I tried one of those "Try Not To Laugh" challenges, but barely made it halfway before cracking up.
I guess you could say... I fought the LOL, and the LOL won.
*.*
Hired a handy man and gave him a list.
When I got home, only #1, 3 & 5 were done.
Turns out, he only does odd jobs.
*.*
Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a masterpiece of military strategy, yet General Mark A. Milley says he can make it even better. Milley believes the book needs to be updated to integrate all the advancements America's modern military has made in military tactics and strategy. To that end, he's updating several of Sun Tzu's famous paradigms:
"If you think you might attack an enemy, pick up the phone and give 'em a heads up. It's only fair."
"You have to be careful not to surprise your enemy. They really don't like it."
"Treason is not treason if it is the lesser of two treasons."
"Know thy pronouns, and know thy enemy's pronouns."
"The supreme art of war is to surrender to your enemy without fighting."
“All war is white rage.”
"If thy commanding officer sends mean tweets, thou need not follow orders or the chain of command."
"The enemy of my friend is my friend."
“Keep your friends close and your enemies on speed dial.”
“You cannot betray the one to which you were never loyal.”
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for China.”
"When retreating, leave most of thy armaments behind so you know what you'll be up against next time."
"Chinese bros before American hoes."
"He who turns on bad orange man gets big book deal."
*.*
I tried to make a 'fancy' sauce last night at dinner, I mixed vodka, gravy and nitrous oxide,
Sadly, all I managed was making myself an Absolut laughing stock!
*.*
What should you do when nobody laughs at your science jokes?
Keep trying until you get a reaction.
Quote of the Times;
The American Dream has turned into a nightmare under President Biden and the radical Democrats. They have declared war against capitalism, thumbed their noses at the Constitution, and empowered our enemies abroad. Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian. - Governor Henry McMaster
Link of the Times;
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/study-miscarriage-rate-covid-vaccine
Issue of the Times;
Here's How to Tell Within 5 Minutes If Someone Isn't as Smart as They Think by Jeff Haden
Science says people who do one thing tend to be less intelligent. And less competent.
I ordered a turkey sandwich and asked for double meat. The guy behind me said, "You shouldn't eat meat." I turned and shrugged.
"Seriously," he said, his voice getting louder. "Meat is bad for you."
"Maybe so," I said. "But I like meat."
Evidently that was not the right response. "A friend turned me on to a vegan diet," he said. "Only fools eat meat. Meat is terrible for you. There's not a single reason to eat meat. The science is irrefutable." Then he paused and moved closer, narrowing his eyes to stare intently into mine.
"It's changed my life," he said.
"I'm not sure all meat is bad," I said. "But that's really cool how being a vegan has worked out for you. How long have you been doing it?"
"This is my second day," he said.
Ah.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
His certainty provides a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a type of cognitive bias described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in which people believe they're smarter and more skilled than they actually are. Combine a lack of self-awareness with low cognitive ability and boom: You overestimate your own intelligence and competence.
As Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, says, "if you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent. The skills you need to produce the right answer are the very same skills you need to recognize the right answer."
As Bertrand Russell said, "one of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."
Or as my grandfather said, "the dumber you are, the more you think you know."
(On the flip side, people with high ability tend to underestimate how good they are. High-ability individuals tend to underrate their relative competence, and at the same time assume that tasks that are easy for them are just as easy for other people.)
But I shouldn't be too hard on the gentleman who had just adopted a vegan diet. I once spent 20 minutes trying to convince a motorcycle mechanic my bike handled poorly because of issues like spring rate and steering head angle and frame height, only to learn I had unknowingly turned my rear shock's rebound damping to its lowest setting.
Wildly overestimating my knowledge made me a D-K.
We all know people who do the same. They take a position and then proclaim and bluster and pontificate while totally disregarding differing opinions or points of view. They know they're right -- and they want you to know they're right.
Their behavior isn't an indication of intelligence, though. It's the classic sign of a D-K.
Wisdom Is Never Found in Certainty
As Jeff Bezos says, "the smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking."
That's because wisdom isn't found in certainty. Wisdom is knowing that while you might know a lot, there's also a lot you don't know. Wisdom is trying to find out what is right rather than trying to be right. Wisdom is realizing when you're wrong, and backing down graciously.
Don't be afraid to be wrong. Don't be afraid to admit you don't have all the answers. Don't be afraid to say "I think" instead of "I know."
As my Inc. colleague Jessica Stillman says, "next time you're trying to determine if someone is actually super smart or simply bluffing, don't ask whether they're always right. Instead, ask when was the last time they changed their opinion. If they can't name lots of times they were wrong, they're probably not as smart as they want to appear."
Which means they're probably a D-K.
News of the Times;
https://fee.org/articles/4-ways-americans-are-fighting-back-against-anti-science-covid-restrictions/
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/federal-govt-whistleblower-goes-public-with-secret-recordings-government/
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/20/26_governors_seek_meeting_with_biden_over_border_surge_146434.html
https://www.rt.com/usa/535454-carlson-vaccine-army-takeover-covid19/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/zoetillman/capitol-footage-lawsuit-release-insurrection
https://vdare.com/articles/patrick-j-buchanan-are-the-us-and-china-stumbling-toward-an-islands-war
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/09/14/as-biden-says-islam-is-peaceful-d-c-imam-calls-for-jihad-n1478681
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPkrU23DG5A
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fed-chair-powell-owned-least-15-million-municipal-bonds-ones-fed-bailed-out-2020
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2021/09/20/new-york-times-credits-jill-biden-as-a-doctor-but-attempted-to-hide-that-rand-paul-actually-is-one-n445757
https://vdare.com/articles/michelle-malkin-the-manufactured-border-crisis
https://humansarefree.com/2021/09/covid-cases-high-schools-in-fully-vaccinated.html
https://www.redvoicemedia.com/2021/09/stew-peters-medical-worker-forced-to-get-vaccine-gets-both-legs-amputated-after-jab/
https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/21/afghan-refugees-bringing-numerous-diseases-to-us-including-measles-malaria-and-tuberculosis/
https://www.newswars.com/afghan-migrants-gang-rape-mentally-disabled-swedish-woman/
Tell?
Tout?
A new study says that couch potatoes are 7 times more likely to have a stroke.
To make matters worse, I had to watch the entire story on the news because the TV remote was on the far opposite side of the room.
*.*
I met a Muslim man who said he had the Qur'an on DVD.
The trouble started when I asked him to burn a copy for me.
*.*
President Biden's popularity has plummeted, dropping to only a 41% approval rating.
People are apparently upset with his handling of Afghanistan, the pandemic and the failure to secure a permanent new host for Jeopardy.
*.*
Just hours after cover art for NHL 22 was shown, EA sports had to recall all advanced copies of the game sent out to testers.
Apparently during beta testing, it was discovered that before going to the second round of the playoffs, the game would freeze.
The irony of a hockey game freezing cannot be ignored.
*.*
I’m writing a book in fifth person.
Every sentence starts out with: “I heard from this guy who told somebody…”
Quote of the Times;
"You know what I mean. But the kinds of things or, you know, stuff that's coming out of Florida, stuff that's coming out of you know, Robert E. Lee had been in Afghanistan, he woulda won." - "President" Joe Biden
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/_clarence_thomas_identifies_the_greatest_danger_in_america.html
Issue of the Times;
U.S. touts new project to bolster Tajik-Afghan border, as Biden abandons U.S. border wall by Bethany Blankley
While the Biden administration halted construction of the border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, the United States is funding border security efforts for Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic trying to keep Afghan insurgents and refugees out.
One day after the Biden administration's Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan, the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, announced that it had launched a project to construct new facilities for a Border Guard Detachment in Ayvoj, along the Tajik-Afghan-Uzbek border.
That facility is designed to help Tajik security forces better respond to Afghans seeking to flee Taliban rule or insurgents seeking to cause mischief to its neighbor.
While the announcement was largely overlooked by the U.S. media, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) warned in August that it was "preposterous" for American tax dollars to be spent securing a foreign country's border while the U.S. southern border remained wide open.
Last month, nearly 209,000 illegal aliens crossed the U.S. southern border, a two-decade high and four times higher than the last August of the Trump administration, which had tightened border security.
"So we are clear: your tax money is spent building a wall and securing the border in Tajikistan and hydro-power in Afghanistan, but our borders are open and the last large hydro power plant built by Army Corp of Engineers in U.S. was in 1979," Gosar said.
Tajikistan shares an 835-mile border with Afghanistan — less than the 1,254 miles of border shared between Texas and Mexico and less than half the 1,954-mile distance of the entire U.S.-Mexico border.
A new detachment facility in Ayvoj, Tajikistan will replace an outdated facility and allow the Border Guard Service to deploy forces more quickly to border areas in response to threats posed by the Taliban's takeover.
The new facility will also provide housing for Border Guard personnel and their family members, U.S. officials said.
Tajikistan is still a member of the post-Soviet, Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CTSO) alliance, Reuters reports.
"The United States and Tajikistan enjoy strong security cooperation, and this border detachment project is just another example of our shared commitment to the security and sovereignty of Tajikistan and Central Asia," said U.S. Ambassador to Tajikistan John Mark Pommersheim.
Since 2002, the U.S. government has provided over $300 million in security-sector assistance to Tajikistan. U.S. taxpayers have also footed the bill to renovate or rebuild 12 border outposts, nine border checkpoint facilities, and three training centers for Tajik border guards to help combat security threats, the embassy disclosed.
One month before the U.S. withdrawal of Afghanistan, Tajikistan said it could only take roughly 100,000 Afghan refugees — knowing ahead of time that they would be coming.
"Tajikistan does not have the capacity to accommodate a large number of refugees and asylum seekers," Interior Minister Ramazon Rakhimzoda said in July, according to a report by Reuters.
Similar concerns were also expressed by other European countries that beefed up their border efforts, including Greece and Hungary.
Meanwhile, in Texas, state taxpayers are left footing another bill: $1.8 billion allocated by the Texas legislature to finish the U.S. border wall on Texas soil begun under the Trump administration.
The Texas Facilities Commission earlier this month selected a program manager to oversee the wall's construction: Michael Baker International, Inc., a Pennsylvania engineering firm, and the Dallas-based design firm, Huitt-Zollars.
The contract is expected to be awarded any day. Both firms have helped complete hundreds of miles of border wall projects for the federal government. It's the first time any entity would be contracted with a state government to install a border wall.
Legislation recently signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott allocates funding for border security.
Instead of the U.S. government sending troops to secure the border, the Texans are paying an initial $301 million towards salaries and costs for 1,800 National Guardsmen and women, roughly 11 battalions, to install fencing with trespassing signs, and later work on the wall construction or another barrier.
A Washington Examiner analysis indicates only 150 miles of the 1,250 mile border has a substantive barrier, leaving 1,100 miles left for Texas to secure.
But the purpose of the border wall is not to cover the entire 1,254 miles of Texas, or the entire southern border separating the U.S. from Mexico.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, has explained the purpose of the wall is to provide controlled points of entry at different checkpoints along the border. This has proven to be an effective strategy to allow Border Patrol agents to manage the flow of immigration and patrol the field to deter criminal activity.
Texas has identified slightly more than 700 miles of land where barriers, fences and the wall can be constructed. The Texas National Guard has already begun erecting an 8-foot-high chain-link fence in some sectors.
News of the Times;
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/number-of-americans-trapped-in-afghanistan-exceeds-biden-admin-claims-gop-lawmaker-says/
https://vdare.com/posts/gunshot-victims-cost-one-cleveland-trauma-center-672-000-per-month-85-of-those-treated-are-black
https://coloradohockeynow.com/2021/09/13/ex-av-colorado-eagles-coach-brett-clark-leaves-team-over-covid-protocol-issue/
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/terence-p-jeffrey/americans-spent-more-taxes-2020-food-clothing-healthcare-and
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/massachusetts-activates-national-guard-bus-children-school-after-vax-mandate-staffing
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/sarah-palin-announces-unvaccinated-believes-science-dr-drew-backs-claims/
https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/2021/09/i-just-want-my-life-back-says-16-year-old-who-developed-neurological-symptoms-after-pfizer-vaccine
https://campusreform.org/article?id=18166
https://www.oann.com/fitton-documents-show-obama-fda-buying-fetal-heads-fresh-never-frozen/
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/desantis-office-over-half-those-seeking-lifesaving-covid-19-treatment-south-florida-fully
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/somalian-refugee-charged-with-shooting-murder-of-north-dakota-mother/
https://thepostmillennial.com/us-lieutenant-colonel-resigns-marxist-takeover
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/sarah-silverman-proposes-national-divorce-between-conservatives-and-liberals/
https://thepostmillennial.com/teen-vogue-busted-police-abolitionist-author-candidates-consultant?utm_campaign=64474
https://www.dw.com/en/evergrande-why-the-chinese-property-giant-is-close-to-collapse/a-59175953
To make matters worse, I had to watch the entire story on the news because the TV remote was on the far opposite side of the room.
*.*
I met a Muslim man who said he had the Qur'an on DVD.
The trouble started when I asked him to burn a copy for me.
*.*
President Biden's popularity has plummeted, dropping to only a 41% approval rating.
People are apparently upset with his handling of Afghanistan, the pandemic and the failure to secure a permanent new host for Jeopardy.
*.*
Just hours after cover art for NHL 22 was shown, EA sports had to recall all advanced copies of the game sent out to testers.
Apparently during beta testing, it was discovered that before going to the second round of the playoffs, the game would freeze.
The irony of a hockey game freezing cannot be ignored.
*.*
I’m writing a book in fifth person.
Every sentence starts out with: “I heard from this guy who told somebody…”
Quote of the Times;
"You know what I mean. But the kinds of things or, you know, stuff that's coming out of Florida, stuff that's coming out of you know, Robert E. Lee had been in Afghanistan, he woulda won." - "President" Joe Biden
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/_clarence_thomas_identifies_the_greatest_danger_in_america.html
Issue of the Times;
U.S. touts new project to bolster Tajik-Afghan border, as Biden abandons U.S. border wall by Bethany Blankley
While the Biden administration halted construction of the border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, the United States is funding border security efforts for Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic trying to keep Afghan insurgents and refugees out.
