But over and above that, this whole thing is traumatizing. For me, personally, it has been a Godsend. But I thought about all this. I had plans in place. I was ready, in many ways, although I will admit some of it was pure blind luck or Grace.
But some of these lockdowns are severe. Even though salt air is one of the most sanitary, sanitizing natural substances on the planet, Democrats like Bill DeBlasio and Gavin Newsome are denying their people access to both the physical and mental health benefits of fresh air, sunshine, and ocean waves.
It’s unconscionable, especially now that the disease seems to be done completely. It’s monstrous.
If the American people–and indeed, the citizens of the world–do not blame them and hold them to account for what amount to crimes against humanity–something far in excess of mere incompetence–then our future is bleak.
I feel like, among others, Gavin Newsome thinks his labor lockout is “beautiful, man”, and for the same reason: it gives him a boner.
But just as Tom Cruise’s character had to know it couldn’t last, Newsome SHOULD know that as gratifying and exhilarating as ordering millions of people to live in fear, misery, desperation, and penury might be, it can’t last forever.
He’s just not ready to stop, just yet. Not yet. It’s still too much fun.
His inner dialogue: ‘There are still people saying it’s out there, right? Fauci says we need a vaccine. Let’s wait for a vaccine. Or a CURE, we could wait for a cure, right? Let’s order them off the beaches. Fuck the peasants. God that felt good. What else can we pull back? Oh, let’s make it last all summer. yes, then demand that only mail in ballots be used. Let’s send five to every household (you do have those lists, right? And the people to work them? Good). God it is good to be governor. I long for the days when it can be like this all the time. My job would be so much easier.”
What we are seeing is a foreshadowing of the sort of control and government the Democrats want. A Universal Basic Income basically would make them the Sugar Daddies of a large percentage of the populace. And when Daddy wants some sugar, he gets sugar, you understand?
Here is the thing, though: the people have a say. When you push, people often push back. When you step out of the shadows and people see you are an ugly monster, they never after stop looking for ugly monsters again. When you lie to them, only some of them will accept it forever.
My FEELING is that there is nothing I can or should say right now. The wheels are turning, and with this much pain, and this much stupidity, and this much abuse, either Americans wake the fuck up, or it is simply not possible, which itself is a useful data point as well.
I was in the grocery store just now, where in theory everyone is supposed to be wearing masks. Masks piss me off and there is no hard penalty in my State for not wearing them, so I strolled in quickly in the middle of a crowd, bought three things, and scooted out. Nobody said anything.
First, though, it occurred to me that there is no perceptual difference between a truly invisible enemy and a non-existent one. That is why I have been calling this thing a Snipe Hunt. Obviously, tens of thousands of people have died, but as with the flu every year, I don’t know any of them. No one I know knows any of them. It’s literally, exactly like the flu season. Well, the END of the flu season, or to be more accurate, about a month after the end of flu season. But it may well be that people are coughing their last in hospitals somewhere even now–we are losing about 2 people a day right now to COVID, or at least that is their story and they are sticking to it, for now.
Secondly, though, returning to Cialdini, he pointed out that people will often rationalize unchosen sacrifices retrospectively as worth it. One obvious example is the practice most car dealers have of dragging the process of buying a car for several hours. They have to “go check with their boss”. That takes 15 minutes every time.
What they are doing is creating an investment for you, an investment of time, and perhaps emotional energy. Nobody wants to sit there for nothing, so what they are doing, in general, with most people, is increase your motivation to buy a car. You don’t want to spend an hour there, then walk away. Most people don’t. Some people do. They get better deals. (Me personally I walk in an tell them what I’m willing to offer, take it or leave it. Usually they take it, because I understand a bit of profit is needed. I just don’t want them flying to Hawaii on their commission.)
Here is the thing with masks: the psychology is that are not really wearing masks because it is worth it. The disease has passed, and all but the most sickly are in more danger driving to the store than they are in the store without a mask.
No: they assume it is worth it BECAUSE THEY ARE WEARING A MASK. The act of wearing a mask becomes a symbolic act whose value is acquired in the act. This is why I see joggers wearing masks. Why I see people in cars driving alone with masks. Why I see people in the park wearing masks.
As I understand the facts, no study has ever been done that has validated the value of masks when it comes to flu viruses.
And the studies that have been done concerning the long term wearing of masks seems to indicate they lead to elevated levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, and following reduced alertness. I do the Wim Hof breathing daily. It gets you high. Your body intakes oxygen, does its thing, then emits carbon dioxide as a byproduct. If you then reinhale that CO2, well you get more of it in your blood, don’t you?
