If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
I'm hearing much concern about a "second wave" for the coronavirus, and an upsurge in the US.
According to the stats, it is not true. It is notable that the daily plague count is not going down in the US as it is in Canada or the UK; I think that can indeed be blamed on the recent protests, and it may get worse.
Popularity per capita of maps featuring the colour red. Not to scale.
Folks are saying the world is going to change. Things will never go back to normal after the coronavirus. Globalism is dead.
I think maybe environmentalism too.
To be fair, my friend Xerxes joins Pope Francis in declaring the opposite: that the pandemic somehow reinforces the environmentalist argument. It is nature taking revenge.
But that is not how it looks to me.
Reports say the canals of Venice now run clear; you can see the fish. They say the skies are clear above Beijing. You can see from satellites.
Xerxes says this shows how much our actions affect the Earth. I think the opposite. It seems to me this reveals our “environmental footprint” is lighter than we imagined. Turn things off for a few weeks, and nature seems to forget we were ever there.
I think of Shelley’s "Ozymandias."
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Was environmentalism always an expression of hubris? Supposing we humans were in control of nature, that we could calibrate the global temperature a hundred years from now right down to a degree or two, like adjusting the thermostat in our home?
Were we arrogant in supposing nature was a maiden so fragile that she needed us to do so? Weren’t we really seeing ourselves as godlike?
The coronavirus reminds us we are arguably not the dominant species on earth. We are definitely not the top of the food chain. Microbes feast on us.
Nature also looks less lovable and benevolent than it did a year ago, doesn’t it?
The coronavirus reminds us that our best-laid plans as men gang aft agley; the epidemic caught us off-guard. Ten years ago, the experts were warning of “peak oil.” Suddenly the price of oil is less than zero. During the crisis, expert advice, expert predictions, expert models for the virus death rate, the rate of hospitalization, the rate of respirator use, have been consistently wrong.
All the computer models and charts and graphs that showed what the global temperature is going to be in 2090, much further in the future and with many more possible variables, are looking quaint and naïve now. Relics of a bygone day when things seemed much simpler. Rather like the 1950s’ confidence that science had a solution for everything.
Environmentalism was always a cheap substitute for religion. It was an amoral creed with man at the centre. A wise and merciful God might even have sent the virus to destroy it, as he did the human sacrifices of Canaan, or Ninevah, or Tyre.
It looks as though Scott Adams was speaking truth about virus cures; early reports have now emerged regarding the hydroxychloraquine trials, and they are not encouraging.
It may yet turn out to be effective, but if it were really effective, you would expect clearer preliminary results than this.
That leaves us in a hard place. Other treatments may prove effective, but anything else is going to take a lot more time. In the meantime, we cannot keep everything in lockdown.
Plan B would seem to be to test everyone, test often, and quarantine only those who have the virus; and those most vulnerable to it.
We may also get some reprieve for the summer. Or the virus may still just burn itself out.
Things are getting rough in the Philippines. A neighbourhood near my family has been declared infected with the virus. Nobody is supposed to come or go. But someone from that neighbourhood slipped out and moved into a house on the next block.
The neighbourhood has arranged a bus for shopping; regular modes of transportation are banned. But proper social distancing seems impossible on the bus.
Several studies are emerging suggesting the infection rate is much higher than supposed. This also means the virus is less deadly than it seemed: most who get it show no symptoms.
The relative lack of spread in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, looks interesting. I wonder if it has to do with the widespread tendency in these place to wear facemasks.
Things have grown dark. I can no longer give eyewitness updates on local conditions, because I am not supposed to venture outside my apartment any more, unless to get food or medicine.
We are into what I would have considered an unlikely worst-case scenario only a few weeks ago.
Can it get worse? Latest report is of a cat catching the coronavirus in Belgium. You cannot get a cat to practice social distancing. Now we may be putting down pets.
Perhaps more horrifying: the Canadian authorities say they can approve a new faster coronavirus test “within a few weeks.” This sounds like murder by bureaucracy. The sick systems remain standing. Trump unveiled a five-minute test the day before yesterday.
