Donald Trump had always struck me as an ignorant buffoon and most of his proposed policies were ridiculous, Ron Unz
You may not like Donald Trump, he may not amuse you, his actions may not serve your interest, but if you think that Trump — the man who built iconic New York skyscrapers, survived the failure of an airline, multiple Atlantic City casinos, and a dud "university," earned several hundred million as a television entertainer, and then, in his seventies and seemingly on a whim, set out to win, and rather easily gained, the US Presidency — is an ignoramus and a buffoon, which is to say a no-nothing and a ridiculous person, you should perhaps consider whether it might be your judgement that is ignorant and buffoonish.
Absent strong public health measures, we would expect it to kill something like 0.5% to 1.0% of a nation’s population, and whether or not that’s a large number is a matter of personal opinion.
That claim is far from the truth as the case of Sweden demonstrates. There, in the absence of "strong public health measures" there have been 5,846 reported Covid deaths, or about 0.06% of the population. That must be close to the final toll, as Covid deaths in Sweden peaked in March and are now at or close to zero.
Why would a scientifically literate person such as Ron Unz make such a false claim? Mere confusion, perhaps*.
One way in which Covid death rates have been greatly exaggerated has been to confuse, deliberately or otherwise, two measures of the death rate; namely, the "Case Fatality Rate" and the "Infection Fatality Rate."
The Covid19 Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is a measure of deaths among confirmed Covid19 cases, the latter being mainly cases of serious illness, which thus came to the attention of the medical profession and were identified as due to Covid19 by a more or less reliable diagnostic methods.
The Covid19 Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is a measure of deaths among all those infected with Covid19, whether they were seriously ill or not, or whether they were ill at all. The IFR can only be determined if there is population-wide testing for past or present Covid19 infection, for example by means of a reliable serological test for Covid19 antibodies.
Evidence currently available suggests that the the IFR is only about one tenth of the CFR. Therefore, to mistake the CFR for the IFR will result in an exaggeration of the actual IFR by a factor of around ten.
But even a ten-fold error does not explain Ron Unz's claim that "absent strong public health measures" Covid19 will "kill something like 0.5% to 1.0% of a nation’s population." To explain that, assuming it is not a straight lie, one must assume that Ron Unz confuses the Infection Fatality Rate with the Population Fatality Rate (PFR). Such confusion assumes a Covid death rate among the population as a whole equal to the Covid death rate among those made sick by a confirmed Covid19 infection, which is nonsense.
But perhaps Ron Unz's claim is a straight lie, which would be consistent with the fact that, when I pointed out the error on his Unz Review post, my comment was deleted.
Breaking down the New York City report, Cuomo noted thatthe Bronx had the highest infection rate of the five boroughs, with a staggering 27.1% of respondents having COVID-19 antibodies. ...
“That number remains obnoxiously and terrifyingly high,” Cuomo said. “It’s not where we want it to be.” Source
There is a pernicious idea that the media, politicians and public health officials in the US, Canada and elsewhere seek to encourage, namely, that the spread of Covid19 is a bad thing. Actually, it's a good thing: here's why.
Epidemics don't end with everyone in quarantine, because life cannot be sustained by a population in perpetual quarantine. Eventually, a quarantined population must get back to work. then people will have to come face to face once again, and the disease will resume it's spread.
So how do epidemics end? They end when the number of people with immunity to the disease rises to the point that the number of people each infected person infects falls below one. At that point, disease spread slows and dies.*
And what determines who has immunity? There are two key factors. One is the acquisition of immunity among those who have been infected and survived the disease. The other is the process of natural selection. Those who lack the necessary immune system genes to fend off the disease die, so that a higher proportion of the residual population has the genes that provide either immunity to infection, or the capacity for recovery from infection.
The seasonal flu is an example of a non-lethal disease that induces immunity in those infected. The plague, or black death, is a an example of a more or less lethal disease that kills many but not all that it infects, leaving a more resistant population more or less immune to the disease.
