President Trump and me…*crosses fingers* – we’re like that. I’ve been promoted again – this time from ‘VIP’ to The Donald’s ‘Hot 100 opinion formers’. Either the Tangerine Dream is very, very hard up for influential media-based influencers, or his direct marketing campaign is FOS. Let’s face it people, it’s the latter.
Direct Marketing (DM) became part of ‘marketing services in the Round’ about twenty years before I packed in advertising in favour of the lure of writing about things more interesting than market research reports and strategic brand documents. Once the internet finally went from military software to world phenomenon, DM took off bigtime.
It quickly transformed itself into the rather more pompous Relationship Marketing (RM) – and along with that development came the usual grab-bag of tartan paint salesmen, self-appointed gurus and missionaries protesting rather too much.
Rather in the same way that China has made the world dependent on its pipeline of poor-quality electronics, so too the charlatans of RM have the advertisers addicted to the alleged ‘P2P’ of micro-targeting. Most of the claims made for it are complete IABATO*, and the stats used a ridiculous distortion of the truth.
It’s the same with Contrick19. The Covidiots insist on telling us that C19 is killing millions more people around the globe than is “normal”; but the only way they can make this bogus claim stick is by comparing winter 2018-19 with 2019-20. In the UK, the Office for National statistics couldn’t be clearer: in its commentary, it asserts that ‘ The excess winter mortality index in England in 2018-19 was significantly lower than the 2016-2017 and 2017- 2018 winters…. seasonal mortality in the 2018-19 winter was the lowest since the winter of 2013‘.
I’ve made this point before, but the media & research drama-Queens are desperate to keep the narrative going. So I was gratified and delighted to see the Covid19inProportion blog using a chart making the comparison with the almost perfectly typical winter of 2017-18:
Toby Young yesterday gave this setting-right-of-wrong the oxygen of publicity at his Covid site, noting in particular that compared to an average winter mortality rate, 6,000 fewer people died in the deadly killer virus shock-horror plague of the C19 winter of discontent. Now are the promoters of the Black Death myth not made merrie.
But equally important, I think, is the likelihood, based on this chart, that lockdown hasn’t worked. One can’t prove something that didn’t happen – but I suspect the Inproportion blog is right, because (as I’ve been saying since late March) C19 may be a novel coronavirus, but it also shows all the signs of being stopped in its tracks by rising temperatures.
Either way – given the massive bias towards death being among the retired old farts like me – shutting down the economic activity of people under 50 was a Page 1 error….and one that will prove more expensive than 95% of the citizenry yet realise.
Macron and Merkel agreed yesterday on a half-trillion euro ‘Covid19 rescue package’ for the EU. I love the way that even élite democracy is so easily ditched in favour of just two people – one of whom was an enthusiastic DDR/USSR collaborator, and the other a banker and brazen creature of the French Big Pharma combine Sanofi.
But €500 billion gives you only a fraction of an idea of just how destructive the “expert advice” on Covid19 has been. Because first of all – the EU being a supertanker that takes a year to start looking for a bolted horse – the money won’t come on stream until March 2021.
And second – once the Council of Economic Ministers has engaged in the usual bunfight, it is expected that the sum available – even at the most optimistic level – will amount to no more than 1% of gdp. Just to put that into perspective, Morgan Stanley estimates that GDP will contract by 8.4% this year in Germany, 10.7% in France, 12-13% in Spain and Portugal, and 15% in Italy – a country not in a position to pay back the unrepayable as it is, let alone after squandering 1 euro in 7 on an invented crisis.
[If you don’t trust my thinking on the “rescue” package, I heartily recommend you read The Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on this subject]
The bottom line remains the same as it always was: Covid19 has killed 43.2 people per million on planet Earth, with circa 83% of deaths in the over 70s demographic.
A cull of almost exactly 0.004%.
For this, our “leaders” shut down the vast majority of global business and commerce. Either they were incalculably dumb, or delighted to muddy the waters of neoliberal and neocon globalist mercantile financialised disaster.
We need more skilled and experienced elected officials, fewer unaccountable experts, and a massive reduction in the influence of the unelected State with its devious, dubious and diabolically hidden agendas.
Same old, same old.
I wish you all a good weekend.
* IABATO – It’s All Bollocks And That’s Official
The Slog 