Month: May 2020

The risks of COVID-19 area reasonably well understood, as are treatment protocols.  Most people can have it, and not even know it.  Some will get pretty sick, like Sturgill Simpson seems to have done.  If you are old and a regular flu would also be likely to do you in, this thing will too.

But if you are under 60, exercising, have a reasonable weight, eat a decent diet, and have reasonably high levels of Vitamin D, particularly, then you can get this disease and shake it off pretty quickly, if you even notice at all.

Here’s my idea, which I will follow with what amounts to a thought experiment, or imaginary role playing: create infection centers, where people can volunteer to first be tested for antibodies, and if they have not had this thing yet, do a basic medical workup, testing inflammation levels and Vitamin D. If both come back OK, then the person is infected with this disease somehow, and told to go home for 14 days, then come back into a protected entrance and checked on by staff who have also already had the disease.  There, they verify that no live organisms remain in the person, who is then both immune to the disease and verified non-contagious.  Their name is then added to a list, but they are otherwise free to go.

If this were done long enough, no vaccine would be necessary.

But here is my thought experiment, which I will preface a bit.  You and I both know that treating people like adults and letting them freely assume their own level of acceptable risk is not something we do in this country. It seems to be uncommon in most other countries too.  So this idea will almost certainly be a non-starter in most places.

Here is my thought experiment, though: imagine if you will that a vaccine becomes available and is made mandatory for employment by most private businesses.  Imagine that this vaccine causes serious complications even in healthy people 2% of the time and death .04% of the time.  Imagine that the end totals on the virus itself wind up being death in .02% of people, and long term complications in 1%.

Imagine, in other words, that the VIRUS two times safer than the VACCINE, empirically.  What rationale could be offered for demanding the vaccine when immunity could be had more cheaply and with less actual risk?

What I would suggest to you is that most people who are neck deep in bullshit–which is to say most “experts”–focus not on the actual end result, but on the PROCESS of obtaining the result.  All of the steps in the process have to be something they are used to.  Nothing new.  Nothing imaginative, even if effective and better.  We have to plod from Step One to Step Last.

And here is the thing, too, with this whole thing: the virus could mutate.  Any vaccine developed might be useless within six months, just as any gained immunity might be useless.  This is more or less the state of things with the flu.  There are so many variants of the flu that vaccine creators more or less roll the dice very year and hope they get close.  Most year they kind of get it but not completely.  That is why despite the flu having visited us annually, to some greater or lesser extent, for many hundreds if not thousands of years, and despite massive vaccination campaigns, and despite prior planning, at least 30,000 die each and every year of the flu in this country alone, and usually at least 400,000 world wide.

So either acquired immunity will last, or it won’t.  If it won’t, then a vaccine won’t either.  If it does, then no vaccine is needed for anyone who has antibodies to it.

What you need to GRASP is that even though they are giving the game away, many, many politicians just can’t let this thing go, can’t let their people go, can’t tear down this wall.  So they are feeling us bullshit.  The media, by and large, is feeding us bullshit.

This is not a problem Americans are rolling up to solve together.  No, this is a problem for Republicans to solve, and Democrats to grandstand on and make use of.  It’s become that simple.

And ask yourself: if both options were on the table, how many governments would give you the choice of taking the vaccine or taking the disease?

They want this thing ambiguous, out there, lurking, hiding in corners, plotting dirty deeds in the darkness.  They don’t want to create knowns.  They don’t want disease clinics where you can just go get it over with.

Put starkly, many politicians, the world over, DON’T WANT THIS DISEASE TO END.  They don’t want your pain to end.  They don’t want a cure.  They want a cure to be “on the way”, forever.

I think of Delta Operator Dalton Fury (real name Nick (just kidding: I don’t know his real name and he would shoot me if I did and revealed it)).  Those guys had Osama Bin Laden trapped in a cave in Afghanistan.  They had a good plan to more or less take the back door to the caves, and get a solid kill on OBL, which more or less would have ended the vengeance element in the War on Terror.

