RSR's Stunning Report Pt 2: List of Ways a Shut Down Kills People
This is the show from Monday, April 27th, 2020
SUMMARY:
(See the transcript of today's important program just below.) Today's public service pandemic program is brought to you by Crawford Broadcasting continuing Real Science Radio's series on how we got here, that is...
- Why now and never before
- The list of ways a shut down also kills people , where is this global phenomenon headed, and what are the relevant principles of governance that governments should be adhering to. All that, while rebutting a few conspiracy theories along the way including The Shaun Hannity Interpretation of China's Flights. See also part one, our Stunning Report 1: Why the Unprecedented Shut Down at rsr.org/why-now-and-never-before. If you're interested, see also our COVID science interviews at rsr.org/michael-behe-covid, rsr.org/kevin-anderson-covid, and rsr.org/james-tour-covid.
* List of Ways Economic Decline Kills People: The opposite of an improved standard of living is an increase in the ways of dying. What makes an economy function is not money but when we do as the Bible commands, and "serve one another." As discussed below, like so much economic caluclation, these increases in death often happen "on the margins", to people and in circumstances where events could go one way or another, and a "tipping point" otherwise avoided is reached because of economic stress.
- Suicide increases (normally, the 10th leading cause of death; 2nd for young adults)
- Stress, a major factor in increased disease, depression, and death
- Extended disappointment can lead to depression, then to death
- Increasing family debt leads to increased stress (see above)
- Forego needed medical treatment for known ailments
- Forego routine healthcare and miss early diagnosis of treatable disease
- Forego needed vehicle maintenance increasing crashes
- Forego equipment maintenance increasing workplace accidents
- People may eat less nutritiously deteriorating health
- Farmers may produce less for various economic reasons
- Manufacturers may cut corners producing less safe and more disappointing products
- Fewer security measures to deter those considering criminal behavior
- Failed businesses bring enormous stress to owners and employees
- Unemployment increases death rate by 50% from many causes including disease, accidents, etc.
- Career employment is replaced by poorly paying jobs
- Marriages fail leading to depression in adults and children
- Raised without a dad at home is the primary indicator of kids ending up on welfare, as criminals, addicts, and early death
- Increased marijuana and other drug use
- Increased alcohol abuse
- Increased abortion
- Government leaders who don't understand godly principles of government introduce additional socialist measures which overtime lead to increased societal dysfunction, depression, and death.
Finally, for every one person who dies as a consequence of economic recession, many many more people grieve and have an increase in stress, unhappiness, failure, depression, disease, and divorce.
* COVID 19 Deaths Overcounted and Why that Doesn't Matter: See below in the transcript.
Today's Resource: Real Science Radio 2018
Welcome to Real Science Radio: Co-hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams talk about science to debunk evolution and to show the evidence for the creator God including from biology, genetics, geology, history, paleontology, archaeology, astronomy, philosophy, cosmology, math, and physics. (For example, mutations will give you bad legs long before you'd get good wings.) We get to debate Darwinists and atheists like Lawrence Krauss, AronRa, and Eugenie Scott. We easily take potshots from popular evolutionists like PZ Myers, Phil Plait, and Jerry Coyne. We're the home of the popular List Shows! And we interview the outstanding scientists who dare to challenge today's accepted creed that nothing created everything. This audio disk features all of the Real Science Radio episodes from 2018.
* Transcript of Today's Program: Today, April 27th, 2020, as a public service for the COVID-19 pandemic brought to you by Crawford Broadcasting, we'll continue our presentation of how we got here, why now and never before such an extensive economic shut down, what are the relevant just principles of governance that governments should adhere to, where this global experience is headed. We've looked at the science and we've been rebutting a few conspiracy theories along the way to hopefully mitigate some misplaced anger.
The Hannity Conspiracy Interpretation of China's Flights: One conspiracy we rebutted was the Shaun Hannity interpretation of what China was doing when they permitted international flights to continue. Countless conservatives think that this was part of China's intentional plan to infect the world. Here at RSR we have as strong a record, or greater, of condemning China, including for their own abortion holocaust, as does almost any other conservative or Christian outlet. Yet much of our last program strongly rebutted that air traffic conspiracy interpretation. We documented the dates, and showed that with the whole world on alert for the virus, and it spreading, and President Trump wisely shutting down flights to and from China, yet most of the rest of the world recklessly ignored his approach, and continued flying to China.