Dr. Birx, who holds some leadership position in the US Administration response, shook everyone yesterday by giving a projected number of total deaths of 100,000 to 250,000 in the US “if we do everything perfectly.”
But the darkest thing is that Dr. Birx ended her talk by saying “there is no magic bullet, there is no treatment, no cure,” except for isolation.
I really was expecting a magic bullet, by about now. What happened to hydrachloroquine? She seemed to be expressly discounting it.
My guess and hope is that it does indeed work, they know it works, but there is a danger of hoarding if everyone knows it works. Supplies may also be insufficient. And if people know it works, they will not obey the orders to socially isolate. Perhaps they are being scared into staying in their homes.
If it works, the evidence will not be publicly apparent for some time either. Even if it starts to be used properly everywhere tomorrow, the death rate should continue to rise for weeks, because deaths do not happen until the second week after the onset of symptoms, and the onset of symptoms may be two weeks after exposure. And the studies suggest that it is too late to give hydroxylchloraquine after the symptoms have become serious.
I am seeing reports of food supply chains under stress. I did not expect this. I stockpiled food, but against quarantine, not against real shortages. Even aside from possibly disrupted supply chains, people’s money is going to run out. India is a nightmare. If people cannot eat, hell will break loose and roam the streets.
Epoch Times reports “mass demonstrations, bordering on riots,” in Hubei. It is worth noting that the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing Dynasty began in Wuhan; it has that heritage and that potential.
“People are not afraid of the Chinese Communist Party anymore,” says Epoch Times’ correspondent. Epoch Times, of course, has an agenda, but has also proven reliable in reporting on matters inside China. They have good sources.
Apart from internal unrest, China is now suffering in terms of international prestige. The UK government has declared that they do not believe China’s official figures on the virus; they believe it is an undercount of up to 40 orders of magnitude. They have censured China for lack of transparency, and apparently cancelled a contract with Huawei for 5G. Czechia, Spain, and other countries are saying huge shipments of test kits they received from China are defective.
Not great for Chinese PR.
In a now-viral YouTube video, a reporter from Hong Kong asks a top WHO official about Taiwan being allowed to participate. The official pretends not to hear the question, then cuts off transmission. The callousness in the face of human misery will be hard to forget.
Now there are urgent discussions of China having subverted international bodies, and various popular apps, for their political purposes. It all as much as identifies China as itself a virus: the coronavirus is deeply branding this idea in everyone’s consciousness.
That’s bound to lead to prolonged economic troubles. Everyone is socially distancing themselves from China. Even if they weren’t, China’s external customers suddenly have less money to spend.
I have been predicting their fall for decades, but I can’t see China’s Communist Party long surviving this crisis. One prominent China watcher, Gordon Chang, predicts their fall within three months.
The more relevant question, perhaps, is who else will fall? All governments, and all organizations and social systems, are being stress-tested, and many are failing.
I think the demand in the US to pull out of the WHO will also be overwhelming; and perhaps too out of other UN bodies. The experience with the virus makes a strong case that the UN is not reliable, and more dangerous than helpful. There is perhaps a need, and will perhaps be a drive, for an alternative organization that admits only functioning democracies; perhaps built on the foundation of NATO. The UN may die, or fade into irrelevance.
I was not an early supporter of Trump; he was almost the last guy I would have picked for the presidency within the 2016 Republican field. I would have supported him against Clinton, but not against just about any other Democratic nominee.
But America seems to have some special Providence that keeps throwing up the right man at the critical time. I thought Reagan was a mad choice too, at the time; yet he won the Cold War. Lincoln came from nowhere. Washington was an improbable hero, a lousy tactician who almost got himself killed in his first battle. U.S. Grant was an obscure shop clerk and a drunk.
I now realize Trump is the ideal man for these times. Tough, optimistic, flexible, able to bargain and make deals.
Watching him, my admiration for businessmen of the entrepreneurial class increases.
A Hasidic doctor in the New York suburbs reports almost 100% success with seven hundred patients using hydroxychliriquine, azythromycin, and zinc on the onset of symptoms. No deaths, no intubations.
This feels right on the premise that this is all from God: salvation comes from the Jews.
My portlisting pal Xerxes is mocking the Catholic Church for cancelling masses.
