I never really had any doubt when I joined.  However much I said it was a hard choice in my graduation thread, it wasn't.  I knew I was a Warder from the beginning.

How I knew that...well, as Arie said above, there is a very different mentality to a brotherhood than a sisterhood, I fit quite nicely into one but observing the other...I don't.   I've almost always connected to soldiers I've talked with.  And I am a bit of a lone wolf.  While I'm very extroverted now, I haven't been always.  So yeah, it's an honour to serve.

And my point is not to  argue that everything is unnecessary, my point is that all the information the public has been given is misleading or wrong.  The model, we find out, is completely wrong.  More evidence Here.

And, as someone who has had a pretty horrific medical history and experienced a lot firsthand, I actually disagree with Millon.  I can say from harsh experience that doctors and other medical professionals can often be wrong.  What I'd suggest is to get as many opinions as possible and keep your head. 

And so basing your decision on one doctor--in this case, the analogies are the WHO and the model from the Imperial College in London--is wrong. 

@LiithaFair enough.  Let's agree to disagree. 

@Millon No need to get angry.  I just think differently, and for the last 6/7 years I've studied medieval propaganda to explore how natural disasters, (including epidemics), have been exploited for political gain.  I kind of know what I'm talking about. 

I can say that the news that's been spread is propaganda, starting with the word "pandemic."  Well, what is a "pandemic?"  Pan/demic means a disease that's affects a wide geographic area and infects many people.  Now, isn't that every flu season?  And coronaviruses in general have never been deadly.  They're the diseases that cause colds.  It was an unknown disease from China, and that was scary, but when it was labeled a "pandemic," it got ten times worse.

Now, who were the people who first called for the world to shut down?  Who wrote the headlines?  Not medical professionals.  Plenty of doctors were against it and still are.  The ones who were presenting the worst case scenarios were the ones who got the headlines, most people who disagreed were censored, and they still are.  Again, how the facts were presented was misleading.

Now, look at my first post when I disentangled that article.  That's far from the only one.  In the immediate days before the crisis came in March, I'd see headlines like "Don't Panic is Rotten Advice."  Then, the article itself would be a lot more down to earth--and sometimes about something entirely different--but, the headline was misleading, and most people only read headlines anyway.  

Lately, I read a headline on how some nurses were protesting protests against the lockdown in Denver.  Misleading.  The important part of that story is that there are protests, not that a few nurses are against it.

In other words--the way it has been reported is propaganda.

Now, the WHO was basing its response on data from Wuhan, China, which was misleading, (because it was propaganda), it was a scary surprise for Italy, then the "model" from Imperial College, London, by Niall Ferguson that drove at least Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to close down their economies was not peer-reviewed and totally wrong.  Hopefully, Ferguson's model was simply a mistake.  But, the deaths have been nowhere close to what his model predicted. 

I don't know all of the real facts, but I can say the data as presented was misleading and sometimes, (as in the model), false.

@Liitha The problem with this analysis is that once the disease got out of the Pandora's box of Wuhan, China, there is no way to put it back, and never was.  We can adapt, but we can't stop it.    

From numbers I've seen in at least America, though, COVID 19 has compared to an extra-bad flu season.  Most people are asymptomatic, and so plenty of us could have gotten it already and don't know it.  

And very few healthcare systems came close to being "overwhelmed." (Italy and New York among the exceptions).  We have mostly "flattened the curve," and so we can develop herd immunity, (the reason for flattening the curve given in March) without that fear.  

So, yes.   It's not the end of the world.

I see your points, and they say hindsight is 20/20.

Social distancing might have worked to "flatten the curve"--I cannot say for sure.  What you are arguing for, though, is totalitarianism.  We've come very close to it so far, but we must do a cost/benefit analysis before we give up freedom.  And, with the numbers that are finally arriving, I can say fairly firmly that what we've done beyond responsible social distancing was unjustified.   In most of America and quite a bit of the UK, after that was done we never needed to "flatten the curve."  And, I even wonder if social distancing was worth it for most of us--I can live with a week of the flu.  And our economy can bounce along with it, too.

We must first ask ourselves how lethal this virus is.  And, unfortunately, we just know it's pretty mild.  We never really tried to find out.  One of the major problems we've had is that statistics mean different things in different places.  Let me give you an analogy--the "violent crime rate" in the UK is actually much higher than in the US.  But, comparing the numbers cannot be done, because "violent crime" is defined differently by each nation, and people acknowledge that.

We know many people who have died so far already had serious health issues.  So one of the major unanswered questions has been whether these people died from COVID 19, or did they just die with COVID 19?  Nations record death in different ways, and so we just don't know yet.     

Antibody tests in (I believe) California are showing that the disease was much more widespread than we've thought, so it is therefore much less lethal than we thought.

