Home » Using “history” to push the continuation of social distancing

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Using “history” to push the continuation of social distancing — 28 Comments

  1. These clowns and the media that enable them do serious damage in the fear and general unease they cause. My mom asked me about some guy she on the news yesterday saying we need to do all this stuff until 2022.

    I have had my fill of epidemiologists. They have as much credibility with me as a carnival fortune teller as this point.

  2. How many people now recall the Asian flu pandemic of 1957, which probably killed at least one million and originated, like the Wuhan-virus, in China?

  3. j e:

    Not many, but I do. It killed about 110,000 in the US, and since the US population was about half what it is now, it’s the equivalent of about 220,000 in 2020.

  4. There appears to be another infection besides the Wuhan virus. That infection is limited to leaders of nations and, in the US, state governors, primarily Democrats, who are hustling and jostling to plunge their economies into deep recession. Japan
    declared a national emergency today.

    Anyone who approves of re-opening an economy (regional or state) while having its more vulnerable individuals continue to take precautions until decent herd immunity develops is regarded as a fool or worse, despised by the Leftists who control the narrative.

    The COVID epidemiologists are cut from the same Leftist cloth as the global warmists. Epidemiology and public health are Leftist domains, which is understandable, since they focus on populations, instead of individuals and individual liberty.

    Control! They love control.

  5. Looks like the parades, etc were in early fall, right at the start of what seems to be the traditional flu/virus season. I wonder if it happened in early June what the result would have been. Warm weather and eastern humidity are not virus friendly.

    Thanks, Neo for mentioning that Israeli study. It is in line with what Willis has been showing in his data on WUWT.

    My wife has been doing the shopping, but today I went out to pick up a prescription and get two grocery items in the nearby larger town. Eastern CT, where there’s not many cases. About 85% of the people in that town were wearing at least masks. Many had also gloves, and one young couple in their 20s, were completely covered except for their eyes: masks, gloves sealed with tape, heavy winter coats and stocking hats pulled way down. Meanwhile I’m walking around sans mask, gloves, normal coat. Yesterday while walking on our town green 5 miles from the aforementioned other town, no one was wearing masks. Completely different attitude between the two close places.

  6. We NEED something to protect us. Masking and distancing look as a matter of ease of understanding like the might work.
    Therefore they MUST work.

  7. The mask/ no mask ratio has been in my observation almost without a pattern. The other day I went to dollar store that was very busy and I would say about a third of the people were wearing masks and it cut across all age groups. I’ve found the same in my visits to a Walmart and Safeway the last couple weeks. Some times lots of masks other times not many.

    I’ve been wearing a mask in stores (not in car by myself or walking far from others like some people) because I have to take my mom to doctor a couple times so I’d just rather be safe than sorry with her. Plus if wearing the mask allows us to open some of the economy then fine I’ll wear the stupid mask.

  8. Wonderful post Neo.

    I’ve seen the claim that aspirin usage made the 1918 epidemic much worse. Do you have any knowledge or feelings concerning that claim?

  9. 1. Leviticus 19:11 (Thou Shall Not Lie Bible Verse)
    Do not lie. Do not deceive one another.

    2. Proverbs 6:16-19 – God Hates A Lying Tongue
    These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,

    A heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.

    3. Proverbs 19:9
    A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall perish.
    * * *

    ..and 9 more quotations from the Bible here:

    https://faithfulchristian.net/thou-shalt-not-lie-bible-verses-about-lying-and-deceit/
    (read through all the listings, and the author’s profile at the end)

  10. Searching for the chapter & verse of the Commandment, the phrase “thou shalt not lie” turned up this interesting movie from 1911, when people actually took it seriously.

    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1225761/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl

    Torn from the bedside of his sick wife, the conscript is enrolled into the army. The woman gets worse and calls for her husband in her delirium. The good priest sends word to him and he deserts from guard duty and hurries home. A squad of soldiers is sent to his house to arrest him and he hides in the attic. His young son, who has been chastised for lying and taught the commandment, “Thou shalt not lie,” when questioned by the soldiers, admits his father is in the house and reveals his hiding place. At the court-martial the father is about to be sentenced to be shot when the priest enters the tent and in an eloquent plea, explains the situation to the stern old general, whose heart is moved and who dismisses the charge and restores the father to his family.

    In Nazi Germany, Communist Russia (and maybe Tzarist as well), and most Chinese eras — plus a good number of nominally-Christian European ones — the soldier still would have been shot.
    The cultural difference could be whether or not the boy was praised or consoled for betraying his father’s presence.

