Disasters Near and Far

The Great Disconnect

Posted on April 5, 2020April 5, 2020 by Mike

The fishy smell intensifies.

According to most national media hospitals are overwhelmed with coronavirus patients.

U.S. media claim doctors and nurses are collapsing under the stress and strain of conditions they describe as “war zones” in the battle against COVID-19.

Media are now reporting about nurses and doctors committing suicide as they try to deal with severe PTSD, and psychological trauma, as a result of endless shifts in overcrowded hospitals filled with desperate and dying patients. Additionally, refrigerated trailers now fill with piles of dead bodies as the morgues are overwhelmed with deceased coronavirus patients.

Influencers, perhaps people with an interest in pushing an agenda, are sharing videos of nurses and doctors pleading for help and crying under duress amid their struggle. It all seems rather sad and unnerving. Additionally, professional instability that severe seems a little disconcerting…. That said, that’s one summation of a recent 24-hour media cycle.

However, there is a disconnect.

I’m not talking a little disconnect; there is a profound and entirely opposite set of reports from nurses, doctors and healthcare workers –in multiple states– who are being laid-off, sent home, told not to come in; and doctors worried of losing their practices because hospitals, and their offices are completely empty.

For every media claim of overwhelmed hospital war-zones, there are a dozen reports from actual workers, nurses, doctors and medical personnel reporting exactly the opposite; and yes, a disparity in reporting even in the New York metropolitan area.

Medical personnel in Wisconsin, Missouri, California, Florida, Colorado, Oregon, Georgia New Jersey, and every region in the USA are reporting there are few to no patients in their facility and the medical staff is being laid-off, or told to go home and/or stay home, because there is nothing to do.

How the heck is this level of profound disconnect possible?

Here here, sirrah! Have I somehow misconstrued? Or do you seriously imply that our national liberal-media complement—so essential to the well-being of the entire Republic, now as always—might conceivably be LYING to us?

Why, you impudent scoundrel! Such damnable slander against good and honorable “journalists” cannot be borne, SHALL not be borne, without consequence! To the field of honor straightaway then—where, on my oath as a gentleman, I shall see justice done upon you, decency and righteousness upheld! Pistols at dawn, I say!! PISTOLS AT DAWN!!!

Sundance solicits reports on all this from readers working in the field, and he gets plenty of ’em. Call me a conspiracy nut if you will, but considering the source of the horror stories—and also bearing in mind, as we should here and elsewhere, that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”—I nevertheless feel the idea that Enemedia might possibly NOT be giving us the straight dope is in no way too great a strain for rationality to bear.

(/sarcasm)

From the belly of the beast

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

Another first-person account of an experience with the Creeping Chinese Crud.

My first hints of the virus were on Tuesday 3/24. A little coughing, lots of mucous, etc. Not a dry cough. By Thursday, Mrs. Bulldog was saying “You’re coughing too much, I don’t want people on our walks to think you have it, so stay home.” Fine…I stopped taking walks. I had started having headaches (sinus) anyway. The headaches got worse. By Friday, my head was pounding, the cough was persistent, and it was dry. No fever. No rash. 3 days of (sorry) diarrhea began.

Over the weekend, the headaches intensified, the coughing got worse. I was more or less stuck on the couch watching movies, in a very annoyed frame of mind. By Sunday, it was suggested I get tested.

So we arranged it, and yesterday at 3pm the results were back. Positive.

Of course, by now the headache is starting to fade. It’s still there, but Tylenol keeps it reduced. The coughing is still there, but laying down helps it stop (don’t lay down too much…no need to promote pneumonia). I’ve been sleeping 10 hours a night. The really weird things, and there are 2 of them, are the general haziness of frame of mind – I can’t concentrate very long – and what I’d call “fever dreams without the fever.” I don’t know how to describe these, but I have the strangest dreams all night. Then I wake up in the morning very dehydrated and have to drink a pint or two of water.

My doctor voiced concern over the number of cases, but also pointed out that “it’s just a flu that is worse for at-risk people, you’re not at risk. Just stay vigilant, take care of yourself and you should be fine.”

So if this were the normal world – I’d take 2-3 weeks off from work, and get better. Instead, I’ve had 3 weeks off, and based on current protocol I will have AT LEAST (if my symptoms play out normally) 3 more weeks off (because my office says 2 weeks after cessation).

For what it’s worth – most people in the US, after 6 weeks off from work, will be broke. If it goes longer, who knows. At this point, the “cure” is worse than the disease. Trump is right to consider opening some counties as soon as possible – like any other pandemic, this has areas of concentration. We can limit exposure to those regions, and keep the rest of the nation working well.

Stay healthy. Stay vigilant. I do believe there is much more, politically, to play out. At this point I no longer believe it’s mainly a health crisis (if it ever was). It’s a political one.

YMMV, as always, but until the body count increases drastically enough to justify thinking otherwise, I couldn’t agree more. Glad to hear you’re feeling better, B-dawg, and thanks for writing up and posting the story of your ordeal for us. The more info we all have, the better off we’re going to be. In fact, the scarcity of reliable information out there is a big part of why we are where we are now.

Whither freedom?

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

Going, going, gone.

Here’s a sensible question. If the mayor of the most notable metropolis in the country can openly suggest that the government has the right to permanently shutter the doors of a church if it refuses to comply with “social distancing” guidelines, or any other edict the government finds necessary in a given moment, then what can’t the government do?

