Moderates United

It occurs to me if there is really such a shortage of PPE, then a case could be made that 10-20% of the healthcare provider population should be infected intentionally so they can develop immunity.

I suspect the healthcare workers who get it and died die of a combination of the disease, overwork, and waiting far too long to rest after they get it, or for that matter to be tested.

People who already have an immunity at least to COVID-19 would not need masks, I don’t think.  Maybe I am missing something, and certainly there will be other diseases present, but I personally have never observed ordinary ER personnel wearing masks until this thing.

And actually, as far as that goes, various State governments could ask for volunteer “quarantine lifters”, who agree to be infected in order to go back to work once they clear it out.  The advantage of this would be rapid treatment.  Everyone would know right away, and rest, and do everything correctly.

When I read about people being arrested–I think that’s what I saw, but they may have been just broken up–for having coronavirus parties, I wonder how we can remain free in this country.  Our leaders have no imagination, and neither, seemingly, do the police they depend on to execute their idiotic orders.

how many people will decide they like this not working thing and quit their jobs, if and when they come back, and go find some old hippies somewhere, or start their own young and middle aged dropout communities.

I don’t think I mentioned it here, but one of the movies which influenced me most when I was that certain age (20-ish) was the movie Bliss, from Australia.  It’s a wild ride, but Barry Otto does a great job.  It was quite controversial at the time–you will see why if you watch it–particularly since I think the Australian version of PBS or something close to it funded it.  It may have even been shown on TV.  That part I’m not sure about.

Anyway, having made a short story long, the long and short of that movie is that, as Thoreau said, the majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

For myself, I continue to worry about the businesses that will fail, and the jobs it will take with them.  I worry about the already poor and marginal.  I know for myself I’ve had period where it hurt to go to the grocery store because I couldn’t afford anything I wanted, and of course many people can’t even do that, so they are going to soup kitchens or the equivalent.  Our own government has forced us into Depression era conditions.  For what, we will find out, but I really hope everyone gets really really pissed and never forgets if it is largely for nothing.

But again, having circled the farm, I find my sense of time improving.  I’m less impatient, and staying with things longer.  I am very very certainly technology addicted and finding that weaning myself is something very needed for my happiness: now, middle term and very certainly long term.

It’s ironic, but the Fear of Missing Out bred by the endless loops and notifications and what not causes us, frequently, to miss out on whatever is in front of us.

I could perhaps call our world, with everybody staring at phones all day, and TV’s and computers, and tablets, the Era of Half Attention.  Half attention everywhere you look, with everyone you look at, who is not at that moment in the middle of a specific task.

I am realizing this clearly for myself.  I am alone.  I live alone and although I have places I go, really no fixed office or regular set of people I see regularly outside of bars, and I’m trying to largely give that up too.

But being alone has value too.  It is a learned skill.  It is a skill I am learning.  Put more accurately: I’m learning to be alone and enjoy it, without feeling I am missing anything important, and without pining for that special someone who, in my case, really would make me unhappy unless they truly were special. 

And I won’t become a hermit.  All my plans remain intact.  But someone who does not NEED people is at an intrinsic advantage in reading them, and in helping them.

And not NEEDING people–rather, taking pleasure in their company, being happy in their company, but not being desperate for it–is really just proactively and intelligently taking away one more thing you could lose which would make you miserable.  It’s a misstatement to say that a big element of Buddhism is getting rid of everything you love, but it’s not fully wrong either.  Most monastic traditions are like that.  Certainly Christianity is.  Or was, in any event, and still is in some places.

The UK–I think Boris Johnson specifically–is accusing China of covering up tens of thousands of deaths.

Here is my guess: they made the same mistake Italy did, of quarantining the young with the old.  This actually worsened the situation.  It was bad policy that they don’t now want to admit.

One of the main reasons the Spanish flu was so deadly was that it got into confined quarters.  If the disease is already inside the gates, a quarantine essentially guarantees everyone in that space gets it.  And if old are in the mix, many of them die.

I really do think the media is channeling their self loathing and hatred of America into hysterical coverage which is consistently leading policy makers, in far too many cases, into overrestrictive policy.

