Thread by @Saintonge235

I think Kaus is going at this story entirely backwards. IMAO, the key to understanding this is not 'Find out who the individuals @realDonaldTrump was talking with in January and February', it's looking at how people in general think about new and strange situations.

https://twitter.com/kausmickey/status/1252140716010045440

In Heinlein's novel THE PUPPET MASTERS, the head of an intelligence agency is described thusly:

“The Old Man had cracked the case, analyzed it, and come up with the right answer in a little more than twenty-four hours. His unique gift was the ability to reason logically with

unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily as with the commonplace. Not much, eh? I have never met anyone else who could do it wholeheartedly. Most minds stall dead when faced with facts which conflict with basic beliefs; ‘I-just-can’t-believe-it’ is all one word to highbrows

and dimwits alike.”

Look at another example of inability to believe the in the unfamiliar, the Spanish Flu. In 1918, the papers were full of "experts" telling people 'Nothing to worry about, it's just "la grippe," we go through this regularly.'
Hell, I'm _still_

hearing that #COVIDー19 is just a cold virus, despite that there's never been a cold virus that killed people by the tens of thousands.

Another big problem is that most people have trouble seeing beneath the surface of a system to the underlying realities.

Consider roulette. What's the underlying reality of the game? Simple: we the public put down 38 dollars. The house sticks two bucks in its pocket, and redistributes the rest. Everything else, the colors, the numbers, the high and low, is designed to distract from that simple

fact that $1 in 19 is lost per bet.

Then there's the problem of understanding how an exponential process works.

On 1945 August 9th, "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki. Around a ton of high explosive was detonated to set up the conditions for eighty-one generations of plutonium

fission, each generation doubling the output of energy.

During the first fifty generations, over half the total reaction, "nothing" happened. The energy release from the fission reaction was the equivalent of a fraction of an ounce of high explosive.

In generations fifty-one

to sixty, the energy release was the equivalent of a small explosive charge, a little over a pound of TNT. Note we are now three quarters of the way through the reaction.

Generations sixty-one to sixty-nine pumped the energy release just over that of the British "Grand Slam"

bomb, around five tons of high explosive. 85% of the reaction has been to get us to the point where the bomb would do what a really heavy conventional explosive device would do.

Generations seventy through eighty released the energy of ten thousand tons of high explosive.

Take a medium size WWII aircraft carrier, magically suspend it in the air above Nagasaki, and miraculously transform the ship into high explosive. Detonate.

Or get 4,000 B-29s, load them with five tons of bombs each (half the weight of each bomb is casing), and somehow have

all 4,000 drop the bombs so they all converged on the same spot in mid air, and exploded simultaneously, and that is what generations seventy through eighty did.

And then came generation eighty one. It added the energy release of AN ADDITIONAL TEN THOUSAND TONS OF TNT.

That last generation released half the total energy.

There was a more advanced, experimental design available. It would have held Fat Man together for generation eighty two. That generation would have yielded another 20,000 tons of TNT equivalent energy. In other words, an

additional Fat Man.

It's been ninety one days since the first diagnosed #CCPVirus case in the U.S. Half of all cases have been diagnosed in the last two weeks, half of all deaths have occurred in the last eight days. The average person can not grasp such things on a gut level

without going through them.

Yes, X failed to call for the necessary steps in time. X = almost all the doctors at the CDC and Public Health service, almost all politicians in the Democratic party, almost every commentator in the media, most of the "officials" in the "#Trump

administration," many of them career civil service BTW, almost all the U.S. population, and @realDonaldTrump.

Right now almost all the people mentioned above don't realize that deaths from the #ChineseCommunistPartyVirus are set to hit about 330,000 (three hundred thirty

thousand), about seven times what has already happened, (BTW, that number assumes new cases drop to zero tomorrow),
and that if we miss that, it will be by God's grace, the experiments done to treat the SARS virus, and Trump's pushing of hydroxychloroquine. Total deaths could

easily be triple that number. And the vast majority of those reading this will say I must be wrong, although simple arithmetic predicts much worse.

330 million people in the U.S. The epidemic probably burns out when 60% (sixty percent) have had it. Case fatality rate looks to

be 1.2% (one point two percent). 330M *.6 *.012 = 2,376,000. That's two million, three hundred seventy six thousand, fifty-six times the deaths we have had.

Now be honest. Did you say look at that the same way you'd look at someone who said 'Our destination is about 300 road

miles away, and we can average around seventy-five, so it's about a four to five hour trip, depending on accidents and if we stop for lunch.' Or did you automatically reject it because it made you feel bad?

@realDonaldTrump deserves a solid B for his actions so far. Once the

"experts" actually managed to get the words out of their mouths and make it clear what we faced, he did pretty much all the right things. Getting the "experts" to say what needed to be done, and grasping it at the gut level were the major hurdles. Hardly anyone in #Trump's place

would have acted differently. Most would have been worse.

@ThreadReader app unroll please

@threadreaderapp unroll please