Yes, they shut down their own domestic travel out of Wuhan. But they weren't forcing other countries to fly their. Each country evaluated their own level of risk. Based even just on the number of planes available in any fleet or nation, no airline or country, including China, could sustain continuing to send flights out of their country unless those same planes were first flying into their country. So the countries that planes were flying into, out of China, were the same countries that continued of their own decision making, and with some recklessness, to fly planes into China. And China's communist tyrant, Xi Jinping, did what tyrants do, in selfishness, incompetence, and hubris, took whatever benefits flew in on the incoming flights, and cared nothing for what harm flew out on the return flights. That's much different than the paranoid belief, generating even more anger, needlessly, than already exists, to claim that China was implementing an intentional plan of infecting the world. Wickedness and recklessness by themselves are not sufficient to convict someone of every suspicion, and God did say, Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.
We began our Crawford-COVID series of programs interviewing brilliant scientists, if you missed any, they're archived for you online at rsr.org, to understand the virus and the disease. [rsr.org/michael-behe-covid, rsr.org/kevin-anderson-covid, rsr.org/james-tour-covid.] We heard from audience favorites like molecular biologist Kevin Anderson, and world renowned scientists Michael Behe, and James Tour discussing his nanoprobe device that, like a guided missile, seeks out pathogens, like a bacteria or even a virus, attaches, and drills into them at three million RPMs, three million revolutions per minute, to destroy them! It's stunning how human beings can use the brilliance that God gave us, to learn about His creation, and to some degree, as He encouraged us, to take control over it.
Use of Thought Experiments: Now we moved on to what's called the soft sciences of economics, psychology, and as Ludwig von Mises called it, who's the former leader of the Austrian School of economics, praxeology, the study of Human Action, and he used the tool, the thought experiment. The hard sciences make great use of thought experiments. That's how Einstein made his discoveries; we park our space satellites far above Earth in what's called the LaGrange points which were discovered by thought experiments in 1736; Paul Dirac discovered antimatter, and positrons, before they were actually observed, Max Planck the Planck constant, Higgs the Higgs boson, in fact, James Clerk Maxwell, the father of the science of electromagnetic radiation, discovered in 1859, not with a telescope, but by his thoughts, that the rings of Saturn were not, as was supposed, solid nor a continuous liquid, but that they were made up of disconnected particles, a discovery not confirmed by observation until 122 years later by NASA's Voyager 2 mission.
The National/Wealthy Family Epidemic Response: We applied von Mises encouragement of using thought experiments to figure out, why now, and why never before, for this extensive economic shut down. And we used an observation made by another Austrian conservative author, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in his work, Leftism Revisited, that some leaders have the capacity to view their own citizens as part of their own family.
And so, just like a wealthy family would do almost anything in their power, even bankrupting themselves, if they thought a spreading disease was anything like, say Ebola, which killed about one out of every two people who got it. But, suppose this was a highly infectious disease, spreading rapidly. If a successful father thought that a spreading infection would likely kill one of his own children, or more, if a son or daughter happened to catch it, he of course would go to extreme lengths, especially if he had the financial wherewithal, to try to prevent that horror. Then think of nations, and their leaders, and to the time in world history, namely, today, when as compared to the past thousands of years, we have both a better understanding of the spread of pathogens, and we have vast wealth, compared to the past, available to governments. So, this shutdown has been coming at us for a long time. Why now, and never before?
Because we can. That's why.
How Economic Decline Kills People: The cure might be worse than the disease, and far more people may die from the shut down. Almost like a medically-induced coma, we have a medically-induced, actually, an intentionally, politically-induced, recession. And how bad might it get? The worldwide economy could get bad enough to kill more people than the disease kills, and that could be either with or without all this mitigation.
