We have all been naughty, disobedient, ungrateful serfs or so say the self-nominated Covidiocy experts, especially including those of nationwide media fame and of a political stripe known for their fanatical allegiance to the current ruling class. We’re supposed to get another tongue-lashing from the White House tonight, which has already promised a winter of severe illnesses and death for those holding out against getting vaccinated against the latest Covid variant. Are they going to cancel Christmas for those who won’t cooperate? Are we now all enrolled in the variant-of-the-month club, and expected to maintain a constant intravenous drip of boosters for the endless variants?
My daughter speculates that the reason that so many are irrationally insistent on universal vaccination and never-ending boosters for the Commie Crud and variants is because the vaccines themselves aren’t doing all that much good and may indeed be doing harm fatal harm, in some cases. Having fallen for the con, now they are soothing their shame and embarrassment at being taken for fools and suckers by insisting that everyone else cooperate in order to share the miserable experience. I believe that the Covid panic is now being maintained on artificial life support. (It’s dead, Jim: you take his tricorder, I’ll grab his wallet…) The only thing keeping it going is government and corporate mandates, and some of those are being quietly walked back.
I don’t care how many spots I hear on the local public radio classical station, groaning on, and on, and on, about masking-up and getting vaxxed … I’m just done, and I’m not going to do either. My daughter and I have both had it (along with Covid-induced pneumonia), and the grandson was fully exposed. Wee Jamie suffered a day of the sniffles and a low-grade temperature; he was over and done with the Crud weeks before his mother and I were. Frankly, I’m of the conviction that if Covid-19 were as dangerous an epidemic as the 1918 Influenza, everyone would have a family member, or someone they know and more than just someone, multiple individuals dead of it. Young, otherwise healthy individuals, dead in days. Morgues and undertakers would be stacked high with corpses, there would be mass graves in cemeteries, and whole communities would be all but wiped out. Nothing like the 1918 Influenza Pandemic happened early in 2020 as much as the media, the CDC, and various politicians hyperventilated about the possibility.
It’s done. Covid, the Chinese Commie Crud is over, after going on for nearly two years now. Two years of lock-downs remember, two weeks to flatten the curve? local politicians demanding masks, self-isolation, minimum-to-no social interaction, the closing and bankrupting of small businesses, cancellation of private events and public celebrations for months on end … meanwhile enjoying unmasked celebrations, approved political protests, social events, and restaurant dinners with dozens of their closest friends. The hypocrisy of small-time dictators like Gavin “Gruesome” Newsom, Despicable Kate Brown, Gretchen “The Governator” Whitmer, and Andrew “Granny-Killer” Cuomo and others of their political ilk, and the dictates of Flip-Flopping Fauci simply cannot be endured any longer. In the part of Texas where I live, mask usage has fallen off, at least to judge by recent ventures into various retail establishments. We did a craft event last Saturday at the VFW post in the little town of Canyon Lake, and none of the vendors or any of the handful of shoppers had on a mask, nor did anyone make a big fuss about that lack. There was a slight uptick in mask-wearing during our last visit on Sunday, probably because the national establishment media has been trying yet again to scare the snot out of the viewing audience over the O(MG)micon variant. I mean really? It’s done. Most people can see it, even if they can’t come right out and say so. Give it a rest and move on with life.
Comment as you wish.
I’ve said it here before, and I’ll say it again:
Why is no one addressing the stupidity of believing that single-layer cloth or paper masks do anything to stop or even minutely slow the spread of an airborne virus? Has everyone on the planet suddenly become innumerate?
The size range of human respirable aerosols is typically 2 to 5 microns. We’re not talking about spit from coughing or snot from sneezing, we’re talking about the stuff we exhale with every breath. If you’re coughing or sneezing, you probably ought to just stay home until you’re better. Okay, for those who don’t know, a micron is about 1/25,000th of an inch (1/25,400th, but close enough). The biggest human respirable aerosol is thus 5/25,000ths of an inch, or 1/5,000th of an inch.
A typical single-layer cloth or paper mask has a mesh opening size on the close order of 1/500th of an inch. Any tighter and you wouldn’t be able to breathe through it.
Does no one see a problem with this? The challenge material (human aerosols) are on the order of ONE TENTH the size of the filter openings. The aerosols simply flow right through the masks.
This is not trying to stop mosquitoes from coming into your house by putting chain-link fence across the open windows, this is trying to stop gnats with burglar bars.
The fact that NONE of these paper and cloth masks have air-tight seals across the face, and that the vast, nay, overwhelming majority of the air flow during exhalation simply bypasses the filter media (mask material) is left as an exercise for the student.
The ONLY masks that actually help slow/stop the spread are highly tested, custom-fitted N95 masks. There’s an elaborate procedure for fitting and wearing them, and facial hair (beards and mustaches) cannot be worn. You can tell somebody who is actually working in a high-risk environment because they have a bruise around the perimeter of their face and across the bridge of their nose since it’s the only way to get a good air-tight seal.
So the mandated wearing of these single-layer masks is just another example of theater from the statist, authoritarian collectivists running our governments, and ordered for the SOLE PURPOSE of exercising their power and control.
The voluntary wearing of single-layer masks is either massive ignorance, stupidity, or virtue signaling on the part of those wearing one…or maybe some combination of all three.
I’m retired from a college educated career, living in a rural area with a large university nearby, I get all sides. Most of my childhood friends, and our church, and many neighbors, are adverse to the vaccines and really hate the masks. Although our church still requires masks except when taking communion, and the pews seem sparsely filled.
