Fermi’s paradox is named after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who famously asked, “Where are all the space aliens?” Whether he actually said that is unknown, but he did wonder how it is that we have yet to find any evidence of life in the universe, other than on earth. According to the Drake equation, there should be quite a few extraterrestrial civilizations that we can detect from earth. Here is a famous paper on the topic written back in the 1970’s explaining the problem.
For those interested in listening to a long discussion on the subject, this episode of the Future Strategist with Jim Miller is a good listen. He interviews Greg Cochran, who knows a great deal about the topic. This was before Greg unfortunately succumbed to the The Madness, so it is free of that stuff. Miller and Cochran go into the background of the topic and offer some possible reasons for why we have not discovered any signs of intelligent life anywhere in the known universe.
Problems like this are fun and make for great science fiction plots. The great science fiction novel The Mote in God’s Eye is about man’s first contact with an alien civilization and touches on why it took so long for humans to find aliens and vice-versa. A main topic of the book is the idea that the alien civilization has Malthusian cycles, where they eventually overpopulate their world and destroy themselves. As a result, they can never advance quite far enough to explore the universe.
The novel does not get too far into this, as it is mostly a plot devise to move the story along, but it is a possible reason for why we have not found intelligent life in the universe and why we can no longer go to the moon. That is, we have regressed due to social evolution of some sort that we don’t fully understand. It now takes ten years to build a tall building in New York City, when a century ago it took a year. We don’t build dams or bridges anymore. We can’t even maintain the ones we have now.
This is where people will say, “We could go to the moon if we really wanted to do it. It’s the government that cannot do it. Private industry could go if it was worth it.” Maybe that’s true or maybe that is just a coping strategy to mask reality. All we know is we have not been to the moon since 1972 and we lack the facilities to do it right now. Even those vaunted private explorers are struggling to do things we could do decades ago, like launch something into space and bring it back again.
Social cycle theory is not a new idea. In the 19th century, Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto developed a theory where power in a society passes back and forth between the clever and the aggressive. Most famously, Oswald Spengler theorized that human societies are born, blossom into maturity and then, like a person, decline into old age and eventually death. Ed Dutton and Michael Woodley have built on this concept using modern studies of human intelligence.
In other words, the reason we have not been able to travel the stars is that intelligent life can never advance to that point. Our civilization lifespan prohibits us from reaching that level of technology. That does not mean there is no progress. Clearly, we have reached a higher level of technological achievement than the Romans, but there’s always a dark age to reset things. What comes after this cycle will learn a lot from us, but maybe make it as far as Mars, before the great downturn ends their run.
Current events offers some insight into why we may never meet space aliens. The panic over the virus is something new to modern society. This virus is not a threat to humanity, but it is treated as one. We know there was no panic over the Swine flu, the Asian flu, the Hong Kong flu and so on. There was no panic over the great influenza outbreak of 2017 that killed 80,000 Americans. Yet with the death toll soaring to 4,000 with the Chinese flu, America is paralyzed with fear.
It could be that when a civilization becomes sufficiently advanced, three things happen that change how it interacts with the world. One is the birth rate falls. This is something we have seen all over the world. Once a society can reliably feed its people and it reduces interpersonal violence to a certain level, total fertility rates fall. At the same time, the society feminizes. Women begin to take up positions of authority in both civil and government institutions, changing the nature of those institutions.
That’s the third thing, what we are seeing today. A society dominated by women is extremely risk averse. The focus first shifts to elevating the value of life, then to guarding the children against any potential risk. We saw this happen in the 90’s and 00’s with the millennial generation, who were sheltered from everything. Finally, the society shifts to organizing against any threat, even those that promise to merely trim a few years off the lifespan of the octogenarians.
A society that is hyper-focused on preventing even the slightest risk is not a society taking great risks to explore the stars. Maybe that’s why the cost of going back to the moon is prohibitively high. The safety precautions that would be required make the venture pointlessly expensive. The reason it takes ten years to build a building that a century ago only took a year to build, is that today’s society is risk intolerant. If just one worker gets a hangnail or stubs a toe, the cost is considered too high.
Another possibility along the same lines is that in addition to the obsession with safety, the low fertility rate simply reduces the population. This is beginning in places like Japan and Italy. In a world of growing populations, the point of technological advance is to provide for more people. In a world of shrinking populations, the point of technological advance is to protect the people. That means more automation and less actual work, which could result in physical harm to the remaining humans.
What we may be seeing is the early stages of a new social model, one imagined in science fiction a century ago. Once a species becomes sufficiently advanced, the population shrinks, but lives in greater comfort. Perhaps in time lifespans will extend so a small number of humans, cared for by automated cities, live long lives almost like children in a daycare center. A species of pampered toddlers is no going to risk it all to explore the stars and come visit earth.
Of course, the Chinese flu is a great reminder that the free flow of people means the free flow of germs, many of which are deadly to those unfamiliar with them. The Europeans expansion into the New World probably killed off 90% of the indigenous people in the Americas. No one really knows for sure, but the great weapon used against the Indians was the pathogen. Small pox and influenza have been the greatest killers spread by man in all of history.
Maybe once a species overcomes all of the problems listed above and reaches the point where it can explore the stars, it has also realized that the spread of pathogens is too high of a risk. Maybe extraterrestrials explored a few places before they could reach earth and the result was a horrific die off. Maybe the alien bug killed them or maybe their bugs killed everything they touched. As a result, they hide from us any sign of life, so we don’t make the mistake of infecting the universe.
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Small point, is that the scary thing is not that COVID deaths were at 4,000 when you wrote this. It’s that today it’s nearly 7,000.
However, even as an emergency room RN, I am not panicking over the virus. This “lockdown” has only barely reduced my movement (aside from going to work) because I live in a rural area where I mostly just do things outside and away from crowds.
With that said, the US is a big place and we have little to no social cohesion or identity. It’s time to stop pretending that we are even a country at all. We are just fifty diffuse states, at best. In Wyoming, there is little to worry about. In New York, there actually might be “bodies in the streets” pretty soon. That’s two different worlds, two different realities. Time to stop pretending like they’re the same.
Projections for total deaths in the US if Corona-chan is left unchecked top at around 5.000.000 dead and some hundred million infected iirc. The virus can also cause permanent damage, including infertility.
There were no significant measures in place to reduce the spread of the 2017 flu outbreak, which makes a comparison between its total death toll and what Corona-chan achieved thus far unwarranted. I’m actually surprised that someone of Z-man’s intelligence will make such a glaring omission.
btw, Corona-chan already killed a far higher proportion of Lombardy’s population than some 80.000 would represent for America, and this was WITH exceptional preventive measures in place.
Just finished reading everybody’s comments. One thing that strikes me as odd is that nobody has remarked about the Trump administration’s creation of the new Space Force. Could be a straw in the wind for future trends. It’s a reaction to the Chinese space program – they have been doing some moon exploration lately, albeit without any landings (as far as I know). Something that Trump got right IMHO.
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Always thought we were on the same footing with aliens that’s why we’ve never seen them. You know Big Bang , ever-expanding galaxies, etc.
They’re on the other side of the universe , but still in the infancy stage of space exploration like us. Then again somebody commented there might be civilizations older than our sun ! In that case they better be Vulcans .
Planet Vulcan was the term I used to describe Finland. At least it was like that 20 years ago. Logic = stability . Of course Hymie and Co. are on a mission to pump diversity into every corner of the planet . If we ever do get any otherworldly visitors they going to have to evolve sans ” the tribe ” or similar parasitic entity.
White birthrate has fallen for a number of reasons. A lot of the damage started decades ago beginning with LBO’s and mergers which gutted American industry in a orgy of downsizing while Free Trade drove the final nail in the coffin for white middle-class America.
As added insult these actions resulted in the destruction of many communities and towns that grew up around various businesses and when the business left there went the community and peoples future. And thanks to government and Big Pharma who pumped massive quantities of synthetic opioids into the rust belt to kill off the remainder of the population.
The Leave if to Beaver home life today is only available to those whites as Tucker Carlson has pointed out, who have the money. IOW the top 1%.
Today’s aerospace companies bare little resemblance to those who put men on the Moon and built the Shuttle. First off those companies came under the control of Bean Counters and credentialism. People with the right papers mattered more than those who had the talent so the talent left.
In advanced stages you end up like Boeing that imports Hindu management and coders and can’t produce a new aircract. that works. And no the 737 MAX doesn’t work and you can’t fix it with silly software patch written by Bombay specials.
Originally Boeing was a company made and run by engineers but that changed some decades ago. Partly due to the acquisition of McDoug and the company no longer being protected against foreign competitors.
The private venture companies are trying to do on shoestring that took billions of dollars to pull off. and they know full well they are only manned mishap away from having their contracts pulled so they go slow.
Can a pathogen spread by europeans to the Americas really be called a “weapon used against the Indians” if no one at the time was even aware of germ theory? That phrasing implies intent.
There is no chance aliens are real and the obsession with aliens in our culture is to some degree a symptom of widespread atheism. Having rejected God, people hold on to the idea of some intelligent being(s) out in the cosmos, and they like to imagine those beings hold secrets about humanity’s origin or purpose, or destiny: the same questions addressed by God in the Bible.
The popular obsession with aliens is also wasteful and disturbing on some level. How many billions have been spent searching for proof of alien life or building giant disk arrays to listen for alien communication?
How many brain cells have been lost watching history channel crap about “ancient aliens”?
Yes. Every alien contact would be an opportunity for infection and death. Makes sense.
If you look at the heroic efforts the Chinese have to undertake to catch a disease from a pig, with whom they share such a preponderance of DNA I think it unlikely that some off-planet alien would be infective no matter how they cooked them.
Maybe faster-than-light travel is crazy simple and we just missed it? I give you Harry Turtledove’s “The Road Not Taken”. Made me smile long ago when I read it in one of Pournelle’s “There Will Be War” collections.
https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf
A: It happened on Earth, so the spontaneous evolution of intelligent life can’t be that improbable.
B: We don’t know that; the probability of life arising around any given star might be 10^-100, i.e. one part in a googol.
A: But there aren’t a googol atoms in the entire universe, never mind a googol stars! Barring divine intervention, such odds would preclude our existence.
B: There aren’t that many atoms in the visible universe (our Hubble volume), but for all we know, the actual universe might be a googol times larger, or infinite.
A: Oh.
Re Divine intervention. This is a common theme in philosophy/religion. What is the first cause? The short answer is “It’s impossible to know.” What is known, is that to posit God as first cause increases the complexity of the explanation, which is naughty, according to Occam’s Razor. Psychologically reassuring, perhaps, but needlessly complicating…e.g. “Where then did God come from?” You just can’t win…
Theology neatly answers that with God is Eternal.
Our minds are incapable of understanding eternal. We are trapped a time prison. Eternalness is just as mysterious as Godness. Even so, what if God is eternal? What if he tires of being eternal? May he decide to just throw in the towel? Then what? Nothingness? Would that nothingness then become the new eternal? Where did all that Godness disappear to?
The incomparable Eric idle from Monty Python had a song called the Galaxy song that ends very appropriately Re intelligent life:
“So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!”
It’s always amusing how Americans take such great pride in their space program and brag about landing a man on the moon half a century ago. Mention it to most Europeans and the response is “Yes. And?” It’s right up there with the well worn American mantra “We beat the Germans in WWII”. Well of course you did – a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
Now if you want something to really brag about something, try bragging about how great your health care system is, or how many days of paid holiday you get. You’re all too busy staring into the stars to notice you’re kids education is one of the worst on the planet, you’re so broke you couldn’t scratch $400 together if you had to and most of you are a pay check away from losing everything you own…I mean are making payments on.
Built a rocket and landed a man on the moon did you? All by yourselves? I wonder how long it would have taken without a brilliant German scientist to show you how to get there.
Karl, you are correct in all you’ve stated and then some. But allow this 1st generation American to counter you for the “team”. Your scientist, Werner VonBraun, gave credit to his inspiration wrt to rocketry, an American named Goddard. 😉
Oh yeah? Well, you should just remember that: If it wasn’t for us Americans, you and your kids would be speaking German right now!
Um. Wait. […] Never mind.
Take away all our vibrancy, our education system doesn’t look so bad. You’re becoming more vibrant too. You’ll see.
Could you retards stop writing “risk adverse”? Risk averse.
Grammer and speling doesn’t matter hear.
we prefer autistic
Another possible for the lockdown is this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_vvYDd01mw
Smuggled Viruses Coming From China Raise Questions Of bioterror
And despite the click bait style headline Tim Pool is no Alex Jones. He’s a moderate Liberal gradually sounding more like DR every day.
This would be a very good and legit reason for locking much of the US down and given the relations between USG and its peoples (3 minutes to bugaloo) and the risks of panic and nuke war with China , better to say nothing.
Even if this isn’t some sinister Chinese op, this flu does tell us we need to extricate ourselves from China but man will that be difficult for a lot of reasons.
I hate the Fermi Paradox for its inability to deal with a very basic idea that E.T. and friends might already be here.
I mean we have people from all walks of life including military officers claiming to have seen alien spacecraft or dead aliens or in a few cases to have had contact with extra terrestrials . Despite in answering their question in full the Fermi heads are as dogmatic about this being impossible as hard core atheists are about all faiths.
Now sure it could be Hurr Durr Durr big psyop but lack of considering that excluded middle displays a lack of imagination at best.
Now to be fair ours is a society that can’t cope with any shocks like I dunno a novel virus or adjust its parameters to function better so if I was the USG I’d cover up the aliens too. That would basically destroy everything toot sweet.
Z and Cochran are two of my favorite curmudgeons, and Z should just disagree with Cochran’s ideas rather than attack him personally. Cochran has been uncannily and quantitatively right about the WuFlu (and other similar topics) in a way that cannot be accidental. Z is picking an unnecessary fight on Greg’s home turf. As another famous curmudgeon said, a man’s gotta know his limitations. Just as enjoy Sailer for his marketing insights and Z for his cultural analysis, I’ll listen to Cochran when it comes to epidemiology. Exponential growth is not gay, it just is. How you respond to a disease with a .5-1% death rate (that skews old, and assuming good medical care, etc.) may be gay, but the death rate just is. Some of us can accept that something can be true even if the left is trying to use it for politics.
One of the largest influence contributing to civilisational decline is the ascent of the gynocracy. Having worked in a mostly male world, you are correct that women by their nature are not risk takers. When shit breaks, they run on fear, striking out because they can’t control themselves nor the situation.
Most male jobs that have stuff that breaks or experiences rapidly changing process that causes crisis/chaos have step by step protocols to follow to troubleshoot. As you work through the steps to troubleshoot, at any one of those steps you can find and solve the problem, the mind and emotions settle down to concentrate on resolution. If a solution is not readily apparent after following steps of protocol, one of my guy mentors coached to make a cup of coffee and step outside, meaning clear your mind by switching into something mindless plus rotate the mind by stepping outside to empty your mind. That makes room for suddenly viewing the problem from another angle. Also, know when to rely on teamwork if you’re not working graveyard. NONE of this problem solving protocol is part of wahmyn world. It’s all about feelings…woowoowoo …feelings. Wahmyn world doesn’t do teamwork well, too competitive.
