Mister Roboto
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I wish someone would come up with what the odds would actually be, of a pandemic occurring in an election year, where “protesting” with people from all over your state does not spread the disease but going to church with your local community does.
The virus is 20 times more likely to spread from person-to-person in an indoor gathering than an outdoor gathering. But I still think it’s a better idea to avoid both sorts of gatherings (I certainly do) as too many people are not wearing face-masks even now.
Funny how “protesting” goes in scare quotes when it’s those other people who are doing it.
Definitely can feel it coming. My sense is that people might play it cool through the holidays which is time for home & family anyways. But come January & February, if the wanna-be tyrants in public service don’t ease up then they’ll be in for a world of hurt. Not enough cops to arrest everybody just because the governor wants it so.
I think it’s morally right to avoid crowds and large gatherings whenever possible as long as the pandemic is raging. But government-mandated lockdowns do more harm then good because 1) how do you determine which human interactions are acceptable and which are not and 2) how do you enforce it short of arresting everybody who is out and about? People have to want to socially distance, and if the virus continues its spread because we chose not to, well then, we have only ourselves to blame as a society when the consequences of that have social, political, and economic knock-on effects that we failed to anticipate.
I find this interesting: Dr. Chris Martenson says that YouTube and Facebook have banned his most recent video about the great helpfulness of Ivermectin in treating Covid-19.
While Facebook and YouTube certainly have the legal right to do so as private companies, I still find actions such as these morally redoubtable. The only time I think there is a morally justifiable case for Big Tech/ Social Media to take stuff down is when something promotes negativity and hate without contributing anything worthwhile to the discussion. By no stretch of the imagination whatsoever do I believe that Dr. Martenson’s video could have been described as any such thing.
Peak Oil never went away, the whole picture of it is just more complicated than we thought it was twenty years ago.
Once again, Chris Martenson sums it up better than anybody else.
As to the article about trucking and consumer goods, I will admit to having done the bulk of my Xmas shopping online this year. I get around Milwaukee on the county bus, and at the age of 53, I have well and truly lost any taste I might have had for long, long bus-rides.
My thought for the day on Covid: The virus is known to be especially hard on people with medical preconditions and poor health in general. That’s why I think it hits populous nations with very large gaps between the rich and the poor (being very poor is very bad for your health) such as the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and India, so harshly.
I always thought it was pretty ridiculous that Michael Flynn was somehow guilty of something because he had informal conversations with Russian government officials. Wasn’t that just part of the job he was supposed to do? It really underlined how the whole Russia-Gate thing was just a five-gallon bucket of pure hysteria.
Curiouser and curiouser. The postal worker in Pennsylvania is “recanting his recanting”, but an investigation into his allegations have found very little to nothing to substantiate them.
Sometimes I feel like I’m in an episode of “The Simpsons” that just won’t end. And not one of the good episodes from the nineties.
From WaPo: Postal worker admits fabricating allegations of ballot tampering, officials say. I understand if one is reluctant to trust WaPo as a source, as they have allowed their objectivity to be compromised since 2016 especially, but I would believe them before I would believe some of the sources that seem to be trusted around here.
@Doc Robinson: If insomnia were mental illness, they would have thrown me into the booby hatch by now. 🙂
I did find this news story about electronic voting-machine vote-flipping at a mainstream television-channel news site. Regardless of the parties involved in the actual event, I can very easily believe an account of electronic voting shadiness. This kind of voting has always seemed to me to be made-to-order for election fraud and rigging.
Well, as for this glitch in Wisconsin, I’m going to have a hard to time giving the notion any credence as long as the places on the Internet I find talking about such a thing are right-wing cultist sites and “news” sources. Given the current political climate, it really sound as though “stolen election” claims are as much a bunch of sour grapes as the “RussiaRussiaRussia” gambit of Hillary Clinton’s partisans.
