Moderates United

Like a giant fog has descended on the continent.  And it is dark.  It feels hard to me to say anything intelligent about what is possible right now.

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.

I was reading just now about Sweden: based on antibody tests, they do not seem to be developing Herd Immunity.  I don’t know exactly how this works, but it could be that any immunity conveyed by having the disease is partial or even non-existent.  Obviously, some people get the flu every year.  Maybe COVID is like that.  I have not seen it discussed much, but I think all viruses mutate often if not continuously.  There may be many strains already.

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.

This should be a goal.

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.

I really think Trump needs to be addressing small audiences each and every day, virtually if possible, but live, via Zoom or whatever people are using.  500  people in Columbus, Ohio one day, then 700 in San Diego the next.  Local Republicans can set all this up.  He needs an audience every day.

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.

I think most Americans are on the edge, and many are slipping over.  We are either not allowed in public, or have to go out unable to see any smiling faces.  Policies change on whims, and few or none of them are REALLY rooted in science.  Masks, for instance, used anywhere outside confined spaces.

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.

The fact that LA/Hollywood has a restaurant or at least occasional “club” where they eat people has bothered me since I read about it.  It’s in the open.

There is a scene in this movie–https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA5HcfVUYlo&t=7543s—

where she shows scenes of what is purportedly graphic fake cannibalism, attended by Will Farell and Lada Gaga, among others, as orchestrated as a provocative art project by Marina Abramaovic, but the idea has to be put out there that the scenes were legitimate and something out of a disgusting and unwatchable horror movie.

If they are eating human beings–and being cagey about where are getting them, with pulling homeless people, of whom there are PLENTY in LA, right off the street one of the options–then why not drink their blood?  Why not rape children? 

All of this darkens my world.  That is to the bad.  It is my task to react creatively and positively.  I continue all my work, and am trying to fill my mind with positive images and ideas.

But I really think if these people get control again–and Joe Biden is ONE OF THEM, with Obama merely having been a figure head of sorts, who was happy enough to be manipulated, but not genuinely evil himself–then there is no end to the list of awful things that will begin to happen, and relatively quickly.  They won’t risk another Donald Trump, or another Populist resurgence.  All the power they have will be quickly put to use making effective dissent by anyone impossible.

It’s a scary time.  But in the same way that I have lost 25 pounds while America has been gaining weight, I plan to calm myself down while everyone else is losing their minds.

So I got to thinking about Rocky Horror again, and wound up again with the unpleasant Meatlloaf scenes. You know, the scene where he is killed then the scene where he is eaten.

And this brought to mind a QAnon video “QAnon, the Deep State, and something”, made by a Dutch woman. I likely posted it here.

Well, she mentions something called “The Cannibal Club”.  I didn’t look it up for the precise reason that I thought it was legit.

Well, here you go: https://www.cannibalclub.org/

Joke?  Not funny.

I think our elites are “hiding” in increasingly plain sight.  I think there is a bit of a psychopathic thrill in committing crimes in plain sight.  I remember watching the original Twin Peaks and the murderer had a body in his trunk. He offers to show a cop who has pulled him over his trunk but the cop decides he’s got the wrong guy.

For my purposes-and my purposes are my own sanity and goodness and those of the planet as a whole, as well as personal loyalty with few limits to those in my life—I am going to do my best to write on the future as if all or most of the people caught in these chains want and even deserve release.  Not everyone is uncomfortable with evil, but I think many wind up that way, after initial curiosity.

There has to be a path back home. There has to be a way home. I am a mercurial, inconstant wanderer, but I feel I need to support this as well as I can.

Me, personally, I would trade the farm to get the tapes she supposedly has. I would grant her immunity from prosecution, certainly, but I would also PAY her hundreds of millions of dollars. I would put her in the Witness Protection Program or—if she refused it as I likely would if I were her– pay for her security the rest of her life.

She IS the house of cards. She can make the whole thing fall. That’s worth nearly anything.

Yes, of course she is a sick psychopath. So what? She’s not a senior member of our government. She is not enabling any abuse right now and quite possibly never will again.  She is a symptom. We need to target the disease.

Bottom line: I would not play hard ball. I would be Santa Claus IF she brings the names and evidence.

I was thinking about the hippies and their lifestyle and ideas were really oriented around the world destroying itself, around them dying young. You live for the moment when the world is going up in flames any time now.

They were not supposed to get old. Yet here they are, trying to make sense of it. They can’t and do t want to give up their pasts, but they never gave any thought to the future. What to do? It’s a real problem, that most have manifestly not solved.

But I continue to think of the Rocky Horror Picture Show as an ideal for them of sorts. You live recklessly for a time. When the inevitable reckoning comes you go back in time and do it again. No adulting is ever needed.

And I would call the orgy in the pool Sexual Amorphism. That’s about where we are now. There is no stable, identifiable sexual energy. There is no “the love of a woman and a man”.  It’s all ephemeral, depersonalized, emotionally detached. It’s oriented around momentary sensations with people who mean nothing to you, who can come and go unnoticed. No one needs a name.

It would be a slight distortion, but only slight, to say that the whole hippie rebellion was a call for parenting, for adulting on the part of society, to set them straight. And it never appeared.  They got lost and were never found.

It’s a new world. The genuine injustices they opposed are now almost completely gone. But it’s all they have, so they keep resurrecting “racism” as a sort of patched up zombie whose only job is to remind them of when they were relevant, all those years ago, and to give them the revivified “love” now of self righteous and sanctimonious anger.

Actual living blacks are just a stage prop in all this. They need a token black here and there, but that this is a white production, being staged by and for white people, is depressingly obvious.

You would be hard pressed to find a health professional of any sort who did not believe that deep, calm, diaphragmatic/ belly breathing is good for you. Shallow breathing is correlated with anxiety. It reflects it, certainly, but arguably the habit supports it as well.  When I do my HRV training I take slow deep breaths and my heart rate decreases, my HRV goes up, and I am very sure my blood pressure goes down as well. There is now an FDA approved blood pressure treatment device that relies on this principle.

You know what interferes with deep, relaxed breathing? Masks. I would go so far as to call them ancillary anxiety support devices.

Everywhere you look, it is OBVIOUS that the overarching goal at least for nearly all Democrats is not to end this lockdown by ending the disease, but to prolong the lockdown by prolonging the fear.

Masks are a visible symbol saying “there is something to fear”. They are certainly that, even if in nearly 100% of the daily interactions around the world the DISEASE IS NOT EVEN PRESENT.

But they also directly support fear.

For me, if it is obvious to me I’m dealing with someone who works somewhere who just doesn’t want to get in trouble—with their employer or the State—I will wear a mask out of courtesy to that.

But I leave my nose exposed, and when possible my mouth.  I have reduced my short take to this: I’m not sick, so I can’t infect anyone. The “asymptomatic carrier” is a unicorn, Either I am coughing and should be home, or the only way I can infect you is sustained contact at a distance close enough to kiss you. And I don’t care if you have it. I don’t care if I’m exposed. I’m doing a LOT to protect t my health and refuse to live in fear of something invisible and largely harmless.

And if you want me to help you alleviate your own fear, sorry pal: not my job, not my problem.