I learned all this working treatment and distribution in the water industry. I am so grateful for this perspective. Learned in water treatment I ran large anxiety dealing with crises in treatment plants because the water was in and out quickly and demanded a rapid problem solving. I faced the fact that guys and a few women were better equipped than me to handle the rapid trouble shooting needed for water treatment. Very stressful when, during a rain/flood event, the influent raw water coming in was mud…literal mud…and all you could do was open up wide the alum and coagulents until the ntu’s started to turn down. I trained and switched to water distribution because most problems in distribution gives one time to think through what is needed, time to assess, work with your on-shift partner, recognize and follow the protocol from main breaks to stealing of copper to losing SCADA system instrumentation. A much happier and less stressed Range found water distribution right for me with the stress level I could live with.
You’re seeing wahmyn politicians running massive fear, puffed up with arrogance so they feel exempt of developing protocols nor following them, and not good at teamwork. They have never learned to think under pressure nor the art of the deal. To cover their fear, they move into endgame action and make totalitarian decisions, threatening to bring in police/military if her directives are not followed. This Is Panic Untrained. I knew this about my mind 30 years ago when I observed it’s a damned good thing I’m not a general because decision making under fire is not my forte.
I’ve become pretty disappointed with a lot of “our guys”. I get that people may be concerned I also understand some of the arguments for the current reaction, although I have a suspicion that the governments know something that they are not divulging,
What I don’t understand is the polarization this issue has caused on our side. Yesterday I had 2 comments deleted on the FTN site, neither of them were snarky or inappropriate.
People seem very attached to their opinions on the issue, even though there is a prettt large information gap.
Anyway, pretty easy to wedge issue our side.
What do you suspect the government knows?
It appears that online surveillance has been heavily increased. Something fishy is going on. It’s almost Orwellian.
There also appear to be a lot of new paid trolls from MoveOn and other orgs. Or maybe they are simply lost NYT commenters.
You have my sympathies. I’ve been banned for life from American Renaissance for posting a racist comment 😀
I listened to FTN the other day. Found it to be incoherently angry. The one host is just so supremely certain of his comprehensively expansive insight and intellect. Comes across as just hating his audience. Weird personality and an aggressive little podcast.
FTN’s been weird the last six weeks. They levy the “just the flu, bro” change against anyone who disagrees with their cold, moldy takes. It’s gotten pretty stale at this point. Considering how apeshit the rest of the media is going with Corona, complaining about flu bro’s is hitting at some pretty low-hanging retards.
As regards the zero-risk culture, I am happy to accept that it is partially driven, at least, by the gynocratic ascendancy. But I wonder how much the growth of legal activism also plays a role? When employers (or their insurers, actually) have to cough up a small fortune for every sprained wrist, is it surprising that said insurers would focus upon minimising risk in order to minimise their exposure?
Interesting discussion. A fellow named Sir John Glubb wrote a pertinent article concerning the duration of empires and the stages they follow titled ‘The Fate of Empires’. It also outlines similarities of empires leading to their decline and fall throughout history, including a late stage period termed ‘the age of intellectualism’. It was written in the mid-70’s and seems pretty spot-on with what we are seeing these days.
One of the largest influence contributing to civilisational decline is the ascent of the gynocracy. Having worked in a mostly male world, you are correct that women by their nature are not risk takers. When shit breaks, they run on fear, striking out because they can’t control themselves nor the situation.
Most male jobs that have stuff that breaks or experiences rapidly changing process that causes crisis/chaos have step by step protocols to follow to troubleshoot. As you work through the steps to troubleshoot, at any one of those steps you can find and solve the problem, the mind and emotions settle down to concentrate on resolution. If a solution is not readily apparent after following steps of protocol, one of my guy mentors coached to make a cup of coffee and step outside, meaning clear your mind by switching into something mindless plus rotate the mind by stepping outside to empty your mind. That makes room for suddenly viewing the problem from another angle. Also, know when to rely on teamwork if you’re not working graveyard. NONE of this protocol is part of wahmyn world. It’s all about feelings…woowoowoo …feelings. Wahmyn world doesn’t do teamwork well, too competitive.
I learned all this working treatment and distribution in the water industry. I am so grateful for this perspective. Learned in water treatment I ran large anxiety dealing with crises in treatment plants because the water was in and out quickly and demanded a rapid problem solving. I faced the fact that guys and a few women were better equipped than me to handle the rapid trouble shooting needed for water treatment. Very stressful when, during a rain/flood event, the influent raw water coming in was mud…literal mud…and all you could do was open up wide the alum and coagulents until the ntu’s started to turn down. I trained and switched to water distribution because most problems in distribution gives one time to think through what is needed, time to assess, work with your partner, recognize and follow the protocol from main breaks to stealing of copper to losing SCADA system instrumentation. A much happier and less stressed Range found water distribution right for me with the stress level I could live with.
You’re seeing wahmyn politicians running massive fear, puffed up with arrogance so they feel exempt of developing protocols nor following them, and not good at teamwork. They have never learned to think under pressure nor the art of the deal. To cover their fear, they move into endgame action and make totalitarian decisions, threatening to bring in police/military if her directives are not followed. This Is Panic Untrained. I knew this about my mind 30 years ago when I observed it’s a damned good thing I’m not a general because decision making under fire is not my forte.
The United States went to the moon as a vanity project to show that our way of life was superior to the Soviet way of life. We have n’t gone back because the cold war is over and there is no reason to go. At trip to the moon now would be equivalent to the Easter Islands carving another dozen statues before they went extinct. After our civilization has collapsed the survivors will use the remaining oil and gas to keep from freezing in the winter, not blasting a useless rocket to the moon.
A possible way to postpone some of the madness heading our way is to send our Navy to torpedo billionaires such as David Geffen’s 500 million dollar yacht.
And stamp 1st Thessalonians 2:15 on the torpedo.
Sink the enemies Navy.
Where’s a U-Boat crew, hungry for action, when you need one?
This is a marvelous idea. I support this.
Can’t. They’re docked at Guam because the crew has COVID-19 🙁
And they can’t get off because the island might tip over, at least according to Hank Johnson.
I’ve often thought that the reason we haven’t heard from the extraterrestrials is a lack of interest. Most species here on earth aren’t very interested in communicating with each other, let alone with us. Perhaps that’s the default for most life forms, us being the exception. We seem to be the only life form here with much of an interest in socializing with other species.
Perhaps the aliens have decided Diversity Is Not Their Strength, and just to prefer to ignore our attempts to communicate.
There you go blaming the workers. You must be an engineer. Maybe you should revisit your opinion that blue collar tradesmen slow down the building process duechbag.
Those who are breeding are of lower IQ.
Survival of the dimest.
Certain websites are now blocked for me — especially those affiliated with the exalted other side.
Be vigilant about what you say and do online. They are using this period of mass hibernation to put the finishing touches on their surveillance state. Expect to see an online social credit system, as well as increased ISP initiatives against so-called “white supremacists.”
No more stepping out to talk to the baker. The mailman recoils from a simple “hello.” I may never see my grandma again. So many are facing the same challenges that I am. Many will cope via the internet. Coupled with the legal lattitude afforded to Gov by The Madness, there is a massive amount of spying going on. It’s going to force a lot dissidents out of hiding. Here and now is where they measure your obedience.
Someday soon, this website will be gone.
This seems a little contrived to fit our current social ills.
Can any of this maladaptiveness persist over the sorts of geological time that are available for the development of intelligence? It seems like the radical benefits of understanding and technology over just about any other short-range natural advantage would be seized on by *somebody* over thousands of years, much less millions, and used to dominate everyone else.
From the perspective of blind greedy-optimization, genes, and the like, technology came out of nowhere and flipped the table in a geological eyeblink. Our instincts may be more comfortable with tedious social dominance games than the development and use of powerful tools, but the people who can figure out how to develop and use the tools will own the future.
I sort of take Niven/Pournelle’s point about the Moties in that novel though: The Moties weren’t trapped by their social pathologies, their social pathologies developed because they were trapped. The posited future was one where there was no way out of their Malthusian trap because no feasible technology could let them escape. It’s way too early in human history to give in to that despair: We know of endless things we could do with nothing but 1960s tech – it’ll just take a while for the right social conditions to reemerge.
“Perhaps in time lifespans will extend so a small number of humans, cared for by automated cities, live long lives almost like children in a daycare center.” – (Insert coastal California County). Only the automation is Manuel-labor. There are certain pockets of the country that are already stuffed with Eloi. Currently, in my Eloi ridden neighborhood, the bored white women are starting to get “flu like symptoms.” They then broadcast this information to the other women in the neighborhood, and get showered with attention. A pecking order is forming in the neighborhood, with perfectly healthy women lower on the totem pole. Obviously, this creates a lot of incentive to turn your seasonal hay fever into the plague.
Maybe they just don’t have the urge to explore and reach out to the edges of the universe. The ancient Greeks wouldn’t sail beyond Gibraltar, the finest seafarers of the age. They liked Greece and Italy. They were content to imagine the cosmos bounded and limited. And no dummies.
Measles gets no respect for indigenous removal.
The smartest humans ever are not who you think. South Africa had some, now extinct humans, that through cranial measurement have been estimated to have an average IQ of 150. So many of them were pushing an IQ of 180.
The giant Homo heidelbergensis? An interesting evolutionary dead-end.
Cranial capacity tells nothing about intelligence. A person suffering from extreme mental retardation may have a cranial capacity well within the normal range.
I think those were the fabled Melon Heads of Texas Arcane fame.
As for the inability to go back to the moon – I thought it must be cuz the black womens that did all the hidden figures math work back in the 60’s weren’t around no mo’.
Would you stick around if you were only making 71 cents for every dollar the buzzcut-sporting honky next to you was making! Surely they all moved on to starting their own businesses.
Back in the 70s the feminists had a joke that went: “If they can send a man to the moon, why can’t they send all of them there?” 🙂
A world without war and the spectre of Death is a world in decline. War keeps us sharp, on edge, concerned about preserving our tribe and our future.
A world at peace is, as you say, a woman’s world.
Well, a long as breasts don’t de-volve, I guess I’ll be ok fed and cared for.
The only intelligence that might reach out to the stars will be inorganic. Aliens avoid us because we’re made of meat.
https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ
Last year I was talking to a friend that works in the finance industry. We were both lamenting the “red tape” that fills our work days. Most of it consists of reports, metrics, and tests designed to eliminate risk.
“You ever notice the dominance of females in the workplace?”
He gave me an odd look, “you mean ten years ago? Where have you been?”
I am not sure if it is the dominance of women in the workforce or a reflection of our risk-adverse culture ( a lot of men spend their days avoiding risk), but I no longer think of new products. I cannot gut my way through the “process.” I suppose I have been absorbed.
All signs point to the West becoming a giant nursery school, where periapts against physical and psychological harm are everything. No civilization hallmarked by microaggressions, trigger warnings, therapy animals, safe spaces, political correctness, and grown men padding up like they’re about to scale the south face of Dhaulagiri when they’re merely tooling around their wealthy neighborhoods on their Schwinns, is capable of accomplishing great things.
I’m wondering who is mad. Despite a widely administered vaccine, the 2017 flu killed 80,000 Americans. The claim is that the current virus is more contagious than the flu, and 10 or 20 times as lethal. If that claim is true, the worst case projections — two million dead if the virus is allowed to go as unchecked by “social distancing” as the flu was in 2017 — seem entirely plausible.
So Z, are you saying that the virus is not in fact as contagious and dangerous as we are being led to believe? The world awaits your medical expertise!
Also, I’d still be interested your prediction for excess deaths due to Coronavirus by year end. People who present themselves as experts ought to be willing to make predictions that they can be held to account for later.
(BTW, I have a friend in her 40’s who has been fighting the virus for three weeks. It’s quite bad).
Start by giving us yours.
Why would you want my prediction?!? I am not pretending to be an expert, so I have no predictions of my own to defend. I defer to those who are experts, and the consensus among them seems to be that the best case scenario, if we maintain the current regime of extreme modification of social behavior, is 100,000 to 240,000 dead, and that it could be many more if we don’t maintain our vigilance. So that would be my prediction. If it’s wrong it’s wrong, but I do not consider myself qualified to dispute the experts. Z apparently thinks he is qualified, and that makes his prediction more interesting than mine.
BTW, I did offer a hand-waving argument to the effect that, if claims about the contagiousness and virulence of virus are correct, then the worst case scenarios do seem plausible. Do you see anything wrong with this argument. Do you understand it?
Who are these experts to whom you refer?
How do you know that they are experts?
Have you examined what these experts have written in the past?
Have you familiarized yourself with what these experts have done in their lives? For instance, have they started enterprises that make or deliver goods and services? Have they ever met a payroll? What percentage of their adult lives have they been employed by the public sector or by a think-tank or university that relies upon gimmie-dats?
Upon what basis do you assert that there is a consensus among the experts supporting a doomsday hypothesis if we don’t do as we are told?
What about the experts who claim that covidia is not the plague? What about Professor Ioannidis? Should we ignore him?
What about Professor Ricciardi’s observation that nearly 90% of the Italian deaths are mistakenly attributed to covidia?
I have already acknowledged that I am not an expert, so no, I haven’t done any of those things. But Z is talking as though he is an expert, so I am simply asking him to make his own projection, so we can compare it to the projections of the experts you are so determined to discount, and see who in the end gets it right. Can you explain to me exactly why you think this is an unreasonable request?
In order to answer your question, it would be helpful if you could explain why you think Z is writing as if he were an expert.
Also, why did you not answer my questions?
You are a one trick pony, aren’t you? Never commit to an answer, just keep asking questions.
The reason I didn’t answer your questions is because I found them to be tedious and uninteresting boilerplate, cut and pasted from a different context. Such questions make a certain amount of sense when asked of politicians or pundits, but if someone is a doctor at the CDC, or the head of a hospital, or a professor of epidemiology, then I am willing to accept them, prima facie, as experts. The question of whether or not they have ever met a payroll or delivered goods strikes me as irrelevant, and I am certainly not going to go digging into their publication record or personal lives. They are not guaranteed to be right about everything — or even anything! — but their status as experts is solid.
I’m aware of outliers like Ioannidis, who I also consider to be an expert. But if you are expecting me to evaluate the arguments and come down in favor of one side or the other you have missed my point. Again, I am not an expert! But Z is certainly writing like he thinks he’s one. He’s calling the current recommendations “madness”. He’s making idiotic comparisons between CORVID-19 and the 2017 flu. He’s telling us that the government is doing it all wrong. So he must believe he knows what he is talking about! All I am asking him to do is commit. To make a prediction that might come back and bite him later if he’s wrong. I’m also asking you to commit, and explain to me why this is an unreasonable request.
I suspect that neither of you are going to be willing to do this.
So, 240k are too many dead? 100k are too many dead. However, we can sink the economy without any fear of ill effect wrt future health and welfare of the populous—nobody dies from poverty?
