Stephen Roney's Blog, page 246

Fever Chart for the USA

Here's the live data showing fewer fever temperatures than normal currently in the USA.


'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Trump’s press conference yesterday felt more upbeat than it has been for a while. He was talking again about soon getting back to work. Most significantly, he was back to talking hopefully about hydrachloraquine. He called it not only a “game changer,” but “a miracle”—if it works, he carefully qualified. Mention of the drug had been eerily absent everywhere official for a while.

Trump surely knows that, if he pushes hydrachloraquine, and it turns out to be a dud, the press will crucify him. They have already done so for even suggesting it. He must have seen very promising and very solid data to take this risk.

You might argue that he is just trying to briefly boost morale at a dark time. But that cuts two ways; talking up a cure could also prompt people to take social distancing less seriously.

The media, less intelligent than Trump, have immediately gone after him again for promoting this harebrained miracle cure, as he must have expected. Now they have thoroughly identified the drug with Trump. If it does not work, he looks really bad. And if it soon proves to work, he is going to look very good.

He must be pretty confident.

Trump also made a point of saying that they had a good secure supply of the drug. This might also have been why the authorities were so quiet about it—they were worried about the supply. Now perhaps they have stockpiled enough to go public.

In bizarrely apocalyptic, and possibly related, news, Venezuela has fired on and rammed a German cruise ship in international waters.

In normal times, this would be insane: an act of war, on a cruise ship?

It cannot be that they feared this ship, like others recently, was infected with coronavirus. They were trying to force the ship to port—not drive it away. And it would be easy to simply refuse it moorage.

I think they must have feared the craft was either spying, or stuffed with US marines looking for an inconspicuous point at which to wade ashore.

And for all we know, they were right. What was a German cruise ship fitted out for Antarctic cruises doing idling along parallel to the Venezuelan coast, just beyond territorial waters?

When the Venezuelan warship rammed the civilian cruise ship, the warship sank. The cruise ship had a reinforced hull for slicing through the Antarctic ice.

That might also have been useful for making unconventional landings in shallow waters.

I suspect the US is gearing up to invade to secure the vital ingredient for hydrachloraquine, for which Venezuela is a source. I suspect Venezuela suspects what I suspect.

Data collected from smart thermometers in the US shows there are actually significantly fewer people reporting a high temperature now than you would see in a regular flu season. And that number is dropping fast.


It looks like the social distancing is working effectively.

At the same time, the thermometer data shows social distancing is reducing the number of people catching the normal flu. It is also reducing the number of deaths by accident, since fewer people are out moving around. The terrifying overcrowding of hospitals we have feared may not happen. The hospital ship Comfort, originally slated to handle trauma cases, freeing the regular hospitals for coronavirus, has been shifted over to coronavirus, because there were not enough trauma cases.

Modified social distancing, based on this experience, may become a part of the culture going forward. No more handshakes. More facemasks during flu seasons. More telecommuting.

It is also possible that the coronavirus is burning itself out. Viruses commonly do so; Ebola did.

It also looks possible that the virus is sensitive to weather, as flu viruses are, and will naturally abate over the next few months at least in the far more populated northern hemisphere. Notably, Australia, which gets a lot of traffic from China, has never yet experienced a breakaway local spread: most cases are still imported. The Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, Taiwan, all close to China, although they have had their troubles, have not been hit with the intensity of Europe or the US. If you look at the Johns Hopkins world map, equatorial Africa also seems to have seen an oddly low number of cases. While some South American countries have seen larger outbreaks—these are the Andean nations, where high elevations produce cooler and drier weather.

Trump suggested this might be because they had good stores of chloraquine, being malarial areas. But it might still be the weather. For what it is worth, more northerly, significantly colder, countries also seem to have been somewhat less affected: Russia, Canada, Iceland, Finland, Scandinavia.

If the virus is abating for summer, it will no doubt come roaring back next fall. But that will give us adequate time to prepare more ventilators, more hydrachloraquine, more face masks, more effective protocols, and more research.

I feel the tide has turned.

In one flat note, Justin Trudeau spent some of his press conference yesterday boasting about how much of the government’s emergency funding to cope with the virus was going to go to more women’s shelters, to protect women and their children in case things are not safe in their home due to domestic violence.

But what about men facing the same situation, from an abusive wife and mother? They, and their children, are simply forced to stay in place and suffer.

