Anti-Woke backlash

 

First it was Bud Light getting boycotted because they decided to associate their brand with an attention-seeking cross-dresser, then Target put their 'June is Pride Month' merchandise front and center, featuring 'tuck-friendly' women's bathing suits aimed at those 'trans women' who haven't yet had their gender-reassignment surgeries.  Now Disney is facing the wrath of parents over a (sales)man in a dress helping little girls pick out their favorite Princess gown at the 'Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique' at Disney World Orlando.

Anheuser-Busch was certain the Bud Light brouhaha would blow over in weeks if not days, but they have been very disappointed thus far.  Target, apparently not prepared to become the next Bud Light, has made motions that look a lot like 'backing down', but their sales are off and their stock price is falling — not like ABInbev's, but showing signs.  Several recent Disney movies have turned in unusually poor box office results.  It looks like parents are taking the kids to the zoo instead of the theater.  What the heck is going on?

I think what's happening is that the normies have reached the limit of their tolerance.  This isn't new.  During the Age of Covid, parents discovered to their horror what their children were learning at school — and they didn't like it.  They didn't like it so much that they descended on school board meetings en masse to let the administrators know how much they didn't like it.  It could all have ended there, but the newly-installed Democratic administration decided to make an example of those uppity parents by siccing the Famous But Incompetent FBI on them.  Lots of normies suddenly were awakened (not 'woke') to the truth that they were a mere complaint away from getting the same treatment.

And their response has been a collective middle-finger.

In this game of economic 'chicken', the consumer has options; the retailers don't.  The LGBTQIA-LS/MFT community is a fraction, a puny fraction of the retail audience.  Even if that community doesn't initiate their own boycott because some retailer backs off their full-throated support of their tiny population, they aren't enough to rescue a brand that has — for all practical purposes — poisoned the well.  That's what Anheuser-Busch has discovered, much to their chagrin.  In some parts of the country, Budweiser brands, not just Bud Light, have lost up to 30% of their market share along with their #1 spot.  Miller, Coors, and Yeungling have gleefully stepped in to take up the slack.  That looks suspiciously like a Kiss of Death.  It's not outside the envelope of reality that ABInbev might be making some serious changes, perhaps 'ownership'.

It will only take one major corporation to crumble to end, completely, the current fascination with 'ESG scores'.

All things considered, I think that would constitute 'a good thing'.

 

A Perfect Storm

 

Airlines are cancelling flights in record numbers, and delaying those that can't be cancelled.  The reasons given are almost entirely laid at the feet of ATC, Air Traffic Control.  That's not entirely a lie, but it certainly isn't "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" either.

Yes, ATC is having trouble with the typical raft of regularly scheduled flights — because there are very many regularly scheduled flights... and there is a shortage of Air Traffic Controllers, and when there isn't a controller available... cancellations and delays.  The other side of that coin is that we have a severe shortage of pilots to fly those regularly scheduled flights, and when there isn't a pilot available... cancellations and delays.

"Wait just a damn second!" I hear someone object.  "Just two years ago, there were cancellations and delays, but not on this scale!  What's going on?" 

Good question.  In the interim, we had a Covid-19 pandemic and a chaotic and poorly-thought-out response by many government agencies.  (I'm granting the government 'the benefit of the doubt' here because I don't want to verge into that argument.)  The result of that response was that many government employees (e.g.: Air Traffic Controllers) were told "take the vaccine (sic) or get fired".  Some took the shot and kept their jobs; others moved into other occupations or retired.  At the same time, government agencies leaned heavily on airlines to implement the same or similar policies.  Many pilots took the shot and retained their jobs; others moved into other occupations or retired.  The result, after all the dust settled, was that there were fewer trained, qualified ATCs and fewer trained, qualified pilots, but the number of regularly scheduled flights remained almost the same.

There is another aspect to the problem I haven't mentioned.  A side-effect of the vaccines (sic) is cardiomyopathy, a condition that negatively affects the heart.  ATC is a high-stress occupation, and a heart in good operating order is a virtual necessity.  Piloting is, likewise, a high-stress occupation, and a heart in good operating order is a necessity, no 'virtual' about it.  Unfortunately, many of those who took the shot are now finding themselves with cardiac problems.  For a pilot, that is a career-ending condition.  This further reduces the already-depleted ranks of pilots and ATCs, and the solution is easy enough to predict: the number of 'regularly scheduled flights' is going to be severely reduced.

Because much of an airline's costs are 'fixed' as opposed to 'variable', the airlines lose their 'economies of scale' when their schedule is shortened.  As a result, expect prices for flights to rise — and that's exclusive of any inflationary pressure — and there's plenty of that.  Then there's fuel.  Jet fuel is fossil fuel — kerosene, and we've seen what's happening to pump prices for refined fluids, haven't we?  Put it all together, and the flying public should expect a situation not much different than that pre-WW-II, where flying was almost exclusively for business purposes, and flying to the family vacation was reserved for the very, very wealthy.

