Home » Open thread 12/17/22

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Open thread 12/17/22 — 26 Comments

  1. The China Covid situation is indeed serious.
    ____________________________

    COVID spreading faster than ever in China. 800 million could be infected this winter

    China is now facing what is likely the world’s largest COVID surge of the pandemic. China’s public health officials say that possibly 800 million people could be infected with the coronavirus over the next few months. And several models predict that a half million people could die, possibly more.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/15/1143002538/china-appears-to-be-facing-what-could-be-the-world-s-largest-coronavirus-outbrea
    ____________________________

    I suspect that half-million deaths is an underestimate.

    Yes, I know that the US fatality statistics are inflated by the “with Covid” vs “of Covid” distinction. Also, China will mostly be infected by Omicron variants, which seem to be less lethal than the earlier Covidsl.

    Nonetheless, consider that South Korea has reported a 0.1% mortality rate:

    https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

    Even at that rate, if 800 million Chinese were infected, that would be 800.000 deaths.

    Consider:

    * These infections will hit over a period of three months, not three years.
    * Chinese health care is poor.
    * 12% of Chinese are diabetic, 38% are pre-diabetic.

    https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787545

    Hard to say how this will play out. I hate to think of that many people getting sick at the same time in the Chinese system. Furthermore, it will be a serious blow to the Chinese economy.

    I don’t expect much truthfulness from the CCP. I will be watching for political instability and lowered economic numbers.

  2. Another factor is the very bad, horrible air pollution in many Chinese cities, which can make the symptoms of COVID worse.

  3. plus there is a percentage of rather obese among the young cohort, part of the result of the one child policy.

  4. Here we go again…

    The Jan.6 committee is going to recommend CRIMINAL CHARGES against ex-President Trump, saying he “did insurgency”, and “tried to overthrow The US Government”.

    …But this will be [a symbolic gesture], since the committee doesn’t have- the powers to arrest Trump, + has no powers to put him on trial.

    I admit- [as I understand it], at his speech before the riot- some of Trump’s advisors said to him- [some of the people in the crowd ARE ARMED, with knives(?), + pipes(?) + heavy sticks (?), + this is a problem], and Trump responded something like, “That is ok. they aren’t here to threaten me with weapons”. I wish Trump had spoken out about the weapons.

    In a perfect world, Trump would have said to the crowd- [WHY do you have, [clubs, knives, and maybe guns,] with you? Put your weapons BACK in your: homes, hotel rooms, and cars, or I am NOT going to make this speech. I will just leave, if you don’t come here unarmed].

    That might have stopped a lot of violence done by people, on that day.

    I think- there were lots of people doing violence- against the US capitol building, + against the people in the building, and against the Washington D.C. police, but no one has proved that:

    1] Trump wanted to inspire people to do criminal violence, and do armed violence, and no one has proved that 2] Trump has done the crime of- doing any action to overthrow the US Federal Government.

    In my view, these Congress-people are trying to punish him, for crimes he did not do.

    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jan-6-committee-preparing-trump-criminal-referral-doj/story?id=95440940

  5. they will refer it to so called Justice, isn’t there already a grand jury, we waste our time with this carp while actually criminals are allowed to go free, they murdered
    ashley babbitt, (you want to make mike byrds action, just seem more negligent) then there was the coverup about sicknick and his four associates, this is why they erected a maginot line around the Capitol

  6. On the video interesting, after all cinnamon is the finest of the flavor
    Maybe should search for Ceylon cinnamon

    China’s population is if reports are correct, aging part of the population is getting greater. If as here Covid is killing of primarily older and the vulnerable with other illnesses.

    Totalitarian will do what Totalitarians do, Kangaroo Courts, charges without a crime. If anything Twitter crime wave being opened is putting a timer on what they can do.

  7. Huxley, the Chinese have one thing going for them as pertains to Covid. Here in Snohomish County, the Asians were the racial cohort who had the lowest case rate. The Pacific Islanders (125) were hit the hardest. Followed by Latinos (99), Native Americans (96), and Blacks (86). Whites were about half (44) the case rate per 1000 than Blacks. The Asians were the lowest. (34)

    We suffered quite a few of our deaths during the Omicron wave, but it was so much larger than the three previous waves, that you would expect the numbers to be high even though Omicron is less lethal.

