This week I had an interesting… I’d like to call it discussion, but it wasn’t. I kept telling him how I’d come to the conclusions I’d come to about Covid (totally vindicated by Fauci’s exposure) and he kept autistically holding on to the government numbers of Covid deaths like a particularly shitty teddy-bear.
Let’s put it this way, if it were on the blog instead of email, you guys would have told me that it was a boring troll and I should block him, because he had no flavor. Except he’s a well-known commenter. I suspect it was an attempt to brow beat me, which reveals a lack of understanding of me that is almost staggering considering how many decades I’ve been me in public. In fact if he continues (he’s trying) and given that I’m in the middle of the world’s most protracted furniture refinishing project (I haven’t tried to redo most of a house’s furnishings since I was 32. So much material for Dyce) and my give a damn is extensively broken, I’m just going to allow the natural Sarah to come through. And nobody likes that. (Right now I’m ignoring him, on the principle that he’s not paying me for my time and energy and he’s certainly not engaging with my arguments.)
Anyway, to an extent I feel sorry for him. I think he’s older than I am. And if he’s not, he’s certainly MENTALLY older.
It’s very hard to let go of the mind set we grew up with, in which the government might have been — was — viewed as the enemy by many of us, but we trusted it to do some things right, at least in the first world. And the things we trusted it to do included collecting numbers on everything, from population to GDP to mortality rates with this or that, to–
Was it bullshit from the beginning? Was that carefully all-knowing facade always bullshit? I have begun to suspect so, since I found out that FDR set the price of gold according to his lucky numbers.
I think at times, in the machinery of government, well-meaning men and women did the best they could. But the task was ultimately always impossible, since it necessitated both a public who would answer truthfully to government busy bodies and supervisors who didn’t have a preconceived idea of what the answer would be.
Honorable men and women who knew the task was impossible just made up a number that made it convenient and easy and appeased their supervisor. They understood the task as “Make up the numbers that will work for us now and that aren’t glaringly crazy. Then roll with it.” I know some of you were even involved in this type of thing. Every time I mention it I get an email from someone going “Oh, yeah, in the seventies I guessitmated the population for x city and they’ve just been adding to it or guesstimating from that number ever since.”
I mean, sure, we have a census, but the census itself is now blatantly adjusted, randomly, to account for “people who don’t want to be counted” and was frankly notoriously flaky even before that. Adjustments were just applied quietly and with less fanfare.
Yeah, they admitted after that the numbers were plumped, but seriously, I LOLed so hard I shot coffee out of my nose when I read that Colorado population had increased in the last census. When I left in 2021, sure, we were getting a mort of Californians and New Yorkers and also bizarrely left-leaning Texans. BUT– But the exodus was so huge that the press of people remodeling their houses meant sometimes the most basic supplies disappeared from the refinishing stores. Like… paint rollers. (Which led to the infamous Sarah crying in Home Despot episode that we don’t talk about if we want to live.) More telling, NONE OF THE THRIFT STORES WERE TAKING FURNITURE. So many people were abandoning what they had to move lighter, that we had to take good cherry cabinets to the dump (And we moved with more than we should because I couldn’t stand the idea of destroying some of it. We’re getting rid of some of it now.) The stores were stuffed to the gills. Getting a u-haul out of Colorado was unobtanium. When older son and his wife moved out, he had to drive to Gunnison from Denver to find a u-haul close to the size he wanted. (And even then, we had to rent a cargo van to supplement it, and the whole family had to drive down to his out of state destination, in various SUVs and vans with the overflow.) As it was he might have found the only u-haul available in the state that weekend. When we moved we kept a u-haul for a week and made several hundred mile trips back and forth. (Because what else could we do?)
But according to the census, all these people were moving in. Sure. Why not?
So starting with the basics, like population, government numbers were always a crapshoot. And that was before the incentive of major government money was added.
Population? States and cities get per capita subsidies of more kinds than I want to think about. Health? Ditto. Business? Oh, baby, don’t get me started.
Which brings us back to the Covidiocy (Yeah, I know they don’t like it when I use that word. Would they prefer the Covidcrime?) and the guesstimate of how many people died of Covid. This person is hung up on “they can’t have made up that much.” This shows a bizarre smallness of mind and also not knowing enough people in the health professions.
They can. They did. In fact, the numbers had no relation to anything in the real word, beyond “Does this hospital need money?” (Pretty much always yes. By the bucketfull.) Look, the federal government was paying per covid death. The early tests were so “reliable” you could do better by flipping a coin. If you tested positive, covid went on the death certificate. If you didn’t test positive, but the symptoms were upper respiratory, “covid” went on the death certificate. I know — because we spent hours over it on email– one of you almost lost her job for fighting a finding of “covid” for the death of a patient who had long been treated for and died of lung cancer. You fought it because it mattered — the family would not get the payout from the insurance for cancer treatment right to the end, which would bankrupt them — but that you had to fight at all tells you how bad the problem was.
As for the death rate, it wasn’t that much higher, and what there was is completely explainable by cancer screening and treatments not being considered essential, by the deaths of suicide and despair, by people abandoned in nursing homes. One of you who works in hospice told me it really was an “old people killer” and I believe it, but I don’t even know if it was Covid or just the heartbreak of being unable to see your family (I understood the decline in my parents, even over the phone.) Or of course the fact that old age homes are staffed mostly by third worlders where uh doing your job is an imposition, and when relatives couldn’t check… I have some horror stories I’d rather not rehash. I like to sleep at night.
So how many people died of actual covid? I think your answer is somewhere between fuckedifiknow and whothehellcantell.
So, given that how am I so sure that the death toll was not worse than (at most) bad flu? The Diamond Princess. We’re not often given perfect microcosms studies, but we were fortunate in Covid. It was the perfect study. Almost all very old people, in an environment that routinely gets overwhelmed by various infections to the point boats have to be taken out of commission, and no medical care for a while. And… the result is bad flu, if that.
Which is why I was screaming in the desert since that study. To make the lie more blatant, no country that wasn’t invested in the lockdown had covid be a thing. AT ALL. In fact, the fact that it had no appreciable increased mortality among our homeless population is a reproach and a slap in the face of those who still buy the government numbers.
Ultimately, that is the thing we have to learn: to look beyond government numbers, because most of them don’t have anything to do with reality. And even those that should be trackable have weird adjustments and begs that you don’t know about but which make the whole thing stupid.
Like recently I found our economy the last quarter was supposedly “Carter slump bad” until of course you deep dive and find out that they count negative net exports as a negative against economic growth (!) which means higher consumer confidence will always translate to “no growth” that is, until we re-industrialize a lot. (We will, G-d willing.)