But even if the Democrats did steal the election this time, I really have to wonder why when Republicans steal national elections (2000 and 2004), it’s “You lost, get over it”, but when Democrats supposedly steal elections, it’s suddenly the apocalypse for constitutional representative government.
That said, I’ve thought for quite some time now that the USA really needs a nation-wide system of hand-counted paper-ballots. Because whether it’s actual election fraud or just allegations of fraud meant to undermine the legitimacy of the incoming administration, it ends up being a very unhealthy and corrosive thing to our body politic. Hand-counted paper ballots would do so much to forestall either situation.
There is part of me that agrees with USA Today columnist Christian Schneider that it may well be too late to get a handle on the pandemic in the USA. But there is another part of me that also hopes he’s wrong.
Well, not that anyone especially cares, but on Wednesday, I went and did the thing. I wrote in Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker of the Green Party/ Socialist Party ticket for president when I early-voted at city hall. Every other race on the ballot was pretty much what you would call a “shoo-in”, but on the Federal and state levels, I resolutely voted for neither Republicans nor Democrats.
Here’s a little something for you pandemic-deniers: Staff at overwhelmed Wisconsin hospital urge people to take coronavirus seriously
Your denial of the seriousness of this crisis while hospitals in my home state are being overwhelmed really reminds of high-school kids who think they have the world all figured out because they just read Atlas Shrugged.
@teri: It’s certainly not the most unappealing thing about Biden. The most unappealing thing about Biden is the policies he has promoted over the last four decades.
As I said on Kunstler’s blog yesterday, the establishment’s Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers in the wake of the Hunter Biden e-mails, are really starting to remind me of George W. Bush supporters when the realization was sinking in that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (“The WMDs were moved to Syria!”)
Among the prophesiers, there is clearly a kind of perverse psychic need for the Trump saga to end with a salaciously climatic conclusion. If you are so inclined — that is, if you are so blinkered by four years of mostly self-inflicted psychological turmoil — then Trump is always going to provide a daily deluge of material that could justify your angst. But a tempered and public-spirited media would have developed strategies by now, five years into the theatrical trolling, to avoid withering into a shrieking stupor every time Trump makes a purposefully-provocative offhand remark. If anything, this emotional fragility has only burnished Trump with an unearned mystique. Because by now, what he’s working with is mostly just schtick.
Michael Tracey can be very annoying and tiresome, and more often than not just plain old wrong, which is why I stopped following him on Twitter. But I think that here he gets it largely right.
@Bill7: There’s certainly a lot of reason to think that. For one thing, there’s the Democratic Party’s surrogates and advocates consistently sending out the message on the Internet that “we’re absolutely entitled to your vote no matter what, so fork over, peons!” How is that going to resonate with voters who are the least bit undecided? And for another thing, there’s the fact that Trump volunteers are going around knocking on doors to talk to voters, while the Democratic Party apparatus is doing…what, exactly?
But if this is what the donor class wants, why foment the civil unrest over it? I guess the Occam’s Razor answer to that question is so that the establishment can implement martial law. They certainly have been busy getting their snazzy, new surveillance-state apparatus all fired up and ready to go, so I’m sure they’re horny to start using it in an even bigger way.
I heard about the Biden campaign’s gloomy internal polling numbers. It’s not exactly shocking that voters aren’t responding well to the Democrats running the even-more-senile-than-Trump guy with a running mate (who is likely to be the real effective president at some point) who is an overambitious cop whom nobody likes.
@a kullervo: Fred Reed of “Fred On Everything” infamy iss of the opinion that men have a greater intellectual range while women have a greater emotional range. That means, according to his theory, that the smartest men tend to be smarter than the smartest women, and also the dumbest men tend to be dumber than the dumbest women. By emotional range, he means that woman can be a lot more caring and compassionate than men but are also a hell of a lot meaner than men when roused to long-term anger. YMMV
Funny how consistently it seems to be the case that one’s investment in being on the anti-Trump train seems to correspond rather neatly with one’s attachment to the interests of the professional-managerial class. I don’t like Trump at all, but I was never part of the “Orange Man Bad” crowd because right around the time Trump’s star was rising in 2015, I was starting to realize how sick I was of the PMC and all their self-serving BS.
