Author: White Whale

A few points I don’t have time to explore further at the moment.

1. What I think we esteem most in “primitive” tribal peoples, in addition to their sense of community, is the dignity they seem to have, the courage of equanimity in the face of trouble, difficulty and pain. Many of our own grandparents had or have it.  But mob culture is built on a nearly universal repudiation of courage, and the embrace of a generalized amorphous fear.

2. Denunciation is the virtue of the mob, whose only crime is not fitting in. I think of the hybrid Darkness in the most recent Stranger Things. Or The Blob. Or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Take your pick.

3. Loyalty, for mob people (to be differentiated from Mob people, who in theory have some form of virtue based on courage and genuine loyalty), is based on the expectation that their friends and associates will have the good sense never to be caught being different. If they are, then they are disowned. I actually saw this recently happen to someone I know. One foot over the line is all it takes.

4. You cannot belong to a mob. You merely participate. And participation is precisely equal to the dignity of personal courage and the will to pursue your own conception of virtue.

5. Our nation is built on the personal pursuit of individual virtue. This is the Eudaemonia Jefferson has in mind when he used the word happiness. Our system, as many have noted, is useless to cowards.

That was something you used to be able to say, and generate smiles.  Now you get cancelled.

There can be no Women’s Rights without Women.  And there can be no Rights without a government capable of being curbed, and a populace willing to cancel the cancelors.

There needs to be a backlash against the outrage mob.  We need more Joanne Rowlings.  She is no conservative, but she is willing to point out the obvious that not all purported “rights” are equal, and that some actively conflict with others.

That women exist is obvious, and that it is biological is obvious.  This is common sense, first week Biology.  It is science.  That these facts are inconvenient to lunatics whose sole aim in life is to cause chaos, pain and confusion should not hinder us a moment in declaring this.

You know what will be left standing when the lunatics win?  Nothing.  Nothing will be left standing.  A smoking plain of ashes is as far as they have thought, and as far as they have ever gotten.  Sometimes there is a well armed police force presiding over the smoking plain of cultural ashes, as in China, but that everything which gives life its savor is gone seems obvious to me.  People exist in Communist regimes.  They do not live.  Their bodies carry on for a time, then collapse.

Communism is Ugliness incarnate.  I would go so far as to say that wherever you see ugliness in public, you see something that is helping their cause.  When you see brutality, coarseness, unreason, shrieking, a lack of proportion and connection: all of these can be used.

George Floyd was a GODSEND to them.  Do you get this?  It made many of them happy.  They were not upset how that man died: they were ECSTATIC.  Most of them would pay good money to cause something like that to happen, which is why I was a conspiracy theorist on all that for a long time.

What I now think happened, by the way, is that Chauvin had used that hold on unruly guys on drugs before, and it had until that moment worked every time.  Recall that cops used to choke people out all the time until about the 1980’s.  It was a great technique, except when you killed the guy.

One thing to consider is that cops get in fights all the time.  There is every psychological reason to have reliable go-to techniques that work nearly every time.  Floyd was a big guy–about 6’5″–and if he was a bouncer he knew how to fight.  If they worked together, as alleged, Chauvin knew that.

Could Trump issue an Executive Order declaring all de facto declarations of Martial Law–or at least greatly restricted freedom of motion–illegal, unless ratified by the individual States legislature within 30 days?  A simple majority in both houses of their State legislatures would fit the bill.  Make the legislators go on record, one way or the other.

Here is the Bill of Rights: https://nccs.net/blogs/americas-founding-documents/bill-of-rights-amendments-1-10

The whole thing would undoubtedly end in court, but the 5th Amendment specifically prohibits anyone being “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law”.


And of course the Amendments passed in the Civil War period grant the Federal Government means of bypassing the 10th Amendment.

Trump should be filling stadiums around the country, energizing his audiences, filling them with hope and energy, and cruising to an easy victory on the strength of the best American economy ever.

Ponder deeply the lengths that elements in our government, that people who were born and raised as Americas, in America, are willing to go to to prevent Trump from winning.

Look at Newsom, in California, torturing 40 million people, locking down endlessly.  He may well cause more people to kill themselves than die in the entire nation in the entirety of this epidemic.  It would not surprise me a bit if 200,000 people killed themselves in California alone.  After all, at the BEGINNING of this whole thing, depression was actually one of the most important and major epidemics of illness on the planet, and certainly in this country.  Here’s a link from 6 years ago, and it has gotten worse since then in every way: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/charting-the-depths/201409/why-we-cant-stop-the-depression-epidemic

The numbers, as I recall them were somewhere around 40,000 drug overdoses and 40,000 suicides a year.  Suicides had overtaken car accidents as a cause of death a few years back.  Where do you think they are now?  They didn’t go DOWN.  We are being tortured.  We are being told the government has absolute control over the most intimate details of our lives, such as whether or not the people we pass in the street can see our faces.  We are being told they can take those “privileges” on a whim, for any reason.  We have no protections.  There are no legislatures out there, demanding that the governors do their jobs and ask for legislative ratification.  There are some good judges out there, restraining their governors, but not enough.