One day after the Biden administration's Aug. 31 deadline to withdraw from Afghanistan, the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, announced that it had launched a project to construct new facilities for a Border Guard Detachment in Ayvoj, along the Tajik-Afghan-Uzbek border.
That facility is designed to help Tajik security forces better respond to Afghans seeking to flee Taliban rule or insurgents seeking to cause mischief to its neighbor.
While the announcement was largely overlooked by the U.S. media, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) warned in August that it was "preposterous" for American tax dollars to be spent securing a foreign country's border while the U.S. southern border remained wide open.
Last month, nearly 209,000 illegal aliens crossed the U.S. southern border, a two-decade high and four times higher than the last August of the Trump administration, which had tightened border security.
"So we are clear: your tax money is spent building a wall and securing the border in Tajikistan and hydro-power in Afghanistan, but our borders are open and the last large hydro power plant built by Army Corp of Engineers in U.S. was in 1979," Gosar said.
Tajikistan shares an 835-mile border with Afghanistan — less than the 1,254 miles of border shared between Texas and Mexico and less than half the 1,954-mile distance of the entire U.S.-Mexico border.
A new detachment facility in Ayvoj, Tajikistan will replace an outdated facility and allow the Border Guard Service to deploy forces more quickly to border areas in response to threats posed by the Taliban's takeover.
The new facility will also provide housing for Border Guard personnel and their family members, U.S. officials said.
Tajikistan is still a member of the post-Soviet, Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CTSO) alliance, Reuters reports.
"The United States and Tajikistan enjoy strong security cooperation, and this border detachment project is just another example of our shared commitment to the security and sovereignty of Tajikistan and Central Asia," said U.S. Ambassador to Tajikistan John Mark Pommersheim.
Since 2002, the U.S. government has provided over $300 million in security-sector assistance to Tajikistan. U.S. taxpayers have also footed the bill to renovate or rebuild 12 border outposts, nine border checkpoint facilities, and three training centers for Tajik border guards to help combat security threats, the embassy disclosed.
One month before the U.S. withdrawal of Afghanistan, Tajikistan said it could only take roughly 100,000 Afghan refugees — knowing ahead of time that they would be coming.
"Tajikistan does not have the capacity to accommodate a large number of refugees and asylum seekers," Interior Minister Ramazon Rakhimzoda said in July, according to a report by Reuters.
Similar concerns were also expressed by other European countries that beefed up their border efforts, including Greece and Hungary.
Meanwhile, in Texas, state taxpayers are left footing another bill: $1.8 billion allocated by the Texas legislature to finish the U.S. border wall on Texas soil begun under the Trump administration.
The Texas Facilities Commission earlier this month selected a program manager to oversee the wall's construction: Michael Baker International, Inc., a Pennsylvania engineering firm, and the Dallas-based design firm, Huitt-Zollars.
The contract is expected to be awarded any day. Both firms have helped complete hundreds of miles of border wall projects for the federal government. It's the first time any entity would be contracted with a state government to install a border wall.
Legislation recently signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott allocates funding for border security.
Instead of the U.S. government sending troops to secure the border, the Texans are paying an initial $301 million towards salaries and costs for 1,800 National Guardsmen and women, roughly 11 battalions, to install fencing with trespassing signs, and later work on the wall construction or another barrier.
A Washington Examiner analysis indicates only 150 miles of the 1,250 mile border has a substantive barrier, leaving 1,100 miles left for Texas to secure.
But the purpose of the border wall is not to cover the entire 1,254 miles of Texas, or the entire southern border separating the U.S. from Mexico.
Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, has explained the purpose of the wall is to provide controlled points of entry at different checkpoints along the border. This has proven to be an effective strategy to allow Border Patrol agents to manage the flow of immigration and patrol the field to deter criminal activity.
Texas has identified slightly more than 700 miles of land where barriers, fences and the wall can be constructed. The Texas National Guard has already begun erecting an 8-foot-high chain-link fence in some sectors.
News of the Times;
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/number-of-americans-trapped-in-afghanistan-exceeds-biden-admin-claims-gop-lawmaker-says/
https://vdare.com/posts/gunshot-victims-cost-one-cleveland-trauma-center-672-000-per-month-85-of-those-treated-are-black
https://coloradohockeynow.com/2021/09/13/ex-av-colorado-eagles-coach-brett-clark-leaves-team-over-covid-protocol-issue/
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/terence-p-jeffrey/americans-spent-more-taxes-2020-food-clothing-healthcare-and
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/massachusetts-activates-national-guard-bus-children-school-after-vax-mandate-staffing
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/sarah-palin-announces-unvaccinated-believes-science-dr-drew-backs-claims/
https://freedomfirstnetwork.com/2021/09/i-just-want-my-life-back-says-16-year-old-who-developed-neurological-symptoms-after-pfizer-vaccine
https://campusreform.org/article?id=18166
https://www.oann.com/fitton-documents-show-obama-fda-buying-fetal-heads-fresh-never-frozen/
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/desantis-office-over-half-those-seeking-lifesaving-covid-19-treatment-south-florida-fully
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/somalian-refugee-charged-with-shooting-murder-of-north-dakota-mother/
https://thepostmillennial.com/us-lieutenant-colonel-resigns-marxist-takeover
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/sarah-silverman-proposes-national-divorce-between-conservatives-and-liberals/
https://thepostmillennial.com/teen-vogue-busted-police-abolitionist-author-candidates-consultant?utm_campaign=64474
https://www.dw.com/en/evergrande-why-the-chinese-property-giant-is-close-to-collapse/a-59175953
Babies?
The recent Pacific Northwest heat wave is said to have killed thousands of clams and mussels along the coast; baked 'em right on the beach.
We are an overturned butter truck away from a heck of a party.
*.*
A judge in Spain says that Shakira may have avoided paying the taxes she owed and should go to trial.
Hopefully, her hips won't be called in to testify.
*.*
In a tragedy that's becoming all too common among millennial women, local wife and mother of three Destiny Madur sadly passed away after she only managed to drink seven and a half glasses of water instead of the recommended eight on Saturday.
"This death was entirely preventable," said presiding ER doctor F.P. Langley. "It's so sad to see a young, healthy woman like Mrs. Madur not drink all eight glasses of water a day as we've been recommending for some time. She was trying to down that last half a glass and then just left it on her bedside table, which kind of looked like the house in Signs with all the water containers left everywhere. But she started watching one of her TV shows and forgot about it."
Dr. Langley said that as soon as the clock struck midnight, Madur realized her mistake and reached for her glass of water to finish it off, but it was too late. She died moments later. Her husband says he is dedicating his life to making sure people drink eight glasses of water a day. "It's what she would have wanted," he said somberly. "She was always telling me to drink more water. In an ironic twist of fate, that's what undid her in the end. WHY, GOD!? WHY?!?!"
According to experts, millions of women die every year after not quite managing to chug a full eight glasses of water a day. "It's the number one cause of death in America," said medical journalist Paul Breadcrombie. "So very sad."
At publishing time, sources had confirmed most men haven't drunk a full glass of water in over a decade and are totally fine.
*.*
My friends asked me to go camping, so I made a list of the things I would need:
#1. New friends.
*.*
What does a British owl say?
Whom...., whom.
Quote of the Times;
“Pedophilia is the end game of equality. It always was. And every single conservative who proudly embraced “judeochristianity” and every single liberal who preened about how he only judged people by the content of their character bears their share of the blame for walking down this road. Jesus Christ came to divide, not to unite, and there is absolutely no equality of any kind, not in Heaven and not in this world. If you are preaching unity, equality, tolerance, and inclusiveness, you are serving evil.” - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/09/29/busted-on-hot-mic-pa-gov-wolf-and-elected-crony-laughing-about-masks-as-political-theater-n986251
Issue of the Times;
Hospital to stop delivering babies as maternity workers resign over vaccine mandate by Brendan Straub
LOWVILLE, New York (WWNY) - Lewis County General Hospital will stop delivering babies after September 24 because too many maternity unit workers have resigned over COVID vaccination mandates.
That’s according to Lewis County Health System Chief Executive Officer Gerald Cayer, who held a news conference Friday in Lowville.
He said 6 employees in the maternity unit resigned rather than get a COVID shot and another 7 are undecided.
According to Cayer, the hospital will be unable to safely staff the unit and will pause delivering babies after September 24.
He said he hopes this is a temporary situation and will work with the state Department of Health to make sure the unit won’t permanently close.
“If we can pause the service and now focus on recruiting nurses who are vaccinated, we will be able to reengage in delivering babies here in Lewis County,” said Cayer.
Cayer said 165 hospital employees have yet to be vaccinated against COVID-19; that’s 27 percent of the workforce.
The other 464 workers, or 73 percent of employees, have gotten their shots, he said.
In August, the state announced all health care workers at hospitals and long-term care facilities across New York would be required to have gotten at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccination by September 27.
Cayer said the announcement prompted 30 workers to get vaccinated, while another 30 resigned.
“Our hope is as we get closer (to the deadline), the numbers will increase of individuals who are vaccinated, fewer individuals will leave and maybe, with a little luck, some of those who have resigned will reconsider,” he said. “We are not alone. There are thousands of positions that are open north of the Thruway and now we have a challenge to work through, you know, with the vaccination mandate.”
News of the Times;
https://nationalfile.com/lockdown-resister-and-music-legend-eric-clapton-releases-this-has-gotta-stop-covid-protest-song/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/15/covid-politics-takes-a-dark-turn-biden-administration-takes-control-of-monoclonal-antibody-drugs-in-order-to-block-treatments-in-red-states-and-ration-equitable-treatment/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/three-california-recall-ballots-sent-address-deceased-american-veteran-patriot-ashli-babbitt-shot-killed-capitol-jan-6/
https://notthebee.com/article/trump-i-guarantee-china-and-russia-already-have-our-apache-helicopters-and-theyre-taking-them-apart-to-find-out-exactly-how-theyre-made
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2021/09/13/watch-video-shows-hospital-staff-plotting-to-scare-the-public-on-covid-19-n1478281
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/us-averaging-70-deaths-per-day-due-covid-vaccine-since-july-24th-3296-covid-total-vaccine-deaths-recorded-vaers-website/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/i_will_never_trust_another_doctor.html
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/ex-washington-democrat-party-organizer-convicted-of-terrorist-train-derailment-plot/
https://welovetrump.com/2021/09/10/military-in-revolt-12-f-22-pilots-immediately-walk-off-the-job-after-bidens-dictatorial-mandate/
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-aoc-wears-tax-the-rich-gown-at-30-000-a-ticket-met-gala?utm_campaign=64474
https://www.westernjournal.com/ex-special-forces-soldier-beats-woman-pulp-left-cheering/
https://thenationalpulse.com/news/coup-general-milley-secretly-pledged-to-warn-chinese-communist-party-if-trump-planned-a-strike/
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395593.php
https://freebeacon.com/politics/nevada-democrats-costume-party/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/won-fort-hood-shooter-islamic-terrorist-nidal-hasan-congratulates-taliban-fort-leavenworth-prison/
We are an overturned butter truck away from a heck of a party.
*.*
A judge in Spain says that Shakira may have avoided paying the taxes she owed and should go to trial.
Hopefully, her hips won't be called in to testify.
*.*
In a tragedy that's becoming all too common among millennial women, local wife and mother of three Destiny Madur sadly passed away after she only managed to drink seven and a half glasses of water instead of the recommended eight on Saturday.
"This death was entirely preventable," said presiding ER doctor F.P. Langley. "It's so sad to see a young, healthy woman like Mrs. Madur not drink all eight glasses of water a day as we've been recommending for some time. She was trying to down that last half a glass and then just left it on her bedside table, which kind of looked like the house in Signs with all the water containers left everywhere. But she started watching one of her TV shows and forgot about it."
Dr. Langley said that as soon as the clock struck midnight, Madur realized her mistake and reached for her glass of water to finish it off, but it was too late. She died moments later. Her husband says he is dedicating his life to making sure people drink eight glasses of water a day. "It's what she would have wanted," he said somberly. "She was always telling me to drink more water. In an ironic twist of fate, that's what undid her in the end. WHY, GOD!? WHY?!?!"
According to experts, millions of women die every year after not quite managing to chug a full eight glasses of water a day. "It's the number one cause of death in America," said medical journalist Paul Breadcrombie. "So very sad."
At publishing time, sources had confirmed most men haven't drunk a full glass of water in over a decade and are totally fine.
*.*
My friends asked me to go camping, so I made a list of the things I would need:
#1. New friends.
*.*
What does a British owl say?
Whom...., whom.
Quote of the Times;
“Pedophilia is the end game of equality. It always was. And every single conservative who proudly embraced “judeochristianity” and every single liberal who preened about how he only judged people by the content of their character bears their share of the blame for walking down this road. Jesus Christ came to divide, not to unite, and there is absolutely no equality of any kind, not in Heaven and not in this world. If you are preaching unity, equality, tolerance, and inclusiveness, you are serving evil.” - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/09/29/busted-on-hot-mic-pa-gov-wolf-and-elected-crony-laughing-about-masks-as-political-theater-n986251
Issue of the Times;
Hospital to stop delivering babies as maternity workers resign over vaccine mandate by Brendan Straub
LOWVILLE, New York (WWNY) - Lewis County General Hospital will stop delivering babies after September 24 because too many maternity unit workers have resigned over COVID vaccination mandates.
That’s according to Lewis County Health System Chief Executive Officer Gerald Cayer, who held a news conference Friday in Lowville.
He said 6 employees in the maternity unit resigned rather than get a COVID shot and another 7 are undecided.
According to Cayer, the hospital will be unable to safely staff the unit and will pause delivering babies after September 24.
He said he hopes this is a temporary situation and will work with the state Department of Health to make sure the unit won’t permanently close.
“If we can pause the service and now focus on recruiting nurses who are vaccinated, we will be able to reengage in delivering babies here in Lewis County,” said Cayer.
Cayer said 165 hospital employees have yet to be vaccinated against COVID-19; that’s 27 percent of the workforce.
The other 464 workers, or 73 percent of employees, have gotten their shots, he said.
