Covidiocy And Authority

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

I lost another friend to the Covidiocy/complications of. Since he’s one of the people who got me through 2020 and so far through 2020 won, and since I never saw this coming, I’m still feeling gutted and out of balance.

I’m also feeling mad. Very, very mad.

Look, it’s not that I don’t believe Covid can be dangerous. Actually it can be dangerous, in spots, to certain people and often unpredictably.

I’m not one of those people who say it’s “made up” or “doesn’t exist.” It is a real thing, though it’s not the black plague, and it’s not nearly as lethal or scary as people think it is, or as its creators expected it to be. I think the Chinese got the idea it was profoundly more serious from the fact that any respiratory virus is more serious there. Mostly because their population is surrounded/smothered in so much pollution that even babies have the lung damage of having smoked 6 packs a day for 20 years. Let’s give thanks for our enemies incompetence at science.

But at the same time, our government immediately adopted the China model of combating what they expected to be a lethal pandemic. And when it didn’t turn out to be a lethal pandemic, they doubled, tripled and quadrupled on the insanity.

There has been lately an expectation that if there’s some sort of crisis, “Society will have to go communist to survive.” I’ve seen this said by a lot of university graduates about everything, ranging from supply issues to new space colonies.

This is wrong. This is also bizarrely stupid.

Having re-read The Forgotten man, by Amity Schlaes, recently, the entire “pandemic response” has a strong wiff of “do what the government bureaucrats wanted to do for decades, and use the pandemic to stomp on any rebellion. Make Healthcare an arm of the government? check. Make sure that every private company has to bend the knee to government directives, Nazi style? Check. Make sure the serfs realize they have no rights, and feed them and allow them to make a living only if they obey us? check. Create a massive financial crisis which might shade into famine in Winter, because then obviously only communism can get us out? Check.

What it has bloody nothing to do with is preventing deaths or even infections.

The Vaccine that doesn’t vaccinate — i.e. render anyone immune — is not a way to prevent deaths. You lose immunity in months. And the fact that they’re pushing it on people who have had the disease and for the first time in the history of bio-medical science denying that natural immunity exists means if we’re lucky ALL it does is make money for the medical companies. (Whom I spent years defending from charges of being money-sucking Bond villains. You were right. I was wrong. Or perhaps they were corrupted later.)

Look, none of this is normal. None of the response to it, even if it were what the government kept insisting it is — i.e. the equivalent of the black plague — the way to fight it is bizarre, strange and definitely counterproductive.

Never have we “quarantined” healthy people. Particularly never have we done it on reports from a totalitarian country of asymptomatic transmission. We actually have no reason to believe there is any such thing, beyond “pushed self full of OTC meds while sick, and dragged out to do things. That’s not asymptomatic. That’s part of a sick culture that forces people to go out and work/go to school while sick.

Never have we denied religious exemptions to vaccines. Not even when there are so many of those in some school districts that Chicken Pox or Whooping cough run rampant. You don’t have to show proof you’re a committed member of a mainstream religion, or that you practice regularly to have your kid not have vaccines. You just sign a statement. And they don’t even keep them out of public school for that.

Never has the government run around stomping on alternate treatments. Look, I had friends who had cancer and quit chemo to use alternate herbal medicine. The government didn’t make those herbs illegal, even when it was obvious they did bloody nothing. Hell, the government made pot legal for ‘medical” treatment even though in most cases that people claim they need it for it’s more useless than rubbing yourself down with mint and rosemary. (Note, not all. It’s fairly effective to raise appetite and to at least make you not care about the pain. However prescribing it for auto-immune or bipolar? Whatever dude. However, the government didn’t stomp on THOSE uses.) Yet it’s run around stomping on everything, and has tried to stop daily use of aspirin after years of encouraging it, because there’s a rumor it helps recover from Winnie the flu.

What kind of pandemic response is that?

For that matter, what kind of pandemic response is to take someone who is infected and showing symptoms and tell them to take OTOC meds and go home?

And DO NOT tell me that it’s because of doctor shortage. They’re firing doctors who rebel against their insanity, and just firing doctors anyway, because it turns out when you don’t let people come in for other conditions, the hospitals are empty.

This is not a response to a disease. This is a bunch of authoritarians trying to create their wet-dream society.

And in the middle of this, we can’t trust anything. We can’t trust government releases/statistics, even if they didn’t contradict themselves every other week. And we can’t trust other insanity floating around, probably orchestrated and encouraged by government sources. (To be fair, it’s hard to tell the glowies when they don’t want you to attack Wretched Whitmer.) So, we don’t know anything. And we’re being gaslighted. And people are dying from this. And from isolation. And from untreated conditions not Xi-flu.

Meanwhile Sweden who released everyone but the very vulnerable is …. normal. This if anything should tell you how ineffective our response has been.

Yeah, sure, Sweden will still have deaths. Look, this insane product of Xi and Fauci’s diseased brains is now with us to stay. Like all colds and flus it will UNPREDICTABLY kill. Neither masks, nor vaccine — now both religious talismans — nor invoking Fauci at bed time will save you from it.

There is a correlation though with less chance of death if you keep healthy. Lose what weight you can (You’re being told this by someone whose thyroid treatment is slightly-under for good and sufficient reason and who therefore can’t lose weight. Even when she forgets to eat for days. So, not a judgement), exercise as much as you can. Do stuff out in the sunshine and fresh air, if you can, even if it’s what I’m going to do: take your work computer out to the back porch, and work there for a couple of hours. Take your vitamin c and d and your zinc.

And for the love of heaven, if you catch it, stay put during recovery. A friend I lost and one I almost lost were both getting better when they decided they were well enough to make what would normally be for them mild exertion.

If this is what I had (in other countries, you could test, but not here) Jan 2020, it really beats you to a pulp. You stay weak and vulnerable a long time. I was actually sick for two weeks, but it was another month before I could go about normal life in a normal way. I felt almost-well, but fortunately I have long experience with that state and its dangers, so I didn’t push it.

Don’t go dying on me. We’re going to need every one of you for the rebuild, after we win, they lose.

The response is going to stay stupid and dangerous while the statist beast flails around. In fact, like everything touched by big government controlled by “progressives” (a worst case scenario. Big government is bad enough) it’s likely to get worse. You take care of you, and be not afraid.

And to Paul Bisdorf, who is now in a much better place but from where, if there’s justice, he’s reading this: I regret we never got to meet. I regret that instead of sending you the Christmas ornament painted with the snail war, I stupidly packed it, and was intending to send it to you for Christmas. But most of all I regret losing you too soon. Fare thee well, my friend, and if I’m good enough, perhaps we’ll meet again in the bright land.

220 thoughts on “Covidiocy And Authority”

    1. I remember “Everyone must get the shot (except members and staff of Congress, the US Postal Service, whomever greases the palms of SloJo’s administration.)” I remember “Everyone must maks (except members of the elite glitterati who can go maskless everywhere.)” I remember “Must stay home and not go to small businesses (except members of the power elite who can go get their hair done or go to ball parks or go to restaurants or or or.)” I remember “OMB is lying about Ivermectin and Hydrocloroquin and Light Therapy (except for the power elite and glitterati who have been treated with all of these methods not available to the peon class.)” I remember “This isn’t a national/worldwide health crisis (until Impeachment failed and then…)”

      Oh, I remember. Families destroyed by malicious orders. People suffering and dying alone and not being able to go to worship services or memorial services while others could riot and loot and burn and go to 7 different huge funerals for a dead self-slabbing abusive pile of stupidity.

      I also remember the CDCs and NIH quietly downplaying the ‘Death by Covid’ number to only 6% of what they previously reported, while Italy says it’s now 3% of what it reported.

      I remember “Brave Heroes of Medicine” and their Tic-Tok videos and the furloughing of health-care workers during the height of the ‘pandemic’ because hospitals were empty (and the curious “All Covid Beds ARE FULL!!!” and the not-reporting of how few Covid Beds they were talking about.)

      I remember “Cases of Covid in children is increased 300% (while not saying that number is basically there’s now 30 cases instead of 10, nationwide, who have popped positive on a known-to-be wildly inaccurate test.)

      I also remember the failure of our health-care system to acknowledge and attack early enough the secondary effects of all of this that actually did all of the killing and could have been prevented.

      I remember our doctors telling us to get the shots, while they refuse to.

      Oh, I remember…

      1. In five or ten years the same people will be gaslighting us to say they never supported the mandates, the lockdowns, the cruelty. But we will have the receipts.

        4. Sort of like all the people who are (now) vaccine advocates who were decrying the vaccine when the Bad Orange Man was still in office?

      2. I wish I had to say I remembered. Unfortunately all I have to do is look out the front door…

        Though one interesting thing struck me about the Getty wedding. Notice who is, and isn’t wearing the masks there? It really is about signalling who is staff, and who is in charge.

      3. I remember my family practitioner demanding the name of the doctor who advised me to avoid the COVID kill-shot. That was along with a bunch of gaslighting and “get the shot to protect the community”, along with “you couldn’t possibly have had it in March 2020; it wasn’t noted in the county until April”. (Narrator voice: in March 2020, the two people inthe local hospital with curiously COVID-like symptoms could *not* get a test.)

