Coronavirus Hoax

[Meno_]

MagsJ wrote:


"A’la EU stylee, and look how that worked out.

They obviously want to build links and be inna with these countries, at the expense of the US people and industries.. they want a piece of that Third-world economical-growth pie. Trade-blocking China from building major roads and whatnot, but it would be a happier picture if US citizens were also benefiting from these new trade deals and changes. That aspect is crazy, I agree.."


{I can't agree more
Euro centrism of say, 1500 plus years of dominance , can not be that easily whisked away.}

[Gloominary]

MagsJ wrote:


"A’la EU stylee, and look how that worked out.

They obviously want to build links and be inna with these countries, at the expense of the US people and industries.. they want a piece of that Third-world economical-growth pie. Trade-blocking China from building major roads and whatnot, but it would be a happier picture if US citizens were also benefiting from these new trade deals and changes. That aspect is crazy, I agree.."


{I can't agree more
Euro centrism of say, 1500 plus years of dominance , can not be that easily whisked away.}

More like 500 years, the middle ages were more Islamocentric and Sinocentric.

And of course much of Europe's involvement in the 3rd world, didn't benefit the 3rd world, nor the working people of Europe, but increasingly international and supranational corporations and institutions, which's why globalization should largely be opposed.

[Karpel Tunnel]

Stanford study concludes that death rate from Covid19 no different from regular flu. More people get it than the flu, but the death % is not greater.

https://reason.com/2020/04/17/covid-19- ... new-study/

[phyllo]

From the linked article :

*UPDATE: One caveat is that a rough calculation applying the Santa Clara infection fatality rate to New York City's 11,000 COVID-19 deaths would imply that essentially all of city's residents have already been infected with the coronavirus. This seems implausible.

[Karpel Tunnel]

From the linked article :

*UPDATE: One caveat is that a rough calculation applying the Santa Clara infection fatality rate to New York City's 11,000 COVID-19 deaths would imply that essentially all of city's residents have already been infected with the coronavirus. This seems implausible.

There is a great deal of evidence that death that are not related to covid are being batched as covid. Earlier Carleas accused Gloominary of being influenced only or in the main by conspiracy sites. But more and more conventional sources of information are disagreeing with what has previously been presented in the media.

Here's the original study from Stanford (hardly a conspiracy source..

https://reason.com/2020/04/17/covid-19- ... new-study/
Here's what one doctor at Stanford concludes from the above study AND from data from NYC

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/ ... lation?amp

[Karpel Tunnel]

What do you mean by odd, and what specifically is it that you find odd?

I've explained this several times. China is not an ally, it is certainly a trade partner. It has aligned itself with the new Axis of Evil, as framed by people in the US, and often criticized US policies and relations to Iran, North Korea and Venezuala. It has run military mainly naval exercises as saber rattling aimed mainly at the US. And the US has done the same. They are considered one of the most likely sources of major threat to the US by many in both parties.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... on/606637/
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-econ ... lity-unite
https://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_ ... of_enemies

This goes on and on back in time for quite a while. We certainly have much more interdependence than we used to, but it is hardly a trusted nation. Nor does it trust the US.


The US government invested money in a lab that was working on corona viruses on the specific species of bat said to be the source of the virus. This lab was considered unsafe by State dept officials, and yet no one considered it even a possible source until the middle of April, when all this was known outside the MSM in december. The man who approved the sending of the millions to this lab also predicted that the Trump admin WOULD have to deal with an infectious disease crisis, even though the major ones do not come along anywhere near that often. Yes, smaller ones do.

No reaction on your part to the first link in that post from Newsweek...
https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backe ... _rudd8F5Lw

Fauci's organization extended the five year funding to five more years, specifically to make corona viruses from that species of bats that would be more transmissable to humans. Before it was surveillance of potential threats and spread of disease within presumably the bat popultion, now it shifted to gain of effect research. The first seems legitimate, it seems to me, with a country the US has had the type of relationship it has had. Not the second. Further the fact that they were experimenting on making the disease more likely to be of a pandemic type makes it vastly more important to consider as a source. And yes, I do understand the justificaiton for that kind of reasearch. The five year extension came AFTER reports from the state dept that the lab was not safe. And even in this Newsweek (read, middlebrow as mainstream as you can get medium) it meantions that a lot of scientists thought this type of research was dangerous and should be banned. I mean, of course it could simply be an error in that lab.

