The lock-down, at least around here, really got going on Monday and has accelerated through the week. The weekend saw the hoarding, as public officials started acting hysterically in front of the cameras. On Monday, businesses started to wind down, sending people home if they were not needed or could work from home. The parking lot at my office was very light on Monday, but there were still people in the building. By Thursday the parking lot was just about empty of all cars.
There’s some traffic on the roads, but it like a Sunday morning, rather than a weekday or even a weekend afternoon. People are staying home, for the most part. Not happy with their work, the government is talking about a nationwide quarantine. They are talking about grounding all passenger air traffic for up to 30 days, halting stock trading on Wall Street, and imposing a shelter-in-place rule. Presumably, if one more person gets sick after that, they will begin bombing American cities.
Yesterday I realized that I had not had a face-face conversation with another human in a couple of days. I’ve spoken to people by phone and had e-mail exchanges, but I’ve not talked to anyone in person for a while. For whatever reason, I was reminded of the old Vincent Price movie The Last Man on Earth. There was an old Twilight Zone episode of a similar nature. Of course, there was the crappy Will Smith version on this theme, in which you end up rooting for the monsters to get him.
In my fortress of solitude, I started thinking about another science fiction classic, The Mote in God’s Eye. In the book, humans finally meet an alien species for the first time and discover something called the Crazy Eddie. This is a mythical character the aliens use to explain the inevitability of repeated cycles of collapse of the alien civilization and the pointlessness of trying to prevent them. Anyone who thinks they can solve the inherent defect in their society is called Crazy Eddie.
That’s the thing that does not get addressed in the tales of apocalypse like I Am Legend or the many movies that spring from it. The plague movies usually have a story line where the good guys can stop the plague or maybe come up with a miracle cure for it afterward. In the post-plague stories, after society has collapsed, the characters never think much about how they got to that place. It’s just bad luck. The collapse itself has no meaning other than as a devise to drive the plot of the story.
Maybe what we are seeing here is the inevitable end of all human society. From the perspective of time, the end point looks like a fizzling out of a dying people, but to those in it, it looks like mass insanity. Maybe this is what it looked like for those living in the late Roman Empire or even the late days of the Republic. Then, as now, the people speaking out against the gathering madness were dismissed as madmen, as everyone set about pulling the roof down on civilization.
On the other hand, one has to consider the possibility that it is not the world going mad, but you are the one going mad. It’s possible. There are a lot of people looking around and wondering why we are doing this, but maybe all of us are suffering from madness and the rest of the world is acting sober minded. It’s possible, but that would mean they have a secret way to feed people in a nationwide 30-day lock-down. Maybe turning America into a hermit kingdom is the path to the Promised Land.
For the curious, if they can get past however they are responding to the what’s happening right now, this is an amazing time. We will see things that no one could have imagined seeing just a few weeks ago. No one can know what follows a 30-day quarantine of a continent sized country. No one really knows what will follow just this one week halt to the global economy. No one knows what happens if the plague fears are wildly overblown, which seems inevitable at this point.
Regardless of what follows, we are living in a time without precedent. A century ago, we had a real plague, but the world did not stop. The stock market collapse in the 1920’s did bring a closure, but it was not for a month. The bank run that happened in 1933 resulted in a week-long bank holiday, but the rest of society kept going. The past provides some samples but nothing close to what is being contemplated. Heck, we are already into uncharted territory with the one-week lock-down.
Maybe I am the crazy one, but crazy or not, messing with big complicated things always has unanticipated results. This is an iron law of systems. Even if the response is appropriate to the danger, taking a sledge hammer to the very complex system that is American society will have consequences that no one can anticipate. Another rule of complex systems is you need to understand the iron law of systems before you are allowed to even tinker with the system. That rule has been violated.
This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.
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This Week’s Show
Contents
- 00:00: Opening
- 02:00: Cochran & Sailer
- 12:00: Permanent Crisis
- 19:00: The Boomer Question
- 25:00: The RV Community
- 30:00: The Truth Still Counts
- 46:00: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
- 49:00: Economics
- 56:00: Leaving A Record
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Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On YouTube
https://youtu.be/Xtb24KqqOw0
It’s believed I contracted some flavor of covid 19 at the cusp of February. I’m Z’s age, male and a frequent flyer who lives in Chicago proper along the lakefront. We were descending from LAX to ORD and the Chinese national, I saw his passport, who otherwise sat like a rock, motionless with a kid on his lap suddenly jerked his head in my direction, yanked his facemask and coughed what seemed like a gallon of hot mucous on my head and shoulders. One shot, nearly one kill. I couldn’t clean myself properly until I reached home. Three days later… Read more »
If the worst happens and you are sick with the flu for a couple weeks, consider yourself lucky. I’d rather endure that than be mangled in a car wreck.
Hope you and yours stay safe. Did anyone give you information regarding your immunity/chances for re-infection?
No. The medical staff at N’western, which includes lotsa vibrants, had no idea WTF they were dealing with. My case was pre-test. Best I garner, there are at least 5 strains of covids 19, each with nuanced characteristics. There was scant latency my instance for example. I wear vinyl or nitrile gloves when shopping etc. I resumed walking thrice weekly with a business partner and friend through the lakefront parks without any special gear or practices, just attempting to avoid the dogsh_t from the pets of Lincoln Park Trixies and Chads, to the extent Millennials are not all Trixies. Right… Read more »
Streets, thanks to you, I was able to tell a good friend what symptoms to expect, and that I heard it from someone who is recovering.
He’s a friend at work, and everybody loves this guy. You are very, very much appreciated.
Chinamen are filthy gross people. Never do business with them by the way.
if i didn’t know better i would think the Chinese national coughed on you on purpose.
Why on earth do suppose that you “know better”? What evidence do you have that the man did NOT, in fact cough on StreetsAndSan on purpose?
Sounds pretty fekking on purpose to me!
We are not allowed to think it was on purpose or that the Chin’s activated it on purpose.
I have to start by saying that this outbreak is the most interesting thing, to me, that I’ve lived through since the buildup to the Moon landing, which happened when I was 15. Just for the record, I’d rather be bored. I’m an internist. Think pediatrician for adults, a generalist. Normally I work in Arizona, but the company for which I am medical director is also in California. This situation has me working in California the past three weeks. Yesterday I dropped a stat on you: the US had 500 new cases a day last weekend. It’s around 3000 a… Read more »
Doc, please keep us in the loop r.e. your experiences and observations. It’s so hard to get any first hand information from someone who is on the front lines of this thing, and who is more interested in observations rather than emotions.
BTW I have met Doc in real life, and he has a passion for life and for his work. A true happy warrior.
Yes – Please be our guy on the inside!
You seem black-pilled about it. If you could clarify, what have you seen that leads you to believe this is going to get out of hand? Two degrees of separation, “many within one”, implies an astounding death toll, one that hasn’t been documented in an entire country yet. Why here?
Doctors are the ones leading this panic. Have you ever spoken to the typical doctor? They got to where they are by memorizing lots of information and regurgitating it.
