I know Italy’s healthcare system was overloaded during flu season last year and the year before and the year before that.
RDittmar: THIS!!!! They already admitted that they are testing after death (here in the US as well) and, despite whatever actually caused the death, if they find COVID-19 then they attribute death to the virus. Lies and damned statistics. Plus age, co-morbidities, AND they still refuse to release any information on the races of those dying (tons of Chinese here and in Italy).
This is going to be one big drawback to Trump’s effort to flood the land with coronavirus test kits. They’re going to do everything they can to juice the number of both cases and deaths to distract attention from awkward questions when the unemployment rate hits 35%, so they’ll be testing everyone who comes into the emergency room. If you die on the way to the hospital after getting run over by a bus, the doctors will shout “Test this man for COVID-19! He’s positive! Another victim of the virus!”. And on top of that, we don’t even know how accurate the test is. For all we know, it could be throwing false positives all the time and none of those false positives will ever be re-checked. They’ll all be listed forevermore as fallout from the crisis.
BTP, we err on the side of caution. There is a middle way. What we seem to know is that the disease is not overly fatal as compared to just about any disease we have encountered. As a bonus, it seems fatal in the least economically significant portion of the population. This suggests a more reasoned quarantine response—one that does not create economic disaster.
The power of the MSM can’t be disregarded here. The lessons to be learned are the same as always. The virtuous Leftist elite saved you, while the benighted bigots, in their arrogant and evil stupidity, circled the plutocratic wagons and left you high and dry. If you will pull your heads out of your ignorant butts and vote in a socialist utopia already, it will be much better next time.
Yes, control of the media is more important than control of the government.
Madness for sure. The thing is we have the data. Indeed, we have an almost perfect experiment for understanding how bad the virus could be: the Diamond Princess. You literally trap 3,700 older people in a tin can and let the virus run rampant. The only part that isn’t perfect is that those infected got great medical care.
No models, no assumptions, just 3,700 older people trapped on a ship with the virus. What are the numbers?
712 infected, so ~19%
10 dead (all or almost all super old, sorry, but they’re old) so 0.27%
(I don’t know the number hospitalized.)
Now, let’s look at that 0.27% death rate. It’s probably exaggerated due to the ship’s population skewing older, but it may be a bit low due to excellent medical care and quickly care when getting the virus. However, since young people almost never die from this and cruise ship population are very old, I’d say the death rate is probably lower than this number. I mean, even with good medical care, older people die. Let’s cut the death rate by 1/3 to account for younger people but maybe less good heath care so 0.18%.
Again, I don’t know the hospitalization rate, so I can’t speak to the overwhelming the hospitals issue. But we do know the absolute worst infection rate and a reasonably close death rate.
Now, there’s zero chance a country like the United States would get the same infection rate as older people trapped on a ship. I think that we can safely cut that in half – and I’m probably being generous. What do we get?
U.S. has 330 million people, so 33 million get it. At a 0.18% death rate, ~60,000 people die. That’s my middle estimate. If by some miracle, we get the full 20% infection rate and 0.3% death rate due to overwhelmed hospitals, you’d have 66 million infected and 132,000 dying. But you could also get a lot less than 33 million infected and 60,000 people dying. These are the outliers.
All these fags ranting about exponential growth need to have the Diamond Princess shoved in their face. It was literally the perfect environment for the virus, and, yes, it probably grew exponentially for a few days, but then burned itself out, just like it would in a larger population, only it wouldn’t get as large of a percentage of the people.
Only a frickin menopausal woman would shut down the world economy over this. Oh wait, it’s not just cat ladies; it’s extremely numerate guys like Sailer and Cochran. How come Steve never brings up the Diamond Princess?
Sailer mocked Merkel for her emotional response to the Million Muslim March, but here he is screeching for the economy to be demolished without calmly running the numbers and weighing to benefits and costs.
Madness indeed.
Numbers, numbers. Logic, logic. When I brought them to the attention of an elite schools educated lady, I got the response “I care about people, not numbers”.
If it is any comfort, the WSJ does give some more push back today.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/worst-case-coronavirus-science-11585351059?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
@Citizen – How do you account for the other data points?
1. China lost their frackin’ minds. Were they simply in error and over-reacted? MB Lamar (below) thinks the whole thing was a false flag, what is your explanation of that data point?
2. Italy is spiking deaths – around 50% increases over normal daily deaths, by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, much more in the north, much less in the south. Obviously, a system designed to handle x deaths per day is overloaded by 1.5x deaths per day. How do you interpret this event?
The Diamond Princess really did happen, but it isn’t the only data point.
Good points.
1. China
My suspicion is that when the Chinese figured out they had something on their hands, they weren’t sure how bad it was. They knew was extremely contagious but didn’t know how lethal. As a result, they had to act as though it was the plague and lock down everything. Probably the right move given what they knew at the time.
2. Italy. I’ll grant you that Italy is mess. But the numbers coming out of Italy, Spain and, now, Switzerland are outliers. Their cases per million and, especially, deaths per million are massive out of proportion to every other country.
So far at least, there’s Italy, Spain, Switzerland and then there’s everyone else. Those three countries are data points, of course, but they are outliers – at least for now. And until someone can figure out why they are outliers, we shouldn’t use them as our baseline assumption.
Also, this isn’t a binary choice. We can enact all kinds of measures and emergency plans without completely shutting down the economy. We should balancing different objectives.
@Citizen –
I can buy that. Indeed, a virus that’s hell on compromised lungs could be a grave problem in a place where everybody smokes and breathes smog all day long. So maybe a combination of it being more serious to a Chinese population and an over-estimate of that real danger leads the Chinese to react with something like panic. Northern Italy is old and smokes and is filled with Chinese expats.
That does explain why we aren’t seeing anything like the advertised mortality rates, or for that matter hospitalization rates.
CSC–Yes indeed. This is in NO way a binary choice. I mean unless you are life long government employee, journalist, pundit, entertainer, or circus clown.
You must not be a professor and actually work in the real world for a living.
Anybody who gets on anything named the Diamond Princess gets what they gets. Talk about a symbol of the gynocracy.
Rhode Island Is hunting down New Yorkers driving across its borders. I thought borders were racist. We officially now live in a police state environment.
Even the ACLU, which I was a long time member of, may actually do what they used to stand for and sue Rhode Island.
Z mentions women in this post and yesterday discussed the make believe cocoon of academia. My wife is a twofer. She is a retired lifelong professor. She is virtually paralyzed at home in fear.
Both the university and the college I used to teach for are both completely shut down. Did you know that you can perform extremely complex scientific lab experiments at home after watching your professor explain how to do so in his kitchen presenting a 10 minute Zoom lecture? You can!! We don’t need no stinking labs. And did you know that the magic money tree continues to pay academic employees full salary and benefits while relaxing….er working from home. It does.
I think that even crops can be grown online now. If our ancestors only knew.
In the YUK.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/uk-police-force-creates-tool-lets-people-snitch-others-not-social-distancing
Any bets on the % of snitches who are
a, Women.
b, Childless.
Out here in the burbs, I can tell you, child or no child, many are ready to drop a dime on anybody displaying insufficient adherence to the New Soviet ideal,
Students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts demand $29,000 refunds for their Spring tuition. Instead the school’s Dean emails them a video of herself dancing to the REM song “Losing my Religion”.
https://vimeo.com/399761785/befce790d7?fbclid=IwAR0dJpmV1ntow6p9Pc08OxsJ1DVeNVP-5j3jz-ag69bmJDf6lzZOeA6HntI
I’ll be discussing two room and board refunds first thing on Monday morning.
Breathtaking narcissism.
What in bloody hell was that strange old woman in the video thinking she was doing?
I like to be the “fly on the wall” and understand what motivates people, but this case is a complete mystery to me.
How many millions of dollars have American parents spent in elevating these mad hags to the Cathedral? Parents, please spend more time evaluating where you spend your own money and your childrens’ financial future (and sanity).
NYU can be summarized as a world class math department, with a decent physics, enginnering and medical school and, I hear, a good philosophy department, latched to god only knows what but certainly all the demonic psychopathologies associated with the far left.
Maybe you and Ramzpaul are right that the types waiting for society to collapse can’t hack it in a Mad Max/ World Made by Hand scenario, but I’m not sure. Plenty of people in the past were relishing the idea of a collapse or were at least willing to capitalize on it for their cause dejure. I remember reading a memoir by a member of Noske’s Freikorp who went off to fight for Germany after World War I and ended up getting imprisoned for a long time with his friends by the newly-empowered democrats; when the stationary this soldier used to write comrades eventually required “50 Billion Mark” postage stamps due to inflation, all the prison guards and the Warden were tearing their hair out while the commies and Nazis were both laughing their heads off. Sure, a lot of these kids probably do nothing besides play videogames and smoke their medicinal marijuana in mom’s basement (even commies in the past could do push-ups), but if the economy collapses we may get to see what melts and what gets forged.
I’m sure I have limited information in this regard, but I haven’t read or listened to anybody in our thing who wishes for the collapse of civilization. The most I’ve heard, is they want the current regime to be discredited. But even Mike Enoch, who is at the top of that list, expressed doubts that this event would do a whole lot to push us in that direction. But every little bit helps.
Impossible to predict what could happen but I’d take a small chance of victory over no chance any day. Remember, we are the descendants of Alexander.