If ever there was a question better left unasked…

Just a few weeks ago, the threat of COVID-19 was considered by nearly everyone to be potentially far deadlier than it has yet proven to be. The fatality rates, hospitalization rates, and the predictions of American death tolls (once routinely touted as “over 2 million”) associated with infection were all much higher three weeks ago than they are today. And yet, as the dire projections about the impact of infection has become considerably smaller with new data and improved medical readiness, the social restrictions placed upon the populace have become progressively more obstructive and draconian.

Got that? The better the health outlook has become, the harsher the government’s restrictions on you have also become.

Coincidence, I’m sure.

If that isn’t bothersome to you, maybe you should think about the fact that these social restrictions seem to have only become harsher on you. Some Americans are enduring no government obstruction in their lives, and others still are actually enjoying more freedom than they would have before these social obstructions in your lives were introduced.

Consider this. A junkie can wake up on a brisk morning in the streets of San Francisco, defecate on the sidewalk in plain view of onlookers, and insert a used needle into his arm to inject illegal narcotics into his veins. The cops will make no effort to stop him, for, you see, that might be a violation of his supposed “rights.” That’s much the same as it was before the coronavirus pandemic, so I should probably add that this junkie’s sleeping and social arrangements may very well be in violation of “social distancing” guidelines, also.

Now, consider that he is far less likely to incur the attention of law enforcement, or even the news media, than you might incur for the crime of choosing to attend your local church, should it have the audacity to be open. It is you, don’t you understand, who is the public health menace.

To put it mildly, the social fabric is being torn apart. And for what?

It’s healthy for Americans to maintain skepticism about the motives and effectiveness of our government. Right now, there is a lot which calls the government’s motives and effectiveness into question. Like what I suspect is a growing number of Americans, I am completely unconvinced that the harsh measures being foisted upon the American people, as collective units amongst the states, are entirely necessary, and even more unconvinced that a similar outcome could not have been achieved with fewer rigid restrictions upon healthy and less at-risk individuals and American life, in general. And as days pass, I’m ever more convinced that the utter annihilation of the economy that we’ve seen, and the trillions in spending of taxpayer money that we absolutely, positively do not have, could have been significantly less damaging if we had demanded fewer government restrictions throughout this crisis, rather than more.

Sure, but how was THAT supposed to provide our masters with any kind of trial run for making certain America had accepted the bit fully?

If you think it’s bad now, though, just wait till the next time they decide to put the boot on American necks and press down. And if you think there isn’t going to BE a next time, you’re a damned fool.

Oh, if only

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

Glenn posts a good ‘un from Fakebook.

The debate over immigration is over: restriction wins.

The debate over borders is over: they are needed.

The debate over globalization is over: the era of autarky begins.

The debate over Europe is over: it is a geographic expression, not a polity.

The debate over global warming is over: it is irrelevant.

The debate over international institutions is over: only nations matter.

The debate over the People’s Republic of China is over: it is a menace to the community of nations, not a member in good standing.

Crisis is clarity.

I don’t disagree, and I do realize that all these most welcome developments will be a while yet in shaking out. But purely in the interest of indulging my own bred-in-the-bone contrarianism, I have to note that things like lax border enforcement; One-Worlder globalization; the EU, UN, ICC, and the accompanying international-bureaucratic Kraken; and most especially Red China are ALL still very much with us. The legions of Leftist advocates for those things are all still with us, too.

THAT’S the problem we’re going to have to take care of first, before we can begin to tackle all those others. So yeah, gonna be a while yet. Another most edifying rumination along those lines:

“In just ten days, we discovered that neither the tampon issue, nor the participation of transsexuals in the Olympic Games, nor the climate emergency were real problems, nor emergencies, nor anything of the sort. They were just fictitious problems, the pastimes of a generation that hadn’t known tragedy.” – Itxu Diaz, National Review

How many times are we supposed to have died? Net Neutrality, Budget cuts, Donald Trump’s very existence were supposed to have killed us all already. How many failed predictions of global warming/climate change/ManBearPig destroying us in 10 years have we seen blow by us without incident? If there was an actual environmental catastrophe incoming, no one would actually believe it.

Aside from that, we have the whole woke subculture. (Have I ever mentioned that I utterly despise the term woke? It’s cheap knock-off black culture) Microaggressions? Safe Spaces? What, are you that fragile that you cower in fear of my words? I guess Evil White Males like me must be some kind of sorcerer. Trans-activism is just like the rest of their celebration of mental illness. I have never heard an actual argument about cultural appropriation, especially since the same people used to moan about inclusion. It is a giant screaming mess like an out of control daycare without the cute part.

*cough-cough* Liberalism, defined *cough-cough*

The central thesis of the Ricochet piece is that sane people can no longer afford to fritter away either resources or attention on the fake “crises” Proggy uses to incrementally advance his authoritarian agenda. Leftism has always been what you might call an ideological luxury item. Everywhere it provides entertainment for pushy, overindulged brats. Nowhere is it a real necessity. I almost just lifted the whole brief essay, but the excerpt ought to be enough of the rich, buttery goodness therein to get you headed over to savor the whole thing.

On the other hand…

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

A different—and far bleaker—view, forwarded to NC Scout by our old chum Historian.