{sigh} Libertarians will likely be the death of us all. But perhaps it’s what we deserve for constructing an entire society around the cult of the individual.
If you watch this video by Dr. Chris Martenson, you just might come away from it thinking that even if many Covid patients were masking, there might be a lot more Covid patients without masking policies. Remember, the idea behind masking is to afford a measure of protection not to yourself, but to the elderly and people with chronic conditions you encounter in public places.
Even if I’m wrong about face-masking, the only real harm it does is to the egos of right-wing special snowflakes. Compelling people to accept a jab of a vaccine that hasn’t been properly tested, however, is another matter entirely. In such a situation, the government doing the compelling very well could and very likely would be forcing people to take something into their bodies that has the potential do serious and egregious harm. There would be nothing rational whatsoever about such a policy.
Dr. Chris Martenson makes the case for face-mask wearing.
FWIW, here is political YouTuber Kyle Kulinski’s take on the 2020 horse-race. (It’s a nine-minute video.) According to the numbers, the only demographic in which Trump is retaining his dominance is working-class men, whom I am supposing are mostly white and mostly Boomer- and Xer-aged. My own personal gut instincts are telling me that it’s probably a mistake, as Kyle says, to expect 2020 to be 2016, because it’s just not. Back in 2016, I expected Hillary to win but realized Trump could possibly pull it off in an Electoral College “squeaker”, which he did. But the tea-leaves really don’t seem to indicate that sort of thing this time the way they did that time.
We live in a crazy age now, though, and I realize I could be eating these words with steak-sauce and a fine Merlot chaser on the night of November Third.
Political YouTuber Kyle Kulinski on Trump’s illness.
About the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons”, according to Wikipedia.
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a conservative non-profit association founded in 1944. The group was reported to have about 5,000 members in 2014. The association has promoted a range of scientifically discredited hypotheses, including the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS, that being gay reduces life expectancy, that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, and that there is a causal relationship between vaccines and autism. It is opposed to the Affordable Care Act and other forms of universal health insurance.
So there’s that….
You should see the hatred on Facebook, soo many people hoping he doesn’t make it. I’m starting to think these people could be dangerous. They remind me of a parent at the soccer games you used to ref. They don’t know the rules, but its their damn kid and don’t you know they’re always right. Nothing stranger or more embarrassing for a child then to have to ask their parent to leave the park so the game can continue. People have no empathy or self respect anymore.
I pretty much agree. While I have a difficult time feeling especially sympathetic for oligarchs of any stripe, I just don’t see anything worthwhile about schadenfreude.
I do, however, think this is a good occasion to point out why I have such a strong opinion in favor of face-mask wearing and mandates. Yes, ordinary face-masks are more for protecting other people than protecting yourself. But I would point out that Donald Trump spent a lot of time around people who were not “masking”, while Joe Biden’s people have been very scrupulous about it. Biden and his running-mate Kamala Harris both continue to test negative for the virus.
I submit for your reading displeasure “Trump Infects America” in New York Magazine.
Nothing in this comment should be construed as an election endorsement.
Well, I’m sure the atheist-skeptics will just love one of my reasons for the SPD target-date. In the middle of December, the Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto Conjunction in Capricorn will be pretty much over, and I’m wondering if maybe this conjunction is “building up a charge” that will be released at the end of it. I chose three months after mid-December because that is a quarter-turn of the wheel of the year, and it mostly covers the winter, when respiratory diseases are more of a problem.
I really do want to be wrong about the possibility of Covid-19 being another Spanish Flu, and I will be happy to discuss how it panned out over a green beer on Saint Patty’s Day. 🙂 [If we could post GIFs, here is where I would put one of Chief O’Hara from the old “Batman” show exclaiming, “Glory be and begorrah!”]
