Justin Trudeau and his family flee the Canadian capital for a secret location amid security concerns as 50,000 anti-vaccine mandate 'Freedom Convoy' truckers march days after being dismissed as a 'small fringe minority'.
At the risk of using a cliché, this is real banana republic stuff. The dictator discovers his power isn't as great as he'd thought, so when the enraged peasants show up, he runs away.
Trudeau's miscalculation is the same as the woke tyrants here in the US. There are more ways to communicate than voting and posting on social media. If you don't have a brutal security apparatus to enforce your edicts, but you behave like you do, eventually those communications channels will be used. Like this.
When his secret police collapsed, Romanian, socialist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's tyrannical demands lost their power. Nicky ended up in front of a firing squad, still barking orders to the peasants who completely ignored them. It's the same scene in Canada and parts of the US, only without the firing squad.
If you're planning on telling everyone what to do about nearly everything in their lives, you will eventually need a whole bunch of devoted thugs. If you can't beat and imprison people like these uppity truckers when they defy you, then flight becomes your only option.
A large group of Canadian truckers are, even now, descending on Ottawa to protest all of the Wuhan Flu restrictions placed on them and their fellow Canadians by the super-smart laptop users in their national capital. It's a phenomenally stupid waste of time.
Like almost every other country, Canada has suffered through two years of WuFlu lockdowns. Their supply chain is in just as much distress as ours. Their industries have taken a huge hit and they've incurred serious debt and more than enough unemployment. Only a complete idiot would think that shutting down their roads so a massive convoy of big rigs could drive across the country to slam into Ottawa's traffic and shut down the capital was a good idea.
And yet, that's exactly what the laptop-users encouraged. They cannot comprehend that all the toys they buy online and the nummy-nums at their grocery stores are made by people doing real, physical tasks. They don't understand that truckers bring them their goodies and noms. They think that it all comes from them passing this or that bill or signing some executive order which causes the money printer to go, "BRRRRR."
Truckers go home and put on your masks! Money printer will go brrrrr!
After two years of lockdowns, anyone with half a brain in their heads would have bent over backwards to make things easier on the ignorant trolls who make the stuff and ship it around the country. All they had to do was lift the restrictions and then head out for French-Thai fusion entrees at their local four-star restaurant. An ape could have figured that out.
Well, apes appear to be in short supply in Ottawa, so instead, they've got a huge mess on their hands. In the end, they'll have to give in to the truckers demands for freedom anyway. Reality will have it's one, deciding vote and the empty shelves and hopelessly gridlocked capital will trump all of their talk shows and social media posts.
Canada's progressive leadership, headed by their airhead PM, Justin Trudeau, have to be run over by a convoy of big rigs before they figure out that giving the peasants some freedom is what allows them to enjoy their unearned sense of superiority over the Normals.
What a waste of time.
We've Seen This Movie Before
Here in the States, deep blue, racial-justice-practicing city governments are starting to understand that they really needed all those cops they chased away. In a similar vein, the Canadian Elites will figure out that without trucks and functioning roads, their Foie Gras Pad Thai can't be made because the goose livers are out in the boondocks in some place called Nova Scotia and their noodles are stuck in Alberta.
As I watch our blue cities fall apart, it all seems so predictable. If you rage against the police, handicap them with ever-stricter rules and allow criminals free reign, cops are going to quit. Either they'll quit by retirement and resignation or they will quit by not enforcing the law.
If the law isn't enforced and most of your population was raised in homes without fathers, you're going to see an increase in violence.
If you see an increase in violence, peaceful, productive people will leave.
If peaceful, productive people leave, you lose tax revenue.
If you lose tax revenue, your public property decays and services have to be cut.
None of these require leaps of faith. They are all natural consequences. My conclusion is that the Elites have no idea how anything works any more. The more time you spend in top-notch universities, the less you know about reality.
The world is going insane. James Tubbs is a sexual predator. He now claims to be Hannah Tubbs. Because of that ... well, you can read it here:
Prosecutors say Tubbs walked into the bathroom of a Denny’s in 2014 and grabbed the 10-year-old by the throat, locked her in a stall, and put her (sic) hand down the girl’s pants. Tubbs stopped when another person walked into the restroom, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Because Tubbs began identifying as female after she (sic) was taken into custody, and Gascon refused to try her as an adult, Tubbs was sentenced to two years in a juvenile facility. In L.A. County, juvenile facilities can house both females and males, but in separate areas. Tubbs will be housed with the females.
Emphasis mine.
This is what James, err, Hannah looks like these days.