I can do 40+ push ups, so can my close friends. A collapse is not be something I would be too broken up about 🙂
For all of our technological marvels humans are still gibbering in the caves ever fearful of the dark magic. Just fifteen years ago people had already resorted to cannibalism in the Superdome after a few days. At least if you believed the same crowd as today. As was then there will be no price to pay, because the shamans saved the fearful tribe from the angry gods.
“Gynocracy”. Well…..THAT explains a lot. Kudos.
Yes it also explains well the constant school closings for temperature drops or snow above two inches. Sometimes it is not the actual weather but fear of outrage from the parents for not reacting strong enough.
The female teachers are also known for threatening students with the police to control them. Gee, how did all of this happen?
Speaking of government schools being shut down due to the virus panic…is that not a potentially huge positive? Read all about it: https://www.breitbart.com/education/2020/03/25/actress-sam-sorbo-coronavirus-the-impetus-to-rethink-education-in-america/
Our local school district has been pushing $110 million bond to build new schools. Instead they could go to a four day schedule. Half the students come on Monday and Tuesday and half on Wednesday and Thursday.Students do the balance of their school work online. You instantly double the capacity of your buildings and save on utilities by reducing the heat, AC, and lighting on Fridays. However, this will never fly because there would be no kickbacks to the administrators for construction contracts.
And the fact that single incomes are much harder to get by on than they used to be..
I’m happy to remain a forum dissident on this issue until / unless facts prove me wrong.
The data is clearly still very dodgy. It’s unlikely that the virus is anywhere near as deadly as we’re being told. Yet at the same time, what I’m seeing by way of direct evidence from various hospitals (US and international) is downright alarming. Squabble all you like about statistical totals and percentages, and fair enough. But professionals on affected wards are being overwhelmed. The reports I’ve read aren’t panic or hoaxes.
It isn’t helpful for Our Thing to line up a Mexican firing squad over this.
For what it’s worth, I believe that what various governments have done is, in essence, a necessary overreaction to focus public attention and avoid hospitals being overwhelmed.
We are not going to suddenly be plunged into dictatorship. Current affairs are simply revealing how far into dictatorship we’ve already been plunged.
Last week the Zman wrote about the difference in perspective of people at various levels in the decision chain. He was right. IMHO, the guys at the top are doing the best they can with what limited info they’ve got. They will screw things up. So be it. Those of us who are veterans or who’ve worked in government executive positions will know what I mean. Sometimes you just have to go with what you’ve got, and make corrections along the way. The one thing government can’t do, is to do nothing. I don’t like it, it’s just how things work.
There are no right answers to the kung flu question. Our respective countries will just have to keep buggering along, and correct course as better information becomes available.
As individuals, we need to keep preparing. Build community. Organize. Understand that if the wheels fall off, things may not go our way. . . .
I suspect the hour is upon us. Given that most of us aren’t making government policy, I suggest we focus on how to move forward as individuals, families and communities.
“I suspect the hour is upon us.” Me too. Even if the panic turns out to be groundless, it may yet be the trigger.
Live in a town full of doctors outside NYC, most practice in the city. The direct observations from them are 1)deterioration in patients can be astonishingly rapid and not predictable in patients that are not old and co-morbid. 2)pulmonary damage is unlike what they have observed in normal pneumonia patients and may not be fully reversible 3) critical patients require up to 3x the duration on ventilators–which creates a cascade of resource problems. I’ve had pneumonia 3x (2 viral 1 bacterial), there is a normal curve of improvement–apparently that is not the case here. The gear resourcing issue is mostly because they are only getting daily “just in time” delivery–and if there is a patient surge-they run out.
I landed a case of viral pneumonia when I was in the Army. Went from stud to dud overnight. On my *** in a cot for a week. It’s evil. No joke. See what SamlAdams wrote. Anything worse than pneumonia is worth being wary of. Brothers, please don’t laugh this off. Skepticism is fine, but watch the downside.
Also have family in industrial chemicals / supply chain management, manufacturing and providing (among much else) hand cleaner and all that jazz. They are going like mad. The airlines were about six weeks ahead of the government on this issue. Trust me, it is NOT bull. Policy settings may turn out to be wrong, but there is a real issue here.
SamlAdams – that prognosis comports to what I’ve read elsewhere. Yes, it can be unpredictable and, in certain unlikely cases, deadly. But none of that changes the overall statistics – most people are not falling dead in the streets. Certainly the co-morbid groups should isolate themselves, and just-in-time is a scourge on all aspects of our economy, along with outsourcing all production. But none of that justifies the economic shutdown or overall panic. If I’m one of the unlucky ones, then I’m gone. I’m still far more worried about the future of my children.
TBD. We shall see. But again, since you are so anxious to err on the side of caution, this must assume you have a value in mind of the lives saved by your particular precautions. Great, how about elaborating?
Specifically,
How many lives will be saved in this pandemic? What do you monetarily estimate their worth? How do you estimate the cost of the effort currently underway? How do you compute the cost/benefit ratio using such numbers?
These are not gotcha questions. They are important questions and ones that indicate whether we have reasonable people in leadership/discussion or whether we have emotion, panicked, ninnies.
There are more questions that logically fall from the above.
Compsci, it’s not a question of how I calculate matters. We won’t mathematick our way to a solution. The simple fact is that the senior people in government are going to have to give it their best, and then unscrew things along the way. I accept your concerns – I have them, too. But our focus needs to be on the way forward. What can we do, here and now?
TBD. And the simple response IMO is that “giving it your best” requires an evidence based, reasoned decision process. You have repeatedly posted that you believe the present actions of government are justified, hence meet my criteria. I simply asked you to elaborate as to why you believe such. Your failure to provide such—evidence in the form of fact base reason—I maintain is proof of what I contend is an “emotional, fear based” response on your part (as well as millions of others, you are not alone). That’s fine, but emotional response is not an rationale argument for your position. Continue to post FUD—hell you may even be proved right in the coming weeks—but it will never be accepted as a counter argument to mine (and most others) opinions/analysis posted here.
There will be plenty of time in the coming months to figure out why some urban areas had such a hideous experience with this while other similar urban areas did not. It is easy sit back and demand an “evidence based approach.” Fine. I don’t disagree. The “evidence” that finally turned around the naysayers at our facility was watching and hearing what the physicians and nurses at the Papa Giovanni hospital in Bergamo had to say. That hospital is large, wealthy and very sophisticated. Had US government and medical people observed Bergamo and against that evidence decided to wait and see how things develop in the US and make decisions after we had plenty of evidence already brewing here in the US, these same Monday morning quarterbackers would then be accusing the gov’t and medical people of ignoring “evidence.”
I think the economy is a real concern. But from what’s been happening first in Hubei province in China, then in Italy, Spain, now happening in the UK, Denmark, Switzerland and many other countries, and probably in Iran although data there is pretty sketchy at best, and also in NYC, Queens not least, even if I wanted to just ignore the human cost, I could ask ‘what the heck is that going to do to the economy??’
How about actual data ? Portland VA medical center. As of yesterday, 3 positive results out of over 100 returned test results. 1 of those was early in all of this and that patient who had many other serious medical issues died. The other 2 positive patients are recovering at home now.
It sounds positive. Good luck, and thank you for your service. But for the moment it remains a small data point. I don’t trust the so-called ‘data’ on an international basis. Instead, I’m looking at anecdotal evidence out of China, Italy, Spain and Washington. Not because they’re definitive, but because in the absence of reliable population-level data, the anecdotal info is more persuasive at the moment. I will be *delighted* to be shown wrong, if it comes to pass.
I’m also a ‘forum dissident’ as you put it, on this one. And I’d be happy to see evidence that I’m wrong to be so. I share the general concerns about the economy and grotesquely expanded state powers. But I don’t think letting this virus run its course would make a bad situation better in either case.
Zman, you do well to question the narrative. However, isn’t it possible that there is valid reason for concern, if not the panic, about the Coronavirus? May I submit for discussion that it is not a cold or the seasonal flu? A disease that kills 1/3 of the residents of a nursing home in scarcely a month (Kirkland, WA) is not “normal”. Nor is the flooding of ER rooms and the consequent depletion of medical and staff resources, albeit only so far in “hot spots” (Italy, perhaps next NYC?) By all the scenarios I’ve read, the peak for the illness is mid-April at the earliest, perhaps into mid-June. Yes, the projections of an epidemic are “wrong” and (per you) not nearly as bad as forecast. To which I’d add, “yet.” To use an imperfect analogy, let’s borrow a scifi disaster movie theme. Astronomers have identified a 1-km asteroid that is on a collision course with Earth. If the predicted impact is on Kansas City, but instead it turns out to be close to Albuquerque, NM, does that mean the prediction is “wrong?” Certainly not. In either case, the result would likely be the worst disaster in human history, although not necessarily the end of civilization. If the meteorite gets big enough, it doesn’t matter how far away you are, you will still suffer or die from the secondary effects.
Ummm, no. This is globalist bullshit spread by insane hysterical females and soyboys who want to LARP that they’re in a “Resident Evil” movie.
Get back to me when Bill Gates “piles of bodies” show up.
Nonsense. A disease that kills 1/3 of what type of population—nursing home—elderly folk, infirmed, weak and at end of life. 1/3 to 1/2 will be afflicted with Alzheimer’s, the rest with diabetes and heart disease. The flu or common cold will kill off the same amount. All such common diseases are deadly when you are of that cohort. That’s why, even before the pandemic, many precautions are taken when visiting your elderly relatives—and often children are asked to stay away.