Pfizer, however, is making out like a bandit.  Moderna and J&J, too.  I suppose it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

 

The Problem With Inflation

 

Inflation in one form or another has always been with us.  Even during the 18th and 19th centuries, there was some inflation.  Inflation, however, really 'got its legs' beginning in the 20th century.  Two events gave it the boost it needed to become a household fixture: the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the 16th Amendment (Income Tax).

The Federal Reserve Bank made it possible for the federal government to fund itself with deficit spending: 'borrow' money from the Fed and pay it back sometime in the future — maybe never.  Our 'national debt', the Keynesians told us, was no problem because 'we owe it to ourselves!'

The Income Tax made it appear that the federal government was actually 'paying' its way.  Well, actually you're paying its way, sort of...

Until the advent of COVID hysteria and the latest round of massive government spending bills, it was estimated that the value — the purchasing power — of a 1913 dollar had fallen to about five cents ($0.05).  Yes, inflated by a factor of twenty.  Since COVID, it has gotten much worse.  80% of all the greenbacks in circulation today were printed within the past 3 years.  Since (Milton Friedman warned us) 'inflation is everywhere and at all times a monetary phenomenon', that means that our hypothetical 1913 dollar is now worth approximately a penny.

Now, if you are a businessman or a wage-earner, your prices or wages will rise to accommodate the inflation.  Everything seems to adjust itself, to 'establish equilibrium'.  Generally.

If you aren't a businessman or wage earner, if you are living on savings, things are going to be somewhat different.  Your savings are static.  They don't automatically rise to establish equilibrium with the new prices for everything.  This is why AARP is always so concerned about their members, many of whom are on fixed incomes.  For them, everything is suddenly more expensive and their 401k's don't seem to be quite as lush as they felt last year or the year before that.

We are told by our politicians that this inflation is transitory, meaning it will subside within the planning future.  (Janet Yellen is lately 'walking back' that pronouncement.)  Even if it is, there's still a serious problem left unaddressed.

The real problem is this: once inflation subsides, prices will still be high.  Just because runaway inflation becomes less runaway, prices don't go down.  They stay at the elevated state the last runaway inflation left them at.  Things are still unaffordable; they're just not becoming more unaffordable.

What us senior citizens on fixed incomes really need is a little runaway deflation: prices retreating to levels not seen since 2018... or 1958... or 1918.

Is that going to happen?  Not likely.  For that to happen, the government would have to grow smaller and less expensive.  The Mint would have to collect greenback dollars and take them out of circulation — while not printing any replacements.  We would then have the situation of 'fewer dollars chasing the same amount of goods'.  We haven't ever seen that happen with the U.S. economy, so we don't know exactly how such a thing would work out, but it would be an interesting experiment, no?

 

COVID Psychosis

 

We used to say about our parents (and some of our older siblings) that they had 'Depression Psychosis' as a result of having lived through such hard economic times between 1930-1947 that it warped the way they thought about how one goes about living.  Beyond doubt, those years were of such a nature that panic had to be an almost-daily experience.  It's the same syndrome that causes your dog to jump whenever a firecracker goes off on the 4th of July.  It's an automatic flinch when some event brings back bad memories.

Moderns don't suffer Depression Psychosis because they haven't experienced the kind of economic catastrophe of an earlier age, but we carry the training:

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do, or do without.

No, these days we have our very own psychoses, a relic of the insane push to get to 'zero-Covid' — which, it's probably worth pointing out, is unattainable short of sterilizing the planet of all traces of life down to the microbial level.

The Japanese have been inculcated to wearing surgical masks over their noses and mouths over a period lasting several decades.  This may be related to fears about radioactive contamination, but that's a guess.  I first noticed it as far back as the 1990s, but it might have been prevalent earlier.  For reasons that are not at all obvious, they 'mask up' when in the presence of others — especially outdoors.  That practice has now spread around the world, although people from most other countries only mask for indoor socialization.

In the United States, starting with the earliest days of Covid nuttiness, the CDC and Anthony Fauci at first advised that masks were largely unnecessary.  Later, they admitted that they had said this to avoid a run on PPE that medical professionals needed because — this is an important point — they dealt with sick people on a regular basis, and were thus at a heightened risk of exposure.  As soon as it was clear that adequate supplies of masks and the suchlike would be available, the CDC's advice changed to 'wear your mask at all times', then 'wear two masks', then 'maybe you don't need a mask outdoors'.  At no point did the CDC or Fauci say "We have these (peer-reviewed) studies that clearly show the benefits of masks".  They didn't say that because there are no such studies, and they would have been pilloried for saying it.