This has nothing to do with the coronavirus. It is a handout to a client group at the expense of the general public, when we are all in dire straits.

So is the Canadian government’s special funding to aboriginal reserves to deal with the crisis. The whole thing about the Indian reserves is that, rightly or wrongly, they are the original example of enforced social distancing. Because of their segregation from other populations, often reinforced by great distances, they are probably the least likely of Canadians to be exposed to the coronavirus.

But in the midst of general crisis, vital funds must be diverted to another client group.

Canadians may be pulling together, but our governments are not.

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

Trapped in a World You Never Made?

What, after all, is the meaning of life?

The common (post)modern stance is that we do not know. We wander our wasteland, waiting for Godot, and Godot does not show.

Some say the meaning of life is 42. Good joke. We are less than laboratory rats.

Or it is up to each of us to simply invent or construct a meaning. As if it were possible to immaculately conceive meaning from meaninglessness, something from nothing.

This sad conception has led to ugly things. It seems to me that it has led to the present cancel culture, rampant censorship, unfriending, shouting down those with whom we disagree. Everyone is losing all their friends. Many are losing livelihoods. To do such things amounts to spiritual murder: when we stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to listen, we are declaring the other a non-person. And it leads on an unwavering trajectory to actual physical murder, perhaps on a mass scale.

For what, after all, can we do, if we have invented our meaning by some act of will, and it conflicts with the next guy’s meaning? As it inevitably will. There is no higher authority to which to appeal. So there is no way to settle the conflict but to pretend he or she does not exist; to silence them; or to eliminate them.

At the same time, from the same cause, at least in the developed world, indications are that the incidence of “mental illness,” and suicide, and death by overdose, alcohol, or “accident,” is growing by spiraling upward seven-league strides.

We have gotten ourselves into a dark place, with this notion that life has no meaning.

Is it right? Is it all Godot’s fault?

It is worth pointing out that life does have meaning. At least, everyone thought it did until quite recently. Until the early 20th century, the meaning of life was uncontroversial. And no, it did not depend on anyone’s particular sect or religion.

The meaning of life was to seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This was understood by the ancient Greek philosophers, and did not change with the coming of the great monotheisms—except that they called the ultimate Good, Truth, and Beauty “God.”

As did the Hindus, independently. Classifying in terms of the human experience of God as opposed to God’s own qualities, they arrived at a similar trinity: Sat, Cit, Ananda, roughly translating as Truth, Consciousness, and Bliss. Bliss describes the aesthetic experience, and corresponds to Beauty. “Consciousness” corresponds to the Good—morality is at base the awareness of the independent consciousness of others, treating another as an independent sentient being instead of a thing.

But, you say, there is no Truth, just as there is no God. You have sought and sought, and found none.

Let us point out first that that claim is contradictory. “There is no truth” is a claimed truth. Of course, if true, it is false.

All you can say, then, is that you have not yet found truth; you cannot claim you know there is none. And if you do say there is none, of course, you are not looking.

Were you ever really looking? Speaking from my experience, those who claim to be such perennial seekers of Truth are those who recoil most dramatically from anyone who claims to have found Truth. Religious believers, most notably. This is contradictory: they seem to dismiss out of hand the possibility that anyone has found Truth. If so, they cannot really be looking for it.

It seems to me that the claim that they cannot find Truth is also easily and trivially disproven. If you insist you have found no truth, are you really prepared to deny the Pythagorean theorem, or that 2 + 2 = 4? Are you prepared to ignore the Law of Gravity in your own daily actions?

But, you will say, if there is Truth, there is no Good. Morality is just what each society agrees on: it is “socially constructed.”

That leaves you with no possible argument that Hitler did anything wrong. He was, after all, the duly elected social authority. You similarly have no argument against such cultural practices as child sacrifice, slavery, or widow burning.

To the contrary, Kant has shown that the moral imperative is self-evident and beyond question. It is enshrined, almost word for word, in all known moral codes: do to others as you would have them do. Respect other sentient beings.

You will then say, at least, that there is no Beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We all know that much.

This is a consolation for physically ugly people like me; we all know it is not really true. While not everyone will find a given thing beautiful, results of a survey will be far from random. Balance, harmony, clarity, seem to be consistent elements. We say that beauty fades, or is often a matter of trickery; but then we mean gross physical beauty, not the Beauty referred to as transcendental. The beauty of art is something else, and does not trick or fade.