They want America to be punished for existing.  They have made this very, very clear, over and over, and across a very broad time domain.  It has of course gotten worse particularly in the Obama era, since he echoed them, but there is something masochistic about the economic and emotional devastation this whole quarantine is bringing.

I think particularly the effect on emotional health is really being understated.  If you think about, for many decades–going back, I think, well into the 19th century–media does not cover suicides.  They found long ago–it may have been Durkheim, who was helping form the discipline of sociology as I recall the history–that reported suicides creates copycat suicides.  Imagine if they were admitting now that locking people into tiny apartments by the millions, with no access to jobs or money, is causing an unusually high–perhaps extraordinarily high–number to kill themselves.  The reaction would be immediate and huge.

For that reason, I suspect this is a major problem no one will talk about, as most likely is psychiatric hospital admissions, and of course drug and alcohol abuse.

In my view, as I understand it, Sweden has taken the correct approach.  They are doing a bit of social distancing–no waiting on tables in restaurants, but you can be seated once the table is ready–and probably cancelling or altering larger events.

But their society is open.  Bars are open.  Theaters are open.  The old are being encouraged to self quarantine, and anyone sick to stay home.  Otherwise, they are going after it hard and fast.

IF their model works, what I would expect would be steep increases in both deaths and reported cases.  IF Oxford is right, that this thing is both vastly more contagious, and vastly less dangerous than has been reported, what will be happening in Sweden is that the ACTUAL number of new cases will be skyrocketing, but most people will not be symptomatic.  Unless they test the population as a whole effectively, the global media will portray it breathlessly as a disaster.  But it won’t be a disaster.  The disaster is waiting for the rest of the world, once we open the gates back up and start counting the businesses who are not coming back at all, who died economically during the long wait for nothing.

But it will be ugly in Sweden for a minute.  Then it will be done.  That is the goal.  That is the aim.  The same number of people die who are going to die in all the other countries, but in one go.

Those of us idled are wasting time and bleeding money while our hospitals sit empty.  I read today, and it seems to be corroborated, that coroners are calling all deaths which happen where COVID-19 is present “COVID-19 deaths”.  This would apply to asymptomatic carriers who had heart attacks or died of cancer . Even those who commit suicide.

This whole thing is disgustingly dishonest.  My hope is that when we get to the other side people’s blind faith both in experts and government is shaken to the core, in permanent and profound ways.

Perhaps ten days ago I quipped, pace Twain, “Lies, damned lies, and fucking experts.”

I think a principle of emotional processing is that once you get behind you stay behind.  It’s like an email in-box, although of course vastly more complex.

An issue with Developmental Trauma is that there are feelings that are just too big to feel, so some part of you develops a workaround.  Ever after, it is highly tempting to keep using that workaround.  This is more or less what Personality Disorders are.  They are all related and in my view have their roots, most of the time, in the first couple years of life, and the mother/child bond.

Yes, MOTHER/child.  We humans have been doing things a certain way for many millions of years.  It is the same way the rest of the animal kingdom does it.  This does not change for reasons of political convenience.

I went by my local ER just now, to drop off some N95 masks I had bought when I really thought we would just be going to work in them, like has happened in Asia every time they’ve had one of these damn things.  Now, I realize they are wasted.

I would like to assert, though, that it is likely they will be wasted in the ER too.  They were slow.  The parking lot of the medical center was largely empty.  This whole thing is putting huge stress on medical centers too, since they are not seeing the flood of COVID-19 people, but they have cancelled most wellness checks, elective surgeries, and pretty everything else that is not a direct support to the ER.

If the goal was to preserve respirators, we have overachieved it.  We are actually wasting time right now.  The goal is to get through this as fast as possible.  The only way which is plausible to me is herd immunity, which means we need 60% of us to get it, then get over it, as fast as possible.

The only speed bump is respirator beds, and the goal there would be to, ideally, keep them exactly at capacity until the epidemic breaks.  I would suggest, though, that given the enormous damage this thing is doing to our economy–which will ALSO kill people–we should err, if we err, on the side of being a little short of beds.  The harsh reality is that most of the people who will need them were sickly and had one foot in the grave anyway.

