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The Peak

Apr 212020
 
 April 21, 2020  Posted by at 6:07 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Gordon Parks Muhammad Ali in training 1966

 

There are times when you think: now things must be easy to comprehend, but as it turns out, they are still not. Let me try once more. See, I was thinking it must have become much easier to gauge the impact in the US of COVID19 when I published the graph below from TheNewAtlantis.com a few days ago. That the stories about seasonal flu etc. at least should be dead and buried, because, well, just look at the graph.

No such “luck”. That warped comparison keeps on rearing its head. The graph is plenty clear about it, however. In a period of about 3 weeks, COVID19 obliterated all other causes of death far behind.

 


click to enlarge in new tab

 

 

I have followed the progress of the virus since early January, so plenty of graphs are available. Below are those from Worldometer and SCMP, starting February 20.

On February 2, the US had 5 cases and zero deaths. Then we get to the graphs.

On February 20, there were 75,750 global cases, 74,500 of which were in China. There were 2,130 deaths, of which just maybe 10 were outside China.

The US had fewer than 15 cases and zero deaths.

 


 

 

One month later, things had changed quite dramatically, or so it seemed.

On March 20, there were 250,000 global cases and over 10,000 deaths. Cases had tripled, deaths had almost quintupled. Italy had overtaken China in most fatalities, from zero a month earlier.

The US had emerged “on the forefront”. It now had 10,400 cases and 150 deaths. Yes, that is just one month ago, 32 days to be exact.

 


 

 

Today, on April 21 2020, you would hardly recognize the situation as it was on February 20 or March 20.

There are now over 2,500,000 cases and over 172,000 deaths.

The US has become the frontrunner, and by a very large margin. It has over 800,000 cases and over 43,000 deaths.

From those 10,400 cases and 150 deaths 32 days ago.

Moreover, of those 43,000 deaths, almost half, 20,000, died in just the past 7 days.

And it’s at this point that people want to call the peak.

 


 

Investor John Hussman developed a model from early February which he’s been updating ever since. His model followed (or actually, predicted) actual numbers quite well:

Apr 15 (637,716 cases, 30,826 deaths): Assuming sustained containment efforts, the “optimistic” projection (my adaptive model) suggests that U.S. daily new cases may have peaked. This does NOT mean these efforts can now be abandoned. Most U.S. fatalities are still ahead, and we still lack capacity to test/track/trace.

 

 

But 5 days ago, John started getting worried:

Apr 16 (667,801, 32,917): This isn’t good. U.S. fatalities just jumped off book. We shouldn’t see 31,000 yet.

Apr 18 (735,076, 38,903): So much for the optimistic scenario. We’re way off book. I had hoped this was just a one-time adjustment. Understand this:

PEAK daily new cases in a containment scenario is also PEAK infectivity if containment is abandoned at that moment.

 

 

 

I’ve long said that people are social animals, and you cannot -and shouldn’t- keep them apart for too long. But at the same time, containment measures in case of epidemics go back a very long way in history. And it’s very well for people to develop models that appear to show that the virus will do whatever it can until it no longer does, and it will soon disappear even if we didn’t do anything to prevent it from spreading.

But those are still just models, just like the one John Hussman developed. And until they are proven, which takes time, the actual numbers we have now speak loudly. Globally, we went from 250,000 to 2,500,000 cases in one month, and from 10,000 fatalities to 172.000. In the US in that same month we went from 10,400 cases to over 800,000 and from 150 deaths to 43,000.

“PEAK daily new cases in a containment scenario is also PEAK infectivity if containment is abandoned at that moment”, says Hussman. Of course everybody wants their freedom back. But at what price? If you don’t, because you can’t, know what the price will be, are you still willing to pay that price?

What I mean is, everyone’s trying to call a peak, but for most that’s merely because they want there to be a peak. The numbers don’t really say that; they may seem to do, but that’s just over 1,2 or 3 days at best. While half of all US fatalities have been over the past 7 days.

If the peak has really already occurred, we will not know it until about 10-14 days from now. So the only thing we can do is to wait that long. Perhaps it would be a good idea to listen to what those have to say who are so enthusiastically labeled “heroes” all over the globe, the doctors, nurses and other frontline caretakers.

If they are indeed your heroes, and that’s not just some empty phrase, listen to what they have to say about the pressure on them, on the system they work in, on the numbers of cases and deaths they see themselves confronted with.