University people are growing frustrated as things drag on, but a zealous core of Karens continue shrieking doom, leading to tensions as even cautious types recognize some pathological behaviors.
I have family working in healthcare, they are all frustrated with the vaccine resisters, having seen a lot of cases and disruption for the duration of this pandemic. The hospitals are full of cases, locally about three quarters of the sickest patients were unvaccinated or only had one shot.
There have been many deaths among people I know, some as young as their thirties, and not a few with no serious prior conditions other than typical crappy diet and some excess pounds. Several were fit and active, although my dearest friend had lingering heart issues from a heart attack at an early age. Just within the last three weeks my cousin’s wife’s family lost four relatives, and yesterday a fellow I used to work with died at fifty-two, I am certain he would have refused to take the vaccine.
I understand both sides, the medical seriousness and the unnervingly poor policy responses. Just keeping my social interactions at a low key and trying to be supportive of others as they cope with sickness and death around them.
“The voluntary wearing of single-layer masks is either massive ignorance, stupidity, or virtue signaling on the part of those wearing one”¦or maybe some combination of all three.”
It’s more in the nature, I think, of a futile gesture; people do it, even though they are generally useless, because it’s something they can do.
“Young, otherwise healthy individuals, dead in days”
Which is now a (tragic) side effect of the “Vaccines” they were injected with – supposedly to protect them from a virus which was never a threat in the first place…
“Most people can see it”
Not in my part of the UK, unfortunately. I was rather taken aback yesterday when someone I work for (on discovering I’m un-jabbed), said to my face that if I ended up in hospital with Covid I should pay for my treatment! Remember, that over here we have the World Class* NHS, which is supposed to be available free to all – something I pointed out, along with asking him if he thought his policy should also apply to smokers, heavy drinkers, overweight people, etc.
* That’s what we are constantly regaled with by politicians, who in the same breath urge us to “Get vaccinated to protect the NHS” Funny, I thought it was there to protect me…
Schools closed; rioters roaming cities, beating people up; people’s lives destroyed because of some joke they cracked years earlier. Has anything like this ever happened before?
Yes it has — in a much stronger form: China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966 to ~1976).
First point to note — this kind of insanity can go on for a decade, mutating as it goes. Don’t expect the stupidity and over-reaction to end any time soon.
Second lesson to draw from China’s experience — when the Cultural Revolution finally ground to an end following Mao’s death, there were retributions against those who had been prominent in the movement. Let’s look forward to that!
This year I did 2 cross country trips in my car – a total of 12,000 miles. I dubbed them informally “The Coronavirus Challange”. It was interesting to see how the various states handled it.
From a sleepy border restaurant on the Nevada Utah border that, all by themselves (it really wasn’t a “town”) demanded masks inside – to most of Texas (wear them if you want to).
The strange thing was that I saw so many hotels with “no vacancy” signs – couldn’t find a room after visiting Yellowstone – in Cody WY at midnight – couldn’t find a room under $250 so drove after midnight back to Red Lodge, MT.
A hotel owner gave me the industry secret – the average occupancy was 40%, but owners can’t find people to clean the rooms.
Between the first trip in May and the 2nd in Sep I had my 2 Pfizer shots.
Thought I was impervious by trip 2 but noticed on trip #2 I had a lagging cough (no fever). Since my mother was in an extended care facility thought I would get myself checked upon return before going back in.
Low and behold, I had COVID-19. But it was so mild it was like a summer allergy. On the advice of the Dr I sat in the house for 10 days (they said the time for transmittal was a 10 day window). In truth since I had the symptoms most of the trip the window had probably already passed.
A friend of mine knew of a couple who both had the Pfizer shots. The husband, like me, had a mild case and quickly recovered. The wife died from it.
So I don’t know what to think, but long ago I stopped believing in anything the guvmint had to say about it.
I read an excellent book on WW1 sometime ago – and in 1918 the effects of the “Spanish” flu was tremendous. The Germans couldn’t mount some offensives – by 1921, more people had died of this than WW1, (20 million).
This certainly isn’t the Spanish flu, and it seems to me that most of those who die from it have other complications, that have already weakened their immune systems.
I’m sure not listening to Fauci – why is he still on the guvmint payroll?
I can get a Covid test on campus if I ask–but I have to say I have symptoms before I can be tested. Wanna bet that a report of a mild cough or runny nose won’t be recorded as a case, whether I actually have the Crud or not?
“I have family working in healthcare, they are all frustrated with the vaccine resisters, having seen a lot of cases and disruption for the duration of this pandemic. The hospitals are full of cases, locally about three quarters of the sickest patients were unvaccinated or only had one shot.”
Take notes as to who these people are, and then observe how they react when (and, I suppose, if…) the actual facts about the vaccines ever come out. I suspect there’s going to be a hugely negative reaction once all the actual facts come out.
Trust me on this one–They wouldn’t have done what they did with regards to the control groups in the testing protocols if they hadn’t wanted to conceal things. The FDA would not be slow-walking the FOIA requests such that it will take 75 years before they release everything, either.
If they didn’t have anything to hide, they wouldn’t be doing these things.
From those facts, coupled with the obscene insistence that we all get vaccinated, even those of us who’ve already had the disease? You should be asking questions, and questioning what the hell is going on in front of your eyes. As well, ask yourself why you’re still signing releases for “experimental” medical use, this long after the “vaccines” have been out there, in use?
I feel really safe in predicting that all y’all who blindly trusted these assholes are going to be sorry, that there will be huge recriminations over the long-term side-effects, and that there will be significant such side-effects, to include likely issues with the same things turned up during earlier mRNA testing, like cancers, immune-system issues, and fertility.
