If I have not shared it, this presentation by Greg Glassman is lucid and useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgnukiqovaA&t=15s
Not only would 1,000 new cases not be scary, I ask: why is this even a headline? Is it a headline for any reason other than that our Governor is DESTROYING OUR ECONOMY over this thing?
About 40,000 people in our State die a month from some cause or other. Are we going to burn our house down because for a time we might be adding 100 more to that? Even a thousand more to that? Hell, even 10,000 to that
?Every one of those deaths is a tragedy to those affected. But so too is not being able to put food on the table, and tossing and turning all night every night because you can’t pay the bills, and you have NO IDEA when this nightmare will end.
As things stand, most of our medical centers and hospitals are largely empty. We are 2-3 weeks “behind Italy”, which was the basis for all this craziness. And what? NOTHING. NOTHING. Or almost nothing. 1,000 cases in a State of over 4 million is not much.
I continue to have a basic question: until a cure is found, the only way out of this epidemic–or ANY epidemic–is for enough people to get the disease and acquire immunity that transmission stops spontaneously.
Since this is the only way most epidemics end, why are we not working towards that end? A certain number of people need to die. This is brutal math, but I didn’t invent it. I’m just the messenger. Until those people die, we have just hit the Pause button.
And that Pause button has an ENORMOUS cost. Without risking much, I can tell you perhaps a third of the mortgage payments in our State were not made this month. Can you begin to count the long term cost of even ten percent of the mortgages in the State?
What about the long term costs of children being exposed to relentless daily arguing they can’t escape from because their parents can’t pay their bills or put enough food on the table?
Anyone who might die because we had a shortage of respirators was on their way out anyway. Those of you who wanted Socialized Medicine, if you have two brain cells to rub together, realize that ALL nations which have socialized medicine have committees who decide at what point to discontinue life saving treatments. It is inevitable, unless you decide adding one day to the life of one person is worth the collected resources of the nation.
So comparing the economic catastrophe being engineered out there right now–led by self important and for now self congratulatory Leftists–to the necessary triage, the hard triage, of who do we treat and who do we not, I think the question is fairly easy: error on the side of having a few too many patients, and a few excess deaths, and get both the economy and the disease moving again.
We are not Italy: most of our elderly are in quarantine, in effect, most of the time anyway. We are not China, which locked everyone up together and let them die together, then lied about their death numbers.
The emerging evidence seems to me clear that because not even a fraction of the needed testing has been done, that our data on this thing is terrible. We are both underestimating its infectiousness and overestimating its lethality.
This column from a Stanford Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology remains relevent: https://www.statnews.com/…/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as…/
Here is what I honestly think: all the manic energy which has animated the people losing their fucking minds over having a President they didn’t want, who talks back to them the same way they talk to him, all that energy has gone into the narrative of longer, harder quarantines.
You can almost hear them saying “spank me government, I’ve been naughty. No a little harder. I’ve been REALLY naughty”.
It’s weird. It’s pathological. It’s masochistic, but then again the anti-American, anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight narrative has always been masochistic, because a great many of the people pushing it are many or all of those things. It is Self Loathing, writ large, which seeks to crash and burn, and take the world with it.
It is Hitler, in the last stages of the war, choosing the destruction of Germany for reasons of pure vanity.
This period of American history will be written about for many years to come. Hundreds of books will be published. Hundred of conferences will be convened.
And most of them will realize that HUGE mistakes were made, and if we ever become sane as a nation (I’m not sure we ever have been, although we’ve clearly been much sanER in many respects), then this will be freely admitted, as will the social psychodynamic causes.
This world could be free, happy, and prosperous. We have so much that could go right if there just weren’t so many fucking lunatics. It’s probably less than 10,000 people on the whole planet, but they continue daily to try and grab the controls and crash the plane.
And they may succeed. Many nations which could have endured many millenia failed because they failed to teach basic spirituality to their children. Not obedience: spirituality.
The enemies of everything good on this planet are intelligent, motivated, and very rich. They can, as far as I can see, only be successful opposed at the nation-state level. And that requires non-corrupt, non-complicit leadership. Trump is perhaps the first one to fit that bill in at least half a century in America, and maybe much longer. This is why he has been opposed by everyone since the get-go.
And as I continue to say, I value the caliber of the man based on the firepower and aggression and terror in the faces of his enemies.
There is a rumor floating around that there will soon be mass arrests. I don’t believe it, because the history of the good people doing the right thing against the odds is very poor. It happens here and there, but almost never in aggregate or under stress. Most people are weak and stupid.
And even our toughest soldiers are often moral cowards. They prefer to follow orders rather than their own conscience. They fail to see just how broken our system is.
How, then, should we view the Era of Half Attention?
What happens to people who die addicted to their iPhones? Where does their consciousness go? I ask because it is hard to say where it was. Is there even an intact, whole person there to lose?