I work at a hospital. Not as a doctor, to the well-concealed disappointment of my late mother (and the well-concealed satisfaction of my late father, who loathed doctors,) nor a nurse or a medical technician; my job is to ensure that the facility itself is capable of supporting the demands of those who use it. I’m a construction project manager for a mid-sized non-profit hospital in one of the mid-Atlantic united States, and I’m good at what I do.

Generally, this hospital is well run, well organized, and well staffed with high quality people, ranking among the top US hospitals, part of a larger system also well ranked. If friends or family were to need care, I’d take them to my hospital, which I consider one of the two best in the system and the area, one reason I accepted an offer to work there.

For the uninitiated, this is a non-trivial modification. A negative pressure room or isolation room, has to exhaust ALL of the air coming out of the room directly to the outside. Standards are for 12 air changes per hour, and the room must meet certain negative pressure standards. That means that the entire volume of the room gets replaced every 5 minutes. Our facility policy is to filter all of that exhaust to ensure that we are not placing passers-by at risk of infection, further complicating matters. Normal air conditioning, even in many areas of a hospital, recycles most of the air to reduce energy costs, so when you throw that air away, as you must do for an isolation room, you significantly increase the load on the air conditioning system. It is a BIG change.

I’ll spare you, gentle Reader, the details, but in 3 days last week we went from about 10% isolation rooms in our hospital to 15%, i.e., a 50% increase in isolation rooms by dint of much effort by a number of contractors, vendors, and hospital staff. Those rooms were virtually empty last week, and hospital volumes were WAY down. It was rather eerie. After that success, I was directed to convert another 12% of our rooms to negative pressure, and we are working that now.

This is now much more difficult as seriously ill patients are starting to swamp the hospital, and the rooms which were empty a week ago are all now filled or rapidly filling with patients on O2 or intubated, most of whom had been seen a week or two ago, evaluated as not seriously ill, and sent home with instructions to come back if they started to feel worse, not better. Well, they DID get worse, and they are coming back. In significant numbers, and this is just the beginning.

Like I said, this is pretty grim stuff for sure. But there’s a glimmer of hope as well, a demonstration of fearlessness, compassion, and humanity that provides some affirmation to lay upon the scales as a counterweight to horror and hopelessness.

(Via WRSA)

Numbers game(s)

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

They ain’t adding up.

All admit that the numbers that are scaring the sense out of the country are mathematical projections. All projections are based on assumptions about the ever-changing numbers of “confirmed cases” of COVID-19, as well as of deaths resulting therefrom. But few—and here it seems we must include many “health officials”—consider that the latter numbers are themselves “soft” and tell us next to nothing about how much, how little, or what kind of dangers the virus poses to us.

To make intelligent decisions about countermeasures, we would need have hard data about all these matters. Yet, for two months, doctors such as Anthony Fauci have messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on projections based on meaningless numbers. Watching the several curves resulting from the testing that is now ongoing and that is projected to continue as the country suffers will provide only more guesses, that will feed more models and more disputes.

The most important fact about COVID-19, its true mortality rate, is the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. No algorithms. Simple arithmetic.

In short, Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over-credentialed, entrusted with too much power, and dangerously incompetent.

It’s mind-blowing to see how many of us who long since accepted American bureaucratic realities are now willing to set it all aside and squander their faith and hope on those same demonstrably inept, corrupt, and untrustworthy bureaucracies…with no evidence whatsoever of even the slightest change or improvement therein.

Learning the true figures about precisely what danger the virus poses to whom must begin by taking into account one thing we know for sure about COVID-19: that many, if not most, of those infected by this unusually contagious virus show few or no symptoms. This suggests eventual near-universal contagion.

But we don’t know how many of these asymptomatic people there are. Hence, meaningful epidemiological testing must include a random representative sample of the population, regardless of whether they are presumed to be infected or not. The numbers resulting from monitoring what happens to the health of individuals in this sample over a few weeks would tell exactly what percentage of people in each category and subcategory suffer what consequences from whatever contact with the virus they happen to have.

Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.

Surely, President Trump’s low point came when he supported bypassing roll call votes in the passage of a $2.2 trillion bill as part of his and other executive officials’ decisions to shut down the country. Making decisions on the basis of meaningless curves and bureaucratic authority rather than through open debate about hard facts followed by roll call votes is not just undemocratic. It’s stupid.

I’d tell you to go read it all, but it’s Codevilla, so I’m sure you know that already,

OHHH yeah, THIS is gonna end well

Posted on April 3, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

Hey, remember back when 3.3 million new jobless claims in only one week seemed like big news? C’mon, sure ya do. It was only last week.

Workers claiming new unemployment benefits swelled to a record 6.6 million last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, as the coronavirus pandemic forced businesses across the country to shut down.

The historic jobless number, about double what forecasters expected, exceeds the previous record set last week of 3.2 million requesting unemployment benefits.

The past two weeks have been record-breakers in terms of job losses as the virus has infected over 215,000 people in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. The previous record high for weekly jobless claims was 695,000 in September of 1982.

Over the past two weeks, 10 million workers have been separated from their jobs and applied for unemployment benefits, and probably many more have lost work but not signed up for benefits. In other words, about 6% of all payroll workers have lost their jobs, meaning that the unemployment rate is likely already above 10%, as high as it ever was in the Great Recession.

