The Dirty Tricks of Antifa

Before I get into antifa tactics, I hope you all realize that any protesting after dark while cities are burning to the ground is very dangerous and counter-productive. We have all seen the horrific video of George Floyd's death and you probably want to show support, it's understandable. But there is no real advantage to protesting at night, unless you are willing to act as a human-shield for criminals who wish to vandalize and loot. Even if you aren't protesting at night there is a chance that individuals can start the destruction early, trying to turn your protest into a riot. You must be prepared to detain these people and deliver them to the cops since the police often stand-by for some reason. It might not be feasible to actually do this, but if you have a plan to do it and spread it around then that in itself will deter antifa and other proxy actors from attempting violence in your demonstration. The better option is just to let them have their own protest and work for justice in other ways until we are invited. 

The real concern of this post is protecting those who are committed to fighting the ongoing  lockdowns this summer. The cells of Soros-funded goons are being activated to make it hard to participate in any political activity that antifa wants to disrupt. Where and when the attacks will come is hard to say, it may be that there are smaller numbers of paid anarchists than it appears from the footage I've seen. But whether it is in Syracuse, Rochester, or elsewhere, I'm quite sure that antifa will target us heavily, just as they targeted patriots in the last Presidential election-year. Those attacks were very effective, even though the ultimate goal was not. They were able to carry-out their goals of de-platforming speakers (now including the current tenant of the White House who can't even put many ads on Youtube), making their enemies look foolish, and getting the police involved on their side. This summer they already have several advantages that they will be keen to use. Now that masks are required they can blend in with peaceful crowd and still maintain anonymity (yet another reason we all should ditch the masks). And there is the lockdown itself, which has put people into a confused and fearful state. Fearful people are vulnerable to their psychological operations that are then echoed by the press (for example, the media currently blaming "White supremacists" for antifa operations, a lie that would be scoffed at normally). They will use all the accumulated ills of the lockdown and the "new-normal" to advantage as they cause havoc and spread disinformation. Antifa's primary weapon is propaganda and disinformation; though they will use force if they can isolate someone, it is the fear of their attacks that provokes a response they can use against us. For all their talk of "direct action" they mainly get others to do the dirty work: they get the cops to attack people after baiting them, they get the locals to loot and smash after starting fires. By remaining calm and unified we can defuse this strategy and make them look like the maniacs that they are.

Their most basic strategy is to hide among a mass of regular counter-protesters and notch-up the chaos by degree. It is pretty hard to tell the paid goons from the useful idiots, so you have to treat them all as dangerous. They may start "discussions" that are just excuses to scream and try to get a reaction. While your attention is on the person making all the noise, the more daring will attack from behind, snatching purses and phones, swinging a weapon and macing. If the strategy works they will get someone to pursue and then surround that person. While this is happening others film from different angles so that the shots can be selectively edited to make us look like the aggressor. As soon as you step out from your group you can be sure that there is a camera angle that will make it look like you are the attacker. So the first principle of defense is to stay in a tight group when they are near. If you have to strike back in defense, only do it from the established position. This makes it hard for them to use editing since the lone person always looks like the one on offense compared to the group just standing there. 

Remember, they are not trying to win a fight. You can win physically and still lose by looking like the "bad guy" since the media will always parrot their claims of victim-hood. The photos might also be sent to employers or the police. If an antifa member is injured they won't heistate to go crying to the "man" and try and get charges pressed. Then the liberal prosecutors will gather all the antifa video evidence that they are fed and often lay on further charges like "inciting a riot" or even hate-crimes. If you have spent time training with your friends to defend against antifa they can even use that against you in NYS under new laws targeting "militias." Basically any organized training of a vaguely martial sort is akin to terrorism in Cuomo-Land. I'm pretty sure you can learn one-on-one martial arts still (but only if you're a liberal). Either way, we have to accept that this isn't a physical fight and physical victory is not our goal. Antifa are weak and anemic from consuming soy for years so they have developed other strategies out of necessity.

Another way to get individuals isolated from the group is by throwing rocks and bottles, escalating the situation until the cops intervene. Both sides will have to clear-out, but it is a victory for them because it's not their event. After disrupting the event via police intervention they will try and isolate people on their way back to their cars for some more assault, theft, and photo-ops. The event has to break-up in groups and then carpool to vehicles that are farther away so everyone can make it out together. If the police are aggressive that might be tough, so always try and get a read on the mood of the cops and plan an exit accordingly. Patriot groups have good relationships with the police, but antifa plays the role of victim of police collusion so the cops are limited in how friendly they can be. You never know what their orders are going to be from day to day as different layers of advisers are sent in that can be hostile, so be ready for betrayal.

It's helpful to think of antifa as a paramilitary wing of the government, as they often are on the payroll of an "alphabet agency" like the FBI or NGOs with links to the Democrats. I'm sure everyone has seen the servile behavior that politicians display towards these "heroes," with the media lapping it up! Our tactics have to reflect the reality that this is not a fair fight. You wouldn't want to fight the police with conventional means, so why expect to win against antifa through superior force? They will just run away and claim victim-hood. On the other hand, if no one stands up to them at all then they claim victory and use that to demoralize their opponents. This is why the key is preparation and remaining calm. 

Preparing for antifa attacks is very difficult because the media will always side with them and pressure the cops as well. We can never bring anything that can be construed as a weapon or wear anything that looks like it is intended for a fight. If you show up in home-made armor they will claim that you came with the intention to brawl and were never peacefully assembling in the first place, no matter that someone got brained with a liquor bottle last week! In some events in Washington State last summer Patriot Prayer (a multi-racial group of Christian Patriots that the media believes are Nazis) did manage to secure police protection for their rallies, with a barricade and separation between them and antifa. However, in order to enter the designated rally zone the Patriots were subjected to search and anything that could possibly be used as a weapon was confiscated. Antifa, as an un-permitted counter-protest, did not enter the area and were not searched. Thus, when people left the event they were met with an armed mob following them to their cars. The only defense for Patriots these days is courage and unity!

Before you go to an event, if you suspect antifa may appear, check with yourself mentally: how willing are you to be on the front line? You have to want to do it gladly and with love as your first motivation.  Remember, it's not just about how physically strong you are or if you would enjoy a confrontation. It's about making our movement look good. If you can't smile and be 100% civil then you should try to stay away from contact zones. It's easy to make these lunatics look bad if we keep our noses clean and have a good time! 

If you think you can turn the other cheek mentally and serve as a front-line protector then be careful to dress in light colors, preferably sporting some red/white/blue. Check yourself from shoulders-up and make sure there is some color there, that's a shot they can easily manipulate to confuse people on social media. You don't want to look scary, and you don't want to be mistaken for antifa in an edited picture or video clip. If the Patriots come wearing a lot of black and tactical camo then they can use that to reverse the narrative. For example, in several Trump rallies elderly Patriots were brutally assaulted by antifa thugs who dressed like some of the more edgy Patriots in the crowd, those pictures were then distributed by the media under the headlines of "Trump Supporters Turn Violent," and other absurdities. People see what they want to believe, so those photos were passed-around social media and eventually smeared an entire political movement to this day. Even just a little flag pin on your hat can make a big difference, antifa would never dream of wearing that!

Other items to bring is eye protection, a sturdy hat, and non-threatening gloves. I've heard golfing gloves are good for blocking attacks, but I'm no golfer so let me know if that is the case. You'll want to have enough bags to be able to pack your stuff up pretty fast so that you can stay together easily. Never bring any signs that can be misconstrued. Recently a protester in Michigan made a sign that said "Hiel Whitmer" with an Iron Cross, which was shot from a distance and used to fabricate the narrative that the protesters were neo-Nazis. This smear has stuck sadly and they are using it to trot-out that useful bugbear again in the antifa/BLM riots, claiming that the antifa provocateurs are in fact Nazis in disguise! That one sign may have been more damaging than bringing guns.

That's about all I have for the moment. It is going to be a tough summer, but we have to focus on having fun and sticking to our message and our faith. Antifa have no faith and their "message" is abhorrent to normal people once they see that the "fascists" that antifa are forever battling are just normal people after-all. The BLM protesters are getting wise to the scam too and we might just get to sit back and munch on some popcorn as they deal with antifa in their own way!