That is probably worth repeating:  There are no peer-reviewed studies showing masks as having any value as regards Covid transmission.  None.  There are studies that indicate masks may actually be detrimental, especially for children (who are, let's remember, at virtually zero risk of contracting or passing Covid).  Despite this, Teacher's Unions across the country demand that school children be masked at all times 'for the protection of the teachers'.  This is a nutty idea even by the standards of New Jersey and may constitute 'child abuse'.

Even so, those afflicted with Covid psychosis harangue the rest of us with constant demands that we wear useless masks for their protection.

Recapping:

1. 'Zero Covid' is unattainable.
2. Masks are essentially useless against Covid transmission.
3. Susceptibility to Covid is very highly correlated with age and co-morbidities.
4. National medical 'experts' cannot any longer be trusted.

Our grandchildren will probably snicker at us and our obsessions after we have passed on — just as we do to earlier generations — but they will understand what drove us.  Let's hope that Covid psychosis is not transmissible.

 

The Governmental Upside to Vaccines (sic)

 

There is a '(sic)' next to the word 'vaccine' because it is a fact that the vaccines we are being cajoled into taking are not actually vaccines in the accepted sense of the word.  For the record:

A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease.  A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins.  The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and to further recognize and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.
    — Wikipedia, 9-21-21

(Whenever, following, I use the term 'vaccine', I am using it as a convenient shorthand only.)  The Covid-19 vaccine does not fit this description.  It is not synthesized from the C19 virus itself.  It does not provide immunity from C19, neither does it prevent future infection.  It's only claim is that it attenuates the severity of C19 should the vaccinated victim become infected.  Anecdotal evidence, largely from Israel, the most vaccinated country on Earth, suggests that the vaccine may, in fact, be more dangerous than C19 itself.  This is especially true for the so-called Delta variant.  That evidence takes the form that hospitalizations and deaths related to C19 closely parallels vaccination rates.  That is: as vaccinations go up, so do deaths.

Meanwhile, news out of India and Africa is being suppressed because it does not follow 'the narrative'.  That news strongly supports the view that Ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) are effective prophylactics when administered early in the disease progression.  In the case of Africa, side-by-side graphs of 'vaccine countries' and 'IVM countries' show that death rates in IVM countries are a puny fraction of that in vaccine countries.  In the case of India, Kerala province went the vaccine-route while much of the rest of the country relied on early widespread HCQ/IVM use and the death rates in Kerala are substantially higher when compared to the rest of the country.

It isn't possible that our government doesn't know this, yet we are urged and coerced into getting vaccinated despite mounting evidence that other options have better outcomes.  Why would our government foist an unproven vaccination regimen on us when there are options that, it now appears likely if not 'certain', are better?

Given that these vaccines are by definition untested — there simply hasn't been enough time to know their long-term effects — could there be an ulterior motive?

Well, there's this:

If a third or more of our population were killed in [a nuclear] attack (a conservative estimate by the standards of the Rand Corporation's "Study of Nonmilitary Defense"), a stronger estate tax would have a tremendous revenue potential.
    — from a 1963 Federal Reserve System planning document

A new mRNA 'vaccine' whose long-term effect was to shorten life spans would likewise provide much-needed relief from Social Security's fast-approaching woes, especially if that vaccine or the disease it purports to treat were highly fatal to an older population.

Alternatively, it has been suggested that our planet is severely over-populated.  A nice little pandemic could fix that — if effective treatments can be suppressed.  It isn't outside the envelope of possibility that the vaccines are simply used as 21st-century snake oil.

In medicine, it has long been recognized that even a quack remedy that is harmless in itself can be fatal when it substitutes for an effective medication or treatment.  The time is overdue for that same recognition to apply to politics.
    — Thomas Sowell

—==+++==—

Update:    As of July 8, 2021, IVM is recommended by CDC/NIH for treating C19.

Update:   April 2026   Huge upswing in stillbirths and miscarriages

 

MartyrMade Twitter Feed

 

The following is a copy of the Twitter feed from user MartyrMade which may be gone by the time you read this.  The viewpoint appears to be from one who is neutral regarding left-right politics.  It contains several observations that are important for people on both sides of that divide to be aware of.

—==+++==—

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective.  It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

• Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.
  


• Here are the facts — actual, confirmed facts — that shape their perspective:  1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign.  We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).
  


• These are Tea Party people.  The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios.  The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.
  


• Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could.  We only learned the DNC paid for the manufactured evidence because of a court order.  Comey denied on TV knowing the DNC paid for it, when we have emails from a year earlier proving that he knew.
  


• This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff — who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t — all the way down the line.  In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.
  


