Tag Archives: WutangCurse

04/1/20

Fair Comparisons — WutangCurse By The Numbers

Public opinion is driven by emotion. Emotion should be based on facts, but we suffer from an inadequate body of data and an unwillingness by the media to report the facts fairly and accurately.

Honestly, I think the media is not smart enough to be able to make the right comparisons and the lens held up to evaluate the problem is too shaky and biased.

How is the US doing v the WutangCurse?

Let me make a comparison: the United States v the European Union (a roughly comparable equivalent).

USA v EU

The United States has 331,000,000 people.

The European Union has 341,000,000 people.

[This is a subset of the European Union which is being used for comparison purposes and doesn’t include all the twenty-eight European Union countries. This is the same subset used by World O Meter from which all the numbers are taken as of 00:00 GMT, 3-31-2020.]

The US has 188,592 total cases of the WutangCurse and has suffered 4,055 deaths.

The EU has 363,150 total cases and has suffered 25,318 deaths.

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03/24/20

We Are WINNING v The WutangCurse

OK, let me stick my neck out here and make a bold statement — “The United States is winning v the WutangCurse.”

Preliminary reports may not seem to indicate that, but I am telling you we are winning.

There I said it. Now, allow me to marshal the proof.

From the beginning of the WutangCurse, I have been following the www.worldometers.info numbers in regard to the Coronavirus, what I call the WutangCurse.

You can find the numbers right here:

World O Meter Coronavirus Numbers

I pay particular attention to the Daily New Cases for the United States of America. Scroll down and find the table that shows how many Daily New Cases we have each day. Then, I click on “USA” and see the breakdown by states.

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03/23/20

Ballot Stuffing v WutangCurse Relief Package

OK, this post is really about the WutangCurse relief package intended to aid folks whose jobs have gone up in smoke, jobs about to be lost, small businesses suffering, and about to be pitchforked.

But first, dear reader, let’s take a little quiz. Is the following election practice legal in the United States?

 1. Can a “voter” register the same day as an election?

 2. Can that same voter immediately fill out a mail-in or absentee ballot?

 3. Can that same voter give the filled in ballot to another person for delivery to the polling point?

 4. Does that delivery person have any limitations as to how many ballots they can collect from voters?

 5. Does the delivery person have to have any authorization from the voter to deliver his/her ballot?

 6. Can that delivery person be paid for his/her service?

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03/21/20

Capitalism To The Rescue

The day after Pearl Harbor, Ford Motor Company announced it was retooling all of its production lines to produce Jeeps and other military vehicles thereby setting in motion a wholesale shift of American industry to support the war effort. Three and a half years later, America was producing 50,000 airplanes of all types on a monthly basis.

The US would produce 640,000 Jeeps (270,000 by Ford alone, the balance from other auto manufacturers) in those three and a half years. When I was in the Army in the 1970s, I had a Jeep like this. I loved my Jeep.

This is what happens when American industry is tapped to rise to a national crisis. Today, we see the same thing happening in the startup world.

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03/20/20

Being An American In Trying Times

I once asked a man who had been in the Army when Pearl Harbor happened what it felt like to be attacked and lose most of our fleet in the mud. I imagined it was harrowing. I imagined that America was scared to its core. I was wrong.

This man would fight in the war in Italy — through two hard winters — carrying an M1 until he was “asked” to run a battery of 105mm guns in support of his infantry regiment and was ultimately to receive a battlefield commission ending the war capturing a German railway construction battalion which he oversaw as POWs.

“So, how did that feel?” I asked him, meaning how did that feel the day of and after Pearl Harbor.

He looked at me with the wise look that men who have lived hard lives like him, who have put his ass on the line for our country, who have killed our enemies in close combat, who have shot it out in direct eyeball-to-eyeball fire with Kraut 88s across Italian valleys, and he said, “I knew we were going to put an ass whipping on those Japs like they never imagined.”

I was incredulous because I had read west coast newspapers of that time and they had the Japs landing in California any day now. The Japs took the Philippines and a bunch of other places. The Germans had already invaded Poland two years earlier. The Germans declared war against us and we had fewer than 200,000 men in the Army and they had 6,000,000 plus great tanks and those damn 88s.

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03/19/20

Voices From the Real World III — Madrid, Spain

OK, a chum of mine is in Madrid, Spain where he is a financial entrepreneur buying up transition properties and breathing value into them with capital and repairs. Smart guy.

He is at home with WutangCurse symptoms with a wife and child. He is in quarantine within his own home.

He sent me the updated numbers for Spain. I always like seeing the detailed, granular breakdown for things like this. Take a look. [Translates as follows: Total conf=Infected, UCI=ICU, Fallecidos=Deaths, Curados=Healed.]

He goes on to further elaborate that he is one of the 20,000 in self-imposed isolation in Madrid alone. He has been feeling poorly for six days, but has plenty of room and a nice arrangement whereby he can even be isolated from his family.

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