My mind is scarcely any less cluttered and confused than anyone elses at present. Pardon me then if I open with several desultory observations.
Item: The Peoples Republic" of China purchased plant and equipment in northern Italy and then proceeded to transport 100000 workers to the region from... Wuhan! My single source for this stunning and acutely relevant (ergo deliberately suppressed) information was Daniel Horowitzs Conservative Review podcast of March 13. The modus operandi implied in the report by the way is indeed distinctly Red Chinese. The PRC mafia has used it throughout Africa: bribing corrupt officials with lavish public works" projects in return for the rape of Africas natural resourcesthen constructing said projects with imported Chinese who move on when the job is done (done as cheaply as possible: a new soccer stadium will fall apart in ten years) and leave the locals without any knowledge of how to make repairs or operate technology. Read Howard Frenchs Chinas Second Continent.
Its anyones guess as to how many contagions such imperialist rapine has spread to Africa or transported from Africa to other parts of the world. Of course these exploitative tactics have also brought thousands and thousands of temporary Chinese laborers and advisors" to Chinas new BFF Irananother nation hit very hard by COVID-19.
Item: Chinese cities have the most polluted air on earth. This is a generalization to be sure; and as a generalization it is unassailable. One may confirm it by consulting any undoctored satellite photo and observing the yellow haze permanently gathered around Chinas coasts. Cars were banned from the streets of Beijing briefly before the start of the 2008 Olympics and additional efforts were made to mop up the filthy skies just above the Olympic stadium for opening ceremonies. Its a safe further generalization therefore that every Chinese living in an urban area has respiratory problems or a tendency thereto. Not that we will ever know an accurate tally of the total deaths in China due to COVID-19... but any genuine figure would inevitably be skewed by the severe propensity of this oppressed and abused people to contract lung disease.
Gordon Chang communicated reports on Frank Gaffneys Secure Freedom Radio broadcast (March 18) that Chinese police are now cracking open small apartments to find piles of corpses. These are the remnants of families brutally quarantined in a small space with a single infected member. Were such mortality figures ever to be tabulated honestly and objectively we of course would emerge with no useful analogue to the diseases effects upon a free society observing modern humane health standards. Chinas experience of the virus teaches us little and the mythical experience published by the Chinese Communist Party teaches us less than nothing.
Once again almost no one has mentioned these generaland extremely relevantfacts within my hearing. On the contrary most media outlets are buying Chinese propaganda lock stock and barrel as if only Italians and Japanese (whose cities are also far from unpolluted) have died.
Item: For the single most significant variable in discussing mortality rates is preexisting respiratory conditions. Not age. Naturally there is a considerable overlap between respiratory problems and age: older people tend to find breathing a little more difficult. My wife and I are both over 65 however and neither of us finds our half-mile path (one way) from doorstep to mailbox a major challenge even though it drops fifty feet and then rises by as much at one juncture. We take this walk daily as well as getting other exercise around our rural propertyand in my case working out for an hour each afternoon. (Feel free to verify my physical status further by viewing my baseball videos on SmallBallSuccess.com where I frequently take a dozen swings off a rapid-fire pitching machine before turning to the camera for narration.) Were certainly not obese Juanita and I and we dont drink or smoke. Were in better shape cardio-vascularly than many a wage-slave in his mid-thirties.
Im starting to take deep umbrage then at the chattering media gracklesmany of them posing as conservativeswho suggest that the over-65 demographic be quarantined. No thank you. How about we go three rounds Steve Hilton and the man left standing gets to quarantine the other to a chair with paracord? (Ive developed a BPH condition as I shared last week; but as long as I dont have to run to the bathroom I like my odds against Cue Ball.) How about in other words we have a massive review of the nations medical database and quarantine everyone with a history of respiratory problems?