• At first, many Trump ppl were worried there must be some collusion, because every media & intel agency wouldn’t make it up out of nothing.  When it was clear that they had made it up, people expected a reckoning, and shed many illusions about their gov’t when it didn’t happen.
  


• We know as fact:  a) The Steele dossier was the sole evidence used to justify spying on the Trump campaign,  b) The FBI knew the Steele dossier was a DNC op,  c) Steele’s source told the FBI the info was unserious,  d) they did not inform the court of any of this and kept spying.
  


• Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back.  They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution — agencies, the press, Congress, academia — gaslit them for another year.
  


• Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration.  They knew their entire lives would be investigated.  Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees.  The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.
  


• This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naïve belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries.  Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.
  


• GOP propaganda still has many of them thinking in terms of partisan binaries, but A LOT of Trump supporters see that the Regime is not partisan.  They all know that the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.
  


• It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.
  


• They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government.  But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them.  They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.
  


• The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable.  If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story.  The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline.  Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.
  


• This is profoundly disorienting.  Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was.  They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.
  


• They watched the press behave like animals for four years.  Tens of millions of people will always see Kavanaugh as a gang rapist, based on nothing, because of CNN.  And CNN seems proud of that.  They led a lynch mob against a high school kid.  They cheered on a summer of riots.
  


• They always claimed the media had liberal bias: fine, whatever.  They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered.  Now they don’t.  It’s a different thing to watch them invent stories [out of] whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.
  


• Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect.  In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.
  


• Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures.  It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc).  After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.
  


• Re: “fake impeachment”, we now know that Trump’s request for Ukraine to cooperate w/the DOJ regarding Biden’s $ activities in Ukraine was in support of an active investigation being pursued by the FBI and Ukraine AG at the time, and so a completely legitimate request.
  


• Then you get the Hunter laptop scandal.  Big Tech ran a full-on censorship campaign against a major newspaper to protect a political candidate.  Period.  Everyone knows it, all of the Tech companies now admit it was a “mistake” — but, ya know, the election’s over, so who cares?
  


• Goes w/o saying, but: If the NY Times had Don Jr’s laptop, full of pics of him smoking crack and engaging in group sex, lots of lurid family drama, emails describing direct corruption and backed up by the CEO of the company they were using, the NYT wouldn’t have been banned.
  


• Think back:  Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source.  The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.
  


• The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!”  That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012.  This is different.  Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.
  


• And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote.  He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got!  As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope.  But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.
  


• Over the ensuing weeks, they got shuffled around by grifters and media scam artists selling them conspiracy theories.  They latched onto one, then another increasingly absurd theory as they tried to put a concrete name on something very real.
  


• Media & Tech did everything to make things worse.  Everything about the election was strange — the changes to procedure, unprecedented mail-in voting, the delays, etc — but rather than admit that and make everything transparent, they banned discussion of it (even in DMs!).
  


• Everyone knows that, just as Don Jr’s laptop would’ve been the story of the century, if everything about the election dispute was the same, except the parties were reversed, suspicions about the outcome would’ve been Taken Very Seriously.  See 2016 for proof.
  


• Even the courts’ refusal of the case gets nowhere w/them, because of how the opposition embraced mass political violence.  They’ll say, w/good reason:  What judge will stick his neck out for Trump knowing he’ll be destroyed in the media as a violent mob burns down his house?
  


• It’s a fact, according to Time Magazine, that mass riots were planned in cities across the country if Trump won.  Sure, they were “protests”, but they were planned by the same people as during the summer, and everyone knows what it would have meant.  Judges have families, too.
  


• Forget the ballot conspiracies.  It’s a fact that governors used COVID to unconstitutionally alter election procedures (the Constitution states that only legislatures can do so) to help Biden to make up for a massive enthusiasm gap by gaming the mail-in ballot system.
  


• They knew it was unconstitutional, it’s right there in plain English.  But they knew the cases wouldn’t see court until after the election.  And what judge will toss millions of ballots because a governor broke the rules?  The threat of mass riots wasn’t implied, it was direct.
  


• • a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, 
  • b) The press is part of the operation, 
  • c) Election rules were changed, 
  • d) Big Tech censors opposition, 
  • e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, 
  • f) Trump is banned from social media.


• They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them [from] getting it.  Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

 

End Times

 

I recently had a set-to with my cardiologist.  While sitting in the examining room, I remarked out loud that it seemed silly that I, fully vaccinated, still needed to wear a mask, especially considering the size of the CoVid-19 particle compared to the limits of an N95 mask.  Specifically, the particle is about 1/4 the size of the smallest particle the mask will filter out.  It goes through the mask material like sand through a cyclone fence.

My cardiologist basically 'flew off the handle', accusing me of being a moron who didn't understand why masks were so important.  Then he walked out of the room, my examination still unfinished, telling me "Call me when you've changed your mind."