Some math. Low end of the stimulus package cost is, last I heard, $2.4T. 1000 x’s 1000 is a million, 1000 x’s a million is a billion, 1000 x’s a billion is a trillion or a million x’s a million is a trillion. We could have compensated each death (at the 240k estimate) at $1M. Instead we will waste half through theft, and pay a few weeks unemployment compensation to those lucky enough to qualify.
And should the COVID-19 virus return, say next Fall or Spring? What then, another shutdown? Of course not, there is no ability to shutdown an economy that is barely alive as it is, thanks to our current heroic efforts. What will happen is what should have happened this time, warnings, vaccines (if applicable), and acceptance of a new disease that we will learn to live with as we have all others.
We are not trained epidemiologists, but please refer to the following link to a web site of a reputable organization that projects deaths in the U.S. from the coronavirus to be about 94,000 (albeit with social distancing practices in place).
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
Not to put words in the mouth of the Z-man, I think he is trying to point out the potential devastating costs to our economy and the need to take into consideration trade-offs. The following (long winded) article from a respected economist may not be the final word, but should raise questions by reasonable persons.
http://caseymulligan.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-economic-cost-of-shutting-down-non.html?mod=article_inline
Certain persons might view this as mere money-grubbing, but my reading of history shows that except for a minority of citizens, the Great Depression was no picnic.
It seems that reasonable persons should not fall for a false binary, either total laissez faire or a total clampdown.
I’m well aware of the potential devastating costs to our economy, and very concerned about them. I have family members whose income has dropped to zero. What bothered me was Z’s dismissive comparison of COVID-19 to the 2017 flu, because only 4000 people have died so far. That’s just stupid!
Anyone who has not attempted to discuss/compute a cost/benefit in terms of lives lost due to current COVID-19 with future lives lost to a crippled economy is not to be listened to. They are economic illiterates at best, panicked ninnies at worse.
Problem is, and unfortunately some here have fell for this, is that the models used are not falsifiable. They give tremendous ranges in estimated deaths and when the deaths occur on the low end of the estimate, they claim success as they point to their extreme recommendations as the cause and when/if the death rate is on the high end, they blame the lack of even more extreme measures as proof of their model. But it is never the fault of the model itself, that is perfect and can not be questioned.
Compsci — No one who builds models thinks that their models are “perfect and can not be questioned.”
But that is exactly what those that would make political hay out of the predictions based on these models say. There was little that was said by these modelers to contradict/qualify such in their initial assessments and these folk were crying the loudest for severe action way before their models drifted in prediction from grave to fantasy land.
In short, these modelers have no skin in the game. They predicted the end of the world without qualification thinking they were on the side of the angels. They were not and I predict they will not be looked upon lightly when the tab is added up.
Modelers spend a lot of time on their models, writing lots of complicated code. If the models make bad predictions, well, *I worked hard on that model*, reality must be wrong. It’s the same thing they do with the AGW stuff – they restate the past to match their model rather than recognize when their model is doing a bad job.
Some standard issue conservatives are beginning to realize that what lies the other side of this virus shutdown is an economic depression. Limbaugh had a strong comment today on what this will do to the economy and even a Con Inc. sleaze like Ben Domenech at the Federalist is talking about it.
At this point, I have addressed all of this many times. You not knowing this means you have not bothered to read what I have written or you prefer to make war on straw men. Maybe there is some other explanation for your ignorance, I don’t know, but your ignorance is not my responsibility. If you are genuinely curious and not just looking for validation, read the last couple of weeks of posting.
I read your blog regularly, and I do not see that you have addressed this. You basically just make assertions, one after the other, many of which strike me as unfounded. I made a simple, clarifying request: put a little skin in the game. If you think you understand the situation better than the medical experts we are hearing from, show us. Tell us what you think is going to happen. I’m not asking for a precise number, just a ballpark figure, so that at the end of the year we can see if you were anywhere close to being correct. Is that truly an unreasonable demand? Why would you be unwilling to do this?
i’ve read the same columns you claim to have read, and yes indeed it’s all there, but nobody is going to go to the trouble to go back over them and show you.
Don’t invest the time and effort, no answer will ever be satisfactory. I’m seeing similar concern trolls and “whataboutism” pop up all over lately.
Due to the various Governoral Ukase’s They have a lot of time on their hands, they are sequestered at home under the bridge.
Troll.
100k or 200k deaths is a statistic. Friend in her 40’s suffering greatly from the disease is a tragedy. There you go, right there. Personal experience changes the appearance of things.
!Jeb
Yes. Longtime fan of the Z man but he is mistaken this time. In my European country, the lefties and left-wing government started like Z. They didn’t take into account that the disease spreads exponentially. Now we are in the middle of the biggest chaos of the last 81 years. People are left to die because there are not enough ventilators. And we are only in the beginning. Give two more months for America. In addition, this is not the first plague nor the first quarantine, even in America
“So Z, are you saying that …”
I’m no Z-man, but I’ll take a stab at this.
The first thing to do is to clean your damn room, Bucko! Then when you see your tangible accomplishment it will improve your posture: straight with shoulders back. It’s an extraordinarily old system. So old that we share it with lobsters. In a rather brilliant piece of research this guy gave lobsters chloroquine….
One solution to the Fermi paradox not generally considered is contained in esoteric science, and was likely one of the secrets of the Mystery schools. The subjective realm in each person, which Jung called the collective unconscious, is a vast realm that’s currently poorly understood.
Given that quantum mechanics has shown that information is non-local, and that consciousness has a participatory effect in the physical/objective world, I suspect that contact with alien intelligence can be achieved in such a way, and very likely has already happened for some time.
I find your statement that “quantum mechanics has shown that information is non-local” fascinating.
Is there a particular result or theory within quantum mechanics that I can research to explore your statement?
The russian story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic is about aliens landing on Earth, hanging around a bit (like having a picnic), and then leaving before anyone sees them. They leave behind various artifacts (litter) and cause strange phenomena in the places they landed. It really is top notch scifi, and very accessible (short too, maybe 100 pages).
Funny enough, the russians did some very decent scifi (original Solaris, for example). One theory is that the themes and trops of scifi were much safer politically, than more down to earth genres.
Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita might qualify
A tremendous novel.
Blew my mind first time I read it.
Manuscripts never burn
Latest #s from my hospital
• Veteran Testing:
o We received 6 COVID test results today; 6 negative and 0 positive.
Total tests sent: 132
Positive: 5
Negative: 119
Pending: 8
• 5 COVID-19 cases to date; 2 in inpatient/ED, 1 recovering at home, 2 deceased
• Employee Testing:
o We received 0 COVID test results today; 0 negative and 0 positive.
Total tests sent: 11
Positive: 0
Negative: 8
Pending: 3
roberto’s ability to format his posts is deteriorating. I hope he is not sick.
Ailurophile Mark Steyn should already be enjoying a groovy dead-cat bounce in “America” book sales this season, but I’ll keep shilling.*
In “Alone,” he discusses another factor contributing to America’s infantilization, risk-aversion and general sissiness – aging.
Mark focused much of that discussion on Japan but it’s broadly applicable to the whole West. **
Until the very modern era of advanced medicine, our present Davoise of sour-pussed spinsters and gay granddads was actuarily impossible. Men of Trump & Biden’s age were more often advisors or honored elder statesmen, leaving the reins of power to men in their 40’s and 50’s.
Old men prefer to hunker down and young men prefer to fight, but that middle-age cohort is “just right,” a Goldilocks zone of risk-takers tempered and schooled by the wisdom of experience.
We’d like to lead but we can’t get grandpa out of the big-boy chair. Our cursus honorum has been dishonored.
Our impending Malthusean Confinement to this planet is the result of racial, sexual and generational factors. A Brown planet led by old childless lesbians and their fag-hag accessory bag geezer buddies is not going to create Wakanda, much less The Foundation or Muad’Dib’s future space empire.
Much more on Malthus to come – spoiler: it’s the reason for the season.
——-
* Yes, there are “Levant-ine” issues with my favorite Leaf neo-con (a list of 1) but he’s still a solid gateway to deeper thinking. Cast aside the outdated references to purple thumbs & the purple-lipped POTUS de jour and see what’s proven true ten years later.
** as we called White Europeans worldwide back then – it had a more “credal” ring to it.
I really became impressed with Steyn during his “After America” book tour. He would be interviewed by the Muh Constitution types who would assert American exceptionalism would overcome the bleak outlook he outlined. He would push back but it was the look on his face that said it all: “you child.”
Steyn has obvious problems but his mind is among the more nimble among public figures. In one more particularly memorable Steyn interview, he pointed out that America worked when it was more or less an Anglo/Celt-dominated polity and demographics put and end to all that. He went right to the line but never repeated that line of thought again during the interviews.
I had a similar realization when I was surveying spots to practice pickup, of all places.
Every public space is full of fucking old people. 1/10 might be a young woman, who is dateable (not obese, decent looking etc.)
And imagine going back 40 years. All these old people would have been young and probably 1/2 of the crowd.
Just so much healthier for young people – looking for love, looking to make friends, looking to start a business… everything is fucked up by this weird inverted pyramid we have.
When you think about it, the material cost to reach another star system — and get back! — is prohibitively high. And for what? Especially if you have the technology to reproduce items (i.e. manufacture) using molecular duplication.
By “cost” (above) I mean the amount of mass you have to consume to accelerate to greater than light speed, and then decelerate. And then do it all over again to get back. Maybe the costs of the last step can be counted against the new system, but still, why go so far when there is so much in your solar system?. Seems like it would be much easier for us to make Mars inhabitable, than to find and reach a “ready to move in” planet.
Utlization, if not yet colonization, of the Solar System is a necessary first step, IMO, to anything interstellar.
Whitey needs a transcendent goal again. You can make a strong argument that White civilization peaked in the Space Race (see Mark Steyn and others), and we’ve been cruising on their fumes ever since.
Yes, the internet and cell phones, but what have we done with them? E-girls selling bathwater to bobs-thirsty Jeets is a “giant leap,” but in the wrong direction.
Even if escaping Sol’s heliosphere proves impossible, getting Chad & Becky to gaze at the stars again rather than their own navels is worth the effort.
That’s why I treat all these initiatives—such as a return to the moon—as “stunts”. If we were serious about inter planetary travel, we’d start with first principles: engines to get us about and self contained environments to keep astronauts alive for long distance journeys.
The one self-sustaining habitat attempt, Biosphere, was a failure and has never been attempted again. Hell, we might even try to develop a self sustaining human habitat at the South Pole first, as it has an environment much less severe than Mars.
The problem with the Drake equation is that it’s a string of unknowables multiplied: how many stars in the universe, how many habitable planets per star, how likely is life to evolve on a given planet and how likely is that life to turn toolmakers? And when you multiply unknowables, you get unknowable to the n-th degree, n being the number of unknowables.
The really scary solution to the Fermi Paradox, is that Earth might be unique in the universe.
Put me down for “unique.” We really are that special and I think we’ll discover at some point that there’s a sweet spot where mysticism and science finally overlap enough to “prove” something “more than this” is really out/in there.
Kudos on sharing my lifelong impression of the Drake Equation. It’s useful as a list of factors to consider but it’s not an “equation” when you can’t quantify enough variables to force a range, much less an exact result.
Calling it an equation is one more reason I throw beer cans at the TV when Neil D’Quarious Tyson-Coates LARPs as Carl Sagan.
Yeah, we have a hundred years of radio and 40 or more of trying really hard to isolate a good radio signal from all the background information. If there were signals that were discoverable, they likely would have been discovered by now. It requires multiple civilizations able to transmit and receive in the right time intervals for the level of separation between the planets in question. There could be a civilization who are where we were in 1850 right now that will never learn radio. We could have been receiving radio signals that dried up 1910.
But I hear we are either already doing it, or will be building telescopes (shortly) capable of finding planets with oxygen in the atmosphere. Supposedly there is no way for oxygen to be in the atmosphere in large quantities without lifeforms to put it there. It will be interesting if we find a bunch of planets with oxygen.
The more advanced a signal, the more it looks like noise. That’s how we keep managing to get 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, etc.
There is always that one-in-a-bajillion accident that turns into something. Very occasionally, the coin flip lands on its edge. Maybe that is us.
Was a big Sagan fan back in the day. Loved Contact. If I remember in the epilogue the science lady is calculating pi, finds a pattern deep in the decimal places, plots it 2 dimensionally, and gets the image of a circle. Sagan winking?
I was a big fan, too. Before I knew what he was really like.
He was a jerk?
Yes, quite. The Drake Equation is formulated using a series of assumptions not verifiable data or actual evidence.
Just like our current pandemic modeling?
Somebody’s gotta be first.
Briggs did a great set of posts on this a few years ago.
https://wmbriggs.com/post/249/
https://wmbriggs.com/post/19188/
He quotes Michael Crichton:
“This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses — just so we’re clear — are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be “informed guesses.” If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It’s simply prejudice.
The Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.”
The most likely answer to the alien question is probably just time. The universe at large, or even just this one Galaxy, is a vast incomprehensible ocean of time as well as space. What are the odds that aliens show up just in the tiny hundred-year window when we have the tech to notice them?
More likely aliens visited earth 375 million years ago, said, Hhm, interesting, shows promise. Make a note to check in again here in 25 million years. But then they themselves went extinct only 12 million years later.
I used to have a gf who taught middle-schoolers, and she used to ask me to come in to class on occasion and warp the kids’ minds with brain puzzles. One time I told them, You kids all like Star Wars, right? The poster says A long time ago in a galaxy far far away… What if I told you that everything that happened in Star Wars was true, but it all happened 700 million years ago, and the entire Empire has been extinct for 500 million years, they’re all dead, and there’s no trace of it. Also, Luke, Leia, Han and the whole gang were all real… only they looked like lobsters, and they were all about the size of a pencil. Do you still like story?
No blowjobs for me that night!
I personally observed a brilliant white trapezoid noiselessly cruising along the Lake Michigan shoreline at 1k ft agl nonchalantly. It was the size of a small town and cast proportionate shadow. The trapezoid was perfectly shaped along lines and there is no way on god’s greenacre that nature or man constructed this thing. I was accompanied by the CEO of a major financial organization you all know, we were aboard his yacht at the time, and nine other IBM engineers from elite schools. At parties for years afterwards somebody would introduce the event with speculation and all would go silent because of the sick electrical-like feeling coursing up and down our spines at the thought of it. There is definitely crap out there not made by homo sapiens or natural forces. It creeps me out because of what I witnessed.
Here’s another paradox… In a world dominated by women, having children has become a low priority and ensuring a potential mother’s “right” to kill its babies has become a very high priority. It’s a strange world indeed.
The wammin scream that “One death is too many” and crash the whole economy to save a few thousand old farts who might die next month anyways. Meanwhile they scream that we must keep the baby-killing factories open.
It’s just pure selfishness. They don’t want to get sick and they also want the “right” to terminate an inconvenient pregnancy.
