Thoroughly depressed.
Never thought it would come to this, not, at least, here in the USA.
Almost the whole country's, nay, the world's economy on lock-down because of a not particularly deadly virus? In the West a long tradition of human rights and freedom thrown out the window? Hunkered. Bunkered, Blinkered. All this because of a virus imported from the lying ChiComs?
We see the best U.S. President in our lifetimes stampeded by twisted, incomplete data, by floundering "experts," and by a twisted, completely worthless mass media and political class: the triumph of Pennsylvania Avenue politico-technocratic madness over Main Street commonsense.
Never forget, there is science and there are those who call themselves scientists. Not the same thing.
Disgusting.
The President gave up on his hope that we could begin restarting the economy by Easter. The "lockdown" continues in our Quixotic quest against a not very particularly deadly virus; a quest headed by people wrong before about previous "existential" threats. Remember North Korea? SARS? MERS? HIV/AIDS? Ebola? Recurrent flu epidemics/pandemics? The last Rebel Wilson movie?
We survived them all without causing incalculable damage to our economy, life-styles, and basic freedoms. In the US, we have thrown out our Bill of Rights, in particular, the First Amendment. Yes, yes, before somebody chimes in, I realize that this legal opinion is probably accurate (h/t Instapundit): "the simple reality is this: federal courts will not enjoin temporary measures that are facially calculated to save lives." Doesn't mean that this is Right in the real sense, or that damage has not been done to the Constitution, and, of course, "temporary" is in the eye of the promoter, i.e., the bureaucracy and its multi-trillion dollar "rescue" packages using our money. If these "temporary" measures and "rescues" continue, soon we will not need to scrounge for toilet paper, we will use worthless $100 bills.
I do, nevertheless, understand the President's predicament. He will get blamed by the howling lefty mob for each and every infection and death, no matter what he does.
All you have to do is hear how Pelosi and Company are lying and distorting his previous words to know that politically he is in a bind. The fact, remains, however, that the data upon which we allegedly rely to drive our decision-making is horribly flawed. Do you really believe there are no new ChiCom virus cases in China? If so, do like the Dutch and the Spaniards have done, i.e., get testing kits and PPE from China . . . and then find they are worthless.
Per the data of the WHO, if the Communist Chinese have, in fact, stopped the virus dead, how'd they do it? What secret formula have they uncovered to stem the number of cases? I will tell you what it is: LIES. Simple, no? They lie, and the horribly compromised WHO and the media repeat that lie.
Even if we accept the data from more reliable countries, we find that the mortality rate appears heading south, down to flu-levels or below. This seems so even when you consider that just about anybody dying who has the virus gets listed as having died from the virus--something patently false.
Anyhow, keep washing your hands.
Hoppes 9 is a great cleaner . . .
I'm with you. It is infuriating to have Cuomo, that LSOS (lying sack of sh*t) say that the President is lying about ventilators and then turn around and say "oh, yeah, we have them but we're stockpiling them until we need them". As if stockpiling and shortage were two different things. Or Nancy Pelosi of all people accusing the President of "fiddling while people are dying". Or have the GALL to push through $25 million in funding for the Kennedy Center only to have the assholes who run it turn around and lay off the musicians who, presumably, the money was meant to help. All the while useless (for the most part) media promotes the Dems/Chinese and excoriates Trump and the Republicans. My only hope here is that once the virus is done and the results are not as bad as projected (please God) then hopefully many more Americans will wake up to the realization that the left is terrible for America. And, perhaps, people will keep washing their hands and the flu will be less prevalent next year.
ReplyDeleteI hope you're right, and when this ChiCom virus hysteria passes, people realize what a massive fraud has been pushed on us.
DeleteDaily life goes on in most of America.
Delete"Lockdown" is not practical for the vast majority of Americans who have to go to work every day to pay for the squatters, both native and alien. And no force, military or police or an army of professional quacks, is capable of enforcing such a lockdown.
It's a mistake to think that just because New York City, outsized media presence is given to hysterics, that the rest of the country does the same - people who's professions don't inhabit the fantasy-land of media and bureaucracy, don't have the luxury of following insane agendas.
By contrast, if real American livelihoods in Pennsylvania and "Upstate" New York and the rest of the Tristate region goes to pot, what happens in NYC is irrelevant; it's been true since the British allied with savages, from Iroquois to Delawars, to destroy the countryside surrounding New Amsterdam, before the City's inhabitants choked from lack of oxygen and sustenance.