The decisions were also made in secret, which meant that the wider expert community could not comment on or give feedback to those deciding who and how this dangerous research would be carried out or if it should at all.

"We have serious doubts about whether these experiments should be conducted at all," wrote Tom Inglesby of Johns Hopkins University and Marc Lipsitch of Harvard. "[W]ith deliberations kept behind closed doors, none of us will have the opportunity to understand how the government arrived at these decisions or to judge the rigor and integrity of that process."

I think people should also check the criticisms of Fauci's work during the AIDs crisis.

We're in the middle of a once-a-century pandemic, so by many definitions everything about the current global situation is odd.

That's not the same kind of oddness. I am talking about the behavior of experts and politicians.

Given that we're in a pandemic, how likely is it that it was first identified in a city with a research laboratory dedicated to studying this kind of virus? That depends on how many such laboratories there are, how many of them are in places where diseases with pandemic potential are likely to jump from animals to people, how much likely such a disease is to be in an area where an above average part of the population is an expert in the disease that's identified, etc.

So you assume it is likely that there would experimentation like this in a lab in the city and also do not mention that the lab raised concerns about safety issues.

Here is an article from 2006, about how multiple infectious disease labs were built in the area of China in which the 2003 SARS epidemic began, not too distant from Wuhan. Is that odd?

I find the wording a bit tough to understand, despite it being in English, but correct me if I am wrong...

The disease has already spread from the region via humans. The labs were built after the earlier SARS outbreak, or?

For US funding, what percent of labs that do this kind of work are US funded? We hear a lot about the Wuhan lab, but given that a lab is studying this kind of disease, how likely is it that the US is funding them? The CDC spent more than $600m in 2019 on "Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases", of which about $750k went to the Wuhan lab ($3.7m over 5 years). Presumably some part of the remaining >$599,250,000 went to other labs, probably also located in parts of the world that have generated multiple potential pandemics in the past decade. Given that there's a lab in a city with an outbreak, how likely is it that it's a US-funded lab? Seems pretty likely.

Then why has no one in the mainstream media mentioned this once they finally focused on the issue? That would quickly dispel some of the oddness. I appreciate you did some work to find some data.

[Carleas]

Stanford study concludes that death rate from Covid19 no different from regular flu.

I responded to this study previously (bottom of this post). Short version:

The complaints are that 1) the tests used had a high false-positive rate, 2) the study may have selected for people at higher risk of having the disease, and 3) the results imply a rate of spread that is implausibly high.

And Phyllo points out that Reason noticed the issue in #3 as well.

It's also since come out that the main researcher's wife was improperly (though innocently, by all accounts) recruiting candidates for the study, e.g. emailing people promising that participating would clear them to go back to work, which will tend to select for sicker people.

China is not an ally

This is just too simple a summary of US-China relations. The countries are trade partners, parties to many treaties, the US has provided aid to China for decades. They cooperate frequently, and haven't had open military conflict since the end of the Vietnam war. It's true that there are territorial disputes, but by that standard Canada and Norway are at war over an island off Greenland.

The important point is that we cooperate with them on tons of things, it isn't at all surprising or suspicious that we cooperate with them on disease research, including by funding their labs located near to the epicenter of a previous potential pandemic outbreak.

The US government invested money in a lab that was working on corona viruses on the specific species of bat said to be the source of the virus.

When you put it that way, it sounds suspicious. But it sounds down right boring if you point out that those bats were also the source of the last outbreak of a potential pandemic, that the funding began following that outbreak, and the lab is in the part of the world where those bats live and where that outbreak started.

it meantions that a lot of scientists thought this type of research was dangerous and should be banned.

It says "scientists", not "a lot of scientists". There are millions of scientists in the world, and for the statement in the article to be true, two of them need to have objected. The article doesn't link to the mentioned editorial, and I can't find it online to see if there were cosigners. I did find a short piece in Science that mentions, unsurprisingly, that there is no universal objection to the research or the secrecy.

That's not the same kind of oddness.

