Moderates United

https://fee.org/articles/why-sweden-succeeded-in-flattening-the-curve-and-new-york-failed/?utm_source=zapier&fbclid=IwAR1Nt9yNMHMX6sQ4f3IP7E5DB6sSTKB12T0qX4xIC3yiprrxeqLd0M7VYXg

I’m so glad Sweden stuck to their guns.

Isolation, lack of exercise, despair: all make people sick by themselves, and almost certainly contribute to disease susceptibility.

Robust health is a sort of vaccine.  Feeling like a trapped and solitary rat is the opposite.

And in New York of course they did everything wrong.

I’m like many people, trying to read through the literature, and acquaint myself with a field I’ve never really had much interest in.

As I understand it, a viral infection is a virus getting into your system somehow, they using your “biological energy”, for want of a better phrase, to replicate.  Fighting off this intruder takes up a lot of body resources, as does the virus, which is what makes you “sick”.

If you think about it, though, a healthy immune system that works decisively and quickly is the equivalent to a vaccination for every known disease, and most unknown diseases.

Here is what I am wondering: if someone tests positive for COVID-19 antibodies, is it really even accurate to say they “had” or “have” it?  Does that not just mean that their immune system is doing what it is supposed to do?

If you tested any of us at random for 50 different diseases, would we not have antibodies for some of them at all times, since we are fighting them off successfully?

I don’t know the answer.  

Why not change the name of the Washington Redskins, even though the logo was developed proudly by a Native American, who liked the name?

Why not change the Texas Rangers?

Atlanta Braves?

Florida Seminoles?

Cleveland Indians?

Why not rename Washington?  State and D.C.?  Why not rename the District of Columbia? 

How about Columbus, Ohio?  Columbus, Indiana?  Every other one?

Jefferson Cities, and Jefferson Counties?

How renaming Indiana, which got its name from all the Indians in it? 

And what about all the cities and counties everywhere named for Indians?  Kentucky is an Indian word.  So too I think are Minnesota and Milwaukee and Michigan and Cuyahoga Falls.

Sacramento means Sacrament and references specifically Spanish Catholicism.  Look at all the wrongs they committed over the centuries.

Do you get the idea?  Somewhere you just have to say SHUT UP.  Fix something today.  Go feed a homeless person, or tutor a kid who lives in the ghetto.  Stop pretending that this stupid shit is doing anything but give you an excuse to be the asshole you were born to be.

My youngest was asking me tonight “why not wear a mask”?  It might help.  We don’t know.  It’s not that big a deal.  When she makes it, I have a hard time saying no, but as I think about it there are a lot of reasons, many of which I have articulated at length here.

What I would stipulate, at root, is that freedom means being able to say no for any reason, or no reason at all.  No hard scientific data supports mask wearing, the way it is done by the public.  It has mild utility as source protection for symptomatic people, but almost no use in preventing the spread of the disease, i.e. as PPE.  If you want to avoid the disease, your best play is to stay away from people and ideally to stay home.  Talk to no strangers in public.   That is more or less foolproof.  Everything else is a calculated risk, which includes the risk of weakening your immune system from inactivity.

And I would suggest the “why not” argument is a slippery slope.  Many people like me argued, when the first crazies started talking about deflecting attention from their long term failures with respect to the black community by destroying statues, that if they pulled down Lee or Stonewall Jackson, they would soon be pulling down Washington and Jefferson. 

We were mocked.  But we were right.

And with this mask thing, I just find them uncomfortable.  I don’t like how they smell.  My gut tells me that on balance they damage my own health.  I don’t feel as good wearing one, particularly for a long period of time.

But the road to hell is paved with small bites, small bits.  Pebbles.  Nothing large, but lots of it.  A little here and a little there, and pretty soon they are putting microchips in us.  This may sound extreme, but so too did the idea of toppling a statue of George Washington.  But now it has happened.  He was also set on fire, if memory serves.  By Communists.  Proud Communists.  In this country.

To me a mask also says “live in fear”.  It is my perception that most of the most scared people are the young, who are empirically at the lowest risk.  But they have been taught to live in fear.  It’s what they do.  They hide easily and with practice behind computer screens and relate virtually.  But that is also a virtual life.  What do you remember at the end of it but fake images, and 2 dimensional pictures of people you hardly know?

I was wondering as well what the effect on the brain is on seeing people all day, but never seeing their faces.  Surely that is unnatural?  Surely we are meant to see facial expressions?  Surely seeing featureless people all day every day activates some part of our fight or flight response, to at least some low extent?

I really feel you have to practice saying NO just because you feel like it.  Just because nobody has the right to tell you how to live your life.  If I’m not coughing, then my mask is not protecting anyone, according to all I read.  So the demand that I comfort them with compliance is really selfish on their part, not mine.

I really think the Cancellors went over the line a long time ago, then stepped on the accelerator.  They are WAY outside the mainstream for most people, even if most people seem to be afraid of them.

But there is business benefit, I think, to standing up to them, to saying NO, like the CEO of Goya did recently.  I would be shocked if his net business did not go up after all this.  People like me will see Goya on the shelf and buy that in preference to any other brand.

Nobody likes killjoys and scolds.  Nobody like puritanical lunatics whose only joy in life is ruining people’s days as often as possible.

Not only do I think moral courage for its own sake is worth nearly any amount of trouble, but I honestly think that even from a purely, selfishly, bottom line oriented perspective there is a financial upside to standing up to these people, and being perceived as doing so.

In a world where the market is saturated in every field, from beans to email, you can’t appeal equally to everyone.  And it’s stupid to try.  What you need is a strong field of intensely loyal customers.  That is plenty to build any business on.

Right now, showing yourself to be willing to stand up to the bullies is a shrewd marketing move, in my view.

And caving in is a bad one.  I don’t buy Nike any more.  For anything.  Ever.  I cancelled Papa John’s.  Barnes and Noble–who refused to sell Milo’s book–is my last recourse when other stores don’t have what I want. 

And even Chik-Fil-A pissed me off with their recent accomodationism.  They were golden.  Now they are perhaps silver or bronze.  I notice.  I remember.  And I’m not the only one.

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.