Life in my area is largely untouched beyond the idiots who decided they wanted to corner the market on some essentials like toilet rolls and decided to sell them at profit. My God, buy commodities or company stocks for whom market sentiments have clearly shafted for the short term, not toilet rolls.
Personally, it's somewhat amusing that some New Yorkers (not Upstaters) are worried about being treated like the plague. Among the funniest complaints I've heard from my New York affiliates is that their clown administrators and ring-leader Governor has been busy banning everything from plastic bags to Weddings.
Let's all take a moment to spare a thought for the 38,000,000 people who have had flu "cases" this year, and the 390,000 of them who had to be hospitalized, and the 22,000 of them who have died. Thank the Lord this has been a mild flu year.
ReplyDeleteIt is worth noting that Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, England -- whose predictions did so much to frighten the Usual Suspects -- has since told Parliament that most of the people who die with Covid-19 in their system would have died anyway in the next 2 or 3 months.
Maybe the panicked over-reaction from the power-hungry bureaucracy & the Democrats will extend a few lives -- but at what cost? How many older people are in the future going to commit suicide because the current over-reaction has destroyed their savings and the resulting inflation has left them homeless & hungry?
I'm a grandfather closer to his allotted threescore and ten than to threescore, but I will not commit suicide. I will simplly work until they carry me out feet first.
DeleteGod help me, I just had to read about the other porky items in last week's bill. https://laurencejarvikonline.blogspot.com/2020/03/this-post-listing-pork-in-coronavirus.html
ReplyDeleteOur Republican representatives really need to resist a 4th bill. Dems will clearly go hog wild with that one. I've read it is likely to be brought up late April.
State governments create the problem by forcing companies out of business... federal government steps in to bail out said businesses. Is this insurrection or something?
ReplyDelete- reader #1482
Supposedly now a little more than 3300 deaths in China, but 47,000 plus urns for ashes are filled with remains. The data and implications I hear/read from around the world does not take into consideration cultural and government differences. There is so much crap in the media, it is hard to figure out the truths.
ReplyDeletethe orders were filled with cat urns instead of people urns?
DeleteThe media seem never to put any of these stories in context. China has a huge population, and consequently about 25,000 (!) Chinese people die every single day. During the period in which we have been aware of Covid-19, approximately 2,000,000 Chinese people have died.
DeleteSet in the context of the expected 2,000,000 "normal" deaths, it hardly matters if the Covid-19 deaths are 3,300 or 47,000 -- probably within the usual statistical variation.
Now, if there were 10 times as many urns, then today's stringent reactions might not look like overkill.
In China cat urns are called woks.
DeleteActually, guo. They don't speak Cantonese in Wuhan.
DeleteThe media is driving this. If the President did not follow this course there would be 7x24 coverage on his inaction to slow the spread. The media would be hounding on every single death and pinning it on him.
ReplyDeletePretty sure Trump has a trap laid out for the Media-Democrat Axis in this.. and they're walking into it, armed to the teeth, certain that "This time, we've finally got him!"
DeleteGenerally Trump's traps involve the Democrat-Media Axis presuming that Americans are ignorant idiots. That's why these traps have *always* worked for Trump.
- reader #1482
The large shipment of urns to Wuhan worries me that we may have something more serious than originally thought.
ReplyDeleteBut, being a user of the Chinese language, a former consular officer with experience in Guangzhou (where they eat anything that "turns its back on Heaven" except for tables), and having had some Far Eastern experience, I will fault the Chinese government and WHO, not Trump, for an over-optimistic reaction. Indeed, the whole world was caught unawares by something novel, and official China led all of us, through its initial attempts to cover up reports, to think the thing more manageable than it is.
First of all, in my years in the Far East, I have strolled through many a market where living animals were bought and slaughtered on the spot. I have eaten things I was raised to regard as "weird". Were I in parts of rural Appalachia and offered opossum or raccoon, I'd be game to try it. But I suffered no discernible ill effects.
The larger likelihood is that China's bio-warfare labs in Wuhan leaked something, whether by mistake or design.
It was by design.
DeleteHeltau
When were you in Guangzhou? I was there 97-99, before the consulate moved to the newer part of town. My husband and I went through the wet market on occasion on the way to other destinations. My eyes generally were firmly fixed on the ground so as not to see all the unpleasantness. :( And we always, always, always disinfected any fresh fruits/vegetables purchased from the "dry" side of the market since they were notorious for using "nightsoil" to grow crops. For those not in the know, "nightsoil" is fertilized with human waste.
