Author: White Whale

These shutdowns are the largest government attack on private prosperity and societal mental health in human history.

Given that this disease presents nearly zero danger to those under 55, nearly everything which has been imposed on us has been completely unnecessary. Nobody needed to tell the sickly and infirm to stay home, and the only two viable paths out of this were and remain Herd Immunity–which is to say the young and healthy getting this thing in large enough numbers that it stops circulating–or a viable vaccine.

There are three major red flags with the vaccine approach:

1) No vaccine has ever been created for ANY Coronavirus, despite the fact that four of them cause the common cold, and much effort has been expended across many decades curing–or preventing–the common cold.

2) No safe vaccine has ever been created in less than five years or so, and that is really, really fast. Most of them have taken 10-15 years. There are a host of potential side effects which can take years to manifest. By and large, for anyone who is healthy under 60-65 it would almost certainly be safer getting injected under supervision with the virus itself until 2024 or so.

3) Even where relatively safe vaccines have been created for viruses, they are only partially effective, and have to changed continually. The flu vaccine is the most obvious example. It is perhaps 40% effective in a good year, which means that it either does nothing for 60% of the people, or–worse, obviously–MAKES THEM SICK. I know many, many people who only get the flu when they get the vaccine, all of them in the military, since once they are out, they stop taking those damned shots.

Nobody in this country seems to be thinking clearly about this whole thing. We are driving people into food banks, ruining people who have been sober for a long time, pushing people into suicide and drug overdoses, shortening the lives of our elderly through loneliness and depression and anxiety, and doing all this with NO PLAN AT ALL.

And let’s not forget all the people who are going to be evicted for not paying rent or foreclosed on for not paying morgages, that they can’t pay because they can’t work because their local autocrats (usually Democrats) WILL NOT LET THEM WORK.

And many people who are making their rent somehow can’t pay their power bills. I said from the outset that the black community as a whole is being hurt vastly more by the lockdowns than by anything their local PD is or is not doing. That is a distraction. What is the reality is closed, empty hotels downtown, boards over nearly everything, few people on the sidewalk even at noon, and perhaps hundreds of businesses that will never reopen, and never again employ ANYONE.

Slowing the spread is not a plan. It is a talking point. A propaganda meme, which appeases those who have responded as desired to the fear porn, but it is not a plan. Protecting hospital capacity is a plan, but that plan was accomplished back in April.

Otherwise, epidemics come in Bell Curves, which means they start slow, increase rapidly, peak, then diminish. We can thank the Chinese for gifting us this thing, most likely, in perpetuity, but here is the kicker: TOTAL MORTALITY IN MOST OF THE WORLD IS NOT UP. We do not have more total people dying. The people who are “dying of COVID-19” (we are told) would have died in any other year of the flu, of a stroke, of pneumonia, of a heart attack, or of some other viral infection.

This whole thing is mass madness or, as one California based child psychiatrist termed it “delusional psychosis.”

There is no question voting Trump is the only way this disaster does not get worse, very fast, and last for a very, very long time. I think most analysts think if Joe Biden gets elected, we are looking at a full blown 1930’s style Depression, which is COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY.

 For the millionth time in the past 15 or so years, I was accused of “watching Fox News” again today.  In truth, I DON’T watch Fox news, other than an occasional repost of Tucker Carlson, but it has long seemed to me that most of the people on there are center-left, as I see it.  Tucker Carlson is a moderate.  He is simply representing, as well as he can–which in the event is ably–sanity.  What is left of it, in any event, that he is trying to protect.

But more generally, left wingers–the screaming Blue Meeanies–are UNABLE to watch anything not intended for them.  If you are trying to debate them, and post something from a non-approved source, they just condemn the source completely, and never even look at it.  

I have long struggled with how to respond to this essentially childish response.

It occurred to me yesterday that what they are REALLY saying is “You are citing a source I would make disappear if I could.  I would censor it.  I would shut those people up.”

It would be reasonable to point this out, then ask them WHY such a sentiment is other than willfully ignorant, illiberal, and grotesquely intolerant, incurious and solipsistic.

Why CHOOSE to live in any echo chamber?  Why not open the door once in a while to see what else is out there, who else is out there?  And specifically, FACTS CAN BE DISCUSSED.  If a conservative–or for that matter a left wing–website says something which is either demonstrably false, or demonstrably unproven or unlikely, then this is the sort of thing educated and well meaning people can debate productively.  

Learning to digest information intelligently is one of the primary POINTS of education, particularly higher education; that, and to learn some sort of useful skill.  Where the Liberal Arts are concerned, essentially the ONLY purpose is to build a broad minded, curious, generally informed personality which can and does perform well in a wide variety of environments.  That they are failing in this task is obvious.

