George Rebane
Today is HD35 for the Rebanes. And all things considered on our ridge top overlooking Deer Creek Canyon and the Central Valley, we are doing well. We’ve gone out twice now for groceries and haven’t even come close to hitting our ‘large scale emergency’ stash. We continue to meet online with our respective organizations, and there has been plenty of time for books and projects. Most of you have caught a whiff of my squiggly pushing projects, specifically in epidemic spread modeling and testing. Playing different scenarios through these models has been both revealing and educational (I’ll share some of these in the by and by.)
I am a dyed-in-the-wool numbers guy and confirm daily that people who don’t know the numbers on any given issue, don’t know what they’re talking about. And knowing the numbers is just the start on the road to understanding anything in the public arena – then you run into things like different utilities to support decisions, and various collections of knowledge shared by decision makers. What is most frustrating to me is how little our government bureaucrats know what is going on, and what it takes to gather such knowledge.
The medical industry has never impressed me, quite the opposite. They are primarily good-hearted technicians and journeymen operating in the dark, trying to follow dated rules and regulations while suffering through the usual human frustrations and weaknesses. As covered elsewhere, their mistakes cause around 200,000 deaths annually. The only hope to make that industry more beneficial to society is to allow its practitioners to have more freedom to devise and apply better methods for healing, and allow entrepreneurs easier access to bring the fruits of their labors to bear on the sick and suffering. Instead, we appear to be going exactly in the opposite direction both by bumbling and on misguided purpose – half of us want to supersize regulatory control and apply central one-size-for-all planning.
In any event, these trying times are at the same time for me frustrating, illuminating, and corroborating. I start my breakfast with the 11apr20 WSJ headline ‘US Coronavirus Death Toll Passes Italy, Becoming World’s Highest’. Now that is not only a nothingburger, but also a load of crap that is echoed by all the other ‘journalistic’ outlets. You figure out what kind of message that is supposed to deliver to the millions of innumerates taking in the news this morning. Italy’s population is about 61 million and their deaths today number 18,849, while America’s population is about 330 million and ours number 18,860, making their per capita death toll 3.09 per 100,000 and ours 0.57 per 100,000. Their death rate is about six times ours. Unless you’re numerate, you don’t have a clue that raw numbers about anything do not convey information, they are just naked data waiting for come context, in most cases a denominator, to make information out of them. Such headlines are nothing but specious blather. (here)
Speaking of deaths, if anyone drew a graph of the number of deaths, or better yet, the world’s death rate plotted over years, C19 wouldn’t register an identifiable ripple. And compared to other recorded major causes of deaths, C19 is definitely and by any means not anything outstanding – it’s a third-rate killer. Save for a couple of real historical pandemics, the real people killers, day in and day out, are governments and their politicians. These regularly kill their citizens by the tens of millions and cause untold misery on those about to die and the survivors. And for soothing the ignorant and panicky palettes of their citizens, each developed country’s government (save perhaps Sweden and China) is prepared to destroy its economy – insane! The US, of course, is leading the way.
In America our C19 epidemic once more illuminates the dysfunction of big government that, as employer of last resort, is run mostly by hubristic idiots. In recent weeks they have again demonstrated that they are both ignorant and irresponsible beyond belief in how they have ignored looming and easily foretold threats to our nation. And the bigger the government, the more right/lefthand problems they have, and the less chance there is of holding anyone wielding power responsible. We have again demonstrated this in spades.
Finally, to put a ribbon on the ongoing national disaster, we have the Democratic Party using this epidemic as their latest tool to torpedo Trump and his administration as it has mobilized the country to fight an enemy against which no leader here or elsewhere has had any experience during their lifetimes. They have now perfected the art of turning accusations into evidence in the media. The demonic Dems (as I’ve pointed out elsewhere) demonstrate daily that what’s bad for the country is good for their politics and their perfidious plans to make America into a large-government socialist state. If their machinations result in a few more tens of thousands of deaths, well, it’s like Uncle Vissarionovich told us long ago about breaking eggs and omelets.
After all is said and done, I am anxiously waiting for the day when the pharaohs will again let our people go. And having finished this rant, I’m now going into my forest and split some more firewood.
One more thing. As the 11apr20 Union now informs us (on page 2) that testing is widely available in our community. Does anyone know what to do with their test result today, how about tomorrow?
[Update] I got curious about the deaths graph and did a bit of research. Here’s the drill. As of today, the total worldwide C19 deaths number 108,858. This number, as we have read is a bit overstated, but let’s take it as reported. Some countries are already beginning to see the cases curve bending downward, which means that the death curve will soon follow. But let’s really be pessimists and assume that 10 million will die before C19 bites the dust. So what impact is that globally?
Well, I show here the latest data for the rate of worldwide deaths over the last 70 years (here) The vertical axis shows annual deaths per thousand people. Without the C19 deaths added, the 2020 number is 7.612 per thousand. (Today’s world population is about 7,835,000,000.) Were we to add 10 million C19 deaths to that (again the wrong thing to do since these are not marginal deaths, many of these people would have died anyway this year since the virus is hardest on the oldest), the 2020 death rate would ‘spike’ to 7.622 per thousand (gasp!). OK, it’s not a really a spike. It’s more like you couldn’t see the change on the graph if we moved it up from 7.612 to 7.622, a 0.13% increase. And even with that ridiculously high number dying of C19, half of our political leadership is willing to plummet the nation into a depression with screams of ‘People before profits!’ We live in the land of idiots; tell me it isn’t happening.
On a cheerier note, I split about eight huge rounds this afternoon and made a very large pile of firewood that should take us to the end of the fireplace season. The Rebane policy is a fire every day/night from start of October to end of May. And here’s the updated copy of the paper I wrote years ago on wood fires – Download WoodFires_v200303
[more update] And here is more on the bullshit that we’re being subjected to by the ‘experts’. Fasten seatbelts before reading. H/T to reader.
[12apr20 update] For completeness I should mention that I am very much in favor of large scale C19 antibody/antigen testing. Why? Because such testing for more enduring/endurable immunity in a population are not snapshots the results of which could literally change overnight. Getting a measure of those having been exposed to C19 and recovered gives healthcare workers and policy makers an idea of how much benefit we can expect from the inevitable rise of herd immunity. Such measures can be incorporated in the more capable epidemic spread models – e.g. Epidyne. (more here) From this link I have copied a useful table of comparative C19 symptoms.
And here is another take on C19 and other happenings that take a more reasoned view on this Easter, a Christian holiday that was not even mentioned this morning on National Propaganda Radio which instead featured two hit pieces on Trump.
rebanesruminations.com 
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