His request was denied.  He was forced to include Afghan forces, for no doubt specious reasons, and the good plan he had he was not able execute, and Plan B just wasn’t good enough, as it ultimately enabled OBL to escape, postponing the war, really, indefinitely.  We are still fighting that particular war.  Our men and sometimes women are still dying.

Somebody wanted that war to last a good long time.  That CLIMATE–of fear, uncertainty and doubt–enabled a lot of operations politically that might have proven impossible otherwise.

I feel the same is happening here.  The “good” part of this, though, is that people are suffering where they live, in their homes, in their families.  There is nothing abstract about what is being done right now, and ultimately, I think, no patronizing and dishonest rationale which will stick the way the fear created by 9/11 did.

And I will ask, too: at what point are people going to start paying attention to the FACT that Tower 7, at least, was taken down with preplanted explosive charges, as proven by a detailed forensic investigation conducted by a professor of Forensic Structural Engineering?

Here is one link: https://www.ae911truth.org/wtc7

When the dealing is done, and the counting  over, about the only enthusiastic Democrats remaining will be skinny jeans wearing little bitches of indeterminate gender and sexuality,

Hell a bad economy will even hurt the illegals that the Left has fallen so deeply in love with. It will CERTAINLY hurt just about everyone who is not rich, certainly people of color, certainly the poor, working and middle classes, and certainly our medical system.

There are few people and few programs not helped by a surging economy and few people or programs not hurt by a devastated one.

And the Democrats have circled the wagons on the Forever Quarantine. They’ve 1) made it an issue and 2) made it THEIR issue.

This is the sort of mistake which is only possible for people who are utterly and completely emotionally and socially disconnected from the mass of humanity to make.  It requires functional if not yet fully clinical narcissism.

The battle for the future has begun. Our system of elections still seems to mostly work.  If we can fry the Democrats nationally-and their equivalents internationally-/in coming elections, then freedom stands a chance.

Here’s an ethical question for you: if you KNEW, for sure, both that freeing the American people to go back to work would cause the death of your 80 year old grandmother, AND that NOT reopening would cause 10,000 people in your State to lose their homes, 100 people to kill themselves, 100 to overdose on drugs, and 100,000to remain jobless for the next two years, which would you choose?

The “if we can save even one life” crowd really has to pick the first, and they HAVE.

But, to state the obvious, a lot more people die if we privilege self righteousness over common sense and practicality.

The only winners in the first scenario are grandma—who by the way is going to have a stroke and die 18 months from now—and people who get to feel morally superior for a time.  Literally everyone else loses, and we get a hundredfold more death.

It occurs to me that since the time of FDR, and the Great Propaganda (there was some sort of economic downturn too around then), the Democrats have been the party of the working poor in economic downturns.  Everyone has a grandparent or great grandparent who swears FDR saved their life.

And to be sure, that was their lived experience.  They weren’t and aren’t lying, but none of them REALLY understand economics, or how FDR and Hoover and the Fed and bad Congressional policy (the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which arguably helped create the Second World War) took what would have been a year or two downturn and turned it into a decade long downturn.

But what we are seeing NOW is that Republicans are the only one trying to put the working poor back to work.  We are the only ones trying to keep small businesses from failing.  And this is national.  It’s everywhere.  If you live in a State with a Democrat for Governor, they are dragging their feet.  If you have a Republican, by and large, they are on the front edge of reopening.

And here is the thing: I don’t even think Democrats have thought far enough ahead to have a plan for if the disease actually HAS disappeared.  If Georgia reopens and, NOTHING.  Florida, NOTHING.

I saw a headline: Texas sees record in deaths.  It was 58 deaths, versus the previous record of 50 set 2-3 weeks ago of 50.  This in a State of 28 million.  Average mortality in the country annually is very roughly 1 in a hundred, which would mean 280,000 people die in Texas of something every year, or over 20,000 a month.

Since this thing started, from the CDC’s website as of a couple days ago, 49,000 people died of COVID-19, and 808,000 from all causes.  That’s about 6% of all deaths.

For THAT we have destroyed we don’t know yet how many small businesses, how many dreams, how many lives?

I think the Democrats are going to lose the mantle of “Best Party in a Downturn”.  They are CAUSING the downturn, and not only doing so unapologetically, but actively denigrating, insulting, and more or less castigating as unwanted political dissidents anyone who disagrees with their policy.

