Out there in the quagmire of the Internet Covid controversy, Ron Unz remains insistent on the deadly peril of covid, asserting that:
... research—examining deaths out of the total number of infections, which includes unreported cases—suggests that Covid-19 kills from around 0.3% to 1.5% of people infected.
Thus stated, without qualification, covid mortality rates will be taken to refer to the population as a whole, which is an entirely false inference.
Covid mortality is hugely age-dependent, so infection fatality rates are meaningless as a basis for assessing personal risk.
If you are under 21, your risk is of death from Covid19 is substantially less than the risk of being killed in a motor vehicle accident. If you are over 75, your risk of death from Covid19 is 10% or more.
There's another factor that massively distorts understanding of the Covid mortality risk, and that is the prevalence of infection among different groups.
A study conducted in UK care homes revealed that as early as April 2020, 40% of investigated care home residents and 21% of staff were Covid19 antibody positive. These rates, which are vastly higher than national rates at the time (almost certainly less than 5%), mean that UK care homes were death traps for the most vulnerable, and accounted for a large majority of the UK's total Covid death toll.
Take these facts into consideration and it is evident that talking of population-wide IFRs is either foolish nonsense or deliberate misdirection.
In Canada, for example, as of October, 2020, 73% of all Covid 19 deaths were of care home residents.
Covid is not a world-destroying pandemic, but rather, whether launched deliberately or by chance, a mechanism for saving both the UK's bloated National Health Service from collapse under its own monstrous weight, and the profits of the US Healthcare insurers. This it is doing by ridding the world of the most useless and expensive eaters.
Young people mostly understand all of this, which is why they don't give a bleep about lockdowns and resent the cowardice of school teachers and university faculty who won't show up and teach.
Related:
Ron Unz isn't this stupid.
ReplyDeleteThough this is also extremely important, what's going on is not heartless, soulless twits proving to us all heart and soul are integral to the human mind (as is the human body, the hands especially).
This is the final culmination of decades of remorseless social conditioning designed to remove autonomy, independence of thought, ability to see what you see (in humility, knowing of the frailty of human senses and sensibility), critical faculty.
All the wellsprings of dissent, spirit, desire, and impulse to individuality and uniqueness, dissent, have been stopped up at the places of their origin, the little oases, the watering holes, and so on. It is both more efficient and less obviously brutal to take care of the problems at their source. This will never be accomplished for entire populations, nor worldwide populations, nor does it need to be. There's a threshold of the population which must be sufficiently conditioned. Apparently this has been reached and now we see "the move being made" into "our" new world order.
The group think is mind-boggling.
My friend who can't understand how anyone could continue to support a former President who is responsible for a half million deaths is a PhD of philosophy and tenured faculty at a respected private university. You posted a link to a Newsweek op-ed by a math or physics professor stating over 90% of academics in the US supported Biden. You'd have to believe the academic community has a monopoly on truth and beauty while the rest of us are "the great unwashed", the "hoi polloi", the "ignorant rabble" to consider the homogeneity of opinion in the academic community benign. (But hey! They all willingly submit to "diversity training" so they are becoming exceptionally superior in sensitivity to uniqueness, dissent, difference, oppression, repression, all that is not sweetness and light.)
You can't reach them with argument. How could you? You are dirtier than any serf or medieval peasant who never had a bath, toothbrush, or dental appointment could ever be. Your mind is even dirtier. Suddenly no one has time, and what you propose is not worthy of serious consideration.
BTW, have you seen this?
https://westernstandardonline.com/2021/01/https-westernstandardonline-com-2021-01-calgary-mother-in-tears-as-son-taken-to-undisclosed-isolation-centre/
Thank you for your comment.
ReplyDeleteThanks also for that link.
The closing of the academic mind is a remarkable phenomenon that deserves scrutiny. The explanation I believe is that the scholarly mentality is a rare thing, not because it requires any remarkable degree of intelligence but because it depends on an unusual independence of mind.
In times past, the academic world was small and the better institutions could recruit from among their students the rare individual with the mentality of a scholar, which is to say the ability to form judgments based on evidence, wherever the evidence may lead.
