Debt Rattle August 1 2020
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Inge Morath Street Corner at World’s End London 1954 • 100s Of Georgia Campers Infected With Corona At YMCA Camp In Days – CDC (WSB) • College
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle August 1 2020]Carol, Huskynut and others from yesterday’s thread – yeah thanks for the support. I’m glad others find their way through the madness. I know Raul has said he is angry a lot of the time because there are just so many malevolent forces – read people – out there doing us as humans harm. I feel that way at times and then other times I have such optimism and joy at living in the forest with my wife and 2 beautiful children repairing soil and ecosystem. Working hard for clients planting fruit trees and oaks and the rest and generally going for whatever level of right livelihood I can get to with what I have to draw from. Still it bugs me to think of all those good people who are having a crack at the same and some asshole comes along and says – “hey the queen has sanctioned me to take what you have and kill you, or how about I steal you and make you work for me”. I just want people to be nice to each other but there are so many wounded crazy bastards out there who think they can complete themselves with the stuff of the world at others expense. Dick Cheney’s a real stand out but so is Schiff and the other power players around the world.
I guess I’m intolerant of a system that is hard to tolerate.
Thank you all again.Also as for Judge Baraitser, Berate – scold or criticize (someone) angrily.
Maybe every time she heard her name growing up she became programmed to be a harsh scolding hard-hearted person?
Just a musing. I guess I could look into her star sign now I’m going left-field…..Looking forward to a payment coming through shortly – I’ll make a donation to TAE ASAP
No, Mr. Kunstler, Mr. Barr is actually incorrect when he avers that an election by mail-in ballots is an invitation to fraud. Elections in Colorado (and Washington state, to name another) have been mail-in for years. Mr. Kunstler is so obsessed with Antifa/BLM that he is getting a little sloppy. He doesn’t like allegations without evidence, so the pot is calling the kettle black here.
@ oxymoron
I guess I’m intolerant of a system that is hard to tolerate.
You beat the system. You got food on the table.The position of “Power behind the throne” is only desirable to certain personalities. (Not you.)
Its happening right now, in the USA.
Historical examples of a “power behind the throne” include:
(go read the article. … Its not ancient history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_behind_the_throne )live and let live.
Meaning:
Run your own life the way you want to, and let others do the same; be tolerant of differences.
( entertaining reading …. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_mercatoria )Ken,
Not my expertise, but I would venture that because mail-in works well in some states (with small populations), it’s not automatically true it will in all states.
The boys are coming home.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-africa-command-ordered-leave-germany-part-12000-troop-withdraw-fallout“U.S. Africa Command has been told to plan to move,” AFRICOM commander Army Gen. Stephen Townsend said in a new statement.
Part of the fallout to Trump’s controversial order to move some 12,000 troops from Germany in a major historic draw down which has angered a number of Congressional leaders, including charges that the US has somehow “handed over” Europe to America’s superpower rivals like Russia and China, is that US Africa Command’s fate as well as other key command headquarters are in the balance.
US Africa Command has been headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany since 2008, but as part of the Pentagon troop withdraw it too will have to move.
@oxymoron – Very bright thought, mentioning Chaney and Schiff in the same sentence. Are you a Cage Fighting fan? BTW, did you betray your handle, giving yesterday’s comment a pass? “Meanwhile cases there are rising again. So much for the flat curve.” 😉
@Ken Barrows, in spite of your complaint, IMHO, Kunsler has been hitting them out of the park of late. I thought the Alamo reference particularly inspired. The marshals were certainly outnumbered. Following the Kiev game plan, I wonder when the snipers show up, and pick off a few on each side. Concerning proof of fraud, is it excessive to require proof of election mail fraud when he’s only claiming it’s an “invitation”? Mailing in your ballot may be safer, and convenient, but why stop there… have your ballot prepopulated based on your browsing/posting habits, and return by mail only if you’d like to change a selection. There, democracy is perfect!
JP Sears: ‘How to be More Afraid!’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcX9HBG4L34&feature=emb_logo
Who benefits from the fear-mongering?
“Tested positive” = “infected” = sick. Sure it does.
I was confused but then that remarkably informative graph explained everything.There’s a “psychohistory” guy (not Asimov) who says when media start implying that children are dangerous, war soon follows.
Cooties, cooties everywhere-
All people harbor dangers!
We used to be great friends but now
We may as well be strangers.“Tolerance” is a species of word that begets paradox- like “truth”.
“I am speaking the truth when I tell you everything I say is a lie.”
Saying “We will not tolerate intolerance” doesn’t fix anything, even when Karl Popper says so.
These are words best avoided if you want to understood.
See what I’ve done there?How do they notify the person who tests positive? Anyone know?
