I just watched an idiot government spokesperson try to tell us the problem is declining because new cases are 'down in China'.
Yes, of course they are down in China, the government put the country on a war footing and shut it down. There are pictures of workmen welding shut the doors on apartment buildings. The lockdown is almost total, of course the spread of infection has declined there.
That has absolutely no effect on the spread in the West where we have taken none of those measures. We haven't even shut down large public meetings like sports events and concerts yet. And don't expect that to be happening in countries where the first priority of the dear leader is to hold large public rallies to boost their egos
There is a huge amount of happy talk based on nonsense right now. A half dozen companies have announced vaccines. But making a vaccine is really easy, all you do is scoop out a bit of the virus. The hard part, the really hard part is working out if the bit of the virus you scooped out is the right bit to provide protection. Most times it doesn't actually have any effect at all. Sometimes it makes people more likely to be infected and sometimes it kills the test subjects. So you have to test and that takes time.
The way that authoritarian regimes react to crisis is very predictable. First they deny that there is any problem at all. Then they minimize the problem and then they panic and over-react. China followed that exact pattern.
The West currently has a large number of aspiring authoritarian leaders but few actual authoritarian regimes. So we are stuck in stage two and will remain stuck there for a considerable time..
On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 6:50 AM Joseph Potvin <jpotvin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
RE: The communication coming from up to down is changing daily.
