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Mass Hysteria

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The numbers are gonna get really scary-looking before they get better. But perspective is important.

Annual global deaths attributable to influenza: 650,000

Annual global deaths attributable to tuberculosis: 1,600,000

Case fatality rate of influenza for confirmed cases = 10% (scary)

Here are some very rough GLOBAL COVID 19 Estimates:

In this model…


Total global confirmed cases reach 1 million on 4/2

Total global confirmed cases reach 5 million on 4/22

Total global confirmed cases reach 10 million on 5/16

Peak global fatality day: April 26, 18,000

Total global fatalities through April 9: 100k

Total global fatalities through May 6: 500k

Total global fatalities through June 30: 640k

A really bad flu season, but hardly an apocalypse.

Sanity check: Ignore the reported case numbers. The reported confirmed cases are essentially meaningless in that they are not random samplings of the population and are plagued with selection bias that indicates a grossly exaggerated fatality rate. in other words, the only people getting tested are the ones who are already ill. Mild or asymptomatic cases are almost entirely ignored in the calculations.

This has been shown in a CDC study of the H1N1 outbreak of 2009.

The study predicted “laboratory-confirmed case equaled 166 infections in reality”. In other words, the true infection rate of the H1N1 outbreak was 135 to 212 times the confirmed case rate! And the prediction of that infection factor was proven out by antibody tests of the population. Applying the low end of this factor range to the 3/26/2020 confirmed case total of 531,865 and 24,073 fatalities implies, by extension, a true case fatality rate of .03%, or 3 out of 1000, or 1/135th less than what is reported by our agenda-driven, sensationalist media.

Case fatality rate accounting for ALL infections would be between .04% to .4% using the 2009 Beijing H1N1 outbreak factor as the low end the Diamond Princess sample factor as the high end.

But more testing is a paradox. The more cases, the more media hysteria. The more hysteria, the more panic. The more panic, the more outrageous assaults on civil liberties by bureaucrats. Increased testing will dramatically increase the case counts, but that, in turn, if it becomes more random rather than just testing sick people, will start to reduce the case fatality rate… eventually.

South Korea

“Journalists” keep touting S. Korea as the model for handling the virus due to their very low fatality rate.

You want to know how they did it?

They created 500 testing locations and tested 250,000 people. Turns out, 3% of that somewhat random sample set was infected. In other words, they radically increased the “confirmed cases” number which caused the fatality rate to plummet. It also implied that the virus is already everywhere in South Korea.

Italy conducted a similar experiment.

Italy tested the entire town of Vo in early March and found 3% of the population was infected.

Notice a pattern, here?

The testing in Vo actually implies what I have suspected and suggested from the start, that 1) COVID 19 has already spread beyond any realistic possibility of containment, meaning the economic destruction we’re suffering is pointless political theater, and 2) the virus is largely benign and asymptomatic.

Good news, BTW: It looks like Italy may have topped.

We’ll see what happens.

I’ll predict that Big Brother will come riding in to take the credit for any “flattening of the curve”, when in reality, the home detention and economic shutdown was probably useless to stop the virus that has already infected 3% of the population.

When this is over, it’s probably going to look like a bad flu season. Trouble is, we will be in a terrible recession, or worse, with an added $3 trillion in U.S. federal debt, 10-15% unemployment, and 401k values cut in half.

Assuming a $6 trillion price tag to combat this virus, I wonder how many ventilators, medical care salaries, supplemental incomes for at risk individuals, and temporary hospitals could have been built for a tiny fraction of that cost?

Politics is not guided by rationality. It’s driven by fear.

On occasion, through no effort on my part, the stars align and a prescient book lands on my lap…

Book Review of Oathkeeper

“For back in our forefathers’ time, the devils ruled this land…”

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Hat tip to Bear Bussjaeger…
#DeepState, #ContinuityOfGovernment, #COG

Leslie Fish – The Digwell Carol Lyrics

It is the time of Digwell, now Summer’s gone away.
People come from miles around to meet on Digwell day.
We all come here with mighty stones, with gravel, rocks, and sand,
Bring it here with oxcarts or with buckets in your hand.

Chorus:
Pile high, pile high, the devil’s underground.
Pile high, pile high, keep the devil down.

And bring you all your blighted crops and blighted beasts beside,
And coffins of this season’s dead that of the blight have died.
Bring them to the mountain’s top and fetch the boulders near,
‘Tis fitting that the blighted dead should all be buried here.

So fetch the boulders, sand, and stones, and pile them deeply here.
We bury now the sorrows, sins, and bad luck of the year,
And when the mountain’s higher by the mound we build today,
Then we shall feast and dance and sing this autumn night away.