Women are just insane. Every woman I have dated and even been friends with is flat out crazy. They don’t know what they want or what they need. Men really do need to step up and take society back. Being a Simp won’t get you laid (unless you’re a good looking Simp) so let’s stand up as men and take control.
The example of “going to the moon” is very weak. The first attempt took over a decade, and I think shows the fundamental problem:
TIME PREFERENCE
The corproations that were prudent and designed to last decades were an artifact of that, but the Bain Capitalists would get with the Usurers, do LBOs, strip the capital, pay the dividends, sell off the good parts, declare bankruptcy putting the pensions on the taxpayer…
We used to be able to have pensions, especially for blue collar jobs. But that requires a very low time preference.
But it works both ways.
In the Great Depression, we could work hard for a decade to reset and rebuild because we could think that far. We were worried about our children and grandchildren, even in extremis.
Today, we are expecting some magic or miracle (where IS Joel Olsteen?) to fix things by Memorial Day. By the same people who laughed at people buying extra toilet paper when the extra value packs were on loss leader sale – “That will last you two years”. No, three actually, but I do rotate stock.
You want to know what happened to the U.S. space program and why we can’t get back there? The answer is explicitly revealed in this book…
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tcVU1OsNz9w/U9UGxhqFlJI/AAAAAAAACY0/hpT_1DLcK-4/s1600/20121-12whiteyonthemooncover.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
Thanks for the link. Gil Scott Heron obviously wasn’t impressed by the Apollo program.
http://93.174.95.29/main/5096CE2ABB424F5FEFC05A6E9D8A6D47
Thanks for link!
And this is why we are not going to Mars. Leaving aside the issues of technology and cost, the only acceptable mission will consist of a Somalian, a pajeet,a wahmen and a tranny. Guys with lantern jaws, crew-cuts and names like “Gene” or “Buzz” have no place in our solar system.
“If we can send ONE Somali to Mars, why not send …”
Eh. Never mind.
I haven’t read that Kersey book, but I can tell you it’s going to be bullshit. The Real Reason we have no space program worth mentioning is because of the dearth of brilliant yet sassy, strong, and independent female Black mathematicians. Why this sudden lack? Because the all-powerful racist white patriarchy is keeping the Sistas down!
“Because the all-powerful racist white patriarchy is keeping the Sistas down!” So true. This is what happens when you put a Nazi in the White House. Everyone knows that Nazis aren’t capable of building rockets.
ISWYDT
If society collapsed to pre-Roman technology and population, we will have lived in the pinnacle of human society never to be replicated in the future. No post collapse society could ever replicate our advancement because all of the easy resources particularly of energy. have already been mined and burned. While they could “mine” the ruins for things like aluminum and copper, they would more or less be stuck with charcoal as a primary energy source. We started off with easy coal that was near the surface and progressed to where we are now, drilling for oil under a mile of water and additional mile of rock. But a pre-modern society couldn’t do it. Even a lot of the stuff near the surface that is left is not viable without an advanced society. Things like the tar sands of Alberta have ridiculously small EROI and are only viable because we already had the capability of strip-mining.
Never say never.
There was a funny sci-fi short story about post-nuclear war collapse. One new civilization rebuilt quickly using recovered books and examples of technology such as documentaries. What they didn’t realize is that the few recovered Star Trek episodes were fictional instead of examples of the most advanced tech – so they built starships.
That’s the dilemma of the Malthusean Trap. We’re well short of that yet but a planet is a big ship to turn on a dime. We’d do well to get started on concepts like scale, race realism and sustainable lifestyles now.
The tipping point won’t be marked and we’ll pass it sometime in the foreseeable future if we don’t start worrying about something beyond the present.
” all of the easy resources particularly of energy. have already been mined and burned.”
I had never considered this.
That problem (all the “easy” stuff’s been mined out) was a minor theme in The Mote in God’s Eye. Been years since I read it, but seem to recall one of the Moties noting that they basically had to go from pointed sticks and stone axes to nuclear in one hop. I’m exaggerating, but Pournelle and Niven’s aliens had exactly those problems.
I would welcome aliens coming to earth with or without their pathogens, as long as they come here legally.
AND as long as they possess demonstrable job skills and can speak our language. But even so, their extended families should not be allowed in.
Typical heartless Terran. You can’t imagine the discrimination they face in their own homeworlds.
Then they should stay in their own galaxies and fix their problems there before bringing them here.
But think of all the exotic offworld food they will have in their restaurants!
RE: legal (space) aliens who speak English.
Dream on, gents. We’ll get “prawns” as in the movie District 9.
At least the prawns gave the stupidest and least self-disciplined humans someone to look down upon.
Oh yeah, there was fury in certain quarters because in the film there were a bunch of aggressively criminal Nigerians. The outrage started at NANALT and worked up from there.
There’s an important lesson embedded in that tale: Don’t lump immigrants into “brown” or even “South Asian”. Always remember that they hate each other, and take pains to subtly but frequently remind them of their differences. Indians and Pakistanis mutually loathe one another (as a general rule, even if there can be individual friendships), and everyone despises the Bangladeshis. Lumping them together helps forge them into a larger political block. (=more power, more anti-whiteness) So do what you can to keep them disunited.
Same applies to yellow people. Everyone hates the Chinese (both for PRC power projection and because in vibrant SE Asia they are the Jew equivalents). Japanese are hated as war-atrocity prone rapists. Both despise the Koreans, who hate them right back. And all three (C, J, K) look down on Vietnamese, Thai, and especially Filipinos. And all the above dislike the Muslim portions (Malaysia, Indonesia) of Asia.
And both the South Asian browns and the yellow East and yellow-brown SE Asians despise blacks. (Forget the idiot American-born Asian Wellesley grads and the like, aping progs and Jewish activists — they no more represent Asians than Beto O’Rourke or Pete Buttigieg represent the average American white guy.)
Exploit divisions, always be reminding people of that, albeit subtly (you don’t want to get tagged for a hate crime over it). One good way is to play dumb (they already expect you to be ignorant*) and ask “naive” (but leading) questions.
* if you really ARE ignorant about these things, now is the time to fix that.
“Dream on, gents. We’ll get “prawns” as in the movie District 9.”
Star Trek BTFO’d. You’re saying I’m not going to have First Contact with a buxom Bajoran who’s all-wahmen except for some Gorbachev forehead issues* ?
If our Federated future = tentacle-porn, some Warhammer-style xenophobia may be called for.
* Was planning on covering that up with a Taylor Swift SS hat but now my dreams are ashes – thx Mike.
Excellent points. I sow division too.
I’ll gently make a comment about Indians when I’m with a Chinese person. When I’m with an Indian, I might say something about China. They really do hate each other. As in, hate to the extent they would have no problem with a genocide.
Basically all non-white groups hate every non-white group but themselves. Chinese are racist against pretty much everyone, but feel that they are entitled to live in the West. Same with Indians. etc.
They are all united in their disdain for negros*. Even other negros. Even Africans can’t stand them.
* a Before-Times term for “African-American”
White Americans have been carefully purged of all their historic insensitive jokes and narratives but this was a long battle and cost a lot of time and money. Even (((media people))) didn’t have infinite reserves of both so American whites are the only people who’ve truly been through all the steps of the Great Purification of the Mind and ascended to the 33rd level of The Rites of Equality and Diversity. European whites are a close second but the scribes have still not translated all 458 Testaments of the Poz into all the European languages.
Most other tribes remain brutally and often hilariously racist about other tribes since no one ever spent the time and money to destroy their old cultures. Even getting American blacks started talking about the Jews, for instance, can be fun because they come across like Klansmen. Heh, division and diversity have a common root word don’t they?
The only reason most whites don’t know, say, the way Malays think of Chinese is the language barrier. So thank you Google Translate for opening up a whole new polyglot world of hate for us all. Those techno pozheads in SF didn’t know what wonders they had unleashed on us did they.
Oh yeah. Boy oh boy do the Malays hate the Chinese. If only the Malays were more organized and competent they’d have Arbeit Mach Frei’d the Chinese beyond anything Mustache Man might have imagined. Akshully they’d have skipped the camps and gone straight to massacres on the street.
Speaking of Chinese, I have YT on in the background as I’m doing some image analyses. I have learned from a comic book channel that Batman is now a Chinaman. And Alfred is not only his butler, but also Bruce Wayne’s gay uncle from Hong Kong. The author of this atrocity is some woman called Melissa de la Cruz who is some Filipina/Cantonese mystery meat (I think). While they (wisely) say “Never read YT comments” I had to take a look. There is comedy gold there.
“Instead of a utility belt, he just coughs on you, and then blames western governments for all his problems.”
“In this version a young Bruce Wayne falls into the bat cave, but he just eats all the bats.”
Eh. The rest are not so funny. But those two made me laugh.
Only if they love the Constitution!
Surviving a virus now is no different than in all of our previous history. It was accepted as part of life even if humanity didn’t understand the process.
I do like the last narration in the 1953 movie version of War of the Worlds:
The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune. Once they had breathed our air, germs which no longer affect us began to kill them. The end came swiftly. All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall. After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth. By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet’s infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challenges. For neither do men live nor die in vain.
We owe it to our ancestors not to be cowards in the face of adversity. Many have died in many ways not to leave it to such poor specimens.
If anybody actually saw / met / chatted with an aliens, took photos, selfies with them, shot videos, and was given by the aliens their equivalent of $24 of beads and trinkets, NOBODY would believe one bit of it.
This is the catch-22 of this whole alien thing; there is really no evidence that could be presented by an individual or groups of folks, that would convince folks of alien existence, even if the aliens did in fact holiday here in the USA.
Now perhaps if the US Govt (though it would have to be with an Obama type president – a leftist, mendacious, incompetent fraud) decided to present hard evidence, then perhaps most folks would believe it.
Supposedly , there are many, many BILLIONS of stars in all the universes that scientists know exist; tough to believe we earthlings are the only intelligent life forms (though, the Washington, DC ruling political elites seem to lack any modicum of intelligence).
Also, why does anybody think aliens would even be interested in us?? Humans would be equivalent to their paramecium on the alien scale of intellect.
AS for females ruling over a society less risk adverse, I refer you to the likes of Pelosi and Hillary; the bigoted black Somali wacko and her PLO pal in the US House of Rep.; that big, fat black pig who still insists she won the election for governor of some state (I forget her name); the racist retard Maxine Waters and her pal Sheila? Jackson or whatever he name is, and that communist s##c AOC, just to name a few of the wonderful “females” who would actually run a less risk adverse nation.
Their policies would be right out of the peaceful, loving Lenin mode; you know, just a few million shot or starved.
The females that would rise to the top would NOT be the “soccer mom” Senator from Seattle and her ilk, or even a Feinstein of Calif; who would be shoved aside or more likely shot, by the hateful, bigoted, spiteful , destructive, leftist pigs we hear about.
Those that rise to the top will be the most ambitious, aggressive , frustrated and hateful females you could imagine; think Mao’s or Ceaucescu’s wife.
We see this in the women’s “lib” movement; every normal female checked out of that party long ago, thus leaving its leadership to a group of commie, frustrated, spiteful, hateful , hairy and ugly lesbo pigs.
Imagine how risk adverse our society would be if the women’s “lib” (i.e., the female Nazi party) leaders ran the show.
Also, why does anybody think aliens would even be interested in us?? Humans would be equivalent to their paramecium on the alien scale of intellect.
Yet humans pore over a microscope studying those same parameciums. I don’t believe inquisitiveness can be separated from high-intelligence.
And yet the paramecium reminds blissfully unaware it is being studied, nor have we attempted to communicate with it.
I.E. We are still thinking of aliens that exist somewhere in our realm of basic physiology, knowledge of physics, lifespan, technology, etc.
If a race managed to not destroy itself for say 250,000 years it would be so comically advanced that even if it appeared you may not even understand what you are looking at. What if they figured out how to escape the ‘petri dish’ and can view space/time in the same way that we look at a 2 dimensional surface. I.E. From a higher dimension you wouldn’t even know you are being observed in 3D space. (The movie Interstellar is the only mainstream fiction to even play with this idea that I’m aware of with 5th dimensional beings who observed 4D environments in the same way we observe 3D ones.)
I could go on but I think this is one of the main stumbling blocks for most folks, they simply cannot wrap their mind around orders of magnitude of an advanced civilization. They would be demigods for all intents and purposes.
They are not gods. Just space aliens. There is a:
33.3% odds the space others are nice and helpfully friendly;
33.3% odds they pay us no heed and blow up earth to make way for a hyperspace byway because we were in the way of urban space renewal.
33.3% odds they are evil SOB’s that pop out our eye balls to eat them and rip our limbs off.
Came to this realization drinking brandy under the stars camping in the high Sierras watching a lightning storm.
The odds aren’t great so with my great powers to control the universe, I have let them know (they can read minds) to stay on their side of the great divide and I’ll stay on mine…no, not interested, space guys.
“Another possibility along the same lines is that in addition to the obsession with safety, the low fertility rate simply reduces the population” – Z-man
You get no disagreement from me; but I do think it is more than that. It is not just that the birth rate is declining; it is that the intelligent are not reproducing and low IQ diverse are reproducing. Even if the morons are also reproducing less, they still are taking over percentage-wise.
The worse of the humans are breeding while the intelligent are herding cats and drinking wine.
Exception- our smokin’ hot girls in the DR.
Classy chicks with a big set of brains are *such* a turn-on.
Blacks in America have been below replacement since 2015. Conservative whites have a higher, and a over replacement, TFR than generic Blacks. It’s the actual Africans that will doom homo sapiens.
As the rest of the world withers away, the people who actively fight to participate in the future will win.
Dysgenia.
Yes, even among the whites this is true (outside of religious circles).
Out in public, the white people with 2 or more kids are, well, white trash. I hate to use a slur against my own people but there are the types of people wearing sweatpants, a baggy sweater and generally ugly and ill-kept.
The wealthy, attractive, well dressed people are almost always childless. I don’t really understand why. I’m still pretty young, I guess I’ll find out why as I age.
The only places where eugenics still happen is at church. Basically the dudes with better jobs and more money have more kids.
In contrast to the mote cycle of overpopulation, we humans have our own unique cycle that exemplifies our own weaknesses. “Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men”. We are entering the last phase of the cycle, the weak men will removed and replaced by the strong. Overdue, but at least it looks like it might finally be here.
Bloody bad luck to be living in an era of weak men creating hard times.
I think we’re finally passing that phase right now. Hard times are coming soon.
A cynic would suggest that the reason for that was that the Progs hadn’t yet shot their wad in the form of Russiagate and impeachment. They probably didn’t think they NEEDED it to depose the President.
Thus craven soyboys like Talib can promote their principle without experiencing the scorn they so rightfully deserve.
Or anything/anywhere else for that matter. All change involves some degree of risk. An extremely risk-adverse society is ultimately going to be hopeless and changeless as well as very oppressive. I am reminded of two of Jefferson’s sayings which would apply in such a risk-adverse society.
and
I would submit that Jefferson was describing Talib in that first quote to a “T”.
