Yeah, you just love government, don’t you?
You’d give them your daughter’s life to rape and discard for the greater good of killing innocent people and then losing anyway in countries that never attacked us across the Middle East and Africa.
It’s only fair!
From the Free Thought Project:
Twin Black Brothers Accused of Robbing Their Own Home, Beaten, Arrested in Their Yard
Many Western governments failed in a grotesque manner in their preparation for this or any other pandemic:
1) They failed to stock up on (or build production capacity for) the medical equipment (eg ventilators) and capacity, as well as personal protective equipment (eg face masks) that would be needed in almost any pandemic
2) They did not set up an even remotely effective testing & tracking system
3) They failed to provide the public early on with some very simple but (see below) highly effective guidelines individuals, businesses and organizations can use to protect themselves and the people around them (frequent & thorough hand washing; not touching your face; no handshakes; frequent disinfecting of surfaces)
If you’re gonna have a government then pandemic preparation would seem to be one of its key functions.
Yet they failed, spectacularly. In fact, they barely even tried.
And now as everybody is panicking, these same governments —as a reward for their catastrophic failure perhaps— are busy handing themselves vast new authoritarian powers we would not have thought possible in a peacetime situation: Cities are put on lockdown; millions are ordered to stay home; businesses told to keep their doors closed; and as people are losing their jobs by the millions it has now de facto become illegal for them to go out and protest these measures.
But what measures are actually effective in containing a pandemic? Is it the voluntary, decentralized actions of individuals, businesses & other organizations, or the authoritarian centralized actions of government?
A full discussion of libertarian approaches to preparing for and containing a pandemic will have to wait for another time, but here are some relevant observations from influential Stanford University Professor of Medicine/Health Research & Policy/Biomedical Data Science/Statistics, John P. A. Ioannidis:
Extreme measures: Under alarming circumstances,extreme measures of unknown effectiveness are adopted. China initially responded sluggishly, but subsequently locked down entire cities.(9) School closures, cancellation of social events, air travel curtailment and restrictions, entry control measures, and border closure are applied by various countries. Italy adopted country-level lockdown on March 8 and many countries have been following suite. Evidence is lacking for the most aggressive measures. A systematic review on measures to prevent the spread of respiratory viruses found insufficient evidence for entry port screening and social distancing in reducing epidemic spreading.(10) Plain hygienic measures have the strongest evidence.(10) (11) Frequent hand washing and staying at home and avoiding contacts when sick are probably very useful. Their routine endorsement may save many lives. Most lives saved may actually be due to reduced transmission of influenza rather than coronavirus.
(9) Chen W, Wang Q, Li YQ, Yu HL, Xia YY, Zhang ML, et al. Early containment strategies and core measures for prevention and control of novel coronavirus pneumonia in China. Zhonghua Yu Fang Yi Xue Za Zhi. 2020;54(3):1-6.
(10) Jefferson T, Del Mar CB, Dooley L, Ferroni E, Al-Ansary LA, Bawazeer GA, et al. Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2011;(7):CD006207.
(11) Saunders-Hastings P, Crispo JAG, Sikora L, Krewski D. Effectiveness of personal protective measures in reducing pandemic influenza transmission: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Epidemics. 2017;20:1-20.
Another interesting read is this overview of effective ways for society to prepare for and respond to pandemics, created by Cassidy Nelson’s research group. Nelson is a medical doctor and research scholar at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. This overview could also serve as a basis for a future discussion on libertarian approaches to the problem of pandemics. Could individuals, businesses and civil society take care of the things mentioned by Nelson, or even come up with effective alternative solutions?
12 things her research group think urgently need to happen if we’re to keep the risk at acceptable levels. The ideas are:
Science
1. Roll out genetic sequencing tests that lets you test someone for all known and unknown pathogens in one go.
2. Fund research into faster ‘platform’ methods for going from pathogen to vaccine, perhaps using innovation prizes.
3. Fund R&D into broad-spectrum drugs, especially antivirals, similar to how we have generic antibiotics against multiple types of bacteria.Response
4. Develop a national plan for responding to a severe pandemic, regardless of the cause. Have a backup plan for when things are so bad the normal processes have stopped working entirely.
5. Rigorously evaluate in what situations travel bans are warranted. (They’re more often counterproductive.)
6. Coax countries into more rapidly sharing their medical data, so that during an outbreak the disease can be understood and countermeasures deployed as quickly as possible.