As to your meteor analogy. We are not talking of predictions right or wrong, but what you do when such predictions are made. To evacuate the city to some spot out of range when there is an error of measurement and a low probability Kansas City (as say Albuquerque) is the impact site. We don’t evacuate all cities within a 500 mile radius. Instead we prepare resources to respond as the situation unfolds and the data shape up projections and pinpoint needs.
Ben. I’m a nurse at a major trauma center. I do understand what you are saying. We are fine so far but the numbers are increasing. I suspect the last couple of weeks bought a lot of hospitals some time to prepare more. Gut feeling? Most hospitals will be fine due to slowing this down somewhat, enhanced preparedness, cancelling surgeries to make more room, reorganizing and quickly training staff, and so forth. I’m no longer worried about being overwhelmed. I want to see our economy open up so we can save businesses and get back to our lives.
I always enjoy the comments here but I will say this. Unless you PERSONALLY have stood bedside and watched a human being whom you are responsible for drown in their own secretions due to respiratory failure despite the best efforts of an entire team of doctors and nurses, you might want to give us a little slack for being alarmed enough to want to slow this down. I would never presume to tell another professional what to worry about when it comes to their field. I agree with the vast majority here – a lot of this has been way overdone. But the hospital piece is legit. If you don’t agree that is fine. But first go become a registered nurse or pulmonologist and then get back to me. A NORMAL day for us is running 95-110% capacity with people waiting for rooms 24-48 hours. Forgive us if we didn’t want to be inundated with even more patients with sudden potential respiratory failure.
It is hard to imagine this great madness being forgotten.
Well, one thing the left (I shall not call it the j-left, out of respect for Z’s delicate sensibilities) is good at is memory-holing.
The most monstrous dishonesties, even atrocities, but once the leadership almost subconsciously “vibrates out” to the hive that it should be forgotten, then … it’s as if it never happened.
Except, of course, for events required in their demonology: Emmet Till, That Thing From World War Two, et cetera.
But then it becomes our responsibility to keep alive memory of their insanities. Our mythmaking has been a bit below par. [Coach voice:] Get out there and show ’em what you can do, lads!
I read somewhere that Haven Monahan and the entire 2006 Duke Lacrosse team have tested positive for the china virus. Just awful. Jussie Smollett, however, tested negative. So thats some good news in all of this mess.
Screwtape – Thanks – that got a guffaw from my husband (I’ve read him the post and the thread).
To be fair we don’t control the media so it’s a bit harder to disseminate myths, but I doubt this will be forgotten. It will be hard for people to forget being forced to shelter in place for months. Sportsball is cancelled, bars are closed, everyone is scared to walk within 6 feet of each other. I doubt this will be forgotten anytime soon. It has affected the mentioned Js the hardest so since they control all the megaphones, the message is deafening. The ffing emmit till thing… the constant image presented in the TV ads… the amount of vengeance that will be reaped if we ever get the opening… The nice thing is we are mirroring Wiemar very closely right now. I’m excited 😀
Its not the event that is forgotten. E.g. Nobody has forgotten the fact that Hitler bombed pearl harbor.
Yeah now, sure. But back then it was fresh in the memory of the herd and they responded by putting japs in camps. This will be fresh too.
…which killed 6 M minority people.
The fish rots from the head is a dictum that describes the current malady that infests Washington DC. We are being led by the likes of Pelosi, Schumer, Schiff, AOC, and Maxine Waters. And many of the Repubs are just as bad as they tend to lean into covert criminal grifting as their primary psychosis (Hello Pierre Delecto). After they trash the world economy printing fiat currency by the quadrillion, they plan to do an Alfred E. Neuman “What me worry?” and “I did for the children.” The only really fatal disease we face is in DC.
Agreed. It used to be that politicos tried to hide the details of their corruption and stupidity… but now they display it in broad daylight and even advertise it. I don’t think anyone can deny it anymore… the wheels are falling off, and unless something is done, this will end badly and soon.
Our son and his girlfriend live next to her parents about fifty miles closer to Atlanta. The “kids” are gen something in their early forties. We and her parents are in our seventies. Hers are in bad heath and we aren’t. The girlfriend is having a meltdown because her parents went out the other day for fried chicken at Publix’s hot bar. We are pretty much staying at home because there’s nothing left to do out. We did have a sausage biscuit from McDonald’s drive-through the other day on the way to Kroger and Sam’s for some necessities but we haven’t told anyone.
I read the other day that the younger generations can’t understand why their Boomer parents aren’t taking this panic seriously. My one word reply is, “Perspective”. We’ve seen this panic so many times. Like when a snowflake falls in Atlanta.
I’m with you on the numbers. I don’t get it. The city/county of 125,000 next door has 30 cases and two deaths. They were shut down before the Governor’s declaration of emergency. Our more rural county of 38,000 has a half-dozen cases and one death. We’re shutdown because our emergency plan was triggered by the Governor’s declaration.
As a tail-end Boomer, albeit of the non-egotistical variety, I agree that it’s a matter of perspective. Geez, how many scares have there been in my life? Global cooling, global warming, Y2K, SARS, etc. Ten years ago, H1N1 infected 60 million Americans, 274k went to the hospital and 12k plus died. How many people remember that? The gay Moslem Marxist Mulatto was president and he wasn’t blamed for his inaction.
Lived in a northern county/suburb of the ATL for 20yrs. Imagine the panic if CV19 had hit in the middle of a snowmageddon event (anything > 2″), and/or an arctic blast (windchill < 20 F).
As an Atlanta native, let me give some perspective. Back before global warming, Atlanta’s winter events would be ice storms rather than snow so the natives have developed a fear of any winter precipitation. This is fed by the usual media overreaction. In the early 80’s, there was a big one. We were told at work that we could leave at 3:00 PM. At 3:00, I walked out the door. It only took me a few minutes more than normal to get home since it was getting slippery. People who stood around and talked about it took hours and some spent the night in their cars. The next year, having learned their lesson, we were released at noon. It was a fizzle.
Hey, remember three months ago when we assassinated a high ranking foreign general and threatened to invade a country?
Man that was crazy.
A well-known local liberal and his wife were in a store yesterday, and the woman had on a bandanna wrapped around her face like a bank robber. She was rushing around the store piling items in her basket while her long-suffering liberal husband waited patiently and quietly to pay. He seemed defeated, resigned. She was in complete panic mode, eager to get out of the store and away from the rest of us plague-infused animals.
I’m in the provinces. Take the above scenario to New York City and you have panic on steroids.
I learned many things from this. I used to thing that 25% of human beings were capable of learning and reason. I’ve revised that; it now stands at 15%. The rest are irredeemable cattle.
I also learned that our leaders and media slobs are the same people and not to be trusted or relied upon. If the super plague ever appears, it will kill everyone except the Omega Men. The united states could now easily fragment into three or four smaller countries, most of which cannot get along with each other. There probably won’t be any room for dissidents in most of them.
We may or may not die on this hill… but the next one may very well do the trick.
The first basic law of human stupidity states without ambiguity that “always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.” Let us know when you’ve come to the (inevitable) realization that your 15% number is still way too high. 🙂
These stupid b****** have shut the entire country down because they are scared to leave their houses and they’re screaming at everyone else just “stay home! just stay home!” all the while they get every living thing delivered to them by Amazon, instacart or shipt, a myriad of other services that have all the sudden enter the delivery business. We’re catering to these people. What we need to do is shut down all the delivery services and make these stupid b****** leave their house. I’m pissed, my business has been destroyed and pretty sure this is what we missed in the Bronze Age collapse. Never let women have any power!
Coming from a small business family in the upper Midwest, I deeply sympathize with you. I live in the greater NYC area and am quite familiar with the nasty ladies of which you refer.
However, the foreign-born first-generation ladies that I know are strong and do not shriek like the locally born and raised and mostly single specimens. Also, Ann Coulter and Heather MacDonald have been heroic. One key factor that makes the toxic brew is the malign influence of academia. People outside the radical left (including conservatives, moderates and even traditional liberals) have largely ignored what has been happening in our school systems and we now are paying the steep price.
Whitney, I’m very sorry to hear that your business has been destroyed by this. I’m incredibly pissed off as well, I have friends that have lost jobs, and even ‘white collar’ friends who have been told either take a pay cut or quit. I count myself incredibly lucky. God bless you and I hope things turn around. Keeping you in my prayers.
Yes, I too wish you a better future, Whitney – and anyone else here suffering from the rule of fools. I have friends whose small businesses are suffering and whose husbands’ jobs are in question. We’ve largely been insulated from this – I don’t work outside the home and my husband’s job is secure. I always buy bulk when money and space permits, so we have yet to run out of anything. I am truly and deeply sorry for those here who have been impacted.
Years ago when the daughter was young and in a smallish private grade school, the school sent home a letter informing us that one of the newly enrolled students had a peanut “allergy”. This was serious and I’m sympathetic to the parents—however the “accommodations” the school was asking of the other parents was absurd.
We were asked that all lunches/snacks the students brought to school be checked for any peanut “ingredients” and those no longer could be brought to school. Further, the allergy was of such extent that the mere breath of a student who had eaten such for breakfast could be detrimental, so breakfast served at home needed to be checked and regulated.
This was the initial reaction of the school to make “reasonable” accommodations for a “disabled” student. In short, everyone had to change their behavior and lifestyle. One student controlled the lifestyle of a hundred.
Anyway, at this time pushback put an end to this silliness. The student finally was given a table for lunch used by no others and the teacher carried about an epipen for emergency purposes.