Who are we, when we live lives devoid of sustained silence, peace, and articulate and genuine humor? Take away all the masks, what is left?
There are many, many questions I have–aspects I am curious about–about what the long term consequences of this Great Pause will be. There will be good and bad economic aspects, and good and bad social aspects.
Will people be more patient, coming out? If so, how long will that last? I suspect lives are being permanently changed right now, both for the better and for the worse. More horror. More joy and kindness. More life.
I realized this morning, doing my version of yoga (I’m like Danny DeVito in Get Shorty: I don’t get anything right off the menu), that the primal terror I felt as an infant manifests as a fear of the world, which of course as it filters up into my rational mind translates to a fear of the future and present.
And typing, endlessly, on the internet, is how I dispel this fear. It is like an irrational magical amulet, by means of which I attempt to cast spells, preventing the inevitable.
In a sense, it is not irrational. It takes a consistent fear, and grounds it. My fingers hit the keyboard for long periods of time, usually daily. The panic and fear are managed.
But this whole thing is much larger than I have been able to ground. I’ve had to use other tools. And having used those other tools I’m looking back at this and wondering if this is really how I want to spend the rest of my life. Where are my books? My concrete accomplishments?
I think I am slowly learning how to live, and learning how to live necessarily means learning how to be comfortable with fear and confusion. And with the profound helplessness which in reality really does define us. We can control some things, but most things we cannot.
It’s really impossible to draw the lines, but for myself, what I feel is that I am a person divided. I need to stop that.
In the 20’s they were fighting a Civil War, if I recall my history.
In the late 1930’s they were invaded by the Japanese, who committed all sorts of atrocities. Over and above the Rape of Nanking there were things like the 400,000 Chinese killed looking for people who supported Doolittle when he and his men landed there after their raid on Tokyo.
And they went straight from the Japanese to Mao. Mao–who by the way depended on “experts” for his agricultural policies–killed some 50 million Chinese in 3 years in the 1959-1961 timeframe.
But most Chinese were food insecure well into the 1980’s, as I understand it. The system never really worked.
And of course you had the Cultural Revolution from about 1966 to 1976, in which frothy mouthed children, who had been programmed into zombie-like frenzies of emotional cannibalism and murder, attempted to destroy Chinese CULTURE outright. And the Tibetans were thrown in there too. Hundreds or thousands of monasteries were destroyed. Priceless and irreplaceable books were burned, in exactly the same way Nazis burned them, or so I believe.
If you were a Chinese born more or less ANY time in the past hundred years, at some time in your life you endured horrific suffering.
Now we are reading that perhaps up to 23 million Chinese may have died already from COVID-19 or related causes (hunger perhaps being one of them, again, with it being very possible people have literally been starving to death in some of these quarantined cities). This, from the fact that seemingly there are 23 million less cell phone accounts now than 4 months ago, and since the repressive and unjust Chinese Communist Party uses those phones to track people. They would not easily give up their easy access to social information, to their version of the Number of the Beast (with which, to be clear, most of the world is also already marked, making microchips largely superfluous).
I personally wonder if the Chinese government did not simply order everyone to stay home no matter what, even if people fell ill, even if the young were infecting the elderly locked in with them. I wonder of millions of people did not die in their tiny apartments, miserable, hidden by their government, who came and picked up the bodies in the middle of the night, for cremation in places many miles from where any journalist would have been allowed to go.
What evil would be beyond a government capable of the crimes which the Chinese Communist Party has already manifestly and inarguably committed? There is no low too low, no cynicism too painful or beyond the pale, no evil which could not be justified both by the apologetics of “revolution”, and the rejection of “bourgeois morality”.
This world contains much horror in it. It is a horror for a bug to be crushed and eaten by a bird, but it happens billions or trillions of times a day. It is a horror for one person to cause another to die in pain, but history is filled with it.
History is filled with kindness, too, but I feel less of it. But of course, “history” is largely stories of war. The peacetime, happy stories come and go and leave little trace. They should of course not be forgotten, though, even so. It is useful to value times of peace and plenty, though. Far too few of us do.
As I think the Tao Te Ching taught, there is a place of truth which is neither beautiful nor ugly, but somehow beyond both. It is what we don’t and can’t see when we become fixated on one or the other, or even the opposition between them. This is not to rationalize evil, but rather to allow into our hearts the only sort of healing and nourishment that matters and which truly works.
He’s right.
I will note he was on many accounts the model for Jack Ryan, from the Tom Clancy books. Certainly, he did spook stuff behind the scenes for multiple US Administrations.
I read in my Men’s Health last night that, according to recent studies, 7 out of 10 Americans don’t have $1,000 in their savings account. 70%.
And the people making this quarantine policy are probably mainly concerned about which stocks have lost value, and which they might need to sell. They have NO FUCKING CLUE.
