Mister Roboto
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Huh. Charlie Brown never struck me as particularly optimistic. Perhaps he was so easily conned by Lucy with the football so many times because he was somewhat attracted to her. {/shrug}
BTW Germ, sorry, but wearing masks will not increase your likelihood of getting the virus. Dailyexpose.co.uk is what we used to call a “kook-site”back in the Usenet days of the early Internet.
@Germ: And don’t forget the example of Japan, which had a tenfold increase in daily new cases recently despite being the world exemplar of masking-conscientiousness. And once again, the point is not the sheer amount of the those daily new cases compared to basket-case countries such as the USA, the point is the sudden explosive growth, which is the sort of thing masking is supposed to help us to prevent by “protecting other people”.
I found the AIER piece an interesting and credible explanation of how the lockdown-school came to be the prevalent program for dealing with a pandemic. A lot of us thought we were just copying China, whose data on how many people are sick or dead can be fairly described as “sketchy”. And the article’s explanation contributes more to the discussion than assertions like “The lockdowns came from the Hitler-Charlie-Manson-Ayatollah-Khomeini conspiracy to chop off our pee-pees and replace them with Chinese yo-yos” that you find on some of the more bizarre corners of the Internet.
So I guess Nancy Pelosi just thanked George Floyd for “sacrificing his life for justice”. Why do I increasingly feel like I’m living in some kind of comic-book? And if I have to live in a comic-book, why can’t it be one where cute Scandinavian guys want to be my friend?
WRT Japan and America’s Covid case numbers: The point is not so much the numbers themselves in terms of sheer amount, as the explosive growth of cases that happened in a short time, which is what universal masking is supposed to prevent because you are supposedly protecting others by doing so. And yes, it is a pretty well-known fact that the average Japanese person takes much better care of themselves over their lifetimes than the average USAmerican. (Full disclosure: I’m a 54-year-old type 2 diabetic who works in a grocery store in a customer-service capacity, so that is why I worry about Covid more than probably a lot of people here. I am still at the point where I can control my blood-sugar with oral medications, sometimes supplementing with small amounts of basal (once-daily) insulin injections [how much medicine I need at any given time fluctuates].)
Well, the Japan graph is the best argument against the effectiveness of masking I’ve seen so far. If any country in the world had near-universal compliance of correct mask-wearing, that would be Japan. We are told that mask-wearing is about protecting other people rather than oneself, and that near-universal compliance of correct mask-wearing is necessary for that to work. That would make Japan the closest thing it’s possible to have to a scientific study (albeit a mere observational study) of this proposition. And yet they experienced a tenfold increase in daily new cases in a pretty short period of time. (By “case”, I’m assuming that means sufficiently symptomatic to be excused from work or school.) I suppose some might say it would have been worse without the masking, but the fact remains, that kind of explosion in people getting sick is what masking is supposed to prevent.
The RT article about breakfast and blood-sugar dips confirms what I’ve known for a while. What the article failed to state outright is that the thing that will get you a big post-breakfast blood-sugar-level dip is eating the very sugary or even merely starchy breakfast that many USAmericans eat every day. My daily breakfast has no added refined sugar and a relatively low starch-content, and I can go an entire eight hours before eating my second meal of the day before feeling terribly hungry. (I’m sure it also helps that it’s a very substantial breakfast in terms of fat and protein calories.)
In all seriousness, though, I don’t think the vaccines will do terribly much harm on a society-wide basis. {/knock on simulated wood} I agree with Swedish doctor and author Sebastian Rushworth at this point in the game. Covid is going to be an endemic thing that comes and goes in mostly-manageable surges such as the one the USA just had between September 1 and March 1 {/knock on SW}, and this will show that the lockdowns weren’t really such a great idea, in addition to the harm done by the lockdowns themselves. The “warp-speed” developed vaccines are basically a window-dressing so that when Covid becomes somewhat manageable, the establishment can take credit for that development without being blamed for the error of the lockdowns. (“See, we kept you locked down and safe while we developed the vaccines that made the situation all better!”) Of course, if we get a variant that’s especially nasty (the Brazil variant might be just such a one) and able to evade whatever mitigation the vaccine might provide, this plan may not succeed.
I highly recommend the Ritter and Escobar articles about the brewing Eurasian crisis.
One thing that occurs to me about Covid and its reported death-rate in the USA: The death-rate for 2020 roughly exceeds the one for 2019 by roughly the same number as reported Covid-deaths. I will be interested to see if this year’s death-rate will be lower, the same, or higher than 2019. If it’s the same or especially lower, than that would indicate that the onset of Covid merely harvested the “low-hanging fruit” in terms of overall mortality. And we had a lot of low-hanging fruit in the form of older poor people with health pre-conditions.
One point that I think bears making in response to what this author said about US death rates: The death-rate for 2020 exceeded the death-rate for 2019 by roughly the amount of people who are estimated to have died of Covid.
My guess would be that the Brazilian variant is more deadly, and so early intervention is a lot more critical.