        I’m stuck with Dr. M or his equivalents because of our tiny population, but I try to avoid the SOB as much as possible.

        I get my flu shots from an FNP who runs an independent clinic. He makes potential notVax patients read and sign a 3 page consent form with adverse reactions listed. If they go through with it, they’re banned from the clinic for 3 weeks to protect everybody else. He’s not loved by the medical establishment in the county. They were trying to shut him down a year before the virus because the hospital/clinic complex didn’t want competition. He’s also damned good.

        1. Just get the Ivermectin and take vitamins D3, and C, Minerals with zinc, and a little Quercetin..Nearly 100% cure rate, but mainly prevents the Flu…More than 200 Congress critters and their families treated with this regimen, and 100% successful..

        2. I am personally sure that I had it in November, 2019 (yes, I know that it was SAID not to have been introduced at that time – but, China later admitted that some of the athletes in that country did pick up the disease).
          I was knocked out and weak for over 2 months. Just had sufficient energy to put in a couple of hours of work at a sedentary job, drive home, and go to bed. Too exhausted to even eat most nights (no, dammit, I didn’t lose weight).
          But, even though:
          – over 65
          – with RA and osteoarthritis
          – asthma
          – and, obese
          I didn’t die. Wasn’t even hospitalized.
          But, I did what Sarah suggested was the right thing – I did NOT extend myself for a very long time. I took the time to heal.

        3. I work at a remote fly in site. 14 days in and 14 days out. Those of us who worked last shift if 2019 had an outbreak of a weird respitory sickness. Half the crew sick in their rooms unable to make it in. Patient zero was a coworker who had just come back from visiting family in Wuhan.
          All those sick lost sense taste and smell. Company ended up getting 4 people who were really bad off site to the nearest hospital.

          I was fine till home day when i felt off but didn’t think much of it. Ended up deathly ill for a week once home and family all got it as well as inlaws.

          Funny but provincial stats show our site is only one to have 0 cases since they started tracking in April 2020. Company claims its our harsh isolation standards. We all know its because we had it in 2019.

          So I’m sure there were cases long before the official first case. There was a new flu going through the people who attended the military olympics in wuhan in oct 2019.

  3. My whole family except the brother got a cough and lethargy in January 2020. My brother in law worked at the hospital so we suspect he was exposed and brought it home to us. He later got tested and had antibodies. I did not, but those tests have a high false negative rate.
    My brother is currently fighting the virus in Texas. He is healthy, so I am not worried. Much.

    2. Same, February 2020. Of course, there wasn’t an antibody test to be had until well after six months had passed. It would be interesting if there was a way to scare up a residual-immunity test of whatever type that would be.

  4. Not wholeness without wounding
    not joy without despair
    not life without the dying
    nor fire without the tears
    Raise a glass to the dear departed. We’ll meet them when our chores are through, as the song says.
    Cosmic hugs Sarah.

  5. Sorry for your loss, Sarah.

    As to the rest, isn’t it awful convenient that the “solution” to a disease which happens to originate in the same city where the world’s most powerful totalitarian regime has a biowarfare lab, is to become more like said regime?

    Communism is the real virus.

    1. And a lab in said city received much US government funding in “gain-of-function” research involving coronavirus, as well. One has to wonder how much our domestic and foreign enemies were collaborating, and to what ends.

        1. And if you look deep enough, the dead in Communist China were the ones that were beginning to pull their public health system down, and were pulling down their public pension system down.

          Then, look at New York or Michigan or any other place where old and infirm were warehoused in nursing homes, thus causing huge death numbers in the population of people who were ‘burdening the public health system’ (Governor Cuomo said basically that before Covid) and burdening the public pension system.

          1. It seems to me these tyrants are trying to replicate the Nazi’s Aktion T4, but with added pain and suffering.

          2. “They” used ventilators as their preferred murder weapon for old folks,,Just get the pressure a little wrong, and it’s over…

          3. The question is how many died.

            And how many of those were using the virus to cover up alternative means.

        2. I’ve been advised that Confucianism is fundamentally legalism made into a way of life. Given how much of academia is arguing unprovables, it shouldn’t be surprising how easily the thought workers drank it up. Throw in a leavening of envy (I’m totally smarter than those boors running things, and could totally do better than them if I got off my ass+) and yeah, they really do want to be that.

          +I am so lucky I got to see early just how hard they work to be that. Sure I’m probably smart enough that *if I wanted to spent 120+ hours a week on it* I could probably do just as well or better. But I’d also dig my brain out my ear with a spoon after the second week, provided I didn’t simply have a stroke, because lord, I don’t want to work like that and it’s not my idea of fun. So, I work at what I do enjoy, and hard enough that I can find my idea of fun.

  6. I’m still holding to the theory-if I could figure out how to prove it, I would-that we had our major “COVID” outbreak around late December 2019/early January 2021. A lot of people that I knew reported having cases of “death flu” that utterly kicked their butts, left them bad for about a week or so, then took a while for them to get back up on their feet.

    And, there’s also a lot of hints (doing freelance book research for a side project that hopefully gets an advance, the slow grinding wheels of tradpub…) that a majority of COVID deaths are from people with inflammation-type diseases. Most of the heart and lungs, with a side order of people with various kinds of dementia. I suspect that a lot of the “sudden, unexpected” deaths knew they had such diseases-either directly diagnosed and didn’t tell anyone or had the symptoms and were ignoring it.

    Note that a lot of the vaccine issues are inflammation issues, namely around the heart with a side order of lungs.

    Yet, we had people in our government that despised Trump and discovered that they had the perfect crisis to never let go to waste…

    1. the Holidays were a big “Flu-like” epedemic around here too, and I got to spend a week closed in a room with several croupers and snivelers who were part of the where we got hit hardest.
      I felt a bit of something coming on and did the “Hammer it with Zycam/zinc lozenges, Airborne, fluids, citrus, and EmergenC, and managed to stave off whatever it was. Cousin was hammered then his wife. We both work for places that have lots of contact with the SinoCommie bastages via parts and back and forth people checking on things (my corporate has offices there).

      1. Same thing-old job had a guy going to the Chinese consulate on a regular basis and there were a lot of sick people around that time and I told him to stay as clear as possible and clean things on a regular basis.

        1. Cousin’s place had a visitor directly from China, who then went on to Sweden (corporate headquarters is there) and it went through there. I wonder if he was “Patient Zero” for Sweden, if not, he was close.

      2. I never quite figured out where I got it. I’d been in a high-population area 3 weeks beforehand, with lots of people from Asia passing through, but that seems too long for the virus to take effect. OTOH, my wife can blame me for her case. Oops. OTOH, market day in Flyover Falls draws a large crowd, and we’re getting more Chinese than in years past.

        It was good I had a mild case. I hit several of the susceptible population parameters (iffy heart, obese, late ’60s). Laid me on my back for a week, with weather awful enough to stay idle inside for a few more weeks. $SPOUSE has fewer of the dread parameters, but she got it worse than I did. OTOH, she was only a few days behind me in symptoms. Neither of us have our pre-ChiCom flu sense of smell return fully. At least I now can walk down the scented candle aisle in the store. 🙂

          1. I’m hoping that it means I can stand the infamous scented pine cone displays at Fred Meyer and JoAnn. If so, it would be worth it. 🙂

  7. I’m mindful of a certain set of movies that were…heh…very prophetic of this all. It’s actually a bit of watching material.

    – Ultraviolet
    – V for Vendetta.

    We’re cruising for just either of those worlds. And it’s patently stupid.

    1. Just had my (at least) annual (re)viewing of V for Vendetta. “Remember, remember, the 5th of November . . .

  8. I don’t know if Ivermectin helps with COVID, but my wife and I tried to get some just in case. I sent the prescription to a Los Angeles pharmacy and I’ve never been treated in this way. The pharmacist refused to fill it (they claim the supplier doesn’t have it which gets them out of legal trouble in California, and they all say it in the same way. It’s a script). But the derogatory attitude is what shocked me – treating me like a child, patronizing, the whole “oh my, I’m dealing with one of these people”.

    I’ve always been hesitant about the Libertarian argument that all medication should be available without a prescription, but if this sort of thing is what is going to happen, then maybe we have to go there.

    1. What grinds me most is, turns out nearly all of Congress was on the stuff too.

      They run around branding anyone who ever had any prescription for it as some adlestruck horse dewormer chugging moron and the they does themselves with it?! The absolute unmitigated gall!

      Those little tin wannabe godlings. Do they paste their toes in gold leaf when they get up in the mornings? How insulting can one get?

      1. I would LOVE for some hacker to dig into the medical records for the Elite – I suspect they would show a LOT of meds they would rather the Normals didn’t know about, and the COVID drugs are top of the list

    2. Wilson’s progressives used patent medicine as a justification to push through prescription medicine rules.

      Modern progressive fucking around with the AMA is possible cause to gut that shit, and leave it to die.

      Both medical licensure and the legal privileges associated with making and filling prescriptions.