It’s really amazing to me that so few people, even in the medical field, are so trusting and have failed to do the reading. I handed a list of cites off one of the physicians telling me I should get vaccinated with this fraudulent crap, and about all he could do was look a little sick, because he himself had never seen any of it.
When all this is over, I think we’re going to be lynching the assholes like Fauci and the rest of the vaccine profiteers–Because, that’s exactly what they are. They never should have let mRNA technology out there at this stage of the game, and I suspect we’re going to rue the day that we did, not only because of the direct effect, but because we’re likely to lose a really promising technology to the widespread reaction to it all. I’ll lay anyone strong odds that in ten years, Thalidomide is going to look like a mere flash in the pan, compared to the outrage and reaction to this mRNA BS.
If the fertility and long-term effects on fetus viability show up in the humans dosed with this crap that showed up in some pre COVID-19 mRNA testing…? LOL; cities are gonna fscking burn. Tuskegee ain’t got shit on this one, folks…
Worst thing about it all? I remain unsure that it wasn’t unintentional.
Speaking of strange things, are we not supposed to pretend it’s not exceedingly strange that our “president” is only capable of “addressing the nation” before 3pm, not at 8pm like every other president in the age of television?
There’s nothing to say anymore about covid or “countermeasures” that hasn’t been said a million times in the past 20 months. It would be nice if there was any sort of collective memory, like how those of us who were pointing out in the summer that Israeli data showed the vaccine performance was falling off a cliff after several months were mocked and laughed at and banned from social media, but that’s not the world we live in.
At this point I think the “experts” I’d like to hear from are people who can suggest how to break episodes of mass psychosis without widespread violence. Because we have a contemporary New Class, the Professional Managerial Class, that thought it was universally recognized as the rightful rulers of the world, become absolutely unhinged by the election of Donald Trump, which was even more catastrophic to them than George W Bush because the election of Obama was supposed to herald their complete control of the world, with his messianic image far more pervasive than Bill Clinton, say, and then along comes covid and just breaks them completely from reality. Many places are basically back to normal, here in New York state “red” areas it varies quite a bit place to place, but social media and democrat control of politics and big media has a huge fraction of people spiraling ever more into madness. I have no idea how to try to draw them back to sanity.
“If the fertility and long-term effects on fetus viability show up in the humans dosed with this crap that showed up in some pre COVID-19 mRNA testing …”
Indeed. My daughter spent the early part of this year, and the last months of 2020 pregnant, and no freaking way was she going to get a Covid vaccination. No. Way. In. H*ll. Not if there was the slightest, merest sliver of a chance that it would harm Wee Jamie in utero. Her OB-Gyn only asked once if she wanted the vax, and never mentioned the matter again. It strikes me that the OB probably had a good notion that the Covid vax was not a good idea for pregnant women.
Brian, would that Charles MacKay were alive and writing in these days. He could add a whole new chapter to “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”.
@Sgt. Mom,
I would say that any woman of child-bearing age (or, under it…) that actually wants a healthy kid in the future ought to carefully research all of this before making an actual “informed” decision. If I were a parent, I’d also make sure my kid in that category didn’t get vaccinated until they were capable of making the same decision for themselves.
I see tragedy over just these issues looming in all of our futures. The recriminations and hate over mRNA are going to make the Thalidomide issues look tame, by comparison. Assuming that I’m correct in my suspicions… I really don’t want to be, but I see the outward signs of things, and all I can do is wonder at the credulity of most of the people around me. The way they “fast-tracked” this crap? The lack of transparency? The unprecedented way that the FDA is slow-walking the FOIA requests?
Dude, if they’ve got nothing to hide, they’re sure not acting like it–And, that, by itself, is telling. If you don’t want to have paranoid conspiracy theories, then don’t fscking act like you’re a part of a damn conspiracy. If there was nothing to hide about mRNA, why aren’t they absolutely burying the people asking for the documents in them? If there weren’t issues, why the obfuscation and slow-walking? Why were the control groups all rolled up into the tests by giving them the vaccines…?
There’s something going on here. Just what it is, ain’t exactly clear, either.
Noting that I am an old bugger, with some ongoing health problems [sequalae from a couple of mini-strokes, and one heart attack, albeit not a “normal” one] and that our family has a number of health problems so that we are all vaccinated.
Pandemic implies something along the order of the Black Plague or the Spanish Flu in body count. As far as I can see, the various forms of COVID, while they can be deadly for some, seem to have a death rate at most of about 3% of those infected. And once you account for both age [we old buggers die easier] and co-morbidities the aged have, we may have a 1% increase in deaths overall. Not negligible, but not like the Plague in Pepys’ London.
Two key things I note that make me suspicious of other motives involved in all this. First of all, there has been from the very beginning a total lack of emphasis on TREATING the effects of COVID for those with the disease in an attempt to cure. Instead, especially in European Socialist medical systems, but here also, they kept patients out of hospitals until they reached the point where they had to be admitted to ICU. By then, they are near death and you are going to lose a lot of them.
Instead, the emphasis has been on vaccines. Experimental vaccines, that were somehow ready and available in record time with no real studies of effects. Having watched the FDA spend most of its time desperately trying to keep drugs off the market even if they met a real need, this is bloody strange. And, indeed, the refusal to seriously test already approved drugs that were already on the market also makes one suspicious. Reputable doctors and health systems have tried drugs like Hydroxychloroquine [used by the US military against malaria and Q Fever for decades in SE Asia] and Ivermectin [used all over Africa by the UN and WHO against a wide range of infectious diseases] with very positive effects. And the US health care establishment insults them and bars experiments to prove them. In fact, Ivermectin is degraded as solely a veterinary horse dewormer, even though that is a side use. The determined refusal to search for and test treatments as part of the process, for these or other drugs is itself highly suspicious.