But also listen when they say things you may not like to hear. If anybody deserves a relaxation of a lockdown, and of pressure overall, surely it must be them, before you.

Guess it’s too much to ask that perhaps you may have learned some lessons lately, about things that you don’t need to do but that you always did. Or to ask you if you heard the birds singing louder in the bluer skies this morning.

Just out of curiosity: Did you know that Anne Frank spent 2 whole years locked down behind a wall?

 

 

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Assange and Auschwitz

Dec 072019
 
 December 7, 2019  Posted by at 7:29 pm Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  12 Responses »


Saul Leiter Taxi c1957

 

When I read that Angela Merkel visited Auschwitz this week (for the first time ever, curiously, after 14 years as Chancellor, and now it’s important?), my first thought was: she should have visited Julian Assange instead. I don’t even know why, it just popped into my head. And then reflecting on it afterwards, of course first I wondered if it’s acceptable to compare nazi victims to Assange in any way, shape or form.

There are many paths to argue it is not. He is not persecuted solely for being part of a group of people (we can’t really use “race” here). There are not millions like him who are being tortured and persecuted for the same reasons he is. There is no grand scheme to take out all like him. There is no major police or army force to execute any such scheme. These things are all obvious.

But I grew up in Holland, where unlike in Merkel’s Germany, the aftermath of WWII and the Holocaust was very much present. I looked it up, and it’s already almost 10 years ago that I wrote Miep Gies Died Today, in which I explained this. Miep Gies was a woman who worked for Anne Frank’s father Otto, helped hide the family in the annex, and after the war secured Anne’s diary (or we would never have known about it) and handed it to Otto Frank.

So accusing me of anti-semitism for comparing the Holocaust to what is being done to Assange is not going to work. Why then did Merkel never visit Auschwitz before this week, and when she did, said how important it is to German history? And why did she not visit Assange instead?

Unlike the people who died in Auschwitz and other concentration camps (Anne Frank died in Bergen Belsen from typhoid), Julian Assange today, as we speak, IS being persecuted, he IS being tortured, and he IS likely to die in a prison. What does Angela Merkel think that Anne Frank would have thought about that? Would she have written in her diary that it was okay?

Would all those millions of Jewish and Roma and gay victims have thought that? There are 75+ years that have gone by. We can not get these victims back, we can not magically revive them. But we CAN make sure that what happened to them, torture and murder, doesn’t happen to people today. “Never Again”, right? Well, it IS happening again.

Are we all supposed to go say “I didn’t know” -“Ich hab es nicht gewüsst”- like the Germans did, and all those who collaborated with them across Europe?

There are victims who are dead, and there are victims who are -barely- alive. And if you claim you wish to honor the dead victims, you must ask what they would have felt about the ones like them who are still alive. Otherwise, you’re not honoring them, you’re just posing and acting and, in the end, grossly insulting them.

Julian Assange is not in a German prison, true, but Angela Merkel is still the uncrowned queen of Europe, and if she would visit Julian in his Belmarsh torture chamber it would make a huge difference. That she elects to visit Auschwitz instead, does not only make her appear hollow and empty, it is a grave insult to the likes of Anne Frank and all the other nazi victims.

 

 

Which brings me to another Assange-related issue. The Guardian’s editor, Katharine Viner, launched an appeal yesterday for people to donate money to her paper’s “climate emergency” fund. That in itself is fine. If people think they need to help save the planet with their savings, sure.

Though I will always have suspicions about all these things. From where I stand, I see too many people claiming to save the planet, oil CEOs and billionaires first, and too much money being invited to join their funds. If you want to donate something for the cause, why do it via a newspaper? But even with that in mind, yeah, whatever, it’s Christmas time. Who cares how effective the money will be?

My problem with Katharine Viner and the Guardian is that they have played a very active role in the smearing and persecution of Julian Assange. They’ve published articles that were proven to be 100% false, and never retracted them, or apologized, or attempted to make things right. The Guardian is a major reason why Julian is where he is. It has accommodated, make that encouraged, the British people’s “Ich hab es nicht gewüsst”.

You can donate to the Guardian’s climate emergency fund, if you believe they don’t run it to make you think they really care about the planet more than about their bottom line, but be careful: you will also be supporting the further smearing and persecution of Julian Assange. Are you sure you want to do that?