Dear BLM,

First of all let me apologize for whatever I write here that you find racist and offensive. Since I'm trying to be open and honest much will fall into those categories. Also know that I'm not really sorry, after all I am only the product of my environment and genetics. But I think a preemptive apology is polite and correct.

I want you to know that I am praying for you, your organization, your communities, your people. I have lived among Blacks for most of my life and we have been through a lot together. This is just a sincere fact, please don't roll your eyes at me! Often there has been tension, dishonesty, hypocrisy, and worse. But there have also been connections and bonds that are real and it hurts me to see us at odds. There is so much that we can accomplish together, so many things we hold in common. We should not let that go to waste because we also have some irreconcilable differences. Perhaps we can join forces against enemies that are so vast and powerful that we have no other choice? I pray that it is so.

As you well know there is a combination of corporate and government power rising right now over this nation. The government is taking powers to itself that are unheard of in our land (since Jim-Crow anyway) and that threaten everyone's God-given rights. At the same time the largest and wealthiest men are using the government-induced lockdowns to force their smaller competitors out of business so that they can monopolize our economy. This is being done with a helpful veneer of socialism on top, but I have no reason to believe that the elites who are engineering this crisis have any attachment to ideology. They will use socialism, they will use capitalism, but most importantly they are using the reputation of "science" and "medicine" to instill terror in us. Even the CDC has admitted that Corona has about the same death-rate as a bad flu. Once you realize this, once you realize the scale of the psychological warfare, then you will understand that we are in grave danger on all levels. The attack on America and other nations is too multifaceted to describe here, but I will say that it involves the use of an arsenal of weapons, of which the police are just one.

When I say that the cops are a minor problem in the big scheme underway I don't intend to be casual or dismissive about them. They are very dangerous and I always interact with them the way I would some large predatory animal that could destroy me easily. Luckily, because I have learned to be calm around them and they don't generally perceive me as a threat, I don't have to worry about police brutality very much personally. If I was living in fear of the police I'm sure my thinking would be different, it is because I have emotional distance from the street enforcers that I am trying to see the bigger picture. So I ask you to come along with me to pierce the veil of lies that is the current media campaign of race-baiting.

The media elites love to use the cops as their scapegoats, it distracts us from the greater crimes which are underway. They also love a good riot with looting so that those people can be scapegoats too and we can bicker about whether or not they were justified in smashing that Target, or that library. It makes me sick to see us be so easily manipulated!

Just as the city of Minneapolis is being destroyed so as to destroy the police, my country is being destroyed in the name of destroying capitalism. Maybe the police are evil, but they will not be destroyed through looting and burning. Maybe capitalism is evil, but those few who benefit from it will not be destroyed by collapsing the economy. No, they will only be made far stronger in the end. We have to salvage what we can from a bad situation and learn together about how to fix it. A solution handed-down to us from on high is not going to be the answer.

So what is the answer? I can't say I know exactly. I do know that we are not looking at separate problems, but two sides of the same coin. They love to contrast the gun-toting protesters of Michigan with the TV-carrying looter of Minneapolis, this is their ideal wedge, their perfect distraction. But even if we disagree with each-others methods (or both methods, as is my opinion), can we agree that the power structure we are defying is one and the same? Maybe not, I wouldn't presume to be an expert on inter-sectional identity theory or anything. My bet is that there are some good ideas being put forth and some bad ones too. I'm genuinely curious what solutions we can come up with together.

So I would like to invite BLM to come and join us in our prayers for healing of our common land. I would like to offer you some time to speak about your own cause after you have listened to us first (the valedictorian address is the most honored, as a guest's should be). I won't say anything against Blacks and I would hope that you can afford us the same courtesy. We need courtesy right now, when we are on the brink of so much destruction. But if you want to harangue Whitey that's fine too, it's just not going to do very much. To accomplish the great things we are now called-upon to do we need unity of purpose, or at least to live and let live. It may be that that is the best we can hope for: to let communities define themselves and govern themselves how they see fit. I hope to hear back from you soon so I can give you the time and place we will be meeting, or get invited to one of your events instead if you care to.

All I ask is that you don't bring antifa!

With Goodwill And Faith In God,
Macsen

Freedom of Speech is Our Only Hope

The MSM have given us many bad-takes during the Corona epidemic, but the most icy-cold of all bad-takes is that Corona proves the need for censorship and control of speech. Innate in the concept of Freedom of Speech is something that gives it precedence over other ideas and notions: we cannot even discuss those concepts without having the freedom to do so.

For example: some say that Corona has proved the need for a more centralized approach to healthcare, while trying to censor those who point-out that the centralized authorities themselves dropped the ball. Even as the FDA lumbered towards designing a Corona test that actually worked, they insisted that no independent labs could move ahead with their own. The result was that the virus spread in darkness with no ability of local and regional authorities to respond to the threat in a logical manner. A German lab had a test ready in January, just a week after China released the genome sequence, but US labs with equal sophistication were unable to help. Nevertheless, the demands for more centralized control via single-payer healthcare in the US, and a "global government" worldwide have come in regularly. I suspect that a storm of red-tape is incoming regardless, but how much worse would it be if we had not the ability to critique the response of central planners?

To take another example, we all know how the media and State governments were clamoring for more and more ventilators to be available. Our own Little Dictator, Andrew Cuomo, said he needed 30,000 of them! Indeed, much of the initial panic that shaped draconian lockdown measures was justified by the false notion that ventilators would be the only treatment and run-out quickly. If many doctors had not spoken-out against the over-use of early-ventilation, at great personal risk, who knows how many more people would have had their lungs blown-out by the dangerous devices?

More and more doctors are coming forward to decry the irrationality of lockdown and the "new-normal," some 500 have signed this letter calling the continuing over-reaction to Corona a "mass-casualty event," with examples from their own practices. Others have done interviews which are promptly banned by Youtube and other tech giants for not complying with the MSM narrative. If anyone is aware of any similar outpouring of doctor whistleblowers let me know in the comments, as far as I know it is completely unprecedented.

Virologists are also being silenced and smeared for questioning the establishment version of reality. We are told by Dr. Fauci, who invested in gain-of-function Coronavirus research (bio-weapons engineering in layman's terms), that there is no possibility that this plague was created in a lab and any dissent is met with the unanswerable charge of "conspiracy-theory!" Yet researchers have found that the novel Coronavirus does indeed attach to human cells more readily than bat cells or other animals. This is quite odd for a virus that is supposed to have evolved among the bats. It does make sense, however, for a virus that was allowed to incubate within human tissue samples over many generations until it gained functionality to easily infect human cells. This is not to say that the genome was bio-engineered in the strict sense, but it does indicate cultivation. Yet, how are we as non-scientists to make a judgement on the subject when the dissenting view is suppressed and ridiculed or banned from the media-platforms that are most popular? We must confront the issue of "gain-of-function" research in a fair manner, it is one of the most important questions that humans are faced with since these bio-weapons hold the potential to wipe us out. What happens if we allow this debate to be hamstrung through censorship? Will we hand-down a world to the future that is even more disfigured than the nightmare currently proposed by the New-Normies?
 The need for open exchange of ideas seems obvious, so how do we explain the rise of censorship on the major tech platforms? Forbes reports that algorithmic-censorship efforts are underway:

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube issued a joint statement and pledged to work together to combat misinformation it continues to spread as fast as the actual coronavirus. Even before the pandemic the social media platforms had been under pressure to address the spread of false news and misinformation, but now the situation seems to be getting worse not better.

It is telling that efforts to gain control of internet speech were underway long before the Corona outbreak. Indeed, as long as dissenting voices have existed there have been pundits discussing the "threat" of "propaganda" and "dis-info" coming from Youtubers and independent bloggers. The de-platforming accelerated in recent years though.  There has always been a robust community of alternate researchers on the internet, so why step-up the censorship to another notch now? What changed in recent years (especially since 2016) is the MSM itself. As more and more media organizations are consolidated under the same corporate structure and infiltrated by the message moderators, the quality of coverage predictably tanks. The steady-drip of "Obamagate" breadcrumbs coming out of the Justice Department shows just how compliant our media was in service of the intelligence community and their patrons in the Executive branch. How could they not only get  Russia collusion so wrong, but also spend literally years trying to paper-over the errors?