In August, the state announced all health care workers at hospitals and long-term care facilities across New York would be required to have gotten at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccination by September 27.
Cayer said the announcement prompted 30 workers to get vaccinated, while another 30 resigned.
“Our hope is as we get closer (to the deadline), the numbers will increase of individuals who are vaccinated, fewer individuals will leave and maybe, with a little luck, some of those who have resigned will reconsider,” he said. “We are not alone. There are thousands of positions that are open north of the Thruway and now we have a challenge to work through, you know, with the vaccination mandate.”
News of the Times;
https://nationalfile.com/lockdown-resister-and-music-legend-eric-clapton-releases-this-has-gotta-stop-covid-protest-song/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/15/covid-politics-takes-a-dark-turn-biden-administration-takes-control-of-monoclonal-antibody-drugs-in-order-to-block-treatments-in-red-states-and-ration-equitable-treatment/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/three-california-recall-ballots-sent-address-deceased-american-veteran-patriot-ashli-babbitt-shot-killed-capitol-jan-6/
https://notthebee.com/article/trump-i-guarantee-china-and-russia-already-have-our-apache-helicopters-and-theyre-taking-them-apart-to-find-out-exactly-how-theyre-made
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2021/09/13/watch-video-shows-hospital-staff-plotting-to-scare-the-public-on-covid-19-n1478281
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/us-averaging-70-deaths-per-day-due-covid-vaccine-since-july-24th-3296-covid-total-vaccine-deaths-recorded-vaers-website/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/i_will_never_trust_another_doctor.html
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/ex-washington-democrat-party-organizer-convicted-of-terrorist-train-derailment-plot/
https://welovetrump.com/2021/09/10/military-in-revolt-12-f-22-pilots-immediately-walk-off-the-job-after-bidens-dictatorial-mandate/
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-aoc-wears-tax-the-rich-gown-at-30-000-a-ticket-met-gala?utm_campaign=64474
https://www.westernjournal.com/ex-special-forces-soldier-beats-woman-pulp-left-cheering/
https://thenationalpulse.com/news/coup-general-milley-secretly-pledged-to-warn-chinese-communist-party-if-trump-planned-a-strike/
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395593.php
https://freebeacon.com/politics/nevada-democrats-costume-party/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/won-fort-hood-shooter-islamic-terrorist-nidal-hasan-congratulates-taliban-fort-leavenworth-prison/
Wasn't?
I couldn't afford one of those DNA tests, so I just announced I won the lottery.
I soon found out who all my relatives are.
*.*
Muslims are a lot like breakfast eggs.
If they aren't Sunni side up, they're probably Shiite.
*.*
Lines:
Phones can be used for talking to people AND to avoid talking to people.
If you sliced wolverine directly in half, which side would regenerate?
Is Hugh Hefner In A Better Place?
Captchas can't distinguish between bots and drunks.
A saddle is like a human-horse adapter.
Kids are just drunk adults.
Accidentally having a small magnet on the bottom of your laptop is like finding a tick on your head.
Why does children's cough syrup taste like candy, but regular cough syrup tastes like donkey balls?
We should have more average looking models so we can see what we're actually going to look like.
If a cyclops closes its eye, is it a wink or a blink?
Everything we eat turns to sh!t.
All of Robin William's quotes are sadder when you realize some of them are referring to himself.
*.*
Although my daughter wasn’t much of a bowler, when her friend’s bowling team was down a player, my daughter agreed to fill in.
“So how’d you do?” I asked a few days later.
She rattled off her scores: “One sixty, one sixty-seven, and one fifty-five.”
“Wow! That’s great!”
“No… One game sixty, one game sixty-seven, and one game fifty-five.”
*.*
Kelly Clarkson's ex-husband is going to receive almost $200K a month in support payments.
You know, with budgeting, you could make that work.
Quote of the Times;
The hospitals are “overwhelmed” because they keep “firing” people. Yet won’t hand out termination letters because they know they can get sued. - Danelishen
Link of the Times;
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/
Issue of the Times;
No, Jesus Wasn't a Socialist by Lawrence Reed
Christian charity, being voluntary and heartfelt, is utterly distinct from the compulsory, impersonal mandates of the state.
The claim that Jesus Christ was a socialist has become a popular refrain among liberals, even from some whose Christianity is lukewarm at best. But is there any truth in it?
That question cannot be answered without a reliable definition of socialism. A century ago, it was widely regarded as government ownership of the means of production. Jesus never once even hinted at that concept, let alone endorsed it. Yet the definition has changed over time. When the critiques of economists such as Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman demolished any intellectual case for the original form of socialism, and reality proved them to be devastatingly right, socialists shifted to another version: central planning of the economy.
One can scour the New Testament and find nary a word from Jesus that calls for empowering politicians or bureaucrats to allocate resources, pick winners and losers, tell entrepreneurs how to run their businesses, impose minimum wages or maximum prices, compel workers to join unions, or even to raise taxes. When the Pharisees attempted to trick Jesus of Nazareth into endorsing tax evasion, he cleverly allowed others to decide what properly belongs to the State by responding, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s.”
Nonetheless, one of the charges that led to Jesus’s crucifixion was indeed tax evasion.
Changing the Definition
With the reputation of central planners in the dumpster worldwide, socialists have largely moved on to a different emphasis: the welfare state. The socialism of Bernie Sanders and his young ally Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that of the benevolent, egalitarian nanny state where rich Peter is robbed to pay poor Paul. It’s characterized by lots of “free stuff” from the government—which of course isn’t free at all. It’s quite expensive both in terms of the bureaucratic brokerage fees and the demoralizing dependency it produces among its beneficiaries. Is this what Jesus had in mind?
Hardly. Yes, amid the holidays, it’s especially timely to think about helping the poor. It was, after all, a very important part of Jesus's message. How helping the poor is to be done, however, is mighty important.
Christians are commanded in Scripture to love, to pray, to be kind, to serve, to forgive, to be truthful, to worship the one God, to learn and grow in both spirit and character. All of those things are very personal. They require no politicians, police, bureaucrats, political parties, or programs.
“The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want,” says Jesus in Matthew 26:11 and Mark 14:7. The key words there are you can help and want to help. He didn’t say, “We’re going to make you help whether you like it or not.”
In Luke 12:13-15, Jesus is approached with a redistribution request. “Master, speak to my brother that he divideth the inheritance with me,” a man asks. Jesus replied, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” Then he rebuked the petitioner for his envy.
Christianity is not about passing the buck to the government when it comes to relieving the plight of the poor. Caring for them, which means helping them overcome it, not paying them to stay poor or making them dependent upon the state, has been an essential fact in the life of a true Christian for 2,000 years. Christian charity, being voluntary and heartfelt, is utterly distinct from the compulsory, impersonal mandates of the state.
What Does Scripture Say?
But don’t take my word for it. Consider what the apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”
And in Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan, the traveler is regarded as “good” because he personally helped the stricken man at the roadside with his own time and resources. If, instead, he had urged the helpless chap to wait for a government check to arrive, we would likely know him today as the Good-for-Nothing Samaritan.
Jesus clearly held that compassion is a wholesome value to possess, but I know of no passage in the New Testament that suggests it’s a value he’d impose by force or gunpoint—in other words, by socialist politics.
Socialists are fond of suggesting that Jesus disdained the rich, citing two particular moments: his driving of the money-changers from the Temple and his remark that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. In the first instance, Jesus was angry that God’s house was being misused. Indeed, he never drove a money-changer from a bank or a marketplace. In the second, he was warning that with great wealth, great temptations come, too.
These were admonitions against misplaced priorities, not class warfare messages.
Creating Wealth Is a Virtue—Not Redistributing It
In his Parable of the Talents, Jesus talks about a man who entrusts his wealth to three servants for a time. When the man returns, he learns that one of the servants safeguarded his share by burying it, the second put his share to work and multiplied it, and the third invested his and generated the greatest return of all. Who’s the hero in the parable? The wealth-creating third man. The first one is admonished, and his share is taken and given to the third.
That doesn’t sound very socialist, does it?
Likewise, in Jesus’s Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, the story upholds capitalist virtues, not socialist ones. When some workers complain that others were paid more, the employer rightfully defends the right of voluntary contract, private property, and, in effect, the law of supply and demand.
At Christmas time and throughout the year, Jesus would want each of us to be generous in helping the needy. But if you think he meant for politicians to do it with police power at twice the cost and half the effectiveness of private charity, you’re not reading the same New Testament I am.
News of the Times;
https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/taliban-10-chapter-2
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/dad-beat-daughter-13-death-24929894.amp
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/incompetent-woke-military-three-star-general-posts-photo-thinks-u-s-troops-leaving-afghanistan-turns-british/
https://technofog.substack.com/p/public-health-propaganda
https://schiffgold.com/key-gold-news/the-fed-is-helping-facilitate-trailer-park-evictions/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/minnesota-man-freed-bail-fund-promoted-kamala-harris-charged-murder/
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=18102
https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2368622636841/texas-governor-greg-abbott-signs-social-media-censorship-bill-into-law
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/navy-seal-who-shot-bin-laden-says-internal-division-now-biggest-threat-america
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-9-9-google-takes-hypocrisy-on-racism-to-a-whole-new-level
https://theprint.in/world/how-sri-lankas-overnight-flip-to-total-organic-farming-has-led-to-an-economic-disaster/728414/
https://twitter.com/DannyWQAM/status/1436835559264202759
https://allnewspipeline.com/Civil_War_Map_Has_Been_Drawn.php
https://conservativebrief.com/congress-investigates-51011/?utm_source=CB&utm_medium=DJD
https://vdare.com/articles/the-fulford-file-why-would-we-expect-afghan-allies-to-assimilate-better-than-the-hmong
I soon found out who all my relatives are.
*.*
Muslims are a lot like breakfast eggs.
If they aren't Sunni side up, they're probably Shiite.
*.*
Lines:
Phones can be used for talking to people AND to avoid talking to people.
If you sliced wolverine directly in half, which side would regenerate?
Is Hugh Hefner In A Better Place?
Captchas can't distinguish between bots and drunks.
A saddle is like a human-horse adapter.
Kids are just drunk adults.
Accidentally having a small magnet on the bottom of your laptop is like finding a tick on your head.
Why does children's cough syrup taste like candy, but regular cough syrup tastes like donkey balls?
We should have more average looking models so we can see what we're actually going to look like.
If a cyclops closes its eye, is it a wink or a blink?
Everything we eat turns to sh!t.
All of Robin William's quotes are sadder when you realize some of them are referring to himself.
*.*
Although my daughter wasn’t much of a bowler, when her friend’s bowling team was down a player, my daughter agreed to fill in.
“So how’d you do?” I asked a few days later.
She rattled off her scores: “One sixty, one sixty-seven, and one fifty-five.”
“Wow! That’s great!”
“No… One game sixty, one game sixty-seven, and one game fifty-five.”
*.*
Kelly Clarkson's ex-husband is going to receive almost $200K a month in support payments.
You know, with budgeting, you could make that work.
Quote of the Times;
The hospitals are “overwhelmed” because they keep “firing” people. Yet won’t hand out termination letters because they know they can get sued. - Danelishen
Link of the Times;
https://donsurber.blogspot.com/
Issue of the Times;
No, Jesus Wasn't a Socialist by Lawrence Reed
Christian charity, being voluntary and heartfelt, is utterly distinct from the compulsory, impersonal mandates of the state.
The claim that Jesus Christ was a socialist has become a popular refrain among liberals, even from some whose Christianity is lukewarm at best. But is there any truth in it?
That question cannot be answered without a reliable definition of socialism. A century ago, it was widely regarded as government ownership of the means of production. Jesus never once even hinted at that concept, let alone endorsed it. Yet the definition has changed over time. When the critiques of economists such as Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman demolished any intellectual case for the original form of socialism, and reality proved them to be devastatingly right, socialists shifted to another version: central planning of the economy.
One can scour the New Testament and find nary a word from Jesus that calls for empowering politicians or bureaucrats to allocate resources, pick winners and losers, tell entrepreneurs how to run their businesses, impose minimum wages or maximum prices, compel workers to join unions, or even to raise taxes. When the Pharisees attempted to trick Jesus of Nazareth into endorsing tax evasion, he cleverly allowed others to decide what properly belongs to the State by responding, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s.”
Nonetheless, one of the charges that led to Jesus’s crucifixion was indeed tax evasion.
Changing the Definition
With the reputation of central planners in the dumpster worldwide, socialists have largely moved on to a different emphasis: the welfare state. The socialism of Bernie Sanders and his young ally Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that of the benevolent, egalitarian nanny state where rich Peter is robbed to pay poor Paul. It’s characterized by lots of “free stuff” from the government—which of course isn’t free at all. It’s quite expensive both in terms of the bureaucratic brokerage fees and the demoralizing dependency it produces among its beneficiaries. Is this what Jesus had in mind?
Hardly. Yes, amid the holidays, it’s especially timely to think about helping the poor. It was, after all, a very important part of Jesus's message. How helping the poor is to be done, however, is mighty important.
Christians are commanded in Scripture to love, to pray, to be kind, to serve, to forgive, to be truthful, to worship the one God, to learn and grow in both spirit and character. All of those things are very personal. They require no politicians, police, bureaucrats, political parties, or programs.
“The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want,” says Jesus in Matthew 26:11 and Mark 14:7. The key words there are you can help and want to help. He didn’t say, “We’re going to make you help whether you like it or not.”
In Luke 12:13-15, Jesus is approached with a redistribution request. “Master, speak to my brother that he divideth the inheritance with me,” a man asks. Jesus replied, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” Then he rebuked the petitioner for his envy.
Christianity is not about passing the buck to the government when it comes to relieving the plight of the poor. Caring for them, which means helping them overcome it, not paying them to stay poor or making them dependent upon the state, has been an essential fact in the life of a true Christian for 2,000 years. Christian charity, being voluntary and heartfelt, is utterly distinct from the compulsory, impersonal mandates of the state.
What Does Scripture Say?