At the beginning of March, the hysteria was already being ginned up, but how much of that hysteria was being ginned up by medical professionals?  Very little, if any.  But, the MSM was anything but responsible.  You saw above how well I took apart the above article about the "youngest death in the UK."  That hasn't been rare.  Half-truths, misinformation, and disinformation is everywhere.  

I know I seem heartless, but sometimes you need to use your head instead.  The economic ramifications of a long shutdown are huge, with many small businesses quickly bankrupted.  People neatly impoverished at the drop of a hat, and with no idea whether they can come back again.   

All this causes health problems, too--it's just less visible.  Depression and suicides are going up quickly.  I've been able to live with it pretty decently, but we youngsters were already suffering from a "loneliness epidemic," and I'm getting fairly worried about some of my friends.  I'm not familiar with the UK's statistics, but obesity in America is becoming as big a health problem as tobacco was twenty/thirty years ago, and the lack of exercise just makes that worse.  Many people are more reluctant to call emergency services for fear that they'd be getting in the way--and maybe they are, maybe they're not, but that's no reason to hold back.

The economic shutdown--"If it just saves one life"--well, it's costing lives and livelihoods, too.

So, was it worth it? 

I keep on wondering when people are going to wake up to the fact we're committing suicide.  And that the coronavirus isn't all that scary to most of us if you ignore the headlines and look at the information behind it.  You've got to keep in mind that just about everything is propaganda.  The world actually begins to make sense once you finally realize that.

Yesterday, "The Coronavirus killed the youngest person yet in the UK."  But, when you read the article--(you can't skim it)--it gets a lot murkier.  You find out the guy was in his forties, and that he had "MND."  So, you look further in the article to find out what MND actually is, and it takes some work, because it's very carefully hid between several facts that at first look more important.  It's called "Motor-Neural Disease." Hmmm. 

So, then you Google "Motor-Neural Disease" to find out what Motor-Neural Disease actually is, and find out that it would have actually put him at a very high risk. Hmm.  So, you turn back to the article, and, finally, you find out that he wasn't expected to live all that much longer anyway.  So, while the guy was the "youngest ever," you can safely conclude that his age was probably irrelevant.

That's not fueling panic at all?  And don't you wonder why those important facts are so well-hid?

Yes, there are plenty of vulnerable people and we need to be cautious, but there's careful and then there's panic.  We need to be realistic: (I'm sorry to everyone who is vulnerable, here, since I'm speaking when I'm not): those most at risk are ALREADY most at risk for other diseases, too.  Mine would probably just be a severe cold.  And I think that goes for most of us.  Quarantines might be good for a couple of weeks while you take a breath and assess everything, but when you kill the economy, you have even a lesser chance of helping the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.

I figure it will be an interesting few months.  Over here at UofE, after 3 weeks of teachers' strikes end Monday, classes are going online, and plenty of international students are fleeing home.   I'm not.     

I've been trying to work and continuing to heal.  I'm not sure how well I'm doing on the "Work" side of things--editing is difficult to evaluate, but the healing's good.

@Ryrin Thanks so much!  And a Happy Valentine's Day to you!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Yes!

Wow, nice!

Amazing!  That looks so cool, good job!

Well, welcome!

That'd be cool if we could work something out!  Chapters are veery different, so the work depends on what I'm doing.  I haven't finished rewriting Chapter 1, but what I've done to it in the past week or so hasn't been hard.  Today I've begun to map out the terrain of Chapter 2, though, beginning to place the acronyms and terms I invented while I was writing the rough draft within it, Latin where it's needed, trying to get things consistent.  Finding, replacing, changing--nothing major yet, but I only managed to get through a third of the chapter. 

How's the weekend been, and how's teaching?

That sounds awesome!  Good luck in everything this coming year.  

I flew back to Edinburgh last week and started writing again Monday.   It's the final months, now, and I'll power them through.

I'm here.  Androl.

Howzit?  I hope the week isn't too bad.

The parents have been busy renovating the house and I've been with them on holiday the past few weeks.  It's been...interesting...watching everything, and today I just finished listening to His Dark Materials.  All complicated.

Those brownies look good.  Might I have some?

Thanks!  That's some good chocolate, if it's not near as dark as my heart (mwhahahaha) .

Thanks!

Thanks, everyone!  

@Sooh:  I see you're lonely in the shadows.  Whenever I've acted, I've been one of the best villains.  So, mind if I join you?  

Hello, everyone(and thanks, @Niniel!).  Brownies are ALWAYS good.

I'm not quite certain what I'd be considered--I'm a returning member of the Band, but I joined last year and never finished being a Raw Recruit.  I was put within the archers and stayed there.  But I'm haycraftd, I did it myself, my favorite character has always been Mat, and an interesting thing about me--I'm a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh right now, but I'm actually an American from New Orleans, Louisiana.      

I always like cookies!  More!

The headlines have been screaming about how evil Tropical Storm Barry is and what it would do for a looong time, now--I can report that New Orleans has been fine throughout it all. 

I'm happy I found you all.