The blame is largely with the Big Tech revolution, which is creating tidal shifts in how public opinion is shaped. Facebook and Google have revolutionized the advertising industry, combining forces to dominate the market almost totally and driving-out competition. Without ad-money independent media organizations are folding-up and the quality of journalism as a whole suffers. Why bother doing real journalism if you don't have any competition and you can just repeat talking-points (that tend to attain a gloss of credibility by their mere repetition) and show some Twitter screen-shots? 

Unfortunately for the legacy media, citizen journalists have filled that void, exposing them for the propaganda devices they have become. If a Youtube channel or blog starts getting millions of views they can fund more full-time research and put out more quality material. Being unrestrained by the taboos of the mainstream and the interests of corporate, they quickly begin to rival the traditional news networks as viable information sources. Even though most bloggers and social-media stars have their own biases, they tend to be open about it while the MSM is barely able to maintain their fig-leaf of objectivity. 

Thus we have seen increased targeting of those voices on Youtube when their subscriber count gets to be over 100,00 or so. We see the disappearance of comment sections under MSM articles and videos, we encounter stricter controls to links on Facebook, and we have Reddit crushing entire subs. Even the President of the United States can't have a subreddit anymore. It was killed through the banning of moderators, leaving no-one to stop the trolls. There are a thousand other control methods that various platforms are using as I'm sure you know.

These underhanded methods of speech-control are just as effective as outright censorship. In some ways they are more effective since the state/corporate propaganda system can pretend to 'liberal' principles while achieving the same goals. One can see the results of this system of de-platforming rather than outright censoring through government edict: multiple "echo-chambers" form which have lively debates within themselves, but rarely cross paths. If this process continues you end up with extremism and the political violence that was common pre-Corona; most commonly antifa groups showing-up and starting physical confrontation with other civilians instead of the traditional fighting with the cops. After all, if discourse is rejected then what other option remains for people to settle their differences? 

What America needs is to take a fresh look at the concept of Free Speech, in the context of the electronic platforms. Open discussion needs to be discussed not just through the narrow lens of First Amendment protection from government censorship. Just because a private entity is doing the censoring, does that mean it is OK? Some would argue yes, it is necessary because false information will be disseminated otherwise. Since most of us are not virologists, why should we be allowed to express an opinion that doesn't reflect the party line? I cannot but agree that false information comes from alternative media (as well as the mainstream), I have myself been mistaken and shared articles that were false in part or whole. Maybe it is inevitable that any human effort to encapsulate the truth in words will contain error. But, knowing that the "authorities" often get it wrong too, we cannot expect them to police the truth alone. The idea of Free Speech is that more people becoming involved in a debate and more views being expressed will lead us closer to reality than relying on one narrow view. When I post an article on Facebook I don't always have 100% certainty that it is factual (lot's of times I disagree with most of what it says but am linking for a specific set of facts it contains), and I can be pretty certain that the errors will be pointed-out to me in any forum that hosts a robust debate. 

The "echo-chamber" effect denies this self-correcting property of Free Speech. My own internet-arguing "career" has included some of the most egregious examples of tech censorship gone wrong, Watching Reddit die has taught me an exquisite example of the power of the "network effect" in the polarizing and quenching of debate. The final result is radicalized echo-chambers where once knowledge and understanding was plentiful. Reddit had a great idea of letting each subreddit be moderated by its own creators and their friends. Thus the site was a bastion of Free Speech even though individual subs had different rules, topics, and tolerances of trolling, ect. Since Reddit is nothing but links with a comments section, people naturally gravitated towards the subs with broad focus and open-discourse so that they could hone their arguing skills and confront all viewpoints. 

This is the "network effect," in which the sheer number of users makes more of them come. Subs with enough activity would rise to the top of the posts on the "front page," giving incentive for users to glob on to hot topics and try and boost them. When I first began to use Reddit my comments were designed to stand the test of argument and they contained many links to supporting data. The culture looked down on mere rhetoric and a comment without links was often disdained. In that online climate many of my views simply became hardened, but I did every so often see that I was wrong on other points. I don't know if we can expect more than an occasional "conversion," since humans do cherish their beliefs. Then the site became a victim of its own success.

In the 2016 election cycle Bernie Sanders hit a chord with Redditors that boosted tons of Bernie-posts to the front page, annoying a good portion of the site's users. As a joke, r/the Donald was created to troll the Bernie-Bros by pushing the absurd candidacy of the reality-TV star to the front page. It was quite satirical with lots of HIGH ENERGY posts about BUILDING THE WALL, a quite effective troll that humorously irked the politically-correct.  But Trump was actually quite serious about his wall obsession, the idea caught fire among American voters tired of immigration, and he managed to actually win. Since r/the Donald was the major player in Trump's online presence the site took a good deal of flak for him winning by jokes, memes, Mexican-baiting, and being a true political outsider (needless to say, Clinton was a pretty weak candidate, too). This was the beginning of the end of Reddit. 

Convinced that they had been complicit in electing the next Hitler the mods changed their tune and started banning left and right. Also many subs got the "ban-hammer" by site administrators. By painting anything related to the Republicans or the Right-wing of American politics as inherently racist, the polarization became more and more extreme and users didn't feel the need to engage in good-faith discourse. The culture of providing links and evidence degraded. 

The first lesson here is that censorship has unintended negative consequences. While there is a benefit to imposing social costs on racism, to keep it in check, the effect of imposing those same social costs onto any view not in line with political correctness has the reverse effect. If you are going to be labeled a racist (or some other kind of -ist) just for having basically moderate views on immigration, then they really is no social cost to racism at all. All societies do have their prejudices and biases, maybe in the future this will change, but who knows? If you establish zero as the acceptable amount of bigotry you are just going to push people who never wanted to be considered bigots or racists into not caring anymore. By denying Free Speech Reddit, almost single-handed, lifted to prominence the echo-chamber of the Alt-Right. 

The death of Reddit is a tragedy. To have an open debate on important issues (immigration in this case) one should not have to visit sites that are full of "deplorable" opinions. What's more, there is no hope of moderating extreme views on either side when all you have are echo-chambers. Other sites have tried to re-create the flourishing open-marketplace of ideas that existed on Reddit, but due to the network effect they all fail. This almost total implosion of one of the major players in English-language discussion initiated a polarization of the online world that may be unstoppable. Anyone seriously interested in saving Western Civilization must recognize that a new paradigm is the only hope of solving the problem. This does appear to be in progress as the critical issue of lockdown and police-state drive those with drastically different ideologies into common-cause. As the shifting of the poles carries over into the online space there is a possibility of the network-effect being made irrelevant. Otherwise the centrifugal forces within our societies are going to tear them apart by infecting every debate with the same "Right/Left" dichotomies and making free and open discussion harder and harder. In the linked post above I called the new dialectic the Tinfoil-Hats versus the New-Normies, but this is a crude approximation and will need to be fleshed-out in another post. 

The hottest take of the entire Corona pandemic is that Free Speech is absolutely vital in preventing politicization of every crisis. Without Free Speech we are lost. Without the ability to verbally disagree, what means are left but brute force? 

A Different Kind Of Armageddon

Being woken by a robot voice on your cellphone saying "Ballistic missile threat detected seek shelter immediately" is perhaps the most terrifying way to start one's day. I laid there for a moment and considered just turning-over and going back to sleep. It's not like there was much I could do, for weeks the tension with North Korea had been discussed by us denizens of Maui and we all knew it only took 15-20 minutes for a missile to arrive. Not a lot of time to prepare, especially in a place where there are no basements and everyone is obsessed with having maximum airflow in their houses.