“My Catholic friends were told they had to attend mass every week. Even during epidemics. Because the wafer and wine, as the symbolic body and blood of the sinless Christ, could not transmit germs.”
This is a grave misunderstanding of Catholic teaching, and so perhaps must be addressed.
The wafer and wine are not, as he says, the “symbolic” body and blood of Christ. They are the actual body and blood of Christ.
Nor did Catholic doctrine ever hold that this means they cannot transmit germs. That would be like saying they cannot get dirty if dropped on the floor. Great pains are traditionally taken to prevent just this.
If a virus can adhere to ordinary bread, it can adhere to the consecrated host. All the “accidents” of bread and wine remain. That means that they still weigh what they did, look as they did, and act as they did. If you drink enough communion wine, you will indeed get drunk.
Does Xerxes want to argue that God would never allow anyone to die as a result of taking communion? That makes no sense; God allows us all to die, good people as well as bad, and no matter how many times you have taken communion.
As to Xerxes’s point, that masses were not cancelled during previous plagues: this is because medical science did not know about germs until about the middle of the 19th century. Before then, the dominant assumption was that infectious diseases were spread by bad smells: the miasma theory.
On this understanding, a church full of incense should be about the safest place to be. Now we know better.
I have no sympathy with those who complain that the Church has abandoned them by shutting the doors. You could as justly complain that the church abandoned us all years ago by closing its doors when masses were not scheduled, preventing us from going in to pray at will. It was, and is, a practical necessity. This falls under the principle that “Thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test.” Going to church and assuming it is God’s duty to protect you from the usual laws of nature is necromancy. It is claiming authority over God.
And, of course, God is everywhere. He is with the hermit in his cell. He is with the imprisoned martyr. He was with the persecuted church in Korea that had no priests for thirty years. We have our choice of online masses on the Internet every day.
A beautiful spring day. A day of superlatives. India is in the largest lockdown/quarantine in history. Wall Street had its biggest one-day surge since 1933. The US just passed the largest spending bill in human history.
Oxford University has released a study arguing that, for all we know, the fatality rate for coronavirus is low. They theorize that fifty percent of Britons may already have been exposed. If so, the proportion of deaths is quite small.
I think this is delusional thinking. If fifty percent of the UK population has already been infected with only 433 deaths, how do you explain that Italy, with about the same population, has 7,000 deaths. That would mean almost 1000% of Italy must have been infected. Excuse my Italian, but is my math that bad?
I don’t know what they’re doing about testing in the UK, but Canada and the US are in effect doing random sampling now, and they are finding when they do test random samples, only a small percentage test positive for the virus.
Yesterday, back-to-back announcements from Boris Johnson in the UK, Doug Ford in Ontario, and Donald Trump in the US. Johnson was belatedly, but firmly, shutting everything down. No gatherings of more than two people. Ford was shutting all non-essential businesses.
And Trump was talking about getting people back to work.
Without his medical officer Fauci present, he was speaking more expansively of the hoped-for chloraquine treatment. He called it possibly “a gift from God.”
My notes say “evidence of the hand of God.” I’m not sure if those are Trump’s words, or my own.
Because I see evidence still of the hand of God. I previously thought it might be meaningful that the virus hit in China, where it is apt to destabilize an anti-religious government; and in a millenarian cult in South Korea, probably killing it. And in Iran, with an unstable Pharisaic regime that has been causing trouble in the region. Yet it was mysteriously sparing other countries. In hitting Europe hard, it seems to be targeting the “open-borders” concept of the EU.
Now it is in the US. In the US, where is the outbreak concentrated so far? In New York City, and along the West Coast. This is the heartland of the Democratic Party. Of more relevance, although the two overlap, this is the heartland of the postmoderns, the intersectionals, the woke.
At the same time, the various reactions to the virus seem to separate the sheep from the goats.
I think there is still room to suspect this is the hand of God.
If the chloraquine treatment does prove effective, and rolls out soon, this feels like the best divine end game. Like deus ex machina, a sunbeam breaking through the clouds.