I always wonder when folks rail against mail in ballots if these same folks have ever voted by mail in ballot and know how that system works. In Arizona I’ve been on the permanent mail in voter list for more than a decade…because as a work at home mother, going to the polls on a specific day just isn’t always feasible.
In AZ, mail in ballots are identical to the usual ballots, must be completed in black pen, are read optically and can be checked by a real person visually. The ballot is placed in a provided envelope, and on the back of the envelope is a place for the voter to sign. This way, the voter’s signature can be verified against the signature in the registry, but the ballot is not directly tied to the signature, just as would be with in-person voting.
Like any system, if we think about it long enough, we can come up with a way to corrupt it. I worked one year in AZ as a poll worker…and the in-person voting system also may be corrupted. Possibility of corruption doesn’t mean corruption is happening or not. There were stories of corruption around in-person voting locally around the 2016 election. Probably no system is incorruptible, but we can make our systems more difficult to corrupt — but we have to balance the desire for incorruptibility with the purpose of the system, which is to be broadly available to the public. Without easy access to all eligible voters, our system has failed in its purpose from the get-go. If our system is not perfect, we can erect checks to help test for corruption (such as exit polls), and that can trigger, for example, manual recounts, and ensure we have ballots that can actually be recounted (i.e. with no possibility of “dangling chads.”)
Oxymoron -I too still have room in my soul to feel cold anger towards those who cruelly and greedily take advantage of others to hugely benefit themselves and others. How to effectively counter this is becoming harder and harder. We may end up, as TAE used to advocate, waiting until the systems are no longer able to police us all, at which time we can disregard the straight jacket of rules that only exist to benefit the wealthy. Now with all the surveillance systems who knows if this will still be possible.
College students getting to attend class subject to being covid tested every second day? Anybody had the test yet? I did – bloody awful – can’t see students willing to do this on a frequent basis.
Kids getting covid – Pulling a page out of my Lyme book here. In areas, like my region, where Lyme is endemic (yes, there are other life-altering diseases, as if covid isn’t enough), almost all dogs will test positive for Lyme antibodies; however, only a very small percentage will go on to exhibit symptoms of sickness (I lucked out on this one- my dog could not walk at all after contracting Lyme). Veterinarians will sometimes advocate antibiotics based solely on presence of any antibodies ( without looking at the level of antibodies and assessing symptoms of illness), when the vast majority of dogs will carry on indefinitely with no evident sickness at all. I wonder if kids, not infants of course, with mature young immune systems, will completely sluff covid off, although still pass it on to more vulnerable others.With old age, anxiety and insomnia, it is clear I am not what I think I am. I can only try to be what I want to be, a decent person. But at 76 almost 77, I still haven’t learned to live with my emotions.
Donald Trump went from World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) to the White House because he is a follower of the Power of Positive Thinking. “Willing himself to success”. With the pandemic and the intelligence community incompetent attempts to get him gone, he was gotten himself into a position where his beliefs and magical thinking are counter to reality.
The U.S. Federal Government has failed. They all must deny it to justify themselves. The CDC report that 260 children got infected with coronavirus at a Northern Georgia Y summer camp has no mention follow up with the families. No discussion of the risks.
Based on the Princess Diamond and USS Theodore Roosevelt, none of the kids was hospitalized but their families got infected too. A parent or two may have been hospitalized and are now in debt for the rest of their lives if they aren’t already. If the child was in a multi-generational household, the elderly have around a 10% chance of dying. Reopening schools with just masks and disinfectant theater will fail. More hotspots will popup.
The only thing that will work is daily testing with cheap quick paper antigen testing and 14-day isolation of those that test positive. The schools must be organized in pods of around 8 so if one becomes infected the rest can be quarantined too. This will work with essential workers, convicts and nursing home residents too. It is malevolent that the White House is protected by antigen tests but nobody else is. The US failure to have national testing and public health system in order that the pharmaceutical industry next year will earn billions from a for-profit vaccine is so deadly and evil that it must be intentional and is covered up by omission and denial.
On Societal Risk There’s a big difference between risks that simply lead to different outcomes and risks of ruin, particularly on the systemic level. We should be worrying about multiplicative risks — such as pandemics.
I swear to G_d Taleb gets less and less relevant with everything he writes. Yeah everyone had thrown two kitchen sinks at this Covid thing from Day 1 we wouldn’t be where we are now. Oh, and by the way, we should all do that every single time an unknown pathogen that kills 1000 people arises.
What happened to a portfolio view of risk? If pandemics are systemic risks of this nature, what about accumulation of biotoxins in the environment from modern farming practices? hey it’s BAU on that front.. has been for decades. The risk of widespread irrecoverable environmental destruction carries the same catastrophic risks to humanity, but with a much more plausible path to that outcome because of the potential number of vectors to it.