See, the headline for Katharine Viner’s article is: The Climate Crisis Is The Most Urgent Threat Of Our Time. And it’s not. The most urgent threat is that to Julian Assange’s health. That is today, not in 5 or 10 or 100 years. After all, what is the use of saving the planet if we allow the smartest and bravest among us to be tortured to death? What do we think Anne Frank would have said about that?

 

 

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Concentration Camps

Jun 242019
 
 June 24, 2019  Posted by at 7:31 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  12 Responses »

Unknown Anne Frank 1941
Merwedeplein, Amsterdam

 

As I watch the – if you ask me pretty vapid- discussion develop that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) started by using the term “concentration camps” to describe the places on the US-Mexico border where “migrants” are being held, and where some of them die, I think back. Now, I actually like AOC, because she’s young (29) and that means she’s the future, simple as that.

And if there’s anything America needs today it’s young people, not even more Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi. America’s young people need someone to speak up for them, and the old guard is not going to do that, if only because they have no idea what their grandchildren are thinking or doing.

Being just 29 also means AOC will say silly things and make mistakes, but more importantly it means she’s allowed to make mistakes. So when she calls the border facilities “concentration camps”, I don’t have a huge problem with that, certainly now that kids are actually dying in them. As I read has happened.

 

As bad as the Holocaust was, there’s no need to give anyone the exclusive right to use the “concentration camp” term. History has been rewritten enough to exclude the gays, the Roma, the gypsies victims etc etc who were “exterminated” in WWII, from our past. Could AOC have done better by using “internment camps” or some such term? Yeah, maybe, but she was going for the shock effect, and she wasn’t around in the immediate aftermath of WWII.

Was she perhaps wrong in going for the shock effect? Not that I can see. She just doesn’t understand it the same way older generations than hers do. Where she did slip is in blaming it all on Trump. Because what comes out now is how Obama was the master “extraditor”. Under his 8-year administration, countless -100s of 1000s, millions even?- migrants were extradited that the media didn’t pay attention to.

None of that excuses what is happening under Trump, but it does provide perspective. As does America’s long-term support for the very people whose ancestors were the victims of the actual WWII camps, in suppressing another people, the Palestinians, in much the same way their parents were suppressed and murdered . That is something I have a hard time comprehending. And that inevitably makes me wonder what Anne Frank would have made of it all. Who, far more than Benjamin Netanyahu, and far more than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would be considered an authority on the topic.

I published the article below on January 11 2010, almost 9 1/2 years ago. Time doesn’t just fly, time has gone hypersonic. AOC’s focus is different from what that of older generations is. But you can’t hold that against her. She’s not trying to insult WWII victims, or their legacies. She should probably still be careful though, about swinging big terms like “concentration camps” around, and about blaming everything wrong on Trump. But, as I said, she’s allowed to make mistakes.

Here’s my take on the death of Miep Gies at the age of 100, whereas Anne Frank never made it beyond 15. Originally from Monday, January 11, 2010:

 

 

Ilargi: Miep Gies died today. She was 100 years old. Born Hermine Santrouschitz in 1909, Miep worked for Otto Frank in Amsterdam when WW2 started. She helped hide the Frank family in the “achterhuis” on the Prinsengracht, the secret room (annex) in the shadow of the Westerkerk church the family lived in for a long time, until they were betrayed.

After Anne was put on a train to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1944 and died there from typhus in March 1945, Miep managed to retrieve her diary, which she handed to Anne’s father, Otto, the sole survivor from the household, in 1945, after the war had ended. In 1947 Otto had his daughter’s diary published, and everything else, including now Miep Gies, is history.

Now I’m not Jewish, nor was I born and bred in Amsterdam proper, but I am an Amsterdammer nonetheless, and have for as long as I can remember been aware of what happened to the Jordaan neighborhood in the city that borders on the part of the Prinsengracht where the Westerkerk and the Anne Frank House are. To this day, there are a ton of words in Amsterdam that are unique to the city, and there are a ton more in the Dutch language at large, that are all joods, jiddish, yiddish.

Every Dutch person knows that Mokum means Amsterdam. A yiddish term. Like mazzel! (good luck), bajes (prison), gabber (mate, friend), gein (fun), geteisem (‘bad’ people), goochem (smart), jatten (to steal), kapsones (“hot air” behavior), penose (criminals), pleite (outtahere), schlemiel (dumbass), smeris (cop), smoes (excuse), sores (trouble), stiekem (stealthily), tof (nice!).