And, in the worst case, are diseases against which an entire population is vulnerable, and in that case the entire population dies, as was the fate of many Amerindian communities afflicted by diseases brought by explorers and colonists from Europe to the New World.
Covid-19, fortunately, is a relatively mild disease for most who are infected by it, leaving them with protective antibodies that reduce susceptibility to future infection. The Covid epidemics working theirs way through the nations of the world seem to be killing no more than 30 to 40 people per thousand of those infected (at least in the developed world), these being mainly the elderly with existing heart or respiratory diseases**.
The end to the Covid-19 pandemic will thus occur when the virus has gone through every population causing an increased level of immunity that halts the disease's spread.
What proportion of the population must have immunity before the rate of recovery from the disease exceeds the rate of infection is not something that can be exactly predicted, since it depends on the way people in each community interact. In a nation of hermits, the disease would never spread and there could be no epidemic. Otherwise, the particular features of specific communities, in particular the way in which people interact with one another, but also many other factors such as age distribution, air quality, nutrition, etc., determine the infection rate that must be attained before an epidemic dies.
What that means is that although lock-downs, quarantines, social distancing and face masks can slow the spread of disease, they have no effect on the incidence of the disease at which disease spread slows and ultimately stops.
So well done The Bronx. With 27% of the population reported to have antibodies for Covid19, they may not be there quite yet, but they are well on the way to the condition of so-called herd immunity, when immunity to the pathogen is sufficiently widespread to cause its spread to slow and die even after a return to normal life.
Despite what crackpots such as Ron Unz of the Unz Review, New York State Governor Cuomo and the political class generally, plus most public health officials tell you, the spread of Covid19 and hence of immunity to Covid19 is good news that heralds the return to normality. But don't expect to hear that from the gerontological medical experts, the politicians and the vendors of patent medicines and vaccines now in the limelight and positioned to profit by the present panic.
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* In New York City, the hardest hit place in North America if not the world, the number of new infections reported daily is down to about one third of the peak rate, indicating that, under present conditions of restricted social mobility, herd immunity has been achieved and the epidemic is dying. An end to the lock-downs in NY City may increase the infection rate if the percentage of the population with immunity is insufficiently high for herd immunity under the changed social dynamics. Certainly, an end to the lock-downs will cause a temporary increase in the infection rate, but a new downward trend leading to extinction of the virus will resume within a reasonably short time.
What percentage of the population must have immunity to achieve herd immunity is impossible to model accurately since people do not interact randomly, but in many distinctive ways according to factors such as age, profession, the need to commute, etc. Certainly, the percentage of infected people needed for herd immunity will be less than the theoretical 67% (assuming an R nought of 3.0), and quite possibly less than half that number.
** In the Bronx, with 27% having Covid-19 antibodies, the number infected is around 382,000 people, of whom 1,700 have died for an infection-specific mortality rate of 0.44%. Of those who have died, 545 were resident of nursing homes or adult care facilities, and most had other serious medical conditions. For the remainder of the population the infection-specific mortality rate has been 0.3%. (Source: Riverdale Press).
Here's the title of a post I made yesterday here on Google's Blogger:
Covid-19, and the Weird World of Ron Unz
Now you might think, if only because Google is the publisher of that post, that Google's search engine would have been able to locate the post right away in response to a search on the exact title.
But if you were inclined to think that, you'd be wrong.
The former publisher of The American Conservative is a case study in contrarianism gone haywire
That's an interesting result, but it's not the the post I published on Google's blogger with the exact title as the search string.
And you cannot read the American Conservative article unless you're a subscriber to the American Conservative magazine (though they may allow you a month's access for free. Try it and see. Essentially, the article on Unz paints him, not as a devious propagandist for some unacceptable cause but merely a nutter. I'm not so sure. What the Am. Con. article does make clear is that although Unz is so vehemently anti-Semitic (though himself of Jewish origin), he firmly supports the Jewish plan for the European majority nations: extinction of the European peoples of traditional Christian faith and their replacement by people from elsewhere. That's pretty much Google's plan too.)