If the threat of pandemics warrant the responses he advocates, then these other risks warrant the same effort x10, or x100. And there are many other risks, without even considering the inevitable costs of his proposed interventions.
When I look at him, I see someone hooked up to precisely the same gravy trains of prestige, pontificating and book promoting that he (accurately) decries amongst the WHO bureaucrats. What a shame he has seemingly no self-awareness.Huskynut- totally agree with the lack of focus on the environmental disaster unfolding and awaiting us (right after the economic tsunami following covid).
Taleb’s position on GMOs is somewhat similar to his position on covid (ie he advocates for the precautionary principle due to the unknown long-term impacts of GMOs). This environmental issue has been on his radar for quite some time.@Sumac.Carol – thanks, I wasn’t aware of that.. it’s good to know.
The problem is that each new article keeps breathing oxygen into the whole Covid debate vastly out of proportion to it’s relative risk.
From the conversations here and elsewhere, I think most of society is aware – some consciously, some unconsciously – quite how at risk humanity is on a wide variety of fronts.
The problem is that this leads the majority to want to “do something”. And the majority of that something always winds up targeting the powerless, whilst the powerful continue unchallenged.
One of the things we have to avoid if we’re to have any meaningful effect, is having our attention and time diverted from the impactful into the marginally-impactful.
I read the other day that Oxycontin had claimed 500k lives in the US. It’d be vastly more productive in terms of lives to ignore Covid and focus on taking down the Sackler family (and not into bankruptcy..). Or Bush and Blair for the millions of Iraqi lives. Or the Bayer execs, etc etc.
Covid, BLM, they’re all divisive and ultimately meaningless distractions from politics of consequence, hence my animosity to Taleb. The consequences of the Long Tail which make sense in terms of environmental destruction are vanishly unlikely in terms of Covid/pandemic. You can rationally adopt the same outlook and strategy for viewing them as he does, but it’s disingenuous in the extreme not to discuss the relative likelihoods of both. That’s Risk 101.Last thought – tactically, we should avoid any discussion on codifying response to a future pandemic until we have good open data/studies on the responses/outcomes to date. I suspect barely 1% of people (if that) have been exposed to the recent studies showing zero correlation between lockdowns and spread/containment.
To begin such discussion now will inevitably lead to politicians prematurely codifying the most extreme of their interventions, based on the misperceptions and residual goodwill (ie relief) of the wider populace.
Much better to kick that can down the road for some time, so that the dissenters have more chance to mobilise. I can’t believe the FB, Twitter, Google et al wall of censorship can’t remain standing for too much longer (though the “market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid” maxim may apply).. what happens when they crumbles or is regulated will be interesting.I suspect barely 1% of people (if that) have been exposed to the recent studies showing zero correlation between lockdowns and spread/containment.
You’d be hard pressed to convince the populations/governments of S.E. Asia of the validity of that study.
Thailand has had no internal transmission of the virus for more than 2 months.
We went into lockdown very quickly and I’d be hard pressed to say it didn’t work; in fact it did work.
We also have an outstanding healthcare system to back up the lockdown.
That fact may be largely responsible for the west’s failures in dealing with the pandemic; no functional healthcare systems (UK & USA)…Be careful of confusing correlation with causation – the Thai society I’m sure is different in many ways from the American society. Obesity is a massive risk factor, as is overall health. I did not do a statistical analysis but I’m pretty sure this is a much bigger issue in the United States. I would argue that, due to this alone, even an earlier lockdown may not have saved Americans from high rates of covid.
You would need to consider many factors to determine what are the determining factors for controlling covid And we are still in the early innings – lockdowns mean reduced exercise of our immune systems, along with all the other socioeconomic ills already mentioned. A full analysis would need to consider the “side effects”of treatment.
I believe, given current overall conditions, covid is turning our already upside down world even more upside down. At the same time, I agree that there are massive risks all over in many areas. Power interests, politics, all manner of deceit and greed, make this an incredible mess to try to sort out.sumac.carol
Are you confusing mortality rate with the rate and extent of spread?
Thailand, 65 million people, to this day has had only slightly more than 3,200 cases total, and 58 deaths.
Their excellent healthcare surely played a part.
The lock-down worked and to argue that is, to my mind, pointless.I believe, given current overall conditions, covid is turning our already upside down world even more upside down. At the same time, I agree that there are massive risks all over in many areas. Power interests, politics, all manner of deceit and greed, make this an incredible mess to try to sort out.
…on that; I couldn’t agree more.
Being sane, in an insane asylum, is an excruciating experience…
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