One of the most important books of the 20th century is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is a semi-autobiographical story of his life inside a Soviet Gulag.
There is a part of the book that has always stuck with me. I believe I’ve mentioned it before.
Gulag rules said that prisoners could not be forced to work outside if the thermometer read lower than 40 below zero. However, the lowest the thermometer ever read was 38 below, so the prisoners always had to work outside.
This lesson was driven home to me again in the HBO show Chernobyl, where the Soviets said it was safe to send people into the reactor to work because the dosimeters read 3.6 Roentgen. That the dosimeters maxed out at 3.6 Roentgen was ignored.
China is no different than the Soviet Union in this regard. If the number measured isn’t the truth, just report the number measured.
Keep that in mind when you see what the media is posting about COVID-19 in the US.
UPDATE: US now has most #COVIDー19 cases*
• US 81,946
• China 81,285
• Italy 80,589
• Spain 56,347
• GER 43,646
• Iran 29,406
• FR 29,155
• Switzerland 11,811
• UK 11,658
• S Korea 9,241* # contingent on countries testing/reporting accurately.Source: COVID-19 tracker
— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) March 26, 2020
Oddly enough, Bloomberg published this four days ago.
China’s Mobile Carriers Lose 21 Million Users as Virus Bites
China’s wireless carriers are reporting drops in users as the coronavirus crisis cuts business activity, with China Mobile Ltd., the world’s largest carrier, reporting its first net decline since starting to report monthly data in 2000.
China Mobile subscriptions fell by more than 8 million over January and February, data on the company’s website show. China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd. subscribers fell by 7.8 million in the period, while China Telecom Corp. has said it lost 5.6 million users last month.
This is not definitive of anything.
However, given other information I’ve reported on, such as China welding people into their buildings and anecdotal reports of people being cremated alive, it suggests that China is suffering deaths in the millions and infections in the tens of millions.
People who died or were executed don’t need cell phones. Or the government cut them off to keep them from reporting on the fact that they were infected and/or sealed into buildings with other infected.
Now consider this. Elon Musk reportedly purchased 1,000 “excess” ventilators from China. How does China have excess ventilators when the rest of the world has a shortage?
If the government doesn’t intend to ventilate sick people and instead intends to let them die sealed into slum buildings, then they have “excess” ventilators they can sell for millions in cash.
So the media is reporting that the US has more confirmed cases than China, but that assumes that China is not surprising their numbers.
The US media really seems to be buying the Chinese propaganda on the spread of COVID-19 to make America and by extension Trump, look bad.
This is a grotesque state of affairs, but totally on-brand for our TDS media.
I suppose the gulag thermometers were mercury thermometers (mercury freezes at -38 degrees).
Your point about communist fake statistics is right on the mark. I like the mention the amazing book “The Final Fall — an essay on the decomposition of the Soviet sphere” by French historian Emmanuel Todd. Well before the fall of the wall he described how a careful analysis of evidence from the USSR demonstrated its severe decay, and how and why this would result in its collapse. Events showed him to be right. His analysis needs to be applied to China. (Perhaps Gordon Chang has done this, in his book “The coming collapse of China”. I need to get that.)
A piece of the approach is to pick lots of data and see what it says, then decide which is trustworthier. In the USSR case, one item was infant mortality, which wasn’t censored for some reason and indicated that the USSR looked like a third world country. I remember a year or two ago seeing a graph of Chinese sales tax revenues that suggested major drops in economic activity, quite unlike the official GDP numbers. I haven’t yet found them again.
All the prisoners assumed that the thermometers were broken so they would always have to work outside. Everyone knew it was rigged but pretended the rules were fair.
“If the government doesn’t intend to ventilate sick people”
Or maybe they did… ballistically
In an alternate universe North Korea is the last haven and Kim really is great leader.