Thursday, April 02, 2020

Last Train To Wuhan

... well, actually, it was the last train out of Wuhan.

This is the video that got me to sell all of my investments and park my money.


In my mind, I saw a map of China that looked like the maps of the US which describe the movement of college kids from the beaches of Florida to the rest of the country.


Going back to the video, a couple of things immediately occurred to me.
  1. You can weld doors shut to trap infected families in their homes all you want, but if you let tens of thousands of people escape the city by train, you've stopped nothing.
  2. If you're going to lock down a city, you don't announce it, give a deadline in the future and then let the trains run until the deadline hits. That video is exactly what happens when people find out they're about to be trapped.
  3. Unless the whole country looks like something out of Logan's Run where it's all chrome and glass and electronic monitoring, there would be no control of the virus. China looks nothing at all like Logan's Run, particularly in the rural areas.
  4. We're all screwed.
I know I promised to stop beating the press, but you'd have to be a special kind of moron to see the train videos and then, months later, believe the Chinese claims that they've got the virus totally under control.

I guess those are the same kinds of special morons who thought Russia wanted Donald Trump to win the election. The joke is really on me, then, isn't it? If the press can't figure out that Russia relies on oil means no Trump bias, they're not likely to think that trainloads of infected people fleeing the epicenter of the pandemic means a viral wildfire across China.

Communism For The Win


In the end, you probably didn't even need to see the video to predict the outcome. China is a dictatorship, run by atheists which means they cannot derive an objective value for human life from first principles. They also see everything in terms of money and power. So long as the Chinese elites could stay safe, dumping a million or so meatbags into the crematoria furnaces wasn't a big deal. If those meatbags were past their productive years, so much the better.

2 comments:

Ohioan@Heart said...

And to extend your comment with minor changes: "[airplanes] of infected people fleeing the epicenter of the pandemic [as Chinese New Year ends] means a viral wildfire across [the globe]".

Truly the CCP Virus. They refused to admit what was happening, lest it interfere with the economic boon that Chinese New Year represents. They've lied about the numbers (with complete complicity of the WHO (see this ). And in what I suspect is the worst part of their lies they declared victory and stopped testing. I suspect the reason is simple. They wanted to get spot light off their problem and did the calculation of the economic costs for shut down vs the epidemic. Frankly, there is good economic reasoning to suggest that it might be the cheaper option (particularly if you don't value life very much, and even more so as the average age of those dying increases. Now we won't do that here, yet. But who knows tomorrow will bring...

ligneus said...

Linda Fox at Liberty's Torch thinks about what is to come after the pandemic.
Seems like it might almost be a blessing in disguise.

http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2020/04/what-might-new-normal-look-like.html

[Couldn't make a hyperlink work tonight].