For me, I am going to use this time to try and remember what it feels like to see the sun, the rain, people as they are, and to appreciate this world.
When everyone is losing their mind, you need people going in the other direction.
Like all efforts at wit it omits realities, overshortens the story, and is a little bit of a lie.
But I would suggest that how TRUE it is should make all good people uneasy.
We need to open up, at least those under 55, and do it now. If Herd Immunity cannot be obtained, at least our individual immune systems will be maintained. The longer we lock down, the more dangerous the common cold becomes.
And I wonder: do we carry permanent antibodies to the cold, or do we simply fight it off continually? I suspect the latter. And if that is the case, that is the only long term solution to COVID.
Thank you China. Fucking assholes. Although it may be us too. It may be Fauci and others, as alleged. This may be our virus, that they simply let loose. It might be as reasonable to call this the Deep State Virus as the China or Wuhan Virus.
But we may never, ever be as safe again as we were.
To this should be added, though, that Farr’s Law seems to apply to all epidemics. They may come through repeatedly, but each one has a beginning, a crescendo, and an eventual end. That is how it always works. Even HIV was like that, although the curve crossed a decade or more.
It is small wonder that no small number of people have fallen into zealotry. It is irrational, factually and logically, but not emotionally. Masks are their way out. They are the way out for the society from this disease, and for them personally what allows them to walk out of their homes without feeling unreasoning terror from an enemy that may be absent everywhere, but which we can’t see, so it is impossible to know.
Just about everyone is scared. This makes herd movements, like BLM, much easier to facilitate. I don’t know how carefully and to what extent, say, the CIA might have planned these operations, but that they noticed that the climate was ripe for riots distracting from the effects of the lockdown seems obvious.
Lifting the fog will show the costs of the lockdowns. It is like we are at a highwater mark, and as the tides fade, we will see what was concealed below. I suspect it is a LOT of misery, most of it hidden in impoverished and desperate homes.
All of the Forgotten People have been particularly forgotten in all this. Urban blacks could reasonably see BLM as something which speaks to them, but it really doesn’t. If you look at the pictures, it is unemployed white people who are not trying to go back to work, and certainly not working to get the black community back to work. Most of them seem to think that all of them can extort a living from the “government”, which is to say the rest of us.
And remember this is being done while all governments everywhere are under severe financial strain from all of this.
We will start to be able to see more clearly in a month or two.
I continue to believe that Trump needs to start getting numbers out about the cost of the lockdowns, on America’s emotional health, her economy, and even her physical health.
Lockdowns seem to accomplish little but making things a bit worse, compared to less stringent measures, like simply encouraging people to stay home if they can. If you stay home for five months, then when you get out, your immune system is weak. It makes you more vulnerable both to COVID and to any of a dozen other diseases out there.
If the resulting increases in disease–from relative easing–are then used as a reason to reimplement lockdowns, you have a vicious cycle whose main outcomes will be trauma and an on-going degradation in all aspects of public health. That is what is going on on California, where the fog and the night seem particularly intense.
And as I’ve said, if Herd Immunity is not attainable, then no vaccine is possible. I would stipulate this as an absolute principle, since the two are connected in principle. Cures may be possible, and certainly palliatives, which exist already.
But as an out of the box idea, what if the requirement to come back to school or work were not a vaccination, but an Inflammation and Vitamin D test? Low inflammation and high Vitamin D levels equate to relative resistance to the disease. You almost certainly won’t die of it, and are unlikely even to be sickened significantly by it. This would apply at all ages up to perhaps 70, which is to say pretty much the entirety of the working age population.
The interesting aspect of this idea is that inflammation, according to most health experts, is really the key element in substantially all health ailments. It is implicated in heart disease, cancer, stroke, autoimmune disorders and overall immune health.
What if, to combat this disease, we implemented policies which extended the national longevity by 5-10 years, and in so doing cut overall healthcare costs precipitously? After all, we are all our own best doctors.
That would be interesting.
I’ve commented from time to time about a comment Erich Fromm made that many people–he probably meant many “bourgeoisie”–would suffer nervous breakdowns if their daily paper were interrupted for an extended period.