The Dutch language would be a hell of a lot poorer if not for the centuries of Jewish culture that enriched the country, and most of all Amsterdam. Rembrandt and Vermeer, and all of their 17th century peers, would not have created what they did without the Jews. The tulip bubble, well, perhaps, but the spice trade that made the city the center of the universe would never have happened without Amsterdam’s Jordaan people. And no, rich they were not. In fact, for most of them most of the time, they were the poorest of the poor.

And it’s all still there, the culture, the songs, the humor, the words. It’s just that the people are not. They were renditioned away.

Through the ages, Holland was a refuge for Jewish people from all over Europe. In the 1940’s, they were put on transport trains to camps, and 90% never came back, including Anne. The city center, and the Jordaan, may now be populated with well-to-do 21st century citizens, but if you take the time to stand still on one of the many bridges in the hood and you listen well, you can still feel the emptiness left behind by those who were forced to die like so much cattle.

And that, my friends, is my personal hinterland. That is me.

And don’t worry, I know about the Dutch part in the slave trade, and a 100,000 other despicable trades. My people are about as guilty as they come. And that is me too. But my people were also welcoming the Jews for centuries when they were cast out everywhere else.

History is a multi-pronged tool, a bird of many feathers and a beast of many moods. Nothing changed there, and nothing ever will. We are a blood-thirsty species, more, much more, than we are willing to allow. It will decide our way forward as it has our ways in the past. And we will not make it a pretty picture. We simply can’t. We’ll be cruel as can be. As we are.

But we will also have always another Anne Frank and another Miep Gies. One lived to be 15 years old, the other 100. Both saw, first-hand, more gratuitous violence than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes. There is some layer of comfort in there, and I hope you will forgive me for not being able to identify it off the bat. I’m just sure it’s there.

Here’s Miep Gies in her own words:

I am not a hero

‘More than twenty thousand Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough.

There is nothing special about me. I have never wanted special attention. I was only willing to do what was asked of me and what seemed necessary at the time.”

 

 

 

 

Globalist

Aug 012018
 
 August 1, 2018  Posted by at 1:56 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  10 Responses »


Salvador Dali Swans reflecting elephants 1937

 

I am often confused by events that happen and by things that people say. But then I think them over and they mostly become less confusing, even if often slivers of confusion remain. This was again the case yesterday morning. Donald Trump went after the Koch brothers, the one biggest symbol of everything that’s wrong with American politics, and I expected the anti-Trump echo-chamber to finally agree on something with him.

But no, what was I thinking? The echo-chamber has deafened and blinded its inhabitants for far too long and far too loudly for one single word of agreement to come out of it. Trump could sing the praises of Hillary Clinton tomorrow morning and it would be used against him. This is not new, it’s been going on for his entire presidency, and before, but it’s still good for people to acknowledge that it’s getting worse be the day – or better perhaps in their eyes?!

Still, if you want to call yourself a journalist, and want to be taken seriously as such, objectivity is the number one requirement. But who in the US or international press can claim to be objective when it comes to Trump? Trump sells, on all sides of the aisle. Be very much for him, or equally much against him, and your paper or TV channel can expect revenues to rise. Being neutral on him: not so much.

Anyway, so Trump went after the Koch brothers. That must have shaken up a lot of the Republican party, because countless senators and congressmen and lower level politicians owe their seats more or less exclusively to the hundreds of millions the brothers throw at election campaigns. Trump does not. Here’s how Tyler Durden covered the action:

Two days after Charles Koch voiced his growing displeasure with Trump’s domestic, foreign and economic policy, warning that Trump tariffs could trigger a US recession, President Trump responded on Tuesday by slamming the powerful Koch-led donor network as “globalist” and “a total joke,” rejecting the conservative group amid reports that the network was shifting away from him over trade and immigration issues. Trump alleged that his policies have “made them richer” and that they “want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed,” while he supports the American worker. In another tweet Trump called them: “Two nice guys with bad ideas.”

“The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against strong borders and powerful trade. I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas,” Trump said in a post on Twitter. “They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them richer” Trump continued his angry tirade: “Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed, I’m for America First & the American Worker – a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America Great Again!”