It must have been a bad hair day. She's clearly not looking her best.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is living up to its reputation for being a trifle backwards by pretending it's still 1960. Pope Francis has organized a Synod on Synodality where, as I understand it, we're going to listen to people kvetch. Here in San Diego, we were told that special attention would be given to "marginalized" communities.
At the parish meeting where this was announced, I very nearly blurted out, "Will Catholics be allowed to speak?" simply out of reflex. Where I work, where our kids went to school and in the culture all around us, Catholics are the marginalized community. Our Diocese, no doubt planning a bus trip to Mississippi so our adherents of Modern Nazi Race Theory racial justice crew can fight to integrate the lunch counters there, has no idea what it's like to be a Catholic in the year 2022.
Just wait until they find out about that Uber for porn, OnlyFans and how our daughters are being told it's just fine to become online prostitutes.
Powerline had a post up yesterday discussing Harvard's latest attempts to justify their racist admission policies. If you haven't kept up, Harvard is alone among the elite universities in that they made the mistake of keeping their admissions records instead of incinerating them to keep others from finding out how they decided who gets into the school.
A group of Asian parents sued Harvard because they were certain their kids were being cheated and they were right. An Asian needs to score 350 points higher on their SATs than a black kid. In addition to using grades, extracurricular activities and test scores, Harvard employs a personality scoring system where they rate candidates for their leadership, courage and possibly hygienic qualities. According to these scores, Harvard thinks Asians are smelly, ambitionless cowards. Because of that, Asian overall scores are dragged down to where the 350-point advantage in the SATs is required to get in to the school.
The case is being heard by the Supreme Court. Depending on whether John Roberts' spine is functioning that day and Brett Kavanaugh's hangover has subsided, Harvard could be in deep kimchi. Worried, Harvard's president, Lawrence Bacow, had this to say after changing into some dry pants:
Harvard celebrates and nurtures individuality as intensely as this nation. Those who challenge our admissions policies would ask us to rely upon a process far more mechanistic, a process far more reliant on simple assessments of objective criteria. Each of us is, however, more than our numbers, more than our grades, more than our rankings or scores. Ask yourself, how much have you learned from other people at this University? How much have you grown from conversations across difference? Would these conversations have been as rich if you had shared the same interests, the same life experiences, and—yes—the same racial or ethnic background as your fellow community members? This is why applications of any kind routinely go beyond mere numbers to include interviews, samples of work product, recommendations, and references. Narrowly drawn measures of academic distinction are not the only indicators of individual promise.
Wow. So blacks are basically conversation pieces? Note that nothing in that paragraph discusses the primary reason admission criteria exist in the first place - to winnow out students who are doomed to failure before they get in and are crushed.
We know that kids who are admitted to elite schools with scores well below their peers typically flunk out or change their majors into easy, but useless ones, those blacks are being fed into an educational meat grinder just so the other students can talk to them from time to time.
It might be less expensive and less damaging to simply set up "talk to marginalized people" booths around the campus and hire properly diverse people to man, err, woman, err xer them. Then you could admit only qualified students, you wouldn't have to watch whole groups wash out, the unqualified wouldn't leave with massive student loan debts and the students would still get all of the benefits of diversity, such as they are.
It would look kind of like this.
Nah. What's the fun in that? Let's admit kids with mediocre test scores and have them compete with the ultra-smart set. What fun it will be for them to join study groups where everyone else understands the material quickly and easily while they struggle*!
#compassion
As a bonus, those blacks who aced the SATs will always have the stigma of their peers wondering if they were beneficiaries of Harvard's anti-Asian racism. Yay.
* - This was me in grad school. I was taking theoretical math classes. Real Analysis came pretty easily, but Abstract Algebra might as well have been taught in Russian. My classmates, much better than I was, understood the stuff. I hated studying with them because it kept reinforcing my inadequacies.
This article over at ZeroHedge was fascinating. It deals with the excess deaths we've seen among younger people that are not due to the Wuhan Flu. Drugs, alcohol and racial justice figure prominently.
The death rate is up by 40 percent from pre-pandemic levels according to Scott Davison, chief executive of OneAmerica, a major insurance company based in Indianapolis. During an online news conference on Dec. 30, 2021, Davison said the change was unprecedented.
“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business,” he said.
OneAmerica sells life insurance to employers nationwide, and similar figures are found throughout the industry.
“The data is consistent across every player in that business,” Davison said. “And what we saw just in the third quarter—we’re seeing it continue into the fourth quarter—is that death rates are up 40 percent over what they were pre-pandemic. Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be a 10 percent increase over pre-pandemic. So 40 percent is just unheard of.”