There is a sickness in the people doing this–and by this I mean the lockdown, when Sweden showed clearly that it was not necessary.  There is a sickness in the people who are telling already tortured children they can’t go back to school and see their friends, when the epidemic, formally, is over, and there is every reason not to hesitate one moment sending the primary school kids back, and little reason to worry about secondary and even the university level.  Where is the basic courage?  The basic impulse to human dignity?

No, regardless of what conspiracy theories you believe–and if you are seeing the ones I am, there are some truly disturbing ones–what is IN OUR FACES, and undeniable, is the sense of satisfaction that Trump and America haters are deriving from using the American people as a hostage to harm Trump.

It’s sickening, if you truly GET how evil this whole thing is.

I bought, back when “this” began, a copy of the movie “Until the End of the World”, by Wim Wenders.  I bought the Director’s Cut, because why not?  That’s the best realization of his vision.  I was going to watch it with my oldest, then she pointed out to me that the run time was 287 minutes, or not quite five hours.  Small wonder he couldn’t negotiate cinematic release.

But I just finished watching it.  It was very prescient in important ways.  He guessed, in 1990, about Google Maps, and really Google itself. 

Schematically, he juxtaposes the chaos and impersonality of urban civilization on a global scale.  They visit Venice, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Peking, and Tokyo.  Only in Japan do things calm down finally. 

Then, in what has now become a bit of cliche–but an understandable and needed one–they go to Australia, where they finally wind up with a bunch of aboriginals.

They go, I suppose, from virtually scripted chaos, to calm, to myth, to a perversion of myth, and finally back to the Logos of word, connection, and deep internal order.

Along the way, the Writer, who is cut out of the original version, or at least his narration, comments:

I’d always cherished the beginning of the Gospel of John: in the Beginning was the Word.  I began to fear that the Apocalypse would read “in the end were only images.”

Two of the main characters become addicted to images, and it is hard, now, not to see the process as eerily similar to iPhone addiction.

They are cured, in at least one case, by a return to the written word.

I will need to ponder all of this a bit more, but if I might comment on the aphorism “the media is the massage” there is an experiential difference between consuming images–which is what the internet consists in, mainly–and words, and particularly stories.  Complex stories.  Human stories.  Stories with meaning.

Connecting stories are really the glue of human culture.  When we long for the simplicity of the Aboriginals, we long for myths, for stories we all know, to which we can all relate.

In America, what connected us until recently was a shared story of “America”.  A shared myth of “America” which admittedly glossed over or omitted the ugly details, but which served to unify us, to give us a common reference point, a common language.

No good ever comes from destroying even an ugly past.  We all need common reference points, and losing those, we become lost.  To become lost, in the modern world, means to be subsumed in a mob, a mob which does not see us, which does not recognize us, which does not care about us.  All a mob provides is an animating energy that enlivens living corpses.

This movie is worth the watch.  This is not a review, but a riff on my perception of the filmmakers intent.  He got an awful lot of things right, including his latent portrayal of the necessity of, and often random fact of, human connection.

It makes you a bit sad, but in a good way.  I pray every day that I might help in some way to help all of us find a way out of this mess we have created for ourselves.

I’m trying to plan a trip in August, and am dumbstruck by the rules in some States. I just looked up New Mexico. They requires a 14 day quarantine or the duration of your stay, whichever is shorter. That is on the official website. Ponder that.

This for a disease which presents almost no risk to anyone who is not at serious risk of dying from the flu or something else each and every year, and which maxes out WITH those people at .4 percent, or 4 people in a thousand who CONTRACT it. One third of people seem to be immune, and nearly everyone who is healthy can get it without EVEN KNOWING IT.

The response, not the disease, is putting millions of good people and good families out of business for no substantive, no justifiable reason. If I am being a bit monotone on this, it is because the lives of literally most of the people on the ENTIRE PLANET are being disrupted, for a disease that is not dangerous for most of us.

Consider that countries where bubonic plague, leprosy, malaria, Dengue fever, and other diseases long conquered in the developing world are endemic, are destroying their agricultural sectors with idiotic restrictions that will cause mass misery and death by slow starvation.

If the idiocy, imbecility and utter reckless destructiveness of this plague of government is not the first thing you think about in the morning, you are either clueless or a better person than me. I admit both as honest possibilities.

It hit me this morning that I have been thinking about this whole thing wrong, or at least incompletely

Consider that we have a flu epidemic (epidemic being defined as more than 7% of deaths from a given and I guess new/transient cause, with the alternative being that we are in a cardiovascular disease epidemic continually) every year.  20-80-000 people die.  20% or so of the country gets the flu, despite mass vaccinations.

We are told “herd immunity” is 60-70% of the population getting the given disease and developing immunity.  But we stop most years at 20% with the flu.  Why?