As I said elsewhere, sometimes you have to shoot the puppy.  You don’t have to like it–if you are morally normal it will be genuinely traumatizing–but the reality remains.  Nobody lives forever.

But if our ER’s are empty, as I suspected they were, then we can say now WITH CERTAINTY that a partial shutdown would have served our purposes better than the full shut down most States actually did.  ALL OF THEM overdid it, some of the dramatically, like California.

And this whole thing is bringing out the stupid.  I watched a cop in the park today tell a couple they couldn’t play tennis.  Think about that.  They are 20-40′ from each other most of the time, and when they are done, they will get in a car together, go eat dinner together, then sleep next to each other.  Fucking Brilliant.  The two guys sitting at a picnic table leaning in and whispering conspiratorially?  He had nothing to say to them.  His mandate was to stop sportsing in public parks.

Here is an important point: this feels like 9/11 to me.  It feels staged, planned, orchestrated.  There are hidden movers playing out scripts written six to nine months ago, to be executed if Trump was acquitted.  I am going to say that I think this whole thing is an operation coordinated by the CIA at least, in tandem with elements in the State and other departments, designed to derail the US economy, and weaken Trump politically.  


I remember 9/11 . We had just balanced the budget, and were enjoying the peace dividend.  We weren’t fighting any wars, really, anywhere.  Saddam Hussein was on the radar, but he was mostly being kept under wraps.  The economy was starting to hum, after a recession in the late 90’s.  Then 9/11, with all that came with it.

Would you not agree that what is being done now is several orders of magnitude PAST the Patriot Act?  It is literally training for fascistic central control.  In California, they have already in effect declared martial law, OVER THE FLU.

Here is the kicker: the report proving that Tower 7 was brought down by explosives was RELEASED THIS WEEK.  Here is the link: https://www.ae911truth.org/wtc7

What are facts and necessary conclusions with regard to this?

1) There must have been well funded and extremely organized planning and operational execution to rig that building with the charges needed to bring it down while it was functioning, and without anyone noticing.  The people involved would have needed extra security clearance, in all likelihood, and almost certainly would have been disguised as construction workers, or perhaps as security guards working there.

2) NIST at a minimum demonstrated incompetence.  This is however an unlikely scenario, since they are NOT incompetent.  They had to have been operating either out of fear, if they failed to let sleeping dogs lie, or out of explicit instructions to more or less cover the whole fucking thing up.  Either way, they behaved, in my view, ignobly.

I say this, of course, not being personally familiar with the sort of threats people capable of something like 9/11 would be able to credibly make.

3) There is every reason to suspect Towers 1 and 2 were brought down the same way.  Tower 7 presents a simpler case since it was not hit with a jet airliner (I will continue to argue it was the actual target of United 93 until I see a reason to stop), but based on all the reading I’ve done, the collapses of Towers 1 and 2 make no sense either, outside of the shaped charge and nanothermite hypothesis.

4) An organized conspiracy got away with the direct murders of something in the neighborhood of 2,000 people that day, and created the political framework–the support and sense of urgency–which sparked wars on the other side of the planet which are still getting Americans killed nearly 20 years later.

5) This operation also enabled the implementation of a continuous surveillance state which if anything is going to get worse in the current crisis, which in my view is the goal.

What are the positives?  The main one is that Donald Trump is President, and it is POSSIBLE that not all our spy agencies are fucking Communist traitors.  Not certain, but possible.  I’ve pointed to the Defense Intelligence Agency as one possibly honest intelligence agency.

And the State of Emergency cuts both ways.  As I understand it, Trump may have created a road map to bring the Fed back in-house.  That would be huge.  He could, possibly, develop a plan for sound money, which would generate a howling like you cannot imagine from the world’s banks.

He may also have more latitude in surveilling, interrogating, arresting, and imprisoning traitors to America, which is what most Deep State operatives are.

I don’t envy him his job.  It’s almost impossible to know who to trust.  He’s being lied to at every turn and from every angle.  Not all the time by every one, but it has to be damn hard figuring out who the straight shooters are.  Everybody has a plan.  What the plan behind the plan is, though, is really, really hard to know.