That seems obvious enough. The 82- and 78-year-old brothers have bought much of the GOP with their billions, but not Trump. Whether that is because they didn’t want to, or couldn’t, is largely irrelevant. One would think even the anti-Trumpers could feel some sense of gratification in the demise of the brothers’ pernicious influence over America as a country, but no, their hate of Trump trumps their dislike of the Koches.

 

And you know what they found to rationalize this? The word ‘globalist’. Yesterday morning I was watching in amazement as my Twitter feed supplied one tweet after the other on the theme. It lasted just a few hours and then it was gone; this morning the whole thing has died out. But the message, or should I say the damage, had been conveyed.

The allegation in these circles is that Globalist Equals Jew. And so you can’t call anyone a globalist, or at least Trump can’t, or you -and he- only can when someone ‘s not Jewish. Now, globalism is a real thing, it’s a philosophy concerning how economies can and should be organized. And it’s sort of the opposite of Trump’s America First and Make America Great Again.

People who ‘believe’ in globalism are opposed to Trump’s trade tariffs. Not so much his proposal to the EU to drop all tariffs though, because that is what they also want. For Trump, globalism means the jobs America lost to people like the Koch brothers moving manufacturing to China et al. His view is that America needs those jobs back. These are simply different views of how economies and societies should be organized. Nothing more, nothing less.

But by making the word Globalist the same as Jew, the discussion about the different views becomes impossible. You cannot call a Jewish person a globalist, even if that person ‘believes’ in the concept of globalism. On the other hand, it’s fine to call non-Jewish people globalists. And this is because certain rightwing forces have at some point allegedly used the term as an anti-semitic slur, or dog-whistle.

However, who decided to let the rightwing decide what a word means? See, I’m sure those who bring this up didn’t invent it out of thin air, but globalism is still a real thing, and since no-one wishes to equate globalism with Judaism one-on-one, I’d say caution is required. Like this: If you cannot positively prove that someone is an antisemite, don’t go there girlfriend. It’s toxic.

 

In Britain, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, 180 light years away from Trump politically, is the subject of an anti-semitism smear campaign at the same time. Though all he’s ever done is be critical of Israeli policies vs the Palestinians. And if we can’t criticize that kind of thing anymore, I don’t know what we live in, but a democracy it’s certainly not. By the way, The Guardian ran a headline yesterday saying “Corbyn Ally Says ‘Jewish Trump Fanatics Making Up’ Antisemitism Claims”. Wait, Jewish Trump fanatics? Oh, never mind…

And yes, we all know that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is Jewish, and his favorite daughter Ivanka has converted to orthodox Judaism when she married Kushner, and Trump’s grandchildren by the couple are Jewish too. Still when economic adviser Gary Cohn left earlier this year, and Trump said “he’s a globalist, but I still like him”, that is now being used against him. Trump’s an antisemite. But Cohn would still be a globalist even if he weren’t Jewish.

Which fits in nicely and seamlessly with Trump being a racist and misogynist and rapist and Putin-puppet and yada yada. But you know, the anti-Trump chamber has become so deafening it’s become fully dysfunctional. There is no information emanating from it anymore, even if many journalists reside in that chamber.

There’s just a bunch of people trying to trump each other in their hate of the man. For them that seems to do the trick, but for anyone outside of the chamber, it’s just a whole lot of noise. It has taken Robert Mueller a year and a half to come up with absolutely nothing in the way of collusion, and he just keeps going. For what? He wants to make it the full 4-year Trump term?

I’m sure there are people out there who use Globalist as a slur for Jewish, but I have no way of being sure Trump uses it in that sense, and neither do his detractors. They have reached a stage where any allegation or rumor or innuendo seems for them to prove their unproven suspicions even and ever more, but they have long lost sight of what is actually true, and what is mere conjecture.

Labeling someone an antisemite is one of the worst things one can accuse another person of, and it should therefore never be done lightly, let alone without any proof. It’s just dirty smear if you have no evidence; and mere allegations don’t cut it. Sure there are people who voted for Trump who fit the picture, but that doesn’t make the man an antisemite. Nor does calling someone who believes in open borders everywhere, a globalist. Whether that person is Jewish or not. Don’t just throw shit around hoping it will stick.

 

Oh, and if you feel tempted to call me an antisemite now, here’s something I wrote in January 2010 when Anne Frank’s friend Miep Gies died aged 100, about where I grew up: Miep Gies Died Today. Good luck with that.