So the logic and the science are really lacking. And wearing a mask is a pain. I have to do it for work sometimes for some tasks, but only for short periods of time.
So why do it? Well, obviously if it weren’t worth it, you wouldn’t be doing it, which means LOGICALLY it must be worth it. That is how the psychology works.
For the Governors ordering this bullshit, they are in some cases hedging their bets, and in other cases trying to dilute the stark reality that this labor lockout hasn’t been necessary or in any way helpful for at LEAST a MONTH. My vote was ten days, just to do what they initially SAID they wanted to do, which is make sure we had an adequate stock of hospital beds and ventilators. That was about six weeks ago.
All in all, I comment on this thing, still, pretty regularly, but if America can’t figure out how badly our experts fucked up, and how Democrats took the fuck up to the next level then doubled down, then our Constitutional Republic really stands no chance of surviving in anything but shell form.
And I wonder, on that score, WHY Barr feels no need for criminal investigations of Obama and Biden? They dug into every last corner of Trump’s life for a long two years and change, and at that WHILE HE WAS PRESIDENT. When COVID-19 started hitting our shores, he was defending himself from a bullshit impeachment proceeding.
Ethically, legally, politically: why NOT go after the bastards? I see nothing.
Every day, more examples of stupidity, cowardice, lack of principle, and short sightedness. I can’t even begin to guess any more who is honest. Rand Paul I like, and Trump I think comes around to the right decisions quickly, even when he strays for a time, but he is surrounded by corrupt losers who are giving him bad counsel at every turn, and failing to protect his back. He has to do that himself.
I’ve linked one search, but this website hosts all the crazy and non-conforming stuff. If David Ickes is your thing, then he lives on there. Share this link. It will make full censorship more difficult for these bastards.
Knut was recently pulled from YouTube, for differing from the talking points the media and Big Tech are pushing.
The thing is, he is highly qualified to render opinions, and it is a patent fact that the “experts” we have trusted so far have fucked up badly.
It will be interesting to see how many people are getting actually “woke” right now. Even though the media and Big Tech are staying on topic and consistent, the amount of pain out there is immense, and there is no spinning or lying about that, or about the patent partisan divide between the Forever Quarantine of the Left, and the “”Let’s not destroy America” of the Republicans.
Let us say half those people are reemployed in a month, and half will be out of work for the next year. Let’s round it down to 12 million who will be out of work for the next year.
In Trump’s economy prior to all this nonsense, there were about 164 million people participating in the labor force. This means, on this assumption, that we will see a 7% increase in unemployment over the next year.
Some years ago an economic analyst calculated that for every 1% increase in unemployment, 40,000 Americans die. They die from a variety of causes. There is less money for medical care from all sources, there is vastly more stress, vastly more divorce, vastly more drug and alcohol abuse, and significant increases in suicide rates. Blended, the overall mortality rate goes up.
Within the last month someone reached out to that researcher and asked if those numbers still hold. He said that the Stimulus money and various small business grants are likely making things much better than when he first ran the numbers.
So let’s cut the number to 20,000. 7% times 20,000 equals 140,000 excess deaths over the next year. That is more than TWICE the number that have died so far, and the death rate and hospitalizations are declining nationally.
No one who has put the least bit of thought into this can possibly conclude that the labor lockout is saving lives, or that the path of compassion is pretending otherwise.
And please add onto this plain and simple misery. The people that die are, by and large, elderly and at the end of their lives. The people who will die from the economic decline will be working age people, and most of them will in effect die of stress and anxiety. They will die slowly, sadly, and with no fanfare.
This whole thing is a monstrous atrocity, and I really hope it comes to be viewed as such soon, and by most of the people in this and every other country which enacted such a benighted policy.
I don’t dispute this is a really bad flu year, in effect. But nobody even noticed when 80,000 mostly elderly Americans died of the flu just a few years ago.
And I DO dispute, categorically, that a labor lockout was or is the correct policy.
Think about this: a vaccine is the disease, but dead. But vaccines, themselves, are cultivated. The disease, itself, is grown on a variety of media, including mashed up human and animal babies (as I understand it). That disease is then killed, processed, then injected into humans. But a lot of stuff in addition to the disease is added, and some of it seems to be harmful in and of itself.
Vaccination, itself, is a means of slowly introducing a disease into people in such a way that they build up immunity. What if introducing the disease ITSELF could be made safer? What if one tiny, tiny droplet were introduced into someone at peak immunity, say with oxygenated blood, maybe even on an IV of some sort.
I know Big Money is involved in all this, as are all manner of Personality Disorders, mainly Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
But I’m just throwing that out there. Why not think new thoughts? All the old ones are thought already.