I came very close to leaving, demanding that the clinic not charge me for the visit since the doctor had refused to treat me as a patient.  Before I did, he wandered back into the room to finish the exam.

Those who reject the notion that a cloth mask can do much to defend against an aerosolized virus are called 'science deniers' by those who hold the opposing view, but I think the situation is exactly reversed.  There are several peer-reviewed studies that suggest masks are essentially useless against CoVid-19, and none that suggest otherwise.

Likewise, hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) was touted early on (primarily by 'the right') as an effective prophylactic when applied before the onset of serious respiratory symptoms.  The mainstream media (MSM) pooh-poohed this idea, largely, it seems, because Trump was for it.  It didn't matter that HCQ was a 70-year-old formulation on which the patent had expired, and that could be manufactured by any reasonably-well-equipped pharmacology lab for peanuts.  Or perhaps that did matter.  If HCQ had taken hold, there would not have been the opportunity for Big Pharma to make billions (with a 'b') producing vaccines whose effectiveness is suspect and whose long-term consequences are unknown.  (HCQ has even been banned for use against CoVid-19 because of a series of 'studies' where it was shown conclusively that it had no value 'curing' the virus in patients where the virus had already gained a foothold.  This was not a surprise to those clinics where it had been studied by applying it in the early stages of the disease.  Nobody had ever claimed it was a cure; it merely blocked disease progression during onset.  Most Americans didn't understand the difference.)

The Ivermectin (IVM) story replicates the HCQ story above save only that IVM is somewhat more expensive to buy than HCQ.

To make it economically feasible for Big Pharma to produce vaccines for Operation Warp Speed, vaccine producers have been, themselves, immunized from lawsuits that might arise should those vaccines produce unpleasant side-effects.  You can't sue them if something goes wrong.

It occurs to me that anyone who doesn't have to take the vaccine, shouldn't.  What will happen if one of the as-yet-unknown side-effects of the vaccine is a shortening of the human life span by 5 or 10 or 15 years?  (That might go a long way toward helping Social Security weather the coming economic downturn(s).)  What will happen if the as-yet-unknown side-effect of the vaccine is a reduction in human fertility by 10% or 15%?  What will happen if the as-yet-unknown side-effect of the vaccine is an increase in stillbirths?  These are all possibilities because there has not been time to study any long-term effects.  What will certainly not happen is that any court will allow a civil suit for damages for any of these potential calamities.  We are just now hearing of an increased incidence of myocarditis among young people who have taken the vaccines, and at least one case of a 14-year-old who suffered a heart attack within two days of getting vaccinated.

All of this for a disease with a 99.7% chance of survival.  Have we become a nation of cowards?  I think it's clear that we have become a nation of idiots.

 

50 Laboratories

 

Back on February 7, 2017, I wrote about problem-solving using massively-parallel trial-and-error and suggested that this method almost always results in the optimal outcome, and gets very close to it when it misses the bulls-eye.

We just went through a period where this method was applied, and it has (apparently) worked as expected.  Fifty states each dealt with Covid-19 using a handful of models such that we now have several different solutions, each demonstrating different levels of success.

New York, New Jersey, and California, along with several others, went the 'hard lockdown' route, while others, notably Florida and Texas, eschewed mask mandates and forced isolation.  The results are in: lockdowns don't work if the desired result is the health of the populace; mask mandates seem to have no observable effect on infection rates; forced isolation is (as was predicted early-on) a recipe for economic catastrophe and very little in the way of 'preventing infection'.  The CDC is now admitting that the chance of acquiring Covid-19 from hard surfaces is approximately zero.  If only someone would have been aware of how useless most of these draconian non-solutions were earlier in the process!

Well, it turns out that someone was aware of how useless mask mandates, hard lockdowns, and economy-crippling isolation measures were.  By and large, what the mainstream media sneeringly refer to as 'right-wing media' was on this case within weeks of the initial outbreaks, and they warned whoever would listen that (a) Covid-19 was far less dangerous than 'the experts' were saying it was, and (b) that there was no reason to torpedo the economy in order to keep people healthy.  In fact, NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and NJ Governor Phil Murphy both sent infected seniors back into the nursing homes from which they had come, the better to infect any seniors who had thus far escaped the virus.  The instant this happened, 'right-wing media' was on the issue 'like white on rice' warning (as if no one could figure this out for themselves) that placing infected persons in close proximity to uninfected persons was an excellent way to infect the uninfected.  Those warnings were dismissed as conspiracy theories, but we now know that they were something else.

The left is keen on 'common-sense gun laws', but they're not quite as keen on common-sense health policies, and now I think we can speculate as to 'why'.  Common-sense gun laws (which are thoroughly divorced from common-sense) give them more power.  Common-sense health policies take power away.  The common denominator is that whatever gives the left power is good, and whatever takes power away is bad.

