Month: March 2020

I would like to assert, though, that it is likely they will be wasted in the ER too.  They were slow.  The parking lot of the medical center was largely empty.  This whole thing is putting huge stress on medical centers too, since they are not seeing the flood of COVID-19 people, but they have cancelled most wellness checks, elective surgeries, and pretty everything else that is not a direct support to the ER.

If the goal was to preserve respirators, we have overachieved it.  We are actually wasting time right now.  The goal is to get through this as fast as possible.  The only way which is plausible to me is herd immunity, which means we need 60% of us to get it, then get over it, as fast as possible.

The only speed bump is respirator beds, and the goal there would be to, ideally, keep them exactly at capacity until the epidemic breaks.  I would suggest, though, that given the enormous damage this thing is doing to our economy–which will ALSO kill people–we should err, if we err, on the side of being a little short of beds.  The harsh reality is that most of the people who will need them were sickly and had one foot in the grave anyway.

As I said elsewhere, sometimes you have to shoot the puppy.  You don’t have to like it–if you are morally normal it will be genuinely traumatizing–but the reality remains.  Nobody lives forever.

But if our ER’s are empty, as I suspected they were, then we can say now WITH CERTAINTY that a partial shutdown would have served our purposes better than the full shut down most States actually did.  ALL OF THEM overdid it, some of the dramatically, like California.

And this whole thing is bringing out the stupid.  I watched a cop in the park today tell a couple they couldn’t play tennis.  Think about that.  They are 20-40′ from each other most of the time, and when they are done, they will get in a car together, go eat dinner together, then sleep next to each other.  Fucking Brilliant.  The two guys sitting at a picnic table leaning in and whispering conspiratorially?  He had nothing to say to them.  His mandate was to stop sportsing in public parks.

Here is an important point: this feels like 9/11 to me.  It feels staged, planned, orchestrated.  There are hidden movers playing out scripts written six to nine months ago, to be executed if Trump was acquitted.  I am going to say that I think this whole thing is an operation coordinated by the CIA at least, in tandem with elements in the State and other departments, designed to derail the US economy, and weaken Trump politically.  


I remember 9/11 . We had just balanced the budget, and were enjoying the peace dividend.  We weren’t fighting any wars, really, anywhere.  Saddam Hussein was on the radar, but he was mostly being kept under wraps.  The economy was starting to hum, after a recession in the late 90’s.  Then 9/11, with all that came with it.

Would you not agree that what is being done now is several orders of magnitude PAST the Patriot Act?  It is literally training for fascistic central control.  In California, they have already in effect declared martial law, OVER THE FLU.

Here is the kicker: the report proving that Tower 7 was brought down by explosives was RELEASED THIS WEEK.  Here is the link: https://www.ae911truth.org/wtc7

What are facts and necessary conclusions with regard to this?

1) There must have been well funded and extremely organized planning and operational execution to rig that building with the charges needed to bring it down while it was functioning, and without anyone noticing.  The people involved would have needed extra security clearance, in all likelihood, and almost certainly would have been disguised as construction workers, or perhaps as security guards working there.

2) NIST at a minimum demonstrated incompetence.  This is however an unlikely scenario, since they are NOT incompetent.  They had to have been operating either out of fear, if they failed to let sleeping dogs lie, or out of explicit instructions to more or less cover the whole fucking thing up.  Either way, they behaved, in my view, ignobly.

I say this, of course, not being personally familiar with the sort of threats people capable of something like 9/11 would be able to credibly make.

3) There is every reason to suspect Towers 1 and 2 were brought down the same way.  Tower 7 presents a simpler case since it was not hit with a jet airliner (I will continue to argue it was the actual target of United 93 until I see a reason to stop), but based on all the reading I’ve done, the collapses of Towers 1 and 2 make no sense either, outside of the shaped charge and nanothermite hypothesis.

4) An organized conspiracy got away with the direct murders of something in the neighborhood of 2,000 people that day, and created the political framework–the support and sense of urgency–which sparked wars on the other side of the planet which are still getting Americans killed nearly 20 years later.

5) This operation also enabled the implementation of a continuous surveillance state which if anything is going to get worse in the current crisis, which in my view is the goal.

What are the positives?  The main one is that Donald Trump is President, and it is POSSIBLE that not all our spy agencies are fucking Communist traitors.  Not certain, but possible.  I’ve pointed to the Defense Intelligence Agency as one possibly honest intelligence agency.