But don’t take my word for it. Consider what the apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9:7: “Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”
And in Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan, the traveler is regarded as “good” because he personally helped the stricken man at the roadside with his own time and resources. If, instead, he had urged the helpless chap to wait for a government check to arrive, we would likely know him today as the Good-for-Nothing Samaritan.
Jesus clearly held that compassion is a wholesome value to possess, but I know of no passage in the New Testament that suggests it’s a value he’d impose by force or gunpoint—in other words, by socialist politics.
Socialists are fond of suggesting that Jesus disdained the rich, citing two particular moments: his driving of the money-changers from the Temple and his remark that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. In the first instance, Jesus was angry that God’s house was being misused. Indeed, he never drove a money-changer from a bank or a marketplace. In the second, he was warning that with great wealth, great temptations come, too.
These were admonitions against misplaced priorities, not class warfare messages.
Creating Wealth Is a Virtue—Not Redistributing It
In his Parable of the Talents, Jesus talks about a man who entrusts his wealth to three servants for a time. When the man returns, he learns that one of the servants safeguarded his share by burying it, the second put his share to work and multiplied it, and the third invested his and generated the greatest return of all. Who’s the hero in the parable? The wealth-creating third man. The first one is admonished, and his share is taken and given to the third.
That doesn’t sound very socialist, does it?
Likewise, in Jesus’s Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, the story upholds capitalist virtues, not socialist ones. When some workers complain that others were paid more, the employer rightfully defends the right of voluntary contract, private property, and, in effect, the law of supply and demand.
At Christmas time and throughout the year, Jesus would want each of us to be generous in helping the needy. But if you think he meant for politicians to do it with police power at twice the cost and half the effectiveness of private charity, you’re not reading the same New Testament I am.
News of the Times;
https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/taliban-10-chapter-2
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/dad-beat-daughter-13-death-24929894.amp
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/incompetent-woke-military-three-star-general-posts-photo-thinks-u-s-troops-leaving-afghanistan-turns-british/
https://technofog.substack.com/p/public-health-propaganda
https://schiffgold.com/key-gold-news/the-fed-is-helping-facilitate-trailer-park-evictions/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/minnesota-man-freed-bail-fund-promoted-kamala-harris-charged-murder/
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=18102
https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2368622636841/texas-governor-greg-abbott-signs-social-media-censorship-bill-into-law
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/navy-seal-who-shot-bin-laden-says-internal-division-now-biggest-threat-america
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-9-9-google-takes-hypocrisy-on-racism-to-a-whole-new-level
https://theprint.in/world/how-sri-lankas-overnight-flip-to-total-organic-farming-has-led-to-an-economic-disaster/728414/
https://twitter.com/DannyWQAM/status/1436835559264202759
https://allnewspipeline.com/Civil_War_Map_Has_Been_Drawn.php
https://conservativebrief.com/congress-investigates-51011/?utm_source=CB&utm_medium=DJD
https://vdare.com/articles/the-fulford-file-why-would-we-expect-afghan-allies-to-assimilate-better-than-the-hmong
Vain?
Today, I shocked the hell out of the postman by opening the door completely naked.
I’m not sure what surprised him most: my nudity, or the fact that I know where he lives.
*.*
Why does Karl Marx's toilet play music every time you flush it?
Because of the violins inherent in the cistern.
*.*
In what has been hailed as ‘a miracle’, one Waterford teenager has reportedly survived in his home with no connection to the internet for almost 6 whole hours.
Answering to the name ‘David Gowan’, the 16-year-old was found in a distressed state yesterday evening, walking through a Dungarvan neighbourhood holding his Samsung Galaxy above his head looking for a signal and muttering incoherently.
The emergency services were notified and David was brought to a nearby Starbucks and hooked up to their Wi-Fi immediately. It remains unclear as to how the teen was left without internet for such a long period of time, and a search has begun to find David’s parents, with fears that they may have other kids without even a single bar of coverage.
“David survived without access to any social media or video sharing sites for the better part of an afternoon,” said an amazed member of Waterford’s child protection services.
“No GIFs, no memes. It’s incredible to see him in such good condition, considering what he went through. There’s grown adults who can’t go without internet for that long, let alone teenagers. God love him like, he didn’t even see the new Matrix trailer yet”.
David was not available for interview, with rumors circulating that the poor youngster had lost the ability to speak in anything other than normal English, having not used emojis for so long.
*.*
Two atheists were lost in a desert. They had run out of supplies and were wandering aimlessly.
One morning, they encountered a Muslim. The Muslim asked, "What are your names?"
The first, figuring the Muslim would be more likely to help a fellow Muslim, lied and said, "My name is Mohammed."
The second stayed honest and said, "My name is Dave."
The Muslim gave Dave a hearty breakfast. He turned to "Mohammed" and said, "Fasting is so hard, isn't it?"
*.*
A truckload of tortoises crashed into a trainload of terrapins.
It was a turtle disaster.
Quote of the Times;
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these. - Harvey
Link of the Times;
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-americans-were-poorly-educated-before-mass-government-schooling/
Issue of the Times;
Covid is a Social Construct by eugyppius.substack.com
Beyond all of the politics and hysteria and right-thinking, there is a real virus beneath it all. Its name is Sars-Cov-2. This virus is not to be confused with Covid-19, which is the illness that the virus causes. The distinction, like that between HIV and AIDS, is medically useful, and it invites us to make other, analogous distinctions, in service of cleaning up our thought.
Illness is as much a social matter as a biological one, and for most of us, the vastly more significant distinction is not that between virus and disease, but between the biological reality of the virus-disease, and the political and social perceptions of this virus-disease. Words help us think, and so here I propose to call the former biological virus-disease Sars2; and the latter, socio-political virus-disease, Covid.
Sars2 is only one of the players responsible for the social construction of Covid, and not even the most important one. It is best to think of Covid as a committee project, with a lot of creative talent. Politicians, epidemiologists, virologists, public health experts, computer models, public health institutes, journalists, Chinese bureaucrats, and yes, among them all, Sars2—they all get some say in constructing Covid. Sometimes Sars2 disagrees with their construct, and sometimes his fellow committee members listen to him. But sometimes he disagrees and gets overruled. He’s only one voice at the table, after all. When a Twitter blue-check or a scientist or your professor lectures you about the substance of scientific consensus, they are just delivering articles of faith about the social construct of Covid, as the committee has defined it.
When we say that something is a social construct, we don’t mean that it isn’t real. We just mean that it could be conceived of in a much different way; and that a big part of what we take for granted about the constructed thing is malleable. Clearly political and scientific authorities could have constructed a massively different version of Covid if they wanted to. If you doubt this, look at China. They have basically eradicated Covid by constructing it out of existence.
In the West, Covid has acquired a variety of features that demand constant and heavy-handed technocratic intervention. This is not the case everywhere, but in the West, where technocratic bureaucracies dominate, this is what Covid has become. The technocrats have had a huge hand in building Covid, and they have constructed the perfect nail for their hammer.
Above all, they have constructed Covid to be an intractable problem, because our bureaucracies derive much of their authority and legitimacy from permanent, intractable problems. This was not the only path. We very nearly embarked upon a quite different one. Before the permanent bureaucracy recognised that Sars2 provided fodder for another eternal project, they had taken substantial steps towards building a very different disease out of Sars2—a disease that nobody needed to worry about very much, that was not very different from other respiratory illnesses, and that would probably go away in the end, or that we could at least overlook if we didn’t think about it too carefully or test for it all that widely.
That changed very quickly. By March, western Covid committees had begun building a very different disease. One of its most important features, is its omnipresence and invisibility.
Covid Is A Hidden, Lurking Menace
Central to our image of Covid is its appearance out of nowhere. A wet market deep in China, or some bio-lab—official discourse is agnostic. The earliest images to reach the West depicted apparently healthy Chinese people suddenly collapsing in convulsions, as if struck by God. Efforts to quarantine the earliest Covid patients in Europe totally failed, as the disease turned out to be circulating broadly among the population first in Lombardy, then in northern Europe, and finally in the United States. This early impression of Covid as omnipresent and invisible remains with us to this day. It is not enough to stay home if you are sick. Healthy people, who never develop symptoms of Covid, nevertheless spread the disease. Aerosolised transmission is the subject of much discussion; Covid menaces through the air. Interestingly, the aerosol aspect only took off after establishment scientists decided that transmission via surfaces was at best infrequent. Yet the menace of contaminated surfaces has persisted in our consciousness, alongside the contaminated air, and the contaminated healthy people, and the visibly contaminated sick.
In the ancient world, it was held that certain life-forms, such as fish, were generated spontaneously by the environment. If you kept a barrel of water around long enough, theory held you’d soon find little minnows swimming around in it. This is, functionally, how we behave with Covid. Two healthy people conversing in an unventilated room will probably yield Covid in one of them. In fact Covid can arise from any instance of social proximity. People fear objects that many others have touched. People fear friends or relatives who are perceived to socialise or travel too much.
Now, Covid does not lurk absolutely everywhere. It favours above all those spaces subject to the direct control of government bureaucracies. Schools, therefore, are especially feared. Public transit is considered another terrifying locus of infection. Covid is especially pervasive in hospitals; a lot of people avoid them now at all costs. In the first wave, it was common to close parks and playgrounds, even though we know the risk of transmission outdoors is minimal. Bureaucrats control public parks.
As you move away from bureaucratic oversight, the threat of Covid recedes. Bars and clubs, in most countries subject to substantial regulation but essentially private enterprises, are a kind of middle ground: Dangerous certainly, and the subject of much moral expostulation, but not quite the unmitigated danger of schools. Things like restaurants and chamber music concerts at private venues take a further step away from bureaucratic oversight, and Covid recedes accordingly. Private offices are managed by bureaucrats hardly at all, so we don't read that much about infection at work. The exception is government bureaucrats themselves, who hear a lot about how dangerous it is for them to go to the office. That space furthest removed from bureaucratic supervision, the home, is a safe haven from Covid, although it is the one place you’re most likely to contract Sars2.
The presence of Covid, which is invisible and potentially everywhere, can only be ascertained via special tests. While you can give yourself an antigen test at home, the results are far less authoritative than antigen tests administered by authorised agents of the bureaucracy, and these in turn are still less significant than PCR tests, administered by medical professions and processed in a lab.
Mere symptoms do not mean you are infected; you could have something else. On the other hand, perfect health does not mean you are Covid-free. I don’t think enough people have recognised how bizarre this situation is. Consider all those people these past months who have recovered from a respiratory illness, with fever and cough, without ever being tested. When they suggest that perhaps they had Covid, it is routine to doubt them. Certainly nobody would exempt them from vaccines on that basis. Compare them to all the people who have no symptoms at all, but test positive, and are widely considered to have a disease. The voluminous and eager literature on the asymptomatics is extremely telling. They are 20% of all cases, or 80%; they are responsible for 2% of infections, or 40%. They are tallied in the statistics, undifferentiated from the truly ill.
Central to the definition of Covid, is that mass testing programs be the only means of defining the extent of the disease, assessing the success of the technocratic response, and the virtue of the compliant population. Covid is not like other communicable diseases, which are diagnosed mostly in private, according to likely symptoms.
Covid as a hidden, lurking menace has had by far the worst consequences for children. Sars2, everybody knows, is not a danger to them. The virus himself has been very clear about this and it has not been possible for the disease bureaucrats to overrule him. It is easy to imagine a parallel universe, one where we are relieved at the near-total safety of our children in the face of this disease, one where we spare them the effects of public health interventions, because they are not at risk.
That is not our world. Government bureaucracies are heavily involved in the lives of children, particularly through schools. Thus public health authorities and, most unnaturally, many women, have come to fear children as a vector of infection. Some people even believe children are the main drivers of the pandemic. Covid lurks, a deadly silent threat, inside them, wherever they gather to play, wherever they gather in school. Classrooms and childcare centres have become places of intense microbial hysteria, silly simulacra of hospitals, with odd Plexiglas barriers, hand sanitiser around every corner, and constant, constant testing. In this world Covid creates its own reality vortex. You find infections where you swab the most. Every time schools are opened, intense surveillance uncovers a new flood of cases, which cements the image of children as dangerous and contaminated, a mortal threat to their grandparents.
If you say to a person of orthodox political alignments that this is a bizarre approach to any disease, to surround precisely those people at least risk with so many precautions, harmful in themselves; and at the same time to leave those most at-risk to their own devices with vague advice to self-isolate, they will say a great many things to you. One of the first things they say will be this: Covid is a totally new virus. It poses an unknown and wholly unprecedented threat to our society. There are no low-risk populations, and there is no way way to protect the vulnerable from this pervasive invisible pathogen. All we can do is disrupt hidden transmission among the invulnerable carriers.
Covid Is A Novel, Extra-Natural Disease
As with the hidden menace, the foundations for this aspect of Covid were laid early on. In the beginning Covid was held to be a zoonotic virus, brought upon humans by exotic Chinese dietary practices. Now many admit that it is likely a laboratory invention, unleashed with some sinister purpose or by accident. However that may be, Covid is totally new to humans; it is unlike any disease we have ever faced before. It is beyond nature and we have no natural defences against it. In the discourse surrounding Covid there has always been the tendency to push this extra-natural facet to the extremes, nearly to the supernatural. The early paranoia about surfaces comes to mind yet again, with those old stories of mail-room employees picking up Covid from packages sent from far-off, plague-ridden lands. Covid can perfuse the air for hours after a fateful cough. There is no general unified Covid with a limited set of properties. Attempts to fix its characteristics dissolve in a pool of contradictory evidence. Note the widely differing characteristics of Covid in neighbouring, broadly similar countries. The better part of this variation arises from different national medical bureaucracies, which have lent Covid different properties according to their capacities and proclivities. But of course the variation is not understood in that way; it is rather put down to some magical aspect of the virus itself. Extranatural virions do one thing in Sweden, and another thing in Germany, and another thing in Italy.
Because Covid is an extra-natural disease, our natural immune systems are not up to fighting it. This is why the prospect of Covid reinfection has been a matter of obsession from the very beginning. The first rumours of reinfection arose in China, where reinfected were said to suffer devastating symptoms, such as heart attacks. Similar cases were never observed in the West and so everyone stopped talking about that. Later on, South Korean health officials began reporting various cases of reinfection, but then it emerged that this was an artefact of the manic Korean testing regime. Recovering Covid patients issued multiple tests may come up negative one day and positive the next, as their body sheds the virus. Though they had been proven wrong twice, reinfection theories persisted. Minor victory came when some serological studies failed to find antibodies in some confirmed Covid patients. Later they had the holy grail, namely several confirmed genuine reinfections.