I agree, but don't you think it's relevant? You've said you don't have a hypothesis, you're just looking at the situation and trying to construct a narrative that connects all the dots. So you see all these dots and think, "well isn't this odd". But this this situation, the dots, the narrative, are all very very far outside of our normal life, we don't know how many labs there are, how much we fund them, how many other doomsday scenarios various branches of the US government are investigating or providing funds to investigate. We don't have good priors about what we'd expect to see because we don't have any experience with this. The "international conspiracy to release a super virus" oddness must owe part of its oddness to the "actual super virus currently upending society" oddness, even if they are different in kind.

So you assume it is likely that there would experimentation like this in a lab in the city and also do not mention that the lab raised concerns about safety issues.

I don't immediately conclude that this is particularly unlikely.

The disease has already spread from the region via humans. The labs were built after the earlier SARS outbreak, or?

The article just explains that China invested significantly in disease labs in response to the 2003 SARS outbreak. That suggests that it is not surprising for a big Chinese city having a disease lab studying viruses related to the one that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak.


I have a very mundane lab connection hypothesis I'd like your thoughts on: we know the lab examined bats, and that those bats were captured and brought to the city. Suppose someone who went to the bat caves caught a virus, traveled to Wuhan, delivered the bats, and then hit the wet market. Would that situation look any different from what we see?

[Urwrongx1000]

This is absolutely true. According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP fell $191.2 billion in Q1 2020. Q2 will probably be worse, and estimates of the total cost when it's all over are $1-2trillion.

For comparison, I did some math around the value on the other side of the scale: the dollar value of lives lost to COVID (see spreadsheet here), and my quick and dirty estimate is that the value of life lost from COVID in the US is at least $8 billion, and may be higher than $20 billion.

My method is very rough, and I can think of a few ways that it can be improved, but here is how I arrived at those numbers:
I found life expectancy data from the Social Security Administration, which shows how many years of life a person of a given age can expect. I couldn't find national demographics for COVID deaths by age, so I used NY death demographics as a proxy. Since their numbers are in age bands, I averaged the life expectancy for all the ages in a band, and I used the male life expectancy because 1) men die more frequently from COVID, and 2) men don't live as long. To exclude those who would have died anyway, I used the %, I used the numbers for people who either don't have a preexisting condition or for whom it is unknown whether or not they have a preexisting condition. That gave me [average years left] * [number dead (60966 on 4/30)] = [total lost years]. I then found estimates for the value of a year of life. There was significant variation, but I did the math for both $50k and $129k: [value of a year of life] * [total lost years] = [dollar cost of loss of life]. The result is $8,517,131,122.25, assuming $50k per life-year, and $21,974,198,295.41 assuming 129k per life-year.

Issues with this approach:
As the wiki page points out, there are better ways to estimate lives in dollars, but I don't know how to do the estimate using QALYs. On the one hand, my estimate may overestimate the true cost, because it treats life-years for all ages as equal in value, which we can be pretty sure they aren't.

On the other hand, I exclude the majority of deaths completely, which is definitely wrong, and probably orders of magnitude larger in effect: deaths with preexisting conditions under 65 are about a quarter of all deaths, and most of those will have a non-zero number of years left. I've basically treated those people as already dead.

Generalizing from the NY data probably isn't perfect.

Using only the male data isn't perfect, and under-counts the cost by 1-5 years per person.

The cost in lost GDP is for Q1, but most deaths tool place in Q2.

The cost in lost GDP includes the cost of both the loss of life and the lockdown-generated economic collapse.

Some additional questions:
- How many lives has lockdown saved? How many lives will it save? This estimates cost of what has happened, not what would have happened. If we think the lockdown has cut deaths in half, it's a very different outcome from what it would be if we think it was only cut by 5%.

- What percent of the loss of GDP is caused by formal lockdown, as opposed to voluntary social distancing? Sweden, the poster child for a less mandatory approach, still saw a 75% drop in movement. Does that mean that formal lockdowns are only responsible for the difference between that and whatever results they're seeing? Note also that Sweden's approach doesn't seem to have improved its economic outcomes (their economic losses are projected to be larger than Denmark and Norway, who have more aggressive lockdowns -- would like to know Gloominary's reaction to this as well).

