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COVID-19 start of a new era
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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 RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to flyeogh)
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quote:
No one wants to stop freedom of speech but fear mongering on the internet is out of control.
It's not just "fear mongering" that is out of control on the internet. Now any fool with access to a keyboard can post any crackpot theory on any subject and have a gullible audience willing to believe him and contribute to the insanity. Frankly, I think we were better off when publication of information on subjects from science and medicine to diplomacy and international relations was restricted to peer-reviewed journals instead of the crap circulating on the internet these days.
Pandemics taking over the world, autism caused by vaccines, black helicopters waiting to take over the US, and a host of other apocalyptic scenarios circulate freely and are believed by many. We have discussed conspiracy theorists several times on the foro, and the internet just increases the reach of their nonsense exponentially. Anyone who thinks human beings are advancing intellectually just has to look at the garbage on the internet to put that belief to rest.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 19 2020 17:44:46
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to BarkellWH)
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I lived for 18 1/2 years on a small tropical island. There were about 2500 Americans employed by the military base there, almost all civilians. The circulation of gossip and rumor on the "coconut telegraph" was notorious.
While I sat on a park bench one day I was approached by an acquaintance, who quoted a current rumor. The rumor was about me, and false.
My response was, "Rick, you know that you can sit right here on this bench and eventually hear any declarative sentence in the English language asserted as fact."
My secretary's husband was an air traffic controller. He made a hobby of starting rumors, and tracing the speed and extent of their spread. While true official notices of an approaching typhoon were posted, he said at lunch that the military was ordering huge C-5 air transports to the island, to take residents to Las Vegas, where hotel rooms were plentiful. At 2:30 that afternoon my secretary heard his fabrication repeated at the beauty shop, with additional details as to which hotels, and what meals would be provided.
As far as the most reputable mass print media go, I used to keep a copy of the Scientific American displayed on the bookcase above my desk. When, as intended, people would occasionally say something about it, I would give them my planned response.
"It has an article in it about the Space Surveillance Network. It is the only article I have ever read in a public source about a large military project which I was familiar with, which has no serious errors of fact or emphasis."
This was not always the case, even with Scientific American. There was an MIT physics professor whose articles criticizing military research and development projects were frequently published in the magazine.
I was casually acquainted with the author, and ran into him from time to time. Once I said to him, "I read your article on our ICBM countermeasures against the Soviet strategic missile defenses."
"Are you involved with that?"
"Yes. Rather deeply."
"I detailed in my article how to defeat all of your countermeasures."
"Yes. The Soviets are working on some of the ideas you mention. They will be successful in about ten years."
"Then your countermeasures will be useless."
"Precisely. But we know what the Soviets are working on, and we know how to defeat it. We will begin testing next year. This is war. Neither we nor the Soviets are standing still. We have consistently maintained about a ten-year lead in technology to counter their strategic missile defenses. You might mention this sort of thing in your articles criticizing the military."
This is just to illustrate that even the most reputable print media are not necessarily accurate in the facts they present, nor balanced in their views.
It is not to say that at present we maintain a lead in strategic missile technology over either the Russians or the Chinese.
RNJ
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Date Feb. 23 2020 2:42:51
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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Having dealt with academics on foreign affairs and national security issues during my career in the US Foreign Service and subsequent consulting career, the MIT physics professor's response regarding our countermeasures against Soviet strategic missile defenses and how the Soviets would defeat them sounds hollow on his part. I doubt that he was unaware of our efforts to design effective countermeasures to keep up with the Soviets. My guess is that he, like many in academia, had an animus toward the military and blamed the United States, in large part, for the arms race.
If I am correct, his omission of any mention of our efforts to counter future soviet missile defense advancements was deliberate and meant to portray the military and national defense community's efforts (not to mention the budget) as a wasted effort. I would reserve my greatest criticism for the editors of Scientific American for inadequate vetting of his article and failure to call him out before publishing it.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Feb. 23 2020 16:30:52
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flyeogh
Posts: 729
Joined: Oct. 13 2004
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to sartorius)
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quote:
Nothing worse than a distorted assessment of reality, except maybe a reality DENIAL.
And now Italy...
Sartorius I’d be interested to know what your concerns with this virus are. Did you have the same concerns with AIDs, SARs and Ebola, or is there something unique about this virus for you? Maybe you’ve seen something I haven’t.