    Mark Twain looked at the question in one of his short stories, “Was it Heaven? Or Hell?”
    He is preaching in this story, and not at his rhetorical best, but it’s a question that deeply concerned him.
    http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/wihoh.html

    Twain is speaking closer to his own opinion, I think, in this essay, “On The Decay Of The Art Of Lying.”
    http://www.online-literature.com/twain/1320/

    Or this one (we need something to read during our shut-in solitude!) — and it has a core of relevance to the present case.
    https://freeclassicshortstories.blogspot.com/2015/12/my-first-lie-and-how-i-got-out-of-it-by.html

    However, I think that the false witness being perpetrated by the CCP and the MSM (BIRM?) definitely falls under the Biblical strictures, and not Twain’s indulgences.

  11. if god gives me a choice between making me a billionaire and have all of my dream desires come true or all liberals and democrats die of heart attack i would choose the latter without hesitation, am i evil? or the liberals’ outrageous heinous behaviors forced a good man into insanity.

    liberals are insufferable, i wish them dead, all fucking dead. of course i don’t condone violence and i don’t encourage violence against anyone but i really wish they all died of natural causes right now. china made and released virus, but somehow the dems force me into house arrest and label me bigots and hateful and insensitive to elders just because i want to find out when we can get the economy back on again.

  12. Seems very misplaced to focus hate on epidemiologists and public health folks. It’s people like that who have been working hard for over 30 years to eradicate polio, for instance, the main institutions being WHO, UNICEF, and the Rotary Foundation.

  13. Ann:

    Sorry but all the good that the WHO accomplished in the last 30 years has been swept away by their abandonment of World health to serve the CCP’s mouthpiece in this pandemic. Get Bill Gates to pay their freight. Or maybe the Alphabet kings of Google can chip in too.

  14. My problem with some of these epidemiologists is they seem to think they are policy makers. Saying things like we will never return to the way things were or we will be doing this until 2022 is totally beyond their pay grade. And why Fauci is out there making proclamations on cable news about what needs to happen for sports to return and other things like that is beyond ridiculous. He is an adviser. Advise the president. Of course, all these stupid recommendations assume that they have any ability to correctly predict the future which they have proven time and again that they don’t.

    Arrogant, self important attention whores.

  15. Dave:

    Why not just wish they get wise rather than that they die, if you had the ability to have a wish granted?

    Liberals are not the problem. The ideas themselves have a seductive appeal, and there always will be people seduced by them.

    In addition, almost every loved one and friend of mine is a liberal.

    What’s more, do you really think that mendacity, evil, tyranny, and hypocrisy would be gone from the world if liberals disappeared? Hardly; not even close.

  16. Dave,

    What neo said. Don’t let hate consume you. It does no harm to your enemies, but plenty of harm to you.

    If one could wave a magic wand and remove wrongheaded political ideas from all who currently hold them today, within a generation there would be a whole new population of believers. It is very seductive to believe absolute power and control can save the world. “If only they would listen to me/do as I say!” Marx, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Hussein, Pol Pot, Hitler, Che, Castro… And we see the inclination in politicians like AOC and Gretchen Whitmer. And all too many of our fellow citizens beg for a leader to save them from their troubles. “Put not your trust in princes.” It has ever been so.

    As Ronald Reagan said in his inaugural address as Governor of California:

    Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.

  17. Rufus T. Firefly on April 17, 2020 at 2:37 am said:
    Dave,

    What neo said. Don’t let hate consume you. It does no harm to your enemies, but plenty of harm to you.

    If one could wave a magic wand and remove wrongheaded political ideas from all who currently hold them today, within a generation there would be a whole new population of believers. It is very seductive to believe absolute power and control can save the world.
    * * *
    Which is why we still read the ancient Jewish accounts of their national history- no matter how often the Lord chastised them for erroneous beliefs and behavior, within a generation or two they were back at the starting line again.

  18. Brendan O’Neill of “Spiked” magazine has an interesting podcast. It’s a great resource for information on Brexit and free speech issues in the U.K. I’m sure you all know Heather MacDonald. She is an extremely brave author and speaker on many contemporary topics. And, I’m pretty sure she, like neo, is a “changer.” I remember reading she grew up liberal in California.

    I think many of you will appreciate this recent interview Brendan did with Heather. They discuss political reactions to the Coronavirus outbreak.
    https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast/the-brendan-oneill-show/

  19. AesopFan,

    Since the Bible figures so prominently in so much of Western literature and art I tried several times to get through it so I could understand all the references to it that I encountered in so many other works. (I did the same thing with Greek and Roman mythology for the same reason.)

    One of my favorite resources for understanding the Bible is Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Old and New Testament. It’s a staggeringly huge work and, since Asimov is a secular Jew who was a non-believer at the time of its writing, he approaches it with little bias. The Bible seems to be a work few people can discuss objectively. He spends a lot of time on regional history and politics, geography… He even references what other extant histories state about the same time periods and addresses potential translation errors. It’s a heckuva work!