This 40 percent figure doesn’t represent folks dying of old age, but is instead a reflection of deaths in working-age adults, aged 18 to 65. However, what’s responsible for the alarming spike in fatalities in this age group isn’t clear.
Just eyeballing the graphs, it looks like drugs killed an additional 25,000, booze took out 8,000 and racial justice whacked 5,000. That's ~40,000 stiffs that can be linked to the lockdowns.
Meanwhile, the WuFlu took out 100,000.
Since the WuFlu goes after people already weakened by age, obesity or other health problems and drug / alcohol abuse weakens you, how many WuFlu deaths happened only because the victim was using? Looking at the drug overdoses alone, it's a roughly 33% overdose increase during the lockdowns. A quick Google search suggests that 31,900,000 Americans use illegal drugs. If a third more users cranked up their use of crank to the point that they crankily croaked, what happened to the ones that cranked it up just a wee bit shy of croaking?
33% of 31,900,000 is around 10 million people. If that many jacked up their jacking-up, that would be 10 million people all primed and ready for the WuFlu morgue. 100,000 is only 1% of that total. It's not farfetched to believe that a good number of the WuFlu deaths were from addicts.
Could using methamphetamine, cocaine and other stimulants put people at risk for COVID-19?
Very likely yes. The use of stimulants such as methamphetamine, cocaine, and amphetamine constricts the blood vessels and may increase the risk for stroke, heart attacks, abnormal heart rhythm, seizures, and other conditions that may lead to more severe heart or lung damage in someone with COVID-19.
According to a September 2020 analysis of electronic medical records, hospital patients who had received a diagnosis of cocaine use disorder in the past year were 6.5 times more likely to have COVID-19 than those without. More research is needed to better understand the relationship between stimulant use and COVID-19.
I have to say, the last sentence made me laugh out loud.
"Hey, science person, is it a bad idea to shoot up during a pandemic?"
"Yes. Also, give me money to keep my lab going so we can give you more absolutely obvious answers to stupid questions."
The begging for money never stops with us science types.
The CDC, probably awash in cash right now, has this to say about toking with pneumonia.
The use of opioids can cause slow breathing, and can even result in ineffective breathing, which can lead to decreased oxygen in the blood, brain damage, or death.
The use of stimulants, such as cocaine, amphetamine, and methamphetamine, can cause acute health problems such as stroke, heart attacks, abnormal heart rhythm, and seizures, as well as more chronic conditions, such as heart or lung damage.
The use of drugs by smoking or vaping (for example, heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana) can make chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, and other lung conditions worse.
Thanks, Captain Obvious.
The head of the CDC. Please send him more money so they can keep researching whether or not it's a good idea to stuff live civet cats down your pants.
So, in retrospect, prior to the advent of the vaccines, we could have significantly improved our survival rates by telling people to get fit, lose weight and put down the needle. What did we do? We closed our parks and masked our children.
SciENcE!
In San Francisco, the progs are showing us how to follow the ScIEnCE! by handing out free needles to junkies and giving them "safe" spaces to inject.
You know, you ignorant, redneck bigots could learn a thing or two from them.
Man, am I struggling to write lately. As soon as I removed my self-imposed mandate to blog every day, my writing dried up and blew away. Argh.
On with the show.
At the gym, I've been listening to The Practice And Presence Of God, which is a collection of letters of Nicholas Hermann, a 17th Century Carmelite monk. A lot of it is good, particularly where it deals with his ennui about prayer. Some of it I completely oppose, particularly the parts about being unworthy.
If you're unworthy and you were created in the image of God, in a world created by God for the purpose of finally creating you, aren't you telling Him He screwed up? Do you think He wanted to create unworthy things? As I listened to one particular letter where Brother Hermann was writhing around in self-abasement, I couldn't help but think of this classic tagline from Laurel and Hardy.
All the while the dude is talking about how worthless he is in the eyes of God, he's actually absolving himself of any real responsibility. After all, how can a worthless, cringing worm be expected to do anything worthwhile? It's like, when he screws up, he's telling God, "Well, here's another nice mess You've gotten me in to!"
And what kind of evangelism does that create? "Hi, can I talk to you about Jesus? Ever since I turned my life over to Christ, I've felt like an unworthy, cringing worm. Join us and you can feel like an unworthy, cringing worm, too!"
Bah. The Big Dude created me for a purpose, to be a member of His team and do worthwhile things. He may be the Boss Man, but He doesn't see me as unworthy. Think about what it would be like to be a leader at work and have cringing worms working for you.
"Johnson, I need you to meet with the clients and let them know their muskrat steamer will be a week late due to parts shortages in Burkina Faso."