Now, this whole thing has no doubt nothing but increase our emotional dependence on technology, but even so, we all need daily routines. We need them for mental health. This is, I think, psychologically very clear.
Work and school are where we see our friends who are not our “coming over and hanging out in the kitchen” friends. And most Americans, any more, don’t have many of the latter any more, seemingly, anyway. This comedian is right on the money. I remember this too.
So work is where we see people we know. It’s where the feeling of isolation–enabled by the wealth that enables the space and the divorces and the family all over the country and world–is reduced.
And school of course for kids is where they see their friends, joke around in the back of class, share lunch together, run around in gym class or recess.
We need these things. Not having them is stressful, and stress kills.
And what about the grandparents? In the BEST of times many of them are isolated. Their kids don’t visit them often enough. They don’t see their grandkids remotely as often as they would like.
How do you think things are now? I have to believe a large percentage–I am going to SWAG half–would EAGERLY risk death to get hugs from their little people, without a moments hesitation.
But they can’t. Their governors won’t let them. In many States, like California, they won’t hardly let them do anything.
This breeds despair, and despair breeds ill health, and ill health makes everyone more likely to die from COVID–and for that matter, literally everything else.
There is no 100% safe path forward. This is the core reality, and perhaps this is the best way for Trump to frame it. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SAFETY IS NOT POSSIBLE.
But the costs of the lockdown are rising, while the deaths from the disease are falling. Surely if there is an inflection point, a time for change, it is NOW.
What Trump needs, I think, is an honest inventory of the costs: the job losses, the suicides, the foreclosures, the evictions, the drug overdoses, the reports of clinical depression in adults and particularly in children, reports on the immunosuppressive effects of stress and isolation and uncertainty, and say something like “look, I can’t promise you that nobody will die in a general reopening. But I can promise you that people are dying NOW from the shutdown. You have death on the one hand and death on the other. It’s ugly. It’s awful. It’s not unprecedented, but it’s been a long, long time. But on one hand you have both death and the dignity and relief of freedom, and on the other you have death and the inhuman demand that people die alone. We Americans are not cowards. We were not bred to cowardice, and cowardice is not our destiny. We need to move boldly to reopen, and do so quickly, and knowing that there may be some casualties, but knowing that NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, those numbers will keep adding up until we get through this thing. This thing cannot be avoided, and it should no longer be postponed. We know a lot about this thing now, including great methods of treatment, and we need to get our economy restarted. We owe it to our children, and we owe it to ourselves.”
And as I keep saying, I really, really think the suicide number–especially if combined with the drug overdose number–will be higher in the past 4 months than the COVID numbers were. I may be wrong. I hope I am wrong, but that this thing has pushed a lot of people over the edge seems obvious. They lost their jobs, their ability to socialize, and were subjected to relentless daily fear and uncertainty that, as some have argued, was tantamount to psychological torture. What do you think that did to people who were already wondering daily if it was all worth it? As I’ve pointed out, something like 25 million Americans before this thing were depressive, if not actively depressed.
I may have made that number up, but it was a lot. You figure out actual suicides and drug overdoses, then figure out how many attempts were made per actual suicide and how many survived drug overdoses there were (most cops carry the overdose drug everywhere, as do many nurses, I hear, since they have become so common); then you have how many people have thought about suicide, which is about ten times that number. Then you have how many people are depressive and at risk of suicidal thoughts. The end result is large. I’ve done it before and don’t have time to do it again.
I will comment with regard to me, I have some tough days. The particular path I have chosen is steep and hard. Listening to “Magic and Mystery in Tibet” was therapeutic for me, because it helped me reframe what is humanly possible.
But I am slowly healing. The knot–the big one–is slowly untangling. That was the thing that made it virtually necessary that I get drunk every so often, and usually at least once a week. Opening that knot has created a lot of pain, but it is useful pain, and I can now see it as temporary. It is moving, flowing, and that means eventual cessation.
It would be good if the faces of supporters were popping up the whole time, even if only from webcams. Where possible, perhaps actual physical groups could be set up for him to address virtually. That’s a lot less effort by the Secret Service, and less demand on his schedule. 100 people here, 200 there. A bar in Green Bay Wisconsin. That sounds perhaps trifling, but I think it would do him good, and certainly contribute to his campaign. Right now, he just needs to continue forward motion. He’s a bit stuck right now, as indeed are all of us. That is a national epidemic too.
