Monday, March 9, 2020

Reset In Progress

Downhill Skiing,

The reset is underway. Which reset? All of 'em?
 In the US we were assured by Ronald Reagan that "there are no limits to human ingenuity", by which he denied The Limits To Growth projections that global real economy would peak some time around 2015, and global human population would peak some time around 2050. That implies some very bad times for humans in the intervening time, which is now. 
Reagan was a TV star who became president. He was a good enough chap, but the book still looks right.

Billionaires are not about to let votes change their system, certainly not at a critical time like this. Take the votes away from Bernie again and give them to Biden and Bloomberg. It worked for Hillary last time. Thanks Colleen.
 The 2020 Massachusetts Democratic Party presidential primary was held on March 3, 2020. Election results from the computerized vote counts differed significantly from the results projected by the exit poll conducted by Edison Research and published by CNN at poll’s closing. As in the 2016 Massachusetts primary between candidates Sanders and Clinton, disparities greatly exceed the exit poll’s margin of error. Sanders won Massachusetts in the exit poll and lost it in the computer count.
 The discrepancies between the exit poll and the vote count for Sanders and Biden totaled 8.4%— double the 4.0% margin of error (95% CI) for their exit poll differences. Warren’s and Biden’s discrepancies also totaled 8.4%, again double the margin of error (95% CI) for their exit poll differences.  These discrepancies replicate the total discrepancy of 8.0% favoring Clinton in the 2016 Massachusetts Democratic Party primary between her and Sanders. This time two progressive candidates exhibit the same discrepancies now favoring Biden representing the establishment’s choice.
 Presidential candidates Biden’s and Bloomberg’s vote counts exhibited the largest disparity from their exit poll projections. Biden’s unobservable computer-generated vote totals represented a 16.2% increase of his projected exit poll share.

Solve problems yourself. Grow vegetables. Sidestep the machine before it collapses. Make it irrelevant.
 A society can be likened to an organism. Its members are individual cells. Organisms survive not because one group of cells in the brain directs the rest. Rather, there is constant interaction and communications among cells, much of which bypasses the brain. This optimizes the odds of the organism’s survival. You put your hand on a hot stove, information is communicated from your skin and its nerves to the peripheral nervous system, not the brain, and the message almost instantly comes back: take your hand off the stove. If cells could only respond to directives from the relatively slow brain, the organism would die within minutes. Similarly, the illusion that huge masses of people can be controlled by a small group from the top only guarantees the eventual end of that small group’s control and perhaps the entire society.

Novel Coronavirus, the original S-strain and the more aggressive L-strain are released and spreading like wildfire, having jumped all the big waters and mountains from China to the wide world. 
 Most people dispute that this is a military creation, perhaps from fear of ridicule. The facts are that most of the work done on the S-strain showed it to be about 95% like a bat strain, except that the whole 5% difference was never seen anywhere before, and existed in the section that binds the ACE-2 receptor in human respiratory and digestive tracts. 
 That was no accident, and was never found in wild animals, because it was never there. 
 The second L-strain coronavirus, the more aggressive one, that caught China partying unawares has that same exact binding site and spike-protein that lets it reach out and touch us so effectively. 
 That site that makes it spread in people gets selected for success, is under selection pressure based on spread over time. Some areas are "neutral", not really affecting infectivity. The L-strain differs by 17% in a neutral area, compared to an S-strain. 
 That's huge in viral time. It's years of mutation and thousands of sequential hosts to mutate that much, but it came out a month after the S-strain, and it has the identical tissue binding sequences.
 Here in Texas some people mount horns from a Texas Longhorn on the front of their cars and trucks. The rest of the vehicle is a different vehicle, but they look the same after you mount the longhorns.
 That's what happened with S-strain and L-strain. Different viral test platforms, maybe from different national labs, or the same one, got the same attack-sequence mounted on them and set out attacking Chinese people in Wuhan.
Which sequence predominates in other countries? 
S-strain is more prevalent in China outside Wuhan, but what about in New York?