And the State of Emergency cuts both ways.  As I understand it, Trump may have created a road map to bring the Fed back in-house.  That would be huge.  He could, possibly, develop a plan for sound money, which would generate a howling like you cannot imagine from the world’s banks.

He may also have more latitude in surveilling, interrogating, arresting, and imprisoning traitors to America, which is what most Deep State operatives are.

I don’t envy him his job.  It’s almost impossible to know who to trust.  He’s being lied to at every turn and from every angle.  Not all the time by every one, but it has to be damn hard figuring out who the straight shooters are.  Everybody has a plan.  What the plan behind the plan is, though, is really, really hard to know.

His gut that we need to go back to work, though, is spot on.

Here is one last observation: the energy of Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to have gone FULLY into the fetishization of quarantine.  If you are a Trump hater, then you want this thing as long and as hard and as frustrating as possible, because you can virtue signal through the whole damn thing, and the longer it lasts, the more it fucks with Trump.

And regular people: well fuck them.  Lots of them voted for Trump, and the rest of them are probably dumb anyway.

My two quarters and a dime for today.  If I sucked information out of your head, then I guess you owe me money.

Actually, let me post this excellent piece, which is actually better than what I would have written: https://www.pensford.com/why-flattening-the-curve-is-overrated/?fbclid=IwAR0asHJdOETCjXPvM28idycyg1xn-JljKcWMtb6otp2WhW1TXZLCSIrB2RY

But what I logged on to say is it occurred to me that doing the thing you choose to do with as much love and attention as possible equals and really exceeds doing all the other things you could have done in its stead.  Let’s call it the Love One is more than Like Two Principle. 

As context, I will mention a line from Churchill’s excellent “Painting as a Pastime”, where he talked about looking at his library and realizing there were some books there he would never read.  He would sometimes pick them up vaguely melancholically, run his hand down the spine, and read the title page and perhaps table of contents, then put it back and more or less apologize.

Me, I have perhaps 30 cookbooks. If I make a recipe from one, that means I can’t make one from another.  If I pursue one workout regime I have foreclosed on the other possibilities.  Or, I am doing multiple ones, each poorly, which is both comical and understandable.

What I am proposing is those of us who have problems making decisions because we are simply too aware of options can have our cake and eat it too.  If you LOVE what you are doing.  If you ENGAGE with your decision, then it stands in for every other possible decision.  And that is the most you could have gotten from any of those decisions anyway, right?

Most of the time, if our choices are about equal, our outcomes would have been about equal.  But if you dilute and divide the outcome with “what-if” thinking, then you lose on both scores.  You achieve a worse result than you would have gotten with literally any choice that you had decided to love and accept and carry through fully.

This flipping through the cards is something most of us have experience with.  You can scroll through PEOPLE, because nobody is quite perfect for you.  But I think there was some wisdom in the Sirens of Titan, when Vonnegut said that the smartest thing to do is love fully the people who ARE in your life, versus pining across a lifetime for people who are not.

The same would apply to life generally, actually.  Why not love what you are doing?  Right now?  This moment.  Are you painting your walls?  Gardening?  Wondering how you are going to pay your bills?  Engage with it and love it. 

With regard to the last, I know from my own past economic history, you can get really creative with bill paying.  I’m not sharing any details, but some of them might make you wonder “Dear God did you really get away with that?”  Yes.  The answer is yes.  I am not and never have been a law breaker–the idea of even risking jail has no appeal to me–but I’m really, really good at identifying and using gray areas.

But hell, even if you are jail right now, reading this: what can you engage with and love?  They have good libraries, I think, most of them, and if not, you can probably talk somebody into getting you some good books.  You have time to meditate.  Time for exercise.  You could take up Tai Chi.

As I think about it, this may be the firm psychological basis behind mindfulness practice.  If you are present, that means you are accepting the present.  The alternative is dissociating, and finding yourself daydreaming, wishing, praying, resenting, being angry. If you are there, then some part of you has accepted what is going on, what you are doing, and the situation.

So for me particularly, I’m going to hit Ottolenghi, then my Samarkand cookbook.  I haven’t made any of the plovs yet, which is kind of the core food.  I bought some licorice a long time ago for meringue cookies. Whatever I make, will stand in for thousands of other recipes.  I’m going to do my best to show up.