But everything, from the GDP to the inflation number is … nonsense. The way they calculate things make them useless, and they’re buried deep where we can’t mentally adjust the nonsense. (And don’t get me started on the fed. Just don’t.)
This is why I continuously find test cases (unfortunately few are as perfect as the Diamond Princess. Reality can be very disappointing.) Also why I gather information all the time, from eavesdropping perfect strangers to looking at what’s available to buy, the prices, etc.
Because yeah, the truth is out there, but you have to look under layers and layers of bullshit to even get an inkling. And you’ll never have all the numbers (Barring a Diamond Princess situation.)
In fact, in a discussion with one of you this morning we circled back to “no one knows how much medical care actually costs.” No, the hospitals don’t. It’s all obscured by government meddling, overregulation AND insurance dealing.
But it goes deeper than that. No one knows what ANYTHING costs. Because there’s too much government interference and meddling in anything.
To all the idiots who want socialism: we already have too much of it. We have a massive information problem, because of government meddling in every level of the economy and the next level taking the cooked levels as truthful.
Kindly take your Mixed Economy, roll it all in corners and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
Mixing lies with the truth makes it all lies. And mixing government meddling with the economy makes it all wobbly and stupid, and makes daily life harder at every level.
We need the federal government to restrict its meddling to the constitutional powers. Defend the borders, negotiate with foreign powers, arbitrate disputes between states and leave us the fuck alone.
And we need state governments continuously afraid of a mob descending on the capital with pitchforks and a nasty disposition.
The truth will set us free.
According To Hoyt 
So nobody knows anything *especially the experts* but we *must trust the experts*. 😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡
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Of course, Comrade! Experts are politburo, so must be trusted. Mere peasants know nothing – uh, I mean, ze citizens must be informed by proper authorities!
:coughs: Ugh, that left gunk in my throat….
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I grew up with a healthy distrust of the government in general but wanting to believe they at least did SOME things right. Over the years I’ve largely lost any hope that they will get anything right other than by pure luck. At first I suspected that this china bug was going to be really, really bad but the numbers didn’t add up. As you point out the Diamond Princess was a clear indication that things were being exaggerated. People were not dropping dead in the street, wasn’t seeing any reports of homeless and other people being found dead all over.
Mostly seemed to revolve around hospitals and senior centers. And one of the big problems with hospitals seemed to be that they closed off much of them and sent qualified people home. Nurses and other medical professionals who could have been reassigned to help if there was really an overwhelming number of patients. ….. But, they didn’t they just overworked the ones who were still there (which reduced the care available) and isolated people from family and friends. Senior centers were just as bad and I speak from the heart that many elderly (outside of a certain few states where it seems they wanted them to die and put infected people into the center)died more from loneliness than anything else.
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The Covideo series that entrapped the country to their phones, tv, and PCs was staged, managed, directed, and propped up professionally by proper bastards: pissants, pederasts, and political persons (but I repeat myself, mea culpa). As the memetic truth goes, how much less would the taxes be if it weren’t all spent on fricking fraud?
Perhaps I’m a touch grumpy today. But I think hanging’s too good for them.
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Hanging’s too good for them. And they aren’t even worth the price of a single bullet.
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We need to go back to tar and feathering. We’d run out of tree branches and lampposts otherwise. Something Sarah said in a previous column “without trumbles”. I named a ship that in a game I play. Had to explain to my adult son and he was impressed and slightly disturbed at the same time. But he didn’t disagree with the sentiment.
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sure is. But let’s hang them anyway, and bill them for the rope.
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Sigh. Yes the government can’t count especially when the answer is I’ll give you money for each person you claim. They practically beg you to lie to them. The Diamond Princess was an amazing stroke of luck for those of us who wanted to actually, you know, follow the science.
Off topic, and for shameless self-promotion, I was just interviewed by Steven Southard https://stevenrsouthard.com/author-interview-frank-hood/.
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Don’t forget the most evil part of it– if you didn’t have COVID, they couldn’t treat you.
So, if you’re a doctor who just doesn’t want the person to die… you say what you must to be allowed to treat them.
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Annnnd if you DID have COVID, they wouldn’t treat you either.
Hubby went to the local clinic (affiliated with the Mayo Clinic) because he had a kidney stone. A lab technician met him at the door, made him take the nose swab test and go back out to his car to await results.
15 minutes later they called his cellphone, told him he was positive for COVID and to go home because they couldn’t do anything for his kidney stone because of the plandemic. Jerks.
He never had a single symptom of COVID but they called his work and he wasn’t allowed to go there. His kidney stone passed during the night and he spent 2 weeks building a garage in our backyard because he was never actually sick.
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The false positives and the false negatives were so high that they might as well have flipped a coin.
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I eventually came down with Covid – after my daughter was exposed to someone with it at a social event some months after Wee Jamie was born … anyway, we had both come down with something flu-ish, after a book meet late in 2019. Honestly, we thought that we both had it then – one of those curious early cases … anyway, because we both thought we had caught it then, we had good reasons to refuse the Cursed Vaxx. (Aside from disinclination to take any hastily rushed out remedy.) But upon coming down with it and testing positive at the ER … yeah, didn’t really appreciate being treated as if we had the plague.
Jamie had it as well – since we all lived in the same house. He ran a mild temp and had the sniffles for a couple of days. Daughter and I both had Covid pneumonia, which took some heavy antibiotics to knock down.
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I had it over New Year’s this year. A lot of blowing my nose and sore throat. And muzzy head, which is why I suffered through the throat until it dawned on me to get cough drops.
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Precisely.
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I have literally seen someone claim that because the number of excess deaths in the epidemic time was equal to the COVID deaths, that proves they were accurate. (Apparently all other causes of death either did not change or exactly balanced each other out. Who knew.)
I pointed that since we know for a fact they falsified the numbers, it didn’t.
Someone tried to argue with me on the grounds of there being no better numbers, I pointed out that corrupting the only data set meant we will never know, and he followed me to my Substack and started to post obscene comments there.
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that’s… special of him.
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It’s one thing when it’s some internet rando; it’s a whole next level when someone you’ve known and gamed with in person for 40 years informs you that questioning the death rates from COVID means you should have your house burnt down.
Fortunately he was in AL and Em and I were in TX.
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Uggh. Some of these people are really deranged two-year-olds.
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The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.” —?” G. K. Chesterton
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Making U.S. senator selection by popular vote was the wrong move. It should have been left to the state legislatures to select, with the state governors making temporary selections in the event of death or incapacitation. The justification for the Amendment was that some states couldn’t select a senator in a timely manner, meaning the state lost their representation in the senate. That has NEVER been a problem for the nation, only the state, and the state is where that solution should have stayed. If the legislatures were good at being deadlocked and unable to elect a senator or two, then it should have defaulted to the governor picking one for the next 6 years.