If we don’t see the national guard trucking bodies out by the thousands then doctors will be yet another institution that loses the trust of the people.
A lot of the panic is because the general populace is “innumerate”. Big numbers are scary to them because they are unable to put them in context. When those who are numerate attempt to use such in evaluation of costs and benefits of policies, they are disparaged and called names by those who seek to exploit the situation. Doctors are not generally innumerate. They are smart people. However, they are of a certain ilk and taught to treat the individual to the best of their ability. They act accordingly, which shades their perspective wrt societal costs—and that is how it… Read more »
Plus doctors are on the front line. They’re people too and they put themselves at risk. Whether or not this thing is as bad as they say (I’m still in the skeptic camp), I can’t blame doctors for taking it very seriously. It’s human nature.
Had an “interesting” exchange with my cardiologist Thursday. His fear seemed to be that the system meaning guys like him) would be overwhelmed. Any appeal to logic – i.e. by advising him that the models used by the experts to predict the future path of this pandemic could not even “predict” the path of previous coronavirus outbreaks using known good numbers – fell on deaf ears. We agreed to disagree and see how things went on the other side. Wish I’d have made a bet with him. Doctors’ money spends just as well as other folks’.
Italy has had deaths equal to about 1 per 20,000 population. Multiply how many people you know times how many each of them knows, on average. The square root of 20,000 is about 130. That’s the number-of-people-needed-to-know for an Italian being within 2 degrees of a victim at present. Exponents work quickly.
I don’t doubt that’s the case (having personal experience with a corona death) in certain areas of Italy, but in the country as a whole? You said that “most” of us would be in the same boat, which implies a nationwide effect. Is that what you’re saying? Also, what is it about Italy that leads you to believe that it’s the most likely scenario facing America and not, say, Japan or South Korea?
The East Asian democracies are the ones doing best. They have racial solidarity and high social trust going for them, and tend to obey authority and pull together. China is the outlier in that part of the world due to its government, which let the people simmer in the broth for a month before doing anything at all. More ‘chaotic’ nations, those blessed with diversity and skepticism, won’t do as well. Spring break didn’t happen like normal on the beaches of East Asia, you can be sure. I suspect we’ll follow the European trajectories, but will be happy to be… Read more »
I’m still at a loss as to how my knowing of someone who’s died or knowing someone who knows someone that died, as anything to do with policy? People die, people live. People who have died are gone. People who have lived must continue to live—and that life must continue in the current society.
Now the question is, what sort of society should that be in order to facilitate the best results for the living? Further, discussion of that future society does not necessarily require that we wait until all events have played out.
If you keep in mind the Doctor’s comments of a week or two ago, the potential for this thing being big and bad was a hypothetical, and he was not exactly flippant about it, but had suspicions that the fears about the actual reach and breadth of the thing might have been overblown. Now he is seeing real infected patients, and he is no doubt taking the responsibility, which good doctors do, of shepherding those patients back to health and vitality. Seeing patients in danger, rolling in, has to be a very sobering experience for a doctor. My guess is… Read more »
Italy is no longer reporting. Like China, Italy’s numbers have blanks in the “New Cases” and”New Deaths” columns at Worldmeters.info. Something smells to me.
Excuse me if I’m reading you wrong, but you are guessing 100 million infected, with millions critically ill or dying? Those percentages haven’t happened anywhere yet. I respect your opinion, but I’m taking it with a giant pinch of salt. High numbers of new cases doesn’t mean millions of dead people. The majority of those infected in multiple nations, thus far, are asymptomatic or only mildly ill. We have a neighbor with family in Hong Kong, and they say everything is back to normal, with only a week or so of quarantine. Some nations, like Singapore, Japan and Korea, avoided… Read more »
Doc. Appreciate your observations. Not sure group sentiment is that the current disease is fake. I believe it’s real. Discussion to me is how best to evaluate the cost/benefit of the response. As you’ve astutely noted, there are those who wish to take advantage of the crisis, any crisis, to fundamentally change society. It may be unavoidable, but I’ve not resigned myself to such at this time.
Look also at the way the majority of people are whole-heartedly on board Maybe where you live but not necessarily where I live. As an independent contractor who delivers food I can tell you that a lot of my customers and none of the people who work at the places where I pick up orders (restaurants and a major regional grocery chain) have flat out told me that this whole covid-19 thing is mostly hype and media-generated hysteria. They’re not buying the bravo sierra for a nanosecond. That said they have no choice but to knuckle under when the government… Read more »
If Trump is going to play Wartime President now, then let Senator Richard Burr be tried and hung as war profiteer.
One death may or may not be a tragedy, but it can be attention-getter.
“. . . let Senator Richard Burr be tried and hung as war profiteer.”
We could all use some cheering up.
Sold all his stonks after a secret meeting about the coronachan? Yeah, that’s a pretty bad look. This whole thing is pretty damn crazy. I’m actually pretty optimistic about it. If nothing else, crisis’ and panic open the door for dramatic shifts in the status quo. There is nothing I fear more than things continuing as they have been. We have been speeding down a road to ruin for far too long.
https://nypost.com/2020/03/20/richard-burr-kelly-loeffler-urged-to-resign-for-selling-stocks-after-coronavirus-briefing/
At least four of them so far. Surely, there are many more. You can be sure Schumer got his beak wet too. McConnell too.
Nothing will happen. This has been standard practice in Washington for decades. They are exempt from insider trading laws.
This is another situation where Trump would have no problem mustering a guillotine mob to seal the fate of the corrupt. He won’t, but the way we’re going it might come to that.
A good strategy for Trump will be to “run against congress” in the Fall. Worked for Truman.
Oh, something will happen, certainly to Burr and Loeffler who are Republicans. The Democrats are in a frothy-mouthed frenzy to get a Senate majority before Justice Ginsberg passes away. Republicans keep trying to show their virtue by committing political seppuku and this time they might get the job done.
Burr is retiring. Collins will bash Loeffler to death with this in the GA Senate election.
Thought experiment. If YOU had secret information about a possible economic cataclysm, would you too sell your investments? Would you tell your friends, your kids, your dad?
Damned straight! I DO think I’d try harder to keep it quiet, though. Just in case.
Possibly with the current meltdown perhaps this is another load of bricks onto the overloaded mule that is white America? We might be nearing the straw that finally breaks the system?
I’m beginning to suspect that Atlas won’t get an opportunity to shrug. I figure he’ll bleed out from a thousand cuts first.
You really think that Burr isn’t going to resign? That this just happened, now? Burr was causing real problems for Trump a few months back, talking shit big time. Now he is a dead man walking. Just ask Jeff Flake…
He chairs the intel committee. No elected official will dare speak out against him. That and all of them do this stuff. Trading on insider information is how they managed to become millionaires of six figure salaries.
Scott Brown introduced the “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act” back in 2011. After he lost to Warren, the law was quickly “amended” to make the dealings of the Swamp more opaque than ever.
Yep. He wound up with no friends in the party as a result. That’s why Burr can tell Tucker to go bleep himself.