7. Set up genetic surveillance in hospitals, public transport and elsewhere, to detect new pathogens before an outbreak — or even before patients develop symptoms.
8. Run regular tabletop exercises within governments to simulate how a pandemic response would play out.Oversight
9. Mandate disclosure of accidents in the biosafety labs which handle the most dangerous pathogens.
10. Figure out how to govern DNA synthesis businesses, to make it harder to mail order the DNA of a dangerous pathogen.
11. Require full cost-benefit analysis of ‘dual-use’ research projects that can generate global risks.12. And finally, to maintain momentum, it’s necessary to clearly assign responsibility for the above to particular individuals and organisations
The Great Jim Bovard has a new one in the Daily Caller.
It was like a scene straight out of a horror film.
That’s how 25-year-old Ibrahim Abu Safiya described the moment he saw someone lying on the ground near an Israeli checkpoint on the outskirts of Beit Sira village, west of Ramallah.
“We approached the man lying on the ground, and he looked terribly ill,” Abu Safiya told Middle East Eye.
“He had an extremely high fever. He could barely move his body and he was struggling to breathe,” Abu Safiya said.
The man lying on the ground was a Palestinian labourer who works in Israel. He told Abu Safiya that he had been showing signs of the coronavirus over the past four days, and was recently tested for the virus.
But before the man, allegedly a resident of Nablus, could receive his test results, his Israeli employer reportedly called the Israeli authorities, who picked him up and dropped him on the other side of the Beit Sira checkpoint, which connects central Israel and the occupied West Bank.
“He told us that they just threw him here on the ground and left him,” Abu Safiya recounted.
“How could they do this to someone?” he asked. “It shouldn’t matter if he’s Palestinian, Israeli, or whatever. He’s a human being!”
Read the rest at Middle East Eye.
Here’s another: The Israelis admit they murder a young man driving his car but claim in their defense that it was revenge for him having thrown rocks at them earlier. Uh-huh.
(Don’t forget, you pay the salaries of these criminals. They take it right out of your paycheck, sucker. -ed)
Biden's teleprompter broke pic.twitter.com/kgGqYV6wl2
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) March 23, 2020
Update: He tries again:
heres biden on the view saying "the cure, that will make the problem worse no matter what" pic.twitter.com/RrfDeFlGzd
— jack allison (@jackallisonLOL) March 24, 2020
They are your deadly enemy.
More reports of members of Congress & their aides dumping stocks that would tank and buying shares of companies that would soar in a global pandemic.
Downright evil.https://t.co/qje6cXbKZt pic.twitter.com/TUcwWnjaDT
— jordan (@JordanUhl) March 23, 2020
COVID-19 is a very serious problem that should be taken very seriously by individuals, organizations, businesses and governments but there are ways in which the public may get an exaggerated sense of the threat:
1. In general: Once a dominant narrative is formed (in this case: Covid-19 as huge threat) reporting will be more inclined to cover things that fit that narrative & ignore/dismiss things that seem to contradict it: The evidentiary standards for reporting that fits the narrative will be lower than for reporting that contradicts it.
2. Reporting focuses on *expected* problems rather than currently existing problems: Most hospital capacity reporting is about expected problems.
3. Ordinary events are now portrayed as evidence for the threat, eg:
a) Many hospitals run at near capacity in normal times and will routinely be over capacity but now this problem may be attributed to COVID-19.
b) Rare cases (eg of young people suddenly getting violently ill & dying from COVID-19) that in normal times are ignored (such rare deaths also happen with eg the flu and other viruses) now make the front page & are portrayed as more common than they are.
4. A large increase in the number of cases sounds scary but becomes much less so when this is because of an increase in the number of tests rather than an increase in the number of cases.
5. Death rates can seem very high when everybody who died from other causes but also had COVID-19 is counted as a COVID-19 death (to be sure, this problem is not that widespread, but it is what happened in Italy).
6. The extent of the problem is not put into context by comparing it to other problems. So while e.g. 500 COVID-19 deaths may sound very scary, if in that same period 10,000 people died from the flu it may seem less so.
7. Exponential growth rates are assumed to continue at that rate instead of quickly levelling off.
8. An excessive reliance on models that are only as good as their assumptions.
9. Relying on experts whose past pandemic predictions were way off.
10. Governments taking enormously far reaching steps to fight the problem give rise to a “Well, they wouldn’t take such extreme measures if the problem weren’t that extreme” attitude.