    3. It does. Hugely.
      America’s Frontline Doctors has access to Ivermectin and HCQ.

      There’s a pharmacy/supplier in India that is on GETTR. You can get it there if AFL isn’t able to help when you need it.

      1. What Kathy said. I used a telemed service to get some HCQ and zinc sulfate so that, if either of us caught it, we’d be able to follow the Zelenko Protocol. We’re healthy but not young. I may do the same and get some ivermectin to put a few eggs in a different basket.

  9. My daughter and I both thought we had it early on, so we were not particularly keen on any vaccines for the Commie Crud, plus having been military, where the yearly fly vax was mandatory and which always made us sicker than the flu would have. But we both contracted it for realsies, this last September, and it was weeks before we could throw it, even with the aid of what we were prescribed at the military emergency room. And no, I’m not getting the vax, not now. I was sick enough, not going to risk any side effects, when natural immunity should keep us fairly safe. (The infant grandson was thoroughly exposed, of course – he had the sniffles and a low-grade temp for about a day, so he should be OK as well.)
    I agree with our host – this whole covidiocy was just a pretext for an authoritarian crackdown.

    1. Retired military here also. Yearly flu vaccine never made me sick, ergo, never sicker than the flu, which I ended up catching several years in spite of the vaccine.

      COVID appears to do its worst in people who already have an inflammatory reaction going on. Hence, if you have heart disease of any kind, are overweight, have an immune system issue, COVID is not going to be kind, and may be lethal, /u even if you’ve had the shots and booster./u Which is also why an aspirin regimen would grant you a better outcome.

      If you also have respiratory issues like me, well, do what you can, and pray.

      2. My imagination thinks about this, and I’m thinking from the perspective of “good story logic.” Which often becomes “good dictator logic” (because dictators are the sort of people that try to make their stories real…often with tragic results).

        Biggest problem China has? Old people-lots of them. The demographic curve is going to be hitting the country soon and hard, if it hasn’t already started.

        A plague that hits people with issues such as heart and lung inflammation (i.e. the Chinese smoke like chimneys and air quality in the PRC is crap), and allows for them to cull the “useless mouths” of the older generations without being too obvious about it has an appeal to it. It’ll spread quickly because the Chinese live together in great numbers and a good plague is always of benefit to the dictatorship. Cull your critics, cremate the bodies, and claim the disease got them.

        And, if it messes up the PRC’s rivals…even better.

        1. That’s why I’m fairly certain that certain members of the Chinese government either ordered the release of the engineered virus, or encouraged it to happen.

          1. I don’t think they had to. The Wuhan lab has always had…difficulties, shall we say, with keeping its germs from escaping.

            After this one got loose, though, it is indisputable that the communist Chinese deliberately shipped hundreds of planeloads of disease carriers to dozens of other countries while Fauxi and the WHO helped them cover up the outbreak.

            When covering it up was no longer possible, Fauxi and the CDC denied that it came from the Wuhan lab, silenced and discredited anybody pointing out the evidence that it did, and their ‘recommended’ health measures made the least medical sense while causing the most social and economic disruption possible.

            The communist Chinese, Fauxi, Daszak, the NIH, WHO and CDC are all guilty of the worst biological warfare attack in all of history. What the world needs now is a repeat of the Nuremberg trials, complete with mass hangings.
            ———————————
            A good Zombie Apocalypse novel is at least as believable as anything we’ve heard out of the ‘Publick Health Authoriteez’ over the last year and a half.

            1. Totalitarian regimes are inherently bad at industrial safety.

              If a form of economic activity requires industrial safety practices to have a tolerable level of safety for humanity, it should not be occurring in a totalitarian regime.

              If the spread of a disease is concerning, industrial safety practices are necessary for handling them in labs. Using this public health incident to push for totalitarianism should be disqualifying for involvement in an organization that conducts disease related research in labs. Which is to say, University officials on Team Democrat should be removed, or the biology and medicine institutions should be separated entirely from the humanities, engineering, law, etc. institutions.

            2. My feelings exactly. I’m not saying they wouldn’t consider releasing it on their own population, just that my gut says that this wasn’t deliberate. My read on why they went into such a lockdown is that they knew something got out, but they didn’t know which bug it was. (Heck, even Ebola starts out with flu symptoms.) Had it been one of the others being tested on, those draconian measures would absolutely have been justified. And having released a deadly disease on accident, they made sure to capitalize on it by spreading it around and convincing the rest of the world to shoot themselves.

              2. They might have also released some deadlier things that did not spread so far.

                At this point, also, trust in authorities and institutions has been so compromised by authorities and institutions that we additionally cannot be sure about releases from US university labs.

              3. My gut feeling was that if they were deliberately releasing it, it would have appeared in Hong Kong first, since they were in the middle of huge anti government demonstrations. (Whatever happened to those demonstrations?)

                1. They rounded up the instigators and disappeared them.

                  Hong Kong is no more. If you’ve got anything in it, get it out or cut it loose, and don’t put anything in. The best they’re in for is a slow decline into communal slavery.

            3. My current running theory is traditional Chinese corruption, namely the combination of poor industrial safety and the need to make money. If I remember right, there was a big nexus of initial cases around a “wet” market in Wuhan. My suspicion is that they were doing testing on pigs or pig carcasses, and pork is an aspirational luxury food item.

              The guy who was supposed to “dispose” of the pig remains might have been selling them at the market. After all, nobody had gotten sick before…

              1. My thoughts exactly.

                The Chinese are evil and have huge cultural blindspots, but they aren’t stupid. Deliberately releasing a pathogen blocks away from a research lab? That’s terrible tradecraft, and their intelligence services are much better than that.

                Now not paying your janitors well enough to avoid temptation or teaching them *why* the dead test animals need to be incinerated instead of sold? That’s totally the kind of thing in keeping with other things they do.

                1. Heck said janitor could have decided “Why are we wasting all this good meat?” and took it (or at least some of it) home for some family celebration to show off how wealthy he/she was.

        2. There’s a theory that at the same time as working on changes to this virus, they were also working on a vaccine for it – that’s why it came out so fast. It could be the Chinese saw that the “vaccine” had a vulnerability called ADE, meaning people who got the shot could become very, very sick when exposed to a virus that had mutated around it. So the virus got out, half or more of the West became injected with mRNA, and now China has the ability to release a virus that is relatively harmless to their citizens, but kills 50% of the Western population.

            1. Objection: calls for too much competence on the part of a governmental actor…

              ________________________________

      3. I used to believe the pharmaceutical companies were doing their best with the flu vaccination that only sometimes worked.
        I even occasionally let myself be guilted into taking it.

        I’ve reassessed that.

        As for the Kung Flu, I caught it in the first official wave, before testing became widely available. It was a really nasty flu, and it lingered. It was bad stuff, but not nearly at the level of destroying millions of people’s livelihoods.
        I might have had the Delta variant as well, but it could have just been a cold that lasted longer than normal.
        And I am never getting the bloody shot.

        1. I have The Truth About COVID, and some short books by Alex Berenson. The book that surprised me is by a local physician practicing here in AZ: The Defeat of COVID is less a guidebook than a summary of hundreds of medical studies, many or most of which go against the COVID Narrative. I recommend it highly for the links; some of her positions don’t stand up to scrutiny; granting that I am not in the medical field.

    2. Retired military myself. Every year with the flu vaccine I would get sicker than a dog when I go the shot, then would end up with a knock-out case of the flu that would morph into pneumonia most years. I swore I would never get another flu shot when I retired, and I have not. I finally knuckled under and got the covid shot some weeks ago so I could continue to provide for the family, but I think it will do me more harm than help if it works anything like the flu shot does for me.

      I figure I have already lived a fairly good (if short) life, so if I have fatal side affects from the “totally safe and life saving vaccine” then oh well. Hopefully the family and friends will raise a toast and drink to the foam in memory. But forcing my children to take the jab is a bridge too far, and this old sailor may have to hoist the black flag if the idiots try to force that.

      1. Similar here. Though I suspect that if even a hint goes out that one might have died from vaccine harm, it will be used to deny next of kin the life insurance payout, because that’s just how these people roll, isn’t it?

  10. Just got around to reading a disaster novel. An EMP attack wipes out electricity and transport west of the Rockies. Chaos ensues and the President seizes power.
    The reality is much simpler. A virus gets out of a lab and governments around the world seize power to deal with “the crisis.”
    Hope all of y’all stay safe in this slow-motion coup.

  11. Today
    SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Monday signed into law a change to the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act that would allow those who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine to potentially face repercussions.

    The law was adopted in 1978 to protect physicians from penalty or discipline for refusing to perform abortions because of a religious or moral objection. Democratic Attorney General Kwame Raoul asked Pritzker to encourage legislation to make clear the law was not intended to cover a contagious and deadly pandemic.

  12. Parts of the country have gone mad.

    I’m in an interesting position, situated where I am. I often see online comments with the gist of “No one in the general population actually believes that,” immediately after just listening to someone around me make it perfectly clear that they do. Some of these people know that I’m conservative, but I don’t think it ever really clicks for them exactly what that means as they’ve never really internalized it. I can express a contrary opinion to something they say, but I suspect that 24 hours later they would have no recollection of the conversation.