"Oh, sir, I am but an unworthy, cringing worm before you. Everything I do is worthless offal, steaming in the darkness of my unenlightened mind."
"Pull yourself together, man! Go meet with the clients and renegotiate the contract!"
It would be exhausting to have to do that all the time.
We're not unworthy, cringing worms. We're not the coach, but we're on the team, chosen for a reason.
Since I'm no longer contributing to my retirement fund, I can't wave it away and say, "Well, that just makes the stocks I'm buying cheaper!" I've been wondering whether or not I should park my money and wait for the rout to end.
Then again, is this just a temporary rout?
What happens when Omnicorn fades away in the US, just like it has in South Africa and now in the UK? The UK recently ditched all Wuhan Flu restrictions.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that England will scrap all restrictions, including mandatory isolation.
That will happen here, despite the best efforts of our bed-wetting Elites. My thinking is that when it does, it will have a significantly positive impact on the market and the economy. The empty shelves in the stores are at least partially due to workers out of action due to Omnicorn infections. Dittos for the supply chain crisis in general. Omnicorn is a very short, very sharp spike, so we will be past the problem in a couple of weeks.
Instead of joining the panic, I'm going to sit tight. There could be something else at work and I might be dead wrong, but that's my thinking right now.
Bonus Data
Check out all the sub-1.0 reproduction rates for the WuFlu. It's glorious. Note that Rt represents the number of new infections created by each infection. If Rt = 2, it means that you getting sick gets 2 more people sick. If Rt is less than 1, the green parts of the graphs, it means the infection is receding as each sick person gets less than 1 other person sick.
Check out this map. Dixie for the win! Darker gray means lower Rt, redder red means higher Rt.
... while demanding the rest of us compliment you on how far you've come.
The most recent Daily Wire Backstage podcast featured an interesting discussion of sexual roles and the gender / trans craze.
As a society, we've done our best to blur the lines between men and women to the point that it's gauche to suggest that there are performance or behavioral expectations on a person because of their sex.
We've also made it hip to identify as all kinds of genders - asexual, pansexual, bisexual, trans and so forth. Not only that, but your gender identity makes a claim on the rest of us. You may look like a lumberjack, but if you tell us you identify as a woman, we have to call you Sarah and use the pronouns she/her.
Current Jeopardy! champ, Tom Schneider, says he's a chick. He doesn't look or act like one, but we're all expected to play along. If we don't, we're bigots.
Think about what this means. If some woman says she identifies as a man, she won't be expected to do anything at all. She won't have to be brave, be stoic, have a career, support a family or have ambitions. There's no cost to her to run around telling us her name is Luke and she's a dude. The cost is all on us as we now have to call her by her new name and use her pronouns. She will also get plenty of praise and support. It's all upside.
Because there are no fixed sex roles any more, all of these new terms essentially mean nothing except that if you take one as your own, you're a big, fat hassle for the rest of us. You become a walking landmine of offense and triggering in exchange for ... nothing.
If there are no accepted gender roles, you haven't really gone anywhere in your quest to be your authentic self.
As a childhood connoisseur of hospitalization for respiratory and digestive tract issues, I've begun to wonder about the recent round of hospitalizations for the Wuhan Flu. Consider these:
The thing is a virus, so you don't treat it with massive doses of antibiotics.
The patients aren't struggling to keep things down, so they could force fluids orally, at home.
Being in a hospital bed sucks. It's not restful. You'd get better rest at home, in your own bed, watching Claude Rains movies or playing Bubble Blast 2.
So just what is the hospital providing? Why are they so impacted with patients for the Omnicorn round? It's an upper respiratory virus which means it's not life-threatening like pneumonia.
In the comments, Tim makes a typically cogent point. "The COVID makes them susceptible to pneumonia, and then the pneumonia is what finishes things. It looks like the dominant forms of pneumonia are the bacterial forms, which most certainly are treated with antibiotics." That would explain the hospitalizations, at least in some cases.
Here's my hypothesis. Thanks to media and government hysteria, many people, perhaps most, are in a state WuFlu paranoia*. That's produced a strong bias towards testing and going to the hospital. Once you arrive at the hospital, malpractice insurance gives them a strong bias towards admission. If they send you home and you croak, they could face lawsuits. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I'm coming at this from a layman's point of view, but I just can't see what good it does to go to the hospital with Omnicorn.
Bonus Thoughts Which Contradict My Original Thoughts**
So how about this: The massive, localized jumps in hospitalizations are due to a combination of Chinese math infection rates and lost staffing due to infections. Omnicorn's most endearing feature is its short, sharp infection spike. That is, it infects a ton of people all at once, but only for a short period of time. A very small percentage of a large number of people, i.e. a small subset requiring hospitalization of a huge number of infected, is enough to wipe out the safety margin of hospital beds.