For back in our forefathers’ time, the devils ruled this land.
They made cruel wars and laws to rule the folks on every hand.
They spoiled the land and water, and they poisoned half the sky.
They cared for nothing but their power, though man and nature die.

In time the danger grew so fierce it threatened them as well,
And so they dug deep in the Earth and hid them safe in Hell.
They hoped to wait in comfort ’till the poisons wore away,
For then they could come out again and rule another day.

They hid themselves below the ground and left the people here,
Amid the blight that they had made and even they must fear,
But still the people stayed alive, and well they promised then
That all the devils hid in Hell would never rule again.

And so our fathers hunted ’til they found the secret gate,
And there they piled the boulders high above where devils wait,
And thus we’ve ever after done these many years and more,
So now our manmade mountain stands above their exit door.

Pile high, pile high, the devil’s underground, oh,
Pile high, pile high, keep the devil down

Merging Big Tech and Big Brother

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“The once-distant planets of consumer Big Tech and American surveillance agencies are fast merging into a single corporate-bureaucratic life-world, whose potential for tracking, sorting, gas-lighting, manipulating, and censoring citizens may result in a softer version of China’s Big Brother…”

“With so many pots of gold waiting at the end of the Washington, DC, rainbow, it seems like a small matter for tech companies to turn over our personal data—which legally speaking, is actually their data—to the spy agencies that guarantee their profits. This is the threat that is now emerging in plain sight. It is something we should reckon with now, before it’s too late.”

“The 2008 election of Barack Obama, a well-credentialed technocrat who identified very strongly with the character of Spock from Star Trek, gave the old-time scientistic-progressive religion new currency on the left and ushered in a cozy relationship between the Democratic Party and billionaire techno-monopolists who had formerly fashioned themselves as government-skeptical libertarians.”

Read more on Wired

Toiletry Company Insults Its Customers

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Men’s razor company #Gillette tried to “virtue signal” with a smug, condescending, insulting ridicule of their own customers. As if men are so horrible they need to be reminded by a company that makes toiletries to do the right thing. I’m curious what would happen if Tampax ran an ad urging women not to be bitchy and irrational while on their periods.

What #SJW lunatic devised this ad strategy, you ask? Her name is Kim Gehrig, the third wave feminist director of this…

Here’s the ad:

 

Yellow Vest Riots Against the EU Soviet Continue

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The revolution will not be televised…

 

Review of ‘Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects” by Dmitry Orlov

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#collapse, #USSR, #Orlov
If one can slog through the author’s ideological disdain for consumerism, sneering distaste for individualism, outright contempt for cars and the “tremendously inefficient” “Potemkin” single family home, his promotion of compelling people to live in stacks of multi-family, multi-generational urban compartments (but not his family because he lives on a boat), his affinity for corralling, sclerotic, government mass-transit systems, and his steadfast commitment to the hysteria of peak oil, there is yet a lot of meat on the bone here.

His walk through the stages of currency failure is informative, and the step-by-step description of the dissolution of government institutions and the “bloody” consequences of the vacuum left behind is fascinating.

Although the author largely dismisses the role of central planning as the primal cause of the Soviet collapse– economic systems that subvert price signals tend to allocate investment capital wastefully– he astutely describes the similarities between the Soviet and the U.S. fed gov’s bloated, bureaucratic failure. Both were/are inextricably enmeshed in bankrupting foreign misadventures, refusing to disengage for fear of ruining their prestige. He describes the pending U.S. fed gov’s imperial failure as being amplified in the absence of the USSR because: “The United States needs a new Cold War to show itself and the world that it still matters” and “A superpower’s vitality is critically dependent on the sustaining power of [its] myth.”

I’m certain neoconservative readers will bristle at that.

Orlov describes how the collapsing corpo-fascist (he describes it as “capitalist”) U.S. economy would be replaced by isolated, atomistic, resourceful opportunists once it is destroyed by hyperinflation.

The comparisons continue: from rates of incarceration, indebtedness, the industrialization of agriculture, the importation of consumer goods, the pervasive, hierarchical incompetence and corruption, the brain drain as specialists flee the empires in search of better opportunities, so on and so forth… all of it compelling reading. In the author’s defense, he shows unapologetically that when one pulls back the veneer of propaganda, both empires were quite similar and on quite similar trajectories, even if the Soviets are portrayed as mere bumbling incompetents whereas Americans are apparently something more sinister– an understandable bias considering the author’s origin and progressive ideology.

Is energy collapse the primary cause of imperial failure? Orlov makes his case. I remain unconvinced as I don’t believe in catastrophic peak oil collapse. Peak oil theorist tend to under-weight technological advances and wholly ignore the substitution effect. But the book is still a very interesting read. I just wish it was less polemic.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2GKJF25QLRSF9