A depression is worse than a recession, long considered a decline in real GDP of more than 10% in one year. GDP, that's gross domestic product; and no, that's not our public school graduating class, that's the value of all goods and services produced. The GDP. Economic forecasters, as Fortune Magazine points out, "are downgrading their predictions almost as fast as they can make them." For example, within just a few weeks, Goldman Sachs downgraded its second quarter GDP estimates from –2%, to –24% to –32%, and that's all within a few weeks.
Annualized, that would qualify as a depression, except that our underlying productivity gains, wealth, diversification of the economy, and so on, could prevent anything like what we historically perceive as a depression from hitting us. But they do say, nothing is certain except death and taxes! But even death can be cheated, through Jesus Christ. So maybe the only certainty is that the government is likely to take more from you than it should. Ha!
Economic decline, regardless of what you call it, kills people. How do people die from a drop in the standard of living? Well, of course it's called a standard of living, and the opposite of that is dying. Donald Trump unfortunately hasn't found a way to verbalize what he knows to be true, that when the economy faulters, people die. The most I've heard him get out of his mouth is:
- suicide, and he mentioned only suicide on a number of occasions; perhaps in the last few days he's expanded on that.
While suicide is not nearly the only way people die from an economic downturn, it is terribly serious. Under normal circumstances, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in America, far higher than traffic fatalities, which doesn't even make the list. 47,000 people die of suicide each year in America, and for young adults, tragically, suicide is the number two cause of death, which is one of the reasons, not the main one, but one of the reasons why we oppose and despise those who seek to decriminalize and normalize suicide.
So an increase in suicide, when a business fails, when a father can't figure out how to provide for his family, when a mom sees her children struggling, when a teenager goes further into depression because his life isn't working out how he or she had expected, those deaths are even more insufferable than COVID 19 deaths.
I'll give one example, from Thailand. We just had a massive trilobite fossil donated to us here at RSR from a listener in Thailand. well, a Bangkok media outlet has reported that suicides have increased measurably from the lockdown there and they document one example, a man who joined a government protest, a 58-year old taxi driver Nam Jiamsupa, killed himself because he didn't have enough money to pay his next three months taxi lease, $555, and their mental health hotline has gone from 30 calls a month to 600. So Donald Trump is right, of course, suicide is a major result of economic difficulty, but that's only one manner of recession death.
Oh, and by the way, what is the top cause of death in the U.S.? It used to be heart disease, at 650,000 a year, with cancer at #2, at 600,000 a year. And here at RSR we've predicted, based on our reporting on and interviews with leaders in the field of targeted antibody treatments, that cancer will drop by 2025 from the second to the fifth cause of death. That's an astounding prediction, and since we made it a couple years ago, it has been heading downward, thankfully. But right now, forget all that, because the #1 cause of death in America, right now, is COVID 19.
Yes, COVID deaths have been overcounted, and that's been a problem for decades with many diseases, identifying the correct cause of death, and COVID deaths have been undercounted, as frequently happens also. That's not a conspiracy, and the two hopefully cancel out, and regardless, that number goes in the numerator of the fraction, and the vastly larger denominator, the number of cases, then helps us decide how deadly a particular infection can be.
So, today, at about 2,000 COVID deaths per day, if that was annualized, and if this continued for another year or two, which it could, especially seeing that the virus has experienced 30 point mutations already, and they could make it even far more lethal than the flu-like, or twice-flu like fatality rate that the coronavirus has right now.
But at 2k a day, if that became routine, that would be 700,000 deaths per year,
but hopefully, we'll have nothing like that.
So, an increase in death from an economic downturn, includes from suicide, which could bring it from tenth, as high as above the normal flu and pneumonia deaths of 55,000 per year, and that could disproportionately include children and young people.
Then, just like an increase in suicide, there is death from all the other ways that people die, only moreso. One large and lengthy study in Europe has shown that the rate of death increases by 50% for the unemployed as compared to for people who are working. And that includes increases in death rates from virtually all causes, disease, accidents, and so on.
People are increasingly unhappy, over a lengthening period of time, and while some have inherent biochemical problems that need psychiatric care, the vast majority need God, and a healthy relationship with Him, becoming increasingly conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, as Paul urges us, becoming more Christ-like, and loving and serving others so much we hardly have time to notice our own twinges of unhappiness.