Unfortunately that purely facetious remark has real-world resonance: the Trump Administration has already been feeling out the possibility of an alliance with Google to identify at risk" populations. William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC) polled his members last week and found near-hundred-percent resistance to the proposal that citizens expose their medical records to Google in seeking diagnosis of their cold-like symptoms. (Resistance plummeted however when respondents were informed of Trumps interest in the strategy.) Denmark has proceeded so far as to impose universal mandatory inoculationswith precisely what serum I know not since there is no antidote to COVID-19 or strictly speaking to any viral infection. In the reigning lunacy of the times however is it far-fetched to imagine our own CDC Gestapo descending upon our homes with hypodermics or crime-scene yellow tape (or maybe yellow stars)?
Since the broadcast media at least seem uninterested in fine distinctions (age vs. respiratory health Chinese vs. local contamination Western European vs. Third World hygiene) what path is the panicked hysterical lynch mob likely to take and to which households? Who knows? Will young people be incarcerated for Friday-night excursions due to the risks that their behavior poses the collective"? Will the elderly (as defined in some manner no less ad hominem than my cue ball" slur) have a cop monitoring their front door for their own good" or for the good of the many"?
When were already being fed so many raw half-truths and unthawed factoids which of us would be comfortable tendering an arm to soak up whatever Super Nanny has decided to pack into her syringe? Will it contain a cure for Climate Changea euthanasia agent perhaps expertly designed to diminish the amount of human CO2 exhalation?
Item: Speaking of factoids... may I point out that the numerator of a ratio is meaningless with a free-floating denominator? Twenty fatalities out of a group of one hundred is a slaughterhouse; twenty out of a hundred thousand is business as usual in a society that embraces constant high-speed driving and recreational drug use. Inasmuch as most people who contract COVID-19 will register mere cold-like symptoms or no symptoms at all how do we know what proportion of the whole is represented by the few dozen deaths logged so far? Is this virus ten times more deadly than H1N1... or a thousand times less so? When FOX scrolls updated death tallies across the bottom of your screen or local newscasters read the figure from their teleprompter how are we to interpret 68" or 151"? Out of how many infectionsnot confirmed cases" but the real number of cases (i.e. confirmations multiplied by some exponent)? A thousand infections? A hundred thousand? Nobody knows... thats the point.
Item: Speaking of the worthless (at best) broadcast media may one ask whats going on there? Has everything elseBoko Haram Maduros dictatorship smoking volcanoes and earthquakesshut down? While the mainstream media are monomaniacally devoted to proving that Trump is steering the ship of state into shoal waters FOX is equally committed to magnifying the crisis so as to recast Captain Ahab as Lord Nelson. Meanwhile maverick voices like Michael Savage (the world-renowned epidemiologist) are castigating both sides in favor of a bipartisan Armageddon message. And as words collide with words in our swirling electronic black hole of hyper-condensed rhetoric one man transmitting one humble podcast releases the useful information in ten seconds with which I began this long query. After those ten seconds it vanishes. Sic semper veritas.
Item: And speaking of Third World hygiene and major news stories that have disappeared over night... may one inquire as to whether our porous southern border has now been secured against the flood of unvetted invaders from all over the world? No. The answer is no" to inquiry and no" to security. Even legally applying immigrants continue to be admitted and resettled without hesitation. According to Representative Chip Roy we havent (as of March 17) stopped accepting asylum-seekers" from across the Bravo. (Such adventurers I suggest must clearly hope for handouts or opportunities in illegal trafficking now that all business has essentially been shut down on the Fruited Plain.) The President fresh back from a cheery trip to India is meanwhile shoveling more B1 visas in that direction as Americans are forced to stay home from work.
At a time when were told that we need a) to secure our population against unnecessary contact with people from distant lands and b) to prepare our hospitals for a sudden influx of patients and when we are c) likely to suffer shortages in certain drugs because of our dependency upon Chinese manufacturers our border with Mexico remains wide open and our programs to resettle refugees from locales like the Congo and Iraq continue apace. All of the Democratic presidential candidates (though were now down to one and a half) have invited in the whole world to consume what beds and medicines we have left; and President Trump himself is apparently poised to sign an emergency bill that reiterates our need for more immigrants! If our being forcibly quarantined and maybe even inoculated is seriously under consideration because of the situations gravity then why at the same time do we continue to see this mechanism for spreading infection far and wide operating at full strength?