    Somewhere after Deuteronomy things started blurring together for me and by the time I got to the New Testament I came up with a shorthand to remember the final 2/3 of the Old Testament:

    Israelites: “G*d, things are really rough down here. Can you send us a King to lead us, rather than these Levite priests?”
    G*d: “You think that’s what you want, but you really don’t want that…”
    Israelites: “But we do. We really, really want a King to tell us what to do.”
    G*d: “O.K., Don’t say I didn’t warn you…”
    Rinse, repeat.

    My wife and I watched the “Ten Commandments” last week. She had never seen it. When Moses was on Ararat and Dathan started convincing the Israelites to abandon him she said, “You mean they just saw the Red Sea being parted and they are going to go back to worshipping a golden calf?!”

    Human beings are wacky.

  20. Morning update: More interesting changes. For the second day in a row “serious” cases showed a decrease from the day before. Over the past two weeks there has been two times serious cases showed some sign of flattening, but we have never seen two days of actual decrease. The “active minus assumed recoveries” peaked 3 days ago. This morning I was able to fit that data with a Gaussian function. It has a standard deviation, or less precise, “full width at half maximum” of 12 days. Which means, if that analysis is correct, we should see a definite decline in about a week. If the serious cases continue to decrease that would support that we are definitely on the downside and the Gaussian is now the proper fit. Again, looking for consistency across various pieces of information, this is all in line with the Israeli paper Neo has referenced, and also the data Willis has posted on WUWT. Cautiously optimistic.

    Rufus: I had never heard of the Asimov book. I’ll have to get it. Someone once said that inside every physicist is a philosopher, and I have been indulging that aspect since retirement. For exactly the same reasons you listed, I wanted to delve into the Bible a bit more, and the Asimov book looks like the way to go.

  21. Thanks Neo,
    If I had remembered that you had written a post on the aspirin issue I could have searched for it myself. Sorry. It was a very good post. I didn’t realize until recently that aspirin is an NSAID pain reliever.

  22. physicsguy,

    I believe Asimov was a Chemist by training, but I often wonder if Physics is a subset of Chemistry, or vice versa 🙂 .

    I just checked on Amazon. You can buy new and used copies of the book. I think it is also sold separately (Old and New Testament), but I’m not sure if the individual copies are still available. You probably know Asimov wrote over 500 books in his lifetime. It’s an inconceivable sum. I’ve read a few of them. His “Understanding Physics” (a compilation of three separate volumes) is one of my favorites, although you would likely be a much harsher critic than I. I’ve bought copies for several musician friends who were struggling with understanding the nature of sound. His explanation on that topic is the best I’ve encountered for a laymen’s understanding.

  23. I found this article on covid-19 transmission over at National Review. Well, it is a pre-review Chinese research publication, but it might ease one’s mind while enjoying the outdoors.

    As the researchers note, the fact that most coronavirus clusters and outbreaks occurred indoors is not particularly surprising given the Chinese government’s enactment of stay-at-home orders. But while the study “does not rule out outdoor transmission of the virus, ”it notes that “among our 7,324 identified cases in China with sufficient descriptions, only one outdoor outbreak [transmission] involving two cases [infections] occurred.”

  24. ” but I often wonder if Physics is a subset of Chemistry, or vice versa ? .”

    Well, it took physicists finding QM to finally help the chemists understand what they were finding. They made the periodic table but until QM there was not real understanding of what it meant. So, I would say the hierarchy of physics as the basis for chemistry, and chemistry the basis for biology holds. I give credit to chemists and also biologists for making sense out of some extremely complex systems. I prefer to stick with the much simpler physics.

  25. Rufus & physicsguy

    “If it squirms, it’s biology. If it stinks, it’s chemistry. If it doesn’t work, it’s physics. And if you can’t understand it, it’s mathematics.” ? Magnus Pyke

    All I know about science I learned on the internet (applied math aka stats, computer programming, and political science degrees here).

    You might enjoy this Asimov story, which combines Biblical and Scientific viewpoints.

    https://bigbible.org/sansblogue/ot/pentateuch/genesis/creation-just-six-days-asimov-explains/

    Asimov’s “How it happened”
    https://bigbible.org/sansblogue/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Asimov.pdf

  26. I remember a high school Sci-Fi creative writing contest in LA. I got an honorable mention for my cycle story, by judges who noted, correctly, that I liked Asimov. The actress playing Star Trek’s Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, presented me a cool computer generated map as a prize.

    Some other writer made an interesting character who’s name was translated as:
    As a color, shade of purple.
    A memorable … As a mauve kind of punny.

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