In fairness, thanks to some devious sleight of hand under Ogabe’s misrule that quietly erased those who had thrown up their hands in despair and just given up all hope of finding a job from the “unemployed” category, those Great Obama Recession stats were complete bunk. The true number, according to some more honest estimations, ranged from 12 to 18 percent—with a few sources claiming it might have been over 20, even. Regardless of which of those estimates you go with, though, the rosy fiction promoted by Ogabe rumpswabs of 5 to 7 percent had no relationship whatsoever with the grimmer reality.

God knows where the numbers will end up after the current fiasco finally winds down. But it ain’t gonna be any place we want to be, that’s for sure. And we’ll be a long, long time recovering from it, too.

Update! We’re in uncharted territory now, folks.

We have never seen a week like this before, and we may never see a week quite this bad again. Of course millions more jobs will be lost in the months ahead as this pandemic stretches on, but it is hard to imagine another spike like we just had. When you add the last two weeks together, somewhere around 10 million Americans have filed new unemployment claims during that time period.

As I noted yesterday, the St. Louis Fed expects the unemployment rate to eventually hit 32 percent. That won’t happen immediately, but if we do get there it will be worse than anything that we witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Because of all the shutdowns that have been instituted nationwide, economic activity has already dropped to levels that we have never seen before in our entire history.

Snyder cites serious food supply disruptions; spiralling mortgage defaults; the sudden tsunami of near-worthless scrip-dollars from Washington in a desperate attempt to stanch the bleeding, and the runaway inflation that will inevitably spawn, before concluding:

Even before any of us ever heard of “COVID-19”, our world was already descending into madness, but now this pandemic has certainly accelerated things.

Millions of Americans have already lost their jobs, and the days ahead are going to be exceedingly challenging.

This is what an economic collapse looks like, and it is just getting started.

Looks like hard times a-coming, with no way to reverse course and avert disaster.

The spy in your pocket

Posted on April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 by Mike

Our modern technological conveniences come at a price. And it ain’t calculated in dollars alone, either.

Kansas Governor Laura Kelly and Dr. Lee Norman, the head of the KDHE, addressed several issues Wednesday afternoon.

The KDHE is using a GPS program that tracks people’s locations through their cell phones. From the data, the state can tell that a lot of Kansans are not following social-distancing guidelines.

The program the state is using gave Kansas a grade of B Monday but has now downgraded the state to a C. Dr. Norman said some Kansas counties are getting an F grade because of how many people are not observing the stay-at-home order.

Well for God’s sake, man, with a scarifying tally to date of 482 cases and ten deaths as this doomsday pandemic ravages the state, how could anybody blame ’em for keeping a close eye on the witless knaves? Sundance cautions:

Comrades, again we note – our voluntary transponder devices (cell phone, FitBit etc) are being used by government officials to monitor our ‘stay-at-home’ coronavirus compliance. It only takes one slight flip of the government switch, or a carefully worded executive order, to turn that innocuous data into a personal penalty (civil fine).

If you choose to roam, ditch your phone…

All well and good, I guess. But what does that do about the countless surveillance cameras, drones, and satellites still monitoring our every move?

Live and (not) learn

Posted on April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 by Mike

Even when people are chanting the old “everything has changed” mantra, some things never really do.

Beyond China, the issue is preparedness. Actually, for almost twenty years, the issue has been preparedness. Since 9/11, freeborn citizens of advanced democratic societies have been subjected to a level of inconvenience and continuous surveillance they would never have previously entertained, from the pointless security theatre of the shoeless shuffle through LAX and O’Hare to the rubber-stamp FISA court warrants to monitor every aspect of Carter Page’s life for years on end with no probable cause. And what’s the upshot of all this 24/7 surveillance?

They didn’t see it coming.

New York, for example, is a city that has already had a huge smoking crater blown into it – and what’s the upshot? Eighteen years on, as I noted last night, after expenditures of billions on purpose-built federal, state and local bureaucracies, a city of eight million people can’t cope with an extra four thousand patients in critical condition.

Why? It’s not as if bio-warfare wasn’t expected to be part of our future: Immediately after 9/11, you’ll recall, there was the anthrax scare, and enthusiastic modeling about what would happen in the event of a suitcase nuke. And in the end hospitals are as overwhelmed as if all that money-no-object Homeland Security spending had never happened. As Kate Smyth has pointed out in our comments section, if Isis weren’t already planning something like this, the ease with which you can wipe out a third of the Dow Jones Industrials will surely have some of the savvier jihad boys dusting off the old bunsen burner.

The most significant change after 9/11 – “the day the world changed” – was the doubling of the rate of Muslim immigration to the west. Will we do the same now? More open borders, more flights from Shanghai and Beijing, more transfer of what’s left of western manufacturing to the Chinese Communist Party, more shrieks of “Raaaaacist!” at any questioning of Beijing’s official lies, never mind whether any advanced nation needs mass immigration or unscreened self-identified “refugees”…

The changes we make this time will be existential. We are suffused in death not only because of Chinese lies but because of those we tell ourselves, suppler and more beguiling as they are. “Preparedness” does not mean merely PPE and ICU, but requires also addressing borders and immigration and political correctness, and diversity unto death. In much of the western world, we are shutting down the economy and daily life, because our rulers could not bear to shut down their own virtue-signaling diversity bollocks.

Will it go the same next time? Absent serious sustained pushback, what do you think?