Yeah, Songbird, a movie by none other than that master of artful subtlety Michael Bay.
Thanks for the video-link, John Day. I have posted it on both my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Let’s see how long those posts stay up!
A fascinating and thought-provoking aside from the “Meme Policeman” website:
An interesting side note is that early on in the pandemic, many on the fringe right/libertarian side were very pro mask, and the establishment left was the one railing against them for public use. This completely flipped within a month, and demonstrated the tribal nature that dominated 2020.
Well, I think it bears pointing out that only first ten points are about the vaccine itself, and they are good points. And #7 is probably the big one explaining why people such as myself are experiencing “vaccine-hesitancy” about the mRNA-driven vaccines: Anyone who takes the shots in this initial round of the roll-out is essentially volunteering to be a “guinea-pig” in lieu of the final round of testing that wasn’t done for this new-fangled vaccination technology. I don’t know about any of y’all, but things tend not to go well for me when I push my luck too much.
The Edward Curtin article is a very effective example of why the national Covid discussion has gone so badly off the rails: Over-the-top rhetoric and pet conspiracy-theories will inevitably generate a highly unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio. Right now, I’m reading a book by a Swedish doctor titled Covid: Why Most Of What You Know Is Wrong, which makes its case with facts, studies, and statistics. In a country that has gone as utterly fruit-bat crackers as the USA has in the past six or so years, expecting any such adherence to facts and logic over kookery and quackery purporting bear “THE TRVTH” is clearly expecting way too much.
Yes, the polish is gone. They used to be able to act as if they somewhat knew what they were doing. It was a pleasant illusion while it lasted.
I think that right now we’re in a similar situation in that regard as the post-Brezhnev USSR. The ruling WWII-era gerontocracy didn’t want anything to change, so twice they installed men who had one foot in the proverbial grave with predictable results. Now our Boomer gerontocracy doesn’t want anything to change (there are only so many Xers and Millennials who are willing to be as pliant as Obama), so they keep shoe-horning in these people who are obviously ill (Hillary) or going senile (Trump and Biden). We really pushed the envelope with Biden though, didn’t we?
Meanwhile covid cases are making new daily highs. Proves lockdowns really work!
And that’s my main beef with the whole concept of locking down. With something as contagious as Covid, it just doesn’t work. The only thing that would work would stopping all human contact, and that would certainly be a case of the cure being vastly worse than the disease. The countries that are having the worst time with Covid are the ones with large populations combined with a huge gap between the very rich and the very poor and that have historically neglected the concept of public health. One might even suspect that the elites of these countries are glad to have a pandemic that seems to zero in on poor people with chronic health problems (not to mention frail elderly people who are too old to do intensive physical labor anymore).
Japan’s PM was given access to the person who is the real president right now, not the senile figurehead. It sounds as though they did him the courtesy of being honest with him.
My big takeaway of 2020 is that the age of rational responses is over. From now on, it’s all irrationality, propaganda, and falsehood all the time. And what’s the most irrational thing we could possibly do? Why, nuclear war, of course. So if that’s what we have to do in order to be truly irrational, then by gum and by golly, that’s exactly what we’ll do, and there will be no stopping it!
I would also point out that a national emergency is something you declare over pandemics, states being on fire, and natural disasters, not the latest round of escalating geo-political tensions.
I certainly find the Biden Administration’s ramping up of Cold War 2.0 disturbing, not that it’s entirely surprising.
Well, I just read yesterday that the WHO “conditionally recommends against” (“conditionally recommending” is a step below “strongly recommending”) hospitals treating Covid patients with expensive, big-pharma-approved remdesivir, as there is very scant evidence that it actually helps. So if my best friend from the high-school daze of the eighties was kept off the ventilator (after which one’s odds become a lot more dicey) by what the doctors treated him with, it was probably the steroids.
If so, I’m glad they gave him something that may have saved his life, but they probably only give you those steroids once you’re already in very bad shape (Dr. John Day probably knows more than I do about how and when hospitals use steroids to treat Covid), and I also know they exact something of a toll on the human body. If he would have been treated with Ivermectin as soon as he fell ill, he probably wouldn’t have needed to be away from work for a whole month and wouldn’t have needed to spend four days in the hospital right before the winter holidays.
Maybe I’m just kidding myself, but part of me wants to believe that if something like Covid would have happened thirty years ago, we would have treated it with something that works and works well and is as potentially cheap and plentiful as the ibuprofen you can buy in those mondo-sized bottles at Walmart. In this case, that is Ivermectin. So one is forced to wonder, once again, who benefits and in what way, from the refusal to properly and effectively treat people who become seriously ill with Covid? And could it be that somebody wants all those older poor people with chronic health problems to “just freaking die, already”?
Russia, U.S. Locked in Propaganda War Over Vaccines
Yes, and a pretty damn “no-holds-barred” one, at that, from the looks of it.