Add to that a significant number of nurses and doctors out of action due to their own Omnicorn cases and you get a perfect, if very temporary storm.
I think my original analysis was wrong. It's not paranoia plus lawsuits, it's simply Omnicorn doing what it does best - infect everyone, all at once.
* - Yes, the thing can be very dangerous, but only to a very well-defined subset of the population.
** - Remember, this blog is here to work through ideas, not defend bad ones.
In August of last year, I blogged about being diagnosed with arthritis in my right knee. I was limping so badly that wife kitteh took to calling me Stumpy after Walter Brennan's character in Rio Bravo.
Figuring I had reached my last chance in life at weightlifting, I started to hit the gym in earnest. I'm at month five now, so I thought I'd share a summary of the results.
If you're on the fence about doing this sort of thing, I hope I can encourage you to give it a try.
Benefits: I've noticed some serious gains. Many shirts that used to be loose are now tight around my arms. Middle son kitteh, who used to row and lift weights, said he can really notice the definition in my muscles. Most importantly, wife kitteh likes the results.
The Knee: I no longer limp. I have no pain at all in the knee. I had not anticipated that. I began this workout regimen as a lost cause sort of thing, doing it just to defy aging. Instead, it's been total success, particularly knee-wise.
Schedule: Currently, I'm going to the gym 5-6 days a week. I lift for an hour a day and do about 20 minutes of cardio on the treadmill. I do abs every day, roughly 300 crunches. The end result is that my abs are constantly painful. Doing some research today, I discovered I'm totally overworking them and maybe the rest of my body as well.
Muscle Grouping: I'm using a 3-day cycle. I start every day with an ab workout of 3 exercises, 4 sets each, 20-40 reps, depending on the machine. That is complete overkill. I haven't been deliberately resting at all. Instead, it works out that there are usually 1-2 days per week that I can't make it to the gym.
Here's the day grouping. Working out 6 days a week would mean I hit each of these twice.
Back and biceps. 5 exercises, 4 sets, ~12 reps per set for the back. 4 exercises, same plan for the biceps.
Legs and shoulders. 4 exercises for the legs, 3 for the shoulders. I know the legs are hugely important, but as I have to use machines to provide my older body with stability, I run out of machines in the gym after 4 exercises. Shoulders are such a small muscle group that only doing 3 exercises doesn't bother me.
Chest and triceps. 5 exercises for the chest, 4 for the triceps.
Weight Loss: I wanted to lose 20#, dropping from 227 to 205. I'm around 216 now and pretty happy with the results. I've discovered that I've lost my taste for almost all sweets and fried food. For example, after about 6 French fries, I've had enough. Potato chips are out of the question. Thick coatings on fried chicken or fish are out of the question.
Supplements: I drink a whey protein shake, the one from Costco, every day. I also do a Danani yogurt each morning in addition to my normal meals. Those add about 30g of protein to my diet. It's not enough, from what I've read. I'm not very disciplined taking vitamins, but we eat a lot of fresh food, so that's probably not a big deal. I'm going to look into recovery supplements, but I'm skeptical of their utility.
6-Pack Abs: One of the sites I read today said that everyone has abs, it's just that almost all of us have a layer of fat hiding them. As far as the abs are concerned, weight loss will be more important going forward than an insane workout regimen for them.
Changes Coming: I've got to give the abs a rest. I'm going to skip the next three days and then only do the abs on leg day. The rest seem to be working out just fine. Yesterday was back and biceps and today my back is pretty sore. I know from experience that in two more days it will be fine and ready for another workout.
Success Metric: In a month, my goal is to be down around 212# and be working out 5-6 days a week without prolonged soreness like I've got right now. Looking at myself in the mirror, it's the weight loss, particularly around the abs, that will make the most difference.
Anywho, I didn't mean this post as a self-congratulatory piece, but more as encouragement for you. I was fat and flabby when I started and really disliked the way I looked. It's taken a bit of self-denial to do this, but it's all been worth it. There are still days when I really, really, really don't want to go to the gym, but when I get there, I enjoy it.
Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLApic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K
More on the implications in a second, but first, here's the scoop on how easy it is to break into a shipping container on a railcar.
They don't lock them. They seal them with a cuttable bolt. You can't put a lock with a key on every container that crosses the country or sea. They have to be opened by the delivery location easily and without a key.
This is what a real insurrection looks like. You've lost control of important nodes in your shipping lines to the enemy. That recommendation, "They have to not stop or move faster" is the sort of thing you tell convoys driving through guerrilla-controlled territory.