I think you and other Liberal-Lefties, the ones who run this country and "authorize" the Lockdown, and keep it going, have missed the critical points.

1) The lockdown and reaction to the Covid flu, was based on fear, not on facts, and still is based on fear, not facts. Therefore, facts coming in, don't matter. Facts be damned. Because the *actual facts*, is what, 0.03% mortality rate, in explicitly confirmed and proven cases? And that the 'flu' numbers don't matter. Information and data is being severely skewed, to the Left, and the numbers *still don't add up*!!!

2) The deaths caused by economic devastation may far surpass Covid deaths, along with the economic damage to the entire country, and world.

3) Facts outlined by the actual experts, actual authorities (like the two Doctors on youtube), have been *censored* and ignored by the Liberal Left Mass Media Mob. However, Fox News, like Tucker Carlson has covered them. And what do *actual facts* dictate? "We should not have been in lockdown. Because you quarantine the sick, not the healthy".


Got that??? You quarantine the SICK, not the HEALTHY. And why has the US quarantined the healthy? Again, because fear. Because of being scared. Because of over-reacting. Because of emotion, not logic, not reason, not fact!!!

[Karpel Tunnel]

This is just too simple a summary of US-China relations. The countries are trade partners, parties to many treaties, the US has provided aid to China for decades. They cooperate frequently, and haven't had open military conflict since the end of the Vietnam war. It's true that there are territorial disputes, but by that standard Canada and Norway are at war over an island off Greenland.

And they have run large scale naval exercises meant to intimidate each other. Trade relations and being an ally are not the same. The whole Evil Axis, as labeled by the West, they have supported. The Cold War referred to in the articles I linked earlier. Russia and the US had treaties and trade during the much of the Cold War. They were not allies. The fact that China one of the few nations considered a real threat to the US given its nuclear arsenal, China's allies true allies, political style and the tensions that have been present for awhile, again.

https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Ar ... struction/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... -priority/
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q ... y10kXm7P8Y
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ar/595747/
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/mo ... ina-432036

plus articles I linked earlier about the way the countries view each other and where they stand in relation to countries where one can use the term 'allies' and 'enemies'. A few more in that direction...

https://thehill.com/opinion/internation ... n-and-evil
https://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asia ... ml?related
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424 ... 4111945808
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chin ... SKCN1SN1Q2
https://blog.oup.com/2020/03/why-irans- ... s-it-risk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2% ... (1999-2013)

notice the way it is simply presumed that Russian and China are the primary threats to choose between and how this is reminiscent of the cold war...

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the ... s-the-bear

And China is, of course, North Korea's biggest ally. Not without tensions, but still. And it is followed by Russia in this. The US is not an ally of NK, not remotely. The Chinese and the Americans run in different circles. Of course countries will trade with almost anyone. There's rarely anything moral involved in this. Money rules. as I said earlier even in a supposedly clear just war like WW2 a number of corporations, US and allied multinational kept on trading with Hitler's Germany...
https://harmoniaphilosophica.com/2011/0 ... azj6wq-22/
https://libcom.org/library/allied-multi ... orld-war-2
that's during a war...
We are vastly more globalized now and I am not claiming it is a war, though there are certainly cyberwar skirmishes, aggressive espionage, industrial theft on massive systematic scales.

Chinese government hackers...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrew ... 95be5761d6
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3 ... gency.html

anyone urging canada or norway to increase their defense spending because of the military threat the other is?....
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKBN1422TT

or try to imagine anyone talking about Norway vs. Canada the way they are here about Japan and China, for example (and what island with millions of people has either Western democracy said it will take by force, if necessary)...
https://www.csis.org/analysis/resolved- ... ion-taiwan

anyone talking this way in Norway about Canada in relation to human rights in general...
https://time.com/5764561/china-human-rights-report/
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/c ... man-rights

FBI or China theft of technology is biggest law enforcement threat to US, FBI says
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... est-threat
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/wray-a ... nce-020620

Chinese espionage in the United States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_e ... ted_States

CHINA INVOLVED IN 90 PERCENT OF ESPIONAGE AND INDUSTRIAL SECRETS THEFT, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE REVEALS
https://www.newsweek.com/china-involved ... ft-1255908