When people can't afford better food, the eat cheaper food. When they can't afford medical care, or the hospitals are otherwise occupied, they forego normal healthcare that could have given an early diagnosis of a treatable disease.
When farmers can't afford more productive seeds, and the right amount of irrigation, that use cheaper seeds and don't water their crops enough.
When manufactures can't afford to use the best materials, they use cheaper materials.
Someone is inclined to commit crime, and he sees corrupt opportunity in a store's reduced security measures.
When a man's good business fails, he takes a job that barely sustains his loved ones.
And much of this, like virtually all economic calculation, is on the margins. Someone who might not have come down with a disease, but the financial and emotion stress it brings, pushed her over the edge and now she's sick.
A business was on the verge of being sustainable, but it fails.
A marriage just might have survived, but the added stress results in divorce, and now three kids are growing up with only mom in the household, and that's the number one indicator for the kids eventually to commit crimes, go on welfare, use drugs, and otherwise ruin their lives, and even, die young.
And, governmental leaders who don't know right from wrong, and who say things like, America will never be a socialist nation as long as I'm in charge, while handing out thousand dollar checks to everyone, and saddling the next generation with trillions of dollars of debt beyond even Obama deficit spending, and even those measures lead to eventual further downturn, and death.
And when a global economy shrinks, short-sighted governments may further increase import tariffs, which primarily is a tax on their own people, again increasing the economic pain. You hit the buyers of Japanese cars with a 10% surcharge, or tariff, and then domestic manufacturers increase the price of their cars by 9%, 100% of which is paid for by the consumer.
So the list goes on and on, of how people die from economic decline, and those deaths can be far more than from this SARS-CoV-2 virus, what we call the Wuhan Flu, because of the cover-up and other lies from the Chinese communists.
But far more important than all that are the moral questions. And we'll get to them tomorrow. I was supposed to get to them today, but felt that I had to provide my bona fides, showing perhaps newer listeners that here at RSR, we carefully think through the science, and the current events, that we report on, and more importantly, that we do all this with a Christian biblical worldview.
So tomorrow, does the government have the right to shut down an economy to fight an epidemic. There's a tremendous amount of anger out there, and it's become a right vs left thing. If Obama had been reigning right now, in office, just like with the H1N1 in 2009 when 60 million Americans were infected, and he shut down nothing, and over 12,000 died, the media couldn't care less and wouldn't have said "boo" against him, nor would they hardly criticize a single thing he did or didn't do if he were here today. And what proof do I have? Look at how they support the Democratic governor of New York, the most hard hit state in the nation, whether he says what the condemn Trump for saying, or does what they condemn Trump for doing, and even when Trump's right and he's wrong. Reality matters not for the fake news blinded by hatred.
So because of the left's Trump derangement syndrome, there is an intense fight over whether to reopen, because the Democrats, the media, and millions on the left want to see the economy crash further to hurt Trump's chances of reelection. So the more they support the quarantine, the more conservative Christians are enraged. And from my vantage point, here atop the RSR Towers, overlooking the front range… Hmm. I can't see much careful and principled thinking on either side.
The best some conservatives have done is to ask if this is constitutional, and I'm not especially interested in that. I want to know about right and wrong, and there are a hundred other nations that are quarantining. God's not going to other judge nations, or even us, on whether or not they violate, or we uphold, our constitution. He's going to judge us on whether we obey Him or not.
Former NJ appeals court judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox regular until he turned against Trump; we've interviewed him here on the air. He wrote two weeks ago that the only time that a government can interfere with a man's freedom is when he is convicted by a jury of a crime. Oh really? How about when the police arrest a mass murderer, and he's held for months, incarcerated until the trial. You mean Judge Napolitano couldn't think of that? So he provides a perfect example of the kind of sloppy thinking that I have seen conservatives engage in, to keep their anger up.
So until tomorrow Lord-willing (if you'd like to share this Crawford-sponsored public service program with a friend, just go online to rsr.org) until tomorrow, this is Bob Enyart for my co-host Fred Williams and Real Science Radio! May God bless you.
