Posted on 03/16/2020 5:20:22 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
The aftermath of the plague created a series of religious, social, and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe’s population to recover, and the effects of the plague irrevocably changed the social structure, resulting in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, foreigners, beggars, and lepers. The uncertainty of daily survival has been seen as creating a general mood of morbidity, influencing people to “live for the moment.”
Because 14th-century healers were at a loss to explain the cause of the plague, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes, and the poisoning of wells by Jews as possible reasons for the plague’s emergence. No one in the 14th century considered rat control a way to ward off the plague, and people began to believe only God’s anger could produce such horrific displays. Giovanni Boccaccio, an Italian writer and poet of the 14th century, questioned whether plague was sent by God for human’s correction, or if it came through the influence of the heavenly bodies. Christians accused Jews of poisoning public water supplies in an effort to ruin European civilization. The spreading of this rumor led to complete destruction of entire Jewish towns, but it was caused simply by suspicion on the part of the Christians, who noticed that the Jews had lost fewer lives in the Plague due to their hygienic practices. In February 1349, 2,000 Jews were murdered in Strasbourg. In August of the same year, the Jewish communities of Mainz and Cologne were exterminated.
There was a significant impact on religion, as many believed the plague was God’s punishment for sinful ways. Church lands and buildings were unaffected, but there were too few priests left to maintain the old schedule of services. Over half the parish priests,
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When the Son of Man comes will He find faith on the earth? (Luke 18.8)
And this man made contagion kills those that still believe in God and country interestingly enough.
[Lots to learn there. Best to you! ]
The Green Revolution a century ago means that 1% of the population produces enough food to make the other 99% obese, with enough surplus to export to godforsaken places like China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
So the likelihood is that malnutrition will not be the factor it was in the past, when 40% or more of the population was involved in agriculture even stateside, as late as the turn of the 20th century.
Is this another tale of decline?
Well, it depends on how you look at it. Because I’m not talking about the embattled U.S. manufacturing sector. I’m talking about the world-beating U.S. agriculture sector.
Last week, we noted an apparent contradiction: The U.S. manufacturing sector produces near-record amounts of materials, measured by the dollar value of output, but employs far fewer people than it did several decades ago. This dichotomy is even more pronounced in agriculture. But the difference is that, on both a global and national basis, people tend to regard U.S. agriculture as an extremely healthy, world-beating sector: highly industrialized, remarkably efficient, an exporter that feeds the world.
It’s little appreciated now, but the U.S. was, for its first century, essentially an agricultural economy. (Hat-tip to an s+b reader for directing me to these great very long-run charts.) In the 19th century, well over 50 percent of the workforce labored on the farm. Yes, there were machines: the cotton gin, the thresher, the first tractors. But by and large, at the start of the 20th century, the U.S. needed a lot of people to farm a lot of land. In 1900, about 40 percent of the U.S. workforce toiled on farms. And you didn’t need a lot of education to qualify for these positions. (Less than 10 percent of the U.S. population had graduated high school.)]
It’s not the Black Plague. It’s dangerous, but we know where it comes from and how it spreads. Even if we were to do what the butflubros want and ignore it, it wouldn’t kill as high a proportion of the population. It might kill more people in absolute terms, but 13 out of 14 of us would still be here.
It didn’t come on China’s road. It came on airplanes.
I recommend Barbara Tuchman’s great book on the effect of the plague on Europe titled “A Distant Mirror”. Informative read.
“This virus has been hyped to trash the economy so that Trump can lose, or more likely, make the loss plausible after they steal it.”
The media surely hyped it, but then, 150+ countries have cases and most are taking “extreme” measures to combat it. So maybe the hype isn’t totally misplaced.
Blaming it on anybody but the Chinese government should be smacked down, though.
And where does the water to replace what falls off the edge come from? Aren’t sea levels rising?
Conversely, this could be used to counter the rising sea levels myth. Many liberals would believe it.
Actually gravity prevents it from falling off and it just hangs there like a curtain.
Good question about epidemics and increase in faith. We shall see.
The rest of the world’s reaction is proof of the influence of American media. Other viruses where just as bad during the Obama regime but the motivation of the left was to cover for Obama’s failures.
[It didn’t come on China’s road. It came on airplanes.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Americans#Population
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_people_in_Italy
And yet stateside coronavirus infections remain a fraction of Italy’s, even though the US’s (presumably) Chinese-American Patient Zero arrived in the US on January 19, at around the same time as Italy’s German Patient Zero (of indeterminate ethnicity) showed up in Northern Italy:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-09/how-coronavirus-spread-from-patient-zero-in-seattle
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-scientists/coronavirus-may-have-reached-italy-from-germany-scientists-say-idUSKBN20Y35B
And that remains the case even in New York City, which has 600,000 ethnic Chinese in its 300 sq miles. That’s double the ethnic Chinese in all of Italy 116,000 sq miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_in_New_York_City
Allowing the rat populations to explode in cities.
Plaque ... that nasty bubonic plaque.
I was told that was a myth but don’t think so.
Which side of the banjo do you carve first? Where do you put the batteries in the hatchet when you want to use it? Panicked, running around like a snail on speed.
One of the odd things about the bubonic plague laws that it tended to kill younger people, not the elderly. It is thought that the elderly had built up immunity’s over the years and we’re better able to survive and the young.
Both Italy and Iran currently suffering heavily have strong recent ties to China. The leather goods industry near Milan has workers who went home to China over the holidays. Most of Iran’s international commerce is now with China. An Iranian from Qom flew back from China bringing a case to that city where the devote lick the screen around the local saint’s tomb. Now a Qom cemetery has a 100 yard ditch for bodies. Chinese have been in US far longer than Italy and Iran, and families probably celebrate the New Year in US. Saw that Italy is not identifying the dead as Chinese to prevent prejudice. Below are some interesting links.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2020/03/16/coronavirus-map-how-to-track-coronavirus-spread-across-the-globe/#3fad48faf980 [An excellent series of maps showing distribution and figures on cases.
I spoke with my son in Puerto Rico this evening after I read that the govt. closed the beach. I asked him about the big pharmaceuticals manufacture business that used to be there. He says while some drugs are still made there, a complex about 5 miles square in the southern part of the island has been abandoned for some years now. We should not be depending on China for 80% of our medicines.
https://apnews.com/2d57b506106f131418c7c846d20babc1 [ Serious restrictions and fines, and only 5 sick and no dead.
I also spoke with my military son about Vitamin C experiments China is doing to test the value of high dose C for severely ill Covid 19 victims. He said there were actually U-tube videos about this which have now been removed by Google mgt. Large shipments of C were made to Wuhan, and China has said they are not going to ship more to US, they need it themselves.
https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=228745
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