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Ah, yes, Progressive Era reforms, a few of which were not bad (secret ballot, uniform railroad gauges for long-haul trains), many of which were either not helpful or downright lousy in the long run.
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Indeed the attempt to fix the issue of Senate corruption from political machines produced a Senate corrupted by money to get reelected. It no longer serves the purpose of theas originally designed to balance the power of the populace by granting power to the state legislatures but is rather just a more sluggish House. Repealing the 17th Amendment should probably be high on people’s lists of fixes (perhaps followed closely by repealing the 16th and making the Census only count people to be represented (i.e. citizens) and citizenship to NOT include those born in the country whose parents are not here legally). All of that is probably almost impossible, sadly.
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My state hasn’t had a secret ballot since 2008. Coincidentally, that’s when they went to electronic voting machines.
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Most recent estimate I’ve seen was the world-wide death total from COVID as of June 30, 2021 was 14.7 million. So yeah, bad flu season at worst. However, that’s not the real horror. The real horror was the fact that COVID was deliberately constructed to be a people killer. It was unlawfully funded and supported with our tax dollars by an utterly corrupt, unethical, murderous criminal named Doctor Anthony Fauci. Kind of reminds me of a Bond villain.
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While I was long retired from the active practice of medicine by the time COVID became a head liner, I still had a bit of a front row seat during the initial problems in Italy because of an academic mailing list that I had the good fortune to be on …. I noticed that some of the stuff being put out didn’t make any sense – most obviously the inappropriate misuse of the idea of quarantine – or the lack there of – by political leaders in NY, NOLA and other big party cities in the early part of 2000, around such DNC approved religious festivals as Chinese New Year and Mardi Gras.
Follow that up with the restrictions on open air gatherings of groups which were not particularly DNC approved politically correct – motor cycle club rallies in Sturgis and Lake of the Ozarks for example – with the images of big DNC donors meeting with DNC big wigs, seated maskless in close set dining facilities, with the wait staff all masked up following shortly there after.
Add in the lack of traditional epidemiological follow up – no repeated antibody titers even among the worst cases to survive to help determine what level of immunity provided medium to long term chances of survival, for the simplest example; followed by the Blood Banking folks doing blinded studies on banked blood showing a far higher number of samples with significant titers of anti-COVID antibodies than would be expected by just using the case reports put out by the State Health Departments and collated by the CDC, for another …. and my curiosity went into high alert.
Then came the fall of 2020 – US and Canadian Flu cases being reported dropped to near zero, while cases from 3rd world countries able to reliably and continuously to report flu, malaria and Ebola cases ….. were NOT reporting large numbers of COVID cases – Of course, those areas also routinely used Ivermectin to provide ongoing prophylaxis against assorted worm infestations, and Chloroquine or Hydroxychloroquine as a routine prophylaxis for malaria …. odd coincidence there, eh what?
Add in being reminded that Dr. “Science uber Alles” Fauci had been the leader of the maladroit handling of the early HIV/AIDs crises ….
and my opinion of what was coming out of Atlanta, DC and Atlanta fell through the floor.
Come to think of it, I lost contact with a former fairly major physician contact from the International Committee of the Red Cross, also based out of Geneva, about the same time … I’ll have to go back and look for him!
Sigh. And it’s not like we’ve learned much about the need to rein in the government and make it the Servant of the People instead of the Masters since that time.
Even more Sadly, the number of elected officials who would be Masters has continued to grow, despite some effective efforts to prune the number of Bureaucrats with the same attitude.
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The classic case of numbers being fantasy is the fall of the Soviet Union.
It caught the leadership by surprise because they were being fed cooked numbers from the bottom up. Even knowing the reports were bogus generated to meet quotas and production targets, they could not internalize how bad the fraud was, and how vulnerable they were, until the tipping point.
CIA and State were surprised because they were reading the same numbers as the Soviet leadership, but actually believed they in any way reflected reality.
There are signs the PRC and the CCP are a good way down that same road.
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I think it was Heinlein who said the population numbers for Moscow were bs in the late 60s. Soviets said millions, he said 750k tops.
Takeaway: perverse incentives lead to perverse results.
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His estimates were based on the infrastructure carrying capacity, which isn’t able to lie like people are.
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Which I suspect is one reason why the CCP keeps building “ghost” cities, etc. It’s the same tactic as putting plywood tanks out for aerial reconnaissance.
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Weirdly he didn’t realize what that meant for WORLD population numbers.
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But… but… counting trucks and railroad cars couldn’t possibly be as good as aerial reconaissance and reports from spies who was just as clueless as the commissars.
That the vaunted CIA would stoop so low as to resort to counting trucks… phui!
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If that’s what Heinlein said he was definitely wrong – while official numbers weren’t necessarily accurate it was several times more than 750K; there was also a significant number living there “illegally” (without propiska). He probably didn’t know that in Moscow USSR back then 100 ft2/person of living space (excluding kitchen and bathroom) was considered (by the government) sufficient for ordinary people in government housing (and many families actually had less) and that vast majority of housing was government owned.
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Hello Ivan. No, Heinlein wasn’t wrong. But you are. It had zero to do with living space and more things like water and food, which even at soviet ration levels, you can’t fake.
Also, to continue commenting on this blog you’re required to post: Putin is an idiot who is destroying Russia because someone broke his little red wagon and he wants it back, old KGB horror that he is.
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Seems like a long winded way to say “Putin is a Nekulturny Chekist”
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Okay, conceded. That works too.
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This is probably part of what should be the basic skills of adult numeracy.
Numbers of an aggregate depend on methodology, and the human behavior of methodological choices is present even for extremely automated measurements of machines.
In principle, you can look at the methodology, and cross check with speculation based on incompatible models of what the people selecting the methodology might be doing.
In practice, this is really expensive. When people are only moderately actively discouraging you from doing it, you may come up with the time anyway from stubbornness. But, if they genuinely threaten you enough that you cannot afford to do so, then maybe everyone gets the surprise.
For covid, we know internet forums for hobbies were persuaded to adjust rules to prevent ‘misinformation’. Academics in fields outside of medicine, for example, did not entirely know that they would not be lynched for speaking about obvious sus aspects.
It does not require a freaking PhD to note that the apples and oranges of changing the test method during an ‘epidemic’ would naively suggest that it is invalid to draw statistical conclusions across the change points.