His gut that we need to go back to work, though, is spot on.

Here is one last observation: the energy of Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to have gone FULLY into the fetishization of quarantine.  If you are a Trump hater, then you want this thing as long and as hard and as frustrating as possible, because you can virtue signal through the whole damn thing, and the longer it lasts, the more it fucks with Trump.

And regular people: well fuck them.  Lots of them voted for Trump, and the rest of them are probably dumb anyway.

My two quarters and a dime for today.  If I sucked information out of your head, then I guess you owe me money.

As you might imagine, having all day to pursue my own projects is fantastic for me.  I’m not rolling in dough, but if this thing ends before June I should be fine.  I differ in this from many millions.

Actually, let me post this excellent piece, which is actually better than what I would have written: https://www.pensford.com/why-flattening-the-curve-is-overrated/?fbclid=IwAR0asHJdOETCjXPvM28idycyg1xn-JljKcWMtb6otp2WhW1TXZLCSIrB2RY

But what I logged on to say is it occurred to me that doing the thing you choose to do with as much love and attention as possible equals and really exceeds doing all the other things you could have done in its stead.  Let’s call it the Love One is more than Like Two Principle. 

As context, I will mention a line from Churchill’s excellent “Painting as a Pastime”, where he talked about looking at his library and realizing there were some books there he would never read.  He would sometimes pick them up vaguely melancholically, run his hand down the spine, and read the title page and perhaps table of contents, then put it back and more or less apologize.

Me, I have perhaps 30 cookbooks. If I make a recipe from one, that means I can’t make one from another.  If I pursue one workout regime I have foreclosed on the other possibilities.  Or, I am doing multiple ones, each poorly, which is both comical and understandable.

What I am proposing is those of us who have problems making decisions because we are simply too aware of options can have our cake and eat it too.  If you LOVE what you are doing.  If you ENGAGE with your decision, then it stands in for every other possible decision.  And that is the most you could have gotten from any of those decisions anyway, right?

Most of the time, if our choices are about equal, our outcomes would have been about equal.  But if you dilute and divide the outcome with “what-if” thinking, then you lose on both scores.  You achieve a worse result than you would have gotten with literally any choice that you had decided to love and accept and carry through fully.

This flipping through the cards is something most of us have experience with.  You can scroll through PEOPLE, because nobody is quite perfect for you.  But I think there was some wisdom in the Sirens of Titan, when Vonnegut said that the smartest thing to do is love fully the people who ARE in your life, versus pining across a lifetime for people who are not.

The same would apply to life generally, actually.  Why not love what you are doing?  Right now?  This moment.  Are you painting your walls?  Gardening?  Wondering how you are going to pay your bills?  Engage with it and love it. 

With regard to the last, I know from my own past economic history, you can get really creative with bill paying.  I’m not sharing any details, but some of them might make you wonder “Dear God did you really get away with that?”  Yes.  The answer is yes.  I am not and never have been a law breaker–the idea of even risking jail has no appeal to me–but I’m really, really good at identifying and using gray areas.

But hell, even if you are jail right now, reading this: what can you engage with and love?  They have good libraries, I think, most of them, and if not, you can probably talk somebody into getting you some good books.  You have time to meditate.  Time for exercise.  You could take up Tai Chi.

As I think about it, this may be the firm psychological basis behind mindfulness practice.  If you are present, that means you are accepting the present.  The alternative is dissociating, and finding yourself daydreaming, wishing, praying, resenting, being angry. If you are there, then some part of you has accepted what is going on, what you are doing, and the situation.

So for me particularly, I’m going to hit Ottolenghi, then my Samarkand cookbook.  I haven’t made any of the plovs yet, which is kind of the core food.  I bought some licorice a long time ago for meringue cookies. Whatever I make, will stand in for thousands of other recipes.  I’m going to do my best to show up.

The only truly firm foundation for economic stability is stable currency; that, and perhaps in our current world, relatively short supply lines, if we view the economy as a form of logistical organization.  Short supply lines are stable supply lines.