Pentagon....
https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/20 ... ndle-both/
https://www2.gwu.edu/~sigur/assets/docs ... rticle.pdf

NSA...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/worl ... peril.html

Homeland Security's view of China...America Should View China as a Hostile, Revolutionary Power
http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com ... nary-power

The killing of US spies there.....
https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/20 ... nce-breach

and this kind of thinking goes back into Obama also, note the Chinese reaction...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... story.html

All of this somehow parallels Canada Norway relations?????? Your flat statement that they are allies makes the slightest bit of sense? No. There is, in a wide variety areas, hostile behavior, carried out by nations with different very different political ideas, each with political philosophies that have as a goal the elimination of other types of political systems and with the US who have gone to war again and again on the justification of removing the wrong or 'wrong' type of government,. I haven't even gone into what the Chinese view as aggressive US behavior and tactics and practices and how they view the US and how they see the US as a hostile threat in general.

I'm sorry, but there is nothing like this kind of rhetoric, in the articles and authorities I linked above, about Norway and Canada. There is no portion of the military of those two countries working out possible war scenarios. There is no concern about WOMD in these countries. There is no regular criticism of each other's general foreign policies. Canada and Norway have the same allies and potential enemies. The comparison with cAnada norway is just facile. I don't have to search hard for these types of articles and opinion pieces, or government positions, they are easily found in major media and governmental agencies.

And further, in contrast, canada and norway have similar values, laws, mixed socialist/capitalist systems, freedom of the press, human rights beliefs and more. China and the US are quite different on all these issues. I could see something like a hockey fight breaking out between Canada and Norway, but I guarantee no one in the equivalents to the Pentagon in those two Western democracies are running simulations to make sure they are not wiped out by the other. What bothers me the most is that his has been a running assumption for a long time in mainstream media (and alternative media for that matter). It's not even controversial. I can accept that anything not run with regularity in mainstream media is going to require significant back up, but I am repeatedly being put in the position of needing to justify something to someone who follows the mainstream media and uses that as his source of information, but for some reason is treating my sense of China/US relations as a conspiracy theory. It's not. It's the primary story in media in general.

The important point is that we cooperate with them on tons of things, it isn't at all surprising or suspicious that we cooperate with them on disease research, including by funding their labs located near to the epicenter of a previous potential pandemic outbreak.

I think it is very questionable that we would cooperate with them on easily weaponized research - part of the concerns of both the state dept. official and scientists - when we are concerned about their cyber warfare, nuclear stockpiles and actions in the region. I think it is very odd we were extending and expanding the research after State department officials said they were not meeing safety standards and also were concerned about the nature of the research. And it can easily be weaponized. Perhaps we did do research in labs in Russia during the cold war that could potentially lead to ways to improve nuclear weapons, and this was done in a lab State department officials said was not run well, but I'm a bit skeptical.

And, yes, the guy who approved the monies sent to the lab, predicted that within a very few years the Trump admin would be dealing with a major surprise infectious disease crisis.

The US government invested money in a lab that was working on corona viruses on the specific species of bat said to be the source of the virus.

When you put it that way, it sounds suspicious. But it sounds down right boring if you point out that those bats were also the source of the last outbreak of a potential pandemic, that the funding began following that outbreak, and the lab is in the part of the world where those bats live and where that outbreak started.

I don't think it was the exact bat species that was the source of the earlier disease, horseshoe or whatever it was this time. The complaining state dept officials were concerned about management and staff weaknesses in one memo and in another that there was a chance the lab would be the source of a SARS like pandemic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... naviruses/
but they got more funding. China is also refusing to allow inspections of the lab now.

Here are some new links....(notice in the first that what seem to be unsafe practices WERE on their website. This is the lab supported by the US and yet complained about by officials at the STate dept and then reupped for funding for more years and more advanced, more dangerous research...)https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/coronavirus-photos-unprotected-wuhan-scientists-21965658
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/ ... -traction/
https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-j ... ?r=US&IR=T
https://nypost.com/2020/05/02/intellige ... ronavirus/
https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/02/inte ... aboratory/
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/who ... -pandemic/
and of course Trump says he has evidence that it was the lab, but I take that with a large grain of salt. It seems to me however that 1) what was dismissed for no good reason as a conspiracy theory earlier, is now being taken more seriously daily by various governments intelligence agencies and jounalists.