Odd though, innit -- the difficulty of finding content hosted by Google in a Google search. Maybe even worth thinking about.
Ron Unz, publisher of the Unz Review, a web-based collection of articles -- many by odd-ball Hitler admirers, anti-Semites, and advocates of Communism -- has run a series of posts concerning Covid-19 in which it is asserted (a) that Covid-19 is a biowarfare agent directed by the US at China, and (b) that Covid-19 is a truly terrifying disease, and that those who compare it with the seasonal flu are hoaxers. Furthermore, comments of said hoaxers are mostly, if not always, deleted from Ron's Review.
Thus, on finding a statement in an article at Zero Hedge asserting, on reliable authority, that the Covid-19 death toll has been comparable to that of the seasonal flu, I was overcome by an irresistible impulse to post it at the Unz Review, as a comment on an article by Ron himself:
Here's a quote that Ron Unz will have to delete, unless, that is, he's an honest man:
Here's another comment I attempted to make at Ron's Review, in response to a comment referring to a WHO tweet that was subsequently deleted:
"There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from #COVID19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection."
First, to say that there is no evidence of X is no evidence of of not X. But in any case the tweet [by the WHO] was deleted, so it would appear that their claim (the WHO's claim, that is) was either unsupported by evidence or known to be false.
Second, to claim, as you do, that antibodies for Covid19 are short-lived is not the same as saying they are non-existent.
Third, if antibodies to Covid19 exist -- as they must or immunological tests for the disease would be impossible -- and as even the WHO now acknowledges, that implies a degree of immunity in those who have been infected. And remember, without an immune system response, every case of Covid19 would be fatal.
The fact is, Covid19, like the flu, a virus of the same family*, is a relatively mild disease except in a minority of cases (chiefly the elderly afflicted by one or several other serious diseases).
The usual mildness of the disease is evident from the fact that although a substantial proportion of the population where serological surveys have been conducted have been shown to have been infected, the death rate as a proportion of those with antibodies is low, in the order of no more than about 0.3%. However, the antibody tests are not known to be highly reliable and the actual death rate is likely much lower. So far, the reported US death toll is just over 60,000 of 328 million Americans, and with the daily totals trending down, the total is thus unlikely to exceed 120,000. If so, the disease will prove considerably less lethal than both the Asian flu of 1957/58 that killed 70,000 of 149 million Americans, or the 1968 Hong Kong flu (H3N2 virus) that killed about 100,000 out of 200 million Americans.
Does that sound like the comment of a hoaxer, or does it sound like the sort of comment that a hoaxer might delete in order to suppress the truth?
Yes, the Unz Review is a weird world, which deserves further scrutiny.
Ron Unz, has said he believes the reason for his being banned on Facebook is "
Facebook’s plans to crack down on misinformation related to our ongoing Covid-19 epidemic."
Having been banned by Ron Unz for what I assume he considered to be "misinformation related to our ongoing Covid-19 epidemic," I am inclined to think that justice has in some way been served -- not that I would consider Facebook a reliable guide to what I personally should or should not read.
Ron Unz, has a piece today, documenting evidence of corporate book burning: specifically, Amazon's engagement in the general corporate war on free speech. The piece starts well enough:
As most are surely aware, the last year or two has seen a growing crackdown on free speech and free thought across the Internet, with our constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights being circumvented through the agency of monopolistic private sector corporations such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Although as yet our government has not gained the power to ban discordant views nor punish their advocates, anonymous tech company censors regularly take these steps, seemingly based upon entirely opaque and arbitrary standards which lack any power of appeal. No one really knows why some individuals are banned or “de-platformed” and others are not, and surely this looming uncertainty has imposed self-censorship upon hundreds of individuals for every publicized victim who receives an exemplary punishment..
