Showing posts with label The Bible. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Bible. Show all posts

Sunday, May 2, 2021

COVID-19 in the largest countries by population: Update for Sun 5/2/21

Countries with 200 million population or more: China, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria.

Data isn't available in all categories for all countries, and data quality varies dramatically.

One should assume figures in the Big Seven are more or less gross underestimations except in the USA. 

China in particular is a JOKE. Why anyone takes them seriously as a "global partner" is beyond me. Show me an honest communist and I will give you six free winning lotto numbers.

Hospital reporting is the worst. Very few countries report the data at all, which tells you they are neither motivated nor equipped to do so even though this is a pretty serious situation which is over one year old. Given how important that data is in judging the progress and severity of the pandemic, it is more than discouraging. The top five for hospitalizations are all US and Europe, the difference between true civilization and the rest being that we know the numbers at all.

The situations in Brazil and especially India are alarming given the high positivity rate in India and the high death rate in Brazil. Reports concentrating on India underreporting deaths (from Reuters and the like) in recent weeks are a sick joke compared with neighboring China which the charts say is a COVID utopia. India is a developing nation struggling to cope under an enormous strain while still remaining part of the free world, but journalists would rather criticize it than question China's glaring effrontery. The myopia is damning.

These Big Seven represent 4.065 billion of the world's population of 7.79 billion, 52.2%, and we don't have a clear picture of what's really going on with them.

What reason would there be to think positively?

Daily new cases, and deaths, per million in the US are still at last summer levels and have not made new lows. Same with hospitalizations. Case positivity is rising again and is actually at 5.8%, provisionally, in this data. Previous very recent levels in the 7s, however, have simply vanished from the record. Why? Johns Hopkins is currently showing 4%. What to believe?

Vaccinations still can't be pointed to for lowering the US numbers because the numbers remain too high. I'm sure they'll point to them once they decline as evidence for vaccine efficacy. Seasonality will be ignored. I will leave a vaccination horror story update for a separate, future post.

Why have cases and deaths and hospitalizations ebbed and flowed in the past in the absence of vaccines? I predict they'll never really say, same as we hear no good explanation for why H1N1 from 2009 simply dropped off the radar. Why did it go away despite the vaccine against it turning into a giant flop? 

They can't predict pandemics' comings and goings anymore than they can predict global cooling in the 1970s, global warming in the 2000s, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 or the end of the Reagan Bull in 2000.

Man is a worm, according to the Bible, a poor player upon the stage, according to Shakespeare, an idiot whose tale is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Nothing!
 

daily new cases per million

daily new deaths per million

case positivity rate

share of population vaccinated usa v world

Top five countries for C19 hospitalizations

share vaccinated in the largest countries by population

 
daily new deaths/million

daily new cases/million

Friday, July 17, 2020

You'll recognize the conservatism of Russell Kirk in James M. Patterson's description of the American founding, but you'll never learn about it from dimwits like Rush Limbaugh or dilettantes like Mark Levin



'In the American context, “liberalism” was not the term used to define the political foundations of the Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution. These documents were understood to be the extension of an older British tradition, even if the British themselves had failed to keep it. American colonists had, by 1776, over one hundred and fifty years of experience of self-government in covenanted and compacted governments, and the language of individual consent to government and rights reserved by individuals against the government were there at the very moment the colonies were chartered.

'Hence, as Donald S. Lutz finds that it is not right to call the Founding “Lockean” because the colonial origins of the Founding preceded Locke by decades. Rather, the Founders found in Locke something that articulated what their forebears already knew and understood when hewing logs to build a cabin in 1611. Moreover, during the Founding, Locke received attention only in the lead up to American Independence but faded into the background as matters of constitutional design arose upon the revolution’s success. During that period, jurist William Blackstone and republican theorist Montesquieu dominated the discourse, with David Hume, Samuel von Pufendorf, and Edward Coke each receiving more attention than Locke from 1780 onward. All were dwarfed by references to the Bible, especially, as Lutz discovered, to the book of Deuteronomy. One would only be surprised by this if one believed that the Founders were liberals. Some were, of a kind, but they were primarily republicans. Their appeal to “liberal” principles was, as James W. Ceaser, has argued, primarily to insist that the “rights of Englishmen” to which Americans, being no longer Englishmen, could no longer appeal. Rather, what made the rights of Englishmen truly rights was how they were grounded in nature, accessible by reason, and endowed by God. In addition, Paul DeHart has shown how this effort involved a combination of classical, Christian, and modern sources with the diverse and extensive experience in statecraft.

'For these reasons, it is simply ahistorical to apply a prefabricated concept of liberalism onto the American Founding or attribute it to a rather complicated mix of ideas and influences expressed among the leaders at the time.'