What most governments do, of course, is play with the value of money in all sorts of ways.  I have been arguing for a while now that I think there is a good chance that the profession of Economics would be unnecessary if there were no such thing as “monetary policy”.

Sound currency, free markets, enforceable contract law, private property rights, and a politically liberal government: these are all you need for sustained long term development.  No advice or experts are needed.

When you start “fixing” things with the government, as we are getting ready to do with the “stimulus”–which I haven’t studied in detail because I know some parts will make me mad–you wind up swinging too far one way, then the other.  You wind up with multiple pendulums which nobody can quite synchronize or make stop.  No amount of expertise or even artificial intelligence can ever equal the intelligence of the market as a whole, as comprised of the individual viewpoints of the countless involved and affected individuals.  The Extended Order, as Hayek put it, or the Invisible Hand, as Adam Smith put it.

I was doing my Kum Nye practice this morning, thinking about something I heard on an Audible book I listened to (Not for Happiness).  He said “Samsara cannot be fixed”.  And he’s right.  Problems, and finite limits, and the possibility but not continual presence of pain are what make this reality special.  Without problems, it cannot serve its purpose.  If one were to “fix” it, one would be destroying something truly useful.

Now, I think all of us, those of us who feel there is something useful and beautiful in the ideal of compassion, could and should try to make this world better, in our small corners, in the places we inhabit, among the people that we meet.

But some part of us needs to recognize that final failure is inevitable, and that the cure is personal growth and empowerment, in the direction of higher spirituality.  The book argued that the solitary mystic was doing more for the world than the hyperactive humanitarian.  I’m not sure I fully agree, particularly since many of those who claim to be on a spiritual path often seem unusually stupid to me.  But the broader point makes sense to me.  Buddha did more teaching the doctrines which were named after him than he could have had he spent his life preaching against war, or for vegetarianism, or for women’s rights.  Among other things, his work has lasted.

Enough of all that.  I’m going to go get a doughnut, and some really good coffee.

Thinking logistically, the way the Fed most logically is brought back in is that the government either buys back all the stock which was put out to the member banks in it, or creates enough new shares that it can acquire a controlling interest.

Here is the thing: the Fed is a private corporation owned by member banks.  Member banks buy into the corporation by purchasing shares of the Fed which are created for the purpose.  You have to be invited to buy the shares, and they are non-transferable normally, I don’t think.

I think if I go the next level of honesty, I’m not sure anyone outside the system is completely sure how it works.  It is more secretive than the Pentagon in many ways.  There are many aspects of its operations the government itself is not allowed to know, even though it creates and controls, directly or indirectly, the entire money supply.

The system is jaw dropping, when you really step back and look at it.  Why do so many left wing academics fail to see the problem, that of giant Wall Street banks controlling the money system?  I get that most of them are fucking idiots, but that is really taking it to the next level.

Trump is inconsistent and erratic.  He does not follow straight lines.  However, he has extremely good instincts, and usually comes to better solutions on hunches than most people do with supercomputers and a roomful of “experts”.  It is not inevitable he will do so here–far from it–but he’s beyond any doubt the best shot at reform we’ve had in many decades.  It’s been completely out of control since 1980 or so, and largely out of control since 1935, I think it was, when it used the largely manufactured event of the Great Depression to free itself from the Treasury.

Is it worth it?  To prevent 10,000 deaths?  100,000?  I don’t see it. 

And it’s quite possible this thing is so benign it could sweep over this country in a week and most of us would not even know we have been infected and built immunity to it.

To prevent this, we are ENGINEERING a short term depression, and what will likely be a 1-2 year recession.  As a result of government policy, and nothing else.  No other factors weigh in.  Wall Street is reacting to the government reactions, not to the disease.  They don’t care about that, any more than they care about the Rubella epidemic in Japan, or the West Nile virus wherever that is happening.

If we use my analogy of a sluice gate, and the flow of water, as the twin mechanisms of quarantine and the spread of infection respectively, then it become obvious that a closed sluice is no good.  We need a certain amount of water through to get to the other side.  We need a percentage of the population–the number I see is 60%–to have had the disease and developed immunity to it.