But I decided to leap into action, grabbed some camping essentials, warned Hazel (she told me to get a cup of coffee, at 80 I can't blame her fatalism) and jumped into the neighbor's car as they rolled out of the driveway. We headed for the grocery-store to get a jump on supplies before the looting began. During the seven minute drive cars were flying by us doing 90 on the curvy coastal roads, fast even by Hawaiian standards. No one could get through to anyone on their phone as the network had jammed with frantic calls to say farewell to loved-ones. There was nothing for it but to stroll the aisles, drinking coffee and waiting for our doom. 

It didn't last a long time, but it was enough time to process what was happening and to define the contours of my new Mad Max life. I wasn't too worried about the actual missile, it would almost certainly hit the ocean harmlessly. It was the geopolitical consequences that looked dire. A nuclear strike would mean a major war, and China could very well get involved. I knew from my previous anti-GMO activism that Maui only had enough food for a month to six weeks. The government didn't consider a reserve necessary because they figured they could just grow it easily enough, I don't think their calculations included the chaos though. There is a lot of fruit growing naturally and plenty of goats and mini-deer, but much of it is seasonal and hard to catch. Who was going to organize this major farming effort on the wasted and toxic cane-fields while everyone was fighting for themselves? Would the old practice of cannibalism make a come-back in this apocalyptic breakdown of the food supply?

The scenario brought to mind my panicked flight to Seattle during the Fukushima nuclear meltdown years before. Watching videos of the massive hydrogen explosions rocking the reactors had made me quite aware of the tenuous position I would be in should the planes and container-ships stop coming due to radioactive fallout blanketing the ocean. The meltdown was bad enough, but what was truly disturbing was the years and years of spent fuel-rods that the Japanese had stored on the roofs of the reactors. They were close-enough together to destabilize each-other and generate heat passively (as all fuel-rod storage tanks are by now) and the water had to circulate. If the hydrogen explosions knocked-out the water supply or generators and the radiation got too bad to fix it, the rods would boil-off the water and ignite into a devastating nuclear bonfire many orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl. We escaped an almost certain doom that time, but maybe this time I wouldn't be so lucky!

With all my mental powers focused on the mission ahead of gathering supplies and making it out to the Hana-side before the racial-purging of the island began I barely even noticed that people around me were getting reception on their phones again. Tulsi had tweeted it was a false alarm, we were saved! Hearing the good news, all I felt was a wave of disappointment pass over me. All the cares and concerns of my normal life, which had been pushed into total abeyance, flooded back in. Back to the meaningless grind, back to the wondering what I was doing with my life, back to my addictions and dependencies, back to normal with all it's accumulated baggage. I was saved from a savage fight for survival, what a bummer!

So it occurred to me today, as I went around trying to push my fliers denouncing the "New-Normal"on the masked New-Normies in line for ice-cream, that people are probably feeling a little bit of that disappointment.  As they are forced to conclude that the sky is not actually falling, as the streets become more and more full of gatherings and the sweet Spring air soothes their fears, there is a powerful hesitancy still. In their absurd masks and the staggered lines I can see people clinging to the props and the pantomime of the pandemic. Even though a vicious plague is a terrible thing, psychologically it may be preferable to the myriad stresses and insecurities that we are free from while in panic-mode. I can only speak for myself and from my own experiences with certainty.  However, I do observe that it is the petite-bourgeoisie that are embracing New-Normal Utopian idealism, as if what is being done to us could be a blessing in disguise. It's beyond ridiculous to think that such gifts will be handed to us by the powerful; I suspect that, deeper in the brain, certain crossed-wires are manifesting this cognitive-dissonance. It is the class notorious for their precarious gripping to every rung on the ladder they can get, while simultaneously feeling guilty about their position. The New-Normies are exactly the type of people who are glad to escape the dichotomy of their existence, no matter where the escape hatch leads to. Just like I was.  

Yet there is also something else in the air. We should reject and resist the "New-Normal" as it is being imposed on us from above, but I don't think we want to go back to the old normal either. This is a time for manifesting the world as we want it. There are great things afoot and if we take part in the currents of history without giving in to fear almost anything is possible. I am reconsidering my old habits and relationships, trying to establish alliances that were not possible before. Those who see that we must make a stand have the benefit of finally knowing who our allies really are. I pray to God that there are enough of us!

Letting The Kids Be

One of the most disturbing things about the "new-normal" is how it will be for children. They will have the longest to live in it, if it isn't stopped, whereas adults like myself are blessed to have lived many years sans constant terror. It is heart-wrenching to see the kids talking to their friends across the street, using walkie-talkies to describe their chalk drawings to each-other. I don't even see the older kids at all much anymore, they have more advanced communication devices with which they can live their lives vicariously. On the bright side, when I do see them they are a lot more open to conversation with probably the only adult they've seen in weeks who isn't losing his mind!

I can't blame them, they are the targets of the most sophisticated psychological warfare techniques ever devised. The onslaught they are facing is uniform across almost all media platforms, which are known to be heavily infiltrated by CIA, FBI, and their ilk using billions in black-budget money. We have no way of knowing the true amount available to them; the 80 billion budgeted for just one year may only scratche the surface now that "spooks" are major players in the private sector, including finance. Medical PR firms are also in the mix, with over 30 billion to spend, another disturbing aspect of the medical centralization that Obamacare caused. The Silicon Valley tech giants have also weighed-in on the side of the fear-mongers, banning any doctor or specialist who dares to risk their career by defying the narrative. They can't stop conspiracy-minded research from being active in the digital space, but they are able to separate the Tinfoil-Hats and the New-Normies into our own respective "echo-chambers." 

A new religion, in which doctors and nurses are priests and priestesses is on the rise. Why shouldn't we trust what they, or at least their PR agents, say? It is difficult for most people to understand the pressure that medical professionals are under to conform; if you want to go down that rabbit-hole Dr. Jennifer Daniels has a large corpus of work on the industry and its peculiarities. She was banished from the profession herself and so can speak about it with the knowledge of an insider and no fear of repercussion (she now lives in the jungle far removed from civilization). Suffice to say, the fact that doctors and nurses are blowing the whistle on this current crisis is pretty amazing and can't be ignored. Or course there is more leakage from the nursing-home employees, but of this more later.

The cherry on the top is the general politicization of all issues into the dis-functional framework of our polarized nation. There is no reason that a virus should be a hot political topic, yet here we are with people discussing civil war! Do we expect to shelter our kids from this mental landscape? Can we do so when we are ourselves falling victim to psychological manipulation? Many apparently think so, and there was at least one good reason for it: we were told the virus doesn't harm children. That spares them at minimum the terror of being killed themselves, however traumatic it may be to worry you could "kill Grandma" by giving her a hug. Children are sensitive little sponges that imitate by nature and we are deluded if we think that telling them they aren't at risk will protect them from our fear. They have little ability to contextualize their experiences, the longer this goes on the more they will believe that this rampant destruction of the social fabric is just "part of life," something that "just happens" every so often.

And that is the whole point. The "new-normal" is very, very costly to maintain. It is not sustainable or rational. It is a wholesale looting of world via destruction of the foundations. Almost every institution is in grave danger of morphing into something almost unrecognizable. This has proven rather easily accomplished, but it will be much more difficult to hold onto the plunder through the coming social and economic chaos. The only way it will perpetuate itself into a system that protects the bandits, and their loot, is if the younger generations can be molded into it. The "new-normal" isn't complete until they defend it, too. Thus we insist on all kinds of drastic and needlessly complex rituals designed to force children to play their part. Any child above two years old must wear a mask they say.  And the new protocols for "safety" start with separating children from their parents: parents are not being allowed into schools to help their children gather their possessions and say goodbye to their teachers. Parents must wait in the car instead of the dentist's lobby. While we don't know exactly what Gates and Cuomo will come up with in terms of re-imagining schools, the general pattern is already being set.

It is basically a kind of theater, much like what we've become accustomed to in the TSA "security theater" screenings. I used to habitually refuse to go through the body-scanner because it is just too Orwellian for me and a little pat-down never did anybody any harm. Seeing everyone line-up, nervously preparing themselves to be spread-eagled and exposed electronically was not my cup of tea and I think it helped them to see someone stand-up against. But these things progress and in my recent trips the pat-downs are now horrible violations, which they also do to children by the way. So now I comply with the x-ray ogling. That is how these things progress.  