Wow. Calling the response to Covid hysteria and fear-porn and then posting a link to an article positing that the vaccination campaign (however misguided and hackneyed it may actually be) is actually a conspiracy to instigate mass genocide. I’m starting to wonder if I might be the only person here whose irony-meter is still functioning. (Yes, I’m sure enjoying the Age of the Barbarism of Reflection, how about y’all?)
@zerosum: Welcome to the late stage of the Age of the Barbarism of Reflection.
Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance Statement on Recent Washington Post Story about the use of Ivermectin to treat Covid.
Wow, Hunter Biden really fell down into the depths of some pretty severe depravity. I will admit to doing a pretty poor job of showing up for my life when I was a young man due to the fog of ego-fantasism and social maladjustment in which I mentally lived at the time, but I take some small comfort in knowing that I at least managed to avoid being the sort of hurricane of fuck-uppery that Hunter Biden became.
WRT to the facemask article on the NIH website: Seeing Is Not Necessarily Believing
JHK (whom I almost never bother to read anymore, but the blog-post title was just too click-baity to resist):
Is there not some larger — very large — question as to how this Manchurian Candidate with failing mental capacities, seemingly run by other figures in the shadows, came to be installed at the head of our government? The USA will not survive as a nation unless we seek to find out.
There are so many ways the USA might and probably will do itself in at this point that the melodramatic question at the end is likely moot.
The news about Prince Philip mostly serves to remind me that when QE2 finally kicks the bucket, I really expect things to start seriously “going south”, because it will be a major signifier of the end of an era.
The USA and Canada could control the virus also the exact same way. But mRNA jabs are not enough to eradicate it. This requires the restoration of good governance and national public health systems.
The USA, take public health seriously??? Never! We’ll let the country burn to the ground first! (As indeed our plutocratic class is doing and has been doing for a long time.)
@a kullervo: I was going to say “Shades of Countess Elizabeth Bathory” in response to that, but the Wikipedia page about her says that accounts of her vampiric activities such as bathing in the blood of young women to preserve her youth, are most likely apocryphal.
The Guardian article was an interesting read, and I find myself in a mindset similar to Ana. I think Covid is very real and very serious, I just don’t think the lockdown strategy is a long-term formula for success in dealing with it. I’m just not very vocal about that because it’s just too easy to end up getting lumped in with all these extremist weirdos. And the fact that the medical establishment is apparently refusing to even consider treating Covid-afflictees with Ivermectin, and the press actively propagandizes against doing so, really has to make you wonder what else might be going on.
I am increasingly of the mind that Covid is something the post-modern world will have to live with for quite a while, as smallpox (a much nastier customer) was for the world of old. I just can’t help wonder just how much more craziness the world will have to go through before the mass of people are ready to accept this unpleasant truth? Maybe one reason they’re militating and propagandizing against the use of Ivermectin is that using it would probably make people calm down a lot more about the pandemic.
The Florida policy has drawn sharp criticism from Fauci, who said it “opened up too quickly” in July. However, the infection control results to date look remarkably similar to California’s, and in some ways better. Through March 28, 9.5 percent of Floridians have been identified as COVID cases. Once we account for the fact that Florida has one of the oldest populations in the country and California has one of the youngest, the death rates with COVID through March 28 are lower in Florida than in California. In fact, the COVID death rate for the under-65 population and the over-65 population are both lower in Florida than in California.
Some think of lockdowns as the only possible way to protect the population from exposure to COVID risk. In reality, the lockdowns in California and elsewhere have served to protect only a portion of the population—the rich.
I am not surprised to learn any of this. Covid is just too contagious, and if lockdowns do anything, they only delay the inevitability of letting nature take its course. I know how cold-hearted that sounds, as nature is often as mean as a rattlesnake, but I think going for such a long time without a major war, famine, or pandemic has made us “go soft” about the harsher realities that are involved in living in this world.
Even countries that strive for the laudable goal of supporting their locked-down citizens with government money probably won’t be able to keep that up for very much longer. Even MMT states that if the government mints too much money in proportion to the amount of economic value being created, there will be inflation. And lockdowns by definition mean less value being created.
Approving HCQ or Ivermectin would have prevented everyone else from getting their vaccine approved and laughing all the way to the bank.
Yep, and those are the dirtbags who should be reviled for “trying to kill grandma”.
From the Matt Stoller article:
The answer to addressing the problem of thinned out supply chains is to recognize that hyper-efficient globalization inherently carries the downside of unpredictable shortages, geopolitical tension, and supply disruptions. And then redesign our global trading order to make it less efficient and more resilient.
Probably most people who are regulars here know this, but a lot of people don’t realize that efficiency and resiliency are always a trade-off. Efficiency tends to be popular in eras such as ours where available-energy is declining and so owners and upper-management are looking for easy ways to increase short-term profitability. But eras of declining energy-availability also make the shocks a system must periodically endure even more intense, and this effect will be magnified by taking away from resiliency by enhancing efficiency over every other priority. That’s exactly why we found ourselves not always able to buy our preferred brand (indeed, if any brand at all) of toilet paper, facial tissues, and paper towels during the “panic” phase of the onset of the pandemic.