What is MOST interesting about this is that the media is covering for them.  They aren’t reporting stories of heartache, loss and woe, and the DEMOCRATS GET THEIR NEWS FROM THAT MEDIA.

That means NO ONE IS TELLING THEM HOW BADLY THEY ARE FUCKING UP.  They haven’t figured it out yet.  They may not figure it out until November.

I just really, really hope Trump and Pence have a plan to forestall and to the extent possible eliminate the extensive voter fraud which will UNQUESTIONABLY be attempted.

But I’m not sure there will be enough cheating possible to stop this landslide.

And the effects will be lasting.  Once you awaken from a dream you’ve been in all your life, you don’t go back quickly, and don’t go back, EVER, the same way.  

Blind Obedience is not a Liberal virtue.

I think it is true that the propagandas of the First and Second World Wars, and probably the Civil War too, created a type in America of the Blind Patriot, the “my country, right or wrong”, but that type is really foreign to our history and ideals. 

Our history is that of obstreperousness, of rebellion, of asking questions, of demanding reasons, and of allowing and encouraging radical difference, as seen for example in the Amish and Mormons.  Much of our radical difference historically was religiously oriented, I think.

But I think I may keep the equation between Reaction, Leftism, and Retrogressivism.

I read Rose Magowan has now called the Democrats a cult.  This seems reasonable.  I’ve accused them of the same many times, and in many ways.

Ultimately, all evil and all sustained stupidity (which is to say an inability to see the world and the self as they are, which cause actions unsuited to the results supposedly sought; actually I could also say persistent actions working towards one rhetorical goal in theory, and a covert and nearly fully unconscious different and largely opposite goal in reality, which describes Leftist history) results from an inability to process the past.  Being unable to process the past means you are never present IN the present. If you are not in the present, you are disconnected from the future.  This means that you are never able to develop the ability to form truly appropriate and rational plans for truly appropriate, good, and rational goals.

What traumatized people do is react, and they react in unpredictable ways.  What a cult provides is a template for action that does not require emotional presence.

True progress involves encouraging the individual to be able to USE freedom productively for spiritual and emotional growth (which I would more or less consider the same thing), and to value freedom for the same reason they value the ability to expand in wisdom, flexibility, knowledge, kindness and love.

Regression, or Reaction, is a call to return to the slavery of really most civilizations of human history, where conformity was demanded, and you were simply handed a place at birth you were expected to occupy forever.  If you tried to get out of that place, you could expect violence.  Even the Indian caste system was like this.  In its details, it is quite horrible if you study it.  Even now there are many millions of Indians who have less rights, and less expectation for legal or social justice than did blacks in the Jim Crow South, or so I understand.  If things are improving, it is only recently, and only under the influence of European Liberal political ideals.

So look at California.  Look at a Governor threatening to punish the peasants for defying his (likely unlawful) orders.  It’s an irrational policy.  The threat is gone.  Georgia hospital admissions are going DOWN. Turns out not being locked in your home is GOOD for you.  Some of us have been saying this for some time.

And I as I keep saying: I really think this thing is gone.  I think it either has a lifespan, like that Israeli scientists claimed, or that it is gone for the same reasons flu is about now every year. 

No vaccine is needed to deal with this, and I don’t even think Herd Immunity is.

But the blind obedience to an idiotic and highly destructive government response is really indefensible.  Personally, I think all the Nazi memes are appropriate and regrettably accurate.

It doesn’t take great evil to support an evil regime: merely pettiness, obedience, and an exaggerated sense of moral grandeur sufficient to allow you to sit in judgement of your neighbors.

Why is the media not publishing human interest stories about the economic effect of this labor lockout on ordinary people?

What I feel will happen is they will resist opening as long as they can, to “save lives”, then when the full scale of what I think will truly be devastation is revealed, change the narrative to “this whole thing was Trump’s fault.”  I’m already seeing people trying to blame Trump for doing too little and too much, often literally in the same sentence.

It will take me a while to set down this part of my mind, and begin to develop true faith.  This fear in me–this constant looking and analyzing for threats and developing at least analytical plans of action–will not go quietly or easily.