With this disease, many people will get it and develop immunity to it without ever even knowing they have had it.  From one standpoint–that of their own experience–this is ideal.  Yes, of course it makes them more infectious, but once a disease is on the march, the march must be completed.  Farr’s Law must be satisfied.  The Bell Curve needs to appear.

A vaccine will need to wait for the next appearance, and I suspect as with flus (there are, what, dozens if not hundreds of variants?), whatever iteration this thing presents will probably be slightly different than the one it is presenting today, diluting the effect of the vaccine.

There will clearly need to be a learning curve here with governments too, those with genuinely humanitarian intention, which is clearly not all of them, as to what policies best balance the physical health of their populations with their economic health.

We need to get smarter across the board in how we deal with these sorts of disruptions.  Rule one, I would submit, is that human life is frail and finite and that we all die.  It is reasonable and sane to do what we can to protect life, and to make it as healthy and comfortable as possible, but it is not, and never will be, worth the resources of a nation to save one life, or even a hundred.

Everything hangs in a variety of balances, and wisdom consists in finding the one which is best for all, and across all time domains.

It is a regrettable fact that the OBVIOUS  economic idea is generally forgotten or ignored, that all policies of any sort can have varying effects on differing people, and can have one effect in the short term, and another entirely over the long term.

The obvious example is so-called Keynesian economics, whereby governments use their powers to print and borrow money to create short term and local illusions of prosperity.  The money flows in, it is spent, and for a short time, things appear good.  Then it ends.  No matter how much money you spend, no matter how many people you give it to, it always ends.

And then things are worse, since natural market forces have been distorted by helicopter money.  I have often compared this to the effect of drinking salt water for thirst.

Something like 2 million Americans die every year.  A choice has to be made between them dying of some virus, and them dying of a heart attack waiting for a welfare check at the unemployment office.  There are no risk free options.

It echoed comments I heard from some BBC hack years ago talking about how in Cuba, when they give an evacuation order IT IS OBEYED, unlike in the decadent free world.  No, you fuck up there, you get whipped.  You almost got the sense that the commentator had some sort of spanking fetish, with Fidel Castro in a starring role.

I literally think Gavin Newsom–who, like all the contemporary crop of Democrats, is a fascist in temperament but not yet, quite, in power–wanted to copy and emulate the Communist Chinese.  He wants their system here.  He is not arresting anyone for dissent yet.  He is not actively censoring people, yet.  But the desire is unmistakably there, in my view.

And recall as well that this whole mess was created by the fact that that same Chinese Communist government DIDN’T WANT TO HEAR IT when a heroic doctor–he knew his life and freedom were on the line, in that den of fascist killers and sadists–started warning people that some serious shit was coming down the pike, and to take precautions and start sharing information so they could fight it together.  Yeah, that guy got locked up.  Then, if I recall the story, he was released, too late to do anything, and then he died of the coronavirus.

The impulse to use force is ever present in human nature.  But the OVERWHELMING majority of the time, it leads quickly to stupidity, ineffectiveness, and a worse situation overall for the group as a whole.  When you put a couple of “winners” out front–you know, like members of the Chinese Communist Party–you inevitably place everyone else in the category of loser.  Rather than raising the average level–which is more or less the American way–you raise a few at the expense of the many.  “Revolutions” then consist merely in replacing who is actually in charge.  The Chinese Revolution, so called, was of that sort.  You replaced one set of SOB’s with another, with the main difference in the degree of sophistry by means of which the latter rationalized their sadism and mass murder.

Returning to this country, though, we need to be very careful that our governments do not get the wrong ideas from all this.  As a nation, we are largely law abiding, and that makes things work.  Most people do their jobs, follow common sense laws, and this harmony helps all of us.  But compliance and conformity, as among others the German Nazis clearly showed, can be harnessed in the service of evil.

There may well come a time when some government or other in this country tries to enforce something like this, and shots get fired.  It’s not inconceivable that could happen this time, although I think that is a terrible idea and would oppose it strongly.  Let this play out, then let the Democrats pay, as I think they will, at the ballot box.

But there may come a time when that sort of thing is needed.  That is why we have guns.  That is why the people who used guns to earn us freedom from despotism made sure we would always have guns.  It is one of the most obvious gifts of the Constitution.

And this whole thing, like both of Obama’s terms, and Democrat calls to ban “assault rifles” (versus the other kind, whatever that might be), will act to put yet more guns into circulation, in addition to the something like one billion currently floating around America.  Our citizens own something like 25% of the total private firearms in the world.  I would take some pride in that statistic.