You could say, perhaps, that the reinfectionists on the Covid committee forced a compromise with Sars2 on this point. Reinfection aligns neatly with established doctrine about the inadequacy of our natural defences. Only broad-scale social and political countermeasures have any chance of success against Covid. Think of it as a substitute, artificial, social immune system: Lockdowns, curfews, quarantines, travel bans, mass testing, masks, school closures, personal distance, interior ventilation, hand sanitiser, contact tracing apps, home office, and more. This is what a society of immune-compromised people looks like. Just as our bodily immune response is responsible for many of the symptoms we associate with illness, so too is the social immune response responsible for the majority of negative effects from Covid. We have made our whole society sick, in a vain effort to keep some people healthy.
The body’s immune system can overreact to the point that it poses a greater danger than the infection itself. In a related way, our social response to Sars2 has entered an inflammatory phase, a spiral of disease hysteria demanding mass testing and contact tracing leading to the discovery of more cases causing more stringent anti-Covid social measures that just make our nations and our societies vastly sicker and more dysfunctional than we were before. Remember that this all started with "two weeks to crush the curve," and consider how far we have come, and how far we might go still. It goes without saying that all these negative effects are taken as further proof of the unusual threat that Covid poses.
Beyond the extra-natural social defences, we have placed all of our hopes in an extra-natural vaccine. Here the discourse devolves into awkward contradiction. To begin with, vaccines, while indeed extra-natural, merely stimulate natural immunity. If we may hope for a vaccine, it is unclear why we cannot let some of our natural immune systems join the fight. What is more, despite unprecedented mass testing programs and enormous scientific interest and the bias of our perspective, Covid reinfection is not yet a pervasive phenomenon. Those with natural immunity are well protected indeed. From the very beginning, the developers of extra-natural vaccines have been warning for a long time that their products will provide only partial protection against Sars2. Yet their products were marketed, until recently, as more protective than infection, and to this moment, even as the vaccines fail, politicians everywhere insist that mass vaccination is the only answer.
Fundamental to this paradox, is the axiom that extra-natural Covid poses an unknowable yet grave risk to everyone. Reinfection is only the beginning of it. All those people who have recovered without lingering effects may well develop brain lesions next year. The health of their internal organs has yet to be confirmed and there are dark suppositions that no few harbour hidden heart or liver or kidney damage. A lot of people might never smell again. Many recover only to relapse several weeks later, and perhaps again several weeks after that. There is now an enormous body of literature about Long Covid, a chronic syndrome marked by every symptom you could imagine: Ongoing fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, joint pain, cartilage degeneration, insomnia, depression—on and on.
Before you get into the weeds of the journal literature on Long Covid or permanent organ damage from Sars2, consider this: Officially, the virus has infected over 220 million people across the world. That is a great river, wide and deep, for our Covid committee to trawl for stories of unusual complications, debilitating symptoms and incomplete convalescences, from now until forever. The question is not, what odd horrible things lurk in that river; but how many of them there are, relative to the ordinary pedestrian things. What are you most likely to find? Long Covid and relapsed Covid and heart attack Covid? Or low-grade grade fever Covid, mild-cough Covid, over-in-five-days-without-a-second-thought Covid? I think we can all answer that question for ourselves. That we let the rare and the unusual dominate our construction of Covid, rather than the mild and the pedestrian, is partly down to publication bias. The banal almost never makes it into print; the strange and unusual invariably find an audience.
But that is not the only reason we must constantly hear about the grave unknown risks of this extra-natural disease. There are others too, and the biggest is simply this: The bureaucracies responsible for constructing Covid have decided that infections must be minimised above all else. That is the Sisyphean task they have set themselves. As the costs of their containment measures increase and society gets sicker, they must tell ever grimmer stories about why it is unacceptable for anyone, ever, to contract Sars2.
Covid Is Universal
Covid is the great sin of globalism, and globalism has brought it everywhere. Not even Antarctica remains Covid-free. Covid can infect animals as well as humans, and the prospect of reinfection has been leveraged to dispel the idea that anyone might become immune from Covid. In this way, the disease applies always and everywhere to everyone. (The opposite and far better-documented phenomenon, that a lot of people who have never had Sars2 have some partial immunity—presumably from prior non-Sars2 coronavirus infections—is contrary to Universal Covid and so it is excluded from official Covid doctrine.)
Because Covid is everywhere, and everybody is subject to it, containment policies must also be general, and vaccination policies must be too. For the disease bureaucrats, Universal Covid is a central doctrine, eagerly defended. The myth of Universal Covid is reinforced by the infection statistics we hear about every day. The only thing that ever makes headlines is how many positive tests there were today, as opposed to yesterday or last week; and which regions have the most infections right now. Since the Lombardy outbreak, everybody grasps that Sars2 infections have a regional particularism about them, but this is never presented as a challenge to Covid’s universality. Regional “hot-spots” are universally applicable examples of what will happen to your region, too, if Covid is not suppressed there and everywhere. Positive swabs might also be broken down into age cohorts, and these function much the same way. If your region has many new cases, but nobody really seems to be sick or dying, this is because the pandemic is currently concentrated among young people. Old people are next, if everybody does not comply with suppression measures. The effect is to make grim statistics a problem, even in the total absence of anybody actually suffering or dying.
Beyond these crude numbers, you don’t know anything about all those positive tests or the processes that generated them at all. It is very hard to figure out, for example, how many of them represent people who tested positive last week, and now have submitted a second test to see if they’ve cleared the virus and can leave their apartment again. Crucial for the interpretation of any such statistics, is to know how many of them emerge from contact-tracing operations, from the kinds of routine tests administered to people like doctors, teachers, and school children; and how many of them reflect actual patients seeking medical treatment. Equally central, if you want to make sense of these numbers, is how many of these people are actually sick, which is another question that many testing regimes leave wholly or mostly unanswered.
Western nations instituted mass testing programs, a universal solution to Universal Covid, after the example of South Korea. In the early days, it was thought that the Koreans had avoided a serious outbreak, without locking down, by testing and tracing everybody. So now we’re doing that too. The theory was that the technocrats would find the positives, shut them away, and allow the rest of us to go about our lives. In practice, it has been pretty much the opposite. Mass testing and tracing, far from replacing mass containment, merely provide the data to justify its enforcement. It is the same with vaccines, now that many regimes are struggling to vaccinate their way out of lockdowns. All that testing and tracing ought to make vaccines less important. Are they not identifying and quarantining the sick? Alas, you can never test and trace your way out of the Universal Covid we have constructed. That would only work for a Local Covid or an Endemic Covid, which we have not built—a Covid that afflicts certain people and not others. So the contact tracers do their thing, but the statistics that their activities generate are used to assess the state of the Covid outbreak for absolutely everybody and general, universal solutions are deployed in response to them. More lockdowns, more vaccines.
The German government is highly federalised, even more so than the United States. Much of the governing actually happens at the level of individual federal states, or Bundesländer. Each of the states could, in theory, manage its own response, according to local circumstances and sensibilities. You’d think this would be an advantage, because the instance of Sars2 infections varies vastly across Germany, and people in different states have different opinions about how to deal with it. If different states had gone their different ways, we would now have very direct insight into the effectiveness of competing containment policies. Of course, nobody in government sees it that way. Instead, Angela Merkel has spent every minute fighting against a federal approach and demanding a unified response. Newspapers have deplored our traditional federalism.
A final expression of Universal Covid lies in the universal mathematical formulae that were once widely held to predict its future progress. In March 2020, the population of the entire world received instruction in the basics of exponential functions. It was thought, as the first wave advanced, that Covid could be plotted on a graph, with time as the x axis and new cases as the y axis. Wherever Covid was spreading, this exercise yielded a curve sloping upwards to the right. Predicting the future course of Covid became a simple matter of plotting that same exponential function into future x-axis time. A lot of commentators, including many scientists, portrayed the resulting projections as mathematical certainties. This was important because raw infection numbers differed everywhere: Lombardy had the worst statistics, and so it was in the lead. Behind it were France and Spain, where Lombardy had been the previous week. Further back was Germany, which needed still three or four more weeks to reach a catastrophe of Lombardic scale. But the math assured all of us that the same thing would happen everywhere, eventually. I will confess that I found all of this powerfully convincing at the time. The flat edifice of Universal Covid seemed to brook no contradictions. But typing it all out now, it is easy to see how foolish it was. Covid did not work the same everywhere, and the curves themselves were never forever and always exponential. Germany never caught up to Lombardy. It never even came close.
Those graphs have receded from our conceptions of Covid. That is not only because they were wrong, but because they ended up drawing attention to how much all of the national outbreaks differed from each other. They were a direct shot across the bow of Universal Covid, and in April and May you could read very long essays by deeply mystified people, pondering how this was possible and what was going on. Many of the authors behind these think pieces were presumably familiar with things like seasonal flu epidemics, which in Europe often differ drastically across regions, even though a similar mixture of flu viruses are typically implicated every season. Influenza, however, isn’t constructed to be a universal affliction, so its various impacts have never bothered anybody.
Covid is a Vice of the Young and the Healthy Against the Old and the Sick
We come to the fourth obtrusive feature of our socially-constructed Covid. By nautical miles, it is the most egregious and appalling one of all, and so I regret that I have the least to say about it. Stupid cruelty does not admit of much analysis.
Sars2 is no threat to the young, we said that already. What is more, disease bureaucracies have not been able to convince the young that they, personally, should worry about Sars2. The only way to enforce the one-size-fits-all measures that Universal Covid demands, is via an ugly moral blackmail.
What began as an appeal in early days to the conscience of the youth, to consider the health of their grandparents, has become an all-out war on everything that young, healthy and fit people do. Here is insight into the withered souls of many scientists and bureaucrats, who see in the casual joy, effortless strength and unthinking beauty of our youth a great indictment of themselves. Many of them have long disliked young people and what they get up to, and now they have been given the power to vent their spleens about it.
The social life of young people irks them most of all. Parties are scorned. Contact tracers routinely identify private celebrations as outbreak epicentres, and from the press reports, you’d think whole districts are rising up in rage against the kids who dared to gather in somebody’s friend’s garage. German police spent a lot of time the past few springs citing teenagers who, after weeks of isolation, dared to get a few beers with friends in the park. It was truly strange to behold: Patrol cars sporting loudspeakers driving slowly along footpaths, between the trees, past benches, reciting the corona distancing rules.
It’s safe to complain about parties, because some people stupidly assume they aren’t essential, or that they’re irresponsible or excessive. But behind the scenes, these ageing meddlers were busy attacking everything else. They have closed gyms for months. When they allowed them to reopen, the conditions were so onerous and counterproductive that it was hard to doubt malicious intent. A whole cloud of official opprobrium descended upon every sort of recreational travel, and remains there. Early disease clusters were traced to skiers, and a batch of young people who’d had the misfortune to visit Ischgl at the wrong time were handed responsibility for several national outbreaks. (Chinese travellers, responsible for the entire European pandemic, remained beyond criticism, even as Italy and Germany had a brief spat over who introduced the virus to whom.) In Bavaria, open-air playgrounds were closed for weeks and weeks, longer than hair salons, in case you thought any of this was about the risk of infection.
When anonymous bureaucrats of this sort are given their way, secure in the knowledge that nobody will hold them accountable for their egregious decisions, and that every mild critique of their policies will be suppressed, they spiral into extremism. In the midst of the lockdown, they began to complain that people were shopping for groceries too frequently and spending too much time in supermarkets. After mask requirements were issued for public transit and indoor spaces, newspapers ran very strange articles lecturing their readers about proper mask procedures. Readers were told never to put on a mask until they’d thoroughly washed and sanitised their hands. Then they were told never to touch the mask again at all. Should they touch it the mask would become hopelessly contaminated, and their hands too, so they'd need to sterilise them all over again and start over with a new mask. Runners and walkers were still allowed outside, for purposes of exercise, and this made the disease bureaucrats very nervous indeed. Pundits complained that parks were too full. Schoolmarms posing as experts began telling runners that their heavy breathing was a danger to everyone within three or four metres of them.
Covid the socially constructed virus-disease exploits the health and beauty of youth to reach the old, but this is not how Sars2 actually works. Sars2 prefers to do most of its killing in institutional settings. It is at base a disease of healthcare institutions, like MERS and SARS; it thrives in nursing homes and in hospital wings. This in Spring 2020 it was ironically the most alarmist regions, those that had imposed the strictest lockdowns nominally for the safety of the elderly, which ended up killing more elderly than anybody else, due to over-hospitalisation, criminal mistreatment of many Sars2 patients and poor, paranoid management of elderly cases.
Undeniably, Sars2—like many other viruses—exploits the social activity of humans. Until now, the Covid bureaucrats have responded with rolling seasonal embargoes on all human social activity that is not mediated by electronics. People who violate these restrictions are behaving irresponsibly and endangering all of society. Consider how much this stance differs from their approach to other viruses. Were gay men, at any point, ever exhorted to abstain from anal sex in the interests of defeating HIV? Was the gay community ever blamed for the AIDS epidemic and scolded by public health bureaucrats for worsening statistics? Were gay bars and bath houses ever targeted for closure or curfews or—imagine!—contact tracing, to flatten the curve? No, they weren’t; and if any of that had happened, we’d be reading to this day what a grave injustice all of it was. HIV is undeniably much harder on those it infects than Sars2, and I submit that, in the hierarchy of human needs, quotidian social interaction ranks well above anal sex.
Some Deconstruction
The question of how we ended up with this miserable social construction of Covid, and not with some other more manageable social construction of Covid, is well worth pondering. The most obvious answer is simply this: Our disease bureaucrats, a bunch of socially promoted charlatans and degree connoisseurs who play scientists on television, got spooked by Sars2. They had a lot of credentials but no real ideas, and so they borrowed their public health response from China.
