Coiling Dragon Cliff Skywalk, Tianmen Mountain, Hunan Province, China.

In late January, China’s embassy in Denmark demanded an apology from daily Jyllands-Posten after it published a cartoon of the Chinese flag with its five yellow stars represented by coronavirus particles.

Tell douchebag modernist composer John Adams to go write a new opera, Kira Davis predicts that era created by Nixon’s opening to China and of the export of industrial production to China and American reliance on cheap Chinese labor is over.

Because this is 2020 and the whole damn world seems to have gone insane overnight, we are now being told that referring to COVID-19 as anything related to China or the Chinese in any way is “racist” and xenophobic or some other bad thing. Even though this virus originated in China. Even though either their food choices or their government is responsible for unleashing this on the globe. It makes no sense, but none of this is making much sense right now. It certainly feels like we don’t have all the information and that’s worrisome given the level of response we’ve been seeing from our government. There is a lot that we, the people don’t know.

But we do know one thing right about now. One thing is becoming more and more clear with each passing moment.

When this is all over we are f***ing done with China.

RTWT

HT: Vanderleun.

President Trump's economy is so strong that it took a global pandemic and the entire United States shutting down just to bring it back to Obama levels. https://t.co/rbtqItZTmF

— Carpe Donktum🔹 (@CarpeDonktum) March 19, 2020

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fake News Disclaimer: There are apparently reasons to suspect that this is not actually the authentic text of a letter written a century ago by F. Scott Fitzgerald while quarantined in the South of France during the great Spanish Flu pandemic but a more recent composition by someone just pretending to be FSF. But good reading regardless.

Dearest Rosemary,

It was a limpid dreary day, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. I thank you for your letter. Outside, I perceive what may be a collection of fallen leaves tussling against a trash can. It rings like jazz to my ears. The streets are that empty. It seems as though the bulk of the city has retreated to their quarters, rightfully so. At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid all public spaces. Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is much the denier, that one. Why, he considers the virus to be just influenza. I’m curious of his sources.

The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.

You should see the square, oh, it is terrible. I weep for the damned eventualities this future brings. The long afternoons rolling forward slowly on the ever-slick bottomless highball. Z. says it’s no excuse to drink, but I just can’t seem to steady my hand. In the distance, from my brooding perch, the shoreline is cloaked in a dull haze where I can discern an unremitting penance that has been heading this way for a long, long while. And yet, amongst the cracked cloudline of an evening’s cast, I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better morrow.

HT: JWB.

This 5,000-year-old weapon, made of an alloy of arsenic and copper, may be among the world’s oldest swords.

Smithsonian:

Housed at a monastery on the Venetian island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, the blade boasted a distinctive shape that reminded the young archaeologist of some of the oldest swords known to humankind, which date back to around 3,000 B.C. and were recovered from sites in western Asia. To confirm her suspicions, Dall’Armellina and her colleagues spent the next two years tracing the artifact’s origins back in time through a series of monastic archives.

After much digging, the team realized that the sword was discovered at Kavak, a settlement near the ancient Greek colony of Trebizond in what’s now eastern Turkey, some 150 years ago. Shortly after, it fell into the hands of Armenian art collector Yervant Khorasandjian, who then gifted it to a monk named Ghevont Alishan. Upon Alishan’s death in 1901, the monastery acquired his belongings—including the sword, which they mistook for a recent construction.

A chemical analysis of the sword solidified its ancient roots. Fashioned from a combination of copper and arsenic—one of the earliest forms of bronze—the weapon almost certainly predates the late third millennium B.C., when humans first transitioned to blending bronze using tin. The blade’s sculpting resembles that of a pair of twin swords found at Arslantepe, another archaeological site that’s been dated to about the third or fourth millennium B.C.

RTWT

HT: Karen L. Myers.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

John P.A. Ioannidis, professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, warns that, as is very much standard operating procedure in the modern world, we are making serious decisions treating totally unreliable statistics as facts.

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.

This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.
The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.
Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different equencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.

That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.

RTWT

We have a serious problem in the fact that most people, including the overwhelming majority of people in positions of power and responsibility do not understand math and think that statistical estimates and projections constitute scientific fact. How many times have you heard the network news talking head gravely report that “We know there are only [pick a number] of [pick an allegedly Endangered Species] left”?

Only old people like myself remember today the 1976 Swine Flu Epidemic Panic that Gerald Ford presided over which, when the whole thing petered out into a non-event, left the President and official Washington looking ridiculous.

HT: Frank Dobbs.

It is time to show the world that nobody stays home and sits on the couch better than the goddamn United States of America

— Pablo S. Torre (@PabloTorre) March 15, 2020

Sid Vicious plus William Butler Yeats equals Shane MacGowan.

Matthew Hennessey, meanwhile, in the City Journal notes that you couldn’t kill Shane MacGowan with a stick.

They say God takes care of fools and drunks. If so, he’s been working overtime the last few decades taking care of Shane MacGowan. As the frontman and principal songwriter of the Irish rock band the Pogues, MacGowan is as famous for his lyrics and whiskey-timbered voice as for his unlikely longevity, despite a Homeric appetite for intoxicating substances, especially, but not limited to, alcohol. Though he cuts a shambolic figure, MacGowan is still upright at [now, 62], a feat many view as a minor miracle. His rheumy eyes and distinctive throat-clearing cackle suggest not genius, necessarily, but late-stage dipsomania; there is nary a tooth left in his head. God or something like God must be taking care of MacGowan. He’s not been doing the job himself.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.