I think that “Hanging is too good for him” as my grandmother used to say.
I quite like the public spectacle associated with M. Guillotine’s device, complete with tumbril. Somewhere on the National Mall would seem appropriate.
Of course, we’d want to bring it up to date and the modern day equivilent would seem to be a woodchipper.
The problem is, once you go there, it gets used on everyone, in turn. c.f. French Revolution. Though most everyone it gets used on lives in Capitol City, so there is that…
Somewhere I read that Robespierre was a huge of Madame le Guillotine – until it was his turn to become intimate with her.
bilejones, one must exercise extreme caution when choosing a petard seeing as how one is always liable to find himself hoisted upon it,
woodchipper is more messy.
No woodchippers. Good lord, man.
Now Madame Guillotine, though, if French damsels in lace decollage, bell hoops, and silk became a thing as well…
La Belle Epoque Novo. The Revival.
A celebration of life after the grim Lockdown!
The below Media-ite story says they sold “shortly after receiving classified into about the ill effects of then looming coronavirus pandemic.”
Translation: After receiving a briefing about how the government was about to shutdown the economy with the inevitable crash of the stock market.
This was not “shrewd investing.” This was blatant criminality. But as Z Man says, nothing will happen. I would be fun run against one of these critters and just bombard them with their perfidy. Sadly, they would be reelected anyway, but it would still be fun…
These people — both parties — hate you.
https://www.mediaite.com/news/three-more-senators-reported-to-have-sold-off-stock-shares-before-coronavirus-meltdown/
If only t’were possible.
Isn’t it infuriating to see mayors and governors order ordinary citizens off the streets and threaten them with punishment if they refuse to comply, after allowing vagrants and the mentally incompetent to squat with impunity on those same streets while claiming that they could do nothing about it?
When things come roaring back….. The service sector which employs a significant percentage of the workforce will simply jump back into the thick of things? Fat chance. Most of these people are forced to live paycheck to paycheck. They are the canaries in the coal mine. It will have a ripple effect throughout the economy. Unemployment and YangBucks may paper over things for a short period but how about the long term? Manufacturing may come running back home but there will be a serious time lag between the contraction in the service economy and the rebuilding of the manufacturing base… Read more »
We have Top Men working on this. Top. Men.
Georgia, they don’t, but *we* do.
Thanks to the Zman for taking a lead.
I would not have realized we’re facing a an unprecedented ‘nationwide 30-day lock-down’, but for the Z-blog.
Now I and we can prepare as best we can.
I think the Woke might see this as their defining WWll moment, as they imagine telling the grandxids of their heroically inspiring March For Unity, showing backwards haters what Our Diversity can achieve. All the oppressed world are global citizens and Americans, equal in the eyes of Gaia and Corona-chan. Except the haters, Nazis, and Trump voters, of course.
I’ve seen recent numbers saying that 71% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. If this goes on more than a few weeks there will be a lot of angry, desperate people out there looking to take from those who were smart enough to set something aside for a rainy day. Prep accordingly.
There are already news reports of looting in California, London and Paris. This is after only a few day.
LA, Paris, London? Well, knock me down with a feather. What with their massive non-native populations and the fact that they’re filled to the rim with vibrancy, they ought to be the safest places in the world.
That was going on before the virus (in cali at least)
Yes, it’s my impression that Californians begin everyday with the “looting forecast” – Today we will see some light pilfering in the inland valleys, possibly spreading to the coastal hills by afternoon. Widespread dumpster fires and petty larceny expected North of Long Beach…
Not San Francisco? What? Are the soup kitchens still running? I’d think SF would be one of the first places to see such civil disorder break out.
So many reasons for weapons and ammo purchases now. No arrests unless you actually murder someone, plus let all the dindus go because they might get the sniffles. And while all these people are out of work and out of business, the landlords (how do I combine parentheses and some sign for Han/Indian?) are warning people to pay up or be evicted. Plus money is germs so go all digital, plus . . . crap, it’s endless. Whether manufactured or not letting a crisis go to waste, they’re going all in. 2032 got here a bit early, folks.
Yeah the pimp hand of the gov’t. Takes the money you earned from whorin’ with one hand, bitch-slaps you with the other, then when the tears well-up he knows its time to hand you back 40% of your money because he really does care. Now get back to work bitch. The convenience of manufacturing’s slow return, which will happen at least in enough areas for pressers, is that to the owners it really doesn’t matter at this point whether the sweatshop is in Vietnam or North Carolina because there are already plenty of Vietnamese in NC to work for sweatshop… Read more »
Yves, how true. Stat’s for last year were indicating a real growth in wages of 3%. After this fiasco, wages will be back down to prehistoric levels and the dirt people will be once again happy to even have a job.
The game is rigged—you can’t win—you can’t break even—hell, you can’t even quit the game.
But but but . . . Walmart is hiring!
Amazing coincidence: these are the three laws of thermodynamics. Can’t win, can’t draw, have to play. We’re in Entropy Hell.
There is going to be immediate economic activity (including new hiring) at the start of the in-migration of manufacturing. Once the physical plant is back and running, economic activity will ramp up steadily for decades. Wait until china is hit with lawsuits for all this shit…
(From my perspective) I think you have done very well to keep your head at this time, and this is very rare: you give some examples of several people who I thought were sound, but have spectacularly failed this challenge. Indeed it seems to you me that you started-off down the wrong track with this business, but (and this is unusual) backed-away from where you were going, recovered; and have start making valuable analyses over the past days. One thing I think you need to consider is that crashing the world economy may be deliberate – indeed I believe it… Read more »
Bingo. Green New Deal! You’re all going to die in 12 years! Ha! Pull the other one.
Would you believe, a vanishingly small number of you Are going to have a mild cold… right now! Really? Holy cow, global tyranny is simply a must-do. Go for it!
Brilliant, really. Why do psychopaths have to be so intelligent?
Incredible. AOC must be laughing herself silly now.
I agree with you but for a different reason. I would not be surprised if the virus was used – used, not created – to crash & reset the economy to something more rational & sustainable. I know that Z readers tend to think the worst of our ruling class and they are usually correct, but top economists (the ones not always in media) tend to be a level-headed bunch, and I suspect they were worried about the trajectory of the national & world economy for the past few years. It’s all built on debt, credit, and micro-trades. You don’t… Read more »
Marko, I’m interested in your idea of a “beneficial” crash, but I don’t believe in the beneficence of others, and economists are low on my list—as I too believe it when they, themselves, call it the dismal science.
Perhaps you’d elaborate with a hypothetical scenario or two in which the future outcome of this world crash evolves into a more sustainable economic order? Then perhaps I’d have a better understanding of what you are saying.
A quick, furious financial crash, generated by a true crisis (war, pestilence, you name it) is a perfect way to reset the financial system. The only other way to reset the markets is to have a devastating financial collapse, and in that case all the world’s eyes are on the financial players, and governments and God knows who gets involved, probably making things worse. With a true crisis, you have a cover and can solve systemic issues without too many eyes judging you. An optimist would see this as a way for Serious Market Men to go in and sweep… Read more »
You can bet your bottom dollar on it.