I could create a mathematical model that suggests that if we do not throw Fauci from an airplane tomorrow, he will drop an oneill island three on NYC saturday, then the dust will kill 98.3% of humanity by September. You, Sarah, and I understand that this is a hot garbage model, that is only sourced from a desire to troll. There is zero reason to predict that it would actually be true.
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The joy of throwing Fauci out of an airplane, plus the chance, however unlikely, that we could save humanity from a terrible fate… I am 100% on board with this model of yours and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
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I agree. We can’t possibly take the chance that tossing that malignant goblin from a plane is the one thing we need to do to save our remaining grandmothers.
We don’t want to be responsible for killing Grandma, do we?
Make sure the plane is big enough for everyone to stay 6 feet part and they are all triple masked.
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I’ve been refueling at large a gas station near the freeway. It’s basically a truck stop, right in town. The stations I used to use started running banker’s hours during the Coof, and this one, built just a few years ago, is almost the only 24/7 station in town nowadays.
Anyway, I’ve had several incidents when going in to pay for gas. (I use cash) There will be someone at the register. I walk up and stand behind them. Sumdood or sumgal fifteen or twenty feet away, down one of the junk food aisles, will get upset that I’m “cutting in line.”
Uh… twenty feet isn’t “in line”. Not even at Peak Coof.
I dunno, maybe they’re out-of-staters; it’s by the freeway, after all. But it’s a consistent thing, and only at that one place. Everywhere else, the “distancing” went away long ago, though I still occasionally see masks in the grocery store.
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Grocery store mask wearers (at least at the Kroger affiliate) tend to be in their 20s, frequently with hair color not assigned at birth, and occasionally the septum ring. The amount has dropped with summer weather, but it’s noticable.
The big independent and the small-chain club store? Usually the very old and those apparently in poor health. Part of is that both tend to cater to the more rural population (at least in Flyover County).
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and of course you can ID by the septum ring because they are invariably wearing the mask incorrectly.
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SO MUCH THIS.
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Skeptic: I accidentally read your name as Sceptic and thought that was WEIRD. (No disparagement intended, just a funny supplied by my dyslexia.) I was thinking “Wouldn’t “Took Antibiotics” be shorter?”
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When I first started commenting on the interwebs, I chose “Skeptic” as a handle, but found out that there was already a “Skeptic” posting on one of my favorite haunts. Since he/she was there first, I changed my name to my not very original current handle! Shades of Prince.
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Booking clerk for Pinochet School of Skydiving approves.
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St. Augusto de Valparaiso, spare us your necessities.
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ALWAYS happens in socialism, and there’s a lot of it in our gears.
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This is why I continuously find test cases (unfortunately few are as perfect as the Diamond Princess. Reality can be very disappointing.) Also why I gather information all the time, from eavesdropping perfect strangers to looking at what’s available to buy, the prices, etc.
Because yeah, the truth is out there, but you have to look under layers and layers of bullshit to even get an inkling. And you’ll never have all the numbers (Barring a Diamond Princess situation.)
Every number – every single number – is so cooked that maybe you can find the real one if you dig. Then try to tell people what the real number is. You need to take them through the layers to reach the truth but if, in the process of doing that, you step on one thing that sets them off, they won’t listen anymore. Because X layer is their Shiny Pet Thing and how dare you threaten that! Don’t you want good roads? Don’t you want people to have health care? Aren’t you a Good PersonTM? Don’t you, aren’t you….
That is not the point. That is never the point. But getting the other person past that layer – whichever one it is – to show them the truth takes forever (if said person doesn’t cut you off completely by screaming, flinging things, and storming out – or throwing you out). It is especially difficult if you are not a fan of numbers or you keep misplacing the map of the explanation in your head somehow (say, by being tired or not being good at numbers). All you end up with for your trouble is a screaming fit or, at best, someone politely ending the conversation because they don’t want to deal with it.
Then there’s the “eyes glaze over” problem of going through the layers. Lots of people lose focus because you need to cut through and gut several hundred numbers to get to the truth. People will remember “the numbers are fake” but they won’t necessarily remember how to prove it because the path there made their eyes glaze over. And that’s before we get to “this is a thing I learned with mother’s milk as true, and that can’t be wrong, if it is then the world’s not safe and it MUST be safe…!”
Hollywood accounting wishes it could be this thoroughly confusing. It really does. Grr.
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The numbers aren’t just cooked, they were falsified at the collection phase, from hospitals and coroners who were “financially incentivized” to find COVID deaths. And if you remember, the CDC admitted first at-home test kits were wrong 51% of the time. Who knows how many of those were reported. (and, last I checked, nobody had any idea how many of those test kits were made, or where they went. Which seems to be a common problem with the Fed in general…)
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I was thinking more broadly – i.e. everything from taxes to weather data to everything else that the government collects. But this does include the Covid deaths as well, and they are among the most cooked numbers on the list.
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And now those padded numbers are embedded in the training data for every LLM, in the datasets scientists might use for statistics, and getting them out again is an exercise in futility.
And this didn’t start with COVID. The entire globull wormening scam was propped up by distorting, adjusting, and siting the sensors in such a way that we can’t even figure out the raw data without a time machine.
Heinlein said “Get the facts”. Our “betters” had no problem making sure we couldn’t.
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“So how many people died of actual covid? I think your answer is somewhere between fuckedifiknow and whothehellcantell.”
A lot of people died with, not “because”.
One younger healthy person I knew on FB; Tamara Willhite. Such a damned shame. Just an unlucky combo of virus and immune response. It happens and it sucks; she seemed like a good person. Not a reason to shut the world down, though. Unless your intent was to break it to begin with…
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I have a young friend who almost died, but it was more “contributing factors.” And honestly? many die like that of the flu every year. I almost died of pneumonia following flu at 33. And it’s because the family had been playing pass the virus back and forth AFTER a stomach flu lasting two months. I was so tired, but looking after toddlers and husband was more important. No one, including me, noticed I was extremely ill until I passed out and Dan dragged me to the hospital.
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I knew one man who died, and it was definitely a case of covid being the last straw. He’d been through the, “remove some bone marrow and make sure it’s free of cancer,” then kill the rest of your bone marrow and inject the purified marrow to grow and replace it,” therapy just a few months earlier, and he’d just gotten word the cancer had come back when he and his wife caught the wuflu together. Went straight to his lungs.
Everyone else varied from, “sick one day,” to, “sick actively a week, then dragging slow recovery,” depending on their age. 2021 the office had two people get sick enough to need oxygen /be hospitalized and one has since been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemo just to keep it suppressed; she’s been told it will never go away.
