So, they are now saying that aerosolization of the virus occurs merely by breathing — the mere sharing of “the sweet breath that comes forth from thy mouth,” as the ancient Egyptians liked to romantically put it. And the shared air can even travel through plumbing.
Which points to the biggest fear: this may be a truly airborne virus. It appears that it could hardly be designed to be more effective in its initial spread. The lethality rate may be low, but if it spreads so successfully. . . .
Which then leads one to challenge a prominent American meme: don’t wear masks. This was apparently pushed to maintain a supply for hospitals. Israel and other countries have made them mandatory, while the American government waffles.
Had the government been more forthright, and asked people to use makeshift masks (bandanas, balaclavas, scarves, etc) and existing personal supplies until mask production could be ramped up, some lives may have been saved — surely the spread of the virus could have been flattened.
I have been advocating the use of makeshift cloth coverings of nose and mouth since the beginning of the quarantine state, on grounds of personal responsibility. I admit that it annoys me to witness fellow shoppers at the local store walk around completely unprotected. But the government’s psy-op gamesmanship may have played a part in the general heedlessness in the region where I live, which, admittedly, has no known cases of the coronavirus.
Known by me and the general populace, anyway.
I encourage social distancing — a term I am becoming rather fond of — which includes going nowhere near people who are ungloved and unmasked.
In the ethics of everyday interaction (a hundred years ago I would have written “intercourse”), there are several levels of openness:
1. normal walking around, greeting, chatting, including physical contact, flesh to flesh
2. when one is ill, one should immediately refrains from the latter, and
3. take some pains to signal illness and protect others from your illness — the Japanese do this very well.
4. In a time of plague, however, of general contagion, the protective efforts have to become the norm, even for presumably uninfected people, and you would think the government would aid in the manners of the community, and in the cultivation of responsibility, by
5. signaling when the switch from 3 to 4 should happen.
Of course, Americans have not mastered 2 and 3. We are a backwards people.
This is what you get for electing a socialist as mayor: someone who wants to enslave doctors and nurses.
The end result of socialism is universal slavery. I’ve spelled it out elsewhere, but most people get it.
Refreshing to see this politician rush to his true position in a crisis.
Plausible, all-too-plausible. This YouTuber, who reads Chinese, merely rooted around in public websites in China and discovered the smoking gun, so to speak.
Previous speculations have been that and nothing more.
Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague year is free on Gutenberg, and is worth reading. Here is the opening:
It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.
We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now. But it seems that the Government had a true account of it, and several councils were held about ways to prevent its coming over; but all was kept very private.
Seems apt for the hour and the day and the month of this plague year.
What if it were absolutely vital to be able to corral the masses of mankind out of the way while something epochal — apocalyptic — happened?
Say, what if all those resigned CEOs, whom we have seen bugging out in the months prior to the contagion, were really entering the underground bunkers where humanity will survive the holocaust that the ancients said would end this Age of Mankind?
What if the Deep State felt it would be easier to handle the end if everybody died in their homes in the coming conflagration?
Not until the last moment would the president come onscreen to say that the end had come, reassuring us that the government had indeed prepared for it, and the remnant of humanity chosen to rebuild civilization were already secured deep underground, and that it was with sadness that they would watch us die in fire — perhaps from a holocaust of vulcanism (say, the Yellowstone caldera), perhaps from a meteor, perhaps from mass coronal ejection, maybe even from an “alien invasion” — and that we should just hug each other one last time as the horror would come: thoughts and prayers.
OK. So that’s a science fiction scenario. But it is drawn from ufology lore, current and quite popular on television and YouTube.
There are a number of similar scenarios, too, perhaps more plausible: that the coronavirus has been an “exercise” (Pompeo’s own word), and that the real nature of the exercise is how easy it would be to completely lock society down, turn capitalism off and kill freedom forever.
This is what they are finding, I think: it is very, very easy.
Now, I’m not saying that any of these things are true. I do not know what the warring tribes of the Deep State are doing or what they want. They keep a lot under tight secrecy, and they play psy-ops with us as their chief modus operandi. It’s been well over half a century and they still won’t release all of the JFK assassination files — and we were never meant to know about Operation Northwoods, and Operation Mockingbird was a complete success, so much so that the intel community and the major news media are one well-oiled machine. And Paperclip brought in a long list of Nazi scientists who were treated alarmingly well, and whose very influence on the Deep State after World War II may very well have been determinative.
I can think of many explanations for any single event, of course. For example, the uptick in CEOs and corporate board members resigning, in advance of the coronavirus? Could be a statistical blip, or it could have more to do with the ongoing (?) investigations into the biggest story of last year: Jeffrey Epstein.
I bring these matters up because they are largely forbidden. Smart people do not discuss such things, and snort in derision if forced to confront them.
But a whole lot of smart people have proven themselves remarkably dumb.
twv
Wirkman Comment 