Author: VD

China calls out the US Army

The Chinese do not appear to be inclined to maintain the globalist media’s nonsensical cover stories concerning corona-chan and other matters:

A Chinese foreign ministry official pushed a conspiracy theory the U.S. army may have had a role in spreading the virus, highlighting growing tensions between the world’s biggest economies as both governments seek to deflect blame for the outbreak.

“It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,” Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesman, said in a tweet. “Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”

He later followed up with another tweet urging his 284,000 followers to share an article arguing that the virus originated in the U.S. It was posted on a website promoting conspiracy theories, including articles lambasting the “Vaccine Deep State” and questioning whether Osama bin Laden ever existed.

On Friday in Beijing, Geng Shuang, another spokesman for the foreign ministry, said that “international society, including the U.S., has different opinions about the source of the virus. But China always believes that this is a matter of science which requires professional and scientific assessment.”

Geng was asked twice if the earlier tweets by his colleague, Zhao, represented the view of the Chinese government. “I think you may want to ask certain senior U.S. officials — did they speak on behalf of the U.S. government when they attacked and smeared China recently?” he said in response to one question.

“What I said represents the Chinese government’s attitude,” he said, in response to the other.

With the coronavirus spreading from China into the U.S. and around the world, both nations are trading tit-for-tat claims about its origins. While it’s unclear whether Zhao was being facetious, earlier this month he became the first official in China to suggest that the virus didn’t originate there, even though he hasn’t provided any evidence for that claim.

Conspiracy theorists are well aware that the COVID-19 virus wasn’t made in China. And it would be very interesting to see how well the globalists are able to maintain their ever-shifting narratives if the Chinese government – which knows perfectly well how fake those narratives are – decides to systematically demolish them.

Because worldwide pandemics starting because someone ate a bat, no, wait, a pangolin, are so much more convincing than biowarfare.

Preparation is the play

Now, you are certainly welcome to bluster and posture about how you aren’t afraid of no virus, or pontificate concerning the probabilities that corona-chan is just a hoax, and so forth. I don’t mind that sort of thing. Everyone deals with these situation in a wide variety of different ways. Personally, I find the bluster-prone to be as needlessly annoying as the panic-stricken.

But what I do mind is actively telling people not to prepare for 2-3 weeks of quarantine, and here is why. Preparation is necessary if you are planning to stay home and keep the excursions outside to a minimum, we all understand that. But what most people fail to keep in mind is that if you, or anyone in your family, even gets knowingly exposed to the virus, (much less actually comes down with a case of the Wu-flu) you will be facing the same 2-3 weeks of home quarantine, only then it will be too late for you to obtain the necessary supplies. And then you will become an unnecessary burden on someone else to keep you supplied.

I understand that not everyone believes a nine-month supply of red and white wine supplemented by a six-month supply of prosecco – yes, we’re ready now – is necessary, but there is literally no harm in doing the month’s grocery shopping ahead of time and it might make your family’s life considerably more easy in the next six-eight weeks if you take the trouble to do so.

One more thought on the subject. If corona-chan is a hoax being perpetrated by the good guys for Storm-related purposes, FFS, play along! 


UPDATE: There is also a major US military exercise taking place in Europe right now.

UPDATE: CDAN asks: “Does anyone think this will turn into The Purge?”

Why slowing the transmission rate matters

An epidemial modeling explains why it is hugely beneficial to slow the rate of viral transmission even if the entire population gets infected, based on the Chinese numbers:

Total population 327 million, with a single initiating infection. 12 day course of disease, initial R0 of 3.5 (as per the stats from China that Steve linked.) Assume 5{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of cases are critical, 2{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of those critical cases die with ICU care, 5{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} with general hospital care, and 50{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} with no care. 90,000 available ICU beds and 900,000 available hospital beds.

Run this model through to completion and it sweeps through the population in about a year, infecting most everyone (less about 9 million who escape), killing 5.4 million.