@Mr. House: My final evaluation of the pandemic will have to wait for until it has to wait, regardless of what anybody on any message-section on the Internet wants to or doesn’t want to hear. Roughly a year from the initial outbreak is not an unreasonable time to wait until making such an evaluation.
The lockdown was a misguided response, so don’t ask me to make heads or tails of it. 🙂
Amy Coney Barrett a feminist icon? Some folks on the Internet have nicknamed her “Aunt Lydia”.
Another note on whether or not Covid is the disaster it was originally forecast to be: It doesn’t appear to be now, but we’re still in the first wave. The Spanish Flu appeared to be the same way in its first wave, but its second wave revealed it to be a substantial pandemic. We have yet to see what Covid serves up for its second wave. The time to keep an eye on it will be between Christmas and Saint Patrick’s Day, IMHO.
I agree that the entire Democratic Party establishment should seriously be in jail right now for elder abuse.
Recently the Spirit spoke to my heart about the social and political climate in this country, and here is how my mind interpreted what They told me: “People’s positions, including yours, are hardening like concrete right now. Let not your heart be troubled nor your mind unfocused by any of it.”
I really think its says so much about the moral bankruptcy of our political divisions that we can’t use HCQ to alleviate coronavirus suffering because “orange man bad”. Though I suppose it also doesn’t help that Big Pharma wants us all to use something more expensive and with a patent on it. Ain’t it fun living in an empire in decline? :-/
A good way to put it is that Hillary Clinton’s partisans from the 2016 election would have us believe that Covid is some sort of civilization-leveling mini-apocalypse. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, would have us believe the whole thing is a “nothing-burger” despite a million dead worldwide after less than a year, with no signs of the death-toll appreciably slowing in countries where the contagion isn’t contained. The truth is somewhere in between those two extremes. While Covid is on track to kill more people than the influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1967, we still shouldn’t conclude at this time that Covid is worse than those. The world is more populous now than it was than by a factor of several billion people, and that a lot of those people are poor means more opportunities for deadly influenza or coronavirus strains to cause suffering and take lives. We’ll just have to see what happens, it would appear.
A good point was made about face-masks that bears repeating: A good, non-expired N-95 mask will protect you and other people (yes, n-95 masks expire at a certain point), but the regular cloth or disposable masks worn properly (no “dick-nose”!) are very helpful in protecting other people. Remember, it’s very possible to be an asymptomatic carrier with Covid. And I support face-mask mandates on the state level, because common face-masks work best for pandemic control when everybody is wearing them.
Lockdowns are risky because they carry risks and harms of their own, are highly questionable in their effectiveness as a long-term strategy, and should only be used locally when the local hospitals and clinics are in danger of being overwhelmed. But feeling harmed or threatened by being compelled to wear a face-mask in a crowded indoor setting or on public transportation suggests a sheer level of right-wing snowflakery that would put the most adenoidal purple-haired social justice warrior to shame.
I would just like to add that I regard Chris Martenson’s coronavirus video-series to be my “go-to” source of information on what’s true about this virus and what’s not. And he presents his thinking on the matter with less ideology than probably anybody else on the Internet.
As I said previously, I think lockdowns don’t really work in the long haul because Covid is so contagious that it’s very easy to lose whatever you gained by locking down once locking down has ended. Universal face-mask wearing (just as long as they are actual face-masks that were designed for that purpose, even cloth ones) are thought to have a lot to do with why Japan has been relatively successful in containing the virus.
I think that the reason the US has been so hard-hit is because economic neoliberalism has hollowed out our capacity for resiliency in the face of crises, and extreme wealth inequality has created a very large mass of people in very poor health. It also doesn’t help that as a society, we’re just not very good at all about taking care of ourselves in terms of health (both mental and physical).