Notice also that the head researcher wondered herself if the lab might have leaked the disease, then later recanted this wondering, which kept her up at night.

It was dismissed on a number of poor scientific grounds - they knew the virus is not engineered - but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how viruses can increase effect in labs, without cut and paste procedures - and it ignores the fact that the lab had many infected animals and tissues - that could also be the source of a leak of a 'natural' form of the virus.

[MagsJ]

This isn’t new news, but here we still are, discussing a very serious matter.. decades later.

How has life expectancy changed in the course of those decades? In the US it's recently fallen, but that's only happened in the past ~5 years. Prior to that it's been a steady upward trend. And globally the trend has been even better, with no drop off (pre-COVID, the virus that's actually killing people).

The number of people living with chronic and long-term illnesses has risen more than exponentially, well here anyway, with diabetes, cancer, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, autism, OCD, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, asthma, autoimmune diseases, etc etc etc.

It wasn’t so when I was a kid and teen, so overall health has been steadily declining, but we’re being kept alive, so that the conglomerates can make money off our weak and dieing carcasses via the medium of mass-consumerism.

Yup, medicine use to be more about holistic healing, then it became more about managing symptoms, keeping the sick alive, and dependent, and now it's gotten even worse, now it's about depopulation, mass murder, it's not medicine at all.

I wouldn’t call what the pharmaceutical industry are churning out these days medicine.. my medicine is plants and herbs and homeopathy. Remember when Monsanto wanted the rights to all the plant seeds in the world.. now it’s becoming clearer as to why?

[Meno_]

The issue has become synthetic, everyone wants to buy in
No one really wants to abate a simulation of well being. Very few nowedays opts for assisted suicide . it may become known as a passing fancy.

Big pharm realizing this, is on charm offensive to sell it. Why not?

It really is invaluable to live off the half hearted cures of the suffering.

[iambiguous]

Just for the sake of argument, on this thread, let's assume that the covid-19 pandemic is not a hoax.

In other words, that the global crisis is really happening!

Here, perhaps, is the part that most stumps even the "experts": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/worl ... e=Homepage

'The coronavirus has killed so many people in Iran that the country has resorted to mass burials, but in neighboring Iraq, the body count is fewer than 100.

The Dominican Republic has reported nearly 7,600 cases of the virus. Just across the border, Haiti has recorded about 85.

In Indonesia, thousands are believed to have died of the coronavirus. In nearby Malaysia, a strict lockdown has kept fatalities to about 100.

The coronavirus has touched almost every country on earth, but its impact has seemed capricious. Global metropolises like New York, Paris and London have been devastated, while teeming cities like Bangkok, Baghdad, New Delhi and Lagos have, so far, largely been spared.'

Then it explores the various faxctors that might be involved:

"the power of youth"
"cultural distance"
"heat and light"
"early and strict lockdowns"
"luck"

But in each context there are many exceptions. No one explanation seems to suffice.

'...most experts agree that there may be no single reason for some countries to be hit and others missed. The answer is likely to be some combination of the above factors, as well as one other mentioned by researchers: sheer luck.

'Countries with the same culture and climate could have vastly different outcomes if one infected person attends a crowded social occasion, turning it into what researchers call a super-spreader event.

'That happened when a passenger infected 634 people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship off the coast of Japan, when an infected guest attended a large funeral in Albany, Ga., and when a 61-year-old woman went to church in Daegu, South Korea, spreading the disease to hundreds of congregants and then to thousands of other Koreans.

'Because an infected person may not experience symptoms for a week or more, if at all, the disease spreads under the radar, exponentially and seemingly at random. Had the woman in Daegu stayed home that Sunday in February, the outbreak in South Korea might have been less than half of what it is.

'Some countries that should have been inundated are not, leaving researchers scratching their heads.'

So, isn't that what those on either side of the political spectrum are really dealing with: the great unknowns. Can those once infected become infected again? Will there be "waves"? Will it mutate?