Let that sink in for a moment.

 

A Small Difference of Opinion

 

I have come to understand — somewhat reluctantly — that Mike Vanderboegh was more right than he could imagine when he opined that Americans are now two distinct people occupying the same territory.  The implications of this are ominous.  They almost guarantee that the United States will eventually — maybe soon — disunite, probably via a civil war, perhaps via a shooting civil war.

It has been obvious for some time, certainly since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that Democrats as a class are unprincipled and mendacious, with minds closed to any idea that does not fit the narrative set by the demagogues by whom they are pleased to be ruled, and violently opposed to all who question their accepted dogma.  In this sense, they are largely indistinguishable from Muslims who are perfectly accepting of the notion that the only good unbeliever is a headless unbeliever.  The rise of "cancel culture" (that oddly seems to affect only conservatives) provides adequate proof.

The things they believe can only be believed by turning a blind eye to uncomfortable facts, while simultaneously declining to fact-check their own sources.  For instance, we have the glaring example of Adam Schiff who, almost weekly for the entirety of the Trump presidency, proclaimed that he had "seen clear and convincing evidence" that Trump and his team colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.  Of course, Robert Mueller at the head of two dozen highly-paid and Democratically-aligned A-list attorneys couldn't find anything prosecutable despite spending two years and 30 million dollars.  When asked directly whether he, Mueller, had inquired into the Clinton campaign's documented connection to the Steele dossier, Mueller demurred because "that was not within my purview".  That is, in lawyer-speak, an admission that Mueller was charged with finding wrongdoing by Trump and his team to the exclusion of everyone else.  As a consequence, the $30 million resulted in a few minor 1001's and very little else.  The persecution of General Michael Flynn never rose to the level that any Democrat would have been bothered by the complete absence of due process because, you see, Flynn was a Republican and thus unworthy of fair treatment.

Since Second Amendment issues are always high on my priority list, most discussions zero in on that pretty quickly.  "I'm not trying to take your guns!" she loudly proclaims.  Well, no, you aren't, but the people you voted for are.  That's where anything resembling "a discussion" usually ends.  No Democrat wants to have to fight that battle under any conditions that might lead them to have to change their mind.  The facts are not on their side, so they argue emotion.  As soon as one party forces the debate back onto a factual base, they execute a strategic withdrawal.

Big Tech and Big Media have together conspired to make a Trump re-election unlikely if not out-and-out impossible.  The treatment of Hunter Biden is illustrative.  Hunter sent his laptop in for repair and then apparently forgot about it.  When the laptop repairman exercised a workman's lien and began peering deep into the innards of the device, he discovered evidence of potentially criminal activity on Hunter's part.  He made a safety back-up copy of the laptop's contents before turning it over to the FBI which (presumably) is still looking into it.  When The New York Post ran a front-page article based on that "safety copy", FaceBook and Twitter shut down NYPost access to their platforms.  No Democrat raised an eyebrow.  The existence of evidence that Hunter Biden may have engaged in criminal activity remained (and remains) unknown to the bulk of the American people.  Had Hunter been linked to anything Republican, he would now be in federal prison awaiting trial.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic provides a wealth of confirming data for the overarching premise.  Mario Cuomo, the Democratic governor of New York, issued an order early in the course of the pandemic that forced NY nursing homes to re-admit Covid-positive patients back among their untested populations.  That this resulted in the deaths of a number of elderly patients that might otherwise have survived the experience is undisputed.  Trump (a Republican) dispatched a Navy hospital ship to NY harbor to help the (Democratic) mayor isolate Covid patients.  When the ship was finally recalled to regular duty some weeks later, they had handled exactly ZERO patients.  It just wouldn't do for any Democrat to place themselves into a position from which they would have to give credit to a Republican for doing something good, even if citizens have to die to prevent it.  Despite this, the governor won an Emmy for his daily press briefings!

Despite widespread lockdowns that crushed their economies, NY, NJ, CT, and CA have experienced high case rates, high hospitalization rates, and high death rates from the virus.  States that rejected hard lockdowns, FL and TX prime among them, have recorded lower rates for hospitalizations and deaths.  Even so, those "free states" are routinely panned in Big Media as being hotbeds of infection.  Only among so-called right-wing media is there speculation that lockdowns might not have been as effective as we were promised.  NY, with very high death rates, even insisted that travelers from "hotbed states" like FL quarantine for two weeks on arrival.  Recently, CBS' "60 Minutes" so blatantly misquoted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis regarding his response to Covid-19 that the (Democratic) mayor of Palm Beach County felt obligated to go public in defense of his (Republican) governor.