DeleteI go back and forth as to whether the virus originated in nature or in the lab in Wuhan. Unfortunately, we may never know for sure.
I was in Guangzhou 1992-94. I'd lived a number of years in Taiwan, where I taught, and started my family there. We also lived in Bangkok for a couple of years, so we were not too surprised or shocked by China's wet markets--although we did wash and disinfect. I think the chief issue we had in markets was that the vendors who sold roast duck were shocked we'd buy a whole one rather than a quarter. The other thing that I noted was how nasty the Cantonese can be towards any person of Far Eastern origin who didn't speak Cantonese.
DeleteDr. David Price’s Empowering Talk with Friends and Family
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwx3JMRTz8U&fbclid=IwAR2kexY7DHkkzpdFImQEXps22qfnQehmVU7CDEd-bjWvszU3PJ77bbBgrCU
I'll bet that 90% of the people that have been infected either didn't know it or had a runny nose for a couple of days and had no idea that they had contracted "the deadliest disease in the history of the human race"
ReplyDeleteMedical professionals know the majority of people coming down with any infection, through the years and throughout the country, don't report it and simply ride it out. Which is good, because the best medical supervision is often conducted by a family member or friend, and the best hospitable bed is often in your own home.
DeleteMost Americans are not sheep bleating for alms, pity, and victimhood.
My doctor made a salient point about why the cities are such hotbeds for infections of all kinds from common colds to exotic diseases, statistically, including mortality. Not even warm weather seems to blunt it: Demographics, not just of age, but of origin. It's a fact that moving populations from one region to another also moves diseases from one region to another - the more disparate the regions, the more likely you are to be moving a bug to a new host population that has no immunological defense.
Military recruits experience this first hand in Boot camp. Dozens of recruits from all over America, brought together and forced to live in a single Barracks. Everybody shares the misery, coming down with something in those first few weeks - and fights through it, few reporting infection or being bed-ridden - many later joking that this is the US Military's "Vaccination program".
Statistics be damned, it saves tax-payer dollars.
That's the way it is in most cities (and cruise ships), except their demographics aren't nearly so young, and their origins (and diseases) are far more dissimilar. More outsiders, more variables, more diseases, more people running the gauntlet of genetics - and thus, higher absolute mortality which deceptively increases the "rate" statistic when the public reads it - along with the vastly underreported number of infections.
And the State with the highest mortality "rate" for diseases including the "seasonal" flu and pneumonia? (an amorphous diagnosis apparently)
Hawaii.
Warm weather be damned when you have an outsized tourism industry, awash with foreigners bringing in new bugs from a plethora of societal "petri dishes".
So everyone should have known the Left-wing class wasn't serious about the "Pandemic" when they refused to stop infections at their most logical point; the chokepoints of transit entering the country. Airports, Seaports, and Border crossings.
All decisions in every walk of life are inherently made based on incomplete information. God encompasses all knowledge. Man does not. And thus, Americans have the right to make decisions FOR THEMSELVES based on incomplete information - by necessity to one degree or another - that's Freedom.
That's not where the problem arises.
The problem arises in making decisions FOR OTHER AMERICANS, whilst hiding behind incomplete information where the conflict of interest is inserted.
This sleight-of-hand is used in every scam from "6 million dead" to "Global Cooling" to "Federal Insurance", unto "Communist Utopia", etc. And always, when the apocalypse and agenda is proven to be a phony Scam, the record of that false-positive is thrown down the memory hole ... and a new "Holocaust", "Global Climate Change", "Bailout", "World Government", etc is christened to create a new generation of bleating sheep for the Wolves to feed on.
The repetition of the Lie persists, in large part because the old Lies are maliciously "forgotten", newly rationalized behind unknowable "unknowns" meant to engender an emotionally-charged panic response.
"Prove a negative".
Don't fall for it (logical response). Don't panic (emotional response). Maintain perspective (the mole-hill is not a mountain).
"No."
They claim something is happening, or has happened; the burden of proof lies with them, as it always has. Especially for the Wolves-in-sheep's-clothing with a self-serving interest, and a history, in crying Wolf.
Give up on the holocaust stuff. You don't know what you're talking about.