 I’ve never been much of a peddler of hope.  It’s not hard to say “everything will be fine” when I have no idea.  Certainly, Trump COULD be elected.  He certainly has the momentum.  Biden is obviously a creepy crook, who may have molested his daughter.  But that may not matter.  Our media is gone daddy gone.  Much of our government is gone daddy gone.  The love is gone.

But what I DO believe in is principle and duty.  Duty is more important than happiness, because it is the spine of happiness.  People who have retained their sanity in this madness have a moral duty to speak THE truth (not their truth: much of this is obvious and really not subject to multiple interpretations, so much as slavish devotion to patent lies on the one side, and confused and bewildered people on the other wondering what the hell is happening).

Speakers of the truth are keepers of a flame of sorts.  They are, in Orwell’s writing, the revolutionaries, the TRUE revolutionaries, in world’s given over to envenomed and rabid sheep.

When you can do nothing else, speak the truth, as you see it, after having taken the time, and processed the pain of difference–where it exists–of actually looking with your own eyes.

I can’t know the future any more than you can, other than by predicting my own behavior, which will not vary until compelled to by force.  The madness is not universal, even if it is widespread.  The craziness is not insuperable.  Even now, I think, many people are waking, blinking their eyes, and wondering how the knives got in their hands, without being able to recall just what Trump and his supporters did to merit their rage.

I suppose I could put it this way: believing sincerely in absolute principles is one way of predicting your own future, because you are creating in advance, not the concrete circumstances of it, but your reaction to it.

It is hard, very hard, to see how we escape this period of induced psychosis.  So much time, so much effort, so much MONEY has gone into its creation.  The Left has developed a talent for making suckers out of genuinely good people, and then slowly turning them into reflexive drones, by changing the behavior, while altering none of the words.

We may lose our freedom.  Our prosperity may be destroyed–pointlessly, needlessly.

But we need to bear up anyway.  We need to face the wind of the future as well as we can, no doubt in most of our cases imperfectly, with fear in our hearts, with doubt and confusion, anger and terror, but face it nonetheless, with as much dignity and humanity as we can.  This, in this time, is authentic spirituality, in my view. We can and should do so much better, but it is a start.  I will never trust any “spiritual teacher” unable to see and speak the obvious, and right now that is most of them.

 This whole mask thing reminds me of the low fat fad which, despite a lack of evidence, was pushed from the top down.  They got to Reagan’s Surgeon General, money was to be made with low fat shit, and America promptly got much fatter.

Just wear masks.  It is so simple.  Just eat less fat.  It is so simple.

As I do from time to time, I will quote Mencken: “For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, clear and wrong.”

And people, not unnaturally I think, tend to suppose that even if a given simple answer is not fully right, that it is at least TRENDING in the right direction.  There is no real basis for this belief.

Ponder that one of the most popular diet fads of our time is the ketogenic diet, where MOST of your calories come from fat.  It is literally the polar opposite of what they were pushing in the 80’s and 90’s, because what they found was that when you eliminate fat and fatty foods, what you have left are carbs that spike blood sugar, and make it vastly harder to resist impulse eating.  If you eat carbs with fat, you stay full longer, and when you eat enough protein, you also feel full longer.  If you snack on low fat potato chips, you want more and more and more and more.  Then you are fat, and your “experts” have failed you, even though you tried to listen to them.

Likewise with masks: there are many reasons to think they might make things WORSE.  It is quite possible that they are not only useless in preventing viral transmission, but that on the whole, they make it WORSE.  

As one obvious example, the Swedes and Dutch have pointed out that masks create a false sense of security.  Viruses are about the size of the water droplets in the vapor you fog up a mirror with.  If you can breathe, they are coming in and out.  Yes, if you cough up sputum it will stop that, but that is not the main mechanism of transmission: it is a little invisible cloud around you, that goes out strongly perhaps 3′, and in attenuated form perhaps 5′.  This means physical distancing works, due to physics, basic physics.  It also means that if you are in that cloud, feeling safe because you are wearing a mask, that you are MORE likely to be infected, since you have effectively done NOTHING to protect yourself.

And I really think many diseases are made more likely with masks.  Many children are having problems with various forms of rashes.  If you reuse your mask, you risk picking up other viruses and bacteria everywhere, when you leave it on a table, or your car seat, or your gym bag.

And I think masks are stressful.  Like the dutiful drones so many of them are, the citizens of the world have vaguely accustomed themselves to this new imposition, which is made softer and easier by the terror of this not-very-dangerous-to-most-of-us disease which has been conditioned in them.

But none of this is normal, even if we are being conditioned to treat it as the “new normal”.  Having a mask on will NEVER be as comfortable as not having one on, and that leads to stress, and stress makes your immune system weaker.