Question, Bruce Charlton, if I may. Now I’m not disputing your premise. I’d just like you to walk me through how the elites you posit are behind the shutdown stand to profit by/from the resultant collapse. Illumine me. I truly wish to know. No irony/sarcasm intended. I have no problem believing someone would initiate a global collapse if it would profit them, I just cannot see how anyone would profit from such an event. I say this especially since the collapse could easily exceed anticipated bounds and end up bring the initiators down too. I do not believe that even… Read more »
I do not fear the virus as much as I do the concerted effort by the television networks, and newspapers to sow doubt, and discord, and to undermine every effort that the President is making. This can lead only to chaos. They are playing with fire in a barn full of straw. Will they be happy to see riots in the streets? Martial law? A body count that dwarfs anything brought on by the covid virus? I believe they either do not care what the results of their campaign of lies and slander produce, or that they hope to see… Read more »
They are playing with fire in a barn full of straw. Will they be happy to see riots in the streets? Martial law? A body count that dwarfs anything brought on by the covid virus? “Yes” to all the above because it will give them more ammunition to use in their unending campaign “to undermine every effort that the President is making”. Their sole goal is regime change and they have no scruples when it comes to pursuing that goal. They desire nothing more than to remove a lawfully elected president and they will accept nothing less than Donald J… Read more »
Governor Tom Wolfe of PA shut down ‘non-life-sustaining’ business last night, which apparently also means Coal Mines must shut down… Coal plants stockpile anywhere between 30 to 90 days of burn. But shutting down the mines means reduced restocking at the plants. But it’s “non-life-sustaining”. Steel mills are still open though.. I guess nobody thought of the coke facilities for the blast furnaces?
These people are insane. I am so pissed of right now. I am supposed to start a new job on March 30. Still planning to start via telecommute, but I am freaking worried now.
They act like they’re terrified of death, but then make decisions like they’ll live forever, yes insane! I heard from my boss this morning that any business that is a “critical supplier” (and a supplier to the critical supplier) will need to stay open. This includes energy (oil, gas, but I would presume coal too), medical, defense, food – the list goes on but we both puzzled what the point was. The further down the supply chain you go, the more likely places will have to stay open since those companies are at the base of the supply pyramid. Maybe… Read more »
So we’ve seen the last of The State for a while then.
Internet, banking and credit outages, that’s what I fear. The Big One.
Like the Lockdown, I can’t imagine it, though.
Update: headed to a shop for a minor repair. The entrance door will be locked, I was told, but they want me to call outside the door instead and they take payment over the phone.
Banks are open. Too life-sustaining apparently. My company supplies to medical manufacturers. We’re closed. M&M Mars is still at least partially open, I hear. Again, must be too life-sustaining.
Probably just another Dem party shakedown imo. Pay to work.
And you’re sitting in the middle of the seat!
Fingers crossed for ya Badthink. Perhaps the trickle down of the payroll “loan” package coming out of the swamp will keep your job safe.
Maybe I am the crazy one, but crazy or not, messing with big complicated things always has unanticipated results. This is an iron law of systems. Even if the response is appropriate to the danger, taking a sledge hammer to the very complex system that is American society will have consequences that no one can anticipate.
I’m surprised at the amount of pushback people give when this is pointed out.
I asked a former friend just yesterday to list for me the government actions, if any, that he considers completely off the table when dealing with coronavirus. This is a married man, with kids, in a job of some importance, who heretofore has always been a reasonable person, even a conservative. I got told, verbatim, to go fuck myself. This is the level of “reasoning” we’re dealing with. Give the modern American “man” the tiniest bit of psychological stress, and he reverts to a toddler.
Information overload. People are being bombarded with notifications and google is pushing it and the press is pushing it and the TV is pushing it. It is all anyone is talking about.
Maybe. A week ago I was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Now they’re just freaking out for the sake of freaking out. It takes a lot to get me to hold a grudge, but telling me to go f*ck myself does the trick every time. And now I’ve lost a friend to this nonsense. That’s another one I owe the Media.
Yeah. Everyone loves to pretend that everything we do only has benefits and that there is no costs on the ledger. Well, now some of those costs are becoming more obvious, like your friend telling you to go eff yourself. That is a cost of the hysterical media.
This thinking has become extremely widespread. Like immigration only has benefits to the GDP and no costs at all.
Bull, you’re not surprised at all 😉
Blast. Caught me!
Some of these people may even have read Joseph Tainter and NN Taleb, too.
Taleb is in full panic mode. He has gone off the deep end with his insane Precautionary Principle.
Sure thing, I agree, and William M Briggs’s takedown of NN Taleb’s precautionary principle mistakes still holds true.
Nevertheless, there’s still validity to some of the stuff Taleb has written about the dangers of messing with complex systems, even if he is flaking out at the moment and continuing to be an obnoxious goon.
On the basis of “suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain” how could any action – or INaction – with regard to covid-19 be justified. To this observer Taleb’s PP would force a total paralysis of any policy making process since any action could be subject to a “suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain”. Any thing a leader/ruler does has at least the potential to cause some harm. How would one go about defining “severe” in such a context? I’m all for exercising “an abundance of caution” but soon or late a leader/ruler… Read more »
I probably have mentioned it before, but John Gall’s Systemantics (aka The Systems Bible) does a great job distilling the problems with systems (and also the irrational belief in them).
In addition to the other pieces of literature mentioned, now would be a good time to read H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” the story of a once-great alien civilization that declines and collapses under its own weakness.
Lovecraft was an admirer of Oswald Spengler and the story, written in the 30’s, is an obvious metaphor for where HPL thought we were headed. It’s tough to say he wasn’t correct.
The Elder Things were so great even Cthulhu wouldn’t mess with them, but then they gave equal rights to a Stone-age race….
Now would actually be a good time to read all of Lovecraft.
http://www.lovecraft-stories.com/story/at-the-mountains-of-madness
The guy was Based.
Be very, very careful, people….your rulers in current government, pennsylvania and federal, who won the most recent popularity contest…err..election……are getting incredibly more powerful and arrogant using this “crisis” to grab more power for themselves…we’re GIVING AWAY the farm…our governor has GRANTED himself the absolute non-legal power to SHUT DOWN BUSINESSES….if this were the 1950’s there would be revolution in the streets…..it is truely a sad state of affairs…..if 30% of us died from this virus while going to work and school,etc. , I would think as a society we’d come out of it stronger……we will never recover from this government… Read more »
Massive money grab. Cookie jar is busted open and the kids are in a frenzy on the kitchen floor. Free shit is all Trump has left. For years it has been “best economy ever, stock market all time high, unemployment lowest ever, jobs jobs beautiful factories…” and “gina gina gina”. Then within three weeks time its “we are all gonna die” unless all of the above is wrecked errr re-priced. Don’t worry though we learned from last time that unless you want a bunch of dirty street-shitting commies camping on wall street you need to throw some bones to main… Read more »
Wall Street was ideally a place for the little guy to participate in the grow-grow-grow of the economy and corporate enterprise. It was also a way to stick it to Goldman’s “muppets” (the little guys) through trading and packaged products, and it is now dominated by the big business and corporate executive “skims”. The old-school Wall Street and the little guy investing is the Potemkin Lower Manhattan facade.