Unz then goes on to document several recent cases in which Amazon has burnt books, shoved them down the memory hole or otherwise made them unavailable to the significant portion of humanity that has come to rely on Amazon.com as the world's largest book distributor.
But Unz soon goes off on a theme he has often raised before; namely the evil influence of Jewry on American society.
The ADL ranks as one of our most formidable Jewish activist organizations, and according to media accounts it has been playing a central role in efforts to censor “hate speech” on leading Internet platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube. So it seems very likely to have also been behind Amazon’s recent purge, especially once we discover the nature of some of the more significant books now banned.
I am not sure what to make of this. When Unz warms to the theme of Jewish malfeasance, his allegations are so inflammatory as to make one wonder about his intention. Is it to incite the kind of anti-Semitism that promotes Jewish community adhesion, or is it, rather, the honest view of a sensitive person of Jewish descent appalled by the history of Jews exploiting those among whom they live.
My own assumption is that it is the latter, although, I think it is a counterproductive and therefore unwise. There are plenty of Jewish sons-of-bitches, some of them in America very powerful. Moreover, there can be no doubt that are Jewish religious fanatics who are racial supremacists who encourage the kind of brutal extremism that motivates the relentless drive to expel Palestinians from their own homeland. But the broad implication that most Jews throughout dispersed among the Western nations are fundamentally disloyal to those among whom they dwell is seems to me not only unfounded, but must inevitably undermine the loyalty of Jews to the communities in which they live.
In fact, the death of the Christian West as a unique and powerful civilization is due, I maintain, not to Jewish manipulation, however, massive the Jewish role in the death of Christendom has been, but to the treason of the Western elites, overwhelmingly, people of non-Jewish extraction. Book-burner -in-Chief, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, for example is no Jew. Western non-Jewish elites have themselves trashed Christianity, and now believe in nothing much beyond money, sex and power, which means getting along by going along with whatever the Money Power demands, even if that means genociding your own people and trashing your own nation.
Indeed, the future of the Western nations would have been assured had Western elites adopted the ethnocentrism of Jews, however brutal that impulse has proved to be in Palestine today*.
In a post entitled "Self-Hating Whites", reproduced by the Unz Review with comment "closed," i.e., not permitted, Paul Craig Roberts, asserts:
White people are on the point of extinction. ... Whites are on the road to extinction ... because of their own tax, social, and immigration policies. ... In Western countries where the white birthrate is collapsing and borders are open to nonwhite immigration, it is only a question of time before whites become a minority in their own country. As the nonwhite immigrants are not being assimilated, Western civilization itself is on the road to extinction.
Roberts then asks:
How did something this topsy-turvy come about?
Identity Politics plays a major role. Identity Politics, now institutionalized in Western universities and school systems as black studies and women studies, teaches whites to be guilty for victimizing nonwhites and teaches nonwhites to hate whites for victimizing them.
"Topsy-turvy"? Topsy-fucking-turvy!
Well, OK. So much for the Jewish Holocaust all white people are supposed to feel endlessly guilty about. It was nothing really. It was simply the result of German policy on ethnic minorities being "topsy-turvy."
Whether Paul Craig Roberts has gone senile, or is an agent of disinformation, I don't know. But in any case, his assessment of the genocide of the Europeans is undoubtedly pathetic if it is not deliberate misdirection. Does he, for instance, really think that identity politics spontaneously reared its ugly, white-hating head in Europe and North America? Obviously, identity politics is being foisted on the European people by the leadership, the corporate media, and the state-controlled educational system. To the extent that white people are taken in by the hate-whitey rhetoric, they are merely pathetic dupes of a campaign to make them responsible for their own demise.
Far from being the result of their own actions and beliefs, Europeans peoples are being destroyed as racial and cultural entities because they constitute the most powerful sovereign, democratic, nation states, and hence the greatest obstruction in the way of global governance by the Money Power, which is to say the global banks, and other mega-corporations, and the billionaire entrepreneur class.