My brother picked up my nieces after school one day when the younger one was about 5. They were attending Catholic school at the time and there was a ban on peanuts.
My niece was sitting in the backseat, giggling up a storm. My brother asked her what was funny. She pulled out an unopened package of peanut butter crackers.
“I took this to school and had it allllll day!”
“ABBY! You’re not supposed to take peanut butter to school.”
“It’s okay, Daddy. I didn’t get caught!”
She’s gonna be a bad seed.
When the letter announcing a new student’s “penis allergy” comes…
OMG, that’s it, that’s it.
Combined with the power of “go online- make me famous!”, we are seeing rule by Instagram Karens as they try to outdrama each other.
Whitney….sorry to hear, hon. Damn and blast these unhinged harridans! They ruin our world. Take care, may you have a spine of steel and land on your feet, Whitney.
Whitney – I am sorry about your business. Truly. But every time I see the news it seems like a lot of men are advocating the shut down. Male doctors, epidemiologists, emergency management types. Even Dr. Birx, the female physician standing along side Trump, has indicated that a lot of this is over the top. Look. I loathe feminists. But this panic seems to be a joint effort.
What a weird time to be alive. If others weren’t going through the same thing, they wouldn’t believe you when you described it to them.
Looks like we picked the wrong month not to be on the Space Station.
I thought I might be reporting from the front in this event, but I haven’t seen any more patients who needed testing. So I’m reporting from the back.
This week my wife and I were going to see some of the sights of Arizona, so we took the week off long ago. She ended up having to go to California to help our daughter, who is barely independent (dual-diagnosis, for those in the know), through a series of appointments with courts and doctors.
They didn’t need me at the clinic where I usually work, nor in California. The fact is, people aren’t going to the doctor. Our volume is down, but of course it takes longer to get through the day with the various precautions. So I hit the road, including big chunks of Route 66.
My first thought was to see if I could avoid the news. Easy to do in a car with XM and my Shakespeare library. It’s easier than ever to travel: no crowds anywhere. The only crowded parking lots were at the trailheads. No traffic in Sedona. I had the Meteor Crater almost to myself. Hotels open, plenty of places to eat. But then the over-highway informational signs were all telling me to keep my distance and wash my hands.
This is reminiscent of an album cover, Crisis, What Crisis? Supertramp, ‘70s. Guy sunning himself in an industrial wasteland. I’m hiking and seeing some of the prettiest terrain around, enjoying my own company in the absence of crowds and the world is somehow falling apart out there.
Seeing lots of trucks on the road is encouraging. They are the red corpuscles of commerce – without them flowing we’d be ready for CPR.
Stopped at the brewery of my favorite beer in Flagstaff and took advantage of their parking lot sale to stock up, at a discount, on their hard-to-find black IPA. You pull up, they dolly it out, and you already paid on-line. Load up, hit the road.
For those who tend towards introversion or might be a bit misanthropic, this is great! I’m not good at small talk and don’t suffer fools well. Plus, as I get older, I find that the percentage of fools I encounter amazingly seems to be equal to my current age.
Tuberculosis got rid of spitting in polite society century-before-last. Lung cancer did the same for smoking last century. Maybe hand-shaking is next.
The gulf between what we are being told is happening versus what we see happening is as big as it’s ever been. Are we in the position of Wile E. Coyote having run off the cliff, but not yet falling?
Anyone read Neal Stephenson? His most recent book, Fall, features a minor side-plot of a hoax perpetuated through the on-line and traditional-media wherein Moab, Utah, was destroyed by a nuclear blast. People believe it for years to come to the degree where they disbelieve those who have recently been to Moab.
Hard not to think of this while driving through Moab and nobody is about. Is this threat any more real to Moabites than the fictional nuclear event?
People seem to disbelieve me when I tell them that the flu has killed at least ten times as many Americans as has Wuhan this year (flu year). Ten times! The CDC’s low-end estimate is 24 K US deaths, up to 64 K on the high end. I might as well be telling them I just drove through Moab.
Another thing that continues to strike me. People have seen so many medical disaster story lines that they seem to assume that there will be vaccine and/or a cure, talking about when, not if. It is entirely possible that neither will happen.
What normally happens with a new, deadly pathogen released into a virgin population is it kills off the most susceptible and then reaches an on-going accommodation with the living. We call some of these things childhood illnesses, because everybody gets them and the adults already had it.Vaccinations have kept many of these in check, but it’s not inevitable that there be a vaccine for a given malady. Got your AIDS vaccine yet? Malaria?
In all likelihood many of what we call cold viruses, when first introduced into the herd, killed a lot of people. This may end up like that: still hanging around, impossible to avoid in the long term, an occasionally lethal condition that otherwise is a nuisance to most people.
The epidemic is still looking for its Rock Hudson. Lots of celebrities are hoping for that positive test. That’s why they are getting tested, to try to leverage a result into relevance.
Let’s say this illness pays attention to our desires and is going to follow a story arc. Bear with me. This is now a Shakespeare play, one of the classic tragedies.
Are we in the first act, where we know something is wrong but not yet to what extent and when we are still doing things that unknowingly will make it worse?
Is it the third act, the crisis, when everything depends on what we do in the moment?
Or is it the fifth and final act, where it’s simply too late to steer the ship of fate away from the rocks?
Nice post TRD. Up here in Montana, I’ve been thinking of places to go explore while the crowds are away. If we were more into fishing season, the possibilities would be limitless.
The same lack of business has happened in our medical community as well. In the lab, the micro folks are pretty hard hit, but the rest of the lab is enjoying the break from the regularly stressful work days. Our testing volume has dropped by nearly half. They are taking the opportunity to finally get me trained up as a proper blood-banker, so it helps my career a bit.
I like your attitude. Enjoy the plague.
I’m here in Texas and all the state parks are shut down. I went camping on the wilderness beach of North Padre island last night and at 8pm the cops swept down the beach kicking everyone out even though there was nearly a half mile gap between each camper. I then had to go back into the city and rent the last room at overcrowded hotel.
Martial law has arrived. Now that the government has got a taste, whatever happens next will be like nothing we’ve ever known.
Sad story, but expected. The reason and rationale for the closure was simply ignored and no exceptions could be made. Big Brother must always seem as invincible, no matter how absurd.
Similar situation here throughout the few remaining stores open. Plastic shields now on all counters in front of cashiers. The irony of course is than no one can communicate through the solid plastic shield, so *both* customer *and* cashier, bend around the shield to transfer money and talk. I spent a good 15 minutes or so in one of those new “social distancing” register lines where tape marks on the floor indicate your required standing/waiting positions and are marked 6 feet apart. The lines now spread into the store isle ways and block customers from merchandise access. Also, today I noticed several customers wearing surgical “masks”. Before today, I saw perhaps one person with a mask on a shopping visit. Now it seems much more common.
China, here we come. Wonder what the Paris designers will offer come the next fashion show? This is all theater.
Celebs with a positive is a growing list. To mind: Boris Johnson, Prince Charles. Tom Hanks. I don’t wish grave illness or death on anyone (well, not them anyway…!) but it’s likely somebody famous will die of COVID-19 at some point.
The common cold is a corona virus.
Literally.
Excellent article with a salient point. One aspect that I’ve noticed as the best indicator of the great panic divide is the fear of death. Perhaps this is the sine qua non of the freak out camp. Most of my friends, like myself and my family, do not fear death irrationally so, and all share your opinion. My coworkers, several of whom are urbanite consuming insect men, are quite apoplectic over this to the point of keeping NPR on at all times, getting the drip drip drip feed of fear porn.
My father was among the first wave hitting the beach at Omaha and nearly drowned disembarking from the landing craft. Couldn’t see these “urbanite consuming insect men” doing the same.
Many modern-day “conservative” Christians think that people have moral duty to live as long as possible, no matter how miserable they are. They also refuse to face the reality of limited resources and unlimited demands. Along with outlawing abortion, they want to outlaw death.
As a female Z-lander, I think this hysteria is insane and I’m working. (Sound of Bronx cheer directed to NJ Gov. Murphy.)
To put it in a crude and oversimplified question:
Would you wish to have a (1) .5% chance of dying but live in an economically ruined country or (2) a 1% chance of dying and continue living in a free and prosperous country? I would think most people would choose the latter option if presented properly. But perhaps I am naïve.
Very good. I’ll try that next. Yesterday I told a childless woman her choice might be to continue to live her life while permitting one in twenty incredible old guys like me choke–at an age nobody expected to reach a centruy ago–or being suddenly dropped into a life she never thought possible. Girl thought it over but didn’t budge. Maybe Corona 20 can specialize in childless women.
But who/what the hell is living? I am home and there is literally nothing left outside the home. I can go to the grocery store, the gas station, and back home. What would be the difference if no restrictions were in place and I was told to decide for myself to self-quarantine?
Compsci: exactly, this is not living, but rather a collective terror destroying the psychic fabric of seemingly half the world. People no longer are able to make their own choices in order to mollify a crowd of hysterical individuals terrified of their own mortality.
Its been a few weeks. That time frame hardly will destroy anything in our national psyche that wasn’t already sick.
My option is that America has growing pains, its used to being a frontier society and socially ordered that way. Now most people live in urban areas (8 of 10) and we are unable to adapt to new circumstances.
Its also highly corrupt and maleducated and that has to be fixed to make complexity work.
The TL;DR is that have less freedom because there are 325 million of us mostly living butt to nut which is how it has been since time immortal and you can’t fix that social gap that easily.
I think people are reacting quite differently depending on context.