This is the show from Monday, April 27th, 2020
SUMMARY:
(See the transcript of today's important program just below.) Today's public service pandemic program is brought to you by Crawford Broadcasting continuing Real Science Radio's series on how we got here, that is...
- Why now and never before
- The list of ways a shut down also kills people , where is this global phenomenon headed, and what are the relevant principles of governance that governments should be adhering to. All that, while rebutting a few conspiracy theories along the way including The Shaun Hannity Interpretation of China's Flights. See also part one, our Stunning Report 1: Why the Unprecedented Shut Down at rsr.org/why-now-and-never-before. If you're interested, see also our COVID science interviews at rsr.org/michael-behe-covid, rsr.org/kevin-anderson-covid, and rsr.org/james-tour-covid.
* List of Ways Economic Decline Kills People: The opposite of an improved standard of living is an increase in the ways of dying. What makes an economy function is not money but when we do as the Bible commands, and "serve one another." As discussed below, like so much economic caluclation, these increases in death often happen "on the margins", to people and in circumstances where events could go one way or another, and a "tipping point" otherwise avoided is reached because of economic stress.
- Suicide increases (normally, the 10th leading cause of death; 2nd for young adults)
- Stress, a major factor in increased disease, depression, and death
- Extended disappointment can lead to depression, then to death
- Increasing family debt leads to increased stress (see above)
- Forego needed medical treatment for known ailments
- Forego routine healthcare and miss early diagnosis of treatable disease
- Forego needed vehicle maintenance increasing crashes
- Forego equipment maintenance increasing workplace accidents
- People may eat less nutritiously deteriorating health
- Farmers may produce less for various economic reasons
- Manufacturers may cut corners producing less safe and more disappointing products
- Fewer security measures to deter those considering criminal behavior
- Failed businesses bring enormous stress to owners and employees
- Unemployment increases death rate by 50% from many causes including disease, accidents, etc.
- Career employment is replaced by poorly paying jobs
- Marriages fail leading to depression in adults and children
- Raised without a dad at home is the primary indicator of kids ending up on welfare, as criminals, addicts, and early death
- Increased marijuana and other drug use
- Increased alcohol abuse
- Increased abortion
- Government leaders who don't understand godly principles of government introduce additional socialist measures which overtime lead to increased societal dysfunction, depression, and death.
Finally, for every one person who dies as a consequence of economic recession, many many more people grieve and have an increase in stress, unhappiness, failure, depression, disease, and divorce.
* COVID 19 Deaths Overcounted and Why that Doesn't Matter: See below in the transcript.
Today's Resource: Real Science Radio 2018
Welcome to Real Science Radio: Co-hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams talk about science to debunk evolution and to show the evidence for the creator God including from biology, genetics, geology, history, paleontology, archaeology, astronomy, philosophy, cosmology, math, and physics. (For example, mutations will give you bad legs long before you'd get good wings.) We get to debate Darwinists and atheists like Lawrence Krauss, AronRa, and Eugenie Scott. We easily take potshots from popular evolutionists like PZ Myers, Phil Plait, and Jerry Coyne. We're the home of the popular List Shows! And we interview the outstanding scientists who dare to challenge today's accepted creed that nothing created everything. This audio disk features all of the Real Science Radio episodes from 2018.
* Transcript of Today's Program: Today, April 27th, 2020, as a public service for the COVID-19 pandemic brought to you by Crawford Broadcasting, we'll continue our presentation of how we got here, why now and never before such an extensive economic shut down, what are the relevant just principles of governance that governments should adhere to, where this global experience is headed. We've looked at the science and we've been rebutting a few conspiracy theories along the way to hopefully mitigate some misplaced anger.
The Hannity Conspiracy Interpretation of China's Flights: One conspiracy we rebutted was the Shaun Hannity interpretation of what China was doing when they permitted international flights to continue. Countless conservatives think that this was part of China's intentional plan to infect the world. Here at RSR we have as strong a record, or greater, of condemning China, including for their own abortion holocaust, as does almost any other conservative or Christian outlet. Yet much of our last program strongly rebutted that air traffic conspiracy interpretation. We documented the dates, and showed that with the whole world on alert for the virus, and it spreading, and President Trump wisely shutting down flights to and from China, yet most of the rest of the world recklessly ignored his approach, and continued flying to China.