The panic about hospital space is another factor. Early on, when we knew nothing about COVID and they were waiting till patients were near terminal to admit them, it strained the hospitals, especially in government controlled [de facto or de jure] health systems. They postponed non-COVID treatments and put them on a waiting list. I have family so delayed. Now that things seem to be easing, those people are finally getting their treatments, filling up hospital beds. At the same time, they are finding between 20% and 33% of medical staff do not trust the experimental vaccines enough to get the shots.
They are being laid off. In a hospital, when you are short staff, you shut down beds. So you have a backlog of delayed treatments coming in, at the same time as you are closing down hospital capacity. So yes, you are short hospital beds and it is not because of a current wave of COVID deaths, but because of the administrative responses throughout.
Our political Social Contract has been breaking down for years. This disease and the failed political response to it is chipping away at the trust people have in our medical system.
Subotai Bahadur
Subotai has brought up a point that needs to be paid far more attention to–there appears to be zero effort put into anything serious (masks aren’t serious) a person can do to prevent infection, or to treat it before it becomes serious. No national campaign to get people to eat better, exercise, take vitamin D, etc., and hcq and ivermectin were met with the most mind-boggling campaigns of slander that anyone’s ever seen. It’s difficult not to be a conspiracy theorist when seeing what we’ve seen these past few years.
re: pregnancy, there is this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-59347464
“A spike in the number of deaths of newborn babies in Scotland is to be investigated.
At least 21 babies under four weeks old died in September, a rate of 4.9 per 1,000 births.
Infant death rates vary widely from month to month, but the increase is larger than expected from chance alone.”
Roughly nine months after the vaccination campaign ramped up? Hmm. Now, you would think you’d see this sort of effect all over the place, and get lots of attention, but I have zero faith in the “authorities” to investigate anything having to do with the vaccines at all. Sorry not sorry but trust in them is completely gone.
“…chipping away at the trust people have in our medical system …”
Chipping away? It’s been demolished, wholesale.
Who is going to trust the CDC when a for-realsies pandemic starts to rear it’s ugly head? Flip-Flopping Fauci and his pals squandered credibility with both hands over the last two years.
We have quite a few neighbors who are of an age to collect Social Security, and have certain health problems … and one of them confessed to me that her personal physician was not eager to advise her to have the vaxx. If those health professionals on the front line have serious doubts, and dare not voice them openly, lest they attract the ire of the Medical Establishment and their allies in the National Establishment Media … what are the rest of us supposed to think.
Like Kirk said – if there’s nothing to hide, then why are they acting as if there is something to hide?
Looks like I’m about to be 4 shots behind “fully vaccinated” (a term that literally didn’t exist two years ago)…
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1473396503276400647
JUST IN – Israel to give 4th vaccine injection to adults over 60, immunocompromised individuals and health workers – PM office (BBC)
The hardcore crazies will never wake up, but I wonder how long everyone else is going to just go along with this insanity.
The really interesting bits are going to come when and (hopefully…) if the consequences I suspect come out of all of this become crystalline-clear and undeniable.
The people they convinced to vaccinate? The ones they mandated do it, who only did so because they were made to? What’s their reaction going to be, finding out that they have been suckered into destroying their health for no good reason?
The funniest thing about this whole thing is that the Democrats now own this crap, fully. If the idiots had let Trump win in 2020, they could have hung this whole thing around his neck forever, and played it off like they had nothing to do with it. I guarantee you they’d have been up in arms if he’d tried doing any of the things they’ve done, like vaccine mandates, but because they did it, they own it.
I’ve got this sick sense in the pit of my stomach that this whole thing is going to turn out to be one of those “historical pivot points”, and I am really sad that so many people are going to be affected by it all. I honestly believe we’re seeing the actual suicide of the Democratic Party and much of the “expert elite”, because when this is all over? If they’re not torn limb-from-limb by their victims, they’re done politically for a long, long time.
I’m getting a strong Thalidomide/Diethylstilbestrol (DES) vibe out of all of this, and I really, really hope I’m wrong. I think that this whole mRNA thing got approved in a moment of strong hubris, and that the actual long-term effects of it all are going to be horrendously unexpected and serious. The more reading I’ve done over the early testing, the less and less I understand how any conscientious physician could possibly have approved this stuff being used, let alone on the scale it has been deployed.
Big pharma had better watch its ass, is all I have to say. The controversy over Oxycontin and all the other narcotics they’ve been profiting off of are peanuts compared to a whole generation of women finding out they’re maybe not ever going to have healthy kids. Care to imagine what it’s going to be like, to tell your kid that you had them vaccinated with the crap that essentially sterilized them…?
Lynchings are likely a best-case scenario, there. Drug addictions? You can blame those on the addict; you essentially sterilize a bunch of people like this? Jesus… The social follow-on effects are going to ring down the generations; nobody is going to trust “authority” at all, after the fact.
Presuming, of course, that there’s anything to my suspicions in this regard. I don’t know; I must emphasize that fact. But, there’s a lot of stuff in the literature I’ve read that gives me cause to suspect that I’m not entirely off-base with this. If you doubt me, go look at mRNA testing going back to the 1990s–It’s there, and the cancer/fertility issues are in there, as well.