100 upcommies, Screwtape.
Everything we were told about Adam Smith was a headfake. It had the competition- us- chasing our own tails while the informed got connections.
Plus! We built all the cool stuff they use.
I feel so, so violated. He didn’t even call back.
{snif} Doncha just love the smell of frog soup?
I think I see the problem with Steve, Greg, and others. They are putting too much faith in institutions, that they mistakenly believe are cultivating the ‘best and brightest’ , much like the Los Alamos project or the Apolo program, and thus we must defer to such institutions for the solutions to social problems such as the virus. These scientists are supposed to have the answers,and if their models say that 300 million Americans will get sick if we don’t shut everything down, then shut it down. These institutions are not cultivating our best and brightest but are dysfunctional and… Read more »
CDC, FDA, and the Surgeon General have already proven they are all about the ‘vibrant and diverse.’
The experts are using models which cannot even predict the past. If the aerospace industry used models of such “quality”, we would see aircraft of all sorts falling out of the sky on a daily basis.
I get around to visiting about a hundred and fifty different businesses in a week, every week. I can tell you that none of the manufacturing is shutting down and almost no one is panicking at all. The few that are panicking, however, are in a complete mental meltdown. Most useless office jobs are closed however. But they are not productive jobs. The employees who would hold baking contests at their “job” are all at home. Amazon has no more of their own delivery drivers they have all been laid off. Despite what news stories you read they are gone.… Read more »
My husband’s office has about 50 of the perhaps 70 people left working in their large, multi-story office building. I seriously doubt any significant work is not getting done by the absence of those hundreds of ‘working women’ and the men who serve under them.
So Chloroquine might be the magic bullet? A simple drug invented in the 30s and as common as aspirin in the tropics? I sure hope it turns out to be the case, and crashing our economy and forfeiting liberties was a ridiculous overreaction.
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-new-hope.html
Chloroquine is a synthetic substitute for quinine. I was able to order some quinine powder capsules a few weeks ago on Amazon, sadly they are sold out now.
If only Warburg’s tincture was still available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg%27s_tincture
And… Now 3 International Studies Find Chloroquine with Azithromycin Shows 100% Success Rate in Treating Coronavirus in 6 Days!
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/huge-development-now-3-international-studies-find-chloroquine-with-azithromycin-shows-100-success-rate-in-treating-coronavirus-in-6-days-video/
Two of the most commonly available drugs in the world (I’ve been prescribed both at different times). We are destroying our economy when, for a fraction of the money being spent, the feds could order 330 million doses of the stuff, hand them out, and be done with this nonsense.
But if they did that then the crisis would pass and they would have nothing for which to blame the President.
Sitting in my truck on break as I type this. Just saw a group of youngsters walk by throwing a football around. Kids playing outside, a rare sight these days. So at least there’s that.
On the other hand, this could be my last day on the job thanks to our brave governor.
Adults panic, kids make the best of it.
My GF casually said last night “i wonder if there will be a spike in babies born 9 months from now”. We had walked around the other day and it was like a spring sunday in some pre-iphone era. Couples both home, gardening, playing with kids in the yard. It was lovely but also kind of eerie because that has become so rare i suppose. I thought for a second then responded that there will definitely be more babies. Just not in this neighborhood. These birds around here are career ladies. They are all on birth control. But a couple… Read more »
Thank you.
I wrote a long time ago that the key to a good bio weapon is that it kills enough of your enemy to cripple him, but no so many that it boomerangs on you and wipes out all your people too. This was back during the anthrax / dirty bomb era in the early 2000’s. China is almost certainly under-reporting cases and deaths. More Chinese die before lunch on a Tuesday than in their reported CV19 death toll. China also knows that the West has a different attitude towards this stuff. So, they game it out, and either release it… Read more »
You have to wonder if some neo-con nuts have another plan in place just like 9-11. Remember The Project for a New American Century?
You’re right. These irresponsible and belligerent actions by the Chinese make it blindingly obvious what we must do — We must begin carpet bombing Papua New Guinea immediately!
The Soviets had a very advanced biological warfare program. No doubt the Chinese picked the brains of former Russian bioweapons people to start their program.
I think it is possible the Chinese did this on purpose, but I suspect it was a blunder. Still, even if they did and publicly admitted to it, our rulers will do nothing, because that would racist.
Check the link I posted above. Explains the details of what the Chinese have planned.
We’re being led by a suicide cult, why would they even care if it was intentional?
I think it’s far more likely to be a US rather than Chinese concoction. The US had no compunctions about using Anthrax in order to get the Patriot Act passed.
Likely formulated in Fort Dietrich, our former bioweapons lab, and taken by a Chinese scientist working in our lab, back to Wuhan, years ago. That’s how the Chinese make the claim that it is a “U.S.” thing. It is, they stole it fair and square, like everything else they wanted. The AIDS-like receptor hooks suggest someone installed those into the virus at some point (I actually know nothing, would be interested to hear what knowledgeable people think about that one), and that Asians appear more succeptible, because they have more receptors, could be either because all of that was unknown… Read more »
I have heard this also. I think it is highly likely a bioweapon which explains the over-the-top reaction from government.
The Han would have no problems using chemical weapons either. Occam’s Razor says a Chinaman dropped a petri dish in their own lab. We’re probably never going to have good, verifiable information that answers this question.
In an era of fake news, false flaggotry, meta-narrative and information overload, is Occam’s Razor even a good hueristic anymore, or is it now just the easiest trap to fall into?
Was it ever a good hueristic, or is it a shibboleth from Conan Doyle and others?
The classic Razor is about finding the explanation for the known facts that requires the fewest “entities”. So you see a shop window break and hear a loud bang a second or so later. It’s reasonable to think that someone fired a rifle at something near you, or maybe AT you and hit the window. It’s also possible though that the bang was just a car up the road backfiring and there was actually someone in the shop firing out through the window using a suppressor so you didn’t hear the shot. In either case it’s a good idea to… Read more »
Bile, our rulers have have been coordinating with Communist China for a generation, yet suddenly they’ll rush to the defense of the citizenry they love so much.
There’s been a lot of speculation about how the lab in Wuhan might have led to the release of the virus in the nearby seafood market, and here’s what I’ve come up with. There’s been reports that the closest relative for the Wuhan virus was found from a bat in a cave in Yunnan, a thousand miles from Wuhan. We know the Chinese were canvassing the country to try and find new strains of the virus that were out there. So, how did they do this? They probably paid contractors to catch bats from all over the country so they… Read more »
First time comment, thanks for all you do Z , keep it up. Your site is an Island of sanity in a sea of chaos…
” the key to a good bio weapon is that it kills enough of your enemy to cripple him, ”
Perhaps.
