Where did the pandemic come from?
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Tag Archives: coronavirus
Murder incorporated health care division
It’s not as if this HCQ stuff will harm you other than in very exceptional situations. It’s that if you are old and falling apart, the CV-1984 is likely to kill you. And it’s also not as if there are not plenty of doctors who actually believe HCQ will prevent you from dying and that it will even cure you. Here’s the short version: Hydroxychloroquine Lowers COVID-19 Death Rate, US Study Finds
And this is the very long version but at least give it a start. Hear him say, “we are letting patients perish unnecessarily.”
Andrews is the most vile premier this state has ever had. We have had incompetence before, also immense waste and hideous policy formation. But if he is really forbidding the use of HCQ on people who will otherwise die, this man is actually evil.
Frauds, snares and delusions in the age of the rhetorical virus
Just picked up a quite excellent book in our local second-hand bookshop. It is titled, Fallacy: the Counterfeit of Argument, and was written in 1959. By happenstance, this is part of the introduction:
The triumph of rhetoric is like the spread of a virus infection. When an epidemic spreads through an area, it is said to prevail there, and local measures may be taken. But to say that it prevails does not mean that everyone is infected. Some persons may escape infection; others are immune. It is not necessary to labour the analogy in order to show that it would be a good idea if the community could somehow develop a serum against some forms of persuasion.
Few can hope to become immune to all the tricks of persuasion since, like viruses, there are too many of them. People are daily exposed to appeals to blind faith, self interest, fear, prejudice, fancy. This book cannot discuss persuasion in all its variety and complexity, but it can attempt to describe and illustrate some of the most dangerous strains.
Logic is the defence against trickery. The kinds of argument with which logic deals are the reasonable ones. Mistakes are possible, even frequent, in applying the forms of logical argument, and these mistakes are regarded as fallacies, many having been noted as early as Aristotle. We shall wish to guard against them. But the most common fallacies today are of a very different sort. It is a small comfort to know that an argument is entirely logical but that its validity derives its conclusion from its premises, and that all the rules of the syllogism, or whatever, are observed to a nicety, if it turns out that the premises are frauds, snares, delusions. There are brilliant tricks for getting people to accept all sorts of false premises as true (some of these tricks have been spotted since the time of the ancient Greeks), and these tricks are so prevalent that even when people realise that something is being pulled on them, they tend to let it pass.
Which brings me to this: The COVID Coup by Angelo Codevilla. It is the best political discussion of the political dimension of Covid-1984 I have come across so far. It was also posted at Instapundit where the “best” comment reads, in full, “Fantastic article”. From the article’s intro:
What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.
Just read it long though it may be. If anything is needed more than reasoned discussion at this time, I cannot think what that is.
“I have unfettered legal power”
“I’m in charge of spectrum auctions and if I say to you everyone in this room, ‘if you want to bid next week in our spectrum auction you better wear red underpants on your head’, you’ll be wearing them on your head,” he said. “I have unfettered legal power.”
The quote is from Stephen Conroy and may be found here: Conroy plays down ‘red underpants’ comments. They love the power, these totalitarians. Daniel Andrews has never shown himself as anything other than stoopid. But he likes the power to tell everybody else what to do. He has screwed up every single thing he has done since becoming Premier, and especially the lockdown, but he gets to give the orders. He has even sold out Victoria to the Communist Party of China to cover his fantastically large deficit expenditures. Disgusting.
Meanwhile: Coronavirus: Levels of herd immunity in UK may already be high enough to prevent second wave, study suggests.
“The outbreaks look similar at the beginning. But in the heterogeneous population, individuals are not infected at random.
“The highly susceptible people are more likely to get infected first. As a result, the average susceptibility gets lower and lower over time.”
She added: “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent. It’s very striking.”
I only wish there was herd immunity against voting for socialists. There is, of course, but only after the voting is over plus around half a dozen years. And even then, it’s always only temporary.
NOW COMING TO MELBOURNE:
Is this the worst journalism you have ever read?
It’s a good thing that The Age is still around so I don’t have to depend on the hysterics at The Oz for my news. Take this today by someone classified as the Associate Editor: Code red for Premier Daniel Andrews as coronavirus crisis reignites. He starts:
Daniel Andrews’s premiership has been smashed and his legacy imperilled. He has had a horrible month; in normal circumstances the Victorian Premier might already have walked.
But for complex social and psychological reasons the Andrews experiment is on life support rather than in the political mortuary. His community is still more interested in beating the virus than in revenge politics.
In his own obtuse way, he has put his finger on the problem: there is no opposition party or leader in Victoria. My favourite party trick at the moment is to ask people to name the Victorian Opposition Leader. Virtually no one can do it. But back to the article as The Oz does everything it can to beat up this dead horse for reasons unknown to me:
Just as the behaviour of the COVID-19 virus can be unpredictable, so is the state of mind of Victorians as they confront their gravest challenge since World War II. The latest record numbers have stunned an already stunned city, with deaths certain to rise [they certainly cannot fall].
“We are in the fight for our lives,” Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos says.
Today the community’s narrowed eyes are focused almost completely on suppressing the killer virus that is marching through the metropolitan area.
He finishes with this:
This once-in-a-lifetime event has entered a highly emotional phase. The economy was retrievable until the fresh outbreak but is now under even greater threat. We are staring at potentially large-scale loss of life. If this crisis deepens and the government is nailed by the judicial inquiry, how long could the Labor caucus justify retaining Andrews at the helm?
Of course Andrews is going to resign, in just the same cowardly way that John Cain left the mess he was responsible for to Joan Kirner. Some legacy! Andrews is the worst premier Victoria has ever had, and that is really really saying something.