In short, Democrats believe many things that are provably false and disbelieve many things that are provably true, and insist that everyone who doesn't believe as they do is a traitor, a terrorist, an insurrectionist, a conspiracy-theorist, or some combination of those.  Given their propensity to destroy the economy and their compatriots' wealth in the process, the only real traitors seem to be the ones with a "D" next to their names.

 

Y2K For Nurses

 

Norene just read me a snippet of an article in a newspaper about COVID-19 causing a huge surge in demand for RNs who can drop everything and act as shock troops for hospitals experiencing a lack of trained staff.  Wages of $100/hour (and up) are attracting nurses from all over for 13-week contracts almost everywhere.

To a mainframe programmer, this looks like Y2K all over again.  $100/hour annualized for a 2000 hour work year comes to $200,000/year.  Overtime at time-and-a-half can easily double that, and $100/hour is the low end of the scale.  Hot diggity!

A bunch of nurses who have been working for — in many cases — short wages see an offer for an irresistibly high hourly rate, and they figure "In three months, I can pay off my mortgage.  If it all falls apart after that, pffft!".  With no mortgage and probably a nice cash cushion beyond that, a nurse can dish pancakes at IHOP until the dust settles, and good nurses are almost never out of work for very long — if they want to work.

For hospital administrators, it must look like a scene from a horror movie:  all my experienced nurses are gone and now I have to shell out triple to replace them with headcount I have to train to use our systems.  Maybe I should have put them in 'golden handcuffs' when I had the chance.  Yeah, you should have...

Ah, well, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

 

Bailouts and IRAs

In less than a month, the government has added $5T to our national debt.  They did it by printing money.  It's backed by nothing.  There can only be one result from that: inflation.  "Big deal!" I just heard someone say.  Yes, indeed, a very big deal, especially if you've already retired.

Washington is spending enough money that its effect will be felt almost immediately.  There are already reports of retail price increases for food.  What this means is that over the next few months and years, virtually everything you want to purchase is going to cost substantially more than it does right now.

If you're a workin' stiff, you can campaign for a wage increase on the grounds that your employer is charging more for whatever your employer sells/provides, but if you're retired:

• you're on Social Security and you're probably not going to get an increase in that,
• you have an IRA with a certain balance, and that balance isn't going to be adjusted upward,
• the stock market is presently in the basement.

That $3,500 cruise you had planned for next Summer?  It'll be $4,000.  For every $7 you were planning to spend, you now have to plan on spending $8.  To put it another way, if you had $400G put aside for your retirement, somebody in Washington just stole $50G.  The balance in the account doesn't change; only its purchasing power does.

Now, if you happen to be one of those fortunate people who are the beneficiaries of the bulk of that $5T bailout, you can grab your pot of gold and put it where it will generate some more wealth for you.  If you're Joe Sixpack, you're shit out of luck.  Better luck next time.

And the reason for all that extra spending?  It's to combat the ill-effects of COVID-19.  The Kennedy Center needs money to help them get past the enforced shutdown, and Planned Parenthood seems to be... well, to be honest, I don't know what they're doing to battle COVID-19, but it's important enough for them to rate $35B.  In fact, almost none of that spending will actually help the man in the street... excuse me, the man forced to quarantine at home.

The real problem here is that all those people who just got the shaft from the financial wizards in Congress will go to the polls in November and re-elect the very same people who just stole 13% of everything the voters had saved, because "Hey, I got a check for $1,200!"  They saw that; they didn't see their retirement savings shrink by 1/7th.

Overreacting to COVID-19

You always have to have a plan, but it doesn't always have to be the same plan.

When we first heard about Coronavirus, COVID-19, the reports were sketchy and the number of cases was small.  "Small" in statistics equates to "unreliable", so we should have heavily discounted the initial speculations of a 6% fatality rate.  "6%' is a scary number.  It's 1-out-of-16.  In this country, 6% is 20 million dead Americans.  People panicked.  The country went into quarantine in an attempt to slow the spread of the disease.

As the number of cases grew, the conclusions drawn grew more reliable.  Soon we revised the fatality rate down to 3%.  That's still 10 million dead Americans, but it was based on testing increasing numbers of people who were exhibiting symptoms.  People without symptoms were assumed (!!) to be uninfected.  They weren't being tested because test kits were scarce.

Something else was becoming obvious: almost everyone who died from COVID-19 had other underlying issues, what are called "co-morbidities".  Yes, they died from COVID-19, but they might not have died if they weren't obese, diabetic, had heart disease, or something else that turned them into a fragile patient.

As test kits became available, people without symptoms began to be tested and we discovered something startling.  Huge numbers of people were showing positive test results, and they were asymptomatic.  They had already contracted COVID-19 and shrugged it off.