In my case I rarely r go out anyway, don’t eat out and go to maybe one “public” event like a movie a year. I kind of was going to see the Vin Diesel film Bloodshot in the theater but its on demand and eh whatever,
Other than the bookstore being closed I rather like physical books , a few goods being in short supply , and of course the anxiety, I hardly notice the changes.
That joke about introvert utopia from the Babylon Bee is close to reality for a lot of people , me included.
In time I might miss my monthly “go the woods/somewhere” trip but thus far its “missing an extra trip” nothing major.
Also to be a bit snide, I though a lot of people on the DR with into accelerationism? I mean what is going to make things worse faster than economic implosion. After all isn’t in Chinese the character for crisis basically the same as opportunity?
Maybe take the time to figure out how to get into power would be a good idea. Plan a run for office or something
Now I do admit you have a point. longer term, more than 90 days this may not be tenable and it won’t be good for US society but so long as food, shelter and Netflix stay on, we’ll get over it.
Tat said we certainly do need a new government. Problem is that there isn’t an agreement anywhere on what is needed,
Those of us on the more government but run by us spectrum can only share a polity with the rest via suffrage and the fact we have no alternative.
This is made worse with ethnic gibs and the lunacy of intersectionalism ,it makes an otherwise manageable problem into chaos.
I’m with you. It’s quality over quantity and the long-term good for all Americans, not just my little potty self.
The flaw in your argument is that you are right.
Its the other way. 1% chance of death with economic damage, 5% with vibrant economy.
The MSM makes it look worse by focusing on every outlier they can find like the athlete who dies of CV-19 or the teenager or child who does.
They are trying to make it look like everyone is threatened. They did the same thing during the AIDS outbreak/hysteria of the 89’s. When they stated ANYONE COULD GET AIDS not just gay men who did anal and drugs like crazy and who had 30 partners in a night in bath houses.
One change to expect going forward: Z writes that a national lockdown was previously unimaginable; but now it’s not only imaginable, it’s lived experience. Therefore it is now part of the toolkit of responses to all manner of crises, actual and potential. As Macbeth observed, once you’ve set the precedent, you’ve ensured a repetition.
Looking a little more deeply, maybe some thought should be given to WHY this was unimaginable to begin with. Maybe because we believed all that stuff about rights, liberty, limited government, etc. Did we just learn that it was all b.s.? I don’t know; but “trust in the system” was already at low ebb in our society, and it will only erode further going forward.
I wouldn’t panic about all that yet. A whole lot of unconstitutional and frankly vile stuff was done under Wilson during WW 1, but when Harding came into office, he and then Coolidge just quietly undid it, papered it over and most schoolkids and adults today have no idea that we lived under a government that incarcerated political dissidents and sent gangs of thugs around to beat and intimidate groups that didn’t fall into line. The section on Woodrow Wilson in high school American history classes is two sentences long and says “WW1! Then League of Nations!” Meanwhile the sentence about Harding, the guy who put everything back together is “Teapot Dome!” (a scandal that looks quaint in comparison to what our reps get away with on a daily basis now).
The American people wanted to pretend all that never happened, and that’s what they got. I have a feeling people will want to pretend the economic shutdown never happened, or that it was absolutely necessary and unavoidable. The one sentence in the history books will be “COVID-19 caused world-wide economic crash” and the kids will never, ever be encouraged to investigate that deeper.
Thanks Vizzini for a great reply. Same to Compsci, Badthinker, and Exile (commenters at the time of writing).
The “fraternity” of commenters here is something that deserves appreciation.
There have been lockdowns/curfews of a sort before, always justifiable by events—earthquake, hurricane, floods—large natural calamity. Readily observable, with an end in sight as things are sorted out. This is the first one based on unverified/disputed “modeling”. In short, arbitrary. Yep, this will happen again.
This ought to be causing the Muh Constitution conservatives to be up in arms over freedom of assembly (no exception for disease, only war). Goes to show that folks like Glenn Reynolds over at instapundit are just playing for an audience, not actually serious about their tricorn hats when things go bad.
Well, we’ve been told for years to give up all our rights to the gods of climate modeling. I guess that was taking too long so now it’s the SIR models for the totalitarian win!
Pozy, I think there’s something to be said for your thinking here. I believe a blog post was ref’d the other day with commentary upon a faculty member’s interaction with fellow faculty cheering on the shutdown as good for the environment. They were “warmists”.
It’s worse than Shakespeare imagined. Courts respect, bend or ignore precedent to reach their desired results on most occasions, from the trial court level all the way up to Notorious RBG.
Laws only protect you to the extent others choose to enforce them in good faith. Talmudry is the foundation of modern Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, common law be damned.
I saw this comment on ZeroHedge a couple a weeks ago under a story about Tulsi endorsing Biden:
“40 years of dem/repub rule careening from one disaster to the next to globalize our economy……..to bring us to this……house arrest.
We dont need another election……..we need insurrection……and we need it now.”
This from The Grauniad splash screen.
“Thanks to your support we can continue to provide our vital reporting – in times of crisis and beyond. Millions of readers across the world are visiting the Guardian every day for open, independent, accurate journalism. Trusted news has never been so important”
These are the people who spent three years telling us that “Russia” whoever he is, installed their/his/its (pronouns are so hard) man Trump in the White House by spending $100k on Facebook ads. Mini Mike Bloomberg meanwhile, one of the worlds smartest men, according to an ex-Mayor of NYC, pissed away $550,000,000 and managed to win the votes of 27 Samoans.
One of the benefits of the spastic twitchings of the hard left is that their lies and agendas are now visible and undeniable,
Bloomberg should have learned from the Russian and solely advertised on FB. He would have saved $549,900,000 and been president by now.
There is another class of females you can add to the gynocracy, married women with children who left the raising of their children to nannies while they pursued a career. The Governor of Rhode Island Gina Raimondo is the perfect example of this. A full-time adult life of pursuing credentialism and position.
Lots of NY’ers have summer homes in RI. If someone with NY plates is driving around RI they will be pulled over. Their choice will be 14 days of self quarantine… alternatives being discussed for not self quarantining being a fine and a stint in the graybar hotel. These kinds of nonMoms are legion in academia and in corporations.
One can make the case that that should be routine when facing New Yorkers.
Can we please add Californians, and citizens of Portland, OR and Seattle to that list?
Don’t forget Chicago. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chicago+mayor&atb=v99-5_f&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Finternewscast.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F03%2Fcoronavirus-chicago-mayor-lori-lightfoot-outlines-steps-to-combat-covid-19-help-small-businesses.jpg&pn=1&iax=images
Wow, she looks like an extra in a zombie movie.
Portlanders don’t drive. They just ride around on TriMet (our public transportation system) all day and will lecture you about the joys of being locked in a rolling latrine for hours to get somewhere you could drive to in 17 minutes. Of course no one in Portland had a job before the shutdown anyway so the daily routine around here is pretty much as always.
11:00 am: Rise and shine
12:00 pm: Start smoking weed.
Well there is the 9:00 pm run to the “funky” bar to get wasted on hipster beer made with locally grown hops. That’s on hold for now I suppose.
Mid-afternoon yesterday in my Middle TN town, I parked in a Kroger parking lot to run in and get some things. The car opposite me had New York plates (they do the front ones there, we don’t have them in TN) which immediately caught my eye. Further examination revealed that the owner of the SUV was a Member of the Montauk (Long Island) Fire Dept., advertising this with a large red-lettered plate attached above the Empire State plate. I wished I could have stayed around to see the owner and get the full story of why they were so far from home with an an auxiliary verhicle that was part of an important safety department. I just read that New Yorkers were heading to their summer hideaways out on Eastern Long Island, and Montauk is as far as you can get on the South Fork. This car is a long way from home!
Was it in department livery or just a private vehicle. Around here it is common to have a plate designator that bolts above the plate or a placard (which I had) since we often responded directly to calls and these indicate to PD to let us pass through blocked streets. But so many NYC’ers have decamped to the Hamptons and stripped the groceries bare (they were on winter stocking schedule) that natives are fed up.
” I wished I could have stayed around to see the owner and get the full story of why they were so far from home with an an auxiliary verhicle that was part of an important safety department.”
Betcha he’s a retired fireman who moved to TN because TN has no state income tax.
The women who comment here might have the right stuff to lead. Fearless moms with strong sons.
Edit: hysterical is pretty close to hysterectomy. Macron and Trudeau would get one if they could.
Not to be pedantic, but the Greek word for womb is the root for hysteria – early doctors diagnosed it in women and attributed it to their hormones. Gee, but we’re all so much smarter now (/s)!
Macron is a trophy husband. Trudeau is a product of nepotism. At least the french have rejected macron en masse. Gives me hope. They’ll come around to the national front, this whole mess might be the catalyst for that. Canada is probably doomed.
Ha! It’s only the relative obscurity of the term that keeps “hysterical” from being stricken from the lexicon for systemic sexism.
Looking back, the Victorians had a few interesting, effective, and appropriate options for the treatment of female hysteria.
The panic mongering is a feature not a bug of the MSM and it’s been going well over 50 years. Think of the sinking of the Maine or Gulf Tonkin.
You need to understand fear is a tool for population management. A scared people don’t think, they become herd bound and can be shaped like putty.
Too many ignore the psychological or PR aspect of the MSM to their detriment.