Not that any of this won't stop the rabid objectivists among us from just shrugging it off. They already factored that [and every other possible variables there are] into consideration. And if you don't share their point of view, you're still an idiotic liberal.

[iambiguous]

And then this part:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/c ... e=Homepage

Fitting right in with my own speculation that some of the reactions to the coronavirus here are attached to one or another rabid, dogmatic political agenda in which something like this is merely construed to be part and parcel of one or another rendition of the "deep state".

So, these folks will use the pandemic merely in order to spread their own reactionary political beliefs about the Jews and the colored people and the foreigners and the homosexuals and the feminists and the globalists and all the people who do not think exactly like they do.

Meaning, in other words, that, in seeing the world around them only as a reflection of what they already believe, it is a complete waste of time trying to actually engage them in intelligent conversation. They spit on that sort of thing. You are either one of us or the enemy.

And, for sure, the last thing they wish to explore is my own take on the objectivist mind. Here for example: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

[iambiguous]

Wow, even the Trump administration itself is now in on the hoax:

'Headline: The Trump administration projects about 3,000 daily deaths by early June.

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.


The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.


The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.'

[Karpel Tunnel]

The five eyes report considers there is a lot of evidence that the virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab...
https://youtu.be/IxNyWqzT9s4

[WendyDarling]

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from the coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.

Yes, yes, yes, as more doctors label any and every death as due to covid 19, the number of deaths will keep rising until they stop lying about the cause of death, ya know, until when the deep state pulls the plug on this hoax and moves back to the end of the world hoax due to climate change or initiates another needless war.

[iambiguous]

The hoaxers get bolder!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/r ... story.html

'A research paper from scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, not yet peer-reviewed, reports that one strain of the novel coronavirus has emerged in Europe and become dominant around the planet, leading the researchers to believe the virus has mutated to become more contagious.

'The mutation affects the structure of a protein, called the spike protein, that is critical to the virus’s ability to infect human cells. The researchers believe this structural change enhances infectivity.

'“The mutation Spike D614G is of urgent concern; it began spreading in Europe in early February, and when introduced to new regions it rapidly becomes the dominant form,” the authors write. They describe the mutation “increasing in frequency at an alarming rate, indicating a fitness advantage relative to the original Wuhan strain that enables more rapid spread.”'

For the love of Christ, shut down everything! Before it's too late!!

[Chakra Superstar]

Surgeon General Adams Dump's Gates' Predictive Model and is now working with 'real data'.


.

[iambiguous]

Hoax or not -- but, come on, who is kidding who -- the stakes here are truly enormous: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/busi ... e=Homepage


'WASHINGTON — As the nation confronts unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, Congress and the Trump administration face a pivotal choice: Continue spending trillions trying to shore up businesses and workers, or bet that state reopenings will jump-start the United States economy.

At least 20 million Americans are unemployed and a large share of the nation’s small businesses are shut and facing possible insolvency. Policy errors in the coming weeks could turn the 18 million temporary layoffs recorded in April into permanent job losses that could plunge the United States into a deep and protracted recession unrivaled in recent history.'

And while 1] some conservatives here aim to convince us the whole thing really is just a liberal plot to create a global government under the thumb of Big Brother and/or the United Nations, while 2] some liberals here aim to convince us this is all just a stepping stone to the Fourth Reich, out in the real world the actual existential tug of war is all too real.

For millions and millions of us. Go too far in the direction of sustaining the lockdown and countless lives will be destroyed economically. Go to far in opening the economy up and the pandemic can explode to even greater heights. And this is all before what is deemed by many to be an inevitable, even bigger wave in the Fall and Winter.

So, in my view, if the objectivists from either end of the political spectrum prevail, it will truly be a calamity of epic proportions. Especially here in America where the overwhelming prepondeance of infections and deaths continue to prevail.

[iambiguous]

Consider:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html

'Are we inherently gullible? Research says no: Most adults have well-functioning machinery for detecting baloney, but there’s a common bug in the machine. Faced with a novel idea or new circumstances, we gravitate to information that fits our already existing beliefs. As Sherlock Holmes put the problem: “Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” This bug has always been exploited by people seeking money, power — or both. But with the rise of social media, the world’s propagandists, con artists and grifters find their search for suckers easier than ever.