Before January 2020, lockdowns were totally foreign to the public health establishment. None of our governments or epidemiologists or disease-control agencies had ever before contemplated containing a pandemic by placing everybody under house arrest and freezing the better part of economic and social life. Lockdowns as a measure against Covid are, top to bottom, an invention not of a fabled “scientific consensus,” but of anonymous authoritarian Chinese bureaucrats whose motives and intent are largely opaque to us. Italian disease bureaucrats copied this measure from the Chinese bureaucrats, the rest of our disease bureaucrats copied from the Italians, and since then they have all continued the senseless copying of containment policies among themselves down to this very moment. If you are an incompetent pseudo-intellectual devoid of ideas, following others is your only option; and if you can get everyone else to follow in the same way, you might even escape blame.
Covid, the socially constructed virus-disease, was fashioned in the midst of the lockdowns, to justify them. This scary construct also works well as a justification for coercive, universal vaccination programs, and so it continues to be propagated. It is a monument to the cognitive dissonance of our intelligentsia, who lobbied hard for a catastrophic policy on the strength of dire predictions that, save in a few much publicised cases, were never realised. Almost everything that has become “scientific consensus” about Covid is a retroactive justification of our failed and plainly foolish containment measures: Covid lurks everywhere, and it is invisible, so we must hide from it in our homes. Covid is a totally novel disease, full of indeterminate properties and unknowable risks, so nobody can be exposed. Covid endangers everyone, and so everyone must stay inside. Even if young people are all but invulnerable to Covid, they too must lock down, to save the old. And of course, for all of these reasons, absolutely everyone must be vaccinated—however dangerous the vaccines, however low-risk the person.
That is the simplest, most straightforward answer to the question of how we got this Covid, and not some other Covid. It is equivalent to the wet-market theory of the origins of Sars2. We got Covid from the stupidity and incompetence of our elites, desperate to justify the economic destruction they wrought via their plagiarised containment measures. Relatedly, in the wet-market theory of Sars2, the virus found its way to humans via the unhygienic dietary practices of the Chinese, and was spread everywhere by the unrelenting globalism of our short-sighted elites.
But just as the vastly more plausible theory of Sars2 is that it represents the product of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so too there is another, much more compelling way of thinking about the deepest origins of our Covid construct. Cast your mind back to January, as the Chinese implemented their own lockdown of Hubei. Consider those bizarre videos that appeared on social media, showing Covid patients convulsing in streets, collapsing on stairs—succumbing, or so it seemed, to instant viral death. Some of this footage recalled scenes from Hollywood films, particularly Contagion. At the time, the framing was this: The Chinese were keeping a tight lid on the Wuhan outbreak, but here and there the magic of social media could defeat the evil communist censors and provide some glimpse of what was really going on. Clips of Chinese news coverage circulated, where the screen briefly flashed mortality figures orders of magnitude higher than the official numbers. This was the journalists trying to alert the rest of the world, or it was grim reality crying out from the ground, or something. All kinds of strange news items, about mass mobile account cancellations in China and industrial-scale cremation in Wuhan, were put about to show that the Chinese were dying in the millions. Everyone in the world watched blurry video of some Chinese guys welding a door shut. Online news outfits declared that the Chinese were literally sealing people in their apartments. That’s how bad Covid was. In the weeks before conditions deteriorated in Lombardy, a whole host of social media accounts began advocating lockdowns as a western containment measure. It has now emerged that many of these were operated by people in China.
Sophisticated propaganda and disinformation campaigns involve more than Russians buying Facebook ads. One tactic, is to take the idea you want to plant, cut it up into a bunch of different pieces, and release these to the world via various proxies and intermediaries. These little bits and piece might take the form of accidental leaks or hacked data or surreptitious photos or whatever. People gather these pieces and put them together, find that they all contribute to the same, ominous picture, and believe that they have discovered a hidden truth. This gives the lie an organic, authentic feel. It becomes a personal thesis and nobody realises that they have been led down the garden path. All of that early nonsense from China has entirely this feel about it. None of it was true, nobody really knows where it came from, but it all supported the same false hysteria.
So a deeper, more conspiratorial but also more plausible answer to the origins of our socially constructed disease, might be this: Covid is the ideological construct our disease bureaucrats used to justify their failed lockdowns; but at root, this construct was probably not of their making. They merely recycled the selfsame propaganda by which shadowy actors had sold them on lockdowns in the first place. It looks like some people very much wanted western governments to implement lockdowns. This led to a remarkable realignment of opinion, whereby the elite leftist establishment, which had sought to minimise the virus as much as possible, totally reversed their position by early March 2020 and began advocating a maximal approach. The Covid that we have now is all downstream from that, and there is no changing it.
How things started, of course, is no indication of how they will end. The optimistic scenario was that the vaccine roll-out in Spring 2021 would defeat Sars2 and that all of this would go away. That was never very plausible, and as it now becomes clear to everyone that the vaccines do not work very well, optimism is no longer on the menu. Perhaps it never was. Covid has given a lot of terrible, petty, mediocre people a great deal of power, and they won’t be willing to give that up, ever, however often they fail.
The most likely scenario, the one which is already playing out, is that Covid devolves into an eternal nuisance after the pattern of climate change, but more intrusive. The vaccines have come, but mass testing and various containment policies remain in place. There will be some attempt to maintain regular boosters, first for the elderly, then for everyone. But this path is one of diminishing returns. Each new round of injections will inspire less compliance, and will also prove less effective.
Over the next several years, most countries will probably fight their disease bureaucrats towards some minimally acceptable long-term compromise. Home office will be normalised. The media hysteria will never totally fade. Full lockdowns, contrary to the interests of many industries, will probably be phased out in the coming years, but in the meantime we will see increasingly inhumane restrictions on the unvaccinated. Other obnoxious interventions will likely return every year in time for Christmas, a holiday that will be increasingly celebrated with a few close relatives, in private. The campaigns against shaking hands, standing too close, or having too many people over for dinner will probably not end for a long time. Contact tracers will come to be loathed as much as city parking enforcers. In the longer run, Covid policy will probably be redirected towards pharmaceutical boondoggles and hygiene legislation that creates markets for a new world of garbage consumer products. The vaccines are probably an early preview of all of the false hope, graft and absurdity the coming world of market solutions will bring. Should Sars2 become especially rare, then other seasonal respiratory illnesses, like the flu, will likely be pressed into service. In many countries, it is likely that a whole generation of kids will grow up wearing crayola-branded dinosaur masks in school.
Still more pessimistic scenarios are possible, but they would probably resolve themselves sooner or later. It is hard to see how any western democracy could endure the economic destruction of biannual lockdowns, or other similarly drastic interventions, for many more years, without destabilising itself politically.
Campaigns to impose regular boosters on entire populations will stir up more and more opposition to mandatory vaccination regimes and, if the gods are merciful, make repression of the unvaccinated increasingly unworkable. We must also remember that the disease bureaucrats are not omnipotent. They have seized power, at first on temporary terms, from other political players, who will sooner or later try to get it back. Intemperate Covid policies have also inspired a wide array of opposition throughout academia and government, even if you don’t always see it. Now that the vaccines have failed and there is no obvious end, it is likely these people will begin to form opposition movements from within bureaucratic ranks. In some countries they might even win, and in the breakdown of international consensus there will be some small hope.
News of the Times;
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/why-isnt-the-attack-on-larry-elder-the-biggest-story-in-america/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/larry_elder_reminds_voters_facts_arent_racist.html
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/08/25/painting-of-george-bush-playing-airplanes-with-two-jenga-towers-found-in-jeff-epsteins-house/
https://www.unz.com/sbpdl/in-name-of-george-floyd-police-department-in-ames-iowa-4-2-black-publishes-racial-data-showing-blacks-were-responsible-for-21-of-arrests-for-crime/
https://www.rt.com/usa/533584-marine-resigns-afghanistan-confidence/
https://www.theblaze.com/news/raes-cafe-mask-mandate-private-club
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/massive-foia-release-proves-fauci-funded-wuhan-research-construct-sars-related
https://www.wnd.com/2021/09/4944011/
https://summit.news/2021/08/31/white-people-are-evil-and-racist-says-somali-migrant-accused-of-abusing-numerous-swedish-women/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/09/prof-white-people-commit-suicide-ethical-act/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/13/macquarie-cats-conservation
https://thepostmillennial.com/florida-diner-forbids-biden-supporters-runs-out-of-food
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9NoQHgjM_0
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=62512
https://justthenews.com/government/security/afghan-refugee-stopped-us-bound-flight-explosive-materials-terrorism-not
I’m not sure what surprised him most: my nudity, or the fact that I know where he lives.
*.*
Why does Karl Marx's toilet play music every time you flush it?
Because of the violins inherent in the cistern.
*.*
In what has been hailed as ‘a miracle’, one Waterford teenager has reportedly survived in his home with no connection to the internet for almost 6 whole hours.
Answering to the name ‘David Gowan’, the 16-year-old was found in a distressed state yesterday evening, walking through a Dungarvan neighbourhood holding his Samsung Galaxy above his head looking for a signal and muttering incoherently.
The emergency services were notified and David was brought to a nearby Starbucks and hooked up to their Wi-Fi immediately. It remains unclear as to how the teen was left without internet for such a long period of time, and a search has begun to find David’s parents, with fears that they may have other kids without even a single bar of coverage.
“David survived without access to any social media or video sharing sites for the better part of an afternoon,” said an amazed member of Waterford’s child protection services.
“No GIFs, no memes. It’s incredible to see him in such good condition, considering what he went through. There’s grown adults who can’t go without internet for that long, let alone teenagers. God love him like, he didn’t even see the new Matrix trailer yet”.
David was not available for interview, with rumors circulating that the poor youngster had lost the ability to speak in anything other than normal English, having not used emojis for so long.
*.*
Two atheists were lost in a desert. They had run out of supplies and were wandering aimlessly.
One morning, they encountered a Muslim. The Muslim asked, "What are your names?"
The first, figuring the Muslim would be more likely to help a fellow Muslim, lied and said, "My name is Mohammed."
The second stayed honest and said, "My name is Dave."
The Muslim gave Dave a hearty breakfast. He turned to "Mohammed" and said, "Fasting is so hard, isn't it?"
*.*
A truckload of tortoises crashed into a trainload of terrapins.
It was a turtle disaster.
Quote of the Times;
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these. - Harvey
Link of the Times;
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-americans-were-poorly-educated-before-mass-government-schooling/
Issue of the Times;
Covid is a Social Construct by eugyppius.substack.com
Beyond all of the politics and hysteria and right-thinking, there is a real virus beneath it all. Its name is Sars-Cov-2. This virus is not to be confused with Covid-19, which is the illness that the virus causes. The distinction, like that between HIV and AIDS, is medically useful, and it invites us to make other, analogous distinctions, in service of cleaning up our thought.
Illness is as much a social matter as a biological one, and for most of us, the vastly more significant distinction is not that between virus and disease, but between the biological reality of the virus-disease, and the political and social perceptions of this virus-disease. Words help us think, and so here I propose to call the former biological virus-disease Sars2; and the latter, socio-political virus-disease, Covid.
Sars2 is only one of the players responsible for the social construction of Covid, and not even the most important one. It is best to think of Covid as a committee project, with a lot of creative talent. Politicians, epidemiologists, virologists, public health experts, computer models, public health institutes, journalists, Chinese bureaucrats, and yes, among them all, Sars2—they all get some say in constructing Covid. Sometimes Sars2 disagrees with their construct, and sometimes his fellow committee members listen to him. But sometimes he disagrees and gets overruled. He’s only one voice at the table, after all. When a Twitter blue-check or a scientist or your professor lectures you about the substance of scientific consensus, they are just delivering articles of faith about the social construct of Covid, as the committee has defined it.
When we say that something is a social construct, we don’t mean that it isn’t real. We just mean that it could be conceived of in a much different way; and that a big part of what we take for granted about the constructed thing is malleable. Clearly political and scientific authorities could have constructed a massively different version of Covid if they wanted to. If you doubt this, look at China. They have basically eradicated Covid by constructing it out of existence.
In the West, Covid has acquired a variety of features that demand constant and heavy-handed technocratic intervention. This is not the case everywhere, but in the West, where technocratic bureaucracies dominate, this is what Covid has become. The technocrats have had a huge hand in building Covid, and they have constructed the perfect nail for their hammer.
Above all, they have constructed Covid to be an intractable problem, because our bureaucracies derive much of their authority and legitimacy from permanent, intractable problems. This was not the only path. We very nearly embarked upon a quite different one. Before the permanent bureaucracy recognised that Sars2 provided fodder for another eternal project, they had taken substantial steps towards building a very different disease out of Sars2—a disease that nobody needed to worry about very much, that was not very different from other respiratory illnesses, and that would probably go away in the end, or that we could at least overlook if we didn’t think about it too carefully or test for it all that widely.
That changed very quickly. By March, western Covid committees had begun building a very different disease. One of its most important features, is its omnipresence and invisibility.
Covid Is A Hidden, Lurking Menace
Central to our image of Covid is its appearance out of nowhere. A wet market deep in China, or some bio-lab—official discourse is agnostic. The earliest images to reach the West depicted apparently healthy Chinese people suddenly collapsing in convulsions, as if struck by God. Efforts to quarantine the earliest Covid patients in Europe totally failed, as the disease turned out to be circulating broadly among the population first in Lombardy, then in northern Europe, and finally in the United States. This early impression of Covid as omnipresent and invisible remains with us to this day. It is not enough to stay home if you are sick. Healthy people, who never develop symptoms of Covid, nevertheless spread the disease. Aerosolised transmission is the subject of much discussion; Covid menaces through the air. Interestingly, the aerosol aspect only took off after establishment scientists decided that transmission via surfaces was at best infrequent. Yet the menace of contaminated surfaces has persisted in our consciousness, alongside the contaminated air, and the contaminated healthy people, and the visibly contaminated sick.