From here, I can see two possible ways things might go. Either we will continue on down the path to absolute tyranny, with states escalating from the current lockdowns to the establishment of curfews, then to declarations of martial law and the deployment of National Guard troops to strictly enforce them. The current nascent progression from verbal admonition or a citation and fine from law enforcement for infraction of The New Rules will rapidly advance to arrest and incarceration. There will be grumbling in some quarters, but no effective resistance.

Alternatively, the current restrictions will gradually be eased as it becomes evident that the coronavirus outbreak didn’t quite live up to its billing as a devastating planet-killer, and people who have grown extremely restless from their mandatory “stay home” period will be eager to return to something as close to whatever the hell “normal” used to be as they can. A general, widespread withdrawal from paying such close attention to international affairs and politics will ensue, which will in turn serve to blunt any “serious sustained pushback” against the idiotic, dream-world Leftist policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

Ever alert to any offered opportunity, the Left’s shrieked accusations of “RACISM!” at anyone with the otherwordly temerity to reference both China and COVID-19 in the same paragraph—as if the one could ever possibly have any relationship whatsoever with the other—will resume with vigor and volume. And the dastardly, genocidal perps of such naked atrocities will go back to being cowed by them, and methodically marginalized into fearful silence.

If the example set by our response to late 2001’s mysteriously-motivated “Some People Did Something” man-caused-disaster event is a reliable indication, and the Wuhan Fug doesn’t do a sudden 180 from current trends to more or less depopulate the nation’s close-packed urban areas instead, the latter option is way more likely. Such a relaxation of vigilance will allow the politicians and big-business tyros who collaborated to sell this country out to the ChiComs for a fistful of yen to quietly get back to doing dirty business with the abominable Reds more or less as before.

The treacherous and untrustworthy ChiComs themselves will face no serious consequences for their habitual lies, their brazen deceptions and misdirections, and the fact that they nonchalantly and knowingly poisoned the entire fucking world, murdered a largish portion of its elderly, and inflicted mass terror and tragedy on wholly innocent civilians. They, too, will quickly and quietly go back to Yellow-Peril business as usual, which means infiltrating and undermining as many other sovereign nations as possible, covertly sabotaging their economies, sapping their will and resolve via propaganda and manipulation, and expanding Red Chinese influence and power to heretofore undreamed-of levels.

All this Americans will proudly hail as “victory,” congratulating ourselves heartily for our courage, our perseverance, and our unswerving commitment to defense of our “freedom.” Y’know, precisely as we did after all those other wars we lost.

Bearing the brunt

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by Mike

Grim tidings from one who oughta know.

Hotel operator Monty Bennett, the CEO of Ashford Inc., went on with Laura Ingraham on Tuesday night.

The hotel, travel, entertainment and leisure industries are being decimated by the coronavirus virus and media-spun panic.

Monty Bennett told Laura Ingraham, “I had to cut 95% of my employees. Even 9-11 or the financial crisis, it took us 5 years and 8 years respectively to fully recover from those calamities. And this tragedy is worse than those two put together time ten. It’s an absolute disaster for our industry. Morgan Stanley recently put out a note that US hotels are the hardest hit industry.”

Let’s pray our political leaders do not allow this pandemic to turn into a national depression.

Ooops, too late.

Update! The longer the shutdown, the more people will be hurt.

The economic predictions for the shutdowns may be as varied as those for the virus itself. The Federal Reserve’s James Bullard has noted that unemployment may rise to as much as 30%. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has estimated a possible unemployment rate of 20%.

Bullard’s number is higher than the unemployment seen in the United States during the Great Depression (25%), and both estimates are significantly higher than the unemployment during the Great Recession (11%). Even if we take the more conservative estimate of 20% unemployment, that is a 16.5% rise in unemployment from its recent historic lows of 3.5% unemployment.

Although it is difficult to estimate how long this downturn may linger, that is a severe shock to the economic system. It is possible that people return to work and economic activity returns in strength in short order after the shutdowns are lifted.

Even then, the costs of shutting down will have been quite large. However, it is also possible that some businesses who had to pause activity for a month or more may not be able to return at all.

Possible? It’s dead certain, a plain and simple fact of life. As is their wont, our incompetent “leaders,” with their arrogance in ignorance, are tinkering with things they can neither control nor comprehend. They aren’t the colossi or Masters Of The Universe they believe themselves to be; they’re very small men mucking about in affairs that are much too big for them—too big for anyone, in truth.

The recession could be longer than some economists are projecting. If the economy does linger in its downturn, the human costs to the shutdown will inevitably begin to increase.

Again: a certainty, a truism so obvious only a self-proclaimed “expert” could miss it.

The fog thins

Posted on April 1, 2020April 1, 2020 by Mike

At LAST we get some all-too-scarce facts and hard data about the Wuhan Fug, via judicious use of the tried-and-true Busting Of Myths format.

We’ve just entered an unprecedented era in human history, because although there have been numerous global plagues before, nobody had smartphones before.

And because nobody had smartphones before, nobody was nearly as dumb before.

Unlike so many, I am here to help rather than harm. I come before ye to shine the light of truth upon so many harmful myths about this dark, mysterious, and beguiling illness from the East.

Gird your loins with these facts as if they were a hazmat suit protecting you from the viral lies that have rendered online information-sharing into a petri dish teeming with deception and stupidity.

MYTH: Coronavirus is man-made.
Completely false. A woman made it. A very lonely Chinese woman with a lot of cats. She originally intended it as a love potion, and then, as we all know now, things went horribly wrong.