Sounds a lot like Diaspar from Clarke’s novels “Against The Fall of Night” and “The City And The Stars”. Of course in Clarke’s far future (10 billion AD) humanity may have cocooned itself in reaction to a near-extinction event caused by its own excessive pride. Clarke (being a man) also envisioned the city of Lys populated by non-risk-adverse people – self-evidently NOT a gynocracy!
I, for one, have trouble believing that any pathogen which evolved under a different star could possibly infect terrans any more than that two species which had evolved under different stars could produce progeny. Sorry, Spock.
Or, just maybe they DE-evolved into gynocracies, stagnated and died a slow, stultifying death.
The problem is the media controls perceptions of reality to too great of an extent. Here’s an example of this. 80,000 deaths of despair per year related to opioid addiction, suicides, overdose, mostly white people so almost no news coverage. 400 negroes die from resisting arrest, whole nation hears about it for months. Jews control the media. This virus has hit them the hardest in tel aviv 2 aka new york, so the whole world shuts down.
Taleb needs to toss me some shekels for all the White Knighting, but here goes.
The “precautionary principle” is sound – the question lies in when it should be applied.
In a nutshell, it says that for low-probability/catastrophic risk events, the burden of proof should lie with the innovator to prove their innovation isn’t harmful, rather than vice-versa.
The classic example is thalidomide. If they had waited 20 years to study its effects before putting it into general circulation, lots less deformed kids. And it’s not as if the species was going to die out while we were waiting.
His main gripe is that we’re taking unnecessary, if low-probability, risks for too little reward. A lot of what lolberts and consumer-cons will call “necessary and vital” is really just “necessary and vital for muh shekels,” not survival, or even merely living well.
To me, exercising the precautionary principle can be a variation on the tragedy of the commons. Personally exercising the precautionary principle can be a wise thing, to keep you living a comfortable and happy life, if your fear of something is crippling you. But if everybody practices it, the world shuts down. So “my” optimum is for “me” to be as careful as possible, but the rest of you loons get out there and do your thing, and keep the system rolling along, please.
Like I said, the trick is knowing when to apply it. Probably the best rule of thumb is to first decide what’s an acceptable status quo in the “if it ain’t broke” sense.
The present system’s reliance on “growth” drives a lot of innovation that’s only marginally beneficial while smuggling a lot of risk.
But, but Mullins! What about Spock’s smokin’ hot wife in “Amok Time”, when Spock is compelled to mate?
Another fantasy shot to hades. Spoilsport.
(No greenskins. Ewww. And Riker is a perv.)
Well, it’s time to p*ss everyone off again (it’s not personal for me). But let’s do the peaceful part first, about Fermi’s Paradox. Ignoring that it is not a paradox but at most a sort of extra terrestrial-biological surprise similar to asking why there are no predators that specialize in hunting elephants, presumably a lucrative niche to catch a 3 ton elephant cow instead of a one ton buffalo as lions and tigers do, if you’re a muscular cat or alternatively giant bear or pack-hunting dire wolf or equivalent hyena. The reason we haven’t met aliens is here, and by Fermi, assumed to be the fault of the various civilizations. Physics probably suggests the problem actually lies there. I’ll try not to bore ppl too much with why but as objects approach the speed of light they get gradually heavier until, at the speed of light, with any rest mass, you have literally infinite mass. The greater the mass the greater the force needed to achieve a given acceleration which means you re going to be running out of steam before you get really close to the speed of light. This effectively makes the universe ‘sticky’ for long-distance travel. And even at the speed of light it can still take many millions of years to wander between galaxies and thousands of years between stars in Milky Way. The most commonly suggested alternative to ‘conventional’ travel are so-called worm holes that sort of make shortcuts through the space-time continuum. But they are so small that if they exist they exist at the quantum scale. There is no guarantee that physics allows macro-scale objects to enter such holes. In other words, the explanation may lie not with civilizations but with the nature of physics or reality.
Okay, now to the peppery part. It is not madness to respond forcefully to an event on the grounds of the evidence available on Covid-19. It is now a fact that it has knocked over hospitals in parts of Italy, and possibly elsewhere such as Queens. It has shown an unprecedented combination of infectivity and morbidity. When a shepherd has cried wolf ten times b/c there was a fox or a beagle, you re right to be skeptical the 11th time he does so. But when he then points to a large, grey or black rough-looking dog-like creature running around the meadow you have a new situation. I won’t go into all the evidence coming out except to say that it probably has a relatively low overall mortality but enough to cripple the economy, paralyze society or set off riots and overwhelm Western health care systems if it runs free.
Finally, the last part about societal cycles I totally agree with and enjoyed reading.
I agree to taking many precautions such as distancing, no handshaking, etc., but there has not been enough examination of the monetary value of human life. Insurance companies and trial courts do this all the time. Human lives can usually be valued between $1-$10 million depending on various factors such as age and earning capacity. If we save 2 million Americans, it’s probably worth it, but I have doubts about this figure. The cost of all this to save several hundred thousand lives is madness. The economy is a very complex organism, and it is being turned on and off by narcissistic circus performers.
That’s an interesting approach, literally putting a price on human lives saved. It’s not an approach I agree with though b/c it is too bluntly materialistic and I think a materialistic mindset, a human is just an economic unit, is one of the things we are dying from as a society. But I acknowledge that the econ side to this is NOT ‘irrelevant.’
By what’s been happening so far, w nothing done, which Im not assuming you are proposing btw, it’s probably at least 2 million lives on the table.
I didn’t mean to sound so materialistic about human life. My underlying point is about tradeoffs of human life. If we assume the economic value per life is say $10 million, we have to examine the impact on other lives of spending that resource. For example, if the retirement portfolios of many seniors drop due to the sum of costs expended to save Covid related lives, many seniors will die earlier due to insufficient funds to spend on healthcare and food. Another example is the human life lost to suicide and opioids related to unemployment and despair caused by shutting down the economy. Risk averse politicians are focusing on one side of the equation, because it is more visible and easy to measure, even if the other side bears more cost.
I think these are perfectly valid points you are raising. I try not to get entrenched in one position on Covid-19 or paint myself into a corner. I’m a physician although not clinically active but that might make it harder for me to see a disease running wild in society and not say ‘stop that thing’. I think that is actually possible.
But I don’t think I am afterrationalizing when I say that, based on the effect of Covid-19 on Western society so far, it will disastrously affect the economy and society’s stability if not checked. Imagine the same scenes seen from hospitals in Italy and New York AND nothing much being done by authorities about it. I think that would lead to real panic and unrest when more and more and more hospitals reported such scenes. So a conservative approach would not help the economy I think.
I will also admit that I think several here take the position they do partly b/c mainstream takes the opposite position. They are responding to their opponents, a sign of negative identity, and not the best information available to them. That is a way to make your opponent control you.
How would you know/estimate the disastrous consequences of COVID-19 when the present consequences of the disease are predominantly man made through panicked reactions based on models and data of unknown validity?
Compsci, that’s very simple, I look at Italy, I look at New York and I see what happens when this virus is only partially contained. The show hasn’t really started in the US yet. Of course if the lockdown works it might never. And then you ll just go ‘you see, you overreacted.’
The aspect of who catches it is different from who dies. The aspect of how a patient is treated, and available resources for such is different in a crap hole like Italy with their medical system and ours. I’ve already posted some examples of the resources we bring to bear on this disease in treatment and hospitalization. The aspect of containment is also problematic. You assume containment is possible, I do not. You assume a complete and total lock down of the population is required for containment, I do not. In short, you’ve bankrupted the greatest economy in the world on a fool’s errand.
You think magic dirt theory means US hospitals are better than Italian or French hospitals?? Save for a few elite places like Mass General, Mayo or Cleveland Clinics, irrelevant to most Americans anyway, they are not. Lombardy is not Sicily. But you dont know that b/c you don’t know anything about this.
You think the Pentagon has stacked several thousands of ventilators away on some secret base, along w the doctors and nurses to man them?? The military can add a few hundred at most. Your reasoning comes down to ‘Murica always #1!!’ Go to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens and have a look.
ICU nurses contract this thing and they’re a bottleneck right now. This virus overwhelms advanced Western hospitals and ‘magic dirt’ is not going to protect US hospitals. You don’t know anything about what you’re talking about. I talk to people who work in hospitals daily and I’m an MD myself. You’re in for an education over the next few weeks, unfortunately.
No one – and most definitely any poltician at any level – wants to ‘go there’, but I think some one needs to ‘go there’ – and at least you put it ‘out there’.
A problematic factor is determining the economic value per life – and is each life the same value? Of as much, or greater concern: who determines the value of each life (unless all lives are assumed to be of equal value).
Simple, you compute a life into expected years. A male white child—say after age 5 has a life expectancy of 84. Save a five year old, gain 79 years. Save an 80 yo, gain 4 years of life. Currently done, but not spoken about in many socialized medicine countries.
Economic value of life varies with government agency, but I don’t recall any estimate as high as $10M.
“U.S. Office of Management and Budget puts the value of a human life in the range of $7 million to $9 million. As of 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a human life at $9.1 million. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration put it at $7.9 million — and the Department of Transportation figure was around $6 million.”
https://www.theglobalist.com/the-cost-of-a-human-life-statistically-speaking/
Not a complete summary of thinking on the matter. Some economists—in the article—discuss strikingly different numbers. But let’s take a round number of $10M per one life for a round figure. Bandied about here has been a high death number of 240K citizens (we’ll ignore life expectancy for now). If my math is correct, you would then claim that 240,000 x’s 10,000,000 is the break even amount for the effort—2,400,000,000,000. Where have I seen that number before? So I guess we’re at the break even number at this time.
Moran. It is not an interesting approach—putting a $$$ value on human life—it is done all the time in this economy and others. All the time. The “interesting approach” is rather assuming all life is of inestimable value and therefore equal. That is absurd.
This is why your argument supporting current prevention measures is unpersuasive. Given your logic, there is no end to the efforts that should be spent on prevention of this disease, no cost too great—because “unknowns” exist.
Start estimating the costs involved in the current effort, which I submit will result in loss of life as well, and I’ll be listening.
I don’t think you understand what it is I’m saying.
“literally putting a price on human lives saved”
Well, sure. It happens all the time. Not the “death panels” thing, but QALY, right?
For those not in the game, QALY=quality-adjusted life year. In other words, if a treatment extends life (e.g. new anti-cancer therapy, a new prosthetic heart valve, etc), what does the treatment cost vs the expected extension of life? The break-even point for QALY has often been set at about $50,000 USD. (How they adjust for inflation, etc is above my pay grade.)
So let’s say a novel artificial heart valve (device, surgery to put it in, associated hospital stays, expected complications, follow-up care — it all must be considered) costs at total of $150k, but people are likely to live another reasonably functional 5 years. Treatment is $30k/QALY. Well, that’s a clear win. Approved!
On the other hand, suppose a new anti-cancer monoclonal/quantum cryptology/nanotech/other SciFi buzzword treatment costs $500k and extends life by 2 months, with all of that life in the ICU on a ventilator while doped to the gills on morphine because of all the pain, well, is it reasonable to pay for that? (And more to the point, what doctor would even recommend such literal torture?)
So yeah, as a society we already put a price on human life, and it’s not crazy to do so. The difficulty is in the details (as always).
This is done in non-lifesaving situations as well. We could lower the national speed limit to 30 mph. Many lives would be saved, but it would take twice as long to get anywhere. We are willing to lose lives for convenience without even thinking about it.
More immediate than abstractly computing the worth of a human life is emergency triage. In a crisis a decision maker may have to “play god.” In war time, we don’t fault the field medic who must triage the wounded. Some will survive without treatment, you put them aside. Some guys are mortally wounded, they’re going to die. Give them comfort care if possible. The last group are those who stand a good chance to recover — you put your resources into them. Now we rarely have to do this in peace time, but the same principles apply. If the ventilators are running low, the attending doctor probably should prioritize the young nurse, the middle-aged physician, over the wheezing 90-year-old codger, the homeless bum, or the convicted axe-murderer. Some choices are pretty easy. Others not so much: Imagine the doctor has to decide between an anonymous health care worker (whose skills are desperately needed) and his own father, or his brother or son? Not so easy. We can make “Death Panels” a bogey man, but in the real world, sometimes difficult decisions must be made.
What I meant was, I didn’t agree that the decision on how to handle covid-19 should come down to a question of ‘which will cost more, trying to stop it or not trying to stop it.’ That approach is reducing humans completely to economic units, something Wall Street and marxists agree on. And why they can get along so easily. It’s also a ‘dead soul’ view of life.
Here’s a suggestion, let’s be honest and for once, implement a one for all and all for one policy in which we spend whatever it costs to save our fellow citizen (we are of course not placing a crude limitation on the matter such as cost) and then assess the cost as a surcharge on annual IRS contributions to all taxpayers, say for the next five years. Who’s for a 25% tax increase, raise your hand?
One can be reasonably circumspect about the potential contained in Wuhan flu while still believing that the measures we have taken have been wrong-headed, at times ineffective, and have possibly exacerbated the situation. If we didn’t have the example of Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, or the Diamond Princess I might be a tad more receptive to some of the measures we’ve adopted in the States, but we’ve seen better results elsewhere by using a different approach. Instilling in people the belief that they’re not to even set foot outside their homes is an incalculable cost to bear for the prevention of several thousand lives.
Absolutely. They are using a sledgehammer and Im not sure that’s the only much less best approach. I guess the position I imagined myself standing for here was ‘this IS serious, not a hoax or madness.’ How then to handle it, well, that is difficult.
I read this group as well and listen to other commentators in the MSM. You must listen to someone else. Never have I hear anyone say this virus was a hoax—as in it does not exist—nor that is was for certain classes of individuals not 3potentially fatal.
The accusation that someone with doubts as to our current prevention efforts equates to some sort of denialism is simply slander that the other side uses for anyone who disagrees with their power grab over this “crisis”.
When you put crisis in quotation marks that’s what I mean by treating it like a hoax. As in ‘sure, there’s a virus but it’s not that bad.’ Through the grapevine I hear from doctors who are still in the New York areas. They say it’s bad, pretty bad. Same w ppl I know in Italy. They tried the hands off approach at first. It didn’t work so well, to understate.
No, the crisis is in “quotes” because it is a manageable disease and not deserving of the panic induced response we are seeing. Not because it is a hoax. That is your interpretation of which you will find no posting of mine to support such interpretation on your part.
I caught a space presentation that Z linked to and the presenter made the case that it’s within our technological grasp to send micro-satellites to neighboring star systems at some higher proportion of the speed of light (20% if I recall, which is smoking fast).
Another theoretician pointed out some time ago that given the time scale of when there was nothing but giant lizards on earth, that possible aliens have had hundreds of millions of years to make a go at self-replicating satellites. I forget the math, but he used a fairly slow guess at the speed these satellites could move, but over hundreds of millions of years any advanced civilization could have populated the entire galaxy with these satellites and yet…nothing.
That was the same guy who wondered if the “filter to life” was behind us (life being a very very rare thing to occur, and intelligent life even more so) or in front (nuclear war, brownunism). My own guess would be: both.