  14. I’m sorry for your loss, Sarah.

    My son and I were horribly sick and lethargic in early 2020, but only for a few days. I had a SARS-like illness in 1999 that nearly killed me and took me over 6 months to recover from, and I haven’t had any issues with the flu since then, so my guess is that I already had antibodies that kicked in.

  15. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend, Sarah.

    Spousal Unit got the word yesterday – just a pinch of incense or be fired. The real salt in the wound is that he already works entirely remote, pre-dating covid, as his ordinary work setup. He’ll be trying for an exemption, but with all the double-down going on … who knows. Please pray or whatever you do for him.

    1. Push the limit. Make them react. Make them make the appointments, if they dare. Drag your feet. Viva la Sabot! Confusion to the enemy! Sue them for wrongful termination, even in ‘at will’ states.

      1. File an ADA complaint. One thing I’ve noticed is they are careful to claim that this isn’t a HIPAA violation to ask for your vaccine status, but they never seem to address ADA, which IIRC defines vaccination status as a protected status.

      2. THIS.

        My employer is trying to slow walk the tyrannical demands. I just told my HR woman yesterday that, though I appreciate the offer of her time (via phone call), everything from now on should be in writing. Email is just fine.

        I’d asked corporate and my local HR “you gonna enforce that illegal mandate? because I can’t wear a muzzle, and the fallback to the jib jab is muzzle plus bogus PCR test.”

        No answer, of course.

        More humorously: The grocery workers union made the mistake of encouraging us to make our own short videos to tell them what we wanted them to focus on for the new contract. Tee hee. My last three words were “Let’s go, Brandon!”

        1. There is one twist that everyone seems to be missing. They asked the head of CDC how many CDC were vaccinated. She could not answer. One reason is that she doesn’t know. Los Federales are not just asking if you have been, and having your boss check your card. They are requiring all federales to download a copy of your “card” to a database.
          Until you have, you do not count as being jabbed.

          So any one who is jabbed, but not willing to submit gets put in the lose your job bucket. If you don’t have a card they tell you to get one from your state if you don’t have a physical card, then copy it and send an actual image with your PII on it. So this is the start of a database with the health information for all federales, (contractors also perhaps?)

          If someone had proposed a law requiring all federal employees download their health records to a database two years ago, do you think it would have gotten any votes? Yet this is being shoved down our throats without any push back. The focus is on the vax/nonvax, not the more evil creation of a database with everyone’s health records. If you say it is “just” the Wuhan virus, you are missing that this database will have everyone, so once the database is created, easy to just add whatever you want later.

          1. Yep, and speaking of databases…..

            https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/11/biden-atf-has-54-million-gun-owners-records-report/

            “In FY21, the ATF received 54.7 million records on gun transactions from licensed gun stores that went out of business, the internal document bearing ATF’s seal shows. The document was originally obtained by the Second Amendment advocacy group Gun Owners of America.

            According to the document, the ATF obtained 53.8 million paper records and an additional 887,000 electronic records in FY21.

            Under the Gun Control Act of 1968, gun stores that close down are required to turn over to the ATF the private records of gun transactions, which are subsequently stored at a federal location in West Virginia. Now, gun advocacy groups say that information is being used by the federal government to create a national gun owners’ database, which is prohibited under U.S. law.”

            Funny how that works when you declare gun stores “non-essential”…..

            1. As soon as they start trying to confiscate guns they will unleash their worst nightmare. And this country will never be the same. Who knows? Maybe it will be better. But then if they could talk, I doubt swords would say they enjoyed the process of forging.

            2. Funny how many of the Democrats’ ‘common sense’ measures consist of turning THEIR fear of what you ‘might do’ into YOUR crime. And then punishing you for it.

              1. That’s the logic that drives the “you have to get vaccinated!” crowd. You won’t do what they “need” you to do so they can feel safe…therefore, you are selfish and ought to be punished.

  16. In early 2020 I was talking on the phone to number one son, who’d been following the Imperial College predictions of mass deaths from the virus. I was seized that sense of absolute panic — I’m not ready. I’m not prepped. I don’t have enough bullets. So I snatched a number 10 can of nacho cheese sauce off the shelf and bought it. Went home. Started figuring out what to do.

    And as the months went by and the predictions were debunked and the Denver convention center remained empty and the mass deaths didn’t happen, I realized this was just a flu and we were being conned.

    I’m opening the #10 can at Christmas this year, and we’ll have family nachos. And we’ll double dip, you commie rat bastards. You lose. We win.

    2. The best time to panic is early. I panicked in February 2020 when everyone was telling me I was a racist for worrying about the WuFlu. We stocked up on staples and reasoned that we would get it and, if nothing else, have to manage the symptoms so we stocked up on NyQuil and other such stuff. the notion there’d be a run on toilet paper never occurred to us, but the probability of the wife allowing TP to go low in this house is, precisely, zero. She’d make a good Mormon — a years worth of food and a rifle.

      Since I was commuting on the NYC subway every day and my two boys were what we once called essential workers but now call something else, I interpret the bad colds we had around that time as WuFlu., down to the loss of taste and smell that seems to be its marker. Number two son had it bad. I refuse to be tested, so I don’t “know” but then the tests are very inaccurate. All the professional idiots who are talking about non symptomatic COVID should be ashamed of themselves. The error rate on the COVID test is such that the result is, essentially, random. I had a knockdown, drag out with my sister the wine mom about this and did have to remind her that I was a trained statistician.

      My professional training is in building models much like the Imperial college one and the much more influential Bill Gates/U of W one that was used by the cabal of tech bros to bounce all the politicians into shutting down the world. After Diamond Princess, I knew exactly where those models were wrong and started to wait for that error to become obvious. What I missed, badly, was the need for politicians first to cover their a$$ from the consequences of their being bounced into error and second, a politicians ability to turn their mistakes into opportunities.

      I was right about one thing though. I nailed the current vax scapegoat. That was inevitable.

      What makes me sad is how few people seem to have realized, even now, how badly they were misled. I suppose we should never underestimate how many stupid people there are and how much damage they can do.

      2. Valentine’s Weekend, Des Moines was WORRIED.

        Costco was nearly empty, there’d obviously been a lot of stocking up going on, etc.

        But the costco lot being empty is what scared me.

        I was about three weeks into scared at that point, by memory.

        1. Mu daughter and I had been mildly concerned, through the spring of 2020. We bought up OTC cold and flu meds early in March, thinking and noting that it was good that most other people seemed to be pretty rational about the impending Covid threat. It wasn’t until the city of San Antonio cancelled Fiesta in mid-March that everyone came f*cking unglued. That’s when the panic hit the grocery stores. There were even, according to a somewhat shell-shocked teller at the local HEB nearest our house, fistfights in the parking lot there.
          Things were relatively normal and calm until mid-March. That’s when the panic hit.

          1. Shadowdancer had warned us that Australia had a heck of a flu season, so Halloween to Christmas I was doing things like taking gallon jugs of hand sanitizer and tissue in to church and being *loud* about how it was a moral obligation to *not* go to Mass if it might cause others harm… and man was I pissed when we all had the flu from heck and missed Christmas Mass. (Probably COVID, along with most of the county.)

            Of course, our local Asian population also *voluntarily* made their New Year’s more understated because so many folks were sick.

            The hair-on-fire nonsense for our area didn’t happen until the Diamond Princess made it clear it wasn’t needed, which….argh.

            1. yes, right around the time the tech bros sent their email to every municipality and government agency in the world saying the University of Washington model says that x people in your area will die and it’ll be your fault unless you lock down immediately. The lockdowns cascaded over the next 24 hours. Once the failure of those models was manifest the damage was done.

              We need to remember this, what was done and by whom. Hard copies.

        2. I can tell you where everyone else’s goods are…. they’re here in the Northern Wastes. My local Walmart is stacked to the rafters. The odd this-or-that was absent (last week it was house brand olive oil, tho plenty of namebrand and imported) but otherwise, full of plenty. Costco and Sam’s Club were in a similar state of mostly excess. Might be truckers are saying fuck the stupid states and are only working in the land of reason.

          1. I wonder the same, here in Texas … there are odd things not on shelves, here and there – like gaps in the shelves for various pasta types at HEB. And the local Ikea had no regular meatballs/// say, what? Ikea with no regular meatballs? Wotinhell…
            But most everything is still in stock. We have a turkey breast, all the fixings for the usual feast. Nothing really major to complain of, when it comes to empty shelves.
            But still – preparing for the worst. This may change, in the blink of an eye. Last March, 2020, everything seemed perfectly OK, and then the City of San Antonio cancelled Fiesta, and that weekend, everything went absolutely nuts. That’s when there was the great run on TP…

              1. And there haven’t been canning lids for months. Mom’s left it permanently on the grocery list.

            2. Texas is also one of the areas with large enough ports to take on big chunks of the traffic intended for the Port of LA.

              And that also means destinations that are both connected by rail and road ways, and not run by blueanon are going to have might higher availability than the west coast or north east will.