Now another stage of the psychological warfare has begun in earnest: corona monster comes after the kids too now! I haven't given much attention to this development, as it is just another expected evolution of the psy-op. They are always "discovering" some new aspect to the magic virus (that definitely wasn't created in a gain-of-function lab) and some sort of nebulous auto-immune response (possibly linked to vaccines) is about what I would expect.There is plenty of data from the vast supply of cases showing that children are a statistically negligible portion of worldwide deaths. Corona is less risky for that age group compared to influenza and pneumonia, though I suppose those diseases don't count anymore for some reason. 

Statistics are reassuring, but what power do they have ranged against the vested interests of the propaganda masters who play our heartstrings and stoke our fears? Very little, if we don't make a conscious effort to resist the deception. Every time we give into our fear and alter our behavior we are programming our brains to react in a fear response again and again. This is how small, almost unconscious, phobias become massive problems for people: they give in little by little. IF you feel afraid to leave your house, for example, LEAVE IT even if you don't need to. The next time the fear will be greater. Once we are caught in a phobia the only way out is to take small steps towards facing the fear and each time we triumph over that hump the next one becomes easier. Please keep this in mind next time someone puts out there hand for you to shake it! There are consequences to caution too, and they can be very very dire.

What I have been paying attention too is something that really should scare the crap out of everyone: the utter massacre inside the nursing homes by viral infection. Is it possible that all the fuss about Kawasaki's disease is partly due to the recent relevations of the heartless and cruel failure to protect our elders from a disease known to target them? What better way to distract from the very real plight of the old by making us terrified for the young? Speculation, of course, but my gut tells me that the nursing-home crisis could blow-up the whole Potemkin Village of corona and reveal some basic truths behind the edifice of fear. For instance, we are being told to hide in our house from a virus that really likes to transmit indoors and hates sunlight and breezes. No wonder, then, that in many states nursing-homes are the primary victims of the pandemic. In Pennsylvania 65%, New York 25%, California 40% or more, and so on. 

These numbers are scandalous, on the face of it they even reflect a failure to protect the most vulnerable even as Governors are smashing our communities and liberties apart. But many States didn't just fail to "protect" the elderly, they actually acted to put them in the path of the freight train. This started with New York when Cuomo ordered the homes to accept residents from hospitals just before lockdown began, supposedly to free up hospital beds, beds that were never needed. Other States followed suite, with predictable consequences. Did he knowingly and intentionally seed the homes in order to evolve this crisis into a fevered pitch and create the "new-normal"? It sure seems that way. Either way, a Federal investigation must be done and I plan on looking into the issue more closely in the future with the aim of sparking one. Maybe when they run out of new monsters to drag out of the closet and scare us with we will examine the question further? 

When this is all over with (the panic I mean, corona is here to stay) we should let the children go back to their old ways and not expect them to participate in our fear-porn obsession forever. In fact we should have allowed them to carry-on their lives with hardly any disruption at all. The elderly, on the other hand, are desperately in need of an improved system of care. Remember: there are going to be more and more of them in the aging West and there will be other nasty bugs going around. We cannot lockdown and re-order our lives each time there is virus raging in the nursing-homes, but we need to do much better next time. Perhaps if we focused on the problem at hand, instead of using the death-toll to advance political and social agendas, we would find it's not so hard after all? Let the kids be kids, we should worry about our parents instead. 

How Normal is "New-Normal"?

This lockdown is a real bummer for a lot of people. Another friend of mine OD-ed last week, I spent about an hour on the phone with his Mom today. She is going through a lot of her own stuff too, but she's kept sane working with the homeless (who are also inexplicably unharmed by corona in her location near Chicago). They are putting them up in hotels so maybe there is a silver-lining, but sadly she is facing eviction and not getting a free room. It's a strange system that takes care of the absolutely worthless, but often lets the semi-functional through the cracks.

Her son was quite a character, the type who had the brains to do anything but always hung-out with idiots. Maybe he liked to be the smartest guy in the room? I don't know, we only knew each-other briefly. He had gotten clean this Spring and was out of rehab and employed, but then the world went crazy and he went back.

Too bad, but the business closings had to be done... right?

Well there were other things we could have done, like protecting the elderly in the nursing-homes. Even Cuomo now concedes that forcing COVID patients into the homes was a bone-headed move. It was done at the last minute, with no warning, and without even allowing the homes to ask the hospital if the resident had tested positive! This went on for months. The rescinding is better late than never, but for thousands who died in infected homes the reversal is far too late.

This decision should call into question the good faith of Cuomo's plan to re-open, eventually, the regions of NY. If he was really acting in the interests of public health why did he lockdown the healthy population and destroy the most vulnerable? If we're trying to slow the spread, why are certain businesses targeted for destruction while others are treated like they have some kind of magical anti-viral force-field around them? It doesn't make any sense. It's almost like the criteria for staying open is to be a powerful and connected national player, those companies who can return the favors of their patron. I have a hunch that NY won't be big enough for our Little Dictator much longer.

Absurdities are flying fast and thick in the world of the "new-normal," one can barely keep-up with them. One of the most disturbing is the news that Bill Gates is once again partnering with the school system,  as if his universally-loathed Common Core "standards" haven't caused enough PTSD in the poor children who've been traumatized by it. If experience is any guide we can expect a new level of childhood stress in the "new-normal" of medical-grade schooling. Who knows, maybe Gate's bizarre and convoluted methods of teaching basic math (that left parents of 1st and 2nd graders confused) will seem quite rational and common sense in the "new-normal" of childhood social-distancing and forehead scans? Even though children are unharmed by corona (and haven't been confirmed to transmit it to adults) we must ensure that they are damaged by it one way or another. How else will they by psychologically scarred enough to accept their role as permanent part-time Walmart  employees receiving a paltry UBI in the "new-normal"? Without a healthy daily dose of pandemic-terror to keep them off-kilter they might start to question why they are being forced to give up their futures so that octogenarians with 3 or 4 medical preconditions can live another year.

Only a step back from Gold in the stupidity Olympics is the tragic irony that public health itself is guaranteed to take a nose-dive from all of this. Millions of ventilators sit in closets unused, dustily prepared for the "second-wave" now promised by Neil Ferguson's broken computer model. The dire "first-wave" of 2 million dead only existed in the computer's darkly-lunatic digital-mind, as it was warped and goaded by the Frankenstenian tinkering of the Imperial College Doomsday Team until gibbering mountains of ventilated corpses spewed forth onto the results page, much to the delight of the Gates-funded mad scientists. Nevertheless, "safety-first" must be our motto as millions of non-simulated medical maladies go untreated for months and hospitals systems crash and burn. In the "new-normal" we will have no need for such frivolities as family-practice care and a doctor's familiar face: I'm sure Jeff Bezos will provide all our medical needs in the new 24-7 warehouse-cage that the lucky few will inhabit two-weeks out of every month.

The lynch-pin of all this, apparently "normal," madness is the lockdown itself. So why would one expect even a semblance of reason to gloss over the gas-lighting of King Cuomo?  While we watch like good kids in the classroom as he places a shiny star over each box of his "reopening metrics," the last slot is still withheld. In this attempt to blackmail his fiefdoms (or regions in the old-tongue) into supine compliance with all the mad whims of his pals, the Tech Giants, Big Pharma, and Multinational Conglomerates, the last piece of his gambit is finally revealed. Sure we may have TONS of extra hospital beds, we've been good obedient children so our hospitalizations are down, and the requisite amount of trace-snitches have infiltrated among us. But that's not good enough if the snitches have nothing to do! 

