Boomer logic

Save the useless old people first! The cri de coeur of the Boomer facing the possibility of a Corona-chan-based Boomercaust.

Throughout the developing crisis in Italy, however, I’ve noticed a worrying ageism in the language surrounding the question of who to treat first. Some medics have been openly admitting that they are prioritising younger patients over older ones.

I appreciate the huge difficulties doctors in Italy are facing, but this is not acceptable. Ageism is the last bastion of acceptable prejudice in society. Phrases such as ‘they were old anyway’ and ‘they’ve had a good life’ are bandied about without thinking about what they really mean.

Does your age mean your life is worth less than someone else’s?

Yes, absolutely! There are multiple reasons to prioritize saving younger people in these circumstances and every elderly individual worth his salt wouldn’t hesitate to agree. Damned Boomers can’t even die with dignity; it’s no surprise that so many of them are going out caterwauling and crying about their importance to the bitter end.

First, the principles of triage dictate that the old people most at risk be treated last. Their treatment consumes more medical resources to less avail than any other population. Second, the principles of economics dictate that old people most at risk be treated last. Their treatment costs considerably more, which means fewer of them can be treated. Third, the principles of fairness dictate that old people be treated last. They have already lived most of their lives, where the young have not. And fourth, the principles of societal survival dictate that old people be treated last. They can neither maintain or sustain society, while the young must live if society is to survive.

Prioritizing medical treatement for the young over the elderly is not only acceptable, it is absolutely necessary, especially in times when resources are limited. Not only is it not “agism” to deprioritize the treatment of the elderly, it is pure anti-societal narcissism for any elderly individual to demand equal medical priority for his age cohort.

Side effects

It’s fascinating to observe all the beneficial “side effects” of the pandemic developing over time:

The coronavirus outbreak that has led to the quarantine of all of Italy has stopped the activity of migrant transport NGOs in the Mediterranean. Migrant transport NGOs have seen their ships remain in dock due to the spread of the coronavirus with the last activity taking place in late February when the NGO Sea Watch was able to land 194 migrants in the country.

Arrivals of migrants in their own boats from North Africa have also halted since February 28th, according to a report from Italian newspaper Il Giornale, which states that the last boat to depart from the area took place off the coast of Libya and was intercepted by the local coastguard.

The migrant transport NGOs, meanwhile, have written a letter to the Italian Agency for Cooperation and Development expressing their concerns over the coronavirus outbreak and how they can continue to operate, likely fearing a collapse in donation money.

Thank you, Corona-chan!

UPDATE: Looks like a Storm warning….

President Donald Trump plans to declare a national emergency on Friday over the coronavirus outbreak, invoking the Stafford Act to open the door to more federal aid for states and municipalities, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The president said he will hold a news conference at 3 p.m. in Washington. Trump spoke Friday with Emmanuel Macron, the French president tweeted, about the pandemic, and agreed to organize a video conference with world leaders on Monday to coordinate research efforts on a vaccine and treatments and work on how to respond to the economic fallout.

Trump is under increasing pressure to act as governors and mayors nationwide step up actions to mitigate the spread, closing schools and canceling public events.

This may answer the question “why isn’t Trump acting faster.” It’s a lot easier to act if people are putting pressure on you to do so. And it’s a lot harder for them to claim that your actions are too harsh if they begged you to take action.

But it shouldn’t end with a national emergency, as the next step will be a declaration of martial law as the Storm is unleashed. Note that European governments are already beginning to extend school and other closures to April 30th.

UPDATE: Ever wonder how long it would take to round up, process, and try 150,000 people? Apparently about two months.

White House coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Friday morning that the current state of crisis in the US would last for two months.

This is not fear porn

First, if you think this is fear porn, then you aren’t old enough to remember either AIDS or the Cold War. Second, this can’t be “the same as SARS” or other recent epidemics, because corona-chan is observably at least one, and possibly two, orders of magnitude more infectious.

The SARS epidemic in 2003 reported 8098 cases with 774 deaths, and was eventually brought under control by July, 2003, in a matter of 8 months. Although 26 countries reported cases, the vast majority of cases were concentrated in five countries or regions: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Toronto, Canada. SARS was eventually contained by means of syndromic surveillance, prompt isolation of patients, strict enforcement of quarantine of all contacts, and in some areas community-level quarantine. By interrupting all human-to-human transmission, SARS was effectively eradicated.

By contrast, there are presently 134,317 reported cases with 4,968 deaths in 116 countries in less than three months of the present pandemic. One of these things is not like the others. To claim that it is accomplishes nothing but to parade one’s statistical innumeracy.

The refusal to take action in the face of potential adversity is not indicative of courage or intelligence. To the contrary, it is paralysis based on denial, fear, and binary thinking.

Neither pestilence nor war are influenced by your opinion of the reality of their existence.

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.