Re: risk zones

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

I just watched an idiot government spokesperson try to tell us the problem
is declining because new cases are 'down in China'.

Yes, of course they are down in China, the government put the country on a
war footing and shut it down. There are pictures of workmen welding shut
the doors on apartment buildings. The lockdown is almost total, of course
the spread of infection has declined there.

That has absolutely no effect on the spread in the West where we have taken
none of those measures. We haven't even shut down large public meetings
like sports events and concerts yet. And don't expect that to be happening
in countries where the first priority of the dear leader is to hold large
public rallies to boost their egos

There is a huge amount of happy talk based on nonsense right now. A half
dozen companies have announced vaccines. But making a vaccine is really
easy, all you do is scoop out a bit of the virus. The hard part, the really
hard part is working out if the bit of the virus you scooped out is the
right bit to provide protection. Most times it doesn't actually have any
effect at all. Sometimes it makes people more likely to be infected and
sometimes it kills the test subjects. So you have to test and that takes
time.

The way that authoritarian regimes react to crisis is very predictable.
First they deny that there is any problem at all. Then they minimize the
problem and then they panic and over-react. China followed that exact
pattern.

The West currently has a large number of aspiring authoritarian leaders but
few actual authoritarian regimes. So we are stuck in stage two and will
remain stuck there for a considerable time.


On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 6:50 AM Joseph Potvin <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> RE: The communication coming from up to down is changing daily.
>
> A pragmatic view of uncertainty:
>
> https://wiki.opensource.org/bin/download/Working+Groups+%26+Incubator+Projects/flow-syllabus/The+General+Direction+of+FLOW/The+Methodological+Significance+of+Uncertainty/WebHome/uncertainty_visualize_medium.png
>
> Joseph Potvin
>