This essential ability of the scholar, which has little to do with raw intelligence, is I believe rare. Most of humanity is better adapted than to question authority. Without deliberate calculation most people, even highly intelligent people, seek automatically to get along by going along.
Thus with the advent of mass higher education, the universities were bound to recruit thousands of professors totally unfit for the academic life. University then became simply an extension of high school where established facts are instilled and questioning of authority is unwelcome.
The environment thus created naturally drove out the true scholars, the people capable of independent thought and left the university merely an echo chamber for whatever ideas were passed down to the subordinate academic staff from the upper echelons of the institution, i.e., from the presidents and deans who are massively overpaid to insure allegiance to the beliefs and policies of the political/business elites that control the university.
As for the poor folks arriving home to Canada only to find themselves dragged off to detention at the command of our increasingly dictatorial liberal regime (so admiring of China's dictatorship) I wonder if this is partly due to fear that the new Covid strains emerging around the world could kick off an antibody-determined enhancement of Covid infectivity and pathogenicity in those now being vaccinated. Thus, to stave off the catastrophe, an iron curtain is going up.
I think what you're saying is true, CS.
ReplyDeleteI've followed my friend's career since his first year in graduate school.
After he graduated, he could not, as is common, find a tenure track position. (I believe his goal had been from the start to be a university professor.)
He is an excellent teacher must have had letters of recommendation from some distinguished professors.
What happened was at first he had to work as an adjunct professor. Are you familiar with this relatively recent development in higher education? Basically these are temp workers, employed at will, with few benefits, poor pay, no security-- it is just not an acceptable way for our society to utilize people capable of giving so much more.
I do not think it is necessary this happens to them.
The only hope is you'll establish a good record as an adjunct and some university will promote you to tenure track.
After his first year as an adjunct, he was informed by the university he'd been working for he would not be retained. He gave his all that year, and was crushed when this was announced.
Here he is with a PhD-- you know what that means...It is a significant investment of time and effort....There's a distinct possibility he'll never use it. There's a distinct possibility he may need to return to school for still more time and effort and expenditure of his parent's funds. Perhaps go to law school. His family is wealthy, so he's not going to starve. He has options a poor working class boy such as me wouldn't have. (And in fact, though I never wanted to be anything but a scientist, what sealed the deal was the dearth of suitable employment, and the surplus of qualified people, in the arts and humanities.)
This situation repeated itself at several different schools, all over the US, over a period of maybe five years. I know this was not because he's a loser. (You have to be good at what you do, and a graduate of a top twenty school, to even get these adjunct positions.)
During this time, he did everything he could to improve his chances, including publishing quite a few papers, writing reviews for journals and so on.
His ability and willingness to persist and plow on eventually paid off. But it was hard on him. He's not going to rock the boat. That is not respected. That is excluded. What they want is a functionary. That's odd because what is an academic functionary, anyway? Especially in the arts and humanities? It is not an independent and critical mind anywhere it might count, such as it could and should have counted this last year.
When he said he didn't have time, it was kinda true. They keep him very, very busy doing this and that. A hamster on one of those little exercise wheels. Meanwhile the students seem to resemble rats in an operant conditioning experiment, determining which bars to press in order to have a food pellet reward, and which to not press, because there is a shock. (Or threat of a shock).
Yes, for most, being an adjunct stinks. However, being a regular faculty member can be worse. I was an adjunct at two universities while holding a government paid job. That was fun: I could observe the brutal infighting among the tenured faculty without suffering any of the fallout. Then I became a tenure-track faculty member. Wow, did that stink. I quit after three days. I am sorry now I did not submit my record of employment to the Guinness Book of World Records. I might have won an entry for the World's most briefly held academic appointment.
DeleteBut, yes, for people who take adjunct appointments as a means of existence, their treatment is generally vile. A school friend who held academic appointments at the University of London, the London School of Economics, and then as a development economist with the UN in 18 countries before settling, briefly in Canada, working first for a major corporation, then an academic institution, and then in government, on occasion, briefing the Prime Minister, until, beyond retirement age for most, finishing up in the US, as an adjunct (with excellent Rate My Prof ratings) at various universities. Having spoken with him by phone on a regular basis for the last fifty years, I have some insight into the exploitation of adjuncts.