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I seldom comment, but I read the blog daily and felt compelled to say (1) today’s edition is brilliant; (2) people who refuse to read one’s carefully constructed response in a discussion (be it text, e-mail, or comment section) yet continue to bombard one with more moving goalposts and tangential talking points do so because they’ve lost and they know they’ve lost; and (3) subsidiarity. It is a central pillar of Catholic social teaching (let us not get into an argument about whether the men of the Church have succeeded in upholding this, or any other, principle). Here’s how my browser’s AI explained it and I believe it is the way to unwind the bureaucratic morass within which America as Constituted has become nearly choked to death:
Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization and governance holding that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level consistent with their resolution. It dictates that central authorities should only perform tasks that cannot be performed effectively by subordinate or local entities, thereby preserving the autonomy and initiative of individuals, families, and local communities.
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Your latter is hated and reviled by professional bureaucrats everywhere: for power is what they choose to pledge their secret allegiance to. Individual liberty is nigh instantly responsive and sensitive. Those with skin in the game are the first to feel, hear, or see the problem before it is even possible to communicate it to purported “higher authority.”
To put it bluntly, those paid to manage, oversee, or judge will do those same things, regardless of whether or not they are right and proper, simply because that is what they are paid to do. Eliminate the sinecures. Remove the positions. Close the buildings and sell the land.
Only thus will the plague of paper-pushers and petty tyrants be slowed, if only for a time.
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Honestly, subsidiarity is the best description of where my political leanings lie. Deal with the problem at the closest level to the problem that can effectively deal with it. You get the best knowledge of the issues that way, and the least friction, especially when it comes to money.
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And when “they” do something you don’t like, you can identify a responsible person and insure that your grievances are heard. Sometimes it’s over the backyard fence because your neighbor is also a town council member.
It is harder to do the dirty work when individuals have to look you in the face and deal with a well-reasoned argument (or diatribe if it’s something like hiring a teacher who was just fired from two districts over thataway because she couldn’t stop telling the kindergarteners about her private life/parts). The faceless bureaucracy is an impenetrable mask that we should have never allowed to be fashioned and placed over The Constitution.
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There were a lot of people who died from Remdesiver (sp*) too.
And I expect many died from respirator use due to so many untrained personnel, who were maybe trying their best but were NOT intensive care certified, being given patients who were intubated.
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There is a reason ventilator/intubation are considered last resort measures. They are freaking dangerous and flat out kill a non-trivial percentage of the people you use them on.
Sure, %15 chance of death from the ventilator may be better than the alternative, but the profligate ventilator use in 2020 killed a bunch of people who didn’t need to die.
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Even trained personnel, respirators are a double edged sword.
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“FDR set the price of gold according to his lucky numbers.”
Well that stopped me short and sent me down a rabbit hole. As of this typing, I haven’t read any further … I’m becoming more and more convinced that, in spite of all our cultural upbringing and 4th- and 7th-grade civics classes and 10th-grade history class, our rulers and government are really no different than mad King Nebuchadnezzar (furry!!!), Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Charles VI (snowflake!!!), Mad King George III, and of course our beloved St. Falsi. There is nothing new under the sun.
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…. The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes. Read it.
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Yup. It’s got a quote in there in which, iirc, FDR picked a price of $21 for gold on one particular day because 7 is a lucky number, and 3×7 is 21.
People mocked Reagan because Nancy liked astrology, even though there was no indication that Reagan ever allowed it to influence any of his serious decisions. We’ve got quotes like the above from FDR, but you’d never know about it if it wasn’t for Shlaes’s book.
She’s also got one on Coolidge that’s a good contrast to FDR.
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COVID contributed to my late wife’s death. Did she have COVID? No, never, but she needed an intravenous drug administered to prevent her from having a heart attack. So off to the ER we went. Found out the ER was so filled with people worried about COVID that I wasn’t allowed in with her (this was about the time of the omicron strain). So she goes in alone. Hours later she calls me, says no one has given her the IV her doctor prescribed, they are so busy with people who are sure they’re going to die with the omicron strain (the mild, easy to catch version that I now believe was released to shut down COVID). She wants me to come get her, she’ll try the oral version of the medicine. I got her, she’ll try takes the oral medicine (only later did her heart doctor tell us the IV version was more effective, which he later insisted he had told us – he did not). We go home. That night she has a heart attack. We call for an ambulance. They arrive quickly, take her away, to the ER, where I can’t be with her. Find out in the morning she was left unattended in an ER room and was found unconscious then intubated. She never got off that tube. Her heart trouble was finally treated properly, but she became so weak on the tube she couldn’t come off of it. Eventually she died. I was able to visit her once she got admitted to the ICU, but the damage was done. She never had COVID, but COVID killed her.
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There are no words. I’m sorry.
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Damn. That’s horrible. :virtualhug:
And damn them. Them being the people who created the “emergency.” (But it’s a complex them, and many of them didn’t know what kind of monster they were creating…I have to remind myself that God is the judge in the end, not me, but man, is it hard sometimes.)
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I’m so sorry.
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I am so, so sorry. :hugs:
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I am so sorry for your loss. 🙏🙏🙏
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I’m so so sorry. Hugs.
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Covid didn’t kill her. Incompetent doctors misinformed by the Centers of Disease Control killed her. Anthony Fauci killed her, indirectly.
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Oof! Sorry.
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Dang.
I am so sorry.
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I’m so sorry.
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I’m sorry. So frustrating and horrible.
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“Like recently I found our economy the last quarter was supposedly
“Carter slump bad” until of course you deep dive and find out that they
count exports as a negative against economic growth (!) which means
higher consumer confidence will always translate to “no growth” that is,
until we re-industrialize a lot. (We will, G-d willing.)”
I think that should be NEGATIVE net exports; in other words the amount imports exceed exports. The US has run a trade deficit pretty much every year I gave been alive, so this is not exactly news. (“lies, damned lies, and statistics” if it was from slanted media reports, or just that media people are ignorant of math or economics)
(sorry for being pedantic about a minor point that in no way invalidates the main point, but having spent a lot of the last several days trying to accomplish highly technical computer tasks with the assistance of AI, you have to treat them as bright but overenthusiastic children. “No that button does does not appear at that spot in the user interface. At that spot I see XYZ.” “OH SORRY FOR MY MISTAKE! YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT THAT XYZ IS IN THAT SPOT.”
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Yes, that. But because people are buying more stuff, it counts against us. Itw as negative net exports. ABSOLUTELY correct.