Also, ask yourself why the hell this one particular vaccine is being pushed like this, with the complete lack of liability for the pharmaceutical manufacturers behind it…? Why are we still having to sign releases, to have this stuff given to us?
I dunno… Powerful Tuskegee and Swine Flu vibes being given off, to me.
I dunno, I don’t think the crazies are going to get mad at the people who’ve deceived them. When their messiah proves to be a fraud, I think dead enders will refuse to believe it, and blame the unbelievers, and things will get ugly. The question is how ugly will they get before we can push on through. They’re already pretty bad, with countries preparing to go full Nazi to eliminate the unclean, I mean unvaxxed…
-deleted – Penny, you are still banned on my posts. You add nothing to the discussion. Sgt. Mom
Good points from all of you, which reflect and confirm my own suspicions about this whole COVID mess. I no longer trust the CDC, either, and suspect that many of the nightmares mentioned above, are going to come true. But, it helps clear out the lebensunwerte leben, doesn’t it?.
Kirk: The funniest thing about this whole thing is that the Democrats now own this crap, fully. If the idiots had let Trump win in 2020, they could have hung this whole thing around his neck forever, and played it off like they had nothing to do with it. I guarantee you they’d have been up in arms if he’d tried doing any of the things they’ve done, like vaccine mandates, but because they did it, they own it.
Oh, if/when the vaccines show a serious long-term threat to our health, they will absolutely try to hang this on Trump and OpWarpSpeed.
But they have a problem. As you note, Trump didn’t mandate the jab(s) – he left the choice to each of us. Just as he didn’t compel all 50 states to go full Cuomo, but instead respected federalism.
The political Left will own this, if/when it goes pear-shaped, as the poster child for the failure of their social technocracy. If it happens, let it be a teachable moment about the misplaced, Flounderian trust in our Pedestaled Elite that so many of our neighbors extended to them, so we don’t again outsource such decisions to them.
Well said.
Jester N: “The political Left will own this, if/when it goes pear-shaped …”
Don’t count on it.
First, time will have gone by — in a society which has a very short memory. Look at how the debacle in Afghanistan has already slipped from view. Second, the passage of time makes it more difficult for everyone to link cause and effect. Third, the political Left will still have the main weapon it has been using in the CovidScam — 24/7 Big Media fear. They will use this to blame bad events on someone other than themselves — Big Pharma, white supremacists, anyone ! And the Karens will absorb the message and quake in fear.
If rationality reigned, the CovidScam would have collapsed long ago and the perpetrators from Fauci on down would be in jail. But rationality does not reign. No reason to expect that to change any time soon.
@Brian said: “No national campaign to get people to eat better, exercise, take vitamin D, etc..”
This. A thousand times this. Why aren’t we having this discussion or at least a conversation? Instead it’s shots all the time.
Better diet, exercise and supplements with vitamin D and/or a good multivitamin not only help if/when you get sick with covid, but everything else you will encounter over the time you have left on the planet.
@Gavin,
“Don’t count on it.
First, time will have gone by ”” in a society which has a very short memory. Look at how the debacle in Afghanistan has already slipped from view. Second, the passage of time makes it more difficult for everyone to link cause and effect. Third, the political Left will still have the main weapon it has been using in the CovidScam ”” 24/7 Big Media fear.”
You are thinking that the future will be like the past, which is not at all guaranteed.
The media has been responsible for most of the distortions in public life for the last several generations, and they’ve been able to get away with it because of the “stored credibility” they have been burning like a pyromaniac in a match factory. How much of that credibility is left, I wonder…?
CNN has now had the spectacle of two senior producers being popped for child molestation. People have noticed this, and I’ve heard comments along the lines of “Oh… That’s why we never heard about Epstein…” from people who used to be fairly credulous consumers of mass media. You can almost see the lights coming on, for them.
So, what you’re saying about “time moving on”, and noting the obfuscatory powers of the American mass media? Those powers have finite limits, and we’re running up against the hard stops as we speak. Let people witness their daughters and granddaughters getting informed that no, they can’t have kids, or that they’re miscarrying because they were trusting enough to take the mRNA vaccine, and you’re going to see a sea-state change that will make today’s controversies look like calm waters compared to the shitstorm maelstrom that comes after a critical mass is reached with media distrust. Right now, we’re used to a media environment where most people automatically believe what the media tells them; care to extrapolate what it looks like, when most people automatically assume that everything the media tells them is a lie, including the words “the” and “a”?
What can’t go on, won’t. They’ve been burning credibility and trust like those are infinite resources, which they are not. You can’t keep feeding people bullshit and expect to be believed once you recognize that they’re no longer accepting your word on anything; trying to get that credibility back is going to take an equivalent amount of time to that they’ve spent lying, even if such a thing is possible.
The thing that pisses me off the most is that these idiots don’t realize why all the “loonatic cunspiracy theories” are so hard to root out; the reason lies in the fact that they have pissed away their credibility, and if CBS comes out and says “Tomorrow, the sun will rise in the East…”, people are probably going to get up and see for themselves, expecting that they’ve been lied to. They can’t refute the lunatics anymore, because they’ve been demonstrating that they’re actually less reliable–I mean, for the love of God, that whole pizza thing with Qanon? How does that look, now, with two senior CNN producers getting popped for kiddy-diddling? Ya think people out in the hinterlands are going “Oh, that was BS, refuted by the news stations…”, or do you suppose they’re saying “Huh. Just what I thought… The news is in on it…”?