A lesson the the VietCong learned very early on in their taste of US aggression is that it is far more debilitating both morally and in terms of resources to badly injure rather than kill.
I wonder what long term effects will result from the current panic inducer.
“Maybe I am the crazy one, but crazy or not, messing with big complicated things always has unanticipated results.” No, you are not crazy it is just that you can see what is coming. You are really “woke” in the real way and not like those idiots on the left. The California governor put the whole state on house arrest today — for their own good of course — and even Stalin never tried to go that far. And so far, it looks like no one is going to try to give him what he really deserves. I am a… Read more »
Women (stereotype) are women, jews (stereotype) are women, boomers (stereotype) are women.
They say: ‘You want what I have but you can’t have it.’
You say: ‘I don’t want it.’
They say: ‘Yes you do!’
Then they blow up the world, because all they wanted was to be the center of attention.
This has been my exact sentiment all along. We’re spending a trillion dollars to stop an 80 year old with COPD from dying, while 20 million people hang themselves because they’re financially ruined. And what better condition would we be in if we hadn’t spent 10 trillion on Jew wars?
No do the ME wars. We’re in Yemen now, FFS.
Why if I were an American, I would be fretting right now about the effect of the virus on the black employment rate.
Only if you were a Republican desperate to prove how not-racist you are.
But surely it’s better to choke to death, gurgling on your own fluids than run any risk of being wayciss?
We won’t be hearing that line again for a long while.
At last! Someone reminds us of what is most important! And let’s not forget to prioritize the self-esteem of Chinese Americans above our own lives!
When they said Diversity Inclusion Equity (DIE), they meant it.
This is actually true, depending on where you live. A lot of my rentals are in heavily black urban neighborhoods. Young, bored, out-of-work, cash-strapped black men are a recipe for trouble.
Do you rent to them? If not, what kind of tenants are you able to procure in that setting?
A couple of my houses have occupants that fit the description, but they are not the primary leaseholders Still, I expect April 1 to be bad for collecting rent.
I’ve got three units and I’m *ahem* very picky about whom I rent to. The difficulty in my neck of the woods is finding the right people willing to live in an area where they may come into contact with the vibrancy, but are gainfully employed and trustworthy. I’ve got a couple good ones right now, but the third apartment is vacant and I’m trying to be very careful in my search. I’d rather it sit empty for 6 months than let it to someone who doesn’t fit the bill.
How would they differ from the typical urban male black?
Quantity, man. And excuses “Da Kung Flu made me do it.”
Especially, King, since the schools are closed.
ok. So maybe we are on the same page here. I’m all for caution – working from home for office types, the grocery store sanitizing the shopping carts continuously, limiting crowds, that sort of thing. The shelter in-place orders in California and elsewhere are batshit crazy and it really does seem that some nutters plan to tank the entire economy all at once.
Of course, there is a plan to streamline the H1-B visas, because of course.
“Of course, there is a plan to streamline the H1-B visas, because of course.”
Let me guess. Our informative and gravely unfortunate StreetsAndSan met one of those potential H1Bs on his way to a sanctuary city.
Probably waved on thru by ICE at landing, since he had a (somebody else’s) kid.
The dilemma in A Mote in God’s Eye for the alien race was their mass reproduction inevitably brought about social and economic collapse of their planet, hence why they wanted the stellar transport technology to travel to new planets. Of course, the Humans wanted to stop them, as their rapid spread would soon lead to war and conflict with other peoples.
The dilemma of humanity will be how to keep prosperous countries to have the will to maintain their civilization and reproduce after comfort is achieved.
Maybe it is just me but I always thought the Moties were like the Chinese.
Intelligent in a way that is useful to them and their reverse engineering skills.
Agreed. That was always my sense too.
The trick is to make modernity family friendly to the working class something which hasn’t been done. Tucker Carksin repeatedly points this out.
Out ruling and monied classes do not want a prosperous working and middle-class because it means less money in their pocket. This is why we have so much off-shorting of jobs and industry to what amounts to countries who practice slave labor.
The upper classes have always had a tendency to rot and die out do to bad mating choices that often breed out vitality and intelligence.
The secret Chet, is to have a reason. When you’re uncomfortable, you have a reason. To get comfortable. When you’re comfortable, you must invent a new reason.
I watched the old “Last Man on Earth” the other night, and even though Heston scoffed at it when watching to prep for “Omega Man” and Richard Matheson had his name removed from the credits, it still maintains its weird elegiac power. Not really scary, but poignant. But I think “Dawn of the Dead” is much more apt for right now, what with the mad consumerism accompanying the End of Times: American cities will be left smoking ruins, the global elite will have retreated to their underground bunkers at Raven Rock Mountain Complex, and worse of all, Amazon will suspend… Read more »
As I’ve been saying all along, it’s only a matter of time before the negroes find out that the fence is no longer electrified. Like the dinosaur scene in Jurassic Park.
that will be a scary day indeed.
thus, whites (and friends) should cling to the 2a more than ever these days.
Careful with the racist characterizations, there friend. In my work of delivering food I’ve come across more than a couple of black people who are just as upset about the hype and hysteria surrounding covid-19 as anybody here. Yes, I agree that the rank and file person of African descent probably has no clue where to begin to look for a clue to what’s going on but then how many whites are truly clued in? Sometimes I rail at “females and mud people” but there really are good and decent and intelligent people of all colors. It just seems that… Read more »
I’m inclined to relate today’s situation with ‘Land of The Dead’.
We’re really missing the forest from the trees on this. My company cannot get compressors anymore as or vendor has been told to make them for ventilators. Along with supply chain disruptions, customers are canceling order. We cannot get chemical masks (N95) to protect my workers at the plant.
We’ll lose more to deaths from suicide, drugs, alcohol, loss of insurance, etc. and you are correct, the boomers are causing undo pressure upon the system.
Stop it with the Boomers, or show evidence that the rest of the population is against the present state of affairs. The enemy is us, in general, and duplicitous politicians in particular. If there is any relation to Boomers, it’s that they are being used as a pawn/prop in this high stakes power game—as in pictures of frail old grandmas holed up in their apartment awaiting the Grimm Reaper of death in the form of COVID-19.
This boomer thanks you 😉
Out and about last night and this morning, things are really quiet out there. Miramar continues to house the quarantined, with guards and barricades at the little side gate where the buses come and go, making sure no quarantined person escapes. Wouldn’t want to get on one of those charter buses after that gig. Governor Newsome here in CA announced a “not really” lockdown last night, statewide, but exceptions for everything and everyone, as long as there are reasons to be at work or have your business open. But no socializing or having any fun, plebes. The vibe really reminds… Read more »
We are well and truly into terra incognita now. We are off the known parts of the map in well into the part with the legend “Here there be dragons”.
Alright, now I want to go reread some Niven / Pournelle. Of course my f&*#^ library is closed for the duration.
Lucifer’s Hammer, Ringworld, protector etc.