Yes, they shut down their own domestic travel out of Wuhan. But they weren't forcing other countries to fly their. Each country evaluated their own level of risk. Based even just on the number of planes available in any fleet or nation, no airline or country, including China, could sustain continuing to send flights out of their country unless those same planes were first flying into their country. So the countries that planes were flying into, out of China, were the same countries that continued of their own decision making, and with some recklessness, to fly planes into China. And China's communist tyrant, Xi Jinping, did what tyrants do, in selfishness, incompetence, and hubris, took whatever benefits flew in on the incoming flights, and cared nothing for what harm flew out on the return flights. That's much different than the paranoid belief, generating even more anger, needlessly, than already exists, to claim that China was implementing an intentional plan of infecting the world. Wickedness and recklessness by themselves are not sufficient to convict someone of every suspicion, and God did say, Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.
We began our Crawford-COVID series of programs interviewing brilliant scientists, if you missed any, they're archived for you online at rsr.org, to understand the virus and the disease. [rsr.org/michael-behe-covid, rsr.org/kevin-anderson-covid, rsr.org/james-tour-covid.] We heard from audience favorites like molecular biologist Kevin Anderson, and world renowned scientists Michael Behe, and James Tour discussing his nanoprobe device that, like a guided missile, seeks out pathogens, like a bacteria or even a virus, attaches, and drills into them at three million RPMs, three million revolutions per minute, to destroy them! It's stunning how human beings can use the brilliance that God gave us, to learn about His creation, and to some degree, as He encouraged us, to take control over it.
Use of Thought Experiments: Now we moved on to what's called the soft sciences of economics, psychology, and as Ludwig von Mises called it, who's the former leader of the Austrian School of economics, praxeology, the study of Human Action, and he used the tool, the thought experiment. The hard sciences make great use of thought experiments. That's how Einstein made his discoveries; we park our space satellites far above Earth in what's called the LaGrange points which were discovered by thought experiments in 1736; Paul Dirac discovered antimatter, and positrons, before they were actually observed, Max Planck the Planck constant, Higgs the Higgs boson, in fact, James Clerk Maxwell, the father of the science of electromagnetic radiation, discovered in 1859, not with a telescope, but by his thoughts, that the rings of Saturn were not, as was supposed, solid nor a continuous liquid, but that they were made up of disconnected particles, a discovery not confirmed by observation until 122 years later by NASA's Voyager 2 mission.
The National/Wealthy Family Epidemic Response: We applied von Mises encouragement of using thought experiments to figure out, why now, and why never before, for this extensive economic shut down. And we used an observation made by another Austrian conservative author, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in his work, Leftism Revisited, that some leaders have the capacity to view their own citizens as part of their own family.
And so, just like a wealthy family would do almost anything in their power, even bankrupting themselves, if they thought a spreading disease was anything like, say Ebola, which killed about one out of every two people who got it. But, suppose this was a highly infectious disease, spreading rapidly. If a successful father thought that a spreading infection would likely kill one of his own children, or more, if a son or daughter happened to catch it, he of course would go to extreme lengths, especially if he had the financial wherewithal, to try to prevent that horror. Then think of nations, and their leaders, and to the time in world history, namely, today, when as compared to the past thousands of years, we have both a better understanding of the spread of pathogens, and we have vast wealth, compared to the past, available to governments. So, this shutdown has been coming at us for a long time. Why now, and never before?
Because we can. That's why.
How Economic Decline Kills People: The cure might be worse than the disease, and far more people may die from the shut down. Almost like a medically-induced coma, we have a medically-induced, actually, an intentionally, politically-induced, recession. And how bad might it get? The worldwide economy could get bad enough to kill more people than the disease kills, and that could be either with or without all this mitigation.