What you say in your post is the old reality, where the media still had some credibility. The new reality? They have zero cred, with anyone. What that means, going forward? I dunno… Maybe people will be more likely to forget, or maybe things will get ampped up. My guess is that there is definitely going to be a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” effect happening, with regards to any “warnings” they might have about some Man on a Horse coming forward. I mean, how many times can they pull the “Republican as Actual Hitler” routine, then saying the guy was an Elder Honored Statesman such as we’ll never see again…? They’ve pulled that shit on Reagan, Dole, both Bushes, and now with Trump, although since he’s still a potential candidate, they haven’t performed the heel-face turn for him, as of yet. But, they will…
The masks here in Arizona serve one purpose. They identify the political party of the wearer.
I wore masks in surgery for 50 years. They were about bacteria and were not foolproof. Orthopedists implanting total joints, which are very susceptible to infection, wear “space suits” and use “laminar flow” operating rooms. And still get infections.
The mask mandates are all about signaling. I’m not sure the wearers know what they are signaling.
Everyone here has already touched on some of the future implications of this mass hysteria. Karl Denninger at Market-Ticker has been hammering many of the same things. Long term, worst case, we may see permanently compromised immune systems and even sterility. If some of these prognostications do manifest themselves, I suggest they may be longer term, and more profound, implications, much more than lynchings of those who did this to us.
Who has been been most pressured to take jab after jab after jab? The high IQ, high tech, high information First World. Who has resisted the jab? The Third World, who preferred to treat the disease therapeutically with such readily available nostrums as ivermectin.
Who stands to gain if the First World is destroyed? Well, the World Economic Forum types think they’re ready to implement The Great Reset, which is actually feudalism reimagined. But the WEF-types are a thin sliver of uber-rich First Worlders themselves. Longer term, who’s up next?
China. There are what, 4 billion Chinese? Even if they were to lose 1/2 of their population, they’d still be the largest single ethnic group remaining. And they’re arming up to take over. All they had to do, to eliminate the opposition (i.e., us), was release a low-grade flu and watch the Karens destroy the First World.
China has an itty-bitty little problem: The ethnic Han have pretty much pissed off all their fellow Chinese, and their neighbors. They may paper over the cracks for a few years, but if you think that the non-Han aren’t looking over at what’s going on with the Uyghurs, you’d be making the same mistake that most of the Han are.
Top of the CCP is almost entirely Han or Han-adjacent; That’s going to play a role in how all of that works out. There’s absolutely nothing to prevent China doing the usual thing it does, and fracture along ethnic and political lines that outsiders don’t even see. Even the Han aren’t monolithic.
I wouldn’t discount the idea of there being a CCP plan to take over the world, but I think that there are a lot of things that will lead to having the actual attempt at it blow up in a lot of people’s faces. You cannot predict where this crap goes–Look at the “One Child” policy: That’s going to ring down the next few generations, and one of the bells ringing is gonna be “Don’t kill our one kid…”, because if the CCP makes a lunge for Taiwan that ends with a lot of deaths, the recoil on that is going to be immense. Just like with the real estate bubble–Things don’t work in China the way we Westerners expect them to. That bubble built up mostly because there were no good investments that the average person could make, to provide for their old age and pass things on to the kids. So, instead of stocks, they bought property–Which just blew up, and you’re seeing a lot of local municipalities confiscating assets for non-payment of taxes. Assets which, ohbytheway, represent many people’s life savings…
As well, there’s the deal with the kids; they’re not just “hope for the future”, they’re also the sole retirement program going across most of China–You get someone’s kid killed invading Taiwan, and you’ve just guaranteed that Mom and Dad are now facing poverty in their old age. How’s that play out, when a lot of people no longer have anything to lose, and they want revenge on the institution that first denied them a second kid, and then killed the first…?
I would not want to be a Chinese oligarch, right about now. They’re all dancing on the edge of the grave, and God help us all when they inevitably lose their balance…
Kirk: Let people witness their daughters and granddaughters getting informed that no, they can’t have kids, or that they’re miscarrying because they were trusting enough to take the mRNA vaccine, and you’re going to see a sea-state change that will make today’s controversies look like calm waters compared to the shitstorm maelstrom that comes after a critical mass is reached with media distrust.
We have already seen this play out in 2021 – in Virginia, as people witnessed daughters and granddaughters being assaulted in the girls’ room and unfairly dominated on the playing field … assaults and unfairness enabled in the name of transgender tolerance, just as predicted by those who were denigrated as “intolerant” … and witnessed what their children and grandchildren were being taught regarding race relations in this nation.
As in China, this has gotten personal. The game has changed.
I was in a conversation where for what seems like the thousandth time, a statistic was presented as the true, unfalsifiable, measure of the “pandemic”. This was the number of ICU beds available in a particular region. Surely, this isn’t something that can’t be faked. Having spent a lot more time in ICU waiting rooms than I wish to remember, the reality is a lot fuzzier.
As a side note; if you ever want to know what’s really happening to your loved one in the hospital, talk to the residents. They’re the ones that actually spend time with patients and since they’re new, haven’t developed the infosec habit dealing with outsiders. In my case it was advice on how to short circuit the pissing contest between the medical and surgical departments that was using my father as a shuttle cock.
If you back the hospital administrator into a corner and apply gentle persuasion (I recommend thumb screws as they are easily portable.), you’ll eventually get him to cough up the patient to nurse ratio they aim for in the wards or floors or pods or whatever they have decided to call them. Tighten down a little more and you’ll find out how bad the actual ratio needs to get before they’ll shell out to get agency nurses to fill in. But even this won’t tell you as much as you’d hope. It won’t tell you about how many others such as cleaning techs (You want the people that clean your hospital room to have somewhat higher standards than the ones at Motel6.), patient transporters and pharmacy techs are available. In other words, all the people that make it possible for nurses to nurse.