You have to keep people on their toes, or what's the point? There's no better way than a good hard TEST! Or how about 35,000 of them? TESTTESTTEST. It doesn't matter who or what, just test! Once upon a time it was really important to only test the symptomatic people (when they wanted the virus to look worse). Now we have learned the wisdom of random testing (not to be confused with randomized testing, that would tell us too much about the actual situation). Hence the forehead scanners going around in the vans to the sign-flying hobos every-day and getting their temp reading. Any who are a little up that day can be swabbed, if needed. From what they have told me they aren't being "forcibly" tested, for now. I expect they won't be allowed to beg a buck on the intersection if it's positive though. We'll have to see, the sign-flyers are our canary and I suggest everyone pick their brains now while we still have a chance.

The test is in a sense a symbol, you are giving your body over to the State, your very DNA. It's tempting to go on a testing binge to get over that hurdle, but once you've given in that's the signal that the lockdown power-play can be used at will. It appears that testing is the gate back into normalcy, but you may find the "new-normal" anything but. Once the contact-tracers get going is when the fun really starts. Don't take any test because you are forced to or co-erced to. It's an abdication of your medical privacy rights, opening you up to the contact-tracers. But by all means, anyone in a risk-group, if you feel like you do need a test get. Let me know what it felt like in the comments. If Cuomo gets enough suckers, maybe he will let us go free? Whatever "free" is, now, in the "new-normal."

Doomsday-Sale at Best Buy

It's quite creepy leaving your house and seeing streets empty, everything dead, people with masks on driving their car. Somehow, though, the most disturbing thing I've witnessed was at Best Buy this weekend. I was driving around and getting a sense of how many sign-flyers were still on the streets; quite a few, actually. They all say that the vagrant community is quite healthy, though there are vans coming through with forehead scanners daily. If that doesn't paint a perfect portrait of a dysfunctional society, I don't know what would.

After my brie f survey ,I ended up at the Destiny parking-lot. Although I had expected everything to be closed, signs advertised "Contact-less Pickup" proudly, like it's the new white-glove delivery. I guess Best Buy is considered essential, who knew? Apparently many people knew as cars were lining-up for Mother's Day sales, so many that I eventually got blocked-in. I watched for a while as suited and masked essential employees strapped giant TVs into the back of pick-up trucks so that the upper-crust could enjoy their lockdown in state-of-the-art comfort. It sent chills down my spine.

So lockdown isn't the same for everyone. If you have a nice large house and plenty of streaming subscriptions it goes easier than the poor crammed into their duplexes with several other people. No wonder they are out on the street in large groups whenever the weather lets-up. But the upper-class in their large houses don't know this, they stay home assuming that everyone else is doing the same, hypnotized by the media-machine, ratting-out their fellows. You can't blame them, can you?

Meanwhile the data keeps coming in bits and pieces, never connected into coherence by the media figures who only play one note all day: FEAR! CNN reports that genetic analysis of corona proves that it spread everywhere in about a month:

They also found genetic evidence that supports suspicions the virus was infecting people in Europe, the US and elsewhere weeks or even months before the first official cases were reported in January and February. It will be impossible to find the "first" patient in any country.

We are in a never-ending lockdown to supposedly stop a virus which is able to spread around the world in a month? Is it really plausible to think that lockdown can stop such a virus, once it has infected 12% of the population of NYS? It truly requires laudable doublethink to both believe that the virus is some terrifying super-bug, while also believing that a partial lockdown (ignored by at least half the population) will stop it!

But Georgia is opening-up, the sky hasn't fallen there. Florida is opening-up having never seen the doomsday predictions materialize. South Korea is doing fine, and they never imposed lockdown. And on and on. We are getting a clear picture of how COVID behaves and thinking people are able to calm-down. Remember that the major threat was always the possibility of over-loading the hospital system. This is not a real concern anymore. 

What is concerning is the infection of nursing homes and other high-risk environments. Perhaps we should have spent our money and resources on protecting those people instead of wasting it all on lockdown policies that don't protect those who need it most? Cuomo failed abysmally in this crucial test, forcing COVID into the homes with his infamous directive and then doubling-down on it.  But it does seems he has quietly backtracked and we are now allowed to protect our elderly, after paying a terrible price. The best thing we can do for our elders is to open-up immediately and let the virus finish it's growth cycle so they can come out of isolation. The longer this goes on, the more we "flatten the curve," the more of them will succumb to loneliness and despair. When all the comparisons are done I expect other states like NJ that had similar ghoulish mandates will be also be high-death outliers. It just goes to show that panic is not the proper way to handle a virus!

The virus is slowly stopping itself through natural burn-out. It was here un-noticed in December/January and has been petering-out since the peak in early March. Hero-doctor Erickson of Accelerated-Care interviewed Knut Wittowski last week and they went over the basic situation. Herd-immunity is quite close, it does not need 100% antibody protection to kick-in. In places with relatively low population density Wittowski says that large spikes are not likely even without antibody protection. There are also many people who shrug the virus off like nothing and are not effective spreaders. We are long past the worst of things and what we really need to be worried about now is the collateral damage of lockdown. At least you and I have to be worried about it, those people grubbing on-sale electronics are doing just fine! That's what really scares me.

Will You Take The Test?

In the past couple of weeks I've made an effort to dig into the nitty-gritty statistics of corona and had quite a few enlightening debates on the subject. I must admit, though, that I haven't learned as much as I expected to about the virus. It's been easier to get data about how COVID behaves in other countries than the US even though we spent a billion on tests (at least). What data I've gotten from the US has mainly taught me lessons about Man not microbe. While trying to hash-out fractions of a percentage-point (and shaking my head at many of the wild numbers that get thrown around in speculative stampede) I noticed that there are really two kind of people out there. The Wing-Nuts and Commies? No, this old division in culture and politics is getting hackneyed to absurdity, despite all attempt to apply the old frame to this new situation.

See, we're not really talking about "just flu or not just flu," "lockdown or no lockdown," each of us is processing events according to our own larger perception of reality. Whereas the "Right" may be terrified of lockdown-wrecked seizure of all economic and political control by the most ruthless elements, the "Left" is more worried about the virus itself and wants to use the  virus as a sort of equalizer. Both arguments are operating in relative darkness. We can't be assured that the political and economic rights of yore will ever be restored, just as we can't know for sure what the corona will do as it eventually comes back sooner or later. While the Left wants the government to somehow dominate the existing private sector and protect us from the thing, the Right just wants to keep opportunistic people from using the virus-lockdown as a weapon against them.

I think the virus is less inherently lethal in itself and more dangerous as a political/social tool for ockdown madness, on-demand. That would put me on the Right, but I don't feel myself to be there in reality. I'm more of a moderate by nature, I can't but help see the uses of both ideologies. People naturally want to compete and market with each other. They also want to cooperate non-competitively with each other too. Both are part of us.

Why not just invent a new paradigm instead? The dichotomy I'm observing travels laterally through both world-views and has to do with how one perceives the power-structure. The two poles are the "New-Normies" and the "Tinfoil-Hats."

Usually the conspiracy theorist is a despised and skulking creature, but today this dog will have his day! Not that everybody will start questioning the very foundations of their reality, but, on the other hand, I predict the harder the State and private sector push-back the more questions will rain on them. I posted six-years ago about the manual for combating conspiracy theories that Cass Sunstein wrote, "Conspiracy Theories," a decent enough addition to the cannon of conspiracy-theory-theory, if flawed in it's postulations. One of the first points he made was that actually banning conspiracy theories tended just to help promote them. Debunking was of course written off as pointless; a nice excuse to get out doing your job, Cass! Nevertheless, he has proceeded from that publishing to a pretty impressive resume including Obama's information tzar. Of that one needs it's own post, or two.

Thus, as a student of the master, I have been recently surprised to see actual conspiracy theorists banned very summarily. This has accelerated and finally gotten to the peak where almost no actual content-creator knows when they could get the hammer. Many do play along, but it is often in the cynical nature of the Soviet bureaucracy. Suppressed ideas can only be suppressed so long.