Blaming the European peoples of both the New World and the Old for their own destruction is a neat trick if you can get away with it, and is firmly supported by Ron Unz's Silicon Valley Friends, the likes of the"digital gangsters" at Facebook, and Google who demand a constant influx of cheap Asian brains to develop software, rather than incur the expense of promoting good education for all Americans. That Trump is an American-Firster, at least in theory, is of course, why the elite class in America and the World hate him with such virulence.
In an interview with Recode, Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said that Facebook will not automatically remove posts denying the Jewish Holocaust. Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, said that "people get [things] wrong" and that he doesn't think they are "intentionally getting it wrong." He then stated in a post-interview email that he personally finds Holocaust denial "deeply offensive" and that he "absolutely didn't intend to defend the intent of people who deny that [i.e., the Jewish Holocaust]".
On the face of it, Mark Zuckerberg seems mentally challenged on the issue. If people who deny the Holocaust are simply misinformed, as Zuckerberg appears to assume, then that is a matter for error correction, not deep offense. If on the other hand, Zuckerberg finds, as he claims, that Holocaust denial is "deeply offensive" that can logically only mean that he assumes the denial is inspired by anti-Semitism not a commitment to historical truth.
What we see, then, is a Jew running what is the World's most wide-reaching media corporation facilitating the spread of anti-Semitism, in the pretense that it is not anti-Semitism, while simultaneously holding that it is deeply offensive because, well, it is obviously anti-Semitism.
If this were the position adopted by just a single Jew, notwithstanding his enormous influence in the media world, one might dismiss it as some kind of unfortunate muddle-headedness. But action by Jews that promote anti-Semitism is remarkably common. For example, Ron Unz, a multi-millionaire California Jew with political ambitions recently published an extraordinary article in his own so-called Web-Zine, the Unz Review, in which he lends credence to the age-old anti-Semitic claim that Jews engage in ritual sacrifice of Christian babies, stating:
I do not doubt that much of the candid analysis provided above will be quite distressing to many individuals. Indeed, some may believe that such material far exceeds the boundaries of mere “anti-Semitism” and easily crosses the threshold into constituting an actual “blood libel” against the Jewish people. That extremely harsh accusation, widely used by stalwart defenders of Israeli behavior, refers to the notorious Christian superstition, prevalent throughout most of the Middle Ages and even into more modern times, that Jews sometimes kidnapped small Christian children in order to drain their blood for use in various magic rituals, especially in connection with the Purim religious holiday. One of my more shocking discoveries of the last dozen years is that there is a fairly strong likelihood that these seemingly impossible beliefs were actually true.
and suggests that Jews pay little attention to the Torah, and may more often pray to the Devil than to God. In which connection he writes:
Furthermore, religious Jews apparently pray to Satan almost as readily as they pray to God, and depending upon the various rabbinical schools, the particular rituals and sacrifices they practice may be aimed at enlisting the support of the one or the other. Once again, so long as the rituals are properly followed, the Satan-worshippers and the God-worshippers get along perfectly well and consider each other equally pious Jews, merely of a slightly different tradition.
To acknowledge the possibility that some Jews at some time and some place may well have engaged in the sacrificial murder of Christian babies, or that some religious Jews may pray to Satan is one thing. But to do so in a manner that would suggest to the uninformed reader the typical American Jew may well be a blood-thirsty, Devil-worshipping, Holocaust-faker is simply preposterous. However, it serves very effectively to make the the Unz Review comment section a magnet for anti-Semites and hence a site for the propagation of anti-Semitism.
The implication is that by promoting anti-Semitism, a component of the Jewish population seeks to maintain what is tantamount to a libel against the people among whom they live, specifically, the claim that Americans, Canadians, the people of Europe are all carriers of what Elie Wiesel called "the age-old mental illness of anti-Semitism."
The consequences of such behavior are clear. First, to encourage Jewish paranoia and hence to reinforce the Jewish tradition of racial separation and supremacism, while weakening the self-defensive reaction of the host population.