              1. Saw a long, long train loaded with containers headed north yesterday. Perhaps they started in Texas. Or possibly Mobile?

            1. Supply shortages are always followed by gluts. Its the cobweb theory in economics. this one will be a doozy.

              We haven’t had a problem getting anything we’ve wanted though there are odd ball things missing.

              1. “Supply shortages are always followed by gluts. Its the cobweb theory in economics. this one will be a doozy.”

                Logistics men are going to make or break their careers on this. The problem of sourcing goods and storing them when you run anywhere from feast to famine on stock is definitively non-trivial.

              2. Of course delivery backups are followed by getting too much at once, and for the same reason as floods– the reduction in demand until it soaks in that you can get it again.

                That’s what makes it so important to get people to look and see if the supply backup they’ve been waiting on is over, because otherwise it’ll go to “overstock– nothing– overstock– nothing” cycle as people stop ordering just about the time someone notices there’s an actual stock and buys at above-normal rate to fill those suppressed demands.

                1. The market will usually handle this. the problem is that this supply problem is a bit the tail from Covidiocy and the rest socialism with a dose of genuine incompetence. I’m not surprised there’s shortages, you don’t do what the world’s politicians did and not get long tailed effects. What I’m surprised by is a, that people are surprised and b, that it’s taking so long. Still, this supply shortage will end in glut and the rise in prices will be followed by a fall.

                  One key transition in normal people growing up is the development of a sense of cause and effect. Young children need to be taught this. The junta don’t seem to have learned this. they’re just spoiled children breaking things and laughing about it since their power insulates them.

                  1. Nah, the pile-up from the various wish list fulfillment nonsense is doing more– isolating those who have health issues, preventing folks from working, not enforcing laws against politically useful groups like unions, emboldened terrorists, etc.

                  2. “b, that it’s taking so long.”

                    The Junta in both CA and DC keeps piling on regulatory changes not related to WuFlu, and they are also keeping fuel supply more and more expensive and restricted. They are keeping things unsteady any time there appears to be market resolution.

                    1. ^^this^^

                      It screws up signaling.

                      So the shortages aren’t *just* the supply not going where it’s needed– there’s stuff that was never made, both by lack of parts and lack of place to PUT stuff you’d made, and not all of that demand goes away when not filled. (example: toilet paper, folks who keep a spare pack of whatever size will fill that when the supply goes back up, so no true glut)
                      Some of it, just keeping things up does enough damage that you have to fill a *higher* demand when things come back. (maintenance is a good example, but the guys doing at least 35mph to get all the harvest done are beating the crud out of the machines they DO have)

    3. $SPOUSE reminded me that I said (early 2020) that if we got the ChiCom virus, it would likely be fatal. OTOH, the Diamond Princess event and actually going through the disease disabused me of it. Panic abated as Commie Kate the Despicable was locking down Oregon.

      We (usually) don’t panic stock, though when a Costco run now entails an overnight stay nowadays, and grocery shopping is an all-day affair, our stocking quantities run to “enough”. We still get caught from time to time; I didn’t stock up on Pur(tm) brand water pitcher filters, and they’re now 2.5X the old price. (And they’ve never lasted the 3 months claimed. 6 weeks nominal, 7 at the outside.)

      I keep looking for more special powder for launching freedom seeds, but I do have enough pods to take care of likely situations.

      1. I only have a small stash of freedom seeds, but my neighbor probably has enough to plant half the state.

        Tod’s Workshop recently did a video on how to make a quick-and-dirty crossbow from saplings… good enough if you’ve got nothing better.

        As for water… sand filter. Not much different from what happens with any shallow well.

        https://www.cdc.gov/safewater/sand-filtration.html

        1. $SPOUSE likes the filtered water, though I reminded her that I’ve been drinking our (off-grid) well water straight from the tap for years without argle bargle fizzup 2553innn any problems.

          The water is only slightly crunchy–we have one of the nicer aquifers in the (highly geothermally active) areas.

          1. Yeah, never mind making bricks without straw; we can make bricks without mud (just add water!)

            I have one of those water softeners you pour salt into… Over 10 on the standard scale is “very hard”. My well tested at 25, cuz that’s all the higher the scale went. It’s still pretty hard even after being run through the softener. Seems to be mostly calcium.

            1. We have a mess. Calcium carbonates, calcium sulfates, with a dash of iron compounds for flavor and color. The good news is that the well we had done a few years ago taps into a cleaner aquifer than the legacy well (about 100 years old) that we were on. (It was shared-well agreement. Loads of fun in administration. [rolls-eyes])

              A friend is a chemist, and he figured out that anything that could remove the water stains from toilets here would also destroy the porcelain glaze.

              1. I just use the muriatic acid they sell for swimming pools. Dump a couple of ounces into the bowl, swish it around a bit, leave it for a few hours, come back and scrub for less than a minute. Clean bowl.

              2. Veneta and surrounding areas have a standard joke. Buy the semi-rusty off white towels, because that is the color your white towels will be after one washing machine. And any other white item washed. This is from the local wells that the city and anyone with their own well gets their water. It is because of the very rust red sandy clay on that side of the valley. See any pictures of Fern Ditch Lake to see the color.

                EWEB water is now supplementing (replacing???) Veneta area water via a pipeline so it might now be “used to be”.

  17. On the pharmaceuticals, someone pointed out a few days back that the companies got immunity for vaccine harm around 1986.

    That’s about 35 years ago, which is just about enough time for any Technical Leads who grew up under ethical constraints to age out and retire.

    The ethical tenor of a technical company will be set by its tech leads, not the business managers. The old hands who are inventing the new products and the revolutionary breakthroughs control what is developed and released. Management can push and pull all they want, but they cannot invent new technology in their own.

    Let me reiterate: a manager did not invent the mRNA vaccines. Some technical lead had an idea, and had the managers figure out how to fund and staff it.

    Thing is, they are very rare, and tend to stay in that role for a long time, so if there has been an ethics requirements shift, especially one that’s not a societal change driven one, it’s going to take a while before the person at the head grew up under the new, relaxed code.

    It’s like for me, I grew up in the shadow of Challenger. Every engineer in my generation remember Challenger and know exactly what “put your manager hat on” means. Probably every engineer who is trained by my generation will also remember that phrase, if only because we love to harp on it. But the generation after that is probably only going to remember it the way we remember the Tay Rail disaster, if at all.

    So, basically, I think we’re seeing the impacts of the first wave of tech leads who came up after liability was removed. Before that, the consequences of total indemnity were being moderated by tech leads to lived by the “do no harm” oath. But I think they’re mostly gone and retired by now.

    1. “On the pharmaceuticals, someone pointed out a few days back that the companies got immunity for vaccine harm around 1986.”

      Which is why they are calling a therapy a vaccine.

  18. I know two families that have gone through this.

    One where we potentially exposed, since it was through the waitress whose family was struck through her nursing student’s work place. We found out it had ran through the 6 children, parents, and grandmother. From very sick, due to asthmatic older adult teen (required oxygen treatment) to sniffles (little children). Older from adult teens, parents, and grandmother, suffered longer with lingering side affects.

    The other was my cousin and his family. They missed their mother/grandmother’s 80th birthday/60th anniversary party bash this last summer because all 5 were down with YKW flu. All were very sick. None hospitalized. No one died (or I’d heard about it). This is a family where everyone, from the smallest child to both parents, are extremely medically compromised. (Very long story.) Based on what their various medical problems are, I doubt it is safe for the majority of this family to take the vaccine because they are allergic to one or more of the vaccines ingredients.

  19. So apparently Gavin Newsom got the booster shot and hasn’t been seen in public since, 11 days and counting.

    His wife says “he’s like taking care of family issues, so stop asking, you haters” and his staff says “he’s like totally in the office taking care of, um, office stuff”.

    Habeas corpus, motherf***ers.

    And gosh, I hate to wish ill health on anyone, but wouldn’t it just be ironic if he had a bad reaction to the Holy Booster? D’you think it would change his personal commitment to Jesus Branch Covidianism?

    2. He’s apparently in the background of a ritzy wedding this weekend, masked, and there’s an “official family Halloween photo,” out. But if he doesn’t appear soon, the rumors are going to get impossible to suppress.

    3. I do think it would be deeply ironic if Herr Fuhrer Newsome died of the ‘booster’ AFTER the Democrats put so much money and effort into ‘fortifying’ the recall election, though. All that fraud for a state funeral.

      Schadenfreude? What schadenfreude?

      1. If he dies it will be anything except the COVID booster. To protect the Narrative they might see that he does if he will NOT be able to return without showing that the booster affected him.

      1. Eat the rich. The poor are tough and stringy.

        And I’d rather have his Dopeyness at a wedding, where he can do no harm, than whoring out the state at some sign-your-industry-away summit.

    6. For what it’s worth, there’s a rumor going around that Gov. Hairgel is currently suffering from a form of short-term facial paralysis that mimics (but is not caused by) the similar symptoms often experienced by stroke victims.

      If true, it’s understandable why he’s staying out of the public eye.

