With the country reeling in the grip of the Chinese Wuhan Communist Death Monster, grocery-shopping at our local supermarket–sorry, I should say “supermarkets,” because now we’ve got to go to more than one–is getting to me, big-time.
It’s like being poor, only you still have money. You just can’t use it to buy the things you want because they aren’t in the store. It got a primal scream out of me today. Don’t worry–I was alone in my car.
The reason I was in the car was because I had to go back to the store. We needed some sliced roast beef, but the deli department wasn’t working. Instead, they had everything in a “grab and go” bin. And what I grabbed turned out to be wrong, so I had to go back. This time they served me some roast beef because their boss wasn’t looking.
But I also had to go to Whole Foods, for lettuce and paper towels. They only had past-lives recycled paper towels, which cost a mint, and no organic iceberg lettuce at all. And if you needed toilet paper–well, you know about toilet paper. There ain’t any to be had.
This is indescribably tiresome. The folks at the supermarkets are doing their best, and I’m grateful to them. But they can’t sell me what they don’t have.
It would be nice if I could believe any of the reports I find in our free and independent press, whose only mission in life is to help Democrats get back into power. The reports run the gamut from “We’re all gonna die!” to “It’s no big deal and the country’s overreacting,” plus every conceivable position in between. It makes for a rather surreal ambience.
I can only pray it’ll be over soon.
We’re all getting a taste of what it’s like to live under socialism and central planning, i.e., empty shelves and empty promises.
We really must hammer that lesson home.
I came across this on Jon Rappoport’s blog from Amanda:
http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?102096-Heroic-Citizens-Fact-Check-the-LYING-MSM-about-Corona
“Heroic Citizens Fact-Check the LYING MSM about Corona”
“Nothing is going on, quiet, no ambulances racing in, empty, nothing happening…It’s all BS!!!! The MSM is giving the impression that hospitals are war zone, bodies are piling up, we are in the medical crisis of our lives, yet when these people visit their local hospitals, NOTHING is happening, they are ghost towns!! Tons of ambulances just sitting there parked, EMTs hanging out and playing with their phones, etc,”
I’m told MSNBC (or some other bunch of BS noozies) showed footage of a hospital in Italy but said it was New York–and got caught. I’ll have to double-check this one.
Amanda says:
March 30, 2020 at 11:24 am
Thanks Jon–I’ll be dropping links to this!!
Please everyone here, I hope you are sharing this info–the bankers are quickly moving ahead with their agenda.
I’m compiling a master list of citizen videos showing the empty hospitals here http://gold-silver.us/forum/showthread.php?102096-Heroic-Citizens-Fact-Check-the-LYING-MSM-about-Corona
(I also have this in email and am sending it out –if anyone here wants to private message me (by joining that forum, use fake name), maybe you can set up protonmail account w/fake name and I can send you the master list and you can email it out too)
Please wake up the sheep!!
And meanwhile, someone else today reported “seeing” lots and lots of dead bodies being carried out of a hospital in Brooklyn and being loaded onto 18-wheelers.
Is there anyone whose reports I can believe? Certain not the one I’ve just mentioned.
Maybe we should keep score to see which side has the most observers. It’s 50-50, just like the WuFlu.
My life hasn’t changed on bit except there are no sub-teaching jobs available until the next school year. I still walk at the Mall, go to the grocery store, Home Depot, order take out, get gas for my cars, and yesterday took a one hour cruise through the rural areas of OK and AR. I still get WiFi, satellite TV, and the Internet. I received Dennis Prager’s book “Still the Best Hope” in the mail today. It is strange to live my normal life while so many around me are in limbo land.
It’s bizarre and I have no idea what is real. The real question in my mind is not how many people are dying, but how many people are actually infected? They present confirmed cases and numbers that have died, but how do they know how many people have it and are asymptomatic? How many cases will never be confirmed.
Until they have a greater handle on that aspect of it, we are caught between the extremes; is it a lethal plague, or an overreaction to the same sorts of seasonal Coronaviruses and influenzas that kill many thousands of people every year?
One other possibility is that this doesn’t fit into any prior mold. Perhaps it is a highly contagious disease that affects different people differently. Polio was like that, killing some, crippling others, yet leaving many people unscathed.
Two headlines attracted my notice yesterday: Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, both claiming 100-200,000 deaths were likely, even under the best-case scenario. Scary! Scary!
Then I read the damned stories and what they were really saying was, “We don’t know!”
The media have contributed much to the unreality of this situation.
Lies, damned lies, statistics and headlines. (Twain needed to be brought up to date.) 🙂
Headlines are advertising for the story. They are the definition of hyperbole, but sadly, many people never dig any deeper. Even news sources that I find to be reliable, overall, seem to employ exaggerated headlines. It’s a pernicious practice.
