Where I live there are 3 Dollar Tree stores. 6 miles separate the 3. And please stop stirring the pot. Let's hear what you have to say about the CV-19 pandemic.

Got this E-Mail yesterday evening:

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First off.

Lee I need to apologize to you. Lee is a good guy who is sharing his views on the world and I now understand why Lee believes as he does.

I think It is important that we stay tight as a group and not engage in disagreements where one or both of us are being manipulated by what we see, read or hear.

I pissed off several of you here with a statement I made in the previous thread where I posted that I believed that the crisis was a another media hoax, and by the way I still stand by that statement 100%.

But know this; The virus is not the hoax-It is very real.

Lee Don't get mad. I want to make a point and I am going to use you as an example so stay with me please.

Lee is scared of getting sick and I do not blame him one bit. Lee is also tracking the news from his PC selected news aggregation suite MS Edge. Edge is Lee's browser and also his home page is where He gets his access to news.

This means for the most part Lee is seeing the news from an angle selected by someone else.

The first thing I do with any Phone tablet or computer is discard the installed news feeds.

The coverage of the virus is the key in manipulation of the public. The perception of the news event is the issue in play each and every day and that is the battle for hearts and minds. Once one or the other in convinced of the story we all tend to self isolate in the theme of the news that best fits our established perception. In other words we fall into the age old "rut".

Here is a chart explaining the "sausage making" of the news. Were we all differ is our Perception.

So lets examine

Kahneman, D., Tversky, A.: Choices, values, and frames. Am. Psychol. 39(4), 341 (1984)

I recall this from School and it is instructive because it used a mythical virus as an examination of presentation bias:

Assume a scenario in which a population of 600 people is endangered by an outbreak of a virus. In a first survey, Kahneman and Tversky asked participants which option they would choose:

A.
200 people be will be saved.

B.
66% chance that 600 people will be saved. 33% chance that no one will be saved.

In the first survey, 72% of the participants chose A, and 26% chose B. Afterward, a second survey was conducted that objectively represents the exact same choices, but here the options to choose from were framed in terms of likely deaths rather than lives saved.

C.
400 people will die.

D.
66% chance that no one will die. 33% chance that 600 people will die.

In this case, the preference of participants was reversed. 22% of the participants chose C, and 72% chose D. The results of the survey thus demonstrated that framing alone, that is, the way in which information is presented, has the ability to draw attention to either the negative or the positive aspects of an issue.


In summary, the effects of media bias are manifold and especially dangerous when individuals are unaware of the occurrence of bias.

The concentration of the majority of mass media in the hands of a few corporations amplifies the potential impact of media bias and individual news outlets even further and that's often why we sit here and bicker with each other.

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https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

YouTube/TED

When Bill Gates was asked this week what the world should do to stop another pandemic, he pointed to a 2015 talk where he described just that.

Gates then said that the world needs to invest in better health systems, increase international collaboration, keep trained medical staff in reserve, and invest in vaccine research.

He said failing to do that, particularly for a virus with characteristics like the new coronavirus, could cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

His comments seem prescient with the coronavirus now in 160 countries, hammering the global economy, and responsible more in excess of 9,000 deaths.

Gates said in 2015 that the world was not prepared for an epidemic, and urged: "We need to get going. Because time is not on our side."

Since then the US instead cut some of its virus programs.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

This week, as the coronavirus pandemic worsened, Bill Gates pointed to a 2015 TED talk he gave when people asked him what the world should do now to stop anything similar happening again.

https://news.yahoo.com/heres-bill-ga...DGPjk0Eo3KDSYQ

Why has Italy been hit so hard? While at first this sounded like Fake News, this is actually real.

In 2013, Italy signed an agreement with China called the "Belt And Road Initiative", also known as the 'Silk Road". Because of Italy's poor economy and high unemployment, they agreed to have Chinese workers build roads in Italy, using financing from Chinese banks, that would benefit Chinese trade routes. This move was widely criticized by members of the G-7 because it was another move by China in their ultimate goal for world domination. But because Italy was in the midst of an economic crisis, they signed on.

Chinese workers, mostly from Wuhan, made daily flights to and from Italy with many relocating their families in the process. When the first case of COVID-19 broke out in January 2020, the U.S. and Italy announced travel restrictions on China.

The CDC and WHO proposed isolating Chinese people coming from the epicenter in Italy. The Italian government balked at the idea because singling out travelers from China would be construed as racist.

On February 1st, Dario Nardella, Mayor of Florence, Italy, initiated a ‘Hug a Chinese’ campaign on Twitter. "We follow the directions of the health authorities and we use caution, but no psychological terrorism," Mayor Dario Nardella said in a tweet announcing the initiative while blasting those he said "could not wait to use this excuse to hate and insult."

So videos were taken of happy Italians hugging Chinese people on the streets of Florence, Milan, and other cities.

Obviously, this was a bad call by the mayor of Florence, but this act, along with the fact that Italy has the oldest population in Europe, and elders were not aware of the virus until it was too late, is why Italy has the greatest number of COVID-19 cases, and the highest death toll per capita.

So the gist is that being PC with open borders sealed their fate. I know there's a lesson to be learned there but it will probably fall on deaf ears with the fine folks at DC. Stay safe everyone.