What most governments do, of course, is play with the value of money in all sorts of ways.  I have been arguing for a while now that I think there is a good chance that the profession of Economics would be unnecessary if there were no such thing as “monetary policy”.

Sound currency, free markets, enforceable contract law, private property rights, and a politically liberal government: these are all you need for sustained long term development.  No advice or experts are needed.

When you start “fixing” things with the government, as we are getting ready to do with the “stimulus”–which I haven’t studied in detail because I know some parts will make me mad–you wind up swinging too far one way, then the other.  You wind up with multiple pendulums which nobody can quite synchronize or make stop.  No amount of expertise or even artificial intelligence can ever equal the intelligence of the market as a whole, as comprised of the individual viewpoints of the countless involved and affected individuals.  The Extended Order, as Hayek put it, or the Invisible Hand, as Adam Smith put it.

I was doing my Kum Nye practice this morning, thinking about something I heard on an Audible book I listened to (Not for Happiness).  He said “Samsara cannot be fixed”.  And he’s right.  Problems, and finite limits, and the possibility but not continual presence of pain are what make this reality special.  Without problems, it cannot serve its purpose.  If one were to “fix” it, one would be destroying something truly useful.

Now, I think all of us, those of us who feel there is something useful and beautiful in the ideal of compassion, could and should try to make this world better, in our small corners, in the places we inhabit, among the people that we meet.

But some part of us needs to recognize that final failure is inevitable, and that the cure is personal growth and empowerment, in the direction of higher spirituality.  The book argued that the solitary mystic was doing more for the world than the hyperactive humanitarian.  I’m not sure I fully agree, particularly since many of those who claim to be on a spiritual path often seem unusually stupid to me.  But the broader point makes sense to me.  Buddha did more teaching the doctrines which were named after him than he could have had he spent his life preaching against war, or for vegetarianism, or for women’s rights.  Among other things, his work has lasted.

Enough of all that.  I’m going to go get a doughnut, and some really good coffee.

I saw some reason for cautious optimism, that this new bill will give the Treasury much more power over the Fed than it normally has.

Thinking logistically, the way the Fed most logically is brought back in is that the government either buys back all the stock which was put out to the member banks in it, or creates enough new shares that it can acquire a controlling interest.

Here is the thing: the Fed is a private corporation owned by member banks.  Member banks buy into the corporation by purchasing shares of the Fed which are created for the purpose.  You have to be invited to buy the shares, and they are non-transferable normally, I don’t think.

I think if I go the next level of honesty, I’m not sure anyone outside the system is completely sure how it works.  It is more secretive than the Pentagon in many ways.  There are many aspects of its operations the government itself is not allowed to know, even though it creates and controls, directly or indirectly, the entire money supply.

The system is jaw dropping, when you really step back and look at it.  Why do so many left wing academics fail to see the problem, that of giant Wall Street banks controlling the money system?  I get that most of them are fucking idiots, but that is really taking it to the next level.

Trump is inconsistent and erratic.  He does not follow straight lines.  However, he has extremely good instincts, and usually comes to better solutions on hunches than most people do with supercomputers and a roomful of “experts”.  It is not inevitable he will do so here–far from it–but he’s beyond any doubt the best shot at reform we’ve had in many decades.  It’s been completely out of control since 1980 or so, and largely out of control since 1935, I think it was, when it used the largely manufactured event of the Great Depression to free itself from the Treasury.

There are almost certainly more people unemployed in America right now than was the case at the worst parts of the Great Depression, in the 1932-33 timeframe.

Is it worth it?  To prevent 10,000 deaths?  100,000?  I don’t see it. 

And it’s quite possible this thing is so benign it could sweep over this country in a week and most of us would not even know we have been infected and built immunity to it.

To prevent this, we are ENGINEERING a short term depression, and what will likely be a 1-2 year recession.  As a result of government policy, and nothing else.  No other factors weigh in.  Wall Street is reacting to the government reactions, not to the disease.  They don’t care about that, any more than they care about the Rubella epidemic in Japan, or the West Nile virus wherever that is happening.