To all the people who said that a civil war would be over quickly and the blue, Federal forces would use air strikes to crush the red rebels, take a good, long look at that video. That's reality. Just what will you strike with your F-15s? How will you target the enemy?
Too Many Places To Defend
When a modern army moves into enemy territory, one of the things they have to do is occupy a chain of hills in order to give them places to put their line-of-sight (LoS) communications nodes. LoS comms have the highest bandwidth. SATCOM is all well and good, but there are often too many users for too little aggregate bandwidth. Drones can be used as relays, but you need to have them in the sky 24/7.
The LoS comms nodes all must be defended and supplied. As you invade, you keep having to drop off units behind you to protect your communications and ever-lengthening convoy routes. Each unit left behind is a unit not available for fighting at the front.
Now instead of an invasion, solve those same problems in the US where some of your cities are effectively in revolt.
When that thought first popped into my head - some of our cities are in revolt - it felt like the ravings of a conspiracy nut. Then, after a little thought, I thought it apt. In SanFran, Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore and NYC, we have books and books and books of laws, but many of them are unenforced, thanks to progressive district attorneys. Shoplifting and carjackings are out of control. Chicago is solving about 1 in 6 of its murders. That means you can kill with near impunity. How about this gem from Philly?
Check out the places where the cops can't defend you: residential driveways, parking lots and garages and gas stations. If they can't protect you there, just how are they going to defend the railyards? In the bump and run scenario, the only safe place is a police station.
Fort Apache, the Bronx, indeed.
John Adams For The Win
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." - John Adams.
When we allowed the left to destroy the family, all of this was set in motion.
For the life of me, I can't figure out what it is that the folks in the CDC, just to use one example out of thousands, think they're preserving when they jammed absolute rubbish down our throats in the past and now backtrack and tell us what many of us knew at the time. Dig this.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged that over 75% of COVID deaths were people “who had at least four comorbidities” and were “unwell to begin with.”
Walensky made the remarks during an appearance on Good Morning America.
“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities,” said Walensky. “So really these are people who were unwell to begin with.”
Clay Travis at Outkick pins the tail on the donkey, but that still doesn't help me explain why.
The CDC director just said over 75% of “covid deaths” occurred in people with at least four comorbidities. Since Biden can’t shut down covid, suddenly all this data is getting shared publicly. pic.twitter.com/NKvproy3lx
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 10, 2022
Update: Some have claimed that her statements were taken out of context and only refer to vaccinated deaths, but the general data show almost the same thing - heaps of deaths with comorbidities. Panicking the general population was unwarranted.
The dementia patient we have as president is floundering and when the election heats up, the airwaves will be full of this supercut.
His promise was clearly stupid at the time, but the CDC and others rallying to his defense only deepens my confusion.
Just what is it that they're defending? Inflation? $30T of debt? Record-setting murder rates in 12 of our large cities? I could go on and on, but I think that's enough to make the point. I can understand the instinct to fight for your blue team, but when the blue world is crumbling all around you, why keep up the charade?
I've written before about our ultra-progressive, modern Nazi friends who have sworn off their Mecca, San Francisco, because it's such a disaster. Now they've decided to change their minds about the transgender mania because it's happening to some of their young relatives and they can see the damage. Reality is having its say and these proggiest of progs are recoiling at the results.
Fair enough. We're watching them get red pilled in real time. They're complete racial justice maniacs, so maybe the ultimate red pill will be to realize that they've supported the slaughter of half the black population through abortion all these years. After all, what difference does it make if half of all black babies are killed in the womb today or born and shoved into gas chambers when they're five? It's all the same. Dead is dead.
Going back to that interview with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, she's clearly fighting a rear guard action, defending the regime. By regime, I mean the whole Gramscian-trampled progressive power structure including the government, the massive corporations, the media, the universities and the entertainment and education industries. But why? What is it that she's actually defending?
This is from Amsterdam, but it could be from anywhere. The people are asking to be allowed to go back to their normal lives of work, school and recreation. The police are beating and using attack dogs to suppress them. For what? Omnicorn blows right through masks and vaccines. What are the cops defending? What is the CDC defending? When they incite violence in protests with planted agents, what is the FBI defending? When it's all said and done, what will they have?
Bonus Bit
Here's Jake Tapper, who couldn't be more of a prostitute for the regime if he wore 3" heels, fishnet stockings and a vinyl miniskirt and stood on the street corner every night, telling us what we all knew all along. He's doing it because the narrative is crumbling. It's just one more rear guard action in defense of ... what?