    Numbers here are still quite low even though we are having an unusually cold November and December. Lots of people still masking up indoors. In Costco yesterday it was about half the customers.

    Thanks for keeping an eye on China. This wave could be a hinge point for them.

  8. That was an interesting video. The presenter is quite aggressive in his enunciation of those three-syllable words: ‘cinnamon,’ ‘Philippines,’ and one or two others.

    Interesting that the Greek and Spanish words for cinnamon are essentially the same: canela/kanela. However, it seems that this is in Modern Greek only; the ancient form was indeed ‘kinnamomon’ (Liddell-Scott has this). That suggests that cinnamon took on a new name among the Greeks, along with much else, due to the Latin influences of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.

    The pattern of names similar to ‘canela’ seems to continue around the Mediterranean basin, from what I can tell with a quick glance at lexica. Even in Albanian, one sees ‘kanellë’. (I can’t read Amharic, unfortunately.) But there is some sort of zone in which the word changes over to something like the German ‘Zimt’, which is rather different from ‘canela’. I guess this division takes in the Germanic countries and the northern Balkans, so that places immediately involved in the Mediterranean trading network picked up this ‘canela’ type of word – all the way around to Holland – while outside that network, the word applied was some kind of local idiosyncratic variant, I suppose.

    But then to get modern English ‘cinnamon,’ our ancestors five hundred years or so apparently binned the ‘canella’ morphology and reached back to the ancient one instead. Curious.

    Having skimmed the Wikipedia writeup on cinnamon, I suspect the presenter of the video used it as the core of his outline in many respects. A little lazy, if at the same time understandable. Hey, I guess if nobody’s paying you to do the research….

    Cinnamon is mentioned sparingly in Scripture, first in Exodus, most of the rest of the references being in the wisdom literature.

  9. Re: JFK assassination (from Open Thread 12/15)

    Banned Lizard, neo:

    I’ve read Bugliosi’s monumental tome, “Reclaiming History” on the JFK assassination. I am persuaded Oswald was the lone gunman that day and much of the conspiracy literature on the assassination is out to lunch.

    However, I don’t conclude that everything else was jake, especially with the CIA. I don’t believe Oswald popped out of nowhere to everyone’s terrible shock. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the remaining withheld JFK files are…problematic…for the three-letter agencies.

    Yesterday Roger Simon explored this JFK thought and a more global question in the Epoch Times:

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/has-american-democracy-been-a-hallucination-for-nearly-60-years_4928653.html

  10. I too was impressed by the Joe Rogan – Tom O’Neill interview, which Banned Lizard referenced.

    Among other things, O’Neill reveals a much shadier, compromised view of Vincent Bugliosi, which has large consequences for the standard story of the Manson Murders and perhaps the JFK assassination as well.

    However, my ears really pricked up when O’Neill mentioned Dr. Jolyon “Jolly” West as the first psychiatrist to interview Jack Ruby and issue the devastating diagnosis that Ruby was “psychotic” and “delusional.”

    O’Neill had made the connection, as others have, that West was a key psychiatrist with the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control. project, intended to create programmed assassins.

    How was Jolly West at the top of the shrinks list to talk to Ruby after Ruby’s bizarre murder of Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Station?

    Plus for me it was weirdly personal. I knew West had corresponded with my mother’s psychiatrist on a nickname basis.

    https://spikethenews.blogspot.com/2013/02/letter-by-dr-louis-jolyon-west-january.html

    Anyway. I’ve got Tom O’Neill’s book, “Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.” I’ve been meaning to read it for a while. Maybe this is a good time.

  11. huxley; Banned Lizard:

    Huxley, I don’t understand how after reading Bugliosi’s book on JFK you could continue to believe that. To me, the argument against the CIA choosing to use Oswald or Ruby is airtight. Even the timing is completely off – if you recall the book’s details on that, you’ll know what I’m referring to.

    In addition, try reading Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter before you read O’Neill’s book on Manson, if you haven’t read Bugliosi’s book yet.

    O’Neill certainly struck paydirt with his Manson book, though, in terms of money. It seems to have sold a lot of copies, and Rogan probably helped by doing the interview. My sense is that O’Neill has even less credibility than Oliver Stone, and that’s saying a lot.