 ​ ​New modeling from The Australian National University looks at seven scenarios of how the COVID-19 outbreak might affect the world’s wealth, ranging from low severity to high severity.
​ ​Four of the seven scenarios in the paper examine the impact of COVID-19 spreading outside China, ranging from low to high severity. A seventh scenario examines a global impact in which a mild pandemic occurs each year indefinitely.
​ ​But even in the low-severity model — or best-case scenario of the seven, which the paper acknowledged were not definitive — ANU researchers estimate a global GDP loss of $2.4 trillion, with an estimated death toll of 15 million.


​$2.5 trillion in stock valuations disappeared from global markets this morning. That's different from GDP, right?

Charles Hugh Smith:
​ ​If the stock market drops 50%, that wipes out pension funds, 401Ks, and mountains of leverage.
​ ​In other words, the Fed has to save all the asset bubbles to save the real-world economy which is now dependent on the excesses of financialization that have enriched the few at the expense of the many.
​ ​Everyone with a pension fund or 401K invested in stocks better hope the Fed becomes the buyer of last resort, and soon, as once stocks crater 50% or more, there's no way to recover the $16 trillion that evaporated, or stop the dominoes from falling.


​Moon Of Alabama is up to date and on-target:
Today the financial markets finally recognized the economic damage the novel Coronavirus will cause.
 The price war in the crude oil markets which Russia initiated did not cause today's stock market fall but it also did not help. While cheap oil is supposed to be good for the economy the drop will also cause significant damage in the U.S. financial markets as the whole fracking industry in the United States is laden with debt and is now destined to be wiped out. Expect crude prices to sink to $20 per barrel as frantic overproduction and a drop in demand due to the virus coincide. Russia is well positioned to win this price war. Others are not.
 It is the virus pandemic that causes the downturn in stock markets. But what makes the Sars-CoV-2 virus, as the novel Coronavirus is now officially known, so dangerous? The Covid-19 disease the virus causes is basically a flu though its seems to be one of the more severe kinds. 
(More infectious and more fatal than the 1918-1919 Influenza)
 But when a new viruses evolves everything is different. Our societies do not have a basic immunity against a new virus. Without countermeasures many more people will get sick during the first, second and third wave of a new virus onslaught than during a normal flu season. Health care staff will also get infected and must quarantine itself. Some health care workers will probably die. Hospitals will become overwhelmed and the health care system will break down just as it did in Wuhan, China. The breakdown of the health care system also leads to a much larger number of virus death than under a working health care system...
 The current case fatality rate in Lombardy has now topped 6%. We know from China (ex Hubei province) that in a functioning health care system the death rate of Covid-19 patients is lower than 1%. It is not the virus that kills more people in Italy, it is an overwhelmed health care system.  
(Consider that this may be L-strain virus in Italy.)
 A health care system that is overwhelmed with Covid-19 cases can also no longer take care of regular cases. People with an acute heart attack, with diabetes problems, or kids who have fallen off a bicycle will find that the hospitals are full and unable to care for them.
 The only way to prevent such a catastrophic development is to spread out the timeline during which the epidemic happens
(Don't go out in crowds. Don't touch things everybody touches without gloves. Toss the gloves before opening your car. Go home. Take 10,000U vitamin D-3 per day until summer, unless your levels are already up to normal. Consider taking 1000 mg of vitamin-C 3 times per day when you spike a fever. Fever-Good, Tylenol-Bad.)
​ ​Today's market crash and Trump's ignorant and disastrous handling of the pandemic make it now less likely that he will get reelected. The pandemic also guarantees that the demand of medicare for all will become a huge winner.  

NYC Mayor De Blasio says quarantine of the whole city "is a possibility"... Whaddayuz think?

Russia declares financial war on Shale Oil and Saudi monarchy. Russia can handle $25/bbl oil for a decade, indefinitely.
​ ​Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said that "considering the decision taken today, from April 1 of this year onwards, neither we nor any OPEC or non-OPEC country is required to make (oil) output cuts."
With global fears over coronavirus already severely impacting the oil market (down 30% since the start of the year), and with the Russians surprising oil ministers gathered at OPEC headquarters by suddenly abandoning a plan meant to keep oil prices steady, the biggest shock was felt by the Saudis, because as Bloomberg puts it, Putin has just effectively dumped crown prince MbS to start a war on America's shale oil industry​.