A nurse down in Charleston, SC told me that, had the city not issued a “shelter-in-place” order, statistical models projected there would be 70,000-100,000 DEATHS in the city. I immediately told her that figure was absurd. The population of Charleston is around 135,000 people. That would be a 50%-75% mortality rate, while The Virus seems to only have a 1-1.5% mortality rate.
These bogus statistics are what panicked hospital administrators are telling nurses in meetings and briefings. You’re right, Z Man, that this fear-mongering is feeding into their feminine desires to protect and to seek attention.
The Pravda effect. The media have been in control for do long they’ve forgotten how to craft a plausible lie, and they no longer see any reason to bother. Sadly, they seem to be right. People I once considered sober and intelligent are swallowing the most absurd lies. Again, it’s the Witch Trials. Cotton Mather was a pillar of his community before, but a laughingstock the rest of his life.
Total power is a win-win: if they believe your lies, that’s a win. But if they don’t, you still get the humiliation win of them not being able to do anything about it.
As to how you’re remembered, it depends on who writes the history.
Aren’t you a history professor, Severian? You could write up a big history book from our point of view.
I was, once. Thank you, Buddha, for early retirement. That’s another reason I’m cautiously optimistic — young people are natural rebels and skeptics. The college kids I used to teach had had their natural rebellion and skepticism pretty well beaten out of them, because, well, how can you prove it isn’t “cisgender privilege” and whatnot? But the lies they’re being told these days are so big, and so obvious, that their natural tendencies can come roaring back. “Won’t get fooled again,” the old song went. Let’s hope….
But Sev, I was promised deaths, inordinate numbers of deaths. The threnody from all media is still pulsing in my ears as I am trapped in the staycation from Hell. Why hasn’t Gavin Newsome died? Why not Nancy Pelosi? Or Kanye West? Or Rachel Maddow? Where are all the deaths?
Well, Tom Hanks DID have vegemite on toast. That’s LIKE death.
Maus -Bill Gates promised PILES OF BODIES!!!!
He’s probably just thinking of the death toll from Windows updates.
I keep saying – show me burning corpse pyramids or GFTO!
No one has been able to, and no one ever will. This is an op being used to take our money, freedom, and future.
Without high-tech medical treatment, that death rate will be much higher. I admit (optimistically), that the overall death rate may be low(er) because we still don’t have reliable statistics of the overall infected rates of a population.
No one is denying treatment, nor for that matter against calling in some extra reserves from around the country. It’s the shutdown of the economy via shelter in place emergency edits that are at issue. All to “flatten” the curve, which is to say prevent a few more deaths. Those lives saved must have a monetary value placed on them such that they can be evaluated against the loss to the economy caused by current prevention attempts.
As I’ve said, the base line estimate for the bail out (conservative, it will go up) is $2+T. That does not even include State spending and lost revenues. That’s an awful lot of money for folk who on average are at the end of their lives—actuarially anyway.
This group in the main are intelligent folk and require no qualifying of opinion sources, but I will indulge myself. I am one of those old farts in the end of life, high risk category—so I speak freely as to such societal trade offs.
I’m sure all this concern for sparing a few more lives will make the abortionists and their supporters completely rethink their positions. After all, if the value of someone in their 80s is still worthwhile to stopper the economy… what is the value of someone with 80 years ahead of them. I’ll be holding my breath.
Penitent, I assume you are dead by now. 😉
I agree with your points. I think the stated fatality rates are possibly an order of magnitude high because the virus has spread far faster than our ability to test and track the infected.
As I’ve said before, the average person is innumerate. Just have that discussion with wife at breakfast yesterday wrt current $2T bailout/relief package and just how much money that was.
Here’s an exercise to the reader. If we were to give $1M compensation for each dead COVID-19 victim how many would have to die before we ran out of $$$.
The MSM is purposely lying and misleading the public as to the stats surrounding cv1-9 infection and hospitalization rates and death. Though quacks like Fauci and Brix also went out their way to scare the green piss out of people with their mass death predictions early on.
In general you can watch TV coverage for a week on CV-19 and end up knowing no more than when you started.
It;s best if people avoid TV news for their mental health
In Minnesota, and several other states, they no longer report negative results. That way the denominator locks in place (frozen 3/23 for MN), while the numerator rises as positive cases accrue, thus making the virus more “infectious”, to the uninformed observer, by the day.
Hmmm Million is 1e6, billion 1e9, trillion 1e12, right? So 2e12 / 1e6 = 2e6/1 = 2 meelion!
A helpful way to think about it is to imagine the entire population of Nebraska, or Indianapolis + its suburbs.
I know i nurse in that same city. I asked jokingly if the bodies were piling up. ”No, we have seen a couple cases come through but we are anticipating a huge spike to start this weekend and everybody is really kind of freaked out. Even the doctors are really stressed. Everyone is exhausted from the protection protocols. Preparing for this has really scared some people. We are hearing terrible stories from other hospitals.” Along those lines.
Oh, and that was LAST weekend. Apparently they are still waiting in panic.
We are experiencing a kind of mass Voodoo Curse, where VooDoo Death is “only a matter of time” away.
The spell has been cast. Those most prone to internalizing these ethereal threats as real are the worst hit. Not by the threat, but by their own reaction to it. Mass psychosomatic illness of fear or an impending illness.
The thing about voodoo death, like this virus, is that it is both real and imagined.
Or in a sense, like Earnest Holmes says, “Thoughts are Things”; VooDoo can’t kill you, but your belief in VooDoo can kill you.
And any rational challenges to unwind the parasympathetic nervous response are dismissed with newfound enthusiasm for poorly managed statistics of a very real, but probably minor illness.
In a gynocracy, the State’s official position is that VooDoo is real. See: “racism”, or “white male privilege”. So the media megaphone chants the curse over and over, rabbit bones and bat wings go into the bowl.
As the collective vagus nerve fires wildly to paralyze us all in our homes, where we are only free to let loose the cascade of heart beats and hopelessness, the VooDoo death is gonna take a small slice of the population, but a very large slice of our collective nervous system called the Economy.
I had a very similar conversation with an old friend who is a nurse.
She and her colleagues are stressed out from preparing for the wave of infections and deaths, they’ve heard the scare stories, but of course, they haven’t seen any cases.
#CoronaHoax 2k20
I am reminded of the excellent Castalia House book The Missionaries by “Owen Stanley”.
The over-reliance on flawed stats and models shows just how innumerate most people are. Zman had some great comments about this on this week’s podcast.
I will believe the panic-mongers when any combination of the following happens: 1) the “urban outdoorsman” community gets decimated (we’ll have to rely on anecdotal evidence for that one, because any admission at all that they’ve got it acknowledges that hobos are a problem, and we won’t be having that.. 2) Countries in S/SE Asia are decimated. They’re right next door to China, the Himalayas are no barrier in these days of air travel, and their public health systems are…. Asian. If this thing is half as bad as the panic-mongers say, India won’t have to worry about overpopulation for the next few centuries. 3) The Media starts slanting its coverage in the “we’ve all got to pull together!” direction. So far, every single story I’ve seen could be subtitled “and that’s why Orange Man Bad.” Since the journos are all urban soyboy bugmen — or whichever gender they choose to self-identify — they’re much more at risk than us Deplorables. All they care about right now is bashing Trump. When they start acting like it’s an actual problem, rather than a cudgel with which to beat Orange Man, I’ll join the freakout.
It would be very useful, now and after the epidemic winds down, to have a website listing all the media’s various nightmare scenarios that were predicted and then failed to materialize. You could even organize it in table form. One column is “predicted deaths/cases by X date” and the other is “actual deaths/cases by X date”.
I know that there are plenty of these kinds of sites listing, say, the failed predictions of doomsday by the Watchtower Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses) The hardcore members just ignore them and keep kicking the apocalypse can into the future but who knows how many people are saved from ever joining the cult by them?
This might also be useful to crush the inevitable counter-factuals that the believers will marshal when people point out that the Plague mostly fizzled. This is a tactic where you admit the predictions fizzled but then say it was only because we took drastic measures to stop it. Being able to show that the people advocating those measures got almost all their numbers wrong might sway some back to skepticism and help further discredit the media in general.
Perhaps we could update, and reissue the classic book, “ Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds” by
Charles Mackay?
The counter-factuals can (and will) always point to the very real fact that just a couple of garden gnomes provide an entire neighborhood with “herd immunity” from infestations of pygmy albino giraffes.
Am old enough to remember the acronym GIGO (garbage in /garbage out). A classic case of computer modeling gone amuck. So much like the hockey stick curve that launched a million windmills and a bird holocaust.
I’ve been replying to people I’ve known for years when they bring up the cold and flu season by telling them that destroying the economy is a bad idea. Or telling them that it’s all being blown out of proportion by the media. One guy I had to call a fking retard because he came out to meet me with a broom to ensure I maintained social distance.
The guy I called a fking retard just excused himself to go back inside and cower in fear. Everyone else, though, grows extremely angry. I can watch as their facial expression changes to one of borderline rage. Sometimes they start sputtering but they always walk away without any real comment.
I can’t afford to piss off too many people so I’ve been trying out other comments. The one I’ve decided on is to tell people we all die one day but I won’t live in fear. They still stop replying to me but I don’t get the sputtering rage.
My wife thinks they get so angry because deep inside they know they are like frightened children and their egos take a blow when I reply like a man.
Yep. And to them, you are like those rogue faggots that ran around deliberately spreading disease to other faggots. If you don’t believe in their bogeyman – they will brand you as one of his minions.
I learned early to just zip my lip. You get enough morons like that in a group and fire them up – and they will start burning witches and heretics.