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Look Im not trying to be an uncooperative antinomian cul de cheval... but just because the nations running short of toilet paper doesnt mean that Im going to volunteer my head for service in those nether regions either. Some of what were being told is patent falsehood: no surprise there. Some of it is imbecilically incoherent or contradictorymore so than usual as if a crowded theater were in flames. Some of it is characterized by the conspicuously absentthe large quantity of not told" stirred into the told". And all of it is being flung at us in the recent context of a fraudulent coup attempt the fraudulent conviction of Mike Flynn the fraudulent exoneration of Comey & Co. a fraudulent impeachment a fraudulent promotion of constitutional values by Im with Trump" crypto-statist Republicans the ongoing fraud of Climate Change now endorsed by Kevin McCarthy... fraud fraud fraud fraud fraud. A steady diet of it from both sides of the aisle going at least as far back as Bush Minors weapons of mass destruction" casus belli (and maybe as far back as the details of the 9/11 narrative). Now they" are shutting down our businesses and chasing us indoors. Who are they"? Personally the shutdown works out well for me. In retirement I go to town once a week for groceries; and as I await Their Lordships of the Medical Establishments pleasure to attend to my prostate surgery in a few months my case can scarcely help but be advanced if my fellow citizens are stitched up in a cocoon and not allowed to go glutting hospitals with their coughs and sniffles. Yes this works out well for me. But does it work out well for our republic? For whom I wonder is it working out politically? The Chinese are obviously doing their disinformational best to leave us holding the CV-19 bag; the Democrats and their lackeys in classrooms and newsrooms see a new chance to discredit Donald Trump; the President himself Im guessing is going full Jimmy Carternay full Franklin Rooseveltin an effort to avoid being defamed as the hands-off George Bush of Katrina; the One World Order ultra-rich who patronize Davos every year see a chance to crash every individual economy around the globe; and the Climate Change Nazis (pardon me for repeating this but it should weigh on the mind of any sexagenarian) are likely relishing the excuse to thin out the planets human burden in some highly bureaucratic pseudo-hygienic fashion. Eco-hygiene" has a much more sanitary public-spirited sound to it than euthanasia". On the other hand I dont seriously believe (pace Steve Deace) that the Chinese deliberately launched a pandemic in order to distract attention from their other problems. I see the calamity as the sort of monumental gaffe la Chernobyl that besets totalitarian regimes intent upon suppressing bothersome realities in favor of their fantastical perfection. And the net effect of this particular gaffe I think (I devoutly hope) will redound to the ultimate discredit of the PRC. The Chinese people cannot be happy about the ruthless handling they have suffered from their government during the crisis (which despite the party line is probably far from over). More relevant to our own politics Americans seem ready at last to accept that we need to produce certain essentials here at home whatever price we may have to pay for them at Wal-Mart. I suspect (or is this another devout hope?) that we may even be prepared at long last to accept the folly of throwing open our national gates to every comer. Actually we were already so prepared: a majority of us old and young Democrat and Republican rich man poor man legal Hispanic citizen and redneck hillbilly. Polls have indicated for years that we the people want real borders that really function. What I mean to say then is thatjust maybewere getting mad enough now to insist that our government representatives either step out of their locked conference rooms and do our will or go home. If that sounds optimistic... well I wish it were. President Trump continues to allow the likes of Steve Mnuchin Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy to warble in his ear; and a very plausible outcome of such political tone-deafness may just be that his vast base" dwindles to a puddle in November. President Biden" has never appeared more of a possibility to me in the same way that the dead limb fallen from the sky into the pond made a very satisfactory king for the frogs in Aesops fable. If Mr. Trump emulates Republican strategists" in showing no more sense than a hunk of deadwood we could end up with no national sovereignty at all in a year or two just because those unfulfilled promises of a secure bordercoupled with renewed pious assurances that we need more immigrants"drove voters to self-quarantine on election day.