In the ancient world, it was held that certain life-forms, such as fish, were generated spontaneously by the environment. If you kept a barrel of water around long enough, theory held you’d soon find little minnows swimming around in it. This is, functionally, how we behave with Covid. Two healthy people conversing in an unventilated room will probably yield Covid in one of them. In fact Covid can arise from any instance of social proximity. People fear objects that many others have touched. People fear friends or relatives who are perceived to socialise or travel too much.
Now, Covid does not lurk absolutely everywhere. It favours above all those spaces subject to the direct control of government bureaucracies. Schools, therefore, are especially feared. Public transit is considered another terrifying locus of infection. Covid is especially pervasive in hospitals; a lot of people avoid them now at all costs. In the first wave, it was common to close parks and playgrounds, even though we know the risk of transmission outdoors is minimal. Bureaucrats control public parks.
As you move away from bureaucratic oversight, the threat of Covid recedes. Bars and clubs, in most countries subject to substantial regulation but essentially private enterprises, are a kind of middle ground: Dangerous certainly, and the subject of much moral expostulation, but not quite the unmitigated danger of schools. Things like restaurants and chamber music concerts at private venues take a further step away from bureaucratic oversight, and Covid recedes accordingly. Private offices are managed by bureaucrats hardly at all, so we don't read that much about infection at work. The exception is government bureaucrats themselves, who hear a lot about how dangerous it is for them to go to the office. That space furthest removed from bureaucratic supervision, the home, is a safe haven from Covid, although it is the one place you’re most likely to contract Sars2.
The presence of Covid, which is invisible and potentially everywhere, can only be ascertained via special tests. While you can give yourself an antigen test at home, the results are far less authoritative than antigen tests administered by authorised agents of the bureaucracy, and these in turn are still less significant than PCR tests, administered by medical professions and processed in a lab.
Mere symptoms do not mean you are infected; you could have something else. On the other hand, perfect health does not mean you are Covid-free. I don’t think enough people have recognised how bizarre this situation is. Consider all those people these past months who have recovered from a respiratory illness, with fever and cough, without ever being tested. When they suggest that perhaps they had Covid, it is routine to doubt them. Certainly nobody would exempt them from vaccines on that basis. Compare them to all the people who have no symptoms at all, but test positive, and are widely considered to have a disease. The voluminous and eager literature on the asymptomatics is extremely telling. They are 20% of all cases, or 80%; they are responsible for 2% of infections, or 40%. They are tallied in the statistics, undifferentiated from the truly ill.
Central to the definition of Covid, is that mass testing programs be the only means of defining the extent of the disease, assessing the success of the technocratic response, and the virtue of the compliant population. Covid is not like other communicable diseases, which are diagnosed mostly in private, according to likely symptoms.
Covid as a hidden, lurking menace has had by far the worst consequences for children. Sars2, everybody knows, is not a danger to them. The virus himself has been very clear about this and it has not been possible for the disease bureaucrats to overrule him. It is easy to imagine a parallel universe, one where we are relieved at the near-total safety of our children in the face of this disease, one where we spare them the effects of public health interventions, because they are not at risk.
That is not our world. Government bureaucracies are heavily involved in the lives of children, particularly through schools. Thus public health authorities and, most unnaturally, many women, have come to fear children as a vector of infection. Some people even believe children are the main drivers of the pandemic. Covid lurks, a deadly silent threat, inside them, wherever they gather to play, wherever they gather in school. Classrooms and childcare centres have become places of intense microbial hysteria, silly simulacra of hospitals, with odd Plexiglas barriers, hand sanitiser around every corner, and constant, constant testing. In this world Covid creates its own reality vortex. You find infections where you swab the most. Every time schools are opened, intense surveillance uncovers a new flood of cases, which cements the image of children as dangerous and contaminated, a mortal threat to their grandparents.
If you say to a person of orthodox political alignments that this is a bizarre approach to any disease, to surround precisely those people at least risk with so many precautions, harmful in themselves; and at the same time to leave those most at-risk to their own devices with vague advice to self-isolate, they will say a great many things to you. One of the first things they say will be this: Covid is a totally new virus. It poses an unknown and wholly unprecedented threat to our society. There are no low-risk populations, and there is no way way to protect the vulnerable from this pervasive invisible pathogen. All we can do is disrupt hidden transmission among the invulnerable carriers.
Covid Is A Novel, Extra-Natural Disease
As with the hidden menace, the foundations for this aspect of Covid were laid early on. In the beginning Covid was held to be a zoonotic virus, brought upon humans by exotic Chinese dietary practices. Now many admit that it is likely a laboratory invention, unleashed with some sinister purpose or by accident. However that may be, Covid is totally new to humans; it is unlike any disease we have ever faced before. It is beyond nature and we have no natural defences against it. In the discourse surrounding Covid there has always been the tendency to push this extra-natural facet to the extremes, nearly to the supernatural. The early paranoia about surfaces comes to mind yet again, with those old stories of mail-room employees picking up Covid from packages sent from far-off, plague-ridden lands. Covid can perfuse the air for hours after a fateful cough. There is no general unified Covid with a limited set of properties. Attempts to fix its characteristics dissolve in a pool of contradictory evidence. Note the widely differing characteristics of Covid in neighbouring, broadly similar countries. The better part of this variation arises from different national medical bureaucracies, which have lent Covid different properties according to their capacities and proclivities. But of course the variation is not understood in that way; it is rather put down to some magical aspect of the virus itself. Extranatural virions do one thing in Sweden, and another thing in Germany, and another thing in Italy.
Because Covid is an extra-natural disease, our natural immune systems are not up to fighting it. This is why the prospect of Covid reinfection has been a matter of obsession from the very beginning. The first rumours of reinfection arose in China, where reinfected were said to suffer devastating symptoms, such as heart attacks. Similar cases were never observed in the West and so everyone stopped talking about that. Later on, South Korean health officials began reporting various cases of reinfection, but then it emerged that this was an artefact of the manic Korean testing regime. Recovering Covid patients issued multiple tests may come up negative one day and positive the next, as their body sheds the virus. Though they had been proven wrong twice, reinfection theories persisted. Minor victory came when some serological studies failed to find antibodies in some confirmed Covid patients. Later they had the holy grail, namely several confirmed genuine reinfections.
You could say, perhaps, that the reinfectionists on the Covid committee forced a compromise with Sars2 on this point. Reinfection aligns neatly with established doctrine about the inadequacy of our natural defences. Only broad-scale social and political countermeasures have any chance of success against Covid. Think of it as a substitute, artificial, social immune system: Lockdowns, curfews, quarantines, travel bans, mass testing, masks, school closures, personal distance, interior ventilation, hand sanitiser, contact tracing apps, home office, and more. This is what a society of immune-compromised people looks like. Just as our bodily immune response is responsible for many of the symptoms we associate with illness, so too is the social immune response responsible for the majority of negative effects from Covid. We have made our whole society sick, in a vain effort to keep some people healthy.
The body’s immune system can overreact to the point that it poses a greater danger than the infection itself. In a related way, our social response to Sars2 has entered an inflammatory phase, a spiral of disease hysteria demanding mass testing and contact tracing leading to the discovery of more cases causing more stringent anti-Covid social measures that just make our nations and our societies vastly sicker and more dysfunctional than we were before. Remember that this all started with "two weeks to crush the curve," and consider how far we have come, and how far we might go still. It goes without saying that all these negative effects are taken as further proof of the unusual threat that Covid poses.
Beyond the extra-natural social defences, we have placed all of our hopes in an extra-natural vaccine. Here the discourse devolves into awkward contradiction. To begin with, vaccines, while indeed extra-natural, merely stimulate natural immunity. If we may hope for a vaccine, it is unclear why we cannot let some of our natural immune systems join the fight. What is more, despite unprecedented mass testing programs and enormous scientific interest and the bias of our perspective, Covid reinfection is not yet a pervasive phenomenon. Those with natural immunity are well protected indeed. From the very beginning, the developers of extra-natural vaccines have been warning for a long time that their products will provide only partial protection against Sars2. Yet their products were marketed, until recently, as more protective than infection, and to this moment, even as the vaccines fail, politicians everywhere insist that mass vaccination is the only answer.
Fundamental to this paradox, is the axiom that extra-natural Covid poses an unknowable yet grave risk to everyone. Reinfection is only the beginning of it. All those people who have recovered without lingering effects may well develop brain lesions next year. The health of their internal organs has yet to be confirmed and there are dark suppositions that no few harbour hidden heart or liver or kidney damage. A lot of people might never smell again. Many recover only to relapse several weeks later, and perhaps again several weeks after that. There is now an enormous body of literature about Long Covid, a chronic syndrome marked by every symptom you could imagine: Ongoing fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, joint pain, cartilage degeneration, insomnia, depression—on and on.
Before you get into the weeds of the journal literature on Long Covid or permanent organ damage from Sars2, consider this: Officially, the virus has infected over 220 million people across the world. That is a great river, wide and deep, for our Covid committee to trawl for stories of unusual complications, debilitating symptoms and incomplete convalescences, from now until forever. The question is not, what odd horrible things lurk in that river; but how many of them there are, relative to the ordinary pedestrian things. What are you most likely to find? Long Covid and relapsed Covid and heart attack Covid? Or low-grade grade fever Covid, mild-cough Covid, over-in-five-days-without-a-second-thought Covid? I think we can all answer that question for ourselves. That we let the rare and the unusual dominate our construction of Covid, rather than the mild and the pedestrian, is partly down to publication bias. The banal almost never makes it into print; the strange and unusual invariably find an audience.
But that is not the only reason we must constantly hear about the grave unknown risks of this extra-natural disease. There are others too, and the biggest is simply this: The bureaucracies responsible for constructing Covid have decided that infections must be minimised above all else. That is the Sisyphean task they have set themselves. As the costs of their containment measures increase and society gets sicker, they must tell ever grimmer stories about why it is unacceptable for anyone, ever, to contract Sars2.
Covid Is Universal
Covid is the great sin of globalism, and globalism has brought it everywhere. Not even Antarctica remains Covid-free. Covid can infect animals as well as humans, and the prospect of reinfection has been leveraged to dispel the idea that anyone might become immune from Covid. In this way, the disease applies always and everywhere to everyone. (The opposite and far better-documented phenomenon, that a lot of people who have never had Sars2 have some partial immunity—presumably from prior non-Sars2 coronavirus infections—is contrary to Universal Covid and so it is excluded from official Covid doctrine.)
Because Covid is everywhere, and everybody is subject to it, containment policies must also be general, and vaccination policies must be too. For the disease bureaucrats, Universal Covid is a central doctrine, eagerly defended. The myth of Universal Covid is reinforced by the infection statistics we hear about every day. The only thing that ever makes headlines is how many positive tests there were today, as opposed to yesterday or last week; and which regions have the most infections right now. Since the Lombardy outbreak, everybody grasps that Sars2 infections have a regional particularism about them, but this is never presented as a challenge to Covid’s universality. Regional “hot-spots” are universally applicable examples of what will happen to your region, too, if Covid is not suppressed there and everywhere. Positive swabs might also be broken down into age cohorts, and these function much the same way. If your region has many new cases, but nobody really seems to be sick or dying, this is because the pandemic is currently concentrated among young people. Old people are next, if everybody does not comply with suppression measures. The effect is to make grim statistics a problem, even in the total absence of anybody actually suffering or dying.
Beyond these crude numbers, you don’t know anything about all those positive tests or the processes that generated them at all. It is very hard to figure out, for example, how many of them represent people who tested positive last week, and now have submitted a second test to see if they’ve cleared the virus and can leave their apartment again. Crucial for the interpretation of any such statistics, is to know how many of them emerge from contact-tracing operations, from the kinds of routine tests administered to people like doctors, teachers, and school children; and how many of them reflect actual patients seeking medical treatment. Equally central, if you want to make sense of these numbers, is how many of these people are actually sick, which is another question that many testing regimes leave wholly or mostly unanswered.
Western nations instituted mass testing programs, a universal solution to Universal Covid, after the example of South Korea. In the early days, it was thought that the Koreans had avoided a serious outbreak, without locking down, by testing and tracing everybody. So now we’re doing that too. The theory was that the technocrats would find the positives, shut them away, and allow the rest of us to go about our lives. In practice, it has been pretty much the opposite. Mass testing and tracing, far from replacing mass containment, merely provide the data to justify its enforcement. It is the same with vaccines, now that many regimes are struggling to vaccinate their way out of lockdowns. All that testing and tracing ought to make vaccines less important. Are they not identifying and quarantining the sick? Alas, you can never test and trace your way out of the Universal Covid we have constructed. That would only work for a Local Covid or an Endemic Covid, which we have not built—a Covid that afflicts certain people and not others. So the contact tracers do their thing, but the statistics that their activities generate are used to assess the state of the Covid outbreak for absolutely everybody and general, universal solutions are deployed in response to them. More lockdowns, more vaccines.
The German government is highly federalised, even more so than the United States. Much of the governing actually happens at the level of individual federal states, or Bundesländer. Each of the states could, in theory, manage its own response, according to local circumstances and sensibilities. You’d think this would be an advantage, because the instance of Sars2 infections varies vastly across Germany, and people in different states have different opinions about how to deal with it. If different states had gone their different ways, we would now have very direct insight into the effectiveness of competing containment policies. Of course, nobody in government sees it that way. Instead, Angela Merkel has spent every minute fighting against a federal approach and demanding a unified response. Newspapers have deplored our traditional federalism.
A final expression of Universal Covid lies in the universal mathematical formulae that were once widely held to predict its future progress. In March 2020, the population of the entire world received instruction in the basics of exponential functions. It was thought, as the first wave advanced, that Covid could be plotted on a graph, with time as the x axis and new cases as the y axis. Wherever Covid was spreading, this exercise yielded a curve sloping upwards to the right. Predicting the future course of Covid became a simple matter of plotting that same exponential function into future x-axis time. A lot of commentators, including many scientists, portrayed the resulting projections as mathematical certainties. This was important because raw infection numbers differed everywhere: Lombardy had the worst statistics, and so it was in the lead. Behind it were France and Spain, where Lombardy had been the previous week. Further back was Germany, which needed still three or four more weeks to reach a catastrophe of Lombardic scale. But the math assured all of us that the same thing would happen everywhere, eventually. I will confess that I found all of this powerfully convincing at the time. The flat edifice of Universal Covid seemed to brook no contradictions. But typing it all out now, it is easy to see how foolish it was. Covid did not work the same everywhere, and the curves themselves were never forever and always exponential. Germany never caught up to Lombardy. It never even came close.