MYTH: Everyone should wear a mask in public.
Mostly true, partially false. Only very attractive people should be free to walk around in public without covering their faces.

MYTH: Baltimore’s mayor begged residents to stop shooting each other so they could use hospital beds for coronavirus patients.
Partially true. What actually happened is that Baltimore’s mayor begged residents to call a cease-fire on shooting each other until they’d shot all the coronavirus patients first.

MYTH: Italy currently has the most fatalities because African migrants brought the virus to Italy.
Another racist trope designed to make Africans look stupid and smelly. The truth is that Italy has so many fatalities because Italians are dirty animals who eat with their hands.

MYTH: The virus spread to humans as a result of Asian girls eating bat soup.
Partially false. Soup wasn’t involved. The virus originally spread to humans as a result of Asian girls having unprotected sex with bats.

MYTH: Black people don’t get coronavirus.
This racist falsehood spread like wildfire until black actor Idris Elba, who tested positive for the virus, wrote a touching editorial debunking it. Black people are fully capable of getting coronavirus. What they actually have trouble “getting” are things such as the value of deferred gratification and a two-parent household. What’s interesting, though, is that white people who act black are immune to the virus. For example, Tom Hanks’s son Chet is, for better or for worse, still perfectly healthy.

MYTH: OK, then, but if that’s true that COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate against blacks, why are there so few infections in Africa?
Because there aren’t many Chinese restaurants in Africa, especially not ones that serve soup containing bats that had unprotected sex with Asian girls. If you’d ever been to Africa, you’d realize this.

I think we should all print a copy of this entire article and keep it handy in a pocket for use as a reference when needed to prevent ill-informed debates from degenerating into bare-knuckle brawling, which is uncouth and unhelpful. Heartfelt and humble thanks to Jim Goad for clearing all this up for us.

Dammit, I thought I had a SCIENCE! category around here someplace, which would be the perfect place to file this post. Gonna need to make one, looks like.

Coronavirus coinkydinks

Posted on March 31, 2020April 1, 2020 by Mike

Ain’t no such thing.

Time bombs are innocuous until the fuse is lit, counting down to an explosion at some predetermined future time. Did the fuse on this current novel virus just happen to light itself? Or was it lit on purpose? And why now?

Here is where the coincidences begin. Wuhan, where the virus originated, just happens to be the location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s only level 4 biosafety lab.

Could the virus have originated in that lab? The “consensus of scientists” say no, that this is just a conspiracy theory. Perhaps, but other consensuses of scientists tell us President Trump is mentally ill and that man-made global warming is melting the polar icecaps.

Plus we have that whole Chinese scientists pretty much admitting to it thing, too.

Chinese scientists believe the deadly coronavirus may have started life in a research facility just 300 yards from the Wuhan fish market.

A new bombshell paper from the Beijing-sponsored South China University of Technology says that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WHCDC) could have spawned the contagion in Hubei province.

Let’s not forget about this, either:

What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, a Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.

According to the PLA Daily, Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax. This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.

Does that suggest to you that the novel coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab, and that Chen’s job is to try to put the genie back in the bottle, as it were? It does to me.

Does to me too, and to anybody else who knows anything about Commie regimes in general, and China in particular. Back to the first article for more on how the “coincidences” do keep piling up.

Move from science to politics for more coincidences, under the backdrop of the Trump presidency and upcoming election. The Chinese Coronavirus was first noted in China in December 2019. What was happening politically here at home at that exact time?

The House was holding impeachment hearings over President Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president, alleging election interference, obstruction of justice, quid pro quo, and anything else Reps Schiff and Nadler could fabricate.

The Ukrainian allegations coincidently originated shortly after the Mueller Special Counsel investigation came up empty in their efforts to remove Trump from office. Articles of impeachment were passed on a partisan basis in December but not acted upon until January, despite the “urgency” of removing the “existential threat” from the Oval Office.

Hmmm. Most peculiar, innit? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps…not so much.

Note the sequence of events, each failed plan was followed by another scheme, all with the same goal of destroying President Trump. Why was the impeachment trial delayed until January? It’s almost as if that was the perfect time to distract the president, the media, and American people while a viral time bomb was beginning to explode.

January was when the Chinese virus was spreading. The intel agencies briefed Trump and Congress. Trump took notice and instituted a travel ban on arrivals from China. Congress ignored the warnings and plowed on with a Senate impeachment trial, guaranteeing no media interest or reporting on the new SARS-like Chinese virus. Was the fuse of the time bomb lit when it was apparent that the Ukraine phone call was a dud, with impeachment a good cover for the burning fuse?

Another way to look at this is to ask: who stands to gain by the economic and social destruction this virus is wreaking?

You’ll want to read all of this one. He makes a pretty tight case, and ties it all up in a neat little bow at the end.

Flatten their curve update! Everyone who played a role in engineering and driving this catastrophe needs to face a serious reckoning. Starting with the ChiComs.

The facts are clear. China is not our friend or ally or even a responsible business partner. Right now, between 30 percent and 40 percent of world national economic output is affected by the coronavirus shutdowns, calculated the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in a report for the G20.

China’s President Xi is petrified that after this inferno the U.S. and others will turn their backs on globalization. In a March 26 letter to the G20, Xi pledged to increase active pharmaceutical supplies and implored G20 nations to cut tariffs and keep up the unfettered flow of trade.