A depression is worse than a recession, long considered a decline in real GDP of more than 10% in one year. GDP, that's gross domestic product; and no, that's not our public school graduating class, that's the value of all goods and services produced. The GDP. Economic forecasters, as Fortune Magazine points out, "are downgrading their predictions almost as fast as they can make them." For example, within just a few weeks, Goldman Sachs downgraded its second quarter GDP estimates from –2%, to –24% to –32%, and that's all within a few weeks.
Annualized, that would qualify as a depression, except that our underlying productivity gains, wealth, diversification of the economy, and so on, could prevent anything like what we historically perceive as a depression from hitting us. But they do say, nothing is certain except death and taxes! But even death can be cheated, through Jesus Christ. So maybe the only certainty is that the government is likely to take more from you than it should. Ha!
Economic decline, regardless of what you call it, kills people. How do people die from a drop in the standard of living? Well, of course it's called a standard of living, and the opposite of that is dying. Donald Trump unfortunately hasn't found a way to verbalize what he knows to be true, that when the economy faulters, people die. The most I've heard him get out of his mouth is:
- suicide, and he mentioned only suicide on a number of occasions; perhaps in the last few days he's expanded on that.
While suicide is not nearly the only way people die from an economic downturn, it is terribly serious. Under normal circumstances, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in America, far higher than traffic fatalities, which doesn't even make the list. 47,000 people die of suicide each year in America, and for young adults, tragically, suicide is the number two cause of death, which is one of the reasons, not the main one, but one of the reasons why we oppose and despise those who seek to decriminalize and normalize suicide.
So an increase in suicide, when a business fails, when a father can't figure out how to provide for his family, when a mom sees her children struggling, when a teenager goes further into depression because his life isn't working out how he or she had expected, those deaths are even more insufferable than COVID 19 deaths.
I'll give one example, from Thailand. We just had a massive trilobite fossil donated to us here at RSR from a listener in Thailand. well, a Bangkok media outlet has reported that suicides have increased measurably from the lockdown there and they document one example, a man who joined a government protest, a 58-year old taxi driver Nam Jiamsupa, killed himself because he didn't have enough money to pay his next three months taxi lease, $555, and their mental health hotline has gone from 30 calls a month to 600. So Donald Trump is right, of course, suicide is a major result of economic difficulty, but that's only one manner of recession death.
Oh, and by the way, what is the top cause of death in the U.S.? It used to be heart disease, at 650,000 a year, with cancer at #2, at 600,000 a year. And here at RSR we've predicted, based on our reporting on and interviews with leaders in the field of targeted antibody treatments, that cancer will drop by 2025 from the second to the fifth cause of death. That's an astounding prediction, and since we made it a couple years ago, it has been heading downward, thankfully. But right now, forget all that, because the #1 cause of death in America, right now, is COVID 19.
Yes, COVID deaths have been overcounted, and that's been a problem for decades with many diseases, identifying the correct cause of death, and COVID deaths have been undercounted, as frequently happens also. That's not a conspiracy, and the two hopefully cancel out, and regardless, that number goes in the numerator of the fraction, and the vastly larger denominator, the number of cases, then helps us decide how deadly a particular infection can be.
So, today, at about 2,000 COVID deaths per day, if that was annualized, and if this continued for another year or two, which it could, especially seeing that the virus has experienced 30 point mutations already, and they could make it even far more lethal than the flu-like, or twice-flu like fatality rate that the coronavirus has right now.
But at 2k a day, if that became routine, that would be 700,000 deaths per year,
but hopefully, we'll have nothing like that.
So, an increase in death from an economic downturn, includes from suicide, which could bring it from tenth, as high as above the normal flu and pneumonia deaths of 55,000 per year, and that could disproportionately include children and young people.
Then, just like an increase in suicide, there is death from all the other ways that people die, only moreso. One large and lengthy study in Europe has shown that the rate of death increases by 50% for the unemployed as compared to for people who are working. And that includes increases in death rates from virtually all causes, disease, accidents, and so on.
People are increasingly unhappy, over a lengthening period of time, and while some have inherent biochemical problems that need psychiatric care, the vast majority need God, and a healthy relationship with Him, becoming increasingly conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, as Paul urges us, becoming more Christ-like, and loving and serving others so much we hardly have time to notice our own twinges of unhappiness.
