Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?

n7axw wrote:
Any form of economics needs order to function. When that order is absent, the lure of totalitarianism in whatever the form becomes more and more attractive...order at any price.

Don

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Essentially yes.

As an aside, the whole concept of eating the seed grain has a couple of problems. As mentioned, the seed grain is often inedible due to being dosed with fungicides and insecticides.
However the real problem is that big business now has the farmers under control, as most seed is hybrid, and can't produce viable next generation seed. Done ostensibly to enable greater yields in difficult times, but in reality ensures an ongoing market, as farmers can't now keep every tenth bag back for the next year.

Michael Everett wrote:North Korea would report a zero-infected level even if 90% of its population were keeling over.
Seriously, North Korea is insistent that it is the perfect country with perfect people, all serving the perfect leader. Anything that goes against that script is to be ignored or destroyed.

Which would only conspire to make it alarming if they report zero cases. The pandemic is no joke. It appears the outside world is having a difficult time with it, and the outside world is sharing data and resources. Being such an insular country implies that NK prefers to be left to it's own devices w/o assistance or data from research by the outside world. Let's hope and pray that if they truly have zero cases, that it really is because of their isolationism.

Biological warfare is a scary proposition. Coming from a country that is so insular by nature is hardly so far fetched, and downright intuitive. And outright frightening.

Interesting reactions. Ringo spends a lot of time describing High Trust verses Low Trust societies and the role that unofficial, voluntary associations play in survival. Cooperation for the common good is portrayed as being more vital than guns and defense.

Daryl wrote:As an aside, the whole concept of eating the seed grain has a couple of problems. As mentioned, the seed grain is often inedible due to being dosed with fungicides and insecticides.
However the real problem is that big business now has the farmers under control, as most seed is hybrid, and can't produce viable next generation seed. Done ostensibly to enable greater yields in difficult times, but in reality ensures an ongoing market, as farmers can't now keep every tenth bag back for the next year.

Absolutely correct. Amish to the rescue!


Just FYI, I did some studies decades ago that demonstrated that just the damage to the world's industrial ecology from a small number of nukes could cause as many fatalities as a full scale, nuclear exchange. If India and Pakistan went nuclear, only few dozen well placed nukes would be so disruptive of food production and transportation that deaths would be in the hundreds of millions. It gets even worse if the US ceases to keep Middle East oil available.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

Daryl wrote:As an aside, the whole concept of eating the seed grain has a couple of problems. As mentioned, the seed grain is often inedible due to being dosed with fungicides and insecticides.
However the real problem is that big business now has the farmers under control, as most seed is hybrid, and can't produce viable next generation seed. Done ostensibly to enable greater yields in difficult times, but in reality ensures an ongoing market, as farmers can't now keep every tenth bag back for the next year.

Absolutely correct. Amish to the rescue!


Just FYI, I did some studies decades ago that demonstrated that just the damage to the world's industrial ecology from a small number of nukes could cause as many fatalities as a full scale, nuclear exchange. If India and Pakistan went nuclear, only few dozen well placed nukes would be so disruptive of food production and transportation that deaths would be in the hundreds of millions. It gets even worse if the US ceases to keep Middle East oil available.

Part of New England was composed of miniature Calvinist theocracies that functioned much this way. Usually these were small communities that died out or lost their original vision within a generation or two. It is interesting how the Amish and Hutterites managed to sustain their original communities over time.

Don

Ps During the summer those Hutterites gals stage small farmers markets here in town. Can they ever cook... Their Apple pie is wonderful!
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Interesting politization of a crisis:

https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/22420-0

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Interesting politization of a crisis:

https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/22420-0

Calling Trump out on his incompetance is not politizising the crisis.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Interesting politization of a crisis:

https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/22420-0

Please elaborate on how calling out the executive for its failure to maintain the US' agencies responsible for dealing with pandemics is a politicization.

While you're at it, please also elaborate on your stance regarding President Trump's predilection for ignoring the advice of experts when it runs counter to his desires.


In other news, there was an article recently about the reasons why China, with all its modern surveillance tech and know-how, failed to see Corona coming and failed to react appropriately. It laid out a pretty coherent case that autocratic regimes like Xi Jinping's often run into a communication failure because they create an environment where reporting issues accurately up the chain becomes impossible due to the regime's violent reaction toward being told something it didn't like to hear. It offered a historical analogue to the great leap forward, where regional managers were reporting record harvest yields up the chain for fear of being punished for underperformance or defeatism; when Mao then proclaimed that China was now a land of plenty and that everyone should feel free to gorge themselves on its riches, a predictable catastrophe ensued.

What does that tell you about the ability of the Trump administration, which encourages people to keep news that might upset his Orangeness away from him because he has a track record of firing people who report news he does not wish to hear or which contradict him on something he made up, to manage a pandemic?

Annachie wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Interesting politization of a crisis:

https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/22420-0

Calling Trump out on his incompetance is not politizising the crisis.

Yeah, I mean she was pretty restrained. She didn't even bring up his administration overruling the CDC to fly infected patients back from Japan with non infected patients.

Or the fact that he dismantled the entire pandemic response infrastructure that existed under Obama and replaced it with nothing.

Or his shutting down the Predict program researching potential infectious diseases that could jump from animal populations to humans... like, oh... it looks like Covid-19 possibly did.

I mean, he could barely have done a better job gutting the ability of the country to respond to something like this if he was deliberately trying to.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/co ... -response/