Now, suppose we impose infection controls on day 80, right about when there’s 1000 deaths from this thing. And then we vary how strong those controls are: from 0.35 (what the Chinese managed) up to nothing at all.

Here we see how the # of deaths varies with the strength of our controls. If we impose Chinese-style controls, we get away with only 5K deaths, or 1000-fold fewer than without the controls. But the inflection point isn’t just at 1.0. In particular if we can get the R0 below about 1.5 that gets us down under 500K, or a 10-fold reduction. At 1.0 we get down to about 50K.

And this is why it is best to leave the opinionating on these matters to those who are, at the very least, statistically numerate. Don’t be like the NBA idiot who, in his clueless effort to demonstrate his brave lack of concern over corona-chan, went out of his way to touch all of the media’s microphones and promptly contracted the virus.

It costs very little to alter your day-to-day life for a few weeks, so why take even a low risk of putting yourself through the experience, even if it is nothing more than a bad flu. If you don’t suck on the runny noses of strangers on the bus just to prove you’re not afraid of the flu, why would you feel any need to avoid taking a few simple steps to avoid altering your routine now?

You can’t run

I could be wrong, but that’s how I’m seeing this play out.

President Donald Trump told the nation he was ordering an immediate shut-down of all travel from Europe to the United States as he addressed the nation on the coronavirus in a prime time Wednesday speech.

‘We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days,’ Trump announced, in a speech from the Oval Office to the nation.

One step at a time….

Italy shuts down harder

Nuova stretta sul contrasto al coronavirus. Il premier, Giuseppe Conte, nel pomeriggio ha riunito a Palazzo Chigi i capi delegazione dei partiti di governo. Alle 20.30 ha annunciato su Twitter: “Questa sera mi collegherò in diretta per darvi alcuni importanti aggiornamenti”. Quindi si è rivolto ai cittadini: “Grazie agli italiani che compiono sacrifici. Al primo posto c’è la salute degli italiani”. Quindi ha indicato le nuove misure: “Saranno chiusi tutti i negozi tranne quelli per i beni di prima necessità, come farmacie e alimentari. Le industrie resteranno aperte ma con misure di sicurezza. Saranno garantiti i trasporti”.

Translation: the Italian premier just announced that all retail stores are closed across the country except for pharmacies and grocery stores.

In other news out of Italy, the Boomercaust is officially upon us “as country’s top doctors say intensive care units should stop treating the elderly.”

An order or wishful thinking?

Hollywood does seem to feature an inordinately large number of deaths, which would presumably be the result of the Hollywood values possessed by the people who run it.

Harvey Weinstein said Jennifer Aniston ‘should be killed’ after he learned that the National Enquirer was planning to run a story accusing him of groping her, court documents have revealed. 

A trove of emails and other communications between Weinstein and his team offer a disturbing look at his reaction to the avalanche of sexual misconduct allegations that sparked his downfall in the fall of 2017. 

The correspondence is detailed in documents unsealed by the Manhattan Supreme Court ahead of Weinstein’s sentencing on Wednesday, where he faces up to 29 years in prison after being convicted of rape and sexual assault late last month.

In one email thread, a spokeswoman for the movie mogul forwarded a note from the Enquirer about a report that Weinstein had groped Aniston at a premiere event for their movie Derailed in 2005.

Weinstein responded to the note by writing: ‘Jen Aniston should be killed.’

Other emails feature the desperate pleas Weinstein sent to some two dozen influential people, including billionaires Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg, asking for them to help ‘resurrect’ his crumbling career and reputation.

On the other hand, Jennifer Aniston was neither killed nor attacked so far as we know. But it’s informative to learn to whom Weinstein was appealing.

UPDATE: Weinstein should be in prison until he dies of old age… or is Epsteined.

Harvey Weinstein was sentenced in a Manhattan criminal courtroom Wednesday to 23 years for sexually assaulting a former production assistant and raping an aspiring actress — a landmark sentencing in the #MeToo era.