When people can't afford better food, the eat cheaper food. When they can't afford medical care, or the hospitals are otherwise occupied, they forego normal healthcare that could have given an early diagnosis of a treatable disease.
When farmers can't afford more productive seeds, and the right amount of irrigation, that use cheaper seeds and don't water their crops enough.
When manufactures can't afford to use the best materials, they use cheaper materials.
Someone is inclined to commit crime, and he sees corrupt opportunity in a store's reduced security measures.
When a man's good business fails, he takes a job that barely sustains his loved ones.
And much of this, like virtually all economic calculation, is on the margins. Someone who might not have come down with a disease, but the financial and emotion stress it brings, pushed her over the edge and now she's sick.
A business was on the verge of being sustainable, but it fails.
A marriage just might have survived, but the added stress results in divorce, and now three kids are growing up with only mom in the household, and that's the number one indicator for the kids eventually to commit crimes, go on welfare, use drugs, and otherwise ruin their lives, and even, die young.
And, governmental leaders who don't know right from wrong, and who say things like, America will never be a socialist nation as long as I'm in charge, while handing out thousand dollar checks to everyone, and saddling the next generation with trillions of dollars of debt beyond even Obama deficit spending, and even those measures lead to eventual further downturn, and death.
And when a global economy shrinks, short-sighted governments may further increase import tariffs, which primarily is a tax on their own people, again increasing the economic pain. You hit the buyers of Japanese cars with a 10% surcharge, or tariff, and then domestic manufacturers increase the price of their cars by 9%, 100% of which is paid for by the consumer.
So the list goes on and on, of how people die from economic decline, and those deaths can be far more than from this SARS-CoV-2 virus, what we call the Wuhan Flu, because of the cover-up and other lies from the Chinese communists.
But far more important than all that are the moral questions. And we'll get to them tomorrow. I was supposed to get to them today, but felt that I had to provide my bona fides, showing perhaps newer listeners that here at RSR, we carefully think through the science, and the current events, that we report on, and more importantly, that we do all this with a Christian biblical worldview.
So tomorrow, does the government have the right to shut down an economy to fight an epidemic. There's a tremendous amount of anger out there, and it's become a right vs left thing. If Obama had been reigning right now, in office, just like with the H1N1 in 2009 when 60 million Americans were infected, and he shut down nothing, and over 12,000 died, the media couldn't care less and wouldn't have said "boo" against him, nor would they hardly criticize a single thing he did or didn't do if he were here today. And what proof do I have? Look at how they support the Democratic governor of New York, the most hard hit state in the nation, whether he says what the condemn Trump for saying, or does what they condemn Trump for doing, and even when Trump's right and he's wrong. Reality matters not for the fake news blinded by hatred.
So because of the left's Trump derangement syndrome, there is an intense fight over whether to reopen, because the Democrats, the media, and millions on the left want to see the economy crash further to hurt Trump's chances of reelection. So the more they support the quarantine, the more conservative Christians are enraged. And from my vantage point, here atop the RSR Towers, overlooking the front range… Hmm. I can't see much careful and principled thinking on either side.
The best some conservatives have done is to ask if this is constitutional, and I'm not especially interested in that. I want to know about right and wrong, and there are a hundred other nations that are quarantining. God's not going to other judge nations, or even us, on whether or not they violate, or we uphold, our constitution. He's going to judge us on whether we obey Him or not.
Former NJ appeals court judge Andrew Napolitano, a Fox regular until he turned against Trump; we've interviewed him here on the air. He wrote two weeks ago that the only time that a government can interfere with a man's freedom is when he is convicted by a jury of a crime. Oh really? How about when the police arrest a mass murderer, and he's held for months, incarcerated until the trial. You mean Judge Napolitano couldn't think of that? So he provides a perfect example of the kind of sloppy thinking that I have seen conservatives engage in, to keep their anger up.
So until tomorrow Lord-willing (if you'd like to share this Crawford-sponsored public service program with a friend, just go online to rsr.org) until tomorrow, this is Bob Enyart for my co-host Fred Williams and Real Science Radio! May God bless you.
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