But if you are under 60, exercising, have a reasonable weight, eat a decent diet, and have reasonably high levels of Vitamin D, particularly, then you can get this disease and shake it off pretty quickly, if you even notice at all.
Here’s my idea, which I will follow with what amounts to a thought experiment, or imaginary role playing: create infection centers, where people can volunteer to first be tested for antibodies, and if they have not had this thing yet, do a basic medical workup, testing inflammation levels and Vitamin D. If both come back OK, then the person is infected with this disease somehow, and told to go home for 14 days, then come back into a protected entrance and checked on by staff who have also already had the disease. There, they verify that no live organisms remain in the person, who is then both immune to the disease and verified non-contagious. Their name is then added to a list, but they are otherwise free to go.
If this were done long enough, no vaccine would be necessary.
But here is my thought experiment, which I will preface a bit. You and I both know that treating people like adults and letting them freely assume their own level of acceptable risk is not something we do in this country. It seems to be uncommon in most other countries too. So this idea will almost certainly be a non-starter in most places.
Here is my thought experiment, though: imagine if you will that a vaccine becomes available and is made mandatory for employment by most private businesses. Imagine that this vaccine causes serious complications even in healthy people 2% of the time and death .04% of the time. Imagine that the end totals on the virus itself wind up being death in .02% of people, and long term complications in 1%.
Imagine, in other words, that the VIRUS two times safer than the VACCINE, empirically. What rationale could be offered for demanding the vaccine when immunity could be had more cheaply and with less actual risk?
What I would suggest to you is that most people who are neck deep in bullshit–which is to say most “experts”–focus not on the actual end result, but on the PROCESS of obtaining the result. All of the steps in the process have to be something they are used to. Nothing new. Nothing imaginative, even if effective and better. We have to plod from Step One to Step Last.
And here is the thing, too, with this whole thing: the virus could mutate. Any vaccine developed might be useless within six months, just as any gained immunity might be useless. This is more or less the state of things with the flu. There are so many variants of the flu that vaccine creators more or less roll the dice very year and hope they get close. Most year they kind of get it but not completely. That is why despite the flu having visited us annually, to some greater or lesser extent, for many hundreds if not thousands of years, and despite massive vaccination campaigns, and despite prior planning, at least 30,000 die each and every year of the flu in this country alone, and usually at least 400,000 world wide.
So either acquired immunity will last, or it won’t. If it won’t, then a vaccine won’t either. If it does, then no vaccine is needed for anyone who has antibodies to it.
What you need to GRASP is that even though they are giving the game away, many, many politicians just can’t let this thing go, can’t let their people go, can’t tear down this wall. So they are feeling us bullshit. The media, by and large, is feeding us bullshit.
This is not a problem Americans are rolling up to solve together. No, this is a problem for Republicans to solve, and Democrats to grandstand on and make use of. It’s become that simple.
And ask yourself: if both options were on the table, how many governments would give you the choice of taking the vaccine or taking the disease?
They want this thing ambiguous, out there, lurking, hiding in corners, plotting dirty deeds in the darkness. They don’t want to create knowns. They don’t want disease clinics where you can just go get it over with.
Put starkly, many politicians, the world over, DON’T WANT THIS DISEASE TO END. They don’t want your pain to end. They don’t want a cure. They want a cure to be “on the way”, forever.
I think of Delta Operator Dalton Fury (real name Nick (just kidding: I don’t know his real name and he would shoot me if I did and revealed it)). Those guys had Osama Bin Laden trapped in a cave in Afghanistan. They had a good plan to more or less take the back door to the caves, and get a solid kill on OBL, which more or less would have ended the vengeance element in the War on Terror.
His request was denied. He was forced to include Afghan forces, for no doubt specious reasons, and the good plan he had he was not able execute, and Plan B just wasn’t good enough, as it ultimately enabled OBL to escape, postponing the war, really, indefinitely. We are still fighting that particular war. Our men and sometimes women are still dying.
Somebody wanted that war to last a good long time. That CLIMATE–of fear, uncertainty and doubt–enabled a lot of operations politically that might have proven impossible otherwise.
I feel the same is happening here. The “good” part of this, though, is that people are suffering where they live, in their homes, in their families. There is nothing abstract about what is being done right now, and ultimately, I think, no patronizing and dishonest rationale which will stick the way the fear created by 9/11 did.
And I will ask, too: at what point are people going to start paying attention to the FACT that Tower 7, at least, was taken down with preplanted explosive charges, as proven by a detailed forensic investigation conducted by a professor of Forensic Structural Engineering?
Here is one link: https://www.ae911truth.org/wtc7