I remember hearing about the BILLIONS of money that would be lost, when all these government employees would not get paid, and would not contribute their share to the local economy.  And how were they going to SURVIVE, these poor people, many of whom made less than $100,000 a year, some of them even AFTER benefits?  The horror.  The horror.

Well, look at what our State governments are doing.  Look at California in particular.  If “shelter in place” (as you would do following a nuclear detonation in the fallout period) means what I think it does, not even the pizza delivery people are working.

Now, this affects the Information Workers, broadly speaking, much less than the service industry.  Most InfoWo’s (not a great shortening, but I like it for that reason, InWo’s would work too) of them do whatever they do on a computer, and in principle they could do it from a beach in Bora Bora, if the internet were reliable and fast enough.

But if you get tips, if you manage people who get tips, if you handle customer service, then you are well and truly fucked.  You may or may not get a check eventually, paid for with borrowed money which itself will create problems at some point, but you are fucked right now.

And it would, I think, be productive and useful to compare the hysteria over a one week government shut down, with the hysteria which is leading to the cessation of all public activity in spaces the size of California.

Both are driven by cynical, abusive, amoral, and frankly disgusting media outlets, pushing a political agenda which has nothing at all to do with the well being of ordinary Americans, which is not REALLY seeking to rectify any wrongs, fix any problems, or palliate and soothe any tears.  They don’t give a flying fuck about the “people”.  We are dogs to them.  Ignorant morons.  Rabble.  Something to be used, like a whore or condom, then cast aside practically, if not rhetorically.  Rhetorically, the story stays the same, and has across decades of failure and abuse.

Shutting down the government appeals to many of us.  I argued for it at the time, I think, although I can’t claim fully recollection.

But shutting down the world outside of home computers: that is ridiculous.

I’ve been posting this elsewhere, and thought I had posted it here, but apparently not.

I thought about the comment Brad Pitt, as Ben Rickert, made in “The Big Short”, that every 1% increase in unemployment leads to another 40,000 deaths.  I looked it up, and this actually seems to be in the range of the numbers most economists think most plausible, something between 30-40,000 deaths.  Most of them from heart attacks brought on by unbearable misery and stress, some strokes from the same cause, some suicides, some homicides, and some drug and alcohol overdoses.

Here is a BBC bit where they discuss these numbers: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p03kpvk2?fbclid=IwAR3Rp_qIS7rew55ULcvF4yxvr5-5gZtjUfCwtvoFWFxGe8RPha5YCH2cTWo

Unemployment, according to substantially ALL studies, has terrible effects psychologically.  It damages self esteem, breeds depression and substance abuse, and acts as a corrosive on families and communities.

So why are we doing this fucking experiment, in the face of something which only killed 10,000 people (maybe: I’m roughly doubling the official number) in China, a country of 1.5 BILLION?  Normal demographic prediction would say they will lose 250,000 dead to the flu this year.  If you figure 80% of the death happens between Dec. 1st and March 30th–which is a SWAG, but probably not too far off, since on all accounts flu is mainly a winter disease–then over those four months about 60,000 people are dying a month, or 15,000 a WEEK, or about 2,000 a DAY.

If you don’t think we are being played–by whom, how, and to what extent it is impossible of course to say–you are a fucking idiot.

But it has been obvious for some time that key power elites want Trump OUT, by any means necessary.  If they didn’t invent or start the virus, they damn well intend to USE it to crash our economy.  Self evidently, if it has a financial effect on them, it will mainly be to create opportunities.  They would have been early sellers of stocks.

For that reason I have argued that this media blitz in favor of hysterical and extraordinarily unprecedented and completely unnecessary measures, should be seen as an extension of the same mindset, and the same methods, which were used to impeach Trump on the basis of a telephone call he released the transcript to, and with regard to a crime the presumptive Democrat nominee CLEARLY committed.

For anyone with half a brain, all you need to do is look at how many powerful and well placed people hate Trump, to understand that 1) he is not one of them; and 2) he represents an existential threat to them.  This doesn’t tell you, exactly, who they are, but it does clearly tell you THAT they are, that they exist, that this guy is the one in a million shot we were blessed with to halt the descent of our nation into soft authoritarianism.