'Witness the grubby exercise known as “#Plandemic.” The risible video is the work of an opportunistic Internet filmmaker whose projects include a clip about his 5-year-old son’s discovery of “the truth” about the wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In his latest film, he advances the conspiracy theory that Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, billionaire Bill Gates and various other malefactors are spreading a manmade novel coronavirus because they enjoy making people sick and hope to profit on an eventual vaccine. Or some similar nonsense along those lines. And there’s more: Beaches were closed to keep Americans away from the “microbes” in seawater that protect against covid-19.

'A coronavirus conspiracy is mild B.S. compared with the great conspiracy theory of 2016, the weapons-grade hooey known as #Pizzagate. In that viral sensation, important political figures supposedly ran a child-abuse ring out of the basement of a pizzeria that, by the way, doesn’t have a basement.

People believe in a “#Plandemic” because it fits into existing convictions. A lot of people already believe — not without reason — that pharmaceutical companies cash in on suffering. Many people have heard that government labs do research on biological weapons. All true. Government has hemorrhaged credibility in recent years — even with regard to veteran public servants such as Fauci. All of these mind-sets are potential vectors for the viral #plandemic.'

Bottom line [his and for the most part mine]:

'Some want your money. Some want your mind. Citizenship in the Internet era demands a heightened commitment to mental hygiene and skepticism. We have to learn that the information that fits neatly into our preconceptions is precisely the information we must be wary of. And even in these wild times, we must heed the late Carl Sagan, who preached that “extraordinary claims” — like grand conspiracies and healing microbes — “require extraordinary proof.”'

He just leaves out the part about objectivism and dasein.

[Karpel Tunnel]

So, in my view, if the objectivists from either end of the political spectrum prevail, it will truly be a calamity of epic proportions. Especially here in America where the overwhelming prepondeance of infections and deaths continue to prevail.

It is objectivist to consider it a calamity. That's a word with a built in negative evaluation. You are saying that if either of these groups manages to win the debates and swing things too far, bad things will happen. That's an objectivist evaluation of the consequences. Doesn't mean it's bad for you to be making an objectivist evaluation, but it's an implicit objectivist appeal. You're a part of the club.

[iambiguous]

So, in my view, if the objectivists from either end of the political spectrum prevail, it will truly be a calamity of epic proportions. Especially here in America where the overwhelming preponderance of infections and deaths continue to prevail.

It is objectivist to consider it a calamity. That's a word with a built in negative evaluation. You are saying that if either of these groups manages to win the debates and swing things too far, bad things will happen. That's an objectivist evaluation of the consequences. Doesn't mean it's bad for you to be making an objectivist evaluation, but it's an implicit objectivist appeal. You're a part of the club.

On the contrary, I never exclude my own point of view here from my own point of view. Me calling anything a calamity [in the is/ought world] is no less a function of "I" as an existential fabrication/contraption.

After all, that's where the part about "I" -- my own -- being "fractured and fragmented" is derived. Meanwhile, your own still incomprehensible rendition of pragmatism [from my point of view] is just not something "I" am able to grasp.

Just as you clearly do not grasp my own perspective yet. Instead, you only insist that you do. And then proceed [in about as close to an objectivist frame of mind as I have come to understand it] to preach the gospel to the choir.

Note to Phyllo:

I'm coming closer and closer to making you Moe here. Alas, KT becomes less challenging with each post.

[phyllo]

I'm coming closer and closer to making you Moe here. Alas, KT becomes less challenging with each post.

I'm not as pretentious as Moe.

[iambiguous]

I'm coming closer and closer to making you Moe here. Alas, KT becomes less challenging with each post.

I'm not as pretentious as Moe.

Not to worry. It's just something I made up.

[phyllo]

It's not that farfetched:

This month’s edition of Men’s Health delves into that question in an article titled “Which Stooge Are You?” Senior Editor Ron Geraci asked psychologists if the Three Stooges might represent some basic personality types found in men. When Geraci called them, the psychologists howled at first. But then they saw some truth in the Men’s Health thesis: Men are all variations of Moe, Larry or Curly.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm ... story.html

And I'm not particularly insulted by it.