    From some of the reviews at Amazon from people who panned the book:

    I have read Helier Skelter and am pretty familiar with the Tate and LaBianca murders. Maybe someone that wasn’t would enjoy this book more but I couldn’t get past 2 chapters. The fact that the author did not release this while Bugliosi was alive to defend himself tells you a lot. It is clear the author is looking for a story in every possible disputed angle. Maybe there is something there but most of it seems pretty speculative to me. The reading is pompous and whiny to me as well. The author takes pains to detail his life difficulties in the beginning which does not set a good stage for credibility. As another reviewer noted, the use of language more grandiose than needed just comes across as someone trying to impress needlessly. I would avoid unless you are a grand conspiracy theorist or someone that needs to have every possible opinion on the Manson Family.

    O’Neill starts with teasing wars with Vince Bugliosi, as if O’Neill will treat us to secret (sacred?) Manson collusions but instead O’Neill meanders off course and he provides us with so-called dark tales of unpleasant LA characters and episodes that properly degrade Polanski. But short of that, this author (who started writing this in 1999) seems totally unaware of the true motives of the Manson Murders even though Bobby Beausoleil wrote his views in the ’80s, and Manson’s own taped interviews in the late ’80s spelled out the real reasons. This author seems completely unaware of those, and displays only a cursory and often incorrect interpretation from Ed Sander’s THE FAMILY trestise. My low respect for O’Neill is earned by his writing… all hat, no cattle.

    Mr. O’Neil goes down the rabbit hole in his quest to connect Manson with state and federal agencies, but is unsuccessful in doing so. Instead he goes on rambling journey of all of the alphabet agencies such as the FBI and the CIA and their varied, classified projects. Pretty soon you find yourself reading about Jack Ruby! O’Neil also carries on his vendetta against Vince Bugliosi attempting to prove that he (O’Neil) is the more honorable person. Those things along with frequent reminders throughout the book that “this is the first time that this has ever been in print” makes the whole business seem to be more about O’Neil than anything else. And at the end of the book, we don’t know anything more about Manson than we did before.

    Twenty years doing research and comes up with little except speculation. No wonder he waited to publish the book till Bugliosi was dead. If Bugliosi had still been alive when the book came out, I strongly believe that Bugliosi would have demolished him in argument and sued his pants off as well.

  12. Huxley, I don’t understand how after reading Bugliosi’s book on JFK you could continue to believe that. To me, the argument against the CIA choosing to use Oswald or Ruby is airtight.

    neo:

    I didn’t say the CIA ran Oswald or Ruby. I said the withheld JFK files were likely problematic for the CIA and its kin.

    I have read Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter” though not O’Neill’s “Chaos.” I am interested in the latter, though I haven’t reached any conclusions. I will probably not base those on Amazon customer reviews.

    Do you have any response to Roger Simon’s column, which mirrored my own thoughts and questions, on this subject? Again:

    –Roger Simon, “Has American Democracy Been a Hallucination For Nearly Sixty Years?”
    https://www.theepochtimes.com/has-american-democracy-been-a-hallucination-for-nearly-60-years_4928653.html

  13. huxley:

    My response is that I think most people think they know a lot more about the JFK assassination facts than they do, and that’s what conspiracy theorists prey on. And “prey” is really the right word for most of them. I would wager that Roger has not read Bugliosi’s book, for example.

    However, I do not trust government agencies either. I’d like full disclosure, but I don’t think we’ll ever get it, but not necessarily because the conspiracy theories are correct.

    It also has occurred to me many times during the last three or so years especially, with COVID and all the crapola issued by the CDC and other agencies, as well as things like the Twitter files, that people (including me) have become more and more distrustful of ANYTHING the government says. Some of that distrust is healthy and some leads to a belief in things even more absurd. I’ve encountered a lot of that with COVID. Much of what the skeptics put out in terms of number crunching and supposed facts is a whole lot worse than what the CDC puts out. A lot of them don’t even understand basic statistics and the difficulties of epidemiological research.

    I see a lot of exploitation, too, by people like Oliver Stone re JFK’s assassination. I detest playing fast and loose with the facts, and as soon as I learned about his movie long ago it struck me that for many viewers his lies would replace the facts.

  14. Neo, have you given your conspiracy theory as to why the government still refuses to release documents on the assassination?
    All it does is fuel the conspiracists. We all know these are the juicy documents!
    Reminds me of when Obama refused to release his birth certificate- just spite.
    The certificate that was released was digitally doctored. I think it would have showed that Davis was his dad.

