by John Ward
Media ‘news’. The answer’s a lie, now what’s the question?
Counterfeit ‘facts’ about the European Union, and the COVID19 virus
The French government is very keen that all equipment to do with water (supply, drainage, disposal and recreation) should come up to very strictly controlled high standards. The main authority concerned with this exacting pursuit of top quality is called SPANK – a name guaranteed to evoke hilarity among the British community here. “Behave yourself or I’ll give you a damned good spanking”. Ooooohum, yes please.
Peel off the packaging of SPANK, however, and what one finds is that same old same old product, gallic protectionism. The whiff of hypocrisy surrounding all this is not helped by the fact that my local water provision company is called SAUR, which the local accent here pronounces “sewer”. Attached to my gite is a plunge pool, whose location at the foot of a hill requires a well to be bored in order to release excess water. The current bout of Noah-level precipitation demands that an “automatic” pump be installed to effect this release of pressure.
Naturally, only French pumps will do. The first one I installed (at twice the price of the Polish equivalent) was A1 when it came to the stopping thing once the well was dry, but Gamma minus at starting once the well was full of heavenly water. Clearly, it fell down badly on the “automatic” promise.
So I recently had another SPANK-approved French product installed. This model is A1 when it comes to the starting requirement in an ongoing full-well situation going forward, but Gamma minus when it comes to stopping no matter how Sahara-like the well might get.
Perhaps the solution is to use both pumps – which no doubt, for the Boy King Macron, would be the win-win outcome. But then, that would be what we water-use scientists are wont to call daft.
When I was a kid, my father was fond of saying, “Well, where the French fall down is in their toilets”. For years I thus had this unshakeable belief that lavatories here were littered with drunken Frenchmen who had collapsed from inebriation while in the act of urinating.
Over the last forty years, the French have worked hard and successfully at burying their reputation for smelly bogs. On the autoroutes, for example, both the aires without shops and the petrol/food services are now boast lavatories of a standard that puts Britain to shame. Equally, the French do not work on the assumption that everyone has a bladder the size of a Montgolfier balloon, and there is no such thing as IBS. This is one of the many things (along with less traffic) that makes travelling within France infinitely more pleasurable than the same experience in Britain.
The rain in Aquitaine continues to pertain. A hundred and fifty years ago, Nietsche declared that God was dead. God took his revenge by almost immediately rendering the German philosopher mad. But the Almighty is – if he exists – very obviously incontinent. We must hope that the old bugger expires before achieving double incontinence.
I used to visit the site Zero Hedge on an almost daily basis, but not any more: it has become merely one more apocalyptic site pumping out Unelected State bollocks. There are Threepercenter Nasties out there determined to use COVID19 as an excuse for everything they’ve screwed up, and whether wittingly or not, ZH is furthering their cause.
Today, the site tells us that ‘mass quarantine looms’, there will be ‘utter mayhem’, ’15 dead in Washington’, ‘Nightmare at Sea’, and ‘2 Individuals At AIPAC Conference With Pence, Pompeo, McConnell & Others Test Positive For Covid-19′. That’ll be 2 (two) then.
Time to shine more reality on this quasi Dark Ages panic proliferation. This from the NPR site – with far better comprehension than the ZH pugilists could ever manage:
‘Outside of Wuhan — the city at the epicenter of the outbreak — the death rate in China has been much lower: about 0.7%. That’s fewer than 1 fatality per 100 cases…..factor out all the data from Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, the fatality rate in the rest of China drops to 0.4%……Wuhan started fast, and early. People didn’t know what they were dealing with. Learning how to treat this, the more patients medical staff saw, the more they could start identifying what kind of supportive care made a difference. So by the time patients started showing up in hospitals in other provinces, doctors and nurses there had a lot more information about what it takes to keep patients alive. Hospitals in the rest of world will likely also benefit from that knowledge.’
Also note this passage in particular:
‘At the beginning of this outbreak remember, people were finding severe disease. And that’s why the alarm bells went off….Those early severe cases made COVID-19 look like a much bigger killer. It was only after officials in China stepped up surveillance that they started uncovering many more mild cases (people with symptoms such as fever and dry cough but limited or no pneumonia).’
This was precisely the point I made here three weeks ago:
‘while some deaths will go unreported because they happen after the snapshot study (true) in healthy people the virus infection itself will go frequently unreported because the patient will put it down to a heavy cold or seasonal flu. If all cases were recorded by testing (and they aren’t, because the patient doesn’t present) then the death rate would be lowered, not raised.’
Taking the NPR view at its most pessimistic, while six people per hundred in my age group stand a chance of dying from Covid19, ninety-four don’t. If someone gave you a 94% chance of recovery from cancer, you’d exit the consultant’s surgery feeling pretty damn chipper, yes?
Yes.
I don’t advocate slovenly over-confidence. I advocate calm preparation and an empirical sense of reality.
FFS people, get a grip.