Putin saves Erdogan from himself, Pepe Escobar​
Once again it was Russia that just prevented the threatened 'Muslim invasion' of Europe advertised by Erdogan


​Eleni in Athens sends this, and she is well guided in her selection. The NATO policy objective has been to reduce most nations to chaos and to keep them there, while taking their nice oil and uranium.
Today's question is, "where's the money for this forever-war going to come from?"​
"NATO Go Home!" ​ ​by Thierry Meyssan
​ ​For two decades, US troops have been imposing their law on the broader Middle East. Entire countries are now without a state to defend them. Populations have been subjected to the dictatorship of the Islamists. Mass murders have been committed. There have been famines as well. President Donald Trump has forced his generals to repatriate their soldiers, but the Pentagon intends to continue its work with NATO soldiers.


​Going Home​

8 comments:

  1. This is my first comment here and I find your blog very informative. Just a question about Reagan being a good enough chap. I remember working with a group in Philadelphia whose goal was to end US involvement in wars in Central America. The armies in El Salvador and Guatemala that Reagan supported were guilty of crimes against humanity. Check out info on the US trained battalion that killed hundreds of women and children at El Mozote, El Salvador. Remember the Amercan nuns who were raped and killed by the Salvadoran Army and Reagan's Secretary of State tried to justify the killings because he believed the nuns may have fired on the soldiers?
    Don't forget the Contras, Iran-Contra, providing aid to Sadaam Hussein in his war against Iran. I could go on and on but unless you absolve Reagan because his mental facilities were on the decline (like Joe Biden) and he was not responsible for his actions, Reagan was just another mass murderer.

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    1. Thanks Cartero,
      As as a tudent at UT, Austin I marched to the state capitol several times chanting "no bombs, no war, US out of El Salvador". Students still did that. I just didn't want to pick on Reagan as a human. He did want to be president, and David Stockman says he was way smarter than people thought. I think a lot of the bad things that happened to Reagan came from his belief that he was the President of the United States Of America, not a figurehead for the deep state operations of George Herbert Walker Bush. G.H.W. Bush was running the drugs, wars and atrocities for profit, the Iran-Contra triangle trade of guns for drugs for money and spare parts for hostages in Iran. Running drugs to Bill Clinton's Arkansas machine in CIA planes was a big part of that. Reagan had to get shot and senile.
      You forced some of my broader view out of me. I suspect we agree.

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  2. This link from Epsilon is wonderful: https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-non-linearity-of-need/

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    1. Thank You, Mary.
      I agree that it is good. The people who get hurt are my patients, amny of them the hardworking poor.
      The hurt will be worse if the spread of the virus is not slowed down to a leak into our human population. It really needs to not play like it played in Wuhan, and like it is playing in Lombardi, Italy and especially Iran.
      Only vast quarantines can really slow this virus, which sheds for days before a person has any cough, malaise or fever, days of shaking hands, touching doorknobs, touching mouth and wiping nose. This is what Germany discovered is the natural progression of the virus in a human incubator.
      America will really have to go full-Bernie-Sanders, then even goose it past that. Socialism for the rich will not work this time. It will just get everybody killed this time.
      Growing vegetables is good, but most people don't know how. We need a depression-era type public works project putting in urban vegetable gardens, fruit trees and training people to tend them (IMHO).

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    2. Thank you. I started in 1983 to do my part to make us a "nation of farmers" with a seed company which is still going.

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  3. I struggle with vegetables. But I'm trying again. This year I made long tables out of a discarded garage door and the pots are up high from the ground. I'm trying everything since I have all this space now, greens, beans, peppers, kale, spinach, lettuce, tomatoes, basil, rosemary, (i.always have trouble with rosemary and I don't get it. I've seen rosemary grow in the harshest of conditions but mine fail Everytime). I can grow the hell out of some ferns. Mine are lush & healthy but those are only helpful for weddings & funerals. Anyway I really just dropped in to say thank you for the longhorn analogy. I got it right away. Now I can explain the difference between the L-strand and the S-strand and that's pretty nerdy. Thank you for all you do. Stay safe Dr. Day. I'll be checking in more regularly. Linda

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  4. This is the vegetable gardening protocol I worked out, Linda. Multiples of the 3 bed rotation, not all identical, seems to work most flexibly.
    http://www.johndayblog.com/2016/07/liberty-garden-central-texas-climate.html

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