  15. Because they screwed up they knew where oswald was comjng from where he has been mexico city and minsk what he had done (re the u2 flight pattern and general walker) they were watching the dre and yet he slipped through their fingers

  16. However, my ears really pricked up when O’Neill mentioned Dr. Jolyon “Jolly” West as the first psychiatrist to interview Jack Ruby and issue the devastating diagnosis that Ruby was “psychotic” and “delusional.” O’Neill had made the connection, as others have, that West was a key psychiatrist with the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control. project, intended to create programmed assassins. How was Jolly West at the top of the shrinks list to talk to Ruby after Ruby’s bizarre murder of Oswald in the basement of the Dallas Police Station?

    See Shana Alexander’s Anyone’s Daughter on Louis Jolyon West, MD. (Then on the faculty of one of the UC campuses). Dr. West was one of the defense witnesses at the Patty Hearst trial, having previously been commissioned by the federal court to produce a report on her competence to stand trial. Shana Alexander rather liked him personally. Alexander is sparing about offering her opinions directly. She lets other figures offer commentary about West which taken collectively point to her conclusion. Her opinion, offered through these voices, was that Dr. West was the linchpin of stupidity in the case, the ultimate author of the incredible defense F. Lee Bailey offered of his client at trial.

    In the course of her profile of West, she offers a bit of anonymous commentary by another academic she’d located. He in her telling referred to West as ‘an opportunistic psychiatrist-executive who has made not one original contribution to psychiatric thinking. A high level hack’. I once buttonholed Haroutun Babigian, then chief of psychiatry at the University of Rochester, and asked what he thought of this characterization of West. HB was absolutely deadpan: “He can take it”.

    I don’t think this guy was the mustache twirling villain you imagine.

  17. Well he got the bottom of the ‘brain washing’ operation by the chinese like some of the gitmo interrogators they tried to reverse engineer the findings

    The ‘successful’ terminations have been very rare a gang of thugs who iced lumumba, trujillo at the hand of some dissidents prats and schneider similarly in chile. Shooters have been least successful

  18. Brian E:

    See this [emphasis mine]:

    Thursday’s release of thousands of documents means that 95% of the CIA’s records on the assassination are now available to the public. As a final step there will be an “intensive one-year review” of any remaining closed files before a complete opening of the books by 30 June 2023.

    The unveiling of the CIA documents has been delayed for years. In 1992, Congress ordered their full release by October 2017, but the deadline was pushed back by presidential decrees from both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

    But nothing will ever satisfy JFK conspiracy buffs.

    Again, if you’re interested in the subject at all, you owe it to yourself to read at least the first few hundred pages of Bugliosi’s book.

  19. Russian history is afflicted with at least one high profile assassination and a bunch of lesser profile ones the latter came from the social revolutionaries who in turn had a man inside their org azev he was no 2 or 3 in the org one of their operatives bogaev was closely watched by the okrana according to solzhenitsyn they was in their interest to dispatch stolypin one of their best ministers this is the lesson the soviets took from their history

  20. Since it is still an open thread; Ukraine war update:

    Bakhmut & The Ukraine Trench War – fortifications, attrition, and lessons – Perun

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fqHERDXVpk

    Note that one of Vlad’s rationalizations for his invasion was to protect the people of Donbas from Ukrainian shelling, except that prior to his little operation the rate was ~ 25 killed per year for all causes (mines, arty, small arms, etc.) now it is orders of magnitude higher, and Roosians are doing most of the killing. Funny that.

    And a more granular post:

    Update on the Battle for Bakhmut: Russia Pushed back from Garbage Heap and Fedora Maksymenka Street -Suchomimus

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH_vKR_AMnM&t=13s

    Or a more global military analysis:

    Cyber Lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War with Shashank Josi – on Midrats Saturday, December 17, 2022

    https://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/

  21. Brian E and Banned:

    Something to consider, you might learn something:

    Perun: The Biggest Challenges for Ukraine | Jake Broe Podcast (E011) @PerunAU

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWAkUWqdfBY

    Note Jake Broe is not “objective” he typically starts his videos with “Day XXX in Russia’s disastrous war in Ukraine.”

    So he won’t sing Vlad’s praises, sorry.

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