On the other hand, I have been constantly amazed at just how willing and eager so many people are to go along with and support each new directive. They repeat each new “abracadabra phrase” as if they’ve known and believed it their entire lives.
As for the “social distancing” part, it seems like for too many have been waiting for their opportunity to be their own neighborhood/workplace enforcer.
Mostly, I’m amazed, though not at all surprised at just how easy this slide into authoritarianism is happening.
With how godawful society has become I suspect “social distance” is a welcome concept to embrace for many.
When I told people the other day that we all gotta go sometime, I thought they might explode. Not because it was flippant, exactly. But because it mocked their deep seated fear of a not-terribly infectious or dangerous cold virus.
If I were the Chinese, I’d be putting the PLA on troop-ships right now! The simpering communists in government will bend over backwards to accommodate the invasion, and the populace will cower in their homes.
Psalms 90, brother, Psalms 90. Plus, a basic knowledge of human existence since, well, humans have existed. And some basic math skills. Duh.
A lot of people saying “we’ve all gotta go sometime” mean “they’ve all gotta go sometime” – usually the same people cocksure they’ll get a ticket on the Ark Ship to Planet Poz b/c “meritocracy.”
The panic was started by rogue governors and mayors, each of whom instituted unconstitutional martial law light. But let’s not sugarcoat what Trump has done here. Not once has he criticized actions of these insane mayors and governors as it pertains to civil liberties. In fact he has blessed what they have done. And all the Q people believe he is in absolute control, almost like a omnipotent god. To cut to the chase, I don’t think I’ve ever been more pessimistic for the outlook going forward than I am now— not because of the virus, which I think could have been managed like it was in Japan, but because the irrational panic machine has taken on a life of its own.
We’ll see how good Trump is in walking this fiasco back. My hope is that the governors of the states—who are spineless—will size upon government recommendations for limiting their panicked edicts. As a local political pendent here once said, “Politicians are spineless, so you must lends them yours”.
Once I laughed at that, now I see he was oh so correct.
Odd, my experience has been pretty much the exact opposite of yours. Most people with whom I interact agree with both of your premises. They’re not “cowering in fear” so much as trying not to get pinched by some over zealous John Law. A potential $1,000 fine and/or half a year in county lockup is nothing to sneeze at.
Well said. Especially the comments about childless women
If we do decide a witch-burning is the best course of action, this time instead of old women, may I suggest we concentrate on the Cloud people. I would nominate anyone who’s ever received government money or benefits beyond regular salaries or pensions, in other words, those who’ve milked the system at the expense of the Dirt People.
Hey Ben, be careful about your selection criteria. Probably you and certainly a lot of the people you advocate for are going to receive $1200 “government” money within the month. And most of the Cloud People won’t get that gibsmedat because their AGI is too high. The stimulus check is a distraction. The real weaponized government intervention was the $4 trillion of Fed “infinity cash” propping up a nation drunk on debt. If you’re underwater in a mortgage or auto loan; have credit card debt; owe thousands in student loans for a worthless degree; or run a leveraged hedge fund, you’re the source of the problem. But it’s the frugal savers who must be made to pay for the bailout. Well, f**k grasshoppers.
Many of us with student loan debt did not have the foresight to choose a lucrative field of study. You can’t blame an 18-year-old for making dumb decisions. Also, I spent most of my student loan refund money on pot.
I wound up with some “student loan” debt on a degree I would never have been allowed to finish. I took out a loan from the base credit union and paid back every last red cent. As for the “not having the foresight to choose a lucrative field of study.” bravo sierra. The internet has been around over 25 years. You could easily have done the research if you had cared to do so. No, while I don’t exactly “blame” an 18 year old for making dumb decisions neither do I choose to either absolve them of responsibility for said decisions or relieve them of the consequences. You were old enough to enlist in the armed forces and to vote (for DemonKKKRats, I’ll wager) so you were old enough to make decisions for which you can damned well suffer the consequences. I do not know if your parents taught you that actions have consequences. Whether they did or did not is irrelevant. ACTIONS . . . HAVE . . . CONSEQUENCES Period! Don’t come to me looking for a shoulder to cry on. I save my sympathy for those who deserve it. YOU . . . DON’T . . . QUALIFY!!!
(Suck it up and soldier on, Buttercup!)
I will not be the slightest bit embarrassed to cash that check you mentioned. My wife drives a school bus and has been out of work since BEFORE the shitstorm actually started. The district’s spring break (for which she did not get paid since she didn’t drive) started TWO FEKKING DAYS BEFORE the Prez’s Wednesday evening briefing. The next day, i.e. the 12th, was when people started to panic – hoarding toilet paper and bottled water. She has been out of work (and not getting a paycheck) since then and right now there’s no telling WHEN our (never to be sufficiently damned) political masters will graciously deign to allow us to leave our homes once more. They’re telling landlords to be lenient on renters but I don’t hear/see where they’re asking banks to be so fekking lenient on those of us with mortgages.
” I would nominate anyone who’s ever received government money or benefits beyond regular salaries or pensions …”
That would be a large percentage of the American population. Most Democrat voters fit in that category, if ” beyond regular salaries or pensions” is modified to “including regular salaries or pensions.”
When you say “regular salaries or pensions” I hope you’re including Social Security and the miserable pittance I receive from the Dept.of Veteran’s Affairs. Oh and the pittance my son gets from the DVA for being rated 100% disabled after they would not let him re-enlist in the Army. I also hope you include the payments my brother gets for putting up with the bravo sierra and charley sierra for 20 years. For that matter, I hope you include the pittance my son’s father-in-law gets for having fekking TWO artificial knees pursuant to his stint in that little party they threw in southeast Asia back in the 60s and 70s! Do WE qualify for one of your necktie parties? Hmmmmm?
This goes far beyond childless women. The MSM has been inducing panics in the American people since the 70’s with alarming regularity.
Problem is most oeioke have short memories so they never call the MSM on this shit.
I’ve been around long enough and my memory is still good that I can recall a lot of the panics the MSM caused.
These are very evil people, not just some box wine harpies going off the deep end.
I like it to the Salem Witch Trials. A discharge of a decade’s built up stress, after which the new culture the old folks were barely holding in check takes over. I’m cautiously optimistic. I’ve had people warn me not to call it Chinese flu, lest I be called a racist. I told them I couldn’t care less what the Chinese think, since they just put 20% of us out of a job. Haven’t heard a peep about racism since, and a few more people making bat soup jokes and the like. This might be the end of the neo-Puritans.
Think McMartin Preschool and Satanic molestation case the AIDS hysteria of 1880’s.
This is a replay of them on a global stage.
Rwc, I remember those. Which is why I just can’t take the Media’s doom-mongering seriously. This is the, what, 9th time we’re all gonna die!! just since 1970?
Call it the Wuhan Virus. Most of the people warning us against “racism” are deans and administrators of universities that have become totally financially addicted to Chinese students and the money they pay (they pay full fare) over the past 15 years. They fear offending their Chinese masters, and loosing the money train.
And again, Yes, Minister is prescient on this, 40 years ago. Season two, episode two, Doing the Honours. Humphrey works to get an exception for his Oxford college on having overseas students pay full rates for their tuition. “Anything but home students! We only get 500 per head”
Yep. I spent umpteen years in academia; I’m well aware of the impact our Most Favorite Trading Partners have had. Hell, even at the third-rate public college I attended for undergrad, in one of our least intellectual states, way back at the dawn of the Clinton Era (1988-2020)… even there and then, we joked that you needed to know Mandarin to pass chem lab, and we all made “Blade Runner” jokes every time it rained.
An end to the neo-Puritans? There will never be an end to them because they thrive on human misery. Maybe we should call them “Corona-Puritans”.
It’s been said that the Salem Witch Trials were the rock on which Theocracy shattered….
Hopefully, decades from now, we’ll be able to say that Corona Panic was the rock on which “I f***ing love science” shattered.
One thing this panic has done is expose all the degreed frauds in the medical industry who can’t even do basic math and research. Sadly it looks like the majority are little more than credentialed idiots.
Meme, we can only wish. But I suspect not. Scientism is our new religion and religion is never required to be rationale as is any faith based belief.
A very wise man once wrote, “It is not science versus religion but scientists versus ministers.” There is no conflict between science (which is only knowledge, after all) and religion. The two operate in entirely different spheres. The problem comes when the priests try to extend their sway into territory not properly theirs. Time and again the Bible has been proven to be reliable in its non-theological information. For example, when the Jews took back Palestine, they were able to dig new wells following the Biblical descriptions of where the Patriarch Abraham dug his. For decades archaeologists laughed at the very mention of the people the Bible called “Hittites”. They laughed until some archaeologist excavating a tel in the middle east discovered the royal archive of the Hittite Empire. In the New Testament book of Acts the writer called St. Luke included “throwaway” facts (minor details of office holders in various cities through St. Paul traveled) that have, time after time, been proven accurate.
Problems arise when men of power and authority in either sphere attempt to take power in the other sphere. So long as scientists stick to observed facts and priests/ministers stick to divinely revealed truth, there need be no tension between science and religion.
Yes, I recognize that my position will not win me friends – in EITHER camp – but that is my understanding of the universe. There are things science can explain very well. And there are other things it cannot – and, IMHO, will never be able to. Religion is able to provide a moral and ethical dimension that, again IMHO, science cannot and never will be able to. Science is really good at answering questions ow “what” and “how”. Religion is at its best answering “why”. Problems arise when the “priests” of either discipline start trying to answer questions which belong to the others’ sphere. Peopleneed to pay more attention to their own back yard and less attention to others’.