      His wife posted a confusing tweet accusing people speculating on her husband’s whereabouts of being haters, but then deleted it. Make of that what you will.

    7. Branch Covidian. So obvious, so perfect, I wish i’d thought of it, but I’m stealing it too.

    8. The rumor that’s (so far) bobbed to the top is that Newsom developed Bell’s Palsy, which usually affects half of your face. Hence he can’t appear in public. Variations suggest he may have developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, which is another nervous system disease. Carol knows a little about both, and I’m boning up on them.

      The kicker is that we can’t necessarily blame the virus for either condition. But you can be damned sure that if it comes out that he has either, the vaccine fetish will be pretty much over among the masses.

      2. My brother and a co-worker had Bell’s Palsy, and in both cases, it cleared up, but took a fairly long time (several weeks to months).

        Someone was passing a rumor that Hairgel died from the booster, but wedding pics say no. (And the fact that he was masked at a high-falutin’ affair gives some credence to the Bell’s hypothesis.

        Speaking of adverse consequences, has J Psaki crawled out from under a rock lately?

        1. Flip through the photos and take a look at who is and isn’t masked.

          You know how the lefty elite were masking all the ‘help’ while they went bare faced? Same thing here, just different tiers of ‘help’.

        2. I found it interesting (and worrisome) that part of an exam for a (hopefully completely unrelated issue) there were multiple checks and questions that just screamed a search-for/making-sure-to-rule-out Bell’s Palsy.

      3. Doesn’t Guillain-Barré mean vaccines are contra-indicated?

        ________________________________

  20. The chief editor of the Wall Street Journal had a column saying the “elites,” got broken in 2016 and have been crazy ever since. (He also suggested right-wing crazy, but he was actually easier on the Jan 6th protesters than most of the media. At least he wasn’t calling them traitors and insurrectionists).
    Meanwhile, the theme that really worries me on Twitter are the people who seem to sincerely believe that unvaccinated people are a disease reservoir and will be solely responsible for any future major outbreaks. If they’d just get vaccinated we’d all be safe!
    They haven’t started referring to their fellow citizens as, “dirty disease carriers,” yet, but I’m afraid it’s coming.

    1. “They haven’t started referring to their fellow citizens as, “dirty disease carriers,” yet, but I’m afraid it’s coming.”

      It’s normal speech up here near Seattle.

  21. Having re-read The Forgotten man, by Amity Schlaes, recently, the entire “pandemic response” has a strong wiff of “do what the government bureaucrats wanted to do for decades, and use the pandemic to stomp on any rebellion.

    More than a wiff. There are papers from the aughts, inspired by SARS-1 and MERS, where researchers did deep dives into records from 1917-1919 and cross-referenced deaths and spread with various practices. They came up with best practices and a plan for another Spanish Flu or other respiratory pandemics.

    We are NOT following those best practices or plans. Yes, they were some closures, specifically restaurants, saloons, and theaters, but not offices, schools, or factories. There was some masking, mostly on trains and other public transit where you are packed cheek to jowl…it wasn’t the same mask hours on end and was a “it’s what we got” not “it’s going to save you.”

    This has all be about control and obedience sold as pandemic response. Win or lose in terms of establishing control what it does mean is they have neutered every single fucking tool they have when a real pandemic does come.

    J. Daniel Sawyer has argued the byproduct of this is the elite have been shown so power grubbing (yes, grubbing) and incompetent that any crisis in the next decade will mean riots in the street and war worldwide (although not necessarily a world war). I can’t say I think he’s insanely off base.

  22. Quote: There has been lately an expectation that if there’s some sort of crisis, “Society will have to go communist to survive.” It’s more that they have been trying to impose communism for decades and have failed, so now they are manufacturing “crisis” after “crisis” in “never let a crisis go to waste” fashion so they can use their manufactured sequence of crisis’s to impose communism step by step in slow boiling a frog fashion. They have used their control of the establishment institutions (schools, media, etc) that they seized to indoctrinate people, especially young ones, to believe this nonsense.

  23. Look, this insane product of Xi and Fauci’s diseased brains is now with us to stay. Like all colds and flus it will UNPREDICTABLY kill. Neither masks, nor vaccine — now both religious talismans — nor invoking Fauci at bed time will save you from it.

    I thought by product you meant the masks and the mandates and crap.

    I’m worried. I got asked if willing to test since I won’t vax and the work mandate is coming. I said yes. It’s stupid, but I’ll do it while I look for a job.

    But here is the thing if they get the vax or test mandate testing will never end. Serious, I expect to make it to 73, another 18 years. If they get the mandate people will be getting COIVD (and flu and Legionnaire’s after the next outbreak of that) weekly when I die.

    It’s another way to make you dance and as we’ve seen if they get one they do not let it go.

    I expect masks as well although at this point I just ignore the signs in stores and walk around. Want to lose a paying customer, that’s their choice.

    1. Yep. We still take off our belts and shoes in the airport, and the war’s supposedly over.

      This is how systems collapse, by packing in so many new rules with pruning the out of date or useless ones until no-one can breathe, much less work. Then, ‘pop’ It’s all gone like a bubble of soap.

      1. Masks won’t come off in airplanes or airports either.

        COVID has probably put me off flying for the rest of my life, especially given my refusal to get vaxed will probably bar any international travel.

          1. Unfortunately, most of my family is 3 time zones away. I would drive if I could, but not gonna happen

            Well, maybe if it was just me, but my wife wouldn’t stand for it.

            ________________________________

            2. Two time zones, and relationship with brothers is “interesting”. I have an unofficial non-aggression pact with SIL, most easily handled by not communicating with her for years at a time.

              Plus, I can’t handle the long drives any more. 7 years ago, I could, but not now, and in winter, I’d have to add an additional few hundred miles to the trip.

    2. Oregon has an EO based masking order. I can’t speak for other parts of the state, but businesses here in Flyover County post the “Masks Required” signs, with no gatekeepers and nobody objecting to the barefaced. Compliance varies a lot.

      My favorite is a restaurant with a home-made sign: “No Mask, No Service”. No mask, and the food’s pretty good.

      (I talked to a cashier at one of the grocery stores we use. In the early days of the orders, they had a gatekeeper, but said person got so much back pressure (and abuse) that they dropped it as soon as they could. The last non-medical holdout was a big-box sporting goods store. The not-Cabela’s was worried that Despicable Kate Brown would kill thier firearms operation if they didn’t comply. Hasn’t been a factor for several months; employees have to mask (OR-OSHA), but customers do or do not per individual choice.

      1. Interestingly, we are under mask orders here in BC, and compliance is 90%+, but I generally don’t get so much as a dirty look as I walk into the grocery store barefaced.

        ________________________________

        1. The only masks seen in my little corner of Appalachia tend to be worn on the faces of official employees and chain store workers. None of the Mom & Pop and farmer’s markets care. No one has asked me to don a mask since last year, and that was in a state government building. They’ve since stopped even that, though the clerks are still masked.

          Methinks this little experiment with panic-pandemic social control has yielded second order effects in places like my little town that they’d be rather unnerved to know about. Effects that create happenings like Virginia.

          I remain worried, as I’m a pessimist by nature, about the future. Nation-future, firstly. Things are very much unstable in the White House. It is obvious to any sane man that the Brandon administration has multiple issues, any of which could prove fatal to the political survival of the occupants. I suspect future generations will learn dire warnings from the history being made 2020-2024.

            1. Did they cackle when you asked the question? That seems to be their new thing. “How dare you ask me such a stupid question, peasant, see I laugh at you.”

            1. May it be so. I’ve seen the left mutate and metastatize into a new form, usually farther to the left. I remember when they were explicitly telling us they were *not* socialists. Then they were. There used to be blue dog democrats. Not so much anymore, Manchin excepted.

              In a sane and proper world, they will be discredited and shunned, their lies and malfeasance uncovered and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We live in clown world, currently, with a vigorous anti-clown defiance brewing in consequence of pro-clown policies (as opposed to just secretly pro-clown, as they have been in the past). Dethroning the clowns in power is a must. It will happen. I hope it’s us that are the ones doing the dethroning is all.

  24. I may have mentioned this in comments on Sarah’s other posts related to COVID, but our MD suggested taking otc quercetin with zinc as a preventive, since quercetin is a zinc ionophore, as is HCQ. They apparently use quercetin to treat mild cases in parts of Europe. MD said it would also act against ordinary colds and flu. Here’s hoping, to put it mildly.

    1. Just remember that there have been some studies showing loss of smell corollating with use of nasal zinc sprays. Which means you might think you got COVID when it was the preventative measures that did it.

      2. Both $SPOUSE and I noted a decrease in sense of smell, and neither of us was using zinc. (IIRC, we got it before zinc was reported to be helpful.)

    2. Ionophores plus zinc have been known to suppress viral replication for years. The fact that most of the public health establishment across the West was ignoring and ridiculing that approach was one of my first clues that the COVID response was mostly in service of political ends. Watching so many researchers perform unethical experiments to try to prove HCQ dangerous still has me mad.