No one has the measure of this disease. No one! While some sites post a counter of confirmed cases and deaths, I’d be very curious as to how these statistics compare to those from influenza.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that this disease is nothing to trifle with. There are many reasonable precautions we can take which will help considerably. Just some simple sanitation measures will help with almost any infectious disease and coupled with a bit of what should be common sense we could do a lot to make things better.
Leaders must face some difficult choices. Not everyone will practice good hygiene and common sense isn’t all that common, so they undoubtedly face enormous pressure to take actions which they believe will limit the spread of the virus. Stay at home orders and various types of quarantines probably seem attractive to such political leaders. Couple in the reality vs. perception factor, and a leader might be tempted to act based upon fear of being seen as a do-nothing leader.
I have analyzed this situation to the best of my ability and discussed it with several trusted friends, including one person that has exceptional skills in quantitative analysis. The consensus is that we have overreacted to some degree. My own assessment is that there are reasonable measures which would allow the economy to be less disrupted and still would have a great deal of efficacy in stemming the growth of this disease.
I’m truly glad that the FDA has seen fit to approve the use of chloroquine. It is alleged to be quite effective in treating this disease and opening it to wider use will serve to prove the matter, one way or another. It seems promising.
To my way of thinking the open questions are as follows:
When will it peak?
If China can be taken at its word, the crisis has passed there. Hopefully by May 1, we’ll be on the downhill slope and we can start getting back to normal.
How fast can the economy recover from this?
I’m concerned about the effects of panic. I’ve watched the media talk the American people into recession several times in the last few decades. Hopefully this doesn’t happen again. There was a Tom Clancy novel called Executive Orders, about Ebola being used as a weapon of bioterrorism against the US, and the story played out along very similar lines, with the president being forced to back draconian measures restricting freedom of movement. It’s an interesting and informative read in the context of the present situation.
I believe that the economy can grow furiously after this situation clears. What is more, the folly of having become so dependent upon a hostile foreign power for manufactured goods may lead to more manufacturing in the US, which might help to give greater impetus to economic growth.
Will life ever be the same again?
I would say yes and no. Every time there is a shakeup, we come out of that shakeup with a new normal. The economic upheavals of the ’70s changed our economy, but the economy of the ’80s was quite successful and we experienced decades of growth thereafter.
Things will change. I believe that there will be renewed attention to sanitation and the prevention of disease transmission. The generation that saw the Spanish Influenza firsthand had an awareness that was passed forward to their offspring. It’s all but forgotten, but up until the mid ’50s, Polio rampaged through the populace killing and crippling otherwise healthy people. The Salk vaccine changed things for the better in a dramatic fashion.
While I don’t want to live in fear, I believe that greater awareness of disease transmission might be a force for good, provided that people operate with accurate information and are not victim to ignorance and rumor. Diseases play by a set of rules and few people are aware of these rules. Viruses are much different than bacterial infections and people need to be aware of how various pathogens operate in order to have the best chance of taking the right precautions.
My official guesstimate on this is that effective treatments will save the lives of many persons afflicted with the virus and that this will happen in the short term. If chloroquine lives up to its promise, a SARS-CV2 infection could mean a regime of inexpensive medication and prove to be no more disruptive than any number of mild seasonal diseases once that treatment is in common use. I could see this happening in the time-frame of 1-2 months.
A vaccine will take longer, but might prove to be well worth the effort. Polio and Smallpox died out quickly when a vaccine was developed. Hopefully we’ll achieve the same with this disease.
But the “new normal” may well shake certain institutions to their very foundations.I haven’t been to the office in two weeks and have little to no need to go there. I’m working some long days from my recliner. The efficiency of teleworking, may prove to be an economic boost.
I would expect an uptick in home-schooling after this, as well. It’s happening to some extent already and I think that people may find it to their liking. If this happens, taxpayers may come to question the need to fund an inefficient and ineffective school system.
Also, I expect to see persons leaving churches in favor of worshipping in smaller groups. Once again, it’s already happening and I wonder how many people are going to question the logic of supporting the overhead of a big building as a worship place. Once people find out that you can buy your own wine and unleavened bread, there may be a permanent shift away from large churches and a move to worship in a manner more consistent with that of first century Christians.
Can anyone argue convincingly that the nooze media and the Democrat Party (the same thing, really) are **not** trying to talk America into a panic? They are rooting for our economy to tank. I do wish people realized that!
I’m certain of it.
Meanwhile, far more people are being infected with, and even dying of, the “regular” seasonal flu, and no one seems to care. In fact, I’ve been feeling pretty crummy myself for a few days, but not with Wuhan symptoms, so I know that if (God forbid) I do get really sick, there’s no point in even trying to see a doctor. “Shelter in place” may become “die in place” for some people at this rate. (Pardon my grumpiness.)
Don’t you dare fail to get better!
Can’t wait for this to be over too