ALB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Yes it does seem that Sweden’s chief epidemiologist may be a bit of a Mad Professor carrying out an experiment on people. According to yesterday’s Times:
”Dr Tegnell suggested last week that Stockholm could achieve herd immunity, where a large enough majority of the population have recovered from the disease that the virus has little room to spread, within weeks. Most scientists estimate that this requires at least 60 per cent of people to become infected.”
That’s a lot of people and of course the more people are infected the more will die. Anyway. is the population of Stockholm large enough or isolated enough to constitute a herd?
We will see. The difference between scenarios about the pandemic and those about climate change is that for the pandemic we don’t have to wait until 2100 to see how accurate or inaccurate they are. We can known within weeks. So, we will be able to see fairly soon whether Dr Tegnell is a mad professor or not.
Not too bad. But this struck me. Can somebody quote chapter and verse on it?
”The “war of the masks” as media call it, is an edifying example of this. Each state is grabbing the material it can through speculation, bidding wars, and even out-and-out theft. The US has been nabbing planeloads of Chinese masks promised to France. France has confiscated cargoes of masks heading by air for Sweden. The Czech Republic has seized at its customs barriers ventilators and masks destined for Italy. Germany has made masks heading for Canada disappear.”
Quite believable of course. I wonder whether this is the cause of the delay in the famous air shipment of protective equipment from Turkey. Is the capitalist business selling them trying to extract a higher price? Are they threatening to sell them to a higher bidder? That would be normal capitalist behaviour.
It is this but I don’t suppose you’ll be able to see it as it’s an old Yahoo group that now only members can see.
So, another amateur epidemiologist that doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That’s what I suspected.
Don’t know if this relevant to the discussion but someone has posted this on a left-communist discussion forum I’m on. I don’t know what the point he is trying to make is; it seems to be that “shelter” (isolation) doesn’t make that much difference.
A friend of mine decided to do some number crunching on COVID-19. Here are here results. – JeffAs of today’s figures 4/16, here are COVID-19 deaths per capita for several European countries:
Belgium 0.0419%
Spain 0.0413%
Italy 0.0366%
UK 0.0202%
Netherlands 0.0194%
Switzerland 0.0149%
Sweden 0.0132%
Denmark 0.0055%
Germany 0.0048%
Austria 0.0046%
Norway 0.0028%
Finland 0.0014%So, assuming all other countries had strong shelter in place rules, note that there are at least 6 countries in Europe that have a higher COVID-19 mortality per capita than Sweden, even though they have shelter in place.
As for the states, I usually collate this info every Monday. So as of Monday 4/13, the following 5 states in the US had a higher COVID-19 mortality per capita than Sweden. I believe they all have strong shelter in place rules:
New York 0.0481%
New Jersey 0.0264%
Louisiana 0.0183%
Michigan 0.0139%
Connecticut 0.0137%BTW, As of 4/13, California’s COVID-19 deaths per capita was 0.0016%, ranking 30 out of the 50 states+DC.
Sources, and additional comments.
COVID-19 deaths: https://ncov2019.live/dataEmail received from Andrew Whitehead, former BBC radio journalist:
I now have a page of my website devoted to Harry Young, including the audio of two long interviews I did with him and of two radio programmes in which I had no role but which featured Harry.This material posted is almost all about his CPGB days. There are a few mentions of the SPGB. I hope it may be of interest to you and your colleagues.More on Bogdanov here:
Meet the new shadow Business Secretary : Ed Miliband, avowed supporter of capitalism.
Trying to make capitalism nicer is the most the Labour Party has always ever aspired to do but, when in office, has always failed to deliver as it’s undeliverable.
There is also this that we said in 1932:
The Programme of the Russian Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries
Speculation about what the Mensheviks would have done if they, not the Bolsheviks, had ruled Russia is pretty idle as they had even less support amongst the general population than did the Bolsheviks and unlike the Bolsheviks were not prepared to be a minority dictatorship. If the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1918 were anything to go by, if the Bolsheviks hadn’t seized power (and the White Russians hadn’t restored the Tsar or established a military dictatorship) Russian parliamentary politics and government would have been dominated by various parties representing the peasants. The biggest party to emerge from those elections was the non-Marxist Socialist Revolutionary Party.
Actually of course Von Mises wrote it in German (in 1920) so the term “commonwealth” is that of the person who first translated it into English in 1935. The German word that Von Mises used was “Gemeinwesen” which doesn’t have to be translated as “commonwealth”. So maybe the translator had read up on genuine socialist literature. Anyway he kept the term “Socialist Commonwealth” in circulation.
I see the homeopaths are trying to cash in on the Coronavirus pandemic. But as today’s Times points out:
”Over recent decades the Prince of Wakes has consistently campaigned for homeopathic treatments. However, The Times understands that he did not receive homeopathic treatment when he contracted the virus.”
He’s not that stupid. Incidentally it’s not just him but the whole royal family who believe in this fake remedy. It’s part of their German heritage.
There is an extract from the Austrian Social Democrat Otto Bauer’s book on the national question here:
https://libcom.org/library/question-nationalities-social-democracy-otto-bauer
He was a reformist and German nationalist.
There was also a Commonwealth Party in Britain during the second world War of the last century.
Just discovered two other descriptions used in the 1920s — “World Commonwealth” and “International Co-operative Commonwealth”. Nuisance that the old British Empire rebranded itself “The Commonwealth”, which is quite illogical and unjustified as there’s not even a remote suggestion in it about wealth being held in common. Quite the opposite in fact.
Also in the 1920s the CP was referred to as the “Communist” (in inverted commas) Party and its members as “Communists” (in inverted commas again). But to keep that word unsullied has proved an even greater task than for the word Socialism.