But setting it as a goal is already a huge victory.

I’m going to offer a general idea: support groups, in whatever size is allowed where you are, for people suffering from the fear and isolation which has been imposed on us, and demanded of us.

And ponder this: if you have a group of, say, 10 people, you are most likely breaking either the law or the stated guidelines not wearing a mask.

Ponder what a mask does; it makes you anonymous.  Several times now I’ve seen people I knew but didn’t recognize because they had masks on.  The masks may vary, and may be personalized, but the eradication of your face–to the point that this would actually be a good time to commit robberies–remains.

And ponder that if you wanted to end the meeting with a group hug, or series of individual hugs, or both, you would again be violating either the law or the published guidelines.

We have entered a time, in AMERICA, where you literally risk committing a crime having a group meeting with your faces uncovered, and ending it with handshakes or hugs.

There is a terrible symbolism to this whole thing that makes it feel intentional and conscious.

And I will add, as I think I have before, “social distancing” has to be viewed as an aggravation of, exponentially–since everyone was talking about exponents until they stopped because their predictions failed completely–of existing social isolation, which has been much written about, and which is a key feature in our “epidemics” of suicide and drug overdose, either one of which will kill in an average year will kill nearly as many people have died thus far from COVID.

And we still don’t have the numbers on overdoses and suicides.  

Something has changed.  I don’t if it changed in me, or the world, or both.

But my gut is telling me to stop fighting, stop arguing, stop trying to control the world. I’ve always been able to rationalize to myself that all my words might influence someone, who in turn influences someone else, etc.

But I need to stop.

Here is the thing: my ideal for a long time has been the warrior.  But if you think about it, part of the warriors job–a BIG part of their job–is to be afraid.  All the time.

Where else would a passion for discipline come from?  Where else a passion for preparedness?  You have to assume someone else out there is training as hard or harder than you.

There is, to be sure, something noble and admirable about facing death and difficulty willingly, in the service of a larger cause.

But I think, for me, right now, my job is to cull fear out of me completely.  All of it.

The true forces of reaction in this world are those which look back to the Pharaohs, which look back to kings and queens, which remember fondly the universal practice of slavery the world over.

The Soviet Union was a reactionary project.  It took the tyranny of the Tsars and at least doubled.  Lenin killed more political prisoners in a year than all the Tsars had in the previous several hundred, and by a good margin, if memory serves.  The Russians, and the Kazakhs, and the Georgians and the inhabitants of a dozen other nations were enslaved by an omnipotent tyrant who governed in the name of the religion of “history” and “science”.

The Nazis looked back mythically, certainly, but their racism was grounded firmly in a specific and then current iteration of biological science and eugenics specifically.

“Utopian” projects which do not elevate and honor the individual are innately retrogressive and reactionary.  The individual is the sole unit of meaning, of action, of thought and perception, and of progress.

All paths to a better future have to provide a template for all individuals to improve themselves morally and spiritually, as individuals.  Everything else is reaction.  Everything else is truly, to use the dismally overused term, right wing.

By that standard, I am far left, in my respect for the individual.

And the French Revolution, by this standard, was also dismally right wing.

I won’t stick with this essentially arbitrary resassignment, but thought I would offer it once as a thought exercise.

The key question is this; are we empowering self organizing systems, by empowering individual people and all the implicate and deep order they provide; or are we REMOVING information from the system by limiting decisions and power to a small handful of individuals who are morally and intellectually among the worst the human species has to offer?

I posted this on Facebook;

This is worth the read, I think, if you are unfamiliar with this particular type of Personality Disorder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…/Borderline_personality_disorder

Personally, I think most Trump Derangement Syndrome falls into this category, which is characterized by vastly too much emotion for a given topic, idealization and demonization, intellectual and emotional instability–usually unrecognized by the person displaying it–and a fear of abandonment which leads to excessive dependence on a political creed and propaganda, even to the point of self harm through stupid ideas. There is also a more or less complete loss of empathy, which is something I’ve seen twice in the last ten minutes.

I’m not a trained psychologist but this is my take. It makes sense.