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I will also say that the COVID vaxx probably killed my sister in law. She was a lifelong smoker but did not have cancer, did not even have COPD. My brother is an employee of the federal government and had to take the shot or else lose his job. His wife believed in the vaxx and kept up with all the boosters. Then she came down with a galloping strain of lung cancer at stage 4. She died within weeks. It has been shown that the vaxx suppresses that part of the immune system other than the part dedicated to fighting the original COVID virus, which no longer exists in the wild. I chalk that up to another death caused by COVID.
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Thinks about her brother’s stage 4 galloping lung cancer, 20 years after quitting smoking.
European, you know, so every vax and booster. G-d help us.
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I strongly suspect (but dare not inquire, for the pain it’d cause) that my nephew’s cancer reappearance was due to a not-vax shot. (He lived in a state where it would have been damned likely for a person in remission for cancer to be required to get the shot for routine followup visits.)
BIL got a booster and another vaccine at the same time. No obvious comorbidites, age mid-70s, but he died of pneumonia.
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My cousin’s mother’s second husband (who am I kidding, she and daddy’s little brother were married for 25+ years before divorcing), my aunt’s second husband, had damage to a specific layer of his heart that was caused by the clot shot. Who knows if the clot shot contributed to the galloping blood and lung cancer of her ex, the first husband? Won’t know because both were longtime smokers. The second husband had stopped smoking decades prior. Uncle smoked until the day he died.
Uncle is also the same family line as me with a long, long, history of death by sudden heart attack. We are the same generation (age wise) learning why. Did the clot shot cause these? Put this under “didn’t help”.
OTOH I had the J&J shot and booster, before it was pulled for not being advanced enough (gave the mRNA version a bad name). Now I hear TPTB are getting ready (if not already done) to approve the new approved standalone mRNA based flu shot …. Spit. Which means it will be rolled out to all of us medicare clients (because that means M O N E Y to the providers).
We are not prone to getting the flu shot anyway. Glad I got the one and done senor shingles and pneumonia shots before they mess with them. I am not anti-vaccine. I know what can happen. But dang!
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There was a paper on the Influenza shots that came out in 2004ish. It showed that having consecutive shots was the same antigen would cause Original Antigenic Sin. That is target fixation and in seniors they would get serious cases of the flu after the next flu shot. It is best to stay away from them.
I’m a senior and don’t take the shots. I’ve never had a clinical case of the flu which includes living through the Asian flu pandemic in the 50’s and the Hong Kong flu in my senior year (68 – 69) in High School.
I told the VA I wouldn’t take man-made mRNA shots until they have a couple of decades of verifiable data on them. They have bothered me since on vaccinations.
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Clinging to the government numbers for dear life and refusing to consider that they could possibly be anything other than absolutely reliable — or maybe actually an undercount…I’ve had that conversation more than once with a couple of people. There’s no way to get them to reconsider. Also more than once, it came down to “Oh, so you’re a scientist now?” and “what makes you think you’re smarter than a scientist?” and “you actually think you know more than the scientists do?”
To the first, no, but you don’t have to be one to see the logical connections between things and recognize crap when you smell it; and to the second, look, scientists aren’t geniuses. They’re just people who had a lot of schooling and some very specialized training. None of them are dumb (you can’t be if you’re going to get through all that), but you don’t actually have to be a genius. Neither am I a genius, but against that consider that I also have had a lot of schooling; I scored very well on the GRE and earned an advanced degree. I lack a scientist’s particular specialized training, but I demonstrably have sufficient brainpower, and I’ve had quite a bit of practice in logicking through problems that don’t often have clear-cut answers — and this is definitely one of those.
Anyway, not just tooting my own horn here; in context, this was by way of reminding my interlocutors that they already knew this about me and should maybe give me some credit instead of throwing “what are your credentials” in my face. (Now I’m wondering if this particular person, having such an idealized view of “a scientist” being smarter than the smartest person you know, has been led astray by the fact that my family is chock-full of brainiacs (I can mostly keep up with them, but I wouldn’t claim any more than that; my dad is the smartest person I’ve ever met, and I’ve hung out with some of you guys), which by extension would mean scientists have to ALL be positively Einsteinian.)
So…where was I…? Oh yeah, recognizing crap when you smell it.
Another one of those things is masking. If more proof was needed after the big flu epidemic (pandemic?) of 19-whatever-it-was, we’ve got it now. The biggest comparative study ever: entire countries whose culture revolves around masking vs. those that don’t, and cities, counties, and states in the US that had different masking requirements. It wasn’t precisely designed, and the data is messy and made messier by those stupid cloth masks they told us to wear, but if masks made a difference in disease transmission, we’d have seen it. Instead, everybody got covid and/or the flu at the same rate in the end, masks or not. (It’s possible masks actually made it *worse*, but I’m not sure about that.)
On the bright side, I came to a pointed realization of what various types of masks ARE good for, and have since saved myself some allergy-and-asthma issues by masking up and not being an idiot when I’m raising dust around the house or making lots of sawdust. And thinking about what would ACTUALLY be effective if I didn’t want to get sick also busted a “handwashing outside of using the toilet is for hypochondriacs” barrier I had erected for myself at some point back in the mists of time; having got serious about having truly clean hands, I’ve gone from getting some viral thing two or three times a year to only…what, one, maybe two?…yes, two…in the past five years.
So hey, something good DID come out of the covidiocy…kind of…
As for “do you actually think you know more than the scientists/the government,” you’ve provided the only good answer: No, because nobody actually knows anything when the numbers get this big and the process of coming up with them is so comprehensively borked. The best way to bet is that it’s crap all the way down.
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To some extent, define me, and define scientists.
I actually, for the area of science that I have put the most concentrated effort into studying, do find the humility to trust the apparent consensus over my inability to get everything to make sense in my eyes.
For one very particular area. Some of what I am reading is pretty sus, and certainly it could also have some very particular conspiracies hiding a bunch of things. But, the size of the industry involved is slightly too big and too varied for me to be persuaded that the one basic answer is entirely conspiracy, or entirely delusional.
Part of things is that the skill level of the background is so specialized, that I can legitimately tell, and verify that I am still catching on very basic ways of understanding stuff.
But, my dudes, the stress of it has made me nuts enough that I could maybe be persuaded that photons are fake. Because I cannot (yet) verify photons in a way that does not require me to trust others.
Outside of that area? Yeah, where what some ‘informed’ insider wants you to accept without questioning, and where that claim is expensive, they have to be effective in their persuasion. And where they screw up persuasion or marketing by showing laziness or thoughtlessness, well, that is a mistake.
The academic world had gotten lazy for literal decades coasting on the reputation earned by people who thought in ways that are maybe alien to the current inmates. Thus these patients think that the trust is the universal law of human nature, when it is merely that the single claims were not previously so expensive and so attention demanding.