I suppose some microreactor could accelerate a very small object to something like 20% of the speed of light theoretically but I dont think the technology is ready. The fastest man-made macro object (not counting subatomic particles in accelerators) is NASA’s Helio 2 which travels at 252792.5 kph= 0.0002342292 c, where c is the speed of light. So as you can see, making any macro object 0.2 c there’s a way to go.
But I’ve also heard the theory that life forms advanced enough for space travel are also advanced enough for nuclear weapons. And presumably darwinian principles of competition would make any successful intelligent life form aggressive. And so they kill each other with nukes before they visit us. Or so the theory goes. Who knows, could be true. Not sure it’s plausible to say EVERY intelligent life form would eventually make the extremely unintelligent choice to blow itself up before getting serious about space travel.
About 0.01c (1% light speed) gets you across the Milky Way in 10 million years. For perspective, there have been stars like the sun* for perhaps several billion years before the sun formed. This would seem to imply that advanced civilization could have existed before the sun even did.
As for the virus, I go on the principle that the burden of proof of a danger lies with the person claiming it exists. The evidence here in favor of extreme measures was weak at the start and has gotten weaker.
1. You had an outbreak of a severe corona virus starting in China that had a higher mortality rate than the common cold. This has happened before and the new virus is genetically very similar to SARS and MERS – https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/24/dna-sleuths-read-coronavirus-genome-tracing-origins-and-mutations/. Like SARS, it seems to have originated in bats and transferred to humans due to mutation. The early statistics coming from China did suggest that this one might be worse than SARS. They also showed that the profile of deaths and serious illness was similar to SARS and affected primarily the very old and those with pre-existing conditions. There was, and is, every reason to expect that it would end up being a somewhat more deadly version of the SARS epidemic.
2. Italy: The Italian situation is being used to club skeptics with lately but, well just read this – https://spectator.org/coronavirus-the-price-of-luxury/. In short – lots of old people, lots of impoverished Chinese immigrants, lots of death, nothing unexpected here.
3. As mentioned above Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the Diamond Princess show evidence that the Western extreme measures are largely irrelevant.
4. This is a prediction – there will be further evidence eventually as places like India, South Africa, and other chaotic and impoverished lands fail to produce mountains of corpses as their populations continue to ignore their governments about the virus like they ignore it about general hygiene, traffic, theft, murder, and everything else already.
* “Like the sun” in this context means high metallicity stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity
This is why (in theory) we choose a government of representative leadership. To provide calm thinking and reflection, rather than raw, emotional, reaction. But as sagely put by Z-man today, we really no longer have that in government anymore—just panicked ninnies, and rapacious scalawags.
To provide calm thinking and reflection, rather than raw, emotional, reaction.
I am pretty ice cold deliberate right now. And I am saying the information available warrants containing this thing or there won’t be an economy to resuscitate. If New York City was officially business as usual right now, the world’s financial center would be deserted by everyone except the homeless.
You guys are in denial and daydreaming. In denial that this was not going to mean the economy taking a 50 MT nuke. You can’t save the economy until you stop this virus.
Yep, we had to destroy a lot of villages in Vietnam to save them.
pozymandias,
I’ll be brief. It is significantly more contagious than SARS, but probably less deadly per infected person. The situation is already extremely different.
Italy is what happens when you don’t contain it. Spain and France are showing that it is not something particular about Italy that made things so bad. South Korea and Japan have basically tried this before, so they were quick to test, trace contacts, isolate. And use masks. And they are reaping the rewards. India has one of the most aggressive containment strategies, w contact tracing. But it’s a big chaotic place so it may blow up there.
Spain and France have similar demographics to Italy and are in the same geographical area though I do not know if they have quite as much Chinese immigration. One country you didn’t mention, Switzerland, has been hard hit as well but of course is quite close to the Northern Italian fashion industries and their Chinese labor. As for the Italians failing to contain the virus, as I recall Italy was one of the first nations to go full-on totalitarian with the lockdowns and such. If this did not achieve containment, that actually reinforces my point.
I never said there was anything wrong with masks, widespread testing, limited visiting to nursing homes, and other sensible precautions. What most Western countries and many US states have done goes far beyond that though and has been justified with all sorts of wild numbers produced by computer models that are already failing to be borne out. What definitely isn’t likely to fail to materialize though is the economic damage from the panic and the despair that follows it. We will see of course. It won’t take long. By summer we’ll all know who was right.
A bug that killed two percent of the population would have caused a shrug in most of recored history yet our supposed solution to this one is more dangerous than the disease. For most of human history 40% of children did not survive. In 1750 America if you survived to the age of 20 in New England you were expected to live to 65, in the South, 41.
In many cultures, killing someone who offends you is not only tolerated but more or less expected. I’m not even sure that’s an entirely bad idea in all circumstances, especially where infidelity is involved.
But something that spreads as fast as Covid-19 and causes the kinds of hospital chaos seen in Italy, Spain and New York, will hit the economy hard in this day and age.
I believe for the last recorded flu year—2018/2019 (?) 45M case 40k+ deaths, which I assume were mostly in hospital settings. COVID-19 is how much worse? Based on what modeling and assumed data inputs? So we close down the entire country?
A week ago or so, one of our commenters here was worried about our hospital bed shortage—as compared to Croatia or some shithole backward country he cited. Part of my response at that time was that we had an economy second to none with reserves like no other—citing US military and such.
What do we see now. Military hospital ships operating in critical areas like NYC. Car companies manufacturing respirators and masks around the clock, while our supplies are not at the time exhausted—no thanks to slime like Cuomo who wanted them all for his State—just in case. I won’t even discuss the new treatment regimens now in place for COVID-19, nor mention the criminally ignorant governors convinced to outlaw these drugs by their medical “advisors”—also criminals.
I could go on, but to what purpose. The problem here is not what type of response posture we should have to a disease, it is fear and panic. That itself is the problem and is a disease worse than the current “plague” as it has no treatment, no cure. Yet it is arguable more deadly.
The problem here is not what type of response posture we should have to a disease, it is fear and panic.
I’m talking about the response not the panic.
You are talking about response formulated out of panic. Thereby simply spouting the “party line”. You facts and figures for the most part are supposition and projection.
Now you may be right, and I may be wrong. We will see and you may remind me of such in a couple of weeks.
I would agree that certain places where you see a combination of some or all of – massive immigration, massive flows of global travelers and goods, large numbers of elderly and sick people, and poor hygiene WILL be hard hit by this or any similar pandemic. I’m still not convinced that the economic damage done by the pandemic itself or that done by the pandemic panic would be worse.
If nothing else this shows that in addition to too heavy a reliance on nasty authoritarian third world nations for goods we also have too many crucial economic and societal functions still being done in overcrowded, decaying shitholes like NYC, San Francisco, LA, and other places that are highly vulnerable not just to exotic plagues but all manner of terrorism and civil unrest. Most of these places lost their original reason to exist long ago. They are the hubs of wheels whose spokes have rotted away.
Modern technologies like 3d printing can scale down and decentralize production, information tech like VR and teleconferencing can reduce the need to concentrate people in giant offices, education (the real kind, not liberal arts PC brainwashing) can also be done mostly online. Yes, these technologies will mean that some people will become even more like techno-mole-people than now. What I see is the ability to interact in person with people of MY choosing, at times of MY choosing for activities I actually want to do. Most of our big city interactions are basically forced anyway. They are “rapey” as the kids like to say. Do you really want to talk to that smelly hobo on the train? I didn’t think so.
I still feel that the response to the virus has been akin to using a hydrogen bomb to knock out a bunch of Somalis in a technical. Good things can come of it though. We can certainly use this to make our case against our present social arrangements, globalism, fake education, authoritarianism, and letting yourself be led into a panic by the type of women who are barely sane even in normal times. Those who actually do care about air and water quality and are not just virtue signalling might also be finally made to question if moving production (and pollution) out of sight and out of mind was really a solution to environmental issues.
There’s another theme of the modern small scale technologies which I hinted at above. It’s the return of freedom of association and the rejection of forces that cram us all together with people we frankly don’t like. If the panic opens more people up to the idea of real freedom of association it might be a good thing in the end after all.
Finally, while most of us associate the environmental movement with the Left, there’s no reason a new coalition of environmentalists, economic autarkists, anti-immigrationists, and free association activists cannot form from out of this.
Heck of a post. Lot to think about.
Thanks Z-Man for the link to the New York Times article concerning the 2017-2018 influenza death toll. That probably ended up deep inside the newspaper. Perhaps there is some weird special dynamic at work here, such as the continuing efforts of CNN and other media outlets to generate constant hysterias. The expected death toll numbers coming from the White House appear to be more than twice those from other sober mainstream analysts. There is a huge political component to this.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
The peoples of the Nile Valley and Fertile Crescent cannot replace or build an elevator or an electric generator without the help of the Far West or the Far East. They are no longer even capable of replicating their ancestors in building a pyramid or a ziggurat. The collapse of Rome changed trade routes. Steady African incursions through the slave trade(not all of them were gelded) changed the people. Change the biology(structure) change the civilization. The Globalization of sacred diversity dulls every blade.
Derbyshire solved the Fermi Paradox a number of years ago when describing the future as an all Black planet if current trends were allowed to continue. We’ve only accelerated things since then.
A rising tide lifting all boats is probably a very bad idea. Advanced civilizations, those capable of building well functioning large cities, had to domesticate their populations over a period of eons to get to that point. In one way or another we had to kill off those who couldn’t or wouldn’t get with the program. Now we’ve flung open our doors to the very sorts of people our ancestors felt they needed to dispatch. Add to that the greater genetic distance of these nuEuros which make them even less likely to acclimate to our preference and … we aren’t averaging up. Even if there where no race mixing the social milieu would still be primitivized.
The Drake Equation needs to add a universal constant for the Diversity Threshold. If you diversify beyond a certain point it Ugga Bugga until the stars burn out.
The Dutton Equation is much more robust and verifiable. Defect + Rope = a cleaner gene pool. Without a more rigorous use of Dutton’s Knot, the Drake Equation will remain the pastime of THC-fueled weebs and Trekkie nerds.
A rising tide will not lift any ships if they all have been scuttled 🙁 “But everything was OK before the tide came in!!! 🙂 “
Maybe the end-state of a risk-adverse civilization is everybody’s consciousness gets uploaded into a super-computer?
The sum total purpose of organic life is the creation of machine life. Machine life travels the stars in this scenario. Other than, perhaps, interfering in civilizations sufficiently advanced to accelerate the process of establishing machine life, which may have happened here in the 1940s, or may not, they are not interested in embryonic organic civilizations.
I must disagree. If you read Dawkins (the Biochemist, not the Atheist 🙂 ) especially “The Selfish Gene”, he makes an excellent case that the gene, and by extension life, exists only to reproduce itself. You can say its “purpose” is to reproduce itself. Another great book is Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”. If we assume life began by accident, it is still mind-boggling that all living things came from a common ancestor (and, by extension, some pre-living collection of atoms). The Theist will claim the existence of God as a first cause, which too is unprovable, and actually complicates matters.
Glad other people speculate about such nonsense too.
In “The Killing Star”, Charles Pellegrino speculated that alien civilizations aren’t blasting messages into space for the same reason that deer don’t howl at the moon – because there are wolves and tigers in the forest.
Agreed. I’ve always thought our broadcasting messages into deep space to be a function of Saganite, we-are-the-universe idiocy whereby all aliens must be ET and none could be the monsters in War of the Worlds. Criminally irresponsible.
As we treat all other species upon this planet as subordinate and items to be used for our needs or enjoyment, why would we expect any other advanced species to treat us any different? Fatal hubris.
Perhaps that is another reason we’ve failed to locate other advanced species outside our solar system—when two advanced species meet, one inevitably destroys the other, leaving just one for us to find, and one searching for us.
As a Gen Xer I grew up assuming that by now we would have colonies or at least permanent structures on the moon and Mars. Instead I am in my late 40s with 8 kids who are facing a pretty bleak future where a subsistence level existence is far more likely than colonies on Mars.
If you have 8 kids, you’re better off than most.
Seconded.
Same, though at this point we have way better science. For instant, if they knew then what we knew now about solar radiation and how a simple burst could fry an Apollo crew I’m not so sure they would have proceeded. It’s almost like the technology becomes an inhibitor to progress after a certain point: since all the problems can be mitigated, then they must, but then it’s too expensive, so no one bothers.
But the men of the Apollo mission would have simply added that risk to the calculus that already existed and almost surely would have proceeded anyway. Today, we’ve given feminine, risk-averse notions veto power over the instincts of men. Shame on us.
A clan with 8 strong branches is going to be better-positioned to weather whatever’s coming than those with none or one. Good job, M8.
Well, that’s progress for you…
Good for you for raising 8 kids. You doubled my productivity. My kids are college age and older now and I wish I would have had 4 more.
The future is not as bleak as you might think. Get your kids in STEM programs. With 8 kids you’re going to need help with college. Have them check Hispanic or Native American on all race-based forms starting right now. You should have received your 2020 census form. Claim Hispanic or Native American heritage. Lay the foundation now to get your gibs later.
Such would depend upon whether or not your children are academically inclined at a high enough level to take STEM—or any college course work. Be realistic. Pushing them into college, if not inclined, is a recipe for disaster. Remain open to the trades which will pay good money for competent and conscientious individuals. A good tradesmen is probably better off than a mediocre college grad wrt income and economic future.
“Claim Hispanic or Native American heritage. Lay the foundation now to get your gibs later.”
I might be claiming to be African-American. Because Olduvai Gorge and all that. Unlike Bad Orange Man, I Believe in Science.
Not looking for gibs. If I were to claim to be AA for ulterior motives (which is clearly not the case) instead of because Settled Scientific Fact, it would be to confound the re-districters and those looking to put up Section 8.
I think that hopium was peddled to everyone in Gen X though a basic knowledge of astrophysics and of exo planet makeup lwould nope all of those ideas their entirety.
In that sense not bothering with space nonsense was a nation growing up. Some things are literally too hard to do.
Of course not being able to maintain our society from 1973 onward (below replacement fertility and mass immigration) was a real gut punch since it ruled out “try again later” as an option.
Re “The Machine Stops”, oddly, my first ‘memory’ from another life is that of a burgher, a minor councilman, about a century from now. The mores are somewhat different, but the striking thing is that everyone lives in crowded corridors. Underground, it seems.
The followup was years of dreams of the Warrens- living in the filth and rot of endless ruins, amidst the polluted and dangerous trash of a fallen city.
(‘Memories’ of lives before, late Dark Age to late medieval, were of the moment of death. Minor characters, a tortured bandit, a family servant, an incestuous uncle. Seeing Chief Boru and the Dane fall on the heath. Mine? Others? Real or not? Something to explore.)
The Caves of Steel.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0553293400
Bad, at your Amazon link, an exerpt is included that really speaks to the Zman’s post. Eerie.
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
One of the topics of conversation I’ve enjoyed lately is, What will change permanently as a result of this? What structural, societal changes are likely to be in store?