Next you will say, but why are these three qualities, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, to be valued? The question cannot really be answered, because their value is self-evident. It is in our ROM. Rather, we determine the value of all other things by the degree to which they are either good and useful, true, or beautiful. Posit, if you like, a divine programmer. There is a point beyond which, in self-knowledge, we cannot go.

How then did we get so knocked off the path in modern times? Why are we sleeping in ditches in Eliot’s Waste-Land?

I can only speculate. I think it was and is a disease of the Humanities. Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was unified by religion; theology was the queen of the sciences. The first schools and the first universities, everywhere, were religious institutions. This is true in Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or Confucian lands. It is universal. Knowledge therefore had a plot and a direction.

With the success in the West over the last few centuries of empirical science, it gained such prestige that it tended to supplant religion and philosophy as the perceived centre of knowledge: now physics and not theology was the queen of the sciences.

For all its impressive success, science does not work well in this role. It is not possible to unify all knowledge on physical terms; most of the real world and of real human experience is on the metaphysical, spiritual plane. We are more than robots with sensing organs.

With the growing prestige of the sciences, the Humanities, over the past two hundred years or more, have been struggling to be “scientific.” This has spawned the “social sciences.” Yet as is increasingly apparent with each generation, every attempt to put the human world on a scientific basis has failed. It must always necessarily fail. Marxism seemed promising, but was wrong. Freudianism was wrong. Behaviourism was wrong. Chomsky was wrong. Keynes was wrong.

All this while physical sciences were building towers and bridges, arcing from strength to strength. No surprise if it was demoralizing. The Humanities/Social Sciences are depressed.

Yet rather than realizing or admitting that they have been hunting in the wrong place with the wrong dogs, scholars in the humanities/social sciences have thrown up their hands and said, increasingly since the Second World War, “There is no truth.” “There is no meaning.” This is the sin of acedia, of spiritual sloth, of despair.

They have then extended this to empirical science as well. It is just not tolerable to accept that science has truth, and they do not. This is the sin of pride; for acedia and pride are interlinked.

But you, gentle reader, need not be so misled. You need not retreat into some personal “reality,” some cherished hallucination, whether drug-induced or otherwise. And you need not then murder your neighbour to maintain it.

Wake up. Smell coffee. Seek truth.

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

First Person Report on the Coronavirus

Just in case you have not seen it.

I suspect the hallucinations Cuomo reports experiencing are not due to the coronavirus. I think it is a sure think he is being given hydroxychloraquine. I remember now hearing that the malaria drugs given to US military during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars sometimes caused troubling hallucinations. Might well have been this same drug.


'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Market day: time to resupply, and my first excursion in about a week. I’m missing a beautiful spring out there, my first in a dozen years. Makes me think of that old Bonnie Dobson song.

This time there was a lineup, even for seniors’ hour, largely because they were taking social distancing seriously. The number of shoppers in the store was properly limited: one out, one it. The people in line did a decent job, at last, on keeping distance. A few were wearing face masks. I was using a scarf, but it was impossible to cover my nose—my glasses would fog up.

There were no empty shelves. At last I was able to pick up some skim milk powder. There was an especially large supply of toilet paper.

The store clerks, heroes all, were sunny and helpful. They were wiping down the belts after each checkout.

I checked and double checked my list, but somehow forgot the one item I was actually out of: artificial sweetener. Folly; but all it means is that I’m on sugar or honey for the week. Not real hardship.

News of the wider world: Reports on Fox are that hospitals in NYC are now swamped and experiencing shortages. On the other hand, Scott Adams says the federal government is unable to get accurate numbers on what the NY hospitals have and do not have, and Trump has said supplies sent have been disappearing.

Novartis has donated 130 million doses of hydroxychloraquine. It seems to me that ought to be enough to handle the current crisis in the US.

Scott Adams, usually a voice of calm, spent some time recently just cursing the “experts,” the professionals: the WHO, the CDC, the FDA. Their advice and commands during the crisis have been consistently wrong, and they seem to have been a delaying and complicating factor. On the other hand, businesses and businessmen have been looking really good: stepping up and getting things done in a hurry, donating to help the cause.

I think this may have a lasting impact. The “experts” were already in trouble thanks to the democratization of knowledge by the internet. This may hasten their decline.


