should we trust the numbers coming from federal, state and provincial authorities on this?

i don't know.

some kind of evidence of undercounting would help.

it's probably best to be skeptical, at least in position, for a while.

this is just the latest installment in a stream of disinformation.

listen, i guess the liberal ruling elite in canada caught the nihilism flu, and has decided that truth is a malleable object to prepare for public consumption, but underlying this is actually a kind of desperate, altruistic nihilism, almost a white lie nihilism, to try to achieve what is seen as a public necessity.

so, they're doing everything they can to plead with you to stay inside - not because that's actually going to work, but because they don't know what else to do.

what they need to do is continue preparing, and, thankfully, it does seem like there are some thinking people in the federal government that are rising to the occasion on this. we'll see how quickly these industrial plans actually materialize.

so, i don't want to rip this apart, because...it's not serious. it's theatre. the better mathematical decryption of this is to rebroadcast the message - they are pleading with you to stay home, and resorting to this out of desperation to have you do it, whether it's likely to be effective, or not.

https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/coronavirus-live-updates-trump-eases-mask-export-ban-amid-backlash/

regarding the effects of globalization on the supply chain, though.

i don't know how many times i've been listening to some prof rant about the effects of neo-liberalism, or some panel discussing the effects of globalization, and heard some remark about what happens to supply chains in a crisis. the general way to make this remark was to present it as an oncoming catastrophic event; you'd often hear something like "just wait until we have a crisis that disrupts the supply chains, then we'll be really sorry, then we'll realize what we've done".

so, to suggest this scenario was predictable is an understatement - the inevitability of this situation was one of the most critiqued components of the system that created it, and one of the most compelling arguments against continuing on with it.

you could probably find a relevant quote warning about this by virtually anybody operating on the economic left. 

anarchists on the ground tend to focus on food sovereignty, but the idea of courses generalizes. the focus shouldn't be about hoarding, though, it should be about maintaining the capacity for self-sufficiency, even if the logic of ricardan free trade does imply the benefits of trade in the short run.

to be clear: the problem isn't really that we've been export-reliant for so long. the problem is that we didn't have a backup plan, in case that failed.

i have to point this out every time this topic comes up - i'm an anarchist, i'm not a communist, so i don't have this intellectual tendency towards emphasizing the nationalization of goods for the fatherland; trade is a good idea, so long as you're actually doing it right, which means actually understanding the theory. the extant "free trade" regime is actually something more akin to a series of mercantilist economies observing overlapping monopolies than any kind of ideologically coherent free trade zone, and we're just seeing how true that is as the system sees stress on it. so, i'll argue that i'm not opposed to tariffs in principle, but tariffs are hard, and you have to be deeply wonkish to use them right - a description that neither applies to donald trump nor to justin trudeau. the reverse argument, though, is also true - understanding the rules of free trade means that it isn't always the best arrangement, especially not when you have large disparities in quality of life between the work forces in the trading nations. in that case, special rules need to be put in place to prevent an absolute advantage in labour costs from siphoning production out of the more wealthy nation, leading to supply chain disruptions in the wealthy country in cases of emergency.

so, i believe in ricardan free trade, if it makes sense, under the rules of ricardan free trade, which don't appear to be consulted very often when attempting to engage in "ricardan free trade", any more. 

so, when trade is mutually beneficial, of courses anarchists would advocate it, as mutual aid.

but, as much as anarchists support mutually beneficial trade, they insist on self-sufficiency, as well. just because we can do a calculation and come to some reasoned deductions on the mutual benefit of trade in terms of minimizing resources allocated to produce those goods doesn't mean we should always prioritize the minimizing of resources allocated as paramount; at the least, maintaining a capacity for self-sufficiency may, in many contexts, be seen as of greater priority than minimizing resources allocated, or, in the capitalist context, of maximizing profits. 

but, don't let them tell you they didn't see this coming; there was a sign at every protest, a comment in every documentary, a remark in every flyer - this was a major component of the opposition to nafta from day one, and we see the predictions coming true.

let's hope that we can react quickly enough to adjust, but let's examine a lot more things a lot more carefully, as well, to ensure this doesn't happen again, and that it's not worse if it does.

i'm encouraged by what i'm hearing about a government-directed response to the manufacturing crisis around medical supplies here in canada. if done well, this could kickstart a substantive manufacturing recovery in the region.

this region has historically been the canadian component of the great lakes automotive manufacturing economy, going back to the auto pact signed by lestern pearson in the 60s, but this has been slowly evaporating since the first nafta was signed, a process that appears to have only been accelerated by the new nafta. this has left the region with a substantive manufacturing excess that nobody has really seemed eager to move on.

in the vacuum created by the decline of the automotive industry, the broader medical industry, including a substantive biomed sector, has moved into southwestern ontario, especially the areas around the university in waterloo. there is a great deal of continuity in retooling these factories for the production of medical equipment, as most of the actual industry in the region, at this point, is, in fact, medical.

we can have silly ideological debates about the role of government, but the reality is that the only way to get an industry up and running in whatever this really existing capitalism actually is is to set up a crown corporation and spin it off.

canada is a large purchaser of medical supplies, so even a shift to domestic production could have dramatic multiplier effects.

let's hope that this government, and successive governments, hold their ground on this, in the face of whatever eventual wto challenges are no doubt coming.

so, these drugs that trump is pushing for covid-19...

i'm starting to piece together a more coherent narrative. they're conducting trials; i stated that what i want to see is a mechanism, regarding just exactly how it is that they expect an antibiotic to eliminate a virus from the system. you can do all the trials in the world, you'll get lucky pretty often given the low mortality rate, but you're not going to convince me of anything until you explain to me how it actually works.

it turns out that my skepticism was well-grounded, and nobody wants to use the drug to directly treat the virus at all. rather, the potential for the drugs is as use as immunosuppressors to combat septic shock, which is apparently a leading technical cause of actual death, related to this outbreak. this is similar to how the drug is used in lupus patients, lupus being an autoimmune disorder where your body goes into something like septic shock repeatedly.

changing the context of the use of the drug clarifies a lot of the hype around it, in cutting through the media babble. it does indeed make no sense to prescribe this drug as a treatment for this virus, at all, but it may eventually be a necessary tool that doctors need to use in patients that are suffering from severe sepsis as a complication.

with that subtlety in the drug's predicted use clarified, a few things should be immediately apparent:

- taking the drug as a precaution, as though it's some kind of magic potion, will, as magic potions often sadly tend to do, actually make you more susceptible, because it's intended use is as an immunosuppressor. if you're relatively healthy, and you take these drugs as a "precaution", they will actually weaken your immune system. that's their medical use - it's the actual intent.

- as such, there is no long term potential for this drug in therapeutic use for patients not experiencing sepsis. so, you should not ask your doctor to prescribe you this drug if you get sick. if your doctor does give you this drug on request after confirming a diagnosis, they should be charged with malpractice, as they should damned well know it's an immunosuppressor, and they damned well know you're infected.

- if your doctor does prescribe you this drug in good faith, you will be struggling for your life when it happens.

understanding this better both clarifies the actual medical use of the drug in context, and clarifies the really depraved behaviour of the president around this. it's actually better if he really doesn't know what he's saying, but i suspect that's less true than anybody wants to acknowledge; this is an immunosuppressor, it's used as an immunosuppressor, and people are going to needlessly die by mass prescribing it.

is this insanity and incompetence or greed-fueled malevolence?

it's a scary question.

but, i'm glad i understand this better, now.