All of this is to say that there is a wider gray area in deciding just who ends up in the ICU than most people know. Need I also mention that the hospitals get paid more for ICU beds than floor beds. Thus we see a glimmer of why, no matter how “overwhelmed” the hospitals were, they never seemed to get to the point where the field hospitals and hospital ships were actually used.
Now, riddle me this: With a population overwhelmingly vaccinated and confronted with a new mutation that appears to be almost benign are we again seeing panic?
The mistake a lot of people make when analyzing something like “hospital statistics” is that they view the issue through the lens of “What do I want from a hospital…?”, and think in terms of their optimal experience with regards to that issue. Reality is that the people running that institution have far different goals, desires, and viewpoints about how things “ought to be”.
We think hospitals are about caring for the sick. They, the people that actually run the place, are fully aware that they’re running a business operation and that they have to stay in business. Furthermore, most of them are more concerned with their little fiefdoms within the hospital than they are with the things we outsiders might think are important, because those things are important to us. What’s important to us is only important to them in that they need to satisfy our wants in order to keep our business, but if they can achieve lock-in via insurance or something else…? They get to make all the decisions. Years and years ago, bad care meant patients went somewhere else–There was a really prestigious doctor in my Mom’s hometown who had a tiny little practice, because he was an ass nobody wanted to go to. Meanwhile, the rustic old “hoss medicine” country doctor who went to the state medical school had more patients than he knew what to do with… There used to be a lot more “patient care” drivers in the old medical industry, which no longer exist due to insurance and other issues.
Like most things, you want to know “what’s really going on”, you have to step back and look at the overall environment: Where are the incentives? Who benefits? What are the “negative incentives”, and who do they motivate?
Most people do not analyze the world in these terms, and so much of what goes on around them is puzzling and disturbing: “Why is he doing that? That makes no sense!!”. Yeah, it does actually make sense, but you’re eyes are going right past the things in the environment which are encouraging that behavior, many of which you likely voted for.
For examples of this, look at the recent carjackings of our two Democratic Party members… They’re all like “Oh, I just don’t get it…”, but the reality is, they failed to consider the world in terms of Skinnerian behavioral processes, and here we are with their stunning lack of comprehension as to why the crime rate is going up.
You don’t have to be a bad person to be a Democrat, but you do have to be a dysfunctional moron to remain one. Yo shit don’ work, yo…
their jive content is inordinately high, yes hosptials are about an 80% default capacity, occasionally it goes to 90% but then of those only half are serious or even symptomatic,
of course misrepresenting the data, just serves to push their preferred panic narrative,
I think Churchill said ‘there were liars, damn liars and statistics’ (progs are a subset)
Banned from my posts, Penny — Sgt. Mom
I try to look at WuFlu statistics to determine how and why the numbers presented mis-state the facts, but often I just have to assume that they are all lies, because if any facts could be proven, that act would disprove others.
An RN friend who runs an ER/ICU/CCU nursing staff in a major SouthWestern city has said that when her ER is overrun with WuFlu patients, plus the usual ER patients, that they are stacked in the halls because she has no one to staff the empty rooms which would be available if there were nurses and other medical and support staff available.
The claim of “overrun ERs” is partially true, but misdirects from the problem of nurses either being fired or just quitting because they aren’t willing to be a beta tester for a failure of an experimental drug are, or are being overworked and disrespected at the same time.
Complex systems are funny that way. There are always a few critical people, places, or things that no one notices until they stop working.
Blackwing: “Why is no one addressing the stupidity of believing that single-layer cloth or paper masks…”
Facemasks are far better indicators of party loyalty than armbands.
Nurses have been leaving one-on-one/hospital nursing for a long time. Hospitals have been complaining about nursing shortages for years. They’ve been trading rotating shifts, dealing with all the body fluids/semisolids, and especially all the “professional” target driven management for normal hours and or higher pay using their nursing credentials for other things.
My nurse niece went from being a surgical nurse working for a surgeon to working for an insurance company.
At the same time, the hospitals are required to maintain a minimum number of nurses per bed. What these standards fail to address is just what the nurses are required to do. So our “professional” managers seeing all these expensive nurses they’re required to employ decide that they can do more. Instead of having patient transporters, the nurse can just take the patients to x-ray or whatever. Instead of a cleaning crew to turn a room around, the nurse can do it. Instead of having a pharmacist or tech prepare an IV, the nurse can do it. Most of these services aren’t available or reduced late night/early morning and weekends because they aren’t usually required. Now this has become an all day every day thing some places. All of this takes the nurses away from their patients and none of it reduces their professional liability.
As I say, this has been going on for years. So when they say that 95% of their workers are “compliant”, that 5% is the difference between squeaking by and collapse. If the resident has his way, there’s going to be a lot of other things that stop working.
What’s the phrase…? “There’s an awful lot of ruin, in a country…”?
The idiocrats in our kakistocracy have no idea at all how anything, anything at all, really works. They’ve been tested, selected, educated in the finest institutions in the land, and they’re a bunch of dolts about the reality surrounding them.
Hospitals and health care only represent a tiny slice of the things they’ve mucked up; I could go on for hours about all the “little, unimportant…” things they’ve screwed up in our military culture; most of us could do the same, about issues they know about.