I believe most private medical care is probably done for. The government has been not-so-gradually assuming control and I don’t think they’ll give it back. People are scared, want reassurances and will trade freedom for security any day. Many people, especially the non-elderly, had never known medical insecurity before – many didn’t know such a thing existed!
The medical private sector, which was already not the dominant portion of overall medical spending, is in deep financial trouble. Don’t expect the feds to prop it up and then leave it to run itself. They’ll prop it up and then move in. This is not like insurance after 9/11 or securities companies in 2008: the government wasn’t directly in those businesses before the crunch. But the government is the major player in the medical market, now more than ever, and will run with the ball from here, I believe.
Our practice is on life support. The ten clinics I’m involved with are all staying open with one provider at a time. Normal is two or even three. Proportional reductions in staffing. Cash flow bottoming out quickly.
I’m now working two days a week. We’re trying not to have to lay anyone off, but everyone is having their hours cut pro rata.
One of my friends works for a malpractice carrier. I’ll quote him: “At work we’re flooded with calls from practices that need to close or at least suspend paying premium. We’re scrambling to figure out how all of this will change the business.”
This is not a plea to feel sorry for anyone. I’m retirement age but like seeing patients. Used to like it. Now I wear a mask and gloves with those few patients who come in. The laying on of hands really is a lost art now.
You’ve seen the stories about the providers being called out of retirement and med students accelerated along, but anybody who isn’t dying is avoiding the doctor’s office these days. Most doctors are twiddling their thumbs. The problem is a mismatch of needed skills.
From Medscape, a professional site for internists:
“Hospitals across the United States are preparing for a surge of COVID-19 patients while facing a shortage of cash from postponed elective procedures. Some are responding by furloughing nonclinical staff and cutting doctors’ pay, Medscape Medical News reports.”
Those on the front lines are no doubt working like never before. O, to be a resident in a medical center again: God help me, I would have loved being in the front lines.
But lots of practices are going to fail. I think the government will appropriate the sector whoever wins in November.
I never understood the Great Depression: FDR made sure it lasted ten years and people still revered him. My parents were as far to the right as I am but they loved the guy, while voting for his opposites the rest of their lives.
Now I’m starting to get it, this turning to the government in fear.
Good news department:
And now for something completely different have a look at this:
https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest
The graph you want shows the deaths, logarithmically, versus time, for different countries or regions.
The import of this graphic (trusting the numbers) cannot be overemphasized. This is the scene in the movie when you realize the day is going to be saved. The cavalry arrives. The horns of Rohan had come at last. Death rates are following similar parabolic arcs, with China past the apex and Italy at it.
This is fascinating, that we can ‘watch’ an epidemic in real time. This is the stuff of sci-fi when you think about it. It could not have been imagined ten years ago. From the wet markets to the wet dreams of the epidemiologists.
Recall that two weeks ago we were seeing a thousand new US cases a day. Yesterday it was a thousand deaths.
Let’s hope these data represent reality. Pestilence is never good. Seeing this has an essentially religious impact on me, of hope for the future. Salvation a la mode and a cup of tea.
They’re going to give us the VA writ large. I think that’s what they’re planning — VA as a test bed for how (or how not) to do it.
I get some of my medical care there, for some service-connected body damage. And yes, there are talented and dedicated providers there. Some tremendous work is done by people who are terribly overworked, and unceasingly frustrated. HOWEVER …. The system — administrative, organization, personnel, support process — is a nightmare of confusion and inefficiency. I worked at one of the facilities (not patient care, but with patients) for a couple of years following retirement. The place is a textbook case of an organization now become a hothouse of wokeness, diversity, inclusion and EEO-mandates. Some of the things I saw celebrated were appalling. I think it’s safe to venture that the entire system has been taken by feminism — both the Z-Man’s gynocracy and the matriarchy, with the power-girls running critical functions, and the mothering-types smothering the Vets in just too much loving care. Sometimes, a guy just needs his foot cut off …. he doesn’t need or want his whole life transformed.
And yes, there are some enclaves of masculinity remaining to be taken by the super-girls … some of the medical strongholds, and there are the apes in facilities management. No one seems to care what they say or do back in their strongholds, as long as the boilers work, and the lights stay on. Of course, their bosses, where still male, lock their manhood in their trunks before heading off to the director’s staff meeting. I’ve heard the comments.
It also seems there’s a direct path from the foreign medical graduate line at Immigration directly to the VA physician recruiting office. Some of the older Vets complain as they can’t even understand, or don’t identify with, one from a foreign country. The bulk of the medical residents at the facility where I worked were Chinese, Indian or Middle Eastern. It’s a bit much to expect some old guy who fought against Chinese and was wounded by them in 1951 to feel comfortable interacting with them. (NOTE: In my position there I worked with multiple cases involving exactly this situation.). Just why is it that we can’t produce our own doctors ….
Anyway, I think that any final government / single-payer system enacted will look a lot like the VA … some things are much better now for VETs, but it’s likely to work even worse when that govt admin and employment culture is imposed on our entire healthcare complex.
And by the way, I don’t think our civilian health care system — the one for us little folks — is itself much better now in many regards, with the docs on a time line with each patient, and busy staring at and typing into their computer screen as you try to talk to them. Of course, the very wealthy, or just very comfortable, among us aren’t likely to have to endure the same “improvement.”
As an aside, if they do go this direction — if our rulers and the political class who serve them do force this, then at the very lease, our elected officials should HAVE to get their medical care from within the system, or go to jail if they try to evade the mandate.
” there’s a direct path from the foreign medical graduate line at Immigration directly to the VA physician recruiting office” and “Just why is it that we can’t produce our own doctors”?
Hoo boy. Yes and yes. The foreign medical grad (FMG) thing is a HUGE problem. We’re not talking about Germans, Swedes and British doctors. We’re mostly talking Indian, Pakistani, Iranian. I guess Chinese too, but I see mostly the first three groups of FMGs. It’s a problem not only in the US and Canada, but in Europe too. (anedcote below)
Why FMGs to the VA? I don’t know for sure, but suspect that it counts as “serving an under-served population.” One way for FMGs to get a green card is to work in an inner-city ghetto, or in a poor rural region because they are “underserved”. VAs MAY fall under that.
But it’s not only a VA problem. While I know a number of fine FMGs, many of the ones that go into private practice in the community are terrible. Mediocre medical knowledge, large-to-gigantic egos, condescension toward their mostly working-class patients [not helped by coming from strong class/caste systems — looking at you, Syed and Ranjeet], but compensated for (/sarc) by grasping greed.
I’ve spent some time in the High Desert of California (Victorville, Apple Valley, Hesperia) and the medical system there is absolutely dominated by South Asians. After talking with many locals, I found out that many of the people there purely HATE the local doctors, preferring to drive a hour or more “down the hill” (Cajon pass/route 15) to see the doctors at Loma Linda or other places. I’m sure many other communities are like this.
Personally I’ve worked at VAs during my training (medical residency, not the fellowships). I really like the patients (other anecdote below), but there are indeed a lot of problems with facilities and the horrible bureaucracy.
—————
FMGs in Europe anecdote: A good friend is from Spain. Got her PhD and MD here in the States (in that order, she is an MD and a genuine PhD, not one of those often bogus MD-PhD quicky programs [putting helmet on now…]) then did residency and fellowship at two great US institutions. She’s thinking of going back to Spain, but found out there is a line to get her Spanish medical license. The line is THREE YEARS long. Now Spanish friend is anti-Trump and vaguely globalist (though she purely HATES North Africans, because of lots of bad experiences with them in Madrid and Barcelona), so you can imagine how much it pained her to be complaining about this out loud to an avowed deplorable redneck like me. She admitted, “I don’t mean to be racist, but most of these people in line ahead of me are from places like Ghana! I am a native Spaniard, fluent in the language, and clearly better trained medically. It does not make sense that I should be behind these people!” Helpfully I said, “Enjoy your open borders.” We are somehow still friends.
VA patients: While I enjoyed interacting with and taking care of most VA patients, I developed a tic when it came to patients who’d achieved O4 or above. One Army LTC (ret, duh) in particular I still can feel my blood pressure rising whenever I happen to be reminded of the guy. (To be fair, there were only a few of these former field-grade characters, and most of them had psychiatric issues or personality disorders. Not formally diagnosed, but they were clearly not right in the head.)
“O, to be a resident in a medical center again”
Funny you say that. A large Internal Medicine program near me has sent its residents home to protect them from WuFlu. This is almost unbelievable to me, but has happened.
Clown World indeed. W. T. F.
Usually the FNG (effing new guy) is the most expendable. What a difference a letter makes. I suspect those FNG’s may have been FMG’s.
I think Range would call them ‘puss ass soy boys’.
The West and much of the rest of the developed world is far beyond feminization, which does entail all of the risk-adverse decline you listed. The transgender movement, “pan-humanism,” climate change, and even the animal rights movement point to something that is post-estrogen let alone post-testosterone. It’s a surrender of humanity based on a psychosis of sorts, not suicidal because that would entail the risk of pain and the end of selfies. Otherwise there would be mass suicide or a reversion to religious faith.
There will be no post-panic world. The West and the rest of the developed world will surrender to the next fear, and then the next, and eventually will disappear as it no longer can build houses let alone dams and skyscrapers. Maybe we were hardwired for obsolescence and have entered an inevitable end stage. Regardless, there will be no going back to even the decadence of 2019.
After all the papers on the reason for the collapse of the Roman empire, perhaps we are watching it unfold around us and in reality it just became so risk-adverse due to the Pax Romana that it created a collapse from the fear of fear itself.
Yes and no. No, the women aren’t destroying us. We are letting them do it. Contrary to popular sentiment patriarchy does not punish strong capable women. It celebrates them and rewards them handsomely. We could (and should) send the bints back to the kitchen with a sharp word and the back of a hand. But it’s us guys tolerating it and promoting it. And now we have chaos and lunacy to look forward to.
Nobody wants to entertain the notion that our spirits are ill. That invokes, God, morals, ethics and judgement. Perhaps when we turned our backs on God, he turned his back on us?
You don’t hear much about SETI anymore. It used to be back in the 70s and 80s that the search for intelligent life was slow because of the technologies involved. But since then, the technologies leaned ahead by orders of magnitude. The are probing huge tracts of sky, seeing further than ever before… and still…nothing. Perhaps God not only made this world for us… but an entire universe? The odds against us even being here are astronomical…and yet… here we are.
If you ever get the chance, look at women with faith, that walk the walk as well as talk the talk. They are happy, warm and intelligent. Contrast that with the girl scientists, girl community organizers, the cat ladies, the nasty women…
We know exactly what we have to do to fix this. But ven dissidents won’t discuss doing anything concrete about it. Why is that?
Fear of rejection.
If you only sleep with one quality woman it’s much better and healthier than the trail of drama and emotional damage that goes with sleeping around, or even having a bunch of failed relationships. Fear of rejection in the deeper sense of being an incel being one byproduct.
It’s another paradox. More sex, then more fear of sex or its lack. Speaking from experience. But it can be overcome! Better to never get yourself in the situation in the first place.
I’ve been saying for a long time that most of our conflicts are not what they seem. Pandering to minorities and immigrants is mostly an intra-tribal fight among wannabe elite whites and Jews. It’s all about “I love X more than you!” where X is some minority or immigrant group. The supposed victim groups themselves have power of a sort but not much agency. They are chess pieces in a game they mostly aren’t aware of.
Likewise, feminism reached a peak of destructiveness in the late 1960s. To put it crudely, it was during that time young men (of whom there were a lot more than now) became convinced that if they just let their sister become a whore, everyone else would too and they would be awash in commitment-free nookie. As we know now, women used their newfound “independence”, mostly provided by government intervention in the workplace and direct hiring of women, to chase a few alpha males and tended to ignore the mass of betas. It tuned out that your sister (and everyone else’s) liked being an alpha’s harem girl more than putting out for random losers. Thus was born the modern incel and school shooter.
The problem started with men and when (and if) it ever ends it will end with them too. The best thing we can do is keep pounding it into the heads of men that, no, pandering to women’s endless panics and frenzies will NOT get you laid. We should be honest about it and admit to them though that it’s possible that not pandering to them will also not get you laid. It’s possible that you might be unattractive and just never have consensual sex. The PUAs are great about telling men the former thing but not the latter. Perhaps there need to be “scholarships” to send these men to “study” in Nevada or Amsterdam.
I don’t see the virus panic as being quite the novel thing that many others here do. Panics over guns, climate change, “bullying”, nuclear power, and now this stupid Chinese head cold… It’s all of a piece – mass media drums these things up, sells the existential panic of them to women, and men go along. For the young ones, it often is a mistaken notion that they simply haven’t grovelled enough at the altar of the gynocracy and abasing themselves a bit further will finally get them a hot girl. For the older men, the habit of falling in line with these things was ingrained long ago and they just keep it up out of habit.
Men under gynocracy will follow their women down the road to madness, panic, paralysis, and ultimate destruction. Ultimately, extreme risk aversion is itself an extreme risk. By contrast, women under patriarchy will (or could) follow their men to the stars.
Women despise betas and ugly men. That’s just the way our society is. I feel bad for them. The truth is that alphas don’t need to learn PUA, it comes natural. I catch women looking at me all the time. Sorry, but you can’t learn that.
I do notice that it’s the fat betas that STILL push the “liberation” shit. I’m not sure that most alphas / PUAs actually want to be hooking up with so many girls – but they’re just dealing with the hand they’ve been dealt. Only the truest of alphas can marry an attractive, non-whore woman and keep her. PUAs are just wannabe alphas.
Women want to mate with the guy that makes her female friends envious. Guys who figure that out and play to it get all the action.
Her friends usually hate me. I guess it’s either envy or they just think I’m a loser 😉
A good counter from a scientist to Fermi’s Paradox was, “When you’re driving down the highway, do you pull over to every anthill at the side of the road, get down on your knees, and say ‘Hello ants!'” ? In other words, maybe any civilization smart enough to pass the threshold Fermi talked about is also smart enough to find us boring. Re: the inability to make things that work or are worth a fig, I think this is closely related to the death of social capital. In a world where you don’t know the people who make your products, you can build a cabinet that collapses because your customer’s recourse is to get on a phone tree and wait to curse out some poor Indian in a call center for an hour; whereas if you live two blocks away from the guy who makes your cabinets (and he gets his cheese or vegetables from you), his incentive to do a good job is a bit higher. You can literally find him if he claims something’s oak but it’s really particle board. But some of the death of craftsmanship is just related the death of beauty, or rather the War on Beauty we’ve been seeing at least since Bauhaus. Look at Notre Dame: Who knows how to do groin-vaulting and tracery windows like those anymore?
There are still stone carver artisans doing stuff like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afkLHVLOz9U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT3C35pcHo8
Part of the problem is that the ‘good enough’ is the enemy of the best, and good enough is often cheaper and mass-producable.
The truth is, MDF is usually ‘good enough’ for a lot of use cases. Craftsmanship is *expensive* and the average person simply cannot afford the vast increase in the cost of labor for craftsmanship.
