Month: March 2020

https://www.dailywire.com/news/sichel-before-you-have-an-opinion-on-coronavirus-ask-yourself-these-questions?fbclid=IwAR3oLcmdg3hUndPN95MUfn3c_MH18FR1tIXs780xqiW99D4c1PpZ12PqvCs

“1. To those who support cities shutting down businesses or even ordering residents to shelter in place, as San Francisco has done, do you acknowledge just how much pain this will create in many people’s lives? At what point of economic pain would you say we are going too far? You agree there is a point at which the government is going too far to save one life, or even a thousand lives.

After all, you don’t think all speed limits should be 10 MPH, except for emergency vehicles.

Where is that point for you in this situation? How bad will the economy – and thus people’s lives – have to get?

2. As I understand it, the worst-case scenario, at least in the West, is something like what Italy is experiencing: too many elderly people getting the virus in a compact period of time, stretching the medical system past its breaking point. In the U.S., then, why isn’t the top priority to specifically protect older Americans? Why isn’t the loudest message from government officials for seniors to self-quarantine, as it appears to be in the United Kingdom? Wouldn’t a measure like this better address the “bend the curve” challenge than telling the entire population to stay inside, thus shutting down the economy?

3. Is there a plan? If there is, what is it? How and when will we know if the plan is working? If the plan is to manage COVID-19’s spread in order to protect the medical system, how will shutting down cities for a few weeks or months meaningfully help? What will happen when life returns towards normalcy? Won’t the virus return with a vengeance when life begins to return to normal? Then, won’t we be in the same position we are now, only poorer and thus less equipped to handle a medical crisis?

4. I know you are not allowed to use the word “flu” in this discussion, but: The H1N1 swine flu originated and broke out in the United States in spring 2009. By the end of that pandemic, about a year later, the CDC says the swine flu “caused 60.8 million illnesses, 273,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in the U.S.” Those numbers marked the end of that pandemic. We are still at the beginning of COVID-19, so the numbers are not apples to apples. But in the beginning of H1N1, did we react nearly as severely as we are reacting now to COVID-19? Why not? I suspect one reason is because we have seen Italy’s medical system become overwhelmed by COVID-19. If that is the main reason, is shutting down our economy the right way to try to avoid that situation? Why is our reaction to COVID-19, seven weeks since the first U.S. case, so disproportionately severe compared to our reaction to the swine flu seven weeks in? Or is it not disproportionate? It’s a fair question.”

This is an argument I developed a couple days ago.  Close all the businesses in the even zip codes, and leave all those in odd zip codes open.  If it is a bar or restaurant, only serve people who live first in the even zip codes, then the odd.  A three stage would be 1-3, 4-6, 7-0, if that makes sense in any given city.

Or do it alphabetically.  It doesn’t matter.  You keep some segment of the economy going, and are able to give an end date to the people you are asking to stay home, which is vital. If you know when an ordeal is going to end–running 26.2 miles–it is vastly easier than “run until we say stop.”

Yes, I get that there are unknowns.  There are ALWAYS fucking unknowns. What is NOT an unknown is that our ECONOMY IS GOING TO HIT THE CRAPPER HARD if we stay on this idiotic path.

And I would suggest that never in human history has there been so much panic over a disease which is over quickly for most people, and in many of whom it doesn’t even have symptoms.  In every culture around the world for all of history, the old have periodically died in larger numbers from illnesses of various sorts.  But even there, we can protect our elderly.  We just ask them to stay home.

This whole thing will be seen as madness soon.  But the Trump era has been filled with madness.  Not from him–he is one of the few sane men in public politics.  But from people like Chuck Schumer, who in the space of a week accused Trump of doing too much and then too little.  WHILE they were criticizing his response for being insufficient he and Nancy were trying to undo his travel ban.  This shit is UNBELIEVABLE. 

I ask again: how fucking stupid are most Americans?  I don’t think we know yet.

Could Trump bring the Fed back in-house?  Make it report to the Secretary of the Treasury, as it did when it was created? 

Could he fire everyone he suspects of working to undermine his administration and the well being of the American people?

Can he do radical bureaucratic reorganizations to unsettle and disrupt the Deep State?

Can we not offer very attractive enticements to bring substantially all medical manufacturing back to our shores, at least, and our country itself, ideally?  I would even be OK with Mexico, since the best long term solution to illegal immigration is better economic conditions south of the border.  Hell people may even go home voluntarily.  I wonder, actually, if some are going home to avoid the coronavirus here.

I had a troubled sleep last night, and saw something like the Number of the Beast, which is a wrist watch which monitors everything about you, all the time, and which has the power to influence your mood.  A reliable system for turning people towards darkness and conformity.

Here is a conspiracy theory for you: COVID-19 was created in a US lab, and released in China, Iran, Italy and the United States by members of the Deep State.  China, in blaming us, may have realized they didn’t create the virus.  They have likely been assuming they did, and been working overtime to cover it up.  But perhaps one of their researchers found a fingerprint pointing unmistakably to us, which is why one of their ministers publicly blamed us and Xi threatened to withhold needed medicines.

The end aim was a Hail Mary to stop Trump, in everything.  They wanted to destroy the US economy, but felt first they needed to contain our remaining nation-state enemies, which for the most part are Iran and China.  They weakened them, then brought the thing here.  They consciously undermined Trump’s travel ban by bringing back the cruise ship carriers against Trump’s wishes and intent.  Then the CDC accidentally-on-purpose fucked up the testing long enough for the virus to spread.

Here’s the thing about diseases: an agent can leave them on a counter in a bathroom, or a bar, or on a door handle, or in the back of a cab or Uber, and nobody will ever know.  It is completely untraceable.

But the net effect is not just going to be a wrecked US economy, but all the powers that will be gained by a government in emergency.  Governments in emergencies never behave well, and panicked people often submit to it.  I think there is a good chance someone around him will try and infect Trump with COVID-19, in what can only be described as an effort at assassination.  It would be a clean hit, if they can get away with it.

My view is that the panic is overwrought.  Italy has the second oldest population in the world (after Japan), and most of them live with extended families.  In the US, we are much younger, and our old live in rest homes, or at least in homes of their own, where they more or less self sequester naturally most of the time, just due to reduced mobility. 

We also have much more space, in most of the US.  Rural and suburban areas are not even remotely concentrated the way most of Europe is.

This thing will kill vastly less than the 30-80,000 people who will die from the flu this year.  Our flu numbers, actually, will most likely be down, too, since meetings are being banned, and everyone is scrubbing continuously with soap and hand sanitizer.

But last year at this time there were 250-500,000 people, give or take, who were or had been hospitalized during the course of the annual flu epidemic which strikes most of the country each and every year.

The only thing possibly worse about this epidemic is a shortage of ICU ventilators for double pneumonias.  But as I say, most of the people who would be filling those beds are half quarantined all the time, and fully quarantined now.  The overflow will not happen, in my view.

What WILL happen is we go in three weeks from a record stock market to a recession.  Thousands of businesses will close permanently with as little as two weeks lost revenue.

This panic has been sold to us by the media, in collaboration with people whose names we may never know, if Trump does not get reelected, and not get righteously ANGRY at all the people in our own government who want to see the American Experiment fail, in favor of gray, loveless, rotten and evil authoritarianism, into the murky mists of the foreseeable future.

This breaks my vow, I will call it, but I needed to say this, and Facebook was the wrong place.