J5V
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Posts posted by J5V
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What will be interesting is what happens when we start easing lock-down restrictions. If we get a spike in infections do we go into another lock-down or do we tough it out?
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1 minute ago, HardCoreBlue said:
Sometimes it’s not what you are saying or writing, it’s how you are saying or writing it that’s important.
Otherwise known as hype.
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1 hour ago, pigseye said:
The worldwide numbers are right around 0.6 - 0.7 %, according to CNN.
What we need to know in order to compare death rates between influenza and covid-19 is accurate data showing infection rates for both. I'm not sure we have any idea how many people have been exposed to the novel coronavirus.
We don't do lock-downs for normal influenza therefore I think it's safe to say that the denominator is far higher than it is for covid-19.
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1 hour ago, pigseye said:
The worldwide numbers are right around 0.6 - 0.7 %, according to CNN.
For influenza?
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It's just wild how all these PHDs, professors, biologists, and scientists that have the credentials, tenure, and support of so many and have dedicated their lives to helping people are just a bunch of conspiracy theorist crackpots. I don't know how you guys just know this to be fact.
The safe thing to do is to just trust in our governments, the big corporations, and the mass media because they always tell us the truth and if they aren't, well, it's for our own good. Right?
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Has anyone seen the Dr Rashid Buttar interview?
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Awfully quiet in here.
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16 hours ago, Noeller said:
The fact that he's been a a great leader through this, is shocking. He's been almost Prime Ministerial...
What has he done that's impressed you so much?
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48 minutes ago, HardCoreBlue said:
Really? With his track record with what comes out of his mouth, you wouldn’t have believed it without audio video? At this stage most just shrug their shoulders when they hear a report of his latest lunacies.
That's what I was doing, just shrugging it off, but it was just so unbelievably stupid, but, fair point. LOL!
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2 hours ago, 17to85 said:
I think 6 year olds come up with better lies.
Perfect time for a journalist to seize the opportunity to ask the president to clarify whether he is not taking his meds seriously or if he's just a lying idiot in over his head.
Nothing will sway his base, but I'd love to see the temper tantrum it would cause.
FTFY.
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We don't want to shut down our business. We regularly import goods from China but may have to rethink that. I had an email exchange with one of our Chinese suppliers yesterday about shipping costs that have tripled since the world-wide lock-down. Tripled! We were quite surprised but perhaps shouldn't have been. I used the occasion to ask how business there had been affected otherwise. The reply was that their particular business was doing okay because they are into electronics and orders are still coming in. But many other businesses there have shut down completely. It was stressed that this had nothing to do with them and that it was a result of orders almost completely drying up from around the world due to the lock-down. Extrapolate that however you will as to what it's effects are going to do to things like the cost of goods, wages, etc. as we move forward.
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I'm just glad to know that Jacksonville is going to be okay. Whew!
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1 hour ago, TrueBlue4ever said:
Thanks. Best I was able to come up with was percentage of population for both countries of people over 55 was 31.5% for Canada and 31.84 for Sweden. Virtually identical. So much for that theory. 🙂
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1 hour ago, GCJenks said:
Are you suggesting Google is a hoax now? Type the question in and hit enter. That’s pretty hard to do. Just look at the source and pick one that would pass a test of MBB peers...
Can't follow? That's ok. A lot of that going around.
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22 minutes ago, GCJenks said:
According to Google 15% and change in Canada, 20% in Sweden. Sweden’s total pop is roughly 10.5 million vs our 37.6.
Interesting. It's hard to find data like that. Is that people over 65? What about over 50? I'm just wondering if one of the reasons Sweden's numbers are skewed higher is because they have a higher percentage of elderly. Obviously if you have fewer elderly you're going to have fewer deaths/lower death rate.
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1 hour ago, GCJenks said:
I thought this graphic was a fitting update to the Sweden experiment. Couldn’t capture the full ranking in one frame but here are Sweden and her closest neighbours. Norway was one of the first to enact social distancing and backed it up with severe penalties for not obeying.
They have already started to back off some of those restrictions, Sweden will likely need to implement some as their health system is now overrun with cases.
Strike that, you’ll have to click the link, I forget that this forum won’t host images directly.
Interesting. Who has a larger percentage of older people in their population, Canada or Sweden, and by how much?
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3 hours ago, Mark H. said:
Here's my experience with conspiracy theories:
First, I'll list a few off the top of my head:
1. All our computers will crash when the year 2000 arrives
2. 911 was an inside job
3. The Titanic didn't really sink, they sunk another ship to claim the insurance on Titanic
4. No one has ever landed on the moon - it was all trick photography
There are 100s of others, but I will stop there. Just looking at those four - they have all been disproven
My question is simply this: can you give us something that was originally labelled a conspiracy theory, that was later proven to be legit?
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Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs.[1] This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation.
Groupthink requires individuals to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions, and there is loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. The dysfunctional group dynamics of the "ingroup" produces an "illusion of invulnerability" (an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made). Thus the "ingroup" significantly overrates its own abilities in decision-making and significantly underrates the abilities of its opponents (the "outgroup"). Furthermore, groupthink can produce dehumanizing actions against the "outgroup". Members of a group can often feel peer pressure to "go along with the crowd" in fear of rocking the boat or of what them speaking up will do to the overall to how their teammates perceive them. Group interactions tend to favor, clear and harmonious agreements and it can be a cause for concern when little to no new innovations or arguments for better policies, outcomes and structures are called to question. (McLeod). Groupthink can often be referred to as a group of “yes men” because group activities and group projects in general make it extremely easy to pass on not offering constructive opinions.