Why is it legal for a state to order a lockdown?
Can this be legal? Why is this incompetent fool, Daniel Andrews, allowed to shut down an entire state on his own say so?
Here’s the latest rumour: Australia Victoria is considering Stage 4 coronavirus restrictions.
Melburnians have been put back under Stage 3 restrictions, but what would Stage 4 look like? Source: AAP
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Mandatory mask-wearing, additional testing, and forcing businesses to close their doors are just some of the potential restrictions on the cards if Stage 4 were to be introduced.
Seriously, how insane is this?
But after a fifth day of new case numbers over 200 since the second outbreak began, authorities have flagged these rules could be tightened.
200 new cases in a state with 6.5 million people. That is approximately 200/6,500,000 which is 0.003% of the population of Victoria.
Dan Andrews is an hysterical fool. He is a blight on the population of Victoria. Virtually everything that has gone wrong since CV began has been Daniel Andrew’s own personal responsibility.
There is now even a Victorian version of the virus that has been detected in Sydney. It should be named after Daniel Andrews which is all the immortality he deserves as the most incompetent Premier Victoria has ever had.
How can such an order be challenged? If under the present constitution we can do nothing, then we must amend the constitution. Does no one any longer care about their personal freedoms? Is Labor now the party of tyranny?
You are almost certainly not going to die from the Corona Virus but you might yet be bankrupted.
LET’S ALSO NOT FORGET THIS: Conroy ‘s ‘red underpants’ comments.
Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has defended a comment he made about Australian telecommunications bosses wearing red underpants on their heads.
Senator Conroy made the remarks in a presentation he gave in New York earlier this week.
A scratchy recording has emerged of Senator Conroy talking about telecommunications and the cost of broadband in Australia during the presentation.
“I’m in charge of spectrum auctions and if I say to you everyone in this room, ‘if you want to bid next week in our spectrum auction you better wear red underpants on your head’, you’ll be wearing them on your head,” he said.
“I have unfettered legal power.”
Senator Conroy made the comments comparing the Government’s position in the telecommunications industry in Australia to that in the United States.
“Not many regulators have quite that much power,” he said.
“But we don’t just have the power, we believe we have the responsibility to do something.”
So the Feds can tell us to wear whatever they like. Can the States? And can we do anything about it?
Does anyone know what is really happening by reading the press?
Even discusses human rights! What’s that got to do with anything? Mostly about media lying.
The dumbest kid in his class
I’ve just started writing a children’s book whose first line reads:
“Daniel was the dumbest kid in his class.”
From there it just seems to roll along. My aim is to immortalise incompetence. Victoria may be one of the few jurisdictions in the world that has had to ramp up its restrictions. Certainly no one else in Australia has had to. What an unbelievable buffoon! And so far as I can tell, he accepts no responsibility for any of it. He should at least say something along the lines of how sorry he is. No chance of that!
But what remains worst of all, most people seem grateful.
LATEST NEWS: Victoria lockdown may cost $1bn a week! How do such people get elected?
CV-19 update
Via Instapundit. Not to deny that it can kill you, but there are positive signs that you are unlikely to hear from Daniel Andrews.
Related: Hospital patients four times less likely to die now than they were in April, Oxford study finds.
Related: Heather Mac Donald: Where Are The Deaths? “In May, Georgia was the main target of expert contempt for its allegedly premature reopening. Since then, the media have gone silent, due to the state’s truly discouraging downward daily death toll from a high of 119 on April 7, long before the reopenings, to 10 on June 24. . . . There are no crises in hospital capacity anywhere in the country. Nursing homes, meat-packing plants, and prisons remain the main sources of new infections.”
Also: Getting Realistic About The Coronavirus Death Rate.
Nearly all the studies find between 10 and 100 times the number of total infections as reported infections, with the average somewhere around 20 to 25 times.
In other words, while the CDC reports 2.34 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, the actual number of infected and recovered people may be closer to 50 million. (CDC Director Robert Redfield told journalists Thursday that the number of cases may be 10 times higher than the earlier 2.34 million.)
Thus, the death rate, which would be 5.2 percent based on that 2.34 million figure, is actually more like one-20th as high — or 0.26 percent.
It can be awful in some people, but overall it’s turning out to be nowhere near as bad as we feared a few months ago. And that’s good!
138Posted at 8:45 am by Glenn Reynolds`
Plus this.
WELL, THE PRESS WON’T SAY IT, SO YOU KIND OF HAVE TO: Seen on Facebook: “So there’s a COVID spike 3-4 weeks after the mass protests. Just saying.”
Related: Did Austin’s protests produce coronavirus spike? (Yes.)
192Posted at 8:04 am by Glenn Reynolds
Melbourne too, it seems.
Led by donkeys
I did the same analysis confined to just Victoria. Here is the same, this time for the whole of Australia.
There are 25.0 million people living in Australia.
If 10% of the population had the CV-19, that would be 2.5 million people.
If 1% of the population had the CV-19, that would be 250,000 people.
If 0.1% of the population had the CV-19, that would be 25,000 people. That is one person in 1000.
If 0.01% of the population had the CV-19, that would be 2500 people. That is one person in 10,000.
The actual number of people in Australia who now have the CV-19 is 538. That is 0.002% of the population, one person in 50,000.
The number of Covid-19 deaths in Australia in the year to June, 2020: 102.
Number of road deaths in Australia in the 12 months to April 2020: 1135 which for the last four months comes to around 378.
The largest crisis we have in Australia is a crisis of political leadership.
Law of Markets 