In his speech, Trump seemed to give an explanation for the mystery I have mentioned here several times: why the virus seems to have largely spared several nations close to China. The Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, all should have been harder hit, but, until recently, seemed largely exempt. It looked to me and others as though it were related to climate. And Trump apparently thinks so too; but in an indirect way.
It is, he suggests, because they are malarial regions.
As a result, their hospitals and pharmacies stock a supply of chloraquine. It is used to treat malaria. Italy or Iran did not. Hearing of early success with the drug—as I did myself, on the internet, from Thailand—doctors were perhaps prescribing it for the cases they encountered. The cases tended to clear up quickly, and this reduced the time during which folks were infectious. So, less spread.
If things are starting to get out of hand now even in these countries, that kills the climate hypothesis, but does fit the chloraquine one. They have probably now depleted the local supply of the drug, and are unable to get more in, given growing international demand.
It occurs to me therefore to give a daily on the ground account of how it is all affecting this mortal in this little corner of Toronto’s east end. Some day it may be of some historical interest.
Went up to the corner this morning to pick up some Vitamin D. I had seen on a YouTube video (I think it was Dr. John Campbell) that it has been shown to protect against respiratory diseases generally. I had been told in the past that I had a deficiency; so now seemed the time to take that seriously.
Thought at the same time I’d pick up a few things at the grocery store.
I found the local clinic was closed today—notice on the door. No reason was given.
Then at the grocery store, the first signs I had yet seen of real public concern. I had been there for my regular shopping on Thursday morning, and then there were no signs of anything unusual. This morning, the meat section was mostly stripped clean, the bread racks bare, the egg section empty, the selection of cheese slim. I could not pick up powdered skim milk; they were cleaned out. I could not get my preferred brand of tea. I saw no toilet paper on sale; but people were wheeling out big packages of paper towels. The shop still had lots of sanitizing hand soap.
News of things shutting down is coming in hourly. It is hard to keep track.
Virus epicentres mapped to mean daily temperatures.
An enduring mystery of the coronavirus is why it has not yet run rampant in the Philippines.
Filipinos are gypsies. They are working in large numbers in all the other countries of the region, some of which have been hard hit—not to mention being most of the crew on most cruise ships. Because home is near, in East Asia they are always flying in and out—it is not unusual to fly in to Manila for the weekend. The Philippines also had, as I recall, the first confirmed case outside of China. Yet the numbers are still small, and there has been no confirmed community spread.
Another why has the virus been so much more disruptive and deadly in Italy than it has been in South Korea? South Korea got it sooner, and things looked desperate. But the number of new cases has levelled off, and there have been far fewer fatalities.
Wait, there’s more. Why did Vietnam and Singapore, close to China and with so many connections, have a rash of early cases, but the victims seem to recover, and not to spread; while Iran, much further away from the Chinese epicentres, and with much less commerce in that direction, explode with serious cases?
I speculated this was because of better social cohesion in the face of disaster.
But now someone has come up with another explanation, that seems to me to make sense. The places where the virus has been particularly successful at spreading, they discover, lie along a narrow band of latitude. Or more specifically, of temperature and relative humidity. These scientists suggest that the virus needs a steady temperature of 5-11 degrees Celsius and 47-79% relative humidity to spread. All the most affected areas share these parameters.
This makes sense in terms of what we know about viruses. They commonly die back in summer. They commonly thrive only within particular climactic parameters.
So why has the virus stopped spreading so swiftly in South Korea? It may not be that South Korea’s containment measures are so successful. It may simply be that the temperature is getting higher as spring takes hold, putting them on the fringe of the virus-fertile zone.
If this is right, and it looks right, this is good news. It suggests the virus may go dormant throughout the northern hemisphere over the next few months. Buying us all some valuable time.
The bad news is that southern Canada is about to move into the kill zone.
But even so, spring in northern climes may not be that favourable to the virus, as the temperature is not steady day to day, and changes quickly.
And if we can aggressively delay its spread, we might hold it back until the warmer weather comes.
In the meantime, this suggests a useful strategy for retirees, those most vulnerable, or those who actually have the virus and are in self-quarantine, to avoid infection. Check the temperature and humidity daily. If they are within the danger zone, postpone any errands. If they are out of the danger zone, it may be quite safe to venture outside.
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