CNN's Jake Tapper rips into "misleading" COVID hospitalization numbers. "We're 2 years into this ... if somebody's in the hospital with a broken leg and they also have asymptomatic COVID, that should not be counted as hospitalized with covid, clearly." pic.twitter.com/rZhcANyYaW
In a comment replying to Ohioan on yesterday's post, I left a link to this Matt Walsh video where he has fun with bisexual, pansexual, asexual and other fetish-themed TikTok videos.
The thing that always strikes me about these TikTok videos is the attitude of the subject. I can't put my finger on the right word for it. Is it giddy? Smug? Superior? All of the above? In any case, there's always always a weird smile and the face is close to the camera which comes across as a dominance behavior.
Today, I finally hit on what is bothering me. You'd never act this way if you were talking to someone about anything real. Imagine discussing the proper way to grill a steak with a friend and getting right up in their face with a smug, creepy smile and making your point that nothing beats a Weber charcoal grill.
Or maybe you'd half-close your eyes and gloat in a condescending, scornful manner about using a coffee rub instead of a simple salt, pepper and garlic powder one.
Nah.
My take: Charcoal is the best even though we don't own a Weber right now. Propane grills don't get hot enough and the fire in a pellet smoker is unevenly distributed.
I like coffee rubs and the salt-pepper-garlic one, too, but sometimes it's fun to play around sometimes and go with paprika, poultry seasoning, cayenne and more.
As far as I can tell, I've now go the Wuhan Flu. I check off a couple of the boxes for symptoms, but not all of them. My symptoms are:
Hair loss,
Frequent experimental cooking failures,
Inability to ferment tobacco and
Inclination to rant on topics I don't understand.
Wait, that's a different list. How about this one?
Tired,
Chills,
Sore throat and
Headache
It could also be a variant of the Short-Timer Disease or perhaps Monday Morning Flu since tomorrow is my last day at work for a while. It might also just be a cold. In any case, I'm hoping it's the WuFlu. It would be great to get the natural immunity thing going.
I'll have that going for me when I drop dead in a few days. Omnicorn is like that.
My best course of action would be to force fluids* and watch Charles Laughton movies. Sadly, that's not going to happen as I still have a few things to finish before I turn into a pumpkin on Friday afternoon. Oh well.
I have big plans for my time off. BIG plans**.
* - The science is settled - beer is a fluid.
** - Plans may be much, much smaller than they appear.
... but it looks like we might as well just ditch all of our precautions and go back to normal life.
As far as I can tell, the Omnicorn variant is unfazed by masks and is blowing right through any amount of vaccinations. It's crazy contagious and everyone looks to be getting the same severity of symptoms CORRECTION: They are not getting the same severity of symptoms. Dig this thread. Key tweet:
The normal X-rays and the near normal ones belong to younger patients and vaccinated patients of all ages. There are vanishingly few pediatric cases with pneumonias.
The horrible pneumonias are seen in the unvaccinated, the immunosuppressed, and some elderly patients.
That suggests the jig is up and it's time to get back to normal lives. Get the vaccine unless you've had the WuFlu already. Other than that, it's still time to get back to our normal lives.
On the plus side, Omnicorn also seems to give much stronger immunity than the vaccines. That's a good thing.
I don't know, maybe the folks who are seriously at risk with comorbidities ought to just hide under their beds for a few weeks while it all blows over. I'm not snarking there, it really looks like the best plan to me. The unvaccinated can cope.
Of course, we could always go the other way and use attack dogs and police batons on people who want to get back to their normal lives. That might work, too.
... and by that I mean, I'm fighting on the side of Omnicorn. After all, it's essentially using our bodies as weapons against its rivals, the Delta and Original Flavor variants.
Our main financial man, Scott Grannis, got Omnicorn over the holidays.
Recently we had 32 family members for our traditional Christmas Eve dinner. About two-thirds of us (my wife and I included) ended up testing positive for Covid, and I'm pretty sure we all got the Omicron variant.
Everyone thought they were healthy to begin with, and the index case was the only one of the group that was triple-vaxxed—surprises all around. Only 3 people were unvaxxed, and all 3 got it; 22 fully vaxxed individuals got Omicron, and virtually all of them had received two doses of the Moderna vaccine. Three people had had Covid previously, but none of them caught Omicron. No one has even considered going to the hospital...
My takeaway: the MRNA vaccines don't protect you at all against Omicron. Omicron is similar to a flu. Above all, it is extremely contagious, so I won't be surprised if nearly everyone ends up getting it. A few weeks ago, I remember telling people that I wouldn't mind catching Omicron, if only because that would solidify my immunity to this crazy virus (I was fully vaxxed last February). Now that it's happened, I have no regrets. Sayonara, Covid!