Why Christianity is vital to civilization

The Z-man inadvertantly explains the central importance of Christianity to Western civilization and Western societies:

Stupidity has a cost. Every society, even small ones, pay a stupid tax, a price for believing and repeating things that are false. Inevitably, all facts result in some action, so the falsehood, assumed to be fact, will lead to an action. That action, based in an untruth, will come with a price. Maybe the price will be small, like women wasting money on tarot card readers. Maybe it will be high, like putting women into positions of authority based on the lunacy of feminism.

Further, the stupidity of false notions is not universal. Dumb people believe in ghosts and magic, while smart people fall for things like libertarianism. Belief in ghosts may be silly, but it is generally harmless. Crackpot ideas like communism and libertarianism, on the other hand, are very dangerous. It turns out that who is passing around the counterfeit idea counts for as much as the idea itself. Smart people falling for dumb ideas is far more dangerous than dumb people being dumb.

Like money, there are at least two qualities popular nonsense. One is the volume of it in circulation and the other is its velocity. The volume seems pretty obvious. At the extreme, if everything people think is true is actually false, they will not be around very long before they act in such a way that ends their existence. An example would be the Xhosa cattle-killing movement and famine of 1856. There is an absolute limit to the amount of stupid any people can indulge.

The less a society is devoted to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, the more it will subject itself to the inevitable and unavoidable costs of stupidity. The reason that the wicked always stumble in the end is that their rejection of the True is applied stupidity, and the acceptance of their self-serving falsehoods relies upon the very stupidity of the masses that prevents societies from functioning.

Biden crushes Sanders

Michigan will not boost Bernie this time:

Joe Biden won Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday, seizing a key battleground state that helped propel Bernie Sanders’ insurgent candidacy four years ago. The former vice president’s victory in Michigan, as well as Missouri and Mississippi, dealt a serious blow to Sanders, who is urgently seeking to jump-start his flagging campaign.

Sanders could still get a boost later in the night in Idaho, North Dakota or Washington state. But fewer delegates were at stake than in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, where Biden’s decisive performance again showed his strength with working-class voters and African Americans, who are vital to winning the Democratic nomination.

53.2{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} Biden
39.6{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} Sanders

Looks like Trump vs Biden. Smells like Trumpslide 2020.

Someone is busy

More and more of these “suicides” of federal officials and law enforcement officers seem to keep happening of late:

A federal prosecutor in California fatally shot his wife before turning the gun on himself in a suspected murder-suicide, authorities said.

Assistant US Attorney Timothy Delgado, 43, gunned down his wife, Tamara Delgado, 45, on Sunday at the couple’s home in Granite Bay and then took his own life, the Placer County Sheriff’s Office tweeted Monday.

“We are investigating yesterday’s homicide as a murder/suicide,” department officials said.

I think we’re rapidly approaching the point where one has to assume that virtually none of these “suicides” are anything of the kind. The only real question is which side is responsible.

So much for being “honourable”

It appears that Prince Andrew has belatedly realized that corrupt Cainites running interference for their elite counterparts are no longer in charge of the FBI and the DOJ:

Prince Andrew is still refusing to cooperate with a federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators — despite a public pledge to do so, federal prosecutors said Monday.

“Contrary to Prince Andrew’s very public offer to cooperate with our investigation into Epstein’s co-conspirators, an offer that was conveyed via press release, Prince Andrew has now completely shut the door on voluntary cooperation,” US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman said late Monday morning after an unrelated press conference.

Andrew — the royal family black sheep who’s been slammed for his friendship with Epstein, and accused of raping one of Epstein’s victims — has reportedly hired Britain’s “most formidable” extradition lawyer to defend him against the federal probe.

No one ever said the prince was particularly bright. But he’s probably got enough of a survival instinct to realize that he’ll end up like his good buddy Epstein – who did not kill himself – if he’s arrested.