'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

Depression and Coronavirus

I was not happy to see Doug Ford, Ontario's Premier, spending his entire press conference yesterday on the topic of “mental health,” and announcing an expenditure of $15 million on a help line to counsel the traumatized public. US sources at the same time are warning of a pending mental health crisis because of the lockdown.

First, there is no solid evidence that mental health counselling actually helps anyone.

Second, historical evidence suggests that the genuinely depressed and chronically anxious actually feel better during a crisis. During the London Blitz, the mental hospitals emptied out.

Third, the best treatment for depression and anxiety is actually to spend some time alone, away from the daily hustle. The depressed are actually finally, thanks to the lockdown, getting the time to think things through.

So this looks to me like a giveaway to already well-off professionals while some are in desperate need. No doubt the psychologists’ lobbyists saw the opportunity and convinced the politicians of the urgent need for their services.

The help lines may get traffic, too, but not from anyone in real need. Just from people experiencing ordinary loneliness and wanting to talk, or from self-dramatizing narcissists in need of attention. In which case, giving them this attention is making their condition worse, like giving an alcoholic another drink.


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Family Values and Original Sin

We often talk about maternal instinct. But there is a far more powerful instinct that we never talk about. Filial instinct. When have you ever even heard the term?

A mother, or a father, are naturally attached to their children. But the natural instinct of attachment is far stronger in a child to their parents.

We often marvel at some animal nursing young of another species. We never think to marvel at the young accepting succor from another species. That we rightly take as spontaneous.

We honour and make much of maternal instinct, therefore, precisely because it is sometimes absent. That makes it noticeable, and worthy of celebration when seen. By contrast, we can simply assume filial instinct in all cases. So it goes unnoticed and unremarked.

Think about it. In the early, vulnerable infancy of any higher species, the parent is everything. Evolution and the imperatives of survival will imprint a deep need for closeness to the parent. Closeness, trust, obedience.

So baby ducks line up spontaneously to follow their mother wherever she goes. If the mother is absent, they will line up to follow whatever else is available. So with the young of almost any species, up to and including the higher primates. A motherless baby chimpanzee can be consoled with a hot water bottle. A baby human is soothed by a plastic nipple.

This is instinct; it has no moral dimension. Yet it is so powerful we want to hold it sacred: we talk of “family values” and “filial piety” as though these were religious duties. Indeed, much of Chinese folk religion can be summed up in the phrase “ancestor worship.”

This simply makes us feel good about ourselves, because we are going to do it anyway. There is a moral debt owed to parents for their material and emotional support in our childhood; we have a duty to similarly support them in their age. But that is all.

In fact, the vital moral issue cuts the other way. To idolize a parent, a mere human, is just that: an idolatry. The average parent is necessarily only average, not better or worse. Some parents will be very good people; some parents will be very bad people.

To adhere too closely to “family values” is just like adhering too closely to tribal values: to believing that your nation, or your race, is inherently superior to all others. We know where that leads, and we call it racism. The worst evils in history, we commonly hold, are done because of racism. “Familyism” is in principle the same thing.

Morality, therefore, requires cutting through the instinctive tie to viewing our parents objectively. Doing so is almost the essential act of morality: not doing so is leaving yourself in the state of original sin—the sin one inherits from one’s ancestors. 

'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.

The Coming US War with Venezuela

Strange that Trump began his press conference yesterday with announcing enhanced counter-narcotics measures. And this was the prime focus of the press conference, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. I had heard that the flow of narcotics into the US had actually recently slowed dramatically, and it stands to reason: with the closing of the Mexican border, and with the drying up of chemical supplies from China to the illegal drug manufacturers in Mexico. 
I suspect it is not about the drugs.

It is about invading Venezuela. Venezuela was mentioned several times.

Maduro is an enemy. Call him a drug kingpin, and the US has justification for going in and taking him out. They used the same rationale to overthrow Noriega in Panama in 1989.

In the meantime, the fight against the drug trade gives an excuse for getting the necessary forces into position.

But the underlying reason might be that Venezuela is a prime source for the tree bark from which one makes chloroquine. It has suddenly become a strategic resource. Reports are clear that chloroquine is now in short supply.

With the military mobilized and in position, the US can either go in and take the resource, or force Maduro to yield it up.

The US government does not want to make the real objective clear, because they do not want panic or hoarding over the lack of chloroquine.


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Death in Wuhan

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A Journal of the Plague Year

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.


'Od's Blog: Catholic and Clear Grit comments on the passing parade.