You mention Italy, and the sudden jump in numbers is I appreciate a concern – as small as they are. But at the same time countries like Belgium, Spain, Sri Lanka, India, Cambodia, Nepal and Tibet (I haven’t listed them all) have had cases and now have none. And Singapore (a massive transport hub and with a dense population) has 89 cases of which 51 have fully recovered. Zero deaths.
And while any loss of life is sad for the family and friends those most at risk are old and have ailments. I saw a case highlighted in a Video the other day where a guy over 80 died of pneumonia. No mention of the virus but there it was highlighted as an example statistic.
Don’t get me wrong you may be right to be fearful and this thing may mutate and kill millions. But I see no evidence to support that at the moment.
_____________________________
nigel (el raton de Watford - now Puerto de Santa Maria, Cadiz)
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Date Feb. 23 2020 19:36:21
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to BarkellWH)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BarkellWH
If I am correct, his omission of any mention of our efforts to counter future soviet missile defense advancements was deliberate and meant to portray the military and national defense community's efforts (not to mention the budget) as a wasted effort.
This was my working hypothesis.
quote:
I would reserve my greatest criticism for the editors of Scientific American for inadequate vetting of his article and failure to call him out before publishing it.
Bill
My working hypothesis also was that the editors of Scientific American shared the professor's animus against the military.
Having a lifetime of close association with the military, I bear them no ill will. However, i believe that since the Cold War, having by far the world's most powerful military has got the USA into at least as much trouble as it has kept us out of.
The professor's articles were "true" in the sense that they contained no lies. However they omitted relevant facts. The omissions might well have been meant to deceive.
I can't say that the Scientific American editors were aware of the professor's deceptiveness. On a subsequent occasion they displayed a surprising level of ignorance about the technology involved in a military R & D project.
The only widely published source I found reliable during the Cold War was "Aviation Week and Space Technology." Before they published an article they would consult a fairly wide range of experts in the subject matter.
Shortly after the huge terminal missile defense radar at Pushkino northeast of Moscow was discovered, a photo of it appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The next day I got a call from a reporter I knew who worked for AvWeek. He asked what was in the building.
I replied, "I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to say, but if they wanted me to work there, it had better be full of dirt." Later that day I had a call from Dick R., the highest non-political appointee in Department of Defense Research and Engineering.
After discussing another issue Dick said, "I got a call from AvWeek about Pushkino. They told me what you had said."
"What did you say?"
"I said that when we first saw it we thought it was to be Brezhnev's tomb."
Dick and I both had official access to information about the Pushkino radar, so we could say nothing about it. AvWeek found sources who were not "read in" to the intelligence info, but who had heard about it through the grapevine. AvWeek's "speculative" article proved to be pretty accurate, as far as it went.
The Pushkino radar in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don-2N_radar
"The 1998 SIOP [U.S. Strategic Command's nuclear war plan] targeted this radar facility with 69 consecutive nuclear weapons."
RNJ
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Date Feb. 24 2020 0:04:12
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to gerundino63)
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Some years ago I read a lengthy piece on "survivalism" among Silicon Valley's wealthy elite (this Ethan Galstad fellow fits that label). They apparently sink massive amounts of money in toys they think they need for whatever version of the apocalypse they happen to enjoy. They then invite each other on their own podcasts and proclaim to the world how they have the key to everything, how they know what's going to happen, etc. etc.
Personally, I think it reeks of a desperate attempt to find meaning in their lives. I could of course be wrong, but it has always struck me that these Silicon Valley folks (generalizing of course) were full of themselves. As if all of human history was just a prelude to them. It takes several forms, and some of them are more optimistic, like this belief that they will be the generation to first become immortal through machines or whatever, but it's the same ridiculous ego trip. After all, they've accomplished so much. How can it be that they're no more important than some anonymous man living out his life in a remote village? Let us then reshape our view of the world to place us at the center, as the first to do X, or the only ones to survive Y, etc. Anything to make us more important than the rubble. Hard to do with the great equalizer that is death.
There's something rather absurd, and profoundly arrogant, to someone playing prophet to others, while claiming to be immune to ego/pride.
_____________________________
"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Feb. 24 2020 15:42:09
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. The pangolin seems to be in the frame for this virus. He seems to have been by chance in the right place to transfer the virus from bats to humans. But personally I think he is being stitched up. 