And many gyms are closed down around the country, and where they are open, if masks are mandated ,many people are not going.  Physical exercise is CLEARLY an important factor in immune health, so anything that diminishes exercise increases the risk of disease.

I could go on, but unless all of our experts fail us both intellectually and in terms of moral courage (did you read about this Danish mask study that the fucking cowards at 3 major medical journals refuse to publish, despite its methodological rigor and very current relevance?) we will have a good approximation of the truth eventually.

In the meantime, I wonder if some sort of Stockholm Syndrome is not setting in, where the sheer SCALE of the sacrifices we are being asked to make by people not citing science, but using maximum social and political pressure, might not cause many people to conclude that the sacrifices must be worth it, since otherwise they would have been asked to make them.  Most people, in my view, are nowhere near cynical enough to understand how the world really works.

 I actually had moments where I felt glad to be alive yesterday.  It was remarkable. I think I can see how one could learn to process life in a calm and pleasing way.

The more I think about it, I think the first and foremost purpose of life is learning to enjoy it.  Everything good comes from that.  Happy people are naturally more connected, more generous, more open, and in the end, more inspirational and uplifting, in a world which has all the things, but little soul.

 It occurs to me to comment/speculate that the primary relationship most Americans–and most members of most developed nations and indeed now many undeveloped ones–have,  is the one they have with their screens.

Your TV, your smart phone, your computer: who are you without those?  How much anxiety would you feel if they were all suddenly taken away?  

The screen is the intermediary between you and your friends, if you are typical.  Of course you meet them, see them, talk with them, play with them.  But friends are temporary: the screen is forever.

And the screen is mutable.  It demands your compliance and conformity, but promises no stability, no constancy, and indeed one of its “charms” is its very randomness and unpredictability.

I’ve seen commentators as diverse as Yul Brenner, Orson Welles, and G. Edward Griffin, comment that we are born alone and die alone, and that whatever companionship we find in the middle is a gift.

But the screen is constant, is it not?  Is this a solution of sorts to the interminable and very ancient human problem of betrayal, of misunderstanding, of change and death?  

I think much of our world is suffering from some varying combination of Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and not infrequently de facto sociopathy.

People are not real, to to many of us.

 Charlie Sheen, but without the intuitive sense of proportion, innate dignity, and ability to delay gratification.

 It hit me this morning, doing my Wim Hof Breathing–which likely also has some Sanskrit name–that gratitude is prayer.

This it occurred to me that all four of the Four Greats–equanimity, joy, compassion and love–are also forms of prayer.  If you feel calm, that is prayer.  If you feel happy, that is prayer too.

 It seems both empirically and logically obvious that people who never develop the symptoms of COVID-19 are never really involved in its spread.  This means that anyone who has never been “sick” with COVID-19–who has not had at least a briefly elevated temperature, a dry cough, and certain shortness of breath–has never had any reason to wear a mask.

What is madness about our response, and one more thing which is radically new, is that we are all being asked to act, at all times, as if we were sick but don’t know it yet.  We are asked to wear masks, not to protect ourselves–because that would then be a matter of personal choice–but a a matter of social conscience.  But this exercise is pointless, demonstrably, for 99.9% of us, each and every day.  If we are sick, we know it, and there is every reason to stay home.  That part makes sense and has always made sense.  But if we are not sick and have never been sick, every moment of discomfort we have endured has been pointless, at least if we believe the data that masks are useless as PPE, and are only being recommended as Source Protection.

What spreads this or any other virus is little viruses in your breath, which have replicated in your lungs or elsewhere in your body, and which mingle with the moisture in your breathing.  If you are in close contact with someone long enough, a certain number of these things lodge in your lungs, and then if allowed to by your immune system, replicate.

If you imagine fogging up a mirror with your breath, and all the water droplets which make up that fog being mingled with viruses the same size or smaller, you get an idea.  We are all surrounded by a small cloud at all times.

But at least half the people who test positive for the presence of COVID-19 never develop symptoms.  None of those people, most likely, are EVER contagious, because the “viral load”, as it is called, never develops sufficiently in you for you to spread it to others.  Only symptomatic and–most importantly–PRE-symptomatic (people in whom the virus is incubating rapidly) people can spread this thing.

Every winter some 60 million people “get” the flu.  But those are only the people with symptoms.  There is every reason to believe that hundreds of millions of us are exposed every flu season, and that if we treated flu the way we are treating COVID-19, we could create the same mass panic every winter.

This thing is causing less than ten percent of the deaths, and overall mortality in 2020 is on track to be about what it was in 2019 and 2018.  There is no mass dying going on.  There is not even that much sickness, when you consider that some portion of the populace is sick with something all the time.