One solution might be for adjuncts to be paid directly by students. That is how Adam Smith earned his keep when teaching philosophy at the University of Glasgow for eleven years. I believe it was the practice for the professor to collect a fee from students as they entered the class room. A good lecturer with a class of 100 or so, could surely generate a revenue of $1000 plus per lecture, which though not a princely sum, is more, I believe, than thieving universities will pay an adjunct.
The comments on this thread are excellent.
ReplyDeleteI graduated with a BA about three decades ago and quickly figured out that an academic career would be a dead end because of a surplus of talented people for the positions available. We will eventually go back to the normal historical situation where knowledge is advanced by amateurs with inherited wealth. What I didn't realize at the time is that all of the professions had become toxic.
I believe one reason that England contributed so much to the industrial and scientific revolutions in the 17th through the 19th century was the existence of the Anglican Church. The Church provided the younger sons of many of the landed gentry with a house, a reasonable income and little to do but preach a sermon once a week. Among these clergymen, some made important scientific contributions. Malthus, for example, whose essay on population influenced the thinking of Charles Darwin. Also Thomas Bayes (a Presbyterian minister), who devised a mathematical formula for calculating conditional probabilities, and Stephen Hales, who made significant discoveries in both plant and animal physiology, albeit the latter through monstrous experiments. The University of Oxford provide another haven for thoughtful clerics, every member of faculty being required to take Holy Orders, as did Isaac Newton.
DeleteOne inference one might draw from this is that today's billionaires could contribute much to the advancement of learning by creating opportunities for truly independent and unpressured existence for gifted individuals from all ranks in society.
There is a danger higher education is on its way to being abolished, along with so many other pillars of our civilization.
DeleteWe don't really know what's happening.
At this moment, there may well be computers or whatever you want to call them of "intelligence" superior to any human, programming themselves, performing all "mental" tasks previously required of "educated" human beings.
Five or so years ago, I was aware were very close to such a moment, assuming such a moment was possible. (There was still uncertainty, but what was certain at that time was we would soon know one way or the other.)
There is a famous 2005 nonfiction book entitled The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, by Ray Kurzweil. The guy isn't a crank and he wasn't writing science fiction. Most of his surmising was rapidly confirmed over the next ten years. Occasionally I hear him interviewed, though not that recently. It would be interesting to know what he currently thinks.
Kurzweil is a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding, which is scary.
ReplyDeleteBut I think they will find machine understanding of natural language a lot harder to crack than they think, and it will require one heck of a lot of computing power.
Thing is, humans understand the meaning of words because they have a experienced words in the context not only of speech but of life. How many times have you experienced the use of the word "blue," or "tree" or "money" and in what contexts, with what implications?
Understanding a word is not a matter of consulting a dictionary. It's a matter of a life-time's experience. Recording that and instantaneously recalling it is what understanding or using speech is about. So I don't see how a machine can understand human language unless it has human experience, and years of it.
Nevertheless, it seems to me likely if not almost certain that technology will destroy us. We evolved to exist in small, warring tribal groups. One group slaughtered another, expanded, then split, the victors in such conflicts being a bit smarter or a bit luckier than the vanquished. Over time the smart guys made weapons, improved them, and the scale of human conquest increased, which led to the invention of what is laughably known as civilization.
Cities were built, irrigation schemes developed for large scale agriculture. As a result intergroup conflict was carried out on an even larger scale.
Better weapons meant greater slaughter in battle. With the World Wars humanity became shocked at the scale of the killing, yet the scale of organization for war increased and the technology became vastly more powerful.
Means to escape disaster seem unlikely. Elon Musk hopes, we can settle another world where the struggle for existence will, at least initially, be so severe that there will be few if any resources available for war.
As an alternative, the globalists hope to establish a world-spanning civilization where the billionaires can treat the masses as cattle, to be brainwashed, brainchipped: Morlocks, that is, to be bred and culled to serve the needs of the ruling Eloi.
But I don't see the Eloi brainchipping themselves. I would expect them to behave with the same reckless abandon as the ancient Greeks, driven by lust, envy, resentment and ambition to seek the destruction of one another/
Then the kings of the earth will wage a final war on the forces of God at bring an end to history.
Maybe we could write that up as a novel!