Footfall, The Integral Trees, Inferno, Escape from Hell…
Your mention of boomers and their parents brought this to mind. Two things got my attention as an ignorant kid in the sixties. One, the government announced it was taking sliver out of coin. Nothing to see here, they assured me most assuredly. That was my first awakening. Two, they announced Medcare. Our most venerated citizens would no longer have to worry about the end of life. Fifty billion dollars, a large sum at the time, exited senior savings accounts in one year. Maybe, likely, the boomers got to keep a large chunck of that money when the not as… Read more »
I just don’t buy our leaders being stupid. I don’t think they are stupid, I think they are evil. “Never attribute that to incompetence what can adequately be explained by malevolence.” (or something like that:) They may be unstable and prone to acting foolish, but they are also very aware of of their goals. Even if foolishness can partially explain their behavior, it is not an accident that it always is in such a way that we lose and they win. It’s like the press. I don’t deny that they are stupid and lazy in addition to being malevolent, but… Read more »
Some of them are genuinely stupid, though. I assume most of them are being bought or blackmailed or both.
I think they’re incompetents trying to larp villainy and doing a very poor job of it 🙂 Making a huge mess more than anything.
The idiots who want to shut down the world to prevent hospitals being overrun are just making a new mistake to deal with the old mistakes of globalism and more importantly “efficiency,” which involved closing a bunch of hospitals. Like all of the other “just in time” efficiency improvements, they have traded resiliency for efficiency. This works fine when everything is running perfectly. But as soon as something goes wrong, the whole thing falls apart. This thinking is now pervasive in our world.
The question is only tangentially one of efficiency. In an era of immense technological ability, how does a hospital stock itself? This particular pandemic has only palliative care as a possible “treatment”. That care being bed, oxygen, and as last resort—mechanical ventilation. Yeah, there is a bit of antibiotics and now a possible malarial treatment, but ignore that for the moment. You want all that at the ready, or in warehouses? What about another pandemic? What specifically will be needed for that? What medicines with limited shelf life should be stocked? Or for that matter highly trained personnel. Our “efficiency”… Read more »
You have a valid point, but I think there is a happy medium between diverting way too many of our resources towards unlikely but catastrophic events. From everything I am hearing, they are really worried that the hospitals will be overwhelmed. My city used to have quite a few hospitals that are now completely gone and have not been replaced. You have to go further to a different hospital. The hospital that serviced my neighborhood closed like 25 years ago. It’s not just hospitals. Entire supply chains are “just in time” with little to no inventory. Storing stuff costs money… Read more »
Guess I’m luck to live in a city – San Antonio, Texas – with a not-insignificant percentage of the total hospital beds in the country. We got a whole shed load of hospitals here; military (Wilford Hall and Brook Army Medical Center) and civilian.
Since the Z Man didn’t mention it, I will: The Omega Man, 1971, starrring Charlton Heston. Campy and a bit pozzy, but Charlton effing Heston! I loved it as a kid…
Here is a link to the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2FU9uJh5YY
I’ve always been a penny-pinching recluse, and used to joke that if everyone started living like me, the economy would collapse into the greatest depression the world had ever seen. Now everyone’s forced to live like me, and well, yeah.
Yesterday, I was feeling optimistic that the tide would turn on this hysteria soon enough. Maybe it was seeing toilet paper return to the store. I was thinking another week and serious questions regarding the necessity of all these measures would start getting asked. Today, the various D governors have shown they’re going to empty their chamber while they can, so I’m thinking it may be Easter before there is some serious push back. But what somewhat black pills me is we’re such a culture of short-attention spans that even if (especially if?) this blows over in fairly short order,… Read more »
Unfortunately, I think you’re being grossly optimistic as to when this ends. None of these governors is going to give up the right to dictate to businesses and people when they can go to work or leave the house for the foreseeable future. They are armed in fact with some bulls**t forecast from the UK that it will take over 18 months before we can even consider leaving our homes to let them justify a year-long lockdown. Not only that but the UK forecasts predicts these mysterious disappearances and re-appearances of the virus, so even if there are no new… Read more »
Trump and the CDC are going to wreck the country economically and financially with the measures they implemented. Then factor in the Chinese screwing with us in terms of supplying us with medication and other medical supplies and worse their factories have not ginned up yet. We are not receiving consumer, indusrial goods from them or components that our factories need. Hospitals are already having to ration antibiotics and even that Malaria drug is being rationed. India who is one of he suppliers of that drug will no longer export it and that leaves China and they are getting outright… Read more »
If the lesson is learned, the price is worth it.
They claim there was this great flu pandemic in 1918. It went on a couple of years I guess. Lots of folks died, even young people. There was no pharmaceuticals or vaccines then.
They used fresh air and sunshine to treat people. They had a lot of success, but were unable to totally destroy the industrialized society that the West had built.
People of 2020: “Hold my beer!”
It’s amazing how isolating it feels when everyone around you keeps saying “flatten the curve” like it’s a magical spell. I’ve had people tell me how nice it is to work from home since they don’t have to do anything, apparently oblivious to the fact that if there is no economic activity then they won’t have a job for long. A prime example of this feminine hysteria is Rod Dreher from The American Conservative. You really should consider doing a post around this man on his own as I think he perfectly encapsulates how smart people think about this virus.… Read more »
more like rod dresser
He’s the “Benedict Option” guy, right?
Yeah, I used to be a big fan. As a Christian I agreed with the importance of building a community to sustain us through hostile times.
But after about 8,000 global deaths this man totally lost his mind. If I was his friend I would be going to his house and making sure he isn’t painting the window panes and screaming at his children to get inside the house.
In WW2 Rod dreher would have been killed by his own men for screaming and risking their position.
Z has aggressively dunked on Dreher in the past; it was funny as hell and I wouldn’t mind seeing it again.
Nice audio clip from The Prisoner to start the podcast. I got caught up with that maybe ten years ago with crappy youtube quality episodes. Better ones available now. McGoohan went on to play the king in Braveheart.
Used to get deathly ill every winter until I was 7 or 8. Almost suffocated a couple of times. Because of that I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t acutely aware of my mortality. It’s a difficult thing to come to terms with, so maybe it was a blessing in disguise to go through it at a young age. It’s stupid to be reckless, but panicking doesn’t help anyone. Only makes things worse. Life is contingent, and when your time’s up it’s up. There won’t be a damned thing you can do about it. Or you survive, there’s no… Read more »
It’s stupid to be reckless, but panicking doesn’t help anyone. We are in the time of what I call Vanderboegh’s Dictum”. Mike Vanderboegh once rote, “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” I submit to you that we are living in a world where elected rulers are following Mike’s “advice”. Well, for all the good the actions they’re taking will do they might as well be taking it. We are off the map here, folks. Terra FEKKING incognita. Nobody has a clue what happens next after TPTB shut down whole sectors of the economies of… Read more »
Yep ol’ Smaug knows Bilbo stole his cup.
My only fear is of being let down. If this pandemic isn’t The End of The World As We Know It then I’m gonna be real dissapointed .
And while you’re behind the stockade we will expect more and higher quality blogging.