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+1
No, I’m not a scientist, but I’m fairly intelligent and logical, and I grew up on a farm so I know the aroma of bovine excrement when I smell it.
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I spent a lot of time at my grandparents dairy farm and ALSO, had several alcoholic relatives.
Both certainly helped my ability to spot a con attempt and/or a load of manure from 50 paces.
When the people in homeless camps, who are not known for scrupulous handwashing, following grocery store arrows, or diligent mask wearing, didn’t start dropping like flies in the street I figured the recommendations were a pile o’crap.
Especially since the only other people who didn’t have to follow the “guidelines” were the so-called elites.
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Precisely on the homeless.
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A lot of time on uncles small property with horses and cattle. Do not point at a horse and call it a deer, or point at a cow and call it an ostrich.
My knowledge of most medical topis can be painlessly inscribed on my smallest toe nail. I do not have the patience to deal with the requirements of science tracking. Doesn’t mean I do not understand how it is suppose to work. I just do not have the patience to do it. OTOH I deal with logic and strict logical consequence on little to no information other than it is “not working”. The BS they spread was not logical. The BS did not match the pattern of what was not happening.
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Not to mention all the mostly peaceful demonstrations that went on. As I told my wife at the time, we’ll know one of two things for sure within about 3 weeks after these great big gatherings convene: 1, the experts were right about the need for lockdowns, and we’re going to see a gigantic wave of sickness and death after this; or 2, nothing much is going to happen, covidically speaking, and we’ll know the whole covid thing is a nothingburger. (Wait…I forgot the third alternative: “antiracism” is magic and will protect you from disease. This seems to be the one all the “trust the experts” people reached.)
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Hypothetically, there may still be extant electronic records that could allow us to clearly identify BLM folx at those events.
Hypothetically, we could use those records, arrest them, convict them, hang them, and then have the records registered as a late death of prolonged illness from being wrongly mobile during a stupid facist lockdown.
Hypothetically, after we had done that, we could attempt to extradite people from overseas for that same end.
Anyway, humor is still not funny enough to justify the murder of humans.
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Until about a year ago, I was a peer reviewer for the National Academies (the engineering side, not medicine.) But starting 20 years ago one of my areas of professional specialty became so thoroughly infested with activists and so thoroughly politicized that I didn’t see the point anymore. Bovine-byproduct reports, studies constructed in a way that could only lead to one conclusion, and angry polemics passing themselves off as “scientific research.” And if a peer reviewer happened to submit comments that although factual did not support the Consensus®, they found they weren’t assigned papers in that area anymore.
So what’s happened on the medical side does not surprise me one bit. Or the pettiness, retribution, and professional damage. Been there, got the aloha shirt. (But I had to buy it myself.)
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I actually wonder if a good portion of the population might have developed a kind PTSD during the prolonged lockdowns and constant drumbeats of doom. Their minds may have built a kind of fortress to protect itself, but after the crisis period is over the fortress can become a prison they can’t escape from. Any challenge that threatens their barrier looks like a direct threat. (Looking back, I personally went through a kind of weird period for a few years after 9/11 and the early War on Terror period. So I think I have some idea of how prolonged barrages of stressful events and news about same can affect people.)
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Crossover predicted that.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/04/16/burning-down-the-social-networks-by-crossoverchaos/
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Wild hilarity in hindsight, that post.
One, we wound up frustrating calling it, without entirely realizing exactly what we were calling.
Two, I have a timing answer to a question that I was literally asking myself earlier this week, about a career change that I turned down. Some of the wording of what I was saying in April 2020 more or less confirms it to me.
Would have been a terrible choice, the road I did not travel. Long story, but yes. I have up to two more years on current position, and I was expecting to be finished with it before now. I did not plan for what I traveled, but the other path would almost certainly have been much worse.
Family losses, very stressful surprises, and going unpleasantly mad several ways this path, but the best guess is that other would still have been worse.
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–
Waves. Been there. Do not regret turning down the option.
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*Wry G* To quote a certain chaotician, “I hate it when I’m always right….”
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Even without the doom part, I can tell you Post-Traumatic Stress from the lockdowns is indeed a thing. It shows up differently in different people and different areas, but it is indeed a thing. And it’s no fun to deal with no matter which side of the equation you are on.
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Yeah, a bunch of us cracked, some harder and worse than others.
Almost everyone seems to have cracked at least a little.
It may not be that /everyone/ is so strongly PTSD as to be clinical from it, but certainly there is some PTSD elements in what a lot of people experienced and are experiencing.
And, basically, the frustrators have kept on trying to pull the disease bell, so some people have not yet truly had a space where they felt safe to unwind, which they would have needed to process things.
I maybe frustrating called it, in advance, and had tools to help me process, and it is unlikely that I have fully processed it.
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I don’t think I ‘broke’ at all, as I was so busy helping a national organization pivot to all-electronic communication, plus only a few years earlier I’d escaped an oppressive office environment that was killing me (and not slowly) and made the 2020-2021 unpleasantness seem like a (insert metaphorical comparison here).
But the loss of trust and the destruction of relationships due to, er, “perception of orange” was much more of an impact on me than the viral restrictions.
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I don’t know if what I had was nervous breakdown or not, but I am a raging extrovert and lockdown broke me
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I went thorugh a weird period for about three years after 2020. Mostly paranoid and even more introverted than normal.
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Let’s just say that my aversion to crowds is greater than it ever has been.
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^^ This ^^
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Whenever I see someone masked now, I think how tragic it is they’re going to spend the rest of their lives in fear because Covidiocy.
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Wags hands.
Have always seen people still masked locally. But generally one can easily determine why the blanky mask might be a reasonable option for them.
But when we’ve seen them on vacations to the wide open outdoors, it is a bit shocking. I know the Asian, when visiting America’s tend to mask up, even before COVID locked us down. Asians still do.
Right now I’m seeing a lot of masks because wildland fire smoke has socked in the valley, and the coast.
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You’re not the only one… several local folks wear a mask with IT’S FOR POLLEN!!! written across the front.
Which means either they have the same feelings, or someone said as much to them.
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I said then that there are people who will wear masks for the rest of their lives. Partly as a fashion statement, mostly because they internalized the belief that masking shows they are the Good People who Care About Others.
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Re the nursing homes “staffed by third-worlders,” there’s a significant demographic of the US, of various races, whose culture and mentality make them functionally third-worlders even as eighth-generation-plus US-born citizens. And a fair number of them also go into healthcare jobs.