DeleteStop the racist Chicom nonsense. The CCP of today has no connection to the Maoist monster who killed 100 million people. Deng's reforms cut that connection. The modern CCP consists of careerists, not Maoist ideologues. They were taken by surprise by a novel virus of rare severity, a once in 50 year event.
ReplyDeleteBut our leaders had ample warning, even with China's delay in reporting. Yet no measures were taken to abate the looming threat. Our Deep State has, however, been nimble enough to increase their own wealth and power. The relief bill has $65,000 PER FAMILY of spending, but only $1,200 will actually go to each family.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred if you call somebody a "racist" or a "Nazi," you're losing the debate. The greatest victim of the ChiComs has been the Chinese people, yesterday and today. The Chinese people in Taiwan, I would note, and, of course, Singapore have done fine without the CCP. In terms of ample warning, that's not true. The ChiComs sat on the info and refused offers to have Western doctors take a look. The USA cut off travel from China in January, a move that probably saved us some grief despite the ChiCom anger that provoked.
Deletesykes, don't you get tired of carrying water for the CCP? Step & Fetch is a bad look on you partner.
DeleteTaking steps, including blanket travel bans, aren't easy calls to make when they affect a large number of people. CCP did not divulge human-human transmission for a *very* long time.
DeleteWithout the WHO providing cover-fire for the CCP and their hiding of the epidemic, the rest of the world would have shut down connections with China in a very organized and properly protective way.
But the WHO provided the same talking points you have, that cutting connections to China is 'racist', and as a result, here we are today.
The US got an extra couple of weeks because the virus more or less had to slingshot through Europe instead of come in on direct flights. But CCP stooges were still able to make their way to the US via roundabout methods.
Note the evolution here. The CCP hid it, then denied it, then minimized it. imo, these are signs of organizational addiction to power. First step, shut everything down. Second step, evict foreign media. Third step, gradually retake the media narrative domestically. Fourth step, let the virus run its course in the confines of a no-leak country. Fifth step, declare success. If the epidemic hadn't leaked early, we (the rest of the world) might have caught the true internal casualty numbers.
And yes, Chairman Mao's visage is *still* emblazoned throughout the country, and Xi Jinpeng is probably Mao's closest approximation of a CCP leader in thirty years.
Remember, it's not the failure of communism, it's the failure of the implementation of communism and particularly its failure to liquidate capitalists. The CCP will agree, and so will Bernie in his unguarded moments.
- reader #1482
" The CCP of today has no connection to the Maoist monster who killed 100 million people." Really? That's probably news so 1) journalists who have disappeared; 2) The Tibetans; 3) The Uighyers; 4) Wuhanese who were forcibly removed from their homes and quarantined; 5) Hong Kongers and 6) Anyone who hasn't been paying attention to Xi's consolidation of power over the past decade - the most one individual has had since Mao. But you go ahead and keep on carrying water for the CCP.
DeleteSorry, Mr. Sykes, but the Chinese Communist Party of today reveres Mao, even if there are people on the street who will tell you it's all the fault of the Gang of Four, while holding up five finger. Another hero in the Chinese Communist Party is Stalin. It continues to crack down on independent journalists, anyone who tries to get anything other than the official line out, and all who believe there's any power greater than the Party. I've served in China )in the 1990's), and agree with Sarah M.
Deletehttps://audioboom.com/posts/7543936-rethink-on-the-chinese-communists-and-the-next-time-of-the-virus-1-of-2-michael-auslin-hooverinst
ReplyDeleteHeadphones are suggested.
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense (Trump) on the ground-floor. But if a man hasn't got plenty of good common sense (Franken Fuchi and Igor Birks)the more science he has, the worse for his patient.
ReplyDelete- Oliver Wendell Holmes
https://wgntv.com/news/coronavirus/los-angeles-will-shut-off-water-and-power-for-nonessential-businesses-that-refuse-to-close/
ReplyDeleteliberals in LA have deputized their buddies to shutdown businesses they don't like during the 'emergency order'.... 'volunteers for the mayor' called 'business ambassadors program'... maybe they'll call themselves the Sturmabteilung
great precedent guys...
- reader #1482
The biggest problem here is uncertainty. The "experts" are not sure what this bug will do. That's why it is call NOVEL Corona Virus.
ReplyDeleteTrue. Who benefits from this? MSM, China, Democrats, Russia etc. I am starting to wonder if this "bug" might really be lab created.
Delete