And I don’t think people get how interconnected everything is. If I lose my job and can’t pay my rent, then my landlord can’t pay somebody else. Maybe she can’t pay the bank, and the bank eventually goes under. All the money is lost or has to be paid out by the FDIC. The FDIC, in turn, is largely a confidence game. They only have about 5% of the money they need to cover our financial system. Congress can now, apparently, vote them an infinite amount, so I’m leaving my money for now in the bank, but this whole thing will be inflationary.
Inflation, in turn, vitiates the value of everything lenders do, and we live in a lending economy. And it goes on and on and on. The longer this labor lockout–that is more or less what it is, with the rich doing the locking out for their own perceived benefit, and at the cost of the poor–lasts, the harder it gets to deal with.
Death we can deal with. Give or take, about 200,000 Americans die a month of something. Another 200,000 in a year is a statistical blip that will be horrible for those involved, but not horrible for everyone. A larger and worse, a GREATER Depression, will affect all households, all kitchens, all lives.
This thing really needs to end. Pushing it past, at the latest, the middle of April–when we will have numbers if this thing is blowing up, or–as I expect since the labor lockout was too early, and too severe–our hospitals are actually losing money and laying off personnel for lack of work, would be foolish, cruel, and historically unprecedented in its stupidity, short-sightedness and callousness.
I suspect the healthcare workers who get it and died die of a combination of the disease, overwork, and waiting far too long to rest after they get it, or for that matter to be tested.
People who already have an immunity at least to COVID-19 would not need masks, I don’t think. Maybe I am missing something, and certainly there will be other diseases present, but I personally have never observed ordinary ER personnel wearing masks until this thing.
And actually, as far as that goes, various State governments could ask for volunteer “quarantine lifters”, who agree to be infected in order to go back to work once they clear it out. The advantage of this would be rapid treatment. Everyone would know right away, and rest, and do everything correctly.
When I read about people being arrested–I think that’s what I saw, but they may have been just broken up–for having coronavirus parties, I wonder how we can remain free in this country. Our leaders have no imagination, and neither, seemingly, do the police they depend on to execute their idiotic orders.
I don’t think I mentioned it here, but one of the movies which influenced me most when I was that certain age (20-ish) was the movie Bliss, from Australia. It’s a wild ride, but Barry Otto does a great job. It was quite controversial at the time–you will see why if you watch it–particularly since I think the Australian version of PBS or something close to it funded it. It may have even been shown on TV. That part I’m not sure about.
Anyway, having made a short story long, the long and short of that movie is that, as Thoreau said, the majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
For myself, I continue to worry about the businesses that will fail, and the jobs it will take with them. I worry about the already poor and marginal. I know for myself I’ve had period where it hurt to go to the grocery store because I couldn’t afford anything I wanted, and of course many people can’t even do that, so they are going to soup kitchens or the equivalent. Our own government has forced us into Depression era conditions. For what, we will find out, but I really hope everyone gets really really pissed and never forgets if it is largely for nothing.
But again, having circled the farm, I find my sense of time improving. I’m less impatient, and staying with things longer. I am very very certainly technology addicted and finding that weaning myself is something very needed for my happiness: now, middle term and very certainly long term.
It’s ironic, but the Fear of Missing Out bred by the endless loops and notifications and what not causes us, frequently, to miss out on whatever is in front of us.
I could perhaps call our world, with everybody staring at phones all day, and TV’s and computers, and tablets, the Era of Half Attention. Half attention everywhere you look, with everyone you look at, who is not at that moment in the middle of a specific task.
I am realizing this clearly for myself. I am alone. I live alone and although I have places I go, really no fixed office or regular set of people I see regularly outside of bars, and I’m trying to largely give that up too.
But being alone has value too. It is a learned skill. It is a skill I am learning. Put more accurately: I’m learning to be alone and enjoy it, without feeling I am missing anything important, and without pining for that special someone who, in my case, really would make me unhappy unless they truly were special.
And I won’t become a hermit. All my plans remain intact. But someone who does not NEED people is at an intrinsic advantage in reading them, and in helping them.
And not NEEDING people–rather, taking pleasure in their company, being happy in their company, but not being desperate for it–is really just proactively and intelligently taking away one more thing you could lose which would make you miserable. It’s a misstatement to say that a big element of Buddhism is getting rid of everything you love, but it’s not fully wrong either. Most monastic traditions are like that. Certainly Christianity is. Or was, in any event, and still is in some places.
Here is my guess: they made the same mistake Italy did, of quarantining the young with the old. This actually worsened the situation. It was bad policy that they don’t now want to admit.
One of the main reasons the Spanish flu was so deadly was that it got into confined quarters. If the disease is already inside the gates, a quarantine essentially guarantees everyone in that space gets it. And if old are in the mix, many of them die.