As Ohioan pointed out in a comment recently, once you recover from Omnicorn, your body is prepped to take on the other flavors. They aren't nearly as contagious and don't stand a chance against a body that's loaded for bear. Or loaded for the WuFlu, as it were. So, in essence, we are all helping Omnicorn take out it's competition.
I'm down with that. I'm on Team Omnicorn, for sure.
Be Not Afraid
South Africa is 4 weeks ahead of us and less than 30% vaccinated. The UK is about 2 weeks ahead of us. With their data, we can do a decent job predicting our future.
It's a short, sharp spike with no significant rise in deaths.
Go Omnicorn!
Since I'm going to the gym every day where everyone is close together and breathing heavily, I'm guaranteed to get it. I may have had it already. When that happens, wife kitteh will get it if she hasn't had it already.
Is the pandemic over? Maybe. Not to worry, though. We still have systemic racism and global warming climate change to fear. So long as we continue to fear, we will continue to turn to the government for protection and that's what counts.
Well, until the money runs out and then we'll have to count on ourselves.
I don't mean bias in a negative sense, by the way.
Among the parents at work, there's been a significant shift in attitudes towards taking sick kids to see the doctor since the Wuhan Flu escaped Wuhan. In the past, when kids got sick, the parents would grimace about the inconvenience and just keep them out of school until they got better. Unless the thing lasted a long time or was very acute, taking them to the doctor was avoided. After all, the hospital was a huge hassle and the kid was going to get better anyway, given rest and fluids. What was the doctor going to do for them other than recommend rest and fluids?
All that has changed. Parents are now rushing to get their kids tested for the WuFlu and visits to the hospital are the norm rather than the exception. The kids still get well - no one I know has had a fatal or even a serious case so far. None of them receive any extra care other than the normal rest and fluids, either.
To me, this indicates a new, strong bias towards hospital visits. You can't have hospitalizations without going to the hospital, so I'm inclined to believe that a non-trivial number of pediatric hospitalizations are precautionary, driven by the parents' newfound fears, driven by the prevalent publisher-peddled panic porn.
How's that for alliteration?
Anywho, my advice is Biblical. Be not afraid. If South Africa is any guide and they're about a month ahead of us in the Wuhan Sniffles outbreak, our current spike will be very steep, relatively short and fairly mild. The Danes think the Sniffles signal the end of the pandemic.
Tyra Grove Krause said on Danish TV 2 that a new study from Denmark’s State Serum Institute found that the risk of winding up in the hospital with Omicron is half that seen with the previous Delta variant. She also said that like the emergence of the variant in South Africa, cases will rise, then quickly fall.
“I think we will have that in the next two months, and then I hope the infection will start to subside and we get our normal lives back,” she said on Monday, according to the Daily Mail.
Sounds about right.
Who are we to argue with the Danes? After all, they gave us the Danish.
"At this stage of the pandemic" is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence. It's replacing the words, "We have been lying to you all along."
On Twitter, I posited that not only does the virus mutate, but it also becomes a better driver. "At this stage" refers to the fact, established by ScIenCE, that the virus can now steer its little virion vehicle around your mask and sneak in through the freaking massive gaps in it. Before, all it could do was go forward and backward and turn only a very little amount. At this stage in the pandemic, it's a regular Hollywood stunt driver.
Only a True Believer or a journalist desperately trying to prop up all of the corrupt and degenerate institutions who've been Gramscian trampled by the Left would fall for this.
PEDIATRIC WUHAN FLU ADMISSIONS HIT AN ALL-TIME RECORD!
Yes, they did. And that record was 344 in one day. Which works out to 7 per state. That's 14 per state if you kick out the smallest 25 states where no one but worthless, mouth-breathing deplorables live.
Just out of curiosity, I went hunting for the average number of daily pediatric admissions in the US. I didn't find it, but I found something that caused me to stop my search. It was this paper on hospital stays for children from 2012. I admit that it's filled with racism, but what isn't these days? You'll have to look past the systemic white supremacy when you read it. Here's a snippet in case you don't want to support hate.
In 2012 there were nearly 5.9 million hospital stays for children in the United States.
5.9 million divided by 365 works out to 16,164 pediatric admissions per day. Assuming that's representative for the current decade, we can say that on the day when 344 children were stricken with the Wuhan Sniffles, the admission count went from 16,164 to 16,508.
The headline in the AP news story linked above reads, "US children hospitalized with COVID in record numbers." The AP's job, apparently, is not to inform, but to frighten. Also, you should vote for Democrats. They will save you from the Scary Things.