Out of the park, ZMan! Out. Of. The. Park!
I couldn’t come up with the word that sums up the cause of the vast majority of the problems in our society, but there is nothing more applicable than gynocracy.
In Deutschland they’re already reporting that domestic violence is way up because of this. Of course it is: Some women don’t know when to relinquish the remote and you got to set them straight. Some feminist pointed out that the home is more dangerous to women statistically than a dark park. Perhaps someone should point out to her that women don’t live in dark parks.
Someone should point out to these women that they commit the majority of domestic violence,
They’re just not terribly good at it and men seem to be ashamed that they are victims.
https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/19133-women-more-likely-to-commit-domestic-violence-studies-show
https://www.mintpressnews.com/woman-aggressor-unspoken-truth-domestic-violence/196746/
https://time.com/2921491/hope-solo-women-violence/
Really? Wow. This confirms even moreso what I previously thought. The root of the problem is that too many men are too weak willed. Women want to be led by a strong man, they say they don’t but they do. Always pay more attention to what people do than what they say. Why do you think they lust after bad boys? Because we pass their shit tests. I hope times get tough, that is pitiful and hard times create hard men. There’s a silver lining for ya.
Our society reacts brutally often with lethal force to men who stand up to their women too firmly.
This tends to limit male options and for many, celibacy and porn become far better.
The repair option isn’t very pleasant either, essentially it means getting rid of the actual bad actors throwing away large parts of the current society and after forcefully demilitarizing it.
That’s not easy.
What does “too firmly” mean? Lethal force? I dunno what cases you might be referring to but what I meant was strong in willpower. Just say no. A woman lacks the strength the physically harm a man, she can’t “make” you do anything you don’t want to. Would you have trouble physically deescalating a situation with an irate 13 year old? Because that’s about how strong an average woman is. I’ve had a couple situations where a girl freaked out on me. All you gotta do is hold them and prevent them from harming them self or you until they calm down. Keep in control of your emotions and show strength, they respond well to that.
There are outliers…married to one. Years ago decked a guy on a commuter train, laid him out flat, broke his nose. Hit him so hard 8mm of bone was pulverized below her knuckle. Felt for the guy. He had to ride to the next stop where the police were meeting him having gotten his ass kicked by a girl in a blue suit, pearls and heels in front of 40 people.
Well, what I’ve noticed (and I’ve mentioned it here before) is that women can smell weakness. I’m usually pretty strong willed and dominant, but when I get tired (happens often, I have a busy schedule) my girlfriend would notice and suddenly she would say things she doesn’t normally say, try to take the lead, etc. Happened with multiple.
There is no “equality” with women – the man is either the benevolent dictator or he is the woman’s mistreated slave. It’s harder to stay dominant now that physical “abuse” is not permitted. I’m not saying you should beat the shit out of her but a slap or punch when it is warranted is perfectly acceptable in my book.
The reason that they crave domination during sex is because they crave domination IRL too…
Kind of off topic but hopefully this helps some guys. Obv. you can’t be a sperg about it and tell them you think this. Just carry yourself in a confident and alpha way (even if you’re not) and don’t take shit from them.
Once, my girlfriend poured a cup of tea all over me, pushed me, and punched me in the head. I slapped her in the face and she immediately stopped flipping out. “I’m gonna go to bed,” she said. She never tried doing anything physical with me again (except sex).
Punching a woman is like punching a 13 year old, this is something a negroid would do, completely unnecessary and weak as fuck. “the man is either the benevolent dictator or he is the woman’s mistreated slave” Binary light switch brain thinking is also something nogs do, and slapping and punching is not benevolent. A wigger is worse than a nigger, I expect a dindu to act the part, but you have no excuse. I’m not saying women are saintly creatures you must not lay a finger on, I’m saying chill the fuck out because hitting someone with 50% of the upper body strength that you have is weak and fucking gay. They aren’t tough, you could do some real damage if you’re angry and that’s messed up man. Shit.
“Some women don’t know when to relinquish the remote!” Nice to still laugh….thanks! Few women understand anymore that marriage is teamwork. Women now behave like demanding selfish angry ill-disciplined little girls. I still can’t figure out the evolutionary adaptation/advantage for men to tightly hold that remote surfing-channel switching-surfing. You’re intense and it doesn’t look like a fun brain space to be. I suppose it’s a form of renewing your High T. Don’t interrupt Basic Husband when he’s holding that remote. He looks like he’s intensely piloting a jet. Hmm…..I view him as a testy space alien…guaranteed he thinks the same of me. Just accept that space aliens channel surf and get on with life!
Range, my new favorite homeless guy James LaFond blames a lot of female cruelty on what happens when you take someone who’s powerless and give them permission and/or instrumentalities for payback.
You’re not the helpless type, thus your “manlike” attitude to all this.
I can still remember when well-adjusted wahmens with “inner strength” were more common. Nowadays, a gal like that might as well be Helen of Troy – and is probably worth that kind of effort to hang onto.
I took a college course (required) in gender studies, which honestly was a mandatory coffee klatch for women… but the female professor did have one interesting exercise. She brought up visual advertisements for products that showed women and asked us to imagine males in those advertisements in the same physical positions as the female models in the ads. Vacuous faces, infantile poses or ridiculous expressions of glee. It was interesting when you did the mental exercise (little did I know fast forwarding 25 years men would be taking open-mouthed soyboy selfies).
Anyway, I garnered some hate from the females in the class when I pointed out that the ads were directed for women probably focus grouped by women. The professor (she was a fair cop as the Brits say) actually gave me kudos for the observation.
Anyway, my point is this. Try the same exercise today in reverse. Imagine men walking around constantly spouting off about how they are “strong men” or “boy power”… it’s ridiculous, its obnoxious, and if it’s actually true then you generally don’t need to pipe off about it.
I come from a long line of actually tough-ass Southern women.and I have never once heard them mouth that garbage.
It’s going to be a mess as young men figure out how to be men. It’s that bad for the younger generation.
On the other hand, they can look to the girls as role models. The girls figuring out how to be feminine will have the hardest time.
This is what we’ve allowed to happen. We don’t deserve what mercy God might show us.
Hi Penitent! I’ll bet you miss those tough ass Southern women with a sprinkle of magnolia.
I call them a couple of times a month. They are definitely worth talking with. Hope you are well Range!
We are just fine and being prudent, not gathering with folks. Salt Lake City on lockdown. Mayor Erin Mendenhall is a totalitarian lefty with a degree in gender studies which qualifies her to boss people around. Gov. Herbert has held out against her…the state is strongly cautioned to stay close to home but no threats. What a difference between the two. I sent an email to Herbert’s office suggesting the problem is within the Salt Lake corridor. Lock those people down and leave southern and eastern Utah alone. The numbers are not here in southwest Utah. Well what do you know..it worked for the moment. Take care Penitant
Funny story. I actually took a feminist studies course waaay back when. Hell, there wasn’t even a Feminist Studies department in those days. But I needed units and it was a night course, so what the hell.
I remember nothing of the course, except the instructor and one particular funny incident during lecture. The instructor was a large, mannish, short haired, lesbian. Typical stereotype. She was lecturing on the evils of Freud and his insidious theory of “Penis Envy”. She remarked, “…Freud’s theory of Penis Envy, drives women “wide”…”
You could have heard a pin drop, except for a few of the guys in the back giggling. She had of course meant ”wild”. So while denouncing Freud, she had unwittingly provided an perfect example of another of his “theories”—that which is termed a, “Freudian Slip”. 😉
Gawd, I miss those days.
Lafond is a very dangerous example for men. Accordingly, I kick in to his patron account. My contribution, such as it is, to the arts. Concerning women… My three daughters have been home. Wife is exhausted, but so far holding her own. Was worried for a time that the oldest girl was a genuine psychopath when she was eary teens. She appears to have lined out but the youngest, a 14 teen old, is coming on strong. She got everbody fooled, but i, alone apparently, know, of what lurkes beneath the sweet placid exterior.
Exile…sweet…thanks! Thus my manlike attitude enhanced with a sense of observation, cultivated patience, a healthy acceptance of reality and a mist of floral and citrus essential oils.
Your thought….powerless becomes payback….is deep stuff for women. Don’t know how we grow away from that.
BH and I went through a bit of a power back and forth. Then we dumped the power play and let surface our natural structure of “separate but equal facilities.” Ran it past him for his take and in his gregarious conversational way replied, “Yep.”
Every civil rights group founded in the 20th Century was not satisfied with legal equality and non-discrimination, but sought privilege, superiority and revenge.
Thus the aggressive attitude exhibited by blacks towards whites and queers towards straights. On the one hand they endlessly claim to be victims while on the other they act like the cock of the walk. I’m a great proponent of Teddy Roosevelt’s maxim to “Walk softly but carry a big stick.”
Talk to cops who work in areas where there are a lot of lesbian “couples.” Look at how Dinduisha treats her kids in public.
Or date the wrong chick(s). Ask me in person sometime.
This always reminds me of the line in Gene Wolfe’s “Shadow of the Torturer” where Severian the apprentice torturer tells the reader that we used to allow women in our guild, but they proved too cruel, exceeding the punishments required by the authorities, so we take in men only now.
I read accounts where the apache squaws were the most vicious to prisoners.
Lewis & Clarke describe a lot of this, much to the chagrin of NuSchool archaeologists and anthropologists.