Those graphs have receded from our conceptions of Covid. That is not only because they were wrong, but because they ended up drawing attention to how much all of the national outbreaks differed from each other. They were a direct shot across the bow of Universal Covid, and in April and May you could read very long essays by deeply mystified people, pondering how this was possible and what was going on. Many of the authors behind these think pieces were presumably familiar with things like seasonal flu epidemics, which in Europe often differ drastically across regions, even though a similar mixture of flu viruses are typically implicated every season. Influenza, however, isn’t constructed to be a universal affliction, so its various impacts have never bothered anybody.
Covid is a Vice of the Young and the Healthy Against the Old and the Sick
We come to the fourth obtrusive feature of our socially-constructed Covid. By nautical miles, it is the most egregious and appalling one of all, and so I regret that I have the least to say about it. Stupid cruelty does not admit of much analysis.
Sars2 is no threat to the young, we said that already. What is more, disease bureaucracies have not been able to convince the young that they, personally, should worry about Sars2. The only way to enforce the one-size-fits-all measures that Universal Covid demands, is via an ugly moral blackmail.
What began as an appeal in early days to the conscience of the youth, to consider the health of their grandparents, has become an all-out war on everything that young, healthy and fit people do. Here is insight into the withered souls of many scientists and bureaucrats, who see in the casual joy, effortless strength and unthinking beauty of our youth a great indictment of themselves. Many of them have long disliked young people and what they get up to, and now they have been given the power to vent their spleens about it.
The social life of young people irks them most of all. Parties are scorned. Contact tracers routinely identify private celebrations as outbreak epicentres, and from the press reports, you’d think whole districts are rising up in rage against the kids who dared to gather in somebody’s friend’s garage. German police spent a lot of time the past few springs citing teenagers who, after weeks of isolation, dared to get a few beers with friends in the park. It was truly strange to behold: Patrol cars sporting loudspeakers driving slowly along footpaths, between the trees, past benches, reciting the corona distancing rules.
It’s safe to complain about parties, because some people stupidly assume they aren’t essential, or that they’re irresponsible or excessive. But behind the scenes, these ageing meddlers were busy attacking everything else. They have closed gyms for months. When they allowed them to reopen, the conditions were so onerous and counterproductive that it was hard to doubt malicious intent. A whole cloud of official opprobrium descended upon every sort of recreational travel, and remains there. Early disease clusters were traced to skiers, and a batch of young people who’d had the misfortune to visit Ischgl at the wrong time were handed responsibility for several national outbreaks. (Chinese travellers, responsible for the entire European pandemic, remained beyond criticism, even as Italy and Germany had a brief spat over who introduced the virus to whom.) In Bavaria, open-air playgrounds were closed for weeks and weeks, longer than hair salons, in case you thought any of this was about the risk of infection.
When anonymous bureaucrats of this sort are given their way, secure in the knowledge that nobody will hold them accountable for their egregious decisions, and that every mild critique of their policies will be suppressed, they spiral into extremism. In the midst of the lockdown, they began to complain that people were shopping for groceries too frequently and spending too much time in supermarkets. After mask requirements were issued for public transit and indoor spaces, newspapers ran very strange articles lecturing their readers about proper mask procedures. Readers were told never to put on a mask until they’d thoroughly washed and sanitised their hands. Then they were told never to touch the mask again at all. Should they touch it the mask would become hopelessly contaminated, and their hands too, so they'd need to sterilise them all over again and start over with a new mask. Runners and walkers were still allowed outside, for purposes of exercise, and this made the disease bureaucrats very nervous indeed. Pundits complained that parks were too full. Schoolmarms posing as experts began telling runners that their heavy breathing was a danger to everyone within three or four metres of them.
Covid the socially constructed virus-disease exploits the health and beauty of youth to reach the old, but this is not how Sars2 actually works. Sars2 prefers to do most of its killing in institutional settings. It is at base a disease of healthcare institutions, like MERS and SARS; it thrives in nursing homes and in hospital wings. This in Spring 2020 it was ironically the most alarmist regions, those that had imposed the strictest lockdowns nominally for the safety of the elderly, which ended up killing more elderly than anybody else, due to over-hospitalisation, criminal mistreatment of many Sars2 patients and poor, paranoid management of elderly cases.
Undeniably, Sars2—like many other viruses—exploits the social activity of humans. Until now, the Covid bureaucrats have responded with rolling seasonal embargoes on all human social activity that is not mediated by electronics. People who violate these restrictions are behaving irresponsibly and endangering all of society. Consider how much this stance differs from their approach to other viruses. Were gay men, at any point, ever exhorted to abstain from anal sex in the interests of defeating HIV? Was the gay community ever blamed for the AIDS epidemic and scolded by public health bureaucrats for worsening statistics? Were gay bars and bath houses ever targeted for closure or curfews or—imagine!—contact tracing, to flatten the curve? No, they weren’t; and if any of that had happened, we’d be reading to this day what a grave injustice all of it was. HIV is undeniably much harder on those it infects than Sars2, and I submit that, in the hierarchy of human needs, quotidian social interaction ranks well above anal sex.
Some Deconstruction
The question of how we ended up with this miserable social construction of Covid, and not with some other more manageable social construction of Covid, is well worth pondering. The most obvious answer is simply this: Our disease bureaucrats, a bunch of socially promoted charlatans and degree connoisseurs who play scientists on television, got spooked by Sars2. They had a lot of credentials but no real ideas, and so they borrowed their public health response from China.
Before January 2020, lockdowns were totally foreign to the public health establishment. None of our governments or epidemiologists or disease-control agencies had ever before contemplated containing a pandemic by placing everybody under house arrest and freezing the better part of economic and social life. Lockdowns as a measure against Covid are, top to bottom, an invention not of a fabled “scientific consensus,” but of anonymous authoritarian Chinese bureaucrats whose motives and intent are largely opaque to us. Italian disease bureaucrats copied this measure from the Chinese bureaucrats, the rest of our disease bureaucrats copied from the Italians, and since then they have all continued the senseless copying of containment policies among themselves down to this very moment. If you are an incompetent pseudo-intellectual devoid of ideas, following others is your only option; and if you can get everyone else to follow in the same way, you might even escape blame.
Covid, the socially constructed virus-disease, was fashioned in the midst of the lockdowns, to justify them. This scary construct also works well as a justification for coercive, universal vaccination programs, and so it continues to be propagated. It is a monument to the cognitive dissonance of our intelligentsia, who lobbied hard for a catastrophic policy on the strength of dire predictions that, save in a few much publicised cases, were never realised. Almost everything that has become “scientific consensus” about Covid is a retroactive justification of our failed and plainly foolish containment measures: Covid lurks everywhere, and it is invisible, so we must hide from it in our homes. Covid is a totally novel disease, full of indeterminate properties and unknowable risks, so nobody can be exposed. Covid endangers everyone, and so everyone must stay inside. Even if young people are all but invulnerable to Covid, they too must lock down, to save the old. And of course, for all of these reasons, absolutely everyone must be vaccinated—however dangerous the vaccines, however low-risk the person.
That is the simplest, most straightforward answer to the question of how we got this Covid, and not some other Covid. It is equivalent to the wet-market theory of the origins of Sars2. We got Covid from the stupidity and incompetence of our elites, desperate to justify the economic destruction they wrought via their plagiarised containment measures. Relatedly, in the wet-market theory of Sars2, the virus found its way to humans via the unhygienic dietary practices of the Chinese, and was spread everywhere by the unrelenting globalism of our short-sighted elites.
But just as the vastly more plausible theory of Sars2 is that it represents the product of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so too there is another, much more compelling way of thinking about the deepest origins of our Covid construct. Cast your mind back to January, as the Chinese implemented their own lockdown of Hubei. Consider those bizarre videos that appeared on social media, showing Covid patients convulsing in streets, collapsing on stairs—succumbing, or so it seemed, to instant viral death. Some of this footage recalled scenes from Hollywood films, particularly Contagion. At the time, the framing was this: The Chinese were keeping a tight lid on the Wuhan outbreak, but here and there the magic of social media could defeat the evil communist censors and provide some glimpse of what was really going on. Clips of Chinese news coverage circulated, where the screen briefly flashed mortality figures orders of magnitude higher than the official numbers. This was the journalists trying to alert the rest of the world, or it was grim reality crying out from the ground, or something. All kinds of strange news items, about mass mobile account cancellations in China and industrial-scale cremation in Wuhan, were put about to show that the Chinese were dying in the millions. Everyone in the world watched blurry video of some Chinese guys welding a door shut. Online news outfits declared that the Chinese were literally sealing people in their apartments. That’s how bad Covid was. In the weeks before conditions deteriorated in Lombardy, a whole host of social media accounts began advocating lockdowns as a western containment measure. It has now emerged that many of these were operated by people in China.
Sophisticated propaganda and disinformation campaigns involve more than Russians buying Facebook ads. One tactic, is to take the idea you want to plant, cut it up into a bunch of different pieces, and release these to the world via various proxies and intermediaries. These little bits and piece might take the form of accidental leaks or hacked data or surreptitious photos or whatever. People gather these pieces and put them together, find that they all contribute to the same, ominous picture, and believe that they have discovered a hidden truth. This gives the lie an organic, authentic feel. It becomes a personal thesis and nobody realises that they have been led down the garden path. All of that early nonsense from China has entirely this feel about it. None of it was true, nobody really knows where it came from, but it all supported the same false hysteria.
So a deeper, more conspiratorial but also more plausible answer to the origins of our socially constructed disease, might be this: Covid is the ideological construct our disease bureaucrats used to justify their failed lockdowns; but at root, this construct was probably not of their making. They merely recycled the selfsame propaganda by which shadowy actors had sold them on lockdowns in the first place. It looks like some people very much wanted western governments to implement lockdowns. This led to a remarkable realignment of opinion, whereby the elite leftist establishment, which had sought to minimise the virus as much as possible, totally reversed their position by early March 2020 and began advocating a maximal approach. The Covid that we have now is all downstream from that, and there is no changing it.
How things started, of course, is no indication of how they will end. The optimistic scenario was that the vaccine roll-out in Spring 2021 would defeat Sars2 and that all of this would go away. That was never very plausible, and as it now becomes clear to everyone that the vaccines do not work very well, optimism is no longer on the menu. Perhaps it never was. Covid has given a lot of terrible, petty, mediocre people a great deal of power, and they won’t be willing to give that up, ever, however often they fail.
The most likely scenario, the one which is already playing out, is that Covid devolves into an eternal nuisance after the pattern of climate change, but more intrusive. The vaccines have come, but mass testing and various containment policies remain in place. There will be some attempt to maintain regular boosters, first for the elderly, then for everyone. But this path is one of diminishing returns. Each new round of injections will inspire less compliance, and will also prove less effective.
Over the next several years, most countries will probably fight their disease bureaucrats towards some minimally acceptable long-term compromise. Home office will be normalised. The media hysteria will never totally fade. Full lockdowns, contrary to the interests of many industries, will probably be phased out in the coming years, but in the meantime we will see increasingly inhumane restrictions on the unvaccinated. Other obnoxious interventions will likely return every year in time for Christmas, a holiday that will be increasingly celebrated with a few close relatives, in private. The campaigns against shaking hands, standing too close, or having too many people over for dinner will probably not end for a long time. Contact tracers will come to be loathed as much as city parking enforcers. In the longer run, Covid policy will probably be redirected towards pharmaceutical boondoggles and hygiene legislation that creates markets for a new world of garbage consumer products. The vaccines are probably an early preview of all of the false hope, graft and absurdity the coming world of market solutions will bring. Should Sars2 become especially rare, then other seasonal respiratory illnesses, like the flu, will likely be pressed into service. In many countries, it is likely that a whole generation of kids will grow up wearing crayola-branded dinosaur masks in school.
Still more pessimistic scenarios are possible, but they would probably resolve themselves sooner or later. It is hard to see how any western democracy could endure the economic destruction of biannual lockdowns, or other similarly drastic interventions, for many more years, without destabilising itself politically.
Campaigns to impose regular boosters on entire populations will stir up more and more opposition to mandatory vaccination regimes and, if the gods are merciful, make repression of the unvaccinated increasingly unworkable. We must also remember that the disease bureaucrats are not omnipotent. They have seized power, at first on temporary terms, from other political players, who will sooner or later try to get it back. Intemperate Covid policies have also inspired a wide array of opposition throughout academia and government, even if you don’t always see it. Now that the vaccines have failed and there is no obvious end, it is likely these people will begin to form opposition movements from within bureaucratic ranks. In some countries they might even win, and in the breakdown of international consensus there will be some small hope.
News of the Times;
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/why-isnt-the-attack-on-larry-elder-the-biggest-story-in-america/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/larry_elder_reminds_voters_facts_arent_racist.html
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2020/08/25/painting-of-george-bush-playing-airplanes-with-two-jenga-towers-found-in-jeff-epsteins-house/
https://www.unz.com/sbpdl/in-name-of-george-floyd-police-department-in-ames-iowa-4-2-black-publishes-racial-data-showing-blacks-were-responsible-for-21-of-arrests-for-crime/
https://www.rt.com/usa/533584-marine-resigns-afghanistan-confidence/
https://www.theblaze.com/news/raes-cafe-mask-mandate-private-club
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/massive-foia-release-proves-fauci-funded-wuhan-research-construct-sars-related
https://www.wnd.com/2021/09/4944011/
https://summit.news/2021/08/31/white-people-are-evil-and-racist-says-somali-migrant-accused-of-abusing-numerous-swedish-women/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/09/prof-white-people-commit-suicide-ethical-act/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/13/macquarie-cats-conservation
https://thepostmillennial.com/florida-diner-forbids-biden-supporters-runs-out-of-food
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9NoQHgjM_0
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=62512
https://justthenews.com/government/security/afghan-refugee-stopped-us-bound-flight-explosive-materials-terrorism-not
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An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.