The federal government, in an effort to get good data, offered states a little bonus to compensate them for the extra work they had to do collecting COVID-19 statistics.  Effectively, the feds were paying the states for reporting COVID-19 cases.  Guess what happens?  Mr. Jones dies after being mugged, and on 'post' he's discovered to be positive for COVID-19.  Presto-chango!  He's a COVID-19 death.  Suddenly, there's a huge bump in the fatality rate.  The reported fatality rate can't be relied upon because it may be artificially inflated.  It's almost certainly lower than reported.  What does this tell us?

• COVID-19 is ferociously contagious.  You almost can't escape it.  If you don't catch it in April, you'll pick it up in May.
• COVID-19 is not very deadly.  The latest estimates of the fatality rate are down in the 0.03% range, 3-in-10,000.  That's still 100,000 dead Americans, but that's a long way away from 20 million.
• Your greatest chance of catching it occurs indoors.  Fresh air and sunlight are hazardous to the virus and suppress its transmission, and thus are healthy for potential hosts (us).

Some countries, notably Sweden, have taken the attitude that COVID-19 is going to have to run its course, and their numbers (cases-per-capita, deaths-per-capita) are not noticeably different than ours.  Given this, what of our reaction to the pandemic?

• Unless you or a loved one is in an at-risk population, staying indoors too much is a bad idea.  It spreads the virus.  Efforts to keep people out of places like parks and beaches is exactly the wrong thing to do.
• Even if you are in an at-risk population, sunlight and fresh air are probably good for you.
• 'Social distancing' probably doesn't work.  Almost certainly, it isn't doing what we hope it's doing.
• Shutting down the economy and disemploying so many people was stupid and irresponsible.
• The experts think everything is working well, and we should keep doing this until we're all destitute.

You always have to have a plan, but it doesn't always have to be the same plan.

Inmates In Charge Of The Asylum

 

Notes from the front lines of the war against CoViD-19: This is (I think) Day-12 of our ordeal.  Bars and restaurants and other places where people typically congregate (including places of worship) are closed by diktat, Clearwater Beach is closed in the middle of Spring Break, school is out until at least April 1, everyone is on a de facto lock-down because — really, where can we go?  There have been about 160 deaths from exposure to CoViD-19.

'Seasonal flu' kills people at rates 100 times that, but (we're told) CoViD-19 hasn't 'peaked'.

Small businesses that rely on a more-or-less constant flow of paying customers are hurting so bad that many of them may not survive until they're allowed to re-open, but — not to worry! — the SBA has loans and grants to tide them over, and a bi-partisan budget expansion — paid for by you, of course, — will surely pass on its first appearance.  The employees of those businesses are furloughed because (a) the business is closed, and (b) they're not allowed to travel (or strongly discouraged).  Many of those employees are low-wage workers heavily dependent on tip income.  Ah, well, at least there's unemployment, and by now the mandatory two-week waiting period is just about over, and they'll be allowed to apply so they'll get their first check after (maybe) another week.  Or two.

Larger businesses have the advantages of scale and the ability to hunker down and mothball their capacity, so this mandatory shut-down is a huge boon to them as far as 'competition' is concerned.  Smaller businesses?  Bummer, Dude.

This artificial impact on businesses from coast to coast is a cratering event for the various stock markets and the economy in general.

Time for a reality check:  the earliest data we have on CoViD-19 comes to us from a cruise ship, the Diamond Princess.  That environment is 2,000-3,000 people in relatively close proximity for a week or more, passing germs back and forth at every meal.  Many of those passengers are older and are much more at-risk than is the general population.  That looks very like a 'worst-case scenario'.  And what conclusions can we draw from the Diamond Princess?

Worst case:  The Diamond Princess tells us that the contagion rate (who's going to catch it?) will probably top out around 20%.  For the U.S. population as a whole, that's 600,000 people, and 80% who won't catch it regardless.  20% of those infected (120,000) will show symptoms severe enough to require intervention, real quarantine and/or hospitalization, some of them in an ICU.  10% of that (12,000) will die.

We lose more than that to seasonal flu, and we lost way more than that to the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic during the Obama administration, and nobody got anywhere near this excited back then.  In short, this is not Captain Trips, and we are not all going to die, and we are almost certainly over-reacting.  The worsening economy is a net negative for Donald Trump whose re-election campaign will almost certainly focus on economic performance issues.

The biggest loser is the Constitution.  Isn't it amazing that what is almost certainly an ordinary virus is all it takes for the American people to look the other way when the government virtually repeals the First Amendment?  Peaceably assemble for dinner or a beer?  Nope, all those places are closed and we don't want you traveling, and we especially don't want you gathering in groups!  Freedom of worship?  Maybe after the crisis passes (heh heh heh).

Never let a crisis go to waste.