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On the face of it, this is hard to understand. After all, people do conspire. That is, they engage in secretive or deceptive behaviour that is illegal or morally dubious.
Conspiracy is a common form of human behaviour across all cultures throughout recorded time, and it has always been particularly widespread in politics.
Virtually all of us conspire some of the time, and some people (such as spies) conspire virtually all of the time. Given people conspire, there can’t be anything wrong with believing they conspire. Hence there can’t be anything wrong with believing conspiracy theories or being a conspiracy theorist.
Thinking of conspiracy theories as paradigmatically false and irrational is like thinking of phrenology as a paradigm of scientific theory. Conspiracy theories, like scientific theories, and virtually any other category of theory, are sometimes true, sometimes false, sometimes held on rational grounds, sometimes not.
Whenever we use the terms “conspiracy theory”, “conspiracism” or “conspiracist ideation”, we’re implying, even if we don’t mean to, there is something wrong with believing, wanting to investigate, or giving any credence at all to the possibility people are engaged in secretive or deceptive behaviour.
I hope and believe that in the future these terms will be widely recognised for what they are: the products of an irrational and authoritarian outlook.
https://theconversation.com/in-defence-of-conspiracy-theories-and-why-the-term-is-a-misnomer-101678
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Bleating and babbling we fell on his neck with a scream
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead!
You better stay home
And do as you're told
Get out of the road if you want to grow old -
While the lockdown is presented to public opinion as the sole means to resolving a global public health crisis, its devastating economic and social impacts are casually ignored.
The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy and extreme poverty.
This is the true picture of what is happening. Poverty is Worldwide. While famines are erupting in Third World countries, closer to home, in the richest country on earth,
“millions of desperate Americans wait in long crowded lines for handouts”
“Miles-long lines formed at food banks and unemployment offices across the US over the past week”The ongoing 2020 Economic Crisis is tied into the logic of the COVID-19 pandemic: No need for the IMF-World Bank to negotiate a structural adjustment loan with national governments.
What has occurred under the COVID-19 crisis is a “Global Adjustment” in the structure of the World economy. In one fell swoop this Global Adjustment (GA) triggers a Worldwide process of bankruptcy, unemployment, poverty and total despair.
How is it implemented? The lockdown is presented to national governments as the sole solution to resolve the COVID-19 pandemic. It becomes a political consensus, irrespective of the devastating economic and social consequences.
This closing down operation affects production and supply lines of goods and services, (Cargill Meat Packing Plant) investment activities, exports and imports, wholesale and retail trade, consumer spending, the closing down of schools, colleges and universities, research institutions, etc.
In turn it leads almost immediately to mass unemployment, bankruptcies of small and medium sized enterprises, a collapse in purchasing power, widespread poverty and famine.
What is the underlying objective of this restructuring of the global economy? What are the consequences? Cui Bono?
A massive concentration of wealth and corporate capital,
the destabilization of small and middle sized enterprises in all major areas of economic activity including the services economy, agriculture and manufacturing.
facilitates the subsequent corporate acquisition of bankrupt enterprises
It derogates the rights of workers. It destabilizes labor markets.
It creates mass unemployment
It compresses wages (and labor costs) in the so-called high income “developed countries” as well as in the impoverished developing countries.
It leads to an escalation of the external debt
It facilitates subsequent privatization
It is neoliberalism to the nth degree.
Crippled by mounting debts, what is at stake is the eventual de facto privatization of the entire state structure, in different countries, at all levels of government, under the surveillance of powerful financial interests. The fiction of “sovereign governments” serving the interests of the electors will nonetheless be maintained.
The first level of government up for privatization will be the municipalities (many of which are already partially or fully privatized, e.g. Detroit in 2013). America’s billionaires will be enticed to buy up an entire city.
Several major cities are already on the verge of bankruptcy. (This is nothing new).
Is the city of Vancouver up for privatization?: “the mayor of Vancouver has already indicated that he feared the bankruptcy of his city.” (Le Devoir, April 15, 2020)
“U.S. households collectively carry about $1 trillion in credit card debt”. No measures are being taken in the US to reduce the interest rates on credit card debt. (It is the same in Canada)
The lockdown impoverishes both the developed and developing countries and literally destroys national economies.
There is a lot of misunderstanding regarding the nature of this crisis.
Several progressive intellectuals are now saying that this crisis constitutues a defeat of neoliberalism. “It opens up a new beginning”.
Some people see it as a “potential turning point”, which opens up an opportunity to “build socialism” or “restore social democracy” in the wake of the lockdown.
The evidence amply confirms that neoliberalism has not been defeated. Quite the opposite.
Global capitalism has consolidated its clutch. Fear and panic prevail. The State is being privatized. The tendency is towards authoritarian forms of government.
That historical opportunity to confront the power structures of global capitalism, –including the US-NATO military apparatus– remains to be firmly established in wake of the lockdown.
(Borrowed liberally from an article dated April 17 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Covid-19
in General Discussion
Posted
That is by far the worst case scenario and the worst possible outcome of the lock-down strategy. If we end up cycling through repeated lock-downs that means that all we've really done is prolonged this thing and destroyed our economy in the process. I really hope you're wrong but fear you may be right.