      1. I will miss Paul.

        I got it in Jan 2020. It was going around the offices at MSFC. One of the Heads of our group specifically got tested for the flu, which came back negative.

        I had 5 days of a high fever, nausea that led me to only drink orange juice and green tea alternating, a dry cough, and the sensation that my heart was being squeezed. Then I had a lingering dry cough for two weeks after the fever broke.

        I felt great in July 2020, but tested positive for Covid with a brain tickling test, after I was exposed to someone with an active case. Quarantined for 14 days then retested and got a negative test. Felt fine the whole time.

        I let my manager know when I tested positive, and he acted like he was humoring me. But later he freaked out when the state of Alabama called him to follow up on my case.

        ( This was when I began to realize that he had let a fellow employee convince him that I was a lier, this eventually led to me quitting my job, since there is nothing to be done when you speak the truth but the decision makers think your lying. I have a policy of always speaking the truth except if Nazis are asking if I have Jewish people in my attic, or something equivalent.)

        I haven’t gotten a job since, my plan after leaving was to 1) Find or be found by a husband (since there really is no point to money without a family) 2) Start my own method of income, 3) get the house cleaned up and organized for efficiency and peace of mind. 4) eat better and exercise more. I really haven’t been doing well at any of these.

        My Dad got a religious exemption until next June with testing and mask wearing. It is what we can do, but I expect that the government will fold on exemptions (I’ve heard NASA contractors are giving exemptions out like crazy).

        My pessimism says they will back down on refusing exemptions, but the commies will keep the papers please plan in place, then they can walk back the lack of exemptions later.

        2. Nothing is so permanent as a temporary measure laid by government in time of crisis. My sympathies on the job front- I’m still poking around for one myself. Re: plan, start small. Little victories add up, and big problems become manageable when tackled bit by tiny bit. Or so I’m told, anyway.

          I wish you luck in your searches, and may Himself grant you success in the future.

  25. I posted a comment mentioning a certain governor and two neurological disorders (by name) and that comment is not visible, though it had two comments from people here. Does the WP site do that sort of comment suppression?

    2. If you have more than one link in a comment, WP is likely to stick it in moderation.

      Beyond that, remember that WPDE is WordPress delenda est.

      1. Oddly, my instance of WordPress isn’t configured to collapse/expand comments like that. But it’s hosted on my own hosting service. I’ve used it since 2009 and it has served me well. I’m guessing it’s a theme or an add-on that I don’t use.

    3. Bell’s Palsy? I can see that one it’s up above.

      I suspect someone knocked over Newsome’s picture and the badness within is starting to seep out. Much like the Caudillo, who looks more and more like a dead guy every day whist the camel goes from strength to strength toward Caesar Romero’s joker.

  26. I finally went to get vaccinated, after a year of being mostly a hermit and going out maybe twice a week, even then masking up like the city ordinance was requiring most of that time. One of the questions at the pharmacy was about whether I had chronic disease, and gave a list of about 8 sample conditions. I said “yes” and even underlined which three of them I had. I was expecting to be disqualified. Nope. They gave me the shots anyway without a peep. If it didn’t matter whether I answered yes or no, why ask the stupid flatulent* question in the first place?

    * double layer of euphemism supplied.

    1. Know a guy who can’t find a place in Iowa that will give him a jab.

      Too much of a reaction to the first one, the nurse at the first place flatly said “you insist on getting it? Be in the emergency room FIRST.”

  27. The way the media presented the numbers from the beginning signaled that the scare dog and pony show was on. Sure, there’s a covid-19, but there’s a lot of subterfuge behind it on a world wide basis.
    Gates, Fauci, and many others have been scheming for a few years about making and using flues and “vaccines” for various nefarious ends.

    The overriding lump in my gut about all of this has been the “vax”. All the efforts to get the shot in everyone, kids included, with it’s mediocre efficiency. Plus the efforts to stifle other treatments which are safer, cheaper, and of equal or greater efficiency.

    Yeah, I know about the money, power, and the conditioning of the sheep. But I think it may even go a step further in that the concoctions could be used to thin the herd. I hope I’m wrong, but there are a few ways this could be managed, especially if this disease/crisis/shot scene continues to be pushed in coming years.

    Fortunately my house has been untouched and none of my friends or family have had the beer flu. I just keep exercising, getting sun, and taking zinc, C and D and hope for the best. I’m in the at-risk age group for sure, but no shot for me.

    2. Bill Gates is one of the key common denominators in all this mess. Never forget he paid for the UofW model and his money accounts for its early prominence.

      I was thinking about the tech lords the other day. Musk and Bezos want to take us to space. Zuck the schmuck is just a weird thief who latches onto other people’s ideas, the googlers want to live forever or become cyborgs or something equally creepy. Gates wants half of us to die and the rest to eat bugs.

      I’m rooting for Musk and Bezos. it’s like living in a Pournelle novel. One thing I know for sure is NASA ain’t gonna get us there, they’re worrying about pronouns and the weather. The saying is “we can send a man to the moon but we can’t …. Of course, we can’t send a man to the moon anymore.

      1. it’s like living in a Pournelle novel.

        “Exiles to Glory”, specifically. That novel has been more and more on my mind the last few years.

        1. Just so, and the stories in High Justice. I read them in High School but they’ve been very much in my mind recently.

      2. NASA didn’t particularly get us to the moon either. If you dig into the Apollo Project, you’ll find that it was a small core of mad scientist rocket engineers who made the moon landings happen, and they did it despite NASA’s tender mercies, rather than because of them.

        I rather suspect the only reason we got there at all was NASA was such a new fresh and young bureaucracy that the bureaucrats were still too new to figure out how to strangle it. They sure got better since, though.

        1. They HAD to succeed, so the bureaucrats had to listen to the engineers. That was ending before the last Moon mission, and was entirely gone by the time of the Space Shuttle. Which was an abomination, a victim of mission creep; as it was our only space vehicle, it had to do all things, none of them well.
          ———————————
          There are forms of stupidity that businesses simply can’t indulge in. There are no such limitations on the stupidity of government.

          1. NSTS, aka the Shuttle, was an engineering marvel.
            As a launch system it was just plain stupid.
            The one metric that counts for launch systems is usable mass to orbit. Your capsule should be as minimalistic as is practical, just enough mass to ensure containment.
            With the Orbiter we were spending the energy to lift some 80 tons of vehicle mass to orbit just to bring it back in something approaching an airplane landing. Note, shuttle pilots would refer to landing the beast as essentially trying to fly a brick.

  28. Sarah, first I’m so sorry for your loss, we’ve been dealing with some of the same here. After having been spared as a congregation for far longer than anyone had expected, our little church has lost two folks in the last 5 weeks.

    Second, I really want to back up what you are saying about, if you get it *rest* even if you feel pretty good. I am starting to come to the reluctant conclusion that the reason I ended up hospitalized early on in all this mess may be related to the fact that I insisted on keeping up a pretty rugged workout routine even once I knew that I had the Wu-Flu. I’d at that point gotten back into tremendous shape trying to reduce my risks any way I could. And since I felt pretty much fine except the joint pain and nausea, I defiantly continued my usual workouts to *prove* how not sick I was going to be (fit person, young middle age, no risk factors). I remained almost asymptomatic for the first 9 days, then two days after a 2 1/2 mile run started coughing and then ended up hospitalized right when I should have been coming out of quarantine.

    All that is an over-long way of saying “Don’t be Jane!” But do get as healthy as you can within your own limits. And the vitamin C and zinc go without saying. Otherwise, treatment and prevention are a matter for you and your PCM and not for some rando family practice PA to tell you over the interwebs.

  30. My condolences on your loss as well. Unpredictable is right… The only death that got close to me was a mid-30s single mother that was one of my favorite servers at a local restaurant, yet I knew other people with greater risk factors who came out of it with nothing worse than a temporary loss of taste and smell. Chinese-style totalitarianism really was the most dangerous virus to come out of this, though, to echo the earlier comment and it’s been horrifying to watch. Thanks for remaining a voice of sanity in all of this; I’ve been working on lowering my risk factors too and should be able to get through any hypothetical case without too much trouble, and I don’t see the dying part being a problem unless things go hot before I can escape and get settled or I get really unlucky with an even dumber driver than the one from a few weeks ago. It does seem like the power grubbers, virtue signalers, and their fellow travelers have been getting a few hoist on petard moments lately so hopefully things will keep up along those lines.

      1. One cousin who got it is quite a bit overweight (CEO again so most of the time in an office but does a good bit outdoors off work), and has had heart surgery (at 4 to patch a hole) and was telling me he was just damned tired over how long it took to get over it, and yeah, one of the worst “flus” he has had. Meanwhile one of our maintenance guys here, newish hire over from the shipyard, late 30’s and okay fit has died, though the family is grumbling the local hacks intubated and coma induced him entirely too fast for their liking, but he has had pneumonia before, so . . .

        1. Most of the Really Bad Cases I’ve heard about that weren’t going well into suspicious deaths were “what moron thought that was a good idea” type things– such as sending someone with multiple risk factors home without treatment to self-isolate, and not giving ANY treatment until they were admitted from the ER.