Xi’s words don’t match his actions. In the face of this global crisis, China has hunkered down. China has tried to pin the origins of the coronavirus on the U.S. Army and on Italy. These inept, Communist Party responses show China is not ready to act with honesty or compassion. China wants to claim victory in their “peoples war,” as Xi called, it but they don’t want to change anything. Yes, Beijing has sent doctors and face masks. But the Communist Party’s two-month cover-up attempt cost lives around the world.

It’s time for a total reconsideration of China’s role in the world and specifically, the U.S. economic relationship with China. Decoupling won’t happen all at once, but pharmaceuticals, 5G wireless, agriculture policy and of course imports and exports all need a new look post-coronavirus.

We can do this, folks. Canada and Mexico were America’s top two trade partners in 2019, with China ranked third in total value, which is exports and imports combined. Our neighbors Canada and Mexico really are the most important partners, accounting for a combined 30 percent of U.S. total trade vs. just 13.5 percent for China.

While Washington will have much to consider, its increasingly clear that coronavirus ended globalization as we know it: the phase dating from the day China joined the World Trade Organization on Dec. 11, 2001, until December 2019, when China fumbled its response to the Wuhan virus outbreak.

I can’t say I expect much if any of this to happen; with such a huge percentage of US manufacturing now based there, we’re much too completely enslaved to China to be able to exact a proper toll from them for these heinous crimes anytime soon. But it’s still a pleasant topic to ponder while we’re all locked in our homes indefinitely, watching it all burn.

Riding the tiger

Posted on March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 by Mike

The unthinkable has now become all too thinkable.

It is a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating predictions about what comes after the great lock down. Trump is no longer talking about Easter as the back to normal date and has extended the lock down through April. Governors are now in a race to see who can come up with the bleakest prediction for when things get back to normal. The Brits now lead the race with six months as their estimate. This is an unprecedented time, which means what was considered unthinkable is very thinkable.

For example, ten years ago most Americans assumed the political classes had learned a hard lesson from Watergate. They had let the security services run wild for too long and suddenly they were a threat to the politicians. The days of a J. Edgar Hoover spying on people were over. Not only was that false, but there was a plot among FBI officials to interfere in the presidential election. They went so far as to concoct an impeachment trap in order to remove Donald Trump.

Six months ago is was unthinkable that these same security agencies would have the president removed by some other means. Six month ago we did not have a third of the country hiding under their beds. We did not have major cities turned into ghost towns by quarantine orders. How unreasonable is it to think that the same people who launched the seditious plot in 2015 would find themselves a Lee Harvey Oswald? It sounds crazy, but we live in an age where the crazy quickly becomes the norm.

What about something less cloak and dagger like martial law? State governors are getting pretty close to the line between state of emergency and assuming dictatorial powers over their states. New Jersey is supposedly issuing travel passes to citizens and arresting people for gathering in their own homes. Los Angeles has suspended the second amendment. Trump has contemplated a Federal quarantine of New York City, which would probably mean troops on the streets to enforce it.

If this does go on for months and the cracks in the ruling class begin to show, is civil unrest really unthinkable? Is civil war unthinkable? Rhode Island now considers New Yorkers persona non grata. Pennsylvania is doing the same. Mainers are now going vigilante on suspected New Jerseyites. Sure, concern for the virus is the stated reason, but a general dislike for New Yorkers is the real reason. There are lots of such divisions in this country. Is civil war really so unthinkable?

Just because something is possible, does not mean it is likely. It is possible to hit the lottery for a billion dollars, but the odds are very small. What we’re talking about here though are the things that were thought impossible or close to impossible just six months ago that are now suddenly possible. Maybe they are still unthinkable within the ruling classes, but we thought the FBI and CIA spying on presidential candidates was unthinkable until not so long ago.

Events have a way of reverbating through history, ramping up in ways the people who initially believed themselves capable of controlling them, of directing them for their own purposes, could never have imagined. And then?

Prison Planet?

Posted on March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 by Mike

Welcome to Prison Nation.

Over the weekend, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio warned that “synagogues” and “churches” that disobey his order to remain shut down may be closed permanently as punishment. One can’t help but notice that the good mayor conspicuously omitted one type of worship facility from this dire warning. But whether mosques are exempt or not, the bigger issue is that Bill de Blasio certainly does not have the authority to permanently close places of worship as a punitive measure for defying his commands. He has the word “mayor” in front of his name, not “sultan” or “king” or “supreme leader.” And the First Amendment still exists, even if he’d prefer to pretend otherwise.

But this is just one example of government officials seizing power that does not belong to them. And it’s not only happening in the United States. Over in the UK, police are setting up checkpoints to questions drivers about where they’re going and why. Those deemed to be engaged in “non-essential” travel will be fined. Some UK police departments have gone so far as to deploy drones to track and follow non-essential joggers, hikers, and dog walkers.

Well, okay then. But that’s only Once-Great Britain, right? As I pointed out last night, the crucial question of whether the English people remain English was answered long ago. A hint as to which way that decision went might be found in the name of the “overpraised Chancellor” Hitchens complained about in the piece I excerpted, which is hardly one of those fine multi-hyphenated English names of old—the ones PG Wodehouse had such riotous fun with, like Cyril Bassington-Bassington, August Fink-Nottle (“Spink-Bottle” to Wooster’s beloved Aunt Dahlia, of course), or Claude Cattermole “Catsmeat” Potter-Pirbright.