He’s off his game right now for a lot of reasons. This disease has created a lot of variables which are hard to game out. If he comes down too hard for a strong reopening then he risks getting blamed if a lot of people die.
At the same time, I think opposing the Democrats in their Forever Shutdown is a winning strategy.
The problem is that people are just scared right now. They are traumatized. They are shell shocked.
This has helped Biden, perhaps even in reality, although I assume the polling is as usual skewed to Democrats, with the goal being as usual to make up the difference through cheating.
If the current situation is Trump, then why not prefer the alternative? That is likely as far as many voters have gotten. That such people should not be voters is obvious, but it is the regrettable reality.
The situation is dynamic. It’s hard to know where all this is going.
But the evictions are going to start hitting soon. The foreclosures. The banks will have a lot of stress put on them, which means the financial system. We have merely been postponing the reckoning.
Trump needs to get ahead of all this, by pointing out that, while some response was needed, that he is the guy who understands the need of all Americans to get back to normal, and specifically back to work. There are something like 30-40 million unemployed Americans right now, and it is hard to see how Democrats are doing anything but trying to crap on them. They are talking quadrillion dollar reparations–which would create Zimbabwe level inflation, rendering the payouts nugatory–while something like 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 five Americans isn’t even allowed to work.
Psychologically, Trump needs audiences. He needs to be talking to people all the time. So I think many short conferences is a good short term solution. I think 1-2 daily mini-rallies, staged virtually, is a good short term solution.
And I think in many States actual rallies should be possible soon. Europe is opening up, and God knows they are the Gold Standard of the Left, or at least when it suits their purposes.
And Sweden continues to be a good model. If the severity of the shutdown has an effect, it is most likely that the more severe it is, the worse the outcomes on every metric, including eventual death from the disease.
But I think being able to address groups at least 5 days a week would be therapeutic for Trump, who is likely a bit shell shocked himself. It’s been quite a ride so far, but I would think a thirst to put the bastards to bed would be more than adequate as a motivation to carry on. Our country is under siege by lunatics, and final victory is perhaps no more than one election away.
So I would say to the President “keep the faith, and find a way to keep on doing what you do so well, and which is so energizing both for you and for your audiences. Keep a positive vision of hope and healing, and say it as often as possible. We need hope. We need a way out of this oppressive climate of fear, so much of which has been created by the media as an indirect way to attack Trump.”
His opponents are willing to destroy America to stop a man whose main interest is in creating jobs and optimism. This needs to be made clear to everyone.
The psychological lesions are going to be devastating. Our kids have been scared out of their minds by a relatively benign virus for 4-5 months now. Our adults are going to start having nervous breakdowns.
And for what? For what? Take California. They have 6,448 deaths. They have not quite 40 million people. And according to the CDC, they had AT LEAST 203,300 deaths in 2017. I added all the causes of death up, and will note that they seem to have changed how they do the accounting. I know for the flu numbers, specifically, they seem to have altered their method to artificially decrease them since this whole thing began.
I will note as well that nationally suicide is a leading cause of death, at least among those under 55 or so. It is not listed as one of the causes of death, making it likely it is hidden in accidents and firearms deaths, which is really pretty disingenuous. These people are crooks, and should not be trusted. Trump figured that out. They were misreporting the COVID deaths, so he changed the reporting system to cut them out of the loop.
But 203300/12 equals about 17,000. In a normal California month 17,000 people are expected to die. Every month of the year. This means that if I multiply up March, April, May, June, and July (5 months), then the overall expected mortality will be 85,000. 6448 works out to right at 7% of that.
For that, children are forbidden from playing on playgrounds, families forbidden from visiting beaches, businesses forced into bankruptcy, the suicide rate probably AT LEAST doubled, rates of anxiety and panic and depressive disorders through the roof, and an entire society traumatized by induced terror.
Do you GET yet that this whole thing is nothing but a monstrous crime, an unfunny joke, being played out by sociopaths, for the sole purpose of damaging the first honest president we have had in at least a generation?
Pray for Trump. Pray for sanity. Pray for us all.