Most ‘good’ furniture, in most parts of the country, is *far* more expensive than Ikea or Wayfair, and is really not that much better. Learning to build and do things yourself is one solution, and how places like Home Depot make most of their money now, but even this is still expensive to get started as tools aren’t as cheap as they could be, and lots of folks don’t have the space.
I guess what I’m saying is that the increase in the standard of living, but also the cost of living, has made a lot of handmade stuff a lot more expensive…
You would be hard pressed to find a furniture maker who could do this kind of 18th century work today…
https://a.1stdibscdn.com/archivesE/upload/1121189/f_123103031539339121881/12310303_master.jpg
I know a guy.
http://www.andersenandstauffer.com/
Probably many out there, but as always you pay for what you get.
And to the larger point, there’s a remnant. Knowledge isn’t lost but undervalued. Or maybe overvalued and hidden, who knows.
If wealthy i would spend my money on fine furniture. Always had a weakness for such.
PS I don’t know what the guy’s politics are or if he’d endorse mine. Just appreciating good craftsmanship. 🙂
Oh, they’re out there. Just not many.
One guy went to an exhibition of fine historical furniture from France. He judged that the workmanship gradually improved up to the Revolution of 1789, then declined, probably because “liberty, equality, fraternity” (LEF) dissolved the master-apprentice relationship and replaced it with universal government schooling.
We’ve since outdone those revolutionaries by extending LEF to women, thereby dissolving Biblical marriage and causing a catastrophic decline in the birth rate as free women end up dying alone with their cats.
E, you would also be hard-pressed to find someone who appreciates the beauty of that kind of work here in IKEA world.
Or maybe there are no aliens?
Aliens are on the roadmap, but they’ve been saying that for so long now that I no longer believe it. Lessons learned, don’t hint at future content if you aren’t sure you will ever deliver.
Well said. Perhaps the x factor in civilizations that can advance to the stars is not so much about their elite intelligentsia, but more about their average joes and his ability to make something useful. There is a quality that doesn’t seem to survive quantity.
Sending one man across the sound barrier is one thing, but what about the ability to send truth and beauty across the Dunbar number?
Screw, Scale is definitely one of the dragons that prowls between here and Star Trek. The threshold between what it takes in terms of complex organization and resources to reach the Final Frontier and the carrying capacity of your people and planet is a thin one, and it’s unmarked.
I think it’s the economics of quantity over quality, driven by the preference for quantity. If people were content to have fewer higher quality items, the local economy could meet their needs nicely and be self sustaining within reason.
“When you’re driving down the highway, do you pull over to every anthill at the side of the road, get down on your knees, and say ‘Hello ants!’” ?”
Any civilization that much more advanced than ours would have wrought its will upon the heavens in such a way as would be impossible to miss. Traveling between stars, terraforming planets, building artificial habitats, and providing for the basic needs of quadrillions of citizens all require gargantuan amounts of energy, all of which, when it’s done its useful work, becomes waste heat that must be dumped into interstellar space. The laws of physics say you can’t hide from a thermal-imaging camera.
Part of our society’s adversity to risk is the decline of religion. If this life is all we got, why take chances?
The Greeks did not have much to look forward to after this life. The Mongols were not too worried about what comes next. I think fear of the after life could very well make a people risk adverse.
There is Fear and there is Hope. Is it fear of an afterlife, or fear of no (or a bad) afterlife?
I keep coming back to Rod Dreher but he’s an example that counters this point. A Christian writer so hysterical at the thought that someone might die that he is currently foaming at the mouth because some Pentacostals in rural Louisiana are continuing to worship together.
It’s not just women in positions of power, it’s that men now react like women. I have good friends who’ve always been decently masculine, played sports, good with women. They’re terrified of this virus, sending me pictures of people playing in the park demanding it all be shut down.
Half of these people have lost their jobs too, even that doesn’t phase them, they just want to be safe no matter the price.
The people loudly demanding to be made safe by their government keepers are no different than the evilCorp arbitrage gamblers who are demanding more liquidity to shore up their greed and hubris.
Fat, diabetic women and their portly manlets who have spent a lifetime frolicking in sugar-coated risk, sitting and lounging on their airchairs while gluttonously consuming more risk, are demanding to have their lives de-risked because a reaper virus likes sweet old fatties the best.
Those men may be masculine in form, but they have been indoctrinated into the femcentric order. Their masculinity, like social capital, has been cashed in for progress. The grand handicapper has done his job; defanging the toxic males such that all is as fair as a maiden.
I see it around here too. Wealthy, “successful” business leaders and such who leverage their expertise in business to lead panic parties and demand more stringent lockdowns of lesser men who fail to see the moral superiority of their fear.
The avenues of headship, rational choice, and stoic provisionIng and protection have been long foreclosed. The can only “man-up” and validate the emotions of their womyn.
So what these males have left is just their tenor tone to underscore the junior high girls chorus.
Yes. I stopped reading Dreher 2 weeks ago when he starting covering his windows with tinfoil and spending most of his waking hours in bed. He actually admitted he was spending most of his day in bed or taking long naps. Apparently the stress from the worst case scenarios he was buying into crushed what little sprit he had and robbed him of the will to live.
He is an embarrassment to Orthodox Christianity, a faith normally associated with steely eyed resolve and asceticism.
He is also a sorry excuse for a man, although that was somewhat apparent in his writing.
He is one of those conservatives who knows what the red pill is and what it represents, but every time he gets ready to take the damn thing he ends up throwing it in the trash can and hiding in the bathroom.
There are any number of pseudo conservative writers who have exposed themselves during this “crisis”.
Dreher has some health issues related to his immune system and lives close to a city with a large outbreak. Part of his reaction is similar to why Steve Sailer reacted the way he did, personal fear that he would not survive if he contracted the virus. That said, he is much more prone to hysterics than Sailer. I don’t think he is close to taking the “red pill” as you put it either. He is realistic about the nature of the totalitarian left, but that is as far as he will go. Dreher might not label himself a blank slater, but he effectively is one.
People like him were not taken seriously in a society that was not as obsessed with safety and as tolerant of histrionics. People like him have always existed, but they were marginalized. Let us not forget that the churches and other religious organizations have not been immune from the rise of wamyn. In fact, the churches have become a magnet for the types of women that are the worst examples of the wamyn phenomenon
The feminization of society means that it makes no difference if you removed every single woman from a position of authority; as men are acting in a manner indistinguishable from their female counterparts.
South Korea has female leadership, but they are a masculine society. As such they are not having the convulsions that the west is.
South Korea is not a masculine society. They just have factories. They made N95 masks with them. We shipped our factories overseas so we have no masks. South Koreans are the number one per capita consumer of male makeup products. We are an empty shell of a country, our leaders moved everything tangibly productive to the third world to enrich themselves just a bit more while americans were busy grilling and watching nig-nogs play sportsballs while they sat on their fat asses eating potato chips. If the fed goes to far with the money printing and we lose our reserve currency status, this is going to be made abundantly clear. I almost hope it does, our people needs some tough love to wake them the fuck up and actually MAGA. When was the last time we built anything impressive like the hoover dam or the golden gate bridge? Everything great America accomplished was done over 50 years ago, when men were men and the country was European. We’ve just been coasting on the greatness of our ancestors ever since.
Atheism, secularism and the accompanying fear of death is certainly part of it. The civilizations that did the best conquering had warlike requisites for the best versions of heaven. Valhalla for the Nordics, 70 virgins for the Islamists. The secular apocalypse myth is that the earth is getting slightly hotter so we must hobble our productivity and make ourselves weak to appease mother gaia. I like Christians on the whole, but the contemporary version of your religion preaches weakness. Whatever happened to “I bring not peace but the sword”? All I hear now when I go to church is various amalgamations of “turn the other cheek” and a rejection of the lessons of the tower of babel story, pathetic.
I’m aiming not for Valhöll but Sessrúmnir.
Generally speaking, none of the hot-desert monotheisms, please. Not necessarily opposed, but HDMs are not for me.
The chicken came before the egg on that one. No risk, no religion. No god based religion, that is. More worship than ever of other things.
This exactly. Spend five minutes on normie social media and you’ll learn that #stayhome is a religious rite equivalent to praying the rosary.
stunning and brave…really should be used in this case. It’s the perfect emergency, relax, stay home, oh and porn is free for the month.
They shall be hailed as heroes by future generations.
At least other things exist. 😈
Briggs has a chart showing deaths of all causes falling sharply in the last couple of months, and of boys age 0 to 17 falling to almost zero. So shutting in and laying low “saves many lives”. But is shutting in and laying low what lives are made for?
In a quixotic attempt to cheat death, we negate life.
Religion has always been about more than the afterlife. As Z notes, our Greco-Roman ancestors didn’t share the Christian/Islamic view of the afterlife. Hades was a bleak place even for Homer’s heroes. Jews have been largely unconcerned with the afterlife since Abraham.
There’s a grain of truth there, though. Ironically I see a lot of fear of death in Christians and Muslims, something Taleb chides the Pope for in “Anti-Fragile,” asking why Benedict was rushed to the hospital rather than the church so many times in his tenure.
It’s a BS atheist talking point on a superficial level but once again, grain of truth.
The jihadis self-detonating for 72 virgins are actually living the doctrine. Roman soldiers complained of fighting the Celts and Teutons alike because the Celts believed death = another spin on the Wheel of Life and Teutons believed death in battle = bigger-breasted maidens and sweeter mead in Valhalla.
Christianity used to be like this, even into our times. How much of wartime propaganda from WWII was aimed at getting Christian White men to follow Christ’s example, dying to quench the world’s pain?
Now we have Rod Dreher living like a Dickensian cat lady.
I have always thought that a focus on the afterlife means that the life you are living today must not be what you want out of it. There is only one person who can change that.
Have you ever noticed how religious Traditions tend to encourage the young and Expendable to be the ones to fight and die while the rich and essential, the rulers that is are safely in a castle somewhere?
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
Marcus Aurelius
I was just watching some documentaries on Nat Geo that proved the point. One was about Apollo 11, then other about Space X. The difference between the guys in mission control in 1969 and today are revealing. Musk would do better if he implemented a dress and haircut code and a ban on hugging. They were just better men than what we have now.
Most of Musk’s engineers are white guys. Yes, you could demand they all wear suits, but these guys did pull off a double landing of boosters from the falcon heavy, as well as a lot of quick, safe reflights of the same boosters. There’s a lot that SpaceX is doing right, on a shoestring budget compared to what Apollo had.
In all honesty, I do think the clothes make the man to an extent. The discipline required to wear a button down shirt and tie in a Houston summer does bleed over to other aspects of life. Musk is brilliant no doubt, and a bit of a throwback. Him forcing his guys to ditch the pony tails and the jeans would only make them better.
Dress code is mostly a cultural thing. As Tom Wolfe once said, every generation dresses its servants in the finery of the prior generation…
If there is no dress code, does that mean there is no culture?
It’s entirely a cultural thing. Some cultures are better than others.
Musk’s “genius” is up for debate. As is his sexuality and origin story. The same could be said of Steve Jobs…well, any notable “genius” as deemed by the media.
I love me some Germans.
Maybe intelligence isn’t a long-term benefit for a species, net-net. It’s what leads to hubris – we’re smart, we know what we’re doing, don’t worry about consequences.
Getting smart was eating the apple. The results may be the same.
Humans suggest the opposite, that intelligence is a huge benefit, at least up to a point. Without extraordinary intelligence we would be chimps, ie occasionally the master but far more often the dinner of big cats and other predators. Lions and tigers exist today only b/c we are sentimental and frankly like to take pictures of them.
Between humans is a different matter entirely. In modern society it is emphatically not a darwinian advantage. But that may be due to the same sentimentality??
So much is unknown. Homo Erectus got along well enough to last a million years in hostile lands from Africa to Asia. His brain capacity was 800cc. Then along comes this other fellow in animal skins with the ability to do calculus before he can be challenged to count past his fingers.
Based on the evidence, and how long they lasted, Erectus and the Neanderthal were more successful than us. Based Neanderthal. Works for me.
Yeah, there’s just the little problem this is not how you compare success between a species that got wiped out and the one who did the wiping.
As so many philosophers and theologians have said, we are far to often knowledgeable, but not wise.
Smart enough is the problem. Smart knows its limits.
Not responding to todays post, but to the good question you raised regarding the sensitivity and specificity of the test for the Wuhan flu.Test we are using here in OK is 100% specific and 97% sensitive. Drawback is it takes 3 – 5 days to get results. .
@Jimmer: First, thank you for posting the WuFlu test results. It’s very interesting and I really appreciate it. And if the questions below sound like I’m badgering you, I’m not meaning to. This comes out of genuine medical/scientific interest.
Do you know why/how that specific test was selected for use? In other words, were there multiple tests available, and that one was deemed the best (best tradeoff), or was it simply the only one available?
I’m not up to date on what is going on re WuFlu testing, but it seems that there are either already faster tests, or ones being developed. Korean friend reports that the test she had to undergo after arriving at ICN (Seoul airport) has an 8-h turnaround time, for example. And a rapid test (5 to 13 minutes) developed in Maine has been fast-tracked (under EUA) by FDA. I actually know one of the key people involved in getting the Maine test under mass production, but he’s been too busy to talk to basically random people like me.
https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/fda-fast-tracks-covid-19-testing-device-made-in-scarborough/97-5f443271-00f4-4d5c-bbb8-2671774254d7
The 3+ day turnaround seems to be a significant limitation. Are suspected patients placed in isolation pending results, or what is protocol at your institution?
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General Comments for the non-medical people who are interested:
A 100% specificity (if the test says you don’t have it, you 100% – or at least 99.9% – really don’t have it) is great. The 97% sensitivity (3% chance someone who really HAS the disease is incorrectly labeled as NOT having the disease) is good but not great.
This test slightly skews toward giving infected people a clean bill of health. Probably NOT a big deal for China Flu, but for something like HIV (lifelong) or Ebola (actually really dangerous to everyone) it’d be better to have the sensitivity up at 99+% at the price of a lower specificity. You then deal with the false positives by using a second (different) test to confirm or deny the first test.
Vocal chords. Language. Writing. That’s the key to our success as it allowed us to accumulate knowledge. A chimp learns little more than what his family can teach him. I can know what Newton knew, and more.
He’s an asshole but Roger Waters had it right: “amused to death.”
Aside, Yockey is an excellent follow-on to Spengler.
He got that line from this: https://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Business/dp/014303653X
Wonder if the aliens also seem to be infected with a multi-generational death cult that is a similar mechanism used by society to wreck the most productive parts of its world. Self harm writ large.
Do the aliens have a tiny minority which wears silly hats running everything?
I’m not sure about that but I’m pretty sure one of them is an evil clown.
More important question is “if they do exist, do the anti-tiny hat beings need permission from the tiny-hat beings to themselves exist?”
Kyle has some Joozian ancestry.
https://southpark.cc.com/clips/153998/the-joozians
Supernatural paranormal risk adverse paranoia.