            1. The refusal to treat without hospital admission seems to be a big factor in the serious illness/death toll numbers, because I suspect earlier treatment would have lessened the severity in many cases. Of course there was an election to steal and power to be grabbed and the AMA has gone full “:woke” so the last thing they cared or care about is people’s health.

  31. “Society will have to go communist to survive.”

    Which unplugs most of the distributed intellect in a nation, from the processes of problem-solving and decision-making. That works against survival.

    2. Yup. That ‘supply chain’ they keep nattering about is a supply WEB, with interconnections and interdependencies running in all directions. It is fundamentally impossible for any top-down central command authority to manage such a network, even if EVERY SINGLE PERSON involved, from top to bottom, is diligently doing their very best to make it work. Figure in some selfish, greedy bastards here and there and you get the classic communist economy with its empty shelves, long lines and starvation.

      1. The interconnected-ness of the supply “chain” boggles the mind when you look at it at any depth. JIT is madness. But it is madness that *worked* because a hundred thousand different things just plain worked. The port nonsense was not expected by the warehousing company in Missouri, or the manufacturing plant in Georgia, or the many little chain stores that depended on a thousand different “links” getting their product on time and passing along their goods.

        No one person can direct the whole of it. Or even significant pieces of it. What they *can* do, and frequently *do* do (pun VERY much intended) is make it work slower, and raise the cost of milk by raising gas prices, or adding a 5c toll to a major road, or adding regulatory burden, and so on. They *cannot* make it work faster, better, or cheaper, save by removing the sand in the gears that is taxes, regulation, and bureaucratic burden- which would put bureaucrats in danger of not being able to justify their fat paychecks. Thus will never happen.

  32. Two items off my Twitter, fwiw:
    Someone posted a TikTok video purporting to show bad vaccine reactions. People twitching, people in bed jerking, etc. Followed by Western folks falling over sideways. That instantly made me think of the, “Chinese drop dead with Covid,” videos, and we know Tik Tok is Chinese. So, are they mischief making for fun and profit, or trying to steer the next step of our breakdown?
    Two, the Epoch Times is reporting the CCP is telling the Chinese to stock up now for the winter. A lot. Why? The ET doesn’t know.

    1. I saw an article a couple of months ago that suggested that China is probably about to get hit *hard* by food shortages. Much of that is due to foodstuffs that are supposed to get shipped in, but likely won’t be.

      Was the article accurate? Dunno. But it is true that China imports a lot of food. And it’s also true that the global supply chain networks are all screwed up right now.

      1. Corn and soybeans in Brazil (I listen to the farming report sometimes, given Iowa they focus on this a lot) are both having not-so-great years.

        Not “OMG we’re all gonna die,” but definitely “star worrying about the poor, if you aren’t already.”

      2. The local food bank is getting canned veggies labeled, “McTrader,” and the cans are labeled, “Made in China.” I was thinking, “they’re exporting food?” but maybe it’s just the cans. Don’t think I’d want to eat the stuff, though.

    2. The CCP backed off on that after it caused a panic, and told their people everything is great, no need to stock up. Supposedly some clerk jumped the gun.

      They’ve been buying up everything they can get for a couple years now, their pork industry is in the toilet, their main growing areas flooded. So who knows?

  33. When the mess first hit the news I expected to get sick. I work big box retail (aka essential worker, which is BS, anyway), I’m overweight, have some weird inflammation thing going on the doctors can’t figure out, and I ALWAYS catch the respiratory bugs when they go around. Worked face to face with the general public straight through, with as little masking as I could get away with. And never got sick. On the other hand I’m active as hell, doubled my dose of D as soon as I heard the news, take zinc and other immune boosters. Go figure. Then my rheumatologist prescribed HCQ in August to see if it’d help with my issues. It does, so now I’m taking that too.

    I’d stocked up on the basics in Feb-ish, and didn’t even have to think about buying TP till Sept or so too.

    But yah, don’t play stupid games with pneumonia’s, rest rest rest for weeks, not matter how decent you feel. Please!

    1. I have Dad’s example to go by. Pneumonia has now killed him twice (first time, at 45 or so, he got better, but it took a jump start and extremely high levels of O2), and that first bout really took it out of him, though he was back working too soon and it returned (that recurrence was when his heart stopped) and got knocked back and even after getting well and taking it easy was slowed for some time after. Though, for him it was never a bug (well respiratory, there is debate on what caused the pericarditis that caused the pneumonia that first time) and the final one was most likely due to the cancer treatments

  34. I’m sorry to hear of the loss of a friend. You can never have enough true friends in life, it seems. Each one shares a bit of themselves with you, and you with them. When they go, that part of you that lived in them goes too, and the part of them in you goes lonely. Regrets are part of the price we pay for caring for other people. It hurts. But it is worth the cost.

    May Himself watch of you and yours as well as the family and friends he left behind. Lucky are they who find such friends in life. No diamonds or gold can compare.

  36. When close friends and family pass, we must press on. And if we enjoy the same eternal reward, we can hope for that meeting “over there”. But we must press on, regardless.

    Philippians 3:12-14, English Standard Version
    Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

    And we must not give up that hope of a joyous reunion.

    1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 English Standard Version
    For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.

  37. Egad. I just did a quick look and some maths:
    the over-reported “dead by WuFlu” numbers (includes among others, shooting victims, drug overdoses, and motorcycle accidents), and the underreported (voluntary reporting, so not every event is actually reported) VAERS adverse events reporting, has it neck and neck on death by WuFlu and getting effed up by the Vax, (Moderna and Pfizer especially) here in the US.
    Bet if the true numbers were reported for both, adverse effects from the Vax would be higher than deaths from CCP Lung Rot. By the By, add the numbers on the younger side of things (they wanna push in on 5 yr olds now) and it is more likely one will have an adverse reaction to the poke than to the disease as more of the serious issues are happening to the younger sets.

    1. The USC, Cal Berkeley football game has been “postponed”. 99% of the Cal football team and coaches have been “vaccinated”, yet there are many “positive” “Covid” Cal tests. So much for “safe”, and “effective”.

      The local sports section actually quotes a sane Cal player’s tweet. “If I understand correctly, I can go to San Francisco, steal a bunch of items in a Walgreens, and not be arrested. However if I refuse a test in Berkeley, I can be.” This was tweeted by a Cal defensive lineman Luc bequette. It is found on page 3 of the sports section, in the newspaper that used to be the San Jose Mercury, but now calls itself the”Bay Area News Group”.

      Interesting that the local propaganda bird cage liner includes that info. Particularly the Walgreens reference. An interesting data point. Are they losing control?
      The truth is escaping.

  38. I use L-Lysine with the approved anti-viral when I have shingles (can’t get the vaccine btw because it is live). It gets me throught the worst of it in about two weeks. Plus in the case of the 2nd covid pfizer jab, I was feeling pretty bad afterwards for about a week so I started something that also had L-lysine in it. I took about three days for me to quit dragging. This was from the second jab… I hate it– I only got it because it is now “required” to have at least two jabs before you can get on the transplant list.

  39. FWIW–As to chemotherapy, I was told by my oncologist that it’s worth trying but 1.Only a small % benefit from it, 2.Most of the benefit comes in the first round, and even the first treatment or two, so 3.If people had difficulty with it, it would be terminated after the first round,, which is why I benefitted some but halted it after the first two treatments because it was causing me to lose weight and delaying the surgery…

  40. You can’t say you weren’t warned.

    https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2021/11/10/john-hayward-offers-disturbing-but-vital-glimpse-at-what-the-dangerous-kamikaze-phase-of-the-democrats-all-out-war-on-the-middle-class-really-entails/

    “The lesson of Obamacare will be repeated to doomed Dems as they tie on their kamikaze headbands. Sure, we got clobbered in a few elections – but we seized control of a huge chunk of the U.S. economy forever! We permanently changed the relationship between citizens and the State!”

    “Once the big spending bill passes, there is nothing more to say. The decision is made forever. The money instantly vanishes and can never be recovered. No refunds, no second chances, no repeals. It’s cute that you think you can “punish” the big spenders in the next election.”

    1. Civilization, true civilization inherently includes the measures which suppress barbarism.

      We have been lied to, saying that these measures are uncivilized.

      And, fundamentally, there is no ‘our’. We are individuals, attempting to carry our civilization inside, and we each have our own goals and causes.

      The dice are rolled, we each take our own turn, and see how the play develops. Perhaps the game will run to civilization again!

  42. The longer I live, the more I learn those holes will never be filled. A friend died of the same brain cancer that killed John McCain, and that had killed his brother 4 years prior. There have been many times I have had a question and started to pick up the phone to call him. He’s been gone since November ’18 and I miss him terribly.

  43. 100% in the 10 ring, Hoyt! My two cents, if the China Virus is so terrible, and the vaccine so incredibly safe and effective, there wouldn’t be governments trying to force it on us. The crowd, hive-mind, collective wisdom would be informing the population and we’d be storming the gates to get it. This is not the case. Big Pharma is working hard, pushing wet noodles, and we all have to ask ourselves…WHY???

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