From what I’m reading, about 52% of Americans get the flu vaccine each year.  And most years, the vaccine is about 50% effective: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/effectiveness-studies.htm

That means about 25% (half of half of Americans) of Americans are thought to get immunity from the vaccine.  25 plus 20 is 45%.  That leaves a gap of at least 15-30%.

Here is my suggestion: a healthy immune system conveys de facto immunity, particularly to types of viruses and bacterias to which the person has been exposed before.

At some point in our lives, all of us have been exposed to a flu virus.  It is inevitable.  Personally, I have had the flu once, but only once, and during one of the most stressful periods of my life (sales job for a brutal, fundamentally irrational, continually changing large American corporation, in which their own policies literally made it impossible for me to meet my goals with any amount of effort).  I don’t get flu vaccines.  Why would I?  I don’t get the flu.

In the Navy ships of America, France, and maybe some others, they found that even on close sustained exposure to symptomatic carriers of COVID-19 about a third of the people never contracted it.

Here is the thing; we are all exposed to bacteria and viruses every second of every day.  They are in the air, on every surface, on our skin, in our bodies.  But we don’t get sick most of the time.  Why?  Healthy immune systems.

And with regard to coronaviruses specifically, we have all been exposed to the first four on the list continually all our lives.  There is no reason to think most of us don’t start with a bit of immunity on first exposure.

So to the list of every total of people who have had a given disease and recovered, you have to add all those who have HEALTHY IMMUNE SYSTEMS.  Let us say this is, on the low side, one third of all Americans, particularly the young.

That means from DAY ONE 115 million Americans have de facto Herd Immunity to all but the most virulent bugs, and COVID-19 is clearly not one of those.  It may be worse than most flus, but not by much.

And consider in this regard too the seeming close connection between World War 1 and the Spanish Flu.  Why were our soldiers called Dough Boys?  Because they lived on donuts.  They were malnourished, and then stuck in ships at sea for long periods of time where they got little fresh air or exercise.

State-side, the war effort probably brought on nutritional (food) shortages, such that immune boosting staples like meat were in shorter supply than normal.

The net effect of all of this was to diminish the natural number of people who would have contributed to our national Herd Immunity, such that THAT YEAR an extraordinary number of people died.  It hasn’t happened since.  Why?  We’ve never been that malnourished since.

This, at least, is a tenable hypothesis.

And I will add that it is is disgusting and infuriating to me to watch people like Dr. Fauci crap all over the notions of professional diligence and competence.  I don’t know if he is on the make as Judy Mikovits alleges  but that he has acted incompetently, unprofessionally, and seemingly with no regard AT ALL for the effects of the lockdowns is obvious.

His unwarranted and indefensible opposition to HCQ alone should disqualify him from his office and respect from anyone who doesn’t have a financial investment in his work.

Why am I not reading what I just wrote in a number of places?  Why are we not seeing the “professionals” recommending sun, exercise, play, Vitamin D, and inflammation reducing diets?

In my view, this lockdown is one of the largest crimes ever perpetrated on the WORLD, at least outside of wartime.  It is literally a peacetime war on freedom, prosperity, and public health.

It occurs to me to comment that anyone who wants to defend the continuation of this lockdown when the epidemic–defined as 7% of death from a given cause–has been over for more than a month, is really forced to privilege potential future evils over present, real, and ubiquitous ones.  They say that what MIGHT happen is vastly more important than what IS happening.

And self evidently, most of them make this process easy for themselves by IGNORING present evils, including the risk of 125 million people starving to death.  To put it mildly, that is a LOT of people, a lot of pain, a lot of misery, and something that HONEST people who feel honest compassion should be deeply worried about.

That most Democrats could not care less, well, we’ve been over this road, haven’t we?  The outlines are clear enough.

Here is an example of the sort of general summation that makes me happy: if we cannot achieve Herd Immunity naturally, then no vaccine is possible.

Vaccines only work if exposure causes immunity lasting long enough to get through at least a given period. But if exposure leads to endogenous immunity, then the vaccines is not formally needed, and particularly not for diseases which are not that dangerous for most people, which is the case with COVID-19.

A vaccine would be for the elderly, and would only be more use than harm if it were proven safe through prolonged and honest testing, not the rabbit race we can expect from all the labs dashing through every sort of traditional restraint in the hope of cashing in on trillions of dollars.

The best way out of this whole thing is to do nothing. Let everyone under 55 back to work tomorrow, with no masks and no social distancing. Keep a certain capacity in the hospitals open for overflow, but otherwise restart all normal work.

One month, or at most two or so, and we’re done. We should have done this back in April, but as I’ve said, a lot of people are ENJOYING the misery of the world.

And to be clear, I see cowards and fools in every direction. Trump is an exception, but he is one of the only ones. I don’t expect anyone to have this courage. But it is the right path. I would bet my own life on it without hesitation, and would be quite willing to get injected with this thing tomorrow.

If we cannot achieve Herd Immunity, then no vaccine is possible.

Now that appeals to my sensibilities.  That is the sort of summation I love.