I love The Mote in Gods Eye! Matter of fact my parents had a copy of Larry Nivens Ringworld on their bookshelf and it was what got me interested in science fiction.
Before he died, I struck up a correspondence with Jerry Pournelle. He was a reader!
I was pretty young when I spotted Ringworld on my parents bookshelf but the really cool book art caught my eye. I’ve loved Nivens and Pournells writing ever since.
Pournelle was a definitely a guy on our end of the spectrum.
maybe IQ spectrum but regrettably he was a civ-nat through in through. read his final letter. he died believing in assimilation .
Wow, Pournelle a reader. Loved his blog. He was once of the more thoughtful people out there.
Holy smokes! That’s awesome. I loved Pournelle’s blog. Also loved his “Falkenberg /Codominium” series he co wrote wit SM Stirling. That man had no starry eyed vision about the nature of man. Very sorry to hear he passed.
Way cool that he read your blog.
Gotcha beat! In ’86 I had TEN WHOLE MINUTES ALONE with Larry Niven! He was an absolute sweetheart. I told him how I was working on a technology to retrofit – cheaply – any CRT monitor to do the touch screen functions he wrote about in “Integral Trees”. He was astonished. For years afterward whenever I read anything of his I could hear his voice telling the story.
His website is still up. It’s been given a facelift since he’s died. If you order one of his books through his website (from Amazog) it will help keep that site going.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/sciencefiction/
It seems to me that there was a moment to pull a total 15- 30 day lockdown countrywide in order to head this thing off and we missed our window. A call on February 25 for a nationwide shut down for the whole month of March might have been survivable for more small businesses with some targeted government financial assistance and actually kept our Corvid-19 cases at the level of South Korea instead of creeping up on Iran as we’re doing now. But we didn’t pull the trigger then and now we’re going to see businesses bleed to death slowly… Read more »
Z: “Presumably, if one more person gets sick after that, they will begin bombing American cities.”
That line killed me so I don’t even care.
Dear Mr. Z-Man. I just finished with your podcast and congratulate you for outlining the current situation with clarity, balance and logic. As for not going with the crowd, you may find company with Bertrand Russell who said “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil”. The ruling classes appear determined to continue with the hysteria. They want to shut down one-half the economy and expect to handle this by blowing one trillion dollars. The Wall Street Journal, the respected publication of “normies”, does not seem to have a problem with this. The ruling classes openly talk about following… Read more »
Correction. WSJ editorializes today about “Rethinking the Coronavirus”. Too little to late?
Anyone wondering about this morning’s market rip should know the Fed is buying any piece of trash they can get their hands on:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/historic-day-fed-buy-record-107-billion-securities-today-alone-fed-balance-sheet-explodes
Skeptics can go right to the Fed’s website and look at the balance sheet graphs yourself:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_fedsbalancesheet.htm
In Kevin Costner’s finest work, “Waterworld”, there is a bit character on the badguy oil tanker. A weathered, frail old man. His only function is to sit in a small boat inside the pitch black belly of the beast and call out the depth of the remaining oil when asked. In the final climactic scene, as Costner brings chaos and collapse upon the ship of savage fools, he drops a flare down a shift into that cargo hold of oil. To which the old man in the boat, bathed by the brilliant light of the oil of a forgotten era… Read more »
TPTB are willing to engage in pointless wars as long as it doesn’t effect them. But when it comes to nuke armed China and Russia they are very cautious. I expect once they see an economic depression likely to have them replaced, they will reverse on the economy.
50% of tests are false positives:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32133832/
In China and other places using that kind of test. Here the labs don’t use that method and don’t tolerate that level of errors. A benefit of non-socialized medicine is that we are pretty much the only country with a full-blown diagnostic lab industry. We discussed a few days ago – if anything they hedge their bets towards false negatives, particularly if the sample is improperly handled.
https://files.labcorp.com/labcorp-d8/2020-03/LabCorp_Coronavirus_%28COVID-19%29_Q%26A_March_10_2020.pdf
Must Read
There are still a few men around making fun of the Great Lunacy and though he is, as all of us still thinking are totally inconsequential in the overwhelming terrible noise of feminine screeching,it still gives some comfort and a few laughs
https://www.unz.com/chopkins/covid-19-global-lockdown/
Absolutely prophetic with just one miss instead of DJ should have been BJ Panic Panic on the streets of London Panic on the streets of Birmingham I wonder to myself Could life ever be sane again? The leeds side-streets that you slip down I wonder to myself Hopes may rise on the grasmere But honey pie, you’re not safe here So you run down To the safety of the town But there’s panic on the streets of Carlisle Dublin, Dundee, Humberside I wonder to myself Burn down the disco Hang the blessed DJ Because the music that they constantly play… Read more »
Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
When at the end of seventies disco music was in its pick
young men started to suffocate, cough and have nausea
under heavy a burden of boredom
That it is how punk and new wave are borne but how should we call that disease that ravaged the kingdom of that time? Disco-78
“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Finally it is only appropriate to finish this essay on panic and hanging by another Smiths’ song
Take me out tonight
Where there’s music and there’s people
And they’re young and alive
……
Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and I
Want to see life
Oh, there is a light and it never goes out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siO6dkqidc4&list=PLze5jhu6M0TV_TK7RubF4wkKyORXJmrQu
I’ve long felt that the lyrics to “Still Ill” were most suitable to modern day Britain, vis-a-vis its sundry invaders:
I decree today that life is simply taking and not giving
England is mine, it owes me a living
But ask me why, and I’ll spit in your eye
Oh, ask me why, and I’ll spit in your eye
Well let’s than finish with the only appropriate way National Front Disco The wind blows Bits of your life away Your friends all say “Where is our boy? Oh, we’ve lost our boy” But they should know Where you’ve gone Because again and again you’ve explained that You’re going to Oh, you’re going to Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah England for the English! England for the English! David, the winds blow The winds blow All of my dreams away And I still say “Where is our boy? Ah, we’ve lost our boy” But I should know Why you’ve gone Because again… Read more »
“This town (town) is coming like a ghost town
All the clubs have been closed down
This place (town) is coming like a ghost town
Bands won’t play no more
Too much fighting on the dance floor
Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2oXzrnti4
Because the music they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life.
Words that sum up my feelings about today’s media and political class.
Damn you Z Man — I shocked my zoomer kid last night when I said I agreed with the local government (for once) because of the need to give the fragile health care system time to adapt. Now I may have to walk it back.
I suspect the cost of this will not be so high. Modern capitalism has been shockingly resilient. Whatever happens, this was a great episode — one of your best.
Something I have not heard discussed is what happens when inmates in prisons and county jails start coming down with this virus. Are “compassionate” judges going to just release them and other inmates claiming that it is cruel and unusual punishment to leave them in such an environment?
It’s happening now. Mostly in the same places where TPTB do all they can to prevent you from obtaining a firearm for self-defense.
They’re already letting the non- violent ones out of the local jail and immediately releasing new non- violent arrestees at booking on their own recognizance at the jails in my state’s two most populous counties.