The more appropriate approach, says Sunstein, is to infiltrate the conspiracy theorist's ranks and subtly detract and distract, sowing discord as much as possible. I would presume that this approach is also being used and why the public discourse about virus becomes more political in nature than is healthy. Maybe to his credit, since his thesis was written the state/private sector have merged intelligence work to a very perilous degree.  I don't doubt that it is feasible that the intelligence community is functioning autonomously inside of it's private-entity creations and controlling the state from without, so to speak. The budgets have gotten crazy, the oversight is a joke. Senators on the intelligence committee don't even have security clearances for high enough to know anything about what they are charged with over-sight, and the private sector cut-outs are a total black box

Why then take the risky approach of banning outright? I think it is a sign that conspiracy theories have gotten to be a real threat. If the fight is inevitable, may as well do it in the open. The people that are in the know are in the know, whether they feign ignorance or not. The people who don't know by this stage won't know until it's too late to matter. At least that's the plan.

But there also arises opportunity on the other side: if the private-sector and government elites work too closely hand-in-glove, they can disrupt the illusion of the Left vs Right dichotomy. It becomes less about which dangerous piece in the dangerous game of building civilization's power structures is worse and more about the whole power-structure itself. Why argue about private-sector individualism and public-sector egalitarianism? Everyone can see that Walmart-Socialism has become a real thing. If you can see what we're up against, then you don't need any ideology to help you understand what to do.

The lockdown economic attack is global attack, it targets the entire world. Therefore, that which opposes it must also be global. That is to say, each nation as a member of the community of nations has to restore to herself her independence and sovereignty. And within those nations the people also have to restore their communal sovereignty. Only then can we successfully restore individual sovereignty, since the community actually determines what an individual's concept of sovereignty is.  This will become more clear as the economic destruction really kicks-in.

However it may be, the question before us now is merely: will you take the Test? Remember, a + could strip you away from contact, from that basic building-block of humanity: other humanity. But to not take it will likely have some similar cost, leaving you with the untouchables, the unclean. And that's life for ya! Never any easy choices...

Another NYC Whistle-Blower and Planning Ahead

King Cuomo has spoken and outlined his plan to remain in absolute power forever. OK, maybe that is a little bit of an overstatement, but not much. This list of requirements that each arbitrarily-created region must fulfill in order to re-open is yet another escalation of COVID madness, dove-tailing nicely with his strategy of psychological warfare. I though that his doubling-down on forcing COVID patients into the nursing homes couldn't be topped. I thought that demanding federal funds to feed into his black-box slush fund of oppression was the ultimate hubris. Nope.

Does anyone out there think it makes sense that NYC is just as close to re-opening as the Western NY region? There are only 127 deaths in the entirety of Monroe County.

A quick glance at these conditions shows how far we have come from "15 Days to Flatten the Curve." Two weeks of lockdown is a radical step, to be sure, but in the "new-normal" the most extremely radical is becoming prosaic. Each testing parameter is a two week average, and there is that little bit about monthly testing requirements. Don't forget, this all just gets us into Phase One until he decides to restart it. It's looking like lockdown is here to stay. But then why would he open-up when he's having so much fun playing dictator? With the MSM lapping it up and Youtube banning the whistle-blower videos coming out of NYC with incredible rapidity, Cuomo has no real reason not to carpe diem. Every day that the lockdown goes on Cuomo becomes more and more invested in his lies.

But we have to live in the real world, while he creates a brave new one for us. I went driving around last night to see what the mild weather was doing to help herd-immunity along. There was a ton of traffic, lot's of groups of 4-8, but no huge parties I could see. I saw no police on the South/West Side at all, and only a couple on the SU Hill where a college girl had rammed a telephone-pole. That's what you get for driving while listening to the panic-station! My over-all impression was that foot traffic was just a hair under a normal Spring peak.

Now that we are effectively adopting the Swedish model, with an economic wrecking-ball thrown in for funsies, we have to accept a little more personal responsibility going forward. As much as COVID has been blown wildly out of proportion, it is still quite dangerous to some. Not to mention the danger of allowing a state of fear and paranoia to continue. Can we balance these two considerations?

I don't think there is any perfect level between reasonable caution and servile cowering at this point. For one thing, we are coming off weeks of lockdown. To expect everyone to be as considerate as the Swedes are alleged to be is absurd.  People have a lot of steam to blow-off, one way or another. If we had taken the rational approach from the beginning and focused on protecting those in the risk cohort we would be much farther along towards herd immunity and also much more able to behave ourselves. As things stand, I predict a considerable surge in hospitalizations, but I could be wrong. Either way it goes, we do have a responsibility to do our best.

Yet, how can we expect our elderly to be deprived of their families for much longer? It is an ugly situation and the continuation of harsh measures may well drag it out longer. So take some time to think over your strategy for protecting yourself and any vulnerable family members you have; the State has shown itself utterly incapable of doing so, even with all the powers it has invested to itself.

Make sure you know what your risks are. This handy tool is a good start to assess your risk level (but don't download their spyware app). It has been my experience that most people are over-estimating their own risk. If you are under 80 and healthy you should be fine, but maybe really sick. Communicate with others what their own fears are and be respectful of them, whether you think they are high or low-balling the threat. If you do get sick be very wary of going to the hospital. They are not using CPAP machines so you might want to procure your own and tough it out with the ability to prone yourself and other such effective measures that are impossible on ventilation. No one can decide for you if you want to go in, but know that you will be isolated if you do. Most importantly: get lot's of fresh-air and sunshine and stay positive.

The other tricky part of the task ahead is how to be careful of possible spikes while not playing into the Fear gripping our society right now. I am of the belief that this fear is doing far more harm than the virus, both in our bodies and in the power-structure being formed around us. It is imperative that we resist this formation inside our minds and hearts and in our communities. With that in mind I am not wearing a mask unless I go into a store or other confined space with other people. Even though I became a convert to masking when the WHO still said not to I think that the psychological damage it is causing us outweighs the slight reduction in transmission. I guess I'm just a murdering misanthropic terrorist!

So remember that, although it is tempting to play along just to "get it over with," that is exactly what the fascist medical-police-state is counting on. They know that people are waking up and seeing the absurdity of the lockdown all around their communities and the terrible toll it has taken. They know that they cannot contain all the information, even with military-grade A.I.  But if people just go-along to get-along we lose any chance to fight this in the future. Make no mistake, this agenda will be with us until we ourselves defeat it. With an aging and unhealthy population, the West cannot help having nasty bugs come through that could take out a lot of people. This is sad, but this is life and life goes on. The question is, do we want life to go on under shutdown or under freedom?

Coronavirus vs Sweden, Who Will Win?

When it picking winners in the war between virus and mankind, I'll take the virus every time. For one thing, ewe are vastly outnumbered many trillions-to-one. A million exist in just a millimeter of seawater! Most of them are so small they cannot be seen by optical microscope so they are very hard to study. We knew about bacteria long before viruses were discovered in 1898, and we never would have found them except they were infecting our bacteria samples in the labs. In the last century months and even years of research has had to be chucked because it was found that viral infections took over cellular samples of entire sectors of the biotech industry, despite all their precautions.

The virus is completely alien to all other life, occupying their own Kingdom. It's even debatable whether they are alive themselves. Britannica calls them the "quintessential parasite" because they cannot even process proteins without stealing from host cells ribosomes. They mooch off the ATP of the cell for energy and all their metabolic functions are gained by use of the host cell. They are the most adaptable "creature" on the planet, surviving literally everywhere. They can even reform themselves out of random bits of DNA suspended in water and become infectious.

We are full of viruses, they are on everything we touch, inside our masks, DID YOU JUST TOUCH YOUR FACE?! Quite full of hubris is the man who thinks he can defeat a virus, if they all worked together against us, that is. You see good reader, we are very lucky to have a large contingent of viral traitors in and among us, who mean us no harm and actually fend off harmful bacteria for us. Luckily, viruses must not only compete with the pathetic humans, but also with each-other. The very adaptability of the virus works to our benefit: they are so small that they need not harm the host cell to propagate and so adaptable that the gentle strains tend to beat-out the dangerous strains. For example, being able to remain undetected in the human body for some weeks is a great boon to viral expansion. This means that the milder mutations of a given virus tend to spread wider than the virulent ones and confer protection from the more virulent strain. One of the questions that our gigantic lockdown experiment should answer (if sober heads ever prevail long-enough to study it impartially) is whether we have done ourselves more harm than good by limiting the spread of less-virulent corona strains that would have prepared the immune system to deal with the bad side of the family when they show up. In our arrogance we may have hamstrung our best defender: COVID-19 itself!