There’s Geller-Mann Amnesia, but I’d like to propose a corollary: Not about the newspapers, but about “experts” in general. Everyone knows that most of the people at the upper levels of their particular hierarchy got there through means other than sheer competency; they know the people making decisions for their agency, their company, their industry are mostly time-serving hacks who got to where they are through sheer inertia and bureaucratic infighting. People will tell you, about the things they’re most familiar with, that the guy over there who’s telling you what to do in that field is an idiot; that you shouldn’t listen to him. They know better.
Yet… Step outside your own area of expertise, and what does everyone do? Yep; find them an “expert”, kiss his or her ass, and then do what that (generally…) self-proclaimed “expert” tells them to do, never questioning it a bit. Nor do they consider that what they know about their own industry or field might also be true outside of it, as well–And, that that “expert” may be the same sort of feckless moron that they are familiar with from inside their own sphere of knowledge.
I don’t think that we’re well-served by this unquestioning worship of the “expert” class. Nobody ever seems to hold them accountable for performance; they can tell you something is going to work, and then when it doesn’t…? Nothing happens to them; their careers flow ever onwards, like some vast river towards the sea.
The majority of the Biden administration is perfectly representative of this phenomenon–How many of them are Obama-era retreads, whose varied and sundry idiocies were never called out for any form of accountability?
You don’t have to be an “expert” yourself; all you need to do is compare actual results to the promised ones, and then say “Yeah, that didn’t work… You! OUTA THA POOL!!!!”.
As a society, we don’t do that. Go look at the career effects on that whole EPA crew that breached the mine down in Colorado–Were there any? Did anyone lose their jobs? Were people held accountable…? Oh, hell no–Not a bit. Same with everything else, everywhere in government. No accountability, no consequence, no fault, and utter, egregious failure all around.
We don’t have a “crisis of civilization”. What we have is a failure of accountability in government and everywhere else in every other institution. Kids aren’t learning? Does anyone fire the teachers, the administrators, the people who train them? Oh, no… It’s not their fault; it’s the kids, the parents, “the system”, or “society at large…”.
Most of the things going wrong around us are going wrong precisely because nobody is accountable for their errors or mistakes; they have no incentive to “get things right” because nothing every happens to those who “get things wrong“.
I think if you look at it, this is a long, drawn-out process that has been going on since at least the late 19th Century. Accountability was a spotty thing, even back then, but there was enough of it around to keep things more-or-less functional and working. Nowadays? We’ve found ourselves in a post-accountability age, where you can fsck up, and all you’ll do is move up.
100% agree. I got the first two shots but the data coming out of Denmark tells me booster will make it worse.
Lockdowns: don’t work
Masks: don’t work
Vaccines: don’t work
Hand washing: works
Sneeze into the sleeve: works
Getting Covid: works
I’m done with all horseshit and manipulation coming from government and media. They’re all lying to us, all the time.
Dave B: “I’m done with all horseshit and manipulation coming from government and media. They’re all lying to us, all the time.”
Which raises the obvious question — Why? Cui Bono?
Well, certainly one reason is that the longer they can keep the lie going, the further they put off accountability for their actions.
Fauci should have lost his job and any position of responsibility back during the AIDS “pandemic”. Did he? Nope; we’re reaping the fruits of what we sowed by not burning his little toesies off in the fires of accountability back then.
There are two things they’re gonna write in the epitaphs for Western Civ, of this I am certain: One will be “But, he tested well…” and the other is “Well, it’s nobody’s fault…”. Well, unless, of course, they’re white “oppressor class” people–Then, they’re responsible for everything and anything.
Whites still make up the majority of the population. When they realize that fact, and that they’re being screwed over by the diversicrats and every other grievance group out there, things may take a decided turn for the worse when that majority decides they might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Which ain’t going to bode well for civil amity and polite discourse…
I look for the coming widespread use of the phrase:
“At the time, all the reputable experts agreed…”
@Ed,
Which leads us to the question of just how those “experts” gained their reputations in the first place…
From observation of Fauci’s career, it’s readily apparent that his reputation has nothing at all to do with his performance, which has been utterly abysmal since the 1980s.
People will tell you, about the things they’re most familiar with, that the guy over there who’s telling you what to do in that field is an idiot; that you shouldn’t listen to him. They know better.
I’ve watched this in Medicine and it’s true. The HMOs and the “Independent Practice Associations” were all started by the worst clinical doctors. I knew them. I have no doubt that lawyers and Democrat 25 year old aids drew up Obamacare. No experience actually delivering care, just as Fauci and Birx have always been bureaucrats.
Mike K, you reminded me of this:
Thomas Sowell
}}} Has everyone on the planet suddenly become innumerate?
With calculators all around, and teachers thinking they not only don’t have to teach long division and classical multiplication, but instead the latter is replaced by the abortion called “box math” … YES.
Box math is an attempt to dodge teaching children the notion of place notation, and what it means, until notably later in school, when the children’s minds are less flexible and less capable of enveloping and building on new ideas.
Place Notation can readily be argued as the single most important development in the base-human level understanding of mathematics. It is elegant, beautiful, and makes an array of important operations and “feels” about numbers straightforward and widely comprehensible.
The Greeks came ***thiiiiiiiss*** close to inventing at least differential calculus. Arguably the primary reason they did not do so was likely the fact that they did not have place notation, but earlier systems like Roman Numerals at hand. Instead, it had to wait another 1500 to 2000 years before it was developed by Newton and Leibnitz… who HAD place notation.
So, yeah, people are getting innumerate, thanks to our shit edimikashinal system and the prevalence of calculators everywhere so they can just grab one rather than actually work through the math and develop (or even retain) their “feel” for numbers.