Yep, that’s Anglund, and Anglund definitely ain’t what once it was. Thankfully, America is still America, right? And always will be, right?

Well. About that.

This week a pastor was arrested and charged with criminal offenses for holding a worship service. Let us note that this event occurred not in North Korea or Saudi Arabia, but the United States of America. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, of Revival International Ministries, turned himself into authorities after leading his congregation in Sunday worship, which put him in violation of his county’s “stay-at-home” order.

Hillsborough County in Florida, like many other states and localities across the country, has forcibly shut down all establishments that it has deemed “non-essential.” As far as I know, no government at any level, anywhere in the nation, has deigned to label churches essential. Our Founding Fathers, who gave the right to assemble and the right to practice religion pride of place in the Bill of Rights, seemed to have disagreed. But in these times we are not subject to the opinions of the Founding Fathers or even the legal document they wrote. We have entered a point in our history where governors, mayors, and local county boards, can come up with any rule they like, outlaw whatever behavior they don’t like, and enforce their edicts at gun point. But to question this new system, I have been repeatedly informed, is to wish death on our nation’s elderly population.

Pastor Howard-Browne insists that his church took many precautions. Hand sanitizer was given out. Staff wore gloves. Congregants were spaced out as much as possible. They may not have all been 6 feet apart, but they were certainly better spaced than you will be if you wait in line at the grocery store. As it happens, you can go to the grocery store 10 times a day and load your cart up with snacks, candy, and soda. You can then stand in a crowd of densely packed people as you wait to purchase your items from a cashier who may or may not be wearing gloves. All of this, says our Dear Leaders, is both safe and essential. But sitting in a church, a few feet from the next person, taking care to cover your mouth when you cough, and making sure that your hands are washed, is both unsafe and inessential. Does that make any real sense? Probably not. Can the government simply declare all churches non-essential, close them indefinitely, and thus circumvent the First Amendment with so much ease as to render it effectively nullified from here on out? I doubt that was ever what the men who wrote it had in mind, but here we are.

I am trying to imagine a definition of “religious liberty” that includes the government closing churches indefinitely on the basis that they are not essential enough to remain open. I cannot think of one that would be at all cogent or meaningful. Indeed, it has become obvious (if it wasn’t already) that our mainstream notions of “liberty” and “rights” and “freedom” are largely nonsensical, as evidenced by the people who normally assert these concepts as absolutes but now insist that the government has the unquestioned power to lock us in our homes and shut our businesses for as long as it pleases.

Most of us, it turns out, do not have a governing philosophy or set of principles. We are slaves to our emotions. So, if the government scares us enough, we will rip the “Give me liberty or give me death” and “Don’t tread on me” bumper stickers off of our cars and stuff them in the closet while we cower along side it. Then when the threat has passed — or at least we are told that it has passed — we will proudly affix the bumper stickers back on our bumpers again, and sing bravely about our love of freedom.

For as long as the authorities still allow anyone to sing, and not one minute longer. Sadly, tragically, at this point a reasonably objective, historically literate person can only conclude that our Founders wouldn’t lower themselves to piss in our mouths if our gums were on fire. Can’t honestly say I’d blame ’em for feeling that way, either.

Remain calm, all is (not) well

Posted on March 30, 2020March 30, 2020 by Mike

Bearing in mind the uncertainty factor—that we don’t really even know what we don’t know as of yet—stepping back for a dose of level-headed perspective seems like it might come in useful.

I’m a recently-retired Professor of Pathology and National Health Service consultant pathologist, and have spent most of my adult life in healthcare and science — fields which, all too often, are characterized by doubt rather than certainty. There is room for different interpretations of the current data. If some of these other interpretations are correct, or at least nearer to the truth, then conclusions about the actions required will change correspondingly.

The simplest way to judge whether we have an exceptionally lethal disease is to look at the death rates. Are more people dying than we would expect to die anyway in a given week or month? Statistically, we would expect about 51,000 to die in Britain this month. At the time of writing, 422 deaths are linked to COVID-19 — so 0.8 percent of that expected total. On a global basis, we’d expect 14 million to die over the first three months of the year. The world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 percent of that total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu). Not figures that would, in and of themselves, cause drastic global reactions.

Initial reported figures from China and Italy suggested a death rate of 5 percent to 15 percent, similar to Spanish flu. Given that cases were increasing exponentially, this raised the prospect of death rates that no healthcare system in the world would be able to cope with. The need to avoid this scenario is the justification for measures being implemented: the Spanish flu is believed to have infected about one in four of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920, or roughly 500 million people with 50 million deaths. We developed pandemic emergency plans, ready to snap into action in case this happened again.

At the time of writing, the UK’s 422 deaths and 8,077 known cases give an apparent death rate of 5 percent. This is often cited as a cause for concern, contrasted with the mortality rate of seasonal flu, which is estimated at about 0.1 percent. But we ought to look very carefully at the data. Are these figures really comparable?

Cause for concern? Sure. Taking reasonable, appropriate precautionary measures? Of course. The kind of irrational panic response we’ve seen of late—upending society wholesale, wrecking the economy, throwing millions out of work, passively forsaking rights and liberties that can never be regained without bloodshed? Sorry, I just can’t see it. The good doctor makes a lot of sense to me here. But YMMV.

(Via Larwyn)

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