Corona is unusually dangerous because it combines the trait of a less-virulent strain, hiding undetectable for 10-14 days, but also can cause symptoms. This means it is practically impossible to contain once it has traveled far from the source, especially when the original host country lies about the spread and destroys priceless viral samples. This leads to anther danger, the fear it instills in the human populations. In this the virus has been aided and abetted by another "virus," the sensationalist and irresponsible media conglomerates (who are also infected by the CIA and other alphabet-soup agencies). Indeed, the media parasites rival the virus for insidious mooching off host population! But that for another post.

This infectious fear not only rages like wildfire through the general population, but also in the medical community. The results are catastrophic, as the Washington Post details:

At the bedside of a covid-19 patient, it’s easy to let fear take over — to feel as though nothing in our training has prepared us for this. Perhaps as a result, critical care doctors like us find themselves deviating from our proven techniques. We are regularly placing coronavirus patients on ventilators earlier than we would were it not for their diagnosis, out of fear that they might decompensate rapidly. We are starting neuromuscular blockade (paralysis) in 40% of patients, half of whom would generally not be considered sick enough to require it considering standard approaches to other viral illnesses like severe influenza, which also means these people are sedated very heavily into a coma — begetting another shortage, this one in sedative medications. Doctors typically use the precarious practice of paralysis less than 10 percent of the time, usually only in severely stiff lungs to prevent damaging them further by a ventilator. Now, reports from the field show, it’s being used to treat lungs that are not very stiff at all. Rather than turn to the protocols we know, critical care doctors are flying by the seat of our pants.

Amazingly, doctors have been treating COVID patients with more aggressive ventilation than normal pneumonia, despite lungs that are not  as stiff! This terror of COVID also deprives hospitals of many tools like CPAP machines that would be more effective than ventilation and allow patients to be mobile, but could also spread the virus faster. Information is throttled, but more and more medical professionals are coming forward all the time. We want to protect our nurses and doctors, of course, but if the virus only targets a fraction of the population we are doing more harm than good treating it like Ebola. Would the public ever have known anything of this if it were not for the heroic Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell? He worked through the peak in NYC and put his observations on YouTube, but had to quit working on the ICU floor on "moral grounds." How many more doctors have been carrying-out these new protocols in silence, knowing that any deviation from the panic narrative could result in a terrible personal backlash?

I started to realize the danger of panicked thinking pretty early-on in the game, though I do admit I was concerned when I first heard about the 2 week incubation period. So, as someone who avoids almost all network news-media, it was strange to converse with my Grandpa in the very early days of the corona panic. I called to see how he was doing and found that he had been home-bound and watching the news for days.  He proceeded to give me a long litany of terrorizing talking-points about how the virus does this and that and the other thing. It struck me that what he was describing was basically just general viral facts. Yes, some viruses are much more contagious than others. Yes, viruses do sometimes spread globally in a very short time. Yes, there is no vaccine to most viruses and many viruses arise every year that we are not immune to. But when packaged and presented by experts and worked-over by the billion-dollar medical PR agencies, these basic facts instill a crippling terror. What I wanted to know was, how deadly is it? As we saw in a previous post, not very.

Some countries have not fallen victim to the fear campaign, notably Sweden.  Sweden is a Western country comparable in manner of living and social mores to the US, despite propaganda being spread that they live in some sort of Nordic Utopia that is spotlessly clean. Yes, Sweden is different from the US, but it is much closer environmentally to where I live in Syracuse NY than Syracuse is to NYC. Therefore, we can generally extrapolate from the Swedish experience, as much as we can from State-to-State comparisons (naturally, the MSM only wants to extrapolate data from NYC and other hot-spot outliers).

Sweden has not responded with lockdown, but rather taken the sensible approach that has worked time and again throughout history: protect the elderly and frail and take some minor precautions. They did restrict large gatherings, but life for them has mostly gone on as normal. As a result of this prudence Sweden is only about a week or two away from herd immunity  These days herd-immunity is characterized as related to vaccination, but it also works just fine for every virus that does not have a vaccine (almost all of them). Exceptions to this rule like Spanish Flu do exist and have been devastating, but they are very rare.

When comparing vaccines to natural her-immunity we see there are positives and negatives. Vaccines contain compounds designed to agitate the immune-system and guarantee antibody formation, so they can make herd immunity happen faster. But if a virus is so weak that the body can shrug it off without even forming antibodies, is that really cause for alarm? On the other hand, vaccines do not last as long as natural immunity. Either way, herd immunity is established when enough people are not friendly hosts to a virus whether or not they have antibodies. While Sweden is called "radical" in the current media climate, what they are doing is utterly prosaic.

In the herd-immunity debate susceptibility has to be considered also. Antibody immunity is only necessary in the portion of the population that is susceptible to infection. This could be as low as 14-18% according to data from closed environments such as the Diamond Princess and the infected aircraft carrier. This helps explain why hospitalizations are leveling-off everywhere even with relatively low antibody prevalence in populations. Keep in mind that hospitalizations are a more important metric than confirmed cases, which continue to grow on-par with testing capacity. The more we test the more we find so we have to look at hospitalizations to see where we are on the "curve" of the epidemic. Infections lags 10 or more days behind hospitalizations, so the peak of the epidemic is actually well-past.

As Sweden's chief epidemiologist says:

We are doing two major investigations. We may have those results this week or a bit later in May. We know from modeling and some data we have already – these data are a little uncertain – that we probably had a transmission peak in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, which means that we are probably hitting the peak of infections right about now. We think that up to 25% of people in Stockholm have been exposed to coronavirus and are possibly immune. A recent survey from one of our hospitals in Stockholm found that 27% of staff there are immune. We think that most of those are immune from transmission in society, not the workplace. We could reach herd immunity in Stockholm within a matter of weeks.

Because of Sweden's successful example the idea of herd-immunity is being discussed and finally some health authorities are beginning to admit what should have been apparent from the start. Sweden's Anders Tengell:

"If you can't get population immunity how can we then think a vaccine will protect us?"

I realize that doctors are duty-bound to shill for vaccines at every opportunity, but it is nice to see some actual common-sense thrown in the mix now and then! All the more so because we have never been able to develop a vaccine for a coronavirus and perhaps never will.

Yet I believe that this debating of the merits of herd-immunity is a bit of a distraction. Humans have not gone extinct despite many trillions of novel viruses showing up on the scene many thousands of years before vaccines were created. We have done this before and we will do it again. We are quite full of ourselves to think that somehow we can defeat all viruses, just because we have had some limited success in vaccinating against a few of them. The virus can always adapt to anything we throw at it. The real question is not "Can we stop the virus from spreading?" (we can't), but "Can our hospitals deal with a temporary surge?" Sweden has shown that they can even without any lockdown at all.

The death toll has not been negligible, however. According to worldometer 2,679 Swedes have lost their lives. This will likely increase by at least several hundred before the virus levels-off. But then they will be over with it, while countries in lockdown have to keep fighting a war of containment, using methods that are horribly destructive to human health. Our peak in deaths per-million is lower than  Sweden's, but the epidemic will last longer. Excepting differences in demographics the death-toll will be about the same. Many will hate to confess it, but the cure is worse than the disease.

We must not forget that the only way lockdown can save lives over the whole cycle of the virus is if it prevents hospitals from becoming over-capacity. Delaying deaths and spreading them out over a longer period does not reduce them. Data from all over the world has shown hospital systems are able to deal with the surge, so why are we pretending that lockdown does more good than harm? Perhaps we have been infected with something even more dangerous and difficult to observe than even the virus: an epidemic of fear and paranoia. This infection might prove harder to shake-off than the coronavirus. To cure this infection of paranoia we have to look at the facts with rationality and not fall into sentimentalism. We must deal rationally with the viruses among us, or we will only do more harm to ourselves than they ever could.