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Test case for the efficacy of the vax in preventing COVID:
My wife’s daughter works in an office which required everyone to be vaxxed. One day, one of her co-workers came in with COVID and threw up in the ladies’ room. Every single woman who used that room–over 20 in all–came down with it.
Do the math. If the vax was even 20% effective in prevention, the odds are almost 99% that at least one of those 20 women would have been spared.
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I’ve been reading some of ATH from April and May of 2020, and am maybe done for now. (Woohoo!)
So antibodies key onto proteins, and the immunity is to specific protein patterns.
One of the bits of speculation then was that we absolutely do not know that it is only possible to have one strain of one respiratory virus in a group at a time. As a modeling choice, in a computer program, you can absolutely see that.
But, it is apparently possible to have multiple STD viruses at once. So multiple respiratory viruses should also be possible.
That line of speculation directly leads to several possibilities.
In particular, to multiple leaks of engineered bioweapons. If that happened, all of the modeling assumptions used would be hosed.
But the other place it leads, down the line, is to the question of stopping multiple with a single fingerprint.
Yeah, we don’t know what entirely happened, and at the same time a lot of the vaccine thinking was clearly deeply retarded, or malicious.
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Yeah, we don’t know what entirely happened, and at the same time a lot of the vaccine thinking was clearly deeply retarded, or malicious.
I propose a third option: CYA. They knew some, but not all, of what the Wuhan Institute of Virology did to that alter that thing. They watched and believed the psyop coming out of China with people dropping like flies and apartments being welded shut and them spraying bleach in the streets.
They didn’t fear what would happen to us. They feared for themselves. Fauci and friends knew from the start that it was a lab leak from a gain of function facility he had been funding.
I imagine my disbelief (that someone could be so evil) is similar to those who learned of the WWII horrors in 1944. It’s hard to grasp the sheer diabolical nature of everyone ‘in the know’ including Deborah Birx of the soft-spoken scarf. They deliberately misled the President, and therefore the official response to the event. It defies my darkest imaginings. “Heavens above, rain down justice; let the clouds pour it down.”
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Birx, whose actions seem to have somehow been forgotten in the current Narrative. She was just as big a lens louse as Fauci, but she’s getting a get-out-of-jail-free card as far as responsibility.
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I thought I read that she was due to get her turn at the hearings. I hope so. 15 days to flatten the curve, my oversized ass!
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IIRC, she was a much bigger driver of the lockdown plan than anyone else in the committees and councils behind the scenes. Her head needs to be mounted on a pike right beside Fauci’s.
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I only know for sure that I caught COVID at one time, well after places had already started opening up (even here in LA County). This was confirmed by the test that I took.
I was scheduled to start a new job at a hospital a few weeks later.
Because California, and because work at a public health facility, I was required by state law to get a booster.
/rolleyes
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That is, in the end, what brought down the USSR. Every worker, foreman, manager, and commissar lied about everything. They had to, just to keep crops planted and production lines running. Orders rolled downhill from the Politburo, and the Soviet system had no provision for, “that’s impossible, we can’t do that.”
After 75 years, nobody had a clue about what the real economy looked like. Not the Politburo, not the foremen, not the KGB, not even the CIA. Near the end, the Soviet military was using the black market to source spare parts. Which had officially been shipped from the factories, but didn’t actually exist in the military supply chain because they had been stolen before they got there.
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much of the troubles Russia and the former Soviets have is either the Mobsters, who knew how to “Capitalist” or the KGB types, who knew how to sort of run things, took power in the vacuum (or some combination of the two).
Frank Zappa of all people was trying to show them the light, but his passing interrupted his work.
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To be fair, though, those people kept Russia alive and fed under communism.
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True, so did Al Capone et al feed their neighborhoods during their reign.
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Russia seems just a series of nested maskirovkas. No face, just masks. Lies upon lies upon legends.
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Pretty much, yes. Much of Europe, to be fair, but Russia has the vices of Europe and Asia.
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Hugely amused. I was in a hospital in 2023, no Covid.
Moved to a SNF (Skilled Nursing Facility, for those lucky enough not to know), no Covid.
24 hours after being admitted to the SNF – Covid.
Ended up cheek-by-jowl with lots of the other post-life.
The only downside, apart from 10 very deaf men playing their TVs 24/7, was that the food, such as it was, was always cold because of the time it took to get it through quarantine.
I was peeved because I had been following the figures published by California and it was clear, except for perhaps one week, that the existential threat, wasn’t.
Oh, and following my first jab, I had large lesions on my lower legs looking very like DVTs, despite being on high-dose Warfarin. Without the jabs, I wouldn’t have been able to shop.
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we need a universal pantograph
see Alexei Panshin.
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faux-vid 19
Con-vid 19
Stupid 19
The AnDramaDuh Strain
Captain Fibs
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In 2021, thousands of doctors and nurses were fired for refusing to take the COVID shots.
1* They fired doctors and nurses during a ‘Health Crisis!!’
2* If doctors and nurses would rather be fired than take the required ‘cure’, that should tell you something.
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It can but not must tell a person that the people who refused to repeal Obamacare were the common enemies of all mankind.
It is possible but not essential to conclude that lynching might have been an appropriate remedy.
Going forward, peaceful procedural remedies may be effective. We shall see.
Trump is muddling the issue of whether we have prove that TikTok is an op, and to what CCP end.
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In 2020, hundreds of thousands of hospital workers were let go. The hospitals, supposedly overwhelmed, were actually empty.
Everything was a lie, including “and” and “the”.
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Yep.
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I believe I have reached the level of perfect Socratic wisdom: “I know that I know nothing.” When I was 20 I knew everything, now at 80 I realize that I know nothing . . . and never did. The truly tragic truth is that our (or any) government is made up of people just like me, who knows nothing, for sure. Therefore, Ms Hoyt is correct, our founding fathers were geniuses in developing limited constitutional government in a republic. Too bad we could not keep it.
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Spit out the black pill. You don’t know where it’s been. Yeah, it’s been dicey for a while, but we’re getting it back.
Dooming feels good but helps no one.
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The most important and most valuable information in the world are prices. When we deliberately screw with prices, we are deliberately making our society ignorant and stupid.
Add political polls to the list of really stupid nonsensical numbers.
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THIS THIS THIS THIS.
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When all victims of a multi-car accident “died of C,” and one person was listed as a C death in 3 different counties (two states, snowbird) a logical person knows the numbers are flawed. That’s just two incidents.
And yet, I have a friend who still firmly believes that the wuflu had a 2% death rate. She didn’t know anyone who died, but obviously…
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It would be darkly comedic but poor tactics to talk about how many of the Biden voters the Trump supporters have murdered.
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