Biden Pandemic Adviser Calls for Four to Six Week National Lockdown

[Captain Genet]

A good move. In Britain, the combo of lockdown aggressive vaccination efforts drove daily number of infections from 60 000 to below 6 000. Social distancing is scheduled to end by July.

[David Horn]

(03-19-2021, 04:59 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: A good move. In Britain, the combo of lockdown aggressive vaccination efforts drove daily number of infections from 60 000 to below 6 000. Social distancing is scheduled to end by July.

We here in the states have no stomach for communal efforts because 'freedom'.  Today, I read a first-person account of a woman who nearly died of COVID (as did her husband) who proudly stated her intent to never take any of the vaccines, because they might be dangerous.  According to her, the husband had a similar experience and felt the same about the vaccines.  She spoke with true pride.

Then there are the healthcare workers who won't take it either. Several of my wife's coworkers simply refuse, even knowing that the risk is very high for them.  Like the aforementioned couple, they are captive to ideology.

This is one case where the RW Israelis seem to have the right approach: issue COVID Green Cards to the vaccinated, and make a wide variety of social events open only to those holding a card.  I would prefer other options, but this seems to be emerging default here, though no one will admit it.

[pbrower2a]

(03-19-2021, 11:12 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-19-2021, 04:59 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: A good move. In Britain, the combo of lockdown aggressive vaccination efforts drove daily number of infections from 60 000 to below 6 000. Social distancing is scheduled to end by July.

We here in the states have no stomach for communal efforts because 'freedom'.  Today, I read a first-person account of a woman who nearly died of COVID (as did her husband) who proudly stated her intent to never take any of the vaccines, because they might be dangerous.  According to her, the husband had a similar experience and felt the same about the vaccines.  She spoke with true pride.

Then there are the healthcare workers who won't take it either. Several of my wife's coworkers simply refuse, even knowing that the risk is very high for them.  Like the aforementioned couple, they are captive to ideology.

This is one case where the RW Israelis seem to have the right approach: issue COVID Green Cards to the vaccinated, and make a wide variety of social events open only to those holding a card.  I would prefer other options, but this seems to be emerging default here, though no one will admit it.

Crisis wars require great sacrifices. In a shooting war that means military deaths. For civilians the sacrifices include dislocations and the possible loss of loved ones as cannon fodder, perhaps changing jobs from luxury production to war production and the severe restriction of normal indulgences. We are at war, as the death toll shows. 

I speak with pride of having both shots so that I can safely move about the country soon, even into places infested with COVID-19, perhaps to do work. I know that I needed the vaccine because I got a nasty reaction to the first shot. Basically I did my best to avoid COVID-19, and it is a good thing that I did because the stalker "Rona" could have killed me. I did not become one of more than 500,000 people, most of whom made some catastrophic mistake perhaps one time or comparatively few, that got them very sick and very dead. I will not get permanent, and probably life-shortening or crippling, organ damage from the infection. I wish there were no disease, and many who have experienced it were trapped in circumstances that they could not avoid or else did something unwise. War has innocent victims, too, and good leadership does what it can to keep the number of innocent victims down. So you make sure that people ration things, turn off lights at night, share the commute, and not do pointless travel.  

This Crisis is at the beginning of its end. It was real, and most of us can expect that we will get some relaxation of it.

[flower2]

No country in history has ever hated freedom as much as the USA does. You know that all hope is lost when you talk to 5 Americans in one day and one says that the Bill of Rights should be repealed, another says blacksmithing should be illegal, one swears wearing fur should be a crime, one says private charities should be outlawed, and another says bump stocks must be banned.

Disgusting.

[Captain Genet]

(03-19-2021, 06:30 PM)flower2 Wrote: No country in history has ever hated freedom as much as the USA does. You know that all hope is lost when you talk to 5 Americans in one day and one says that the Bill of Rights should be repealed, another says blacksmithing should be illegal, one swears wearing fur should be a crime, one says private charities should be outlawed, and another says bump stocks must be banned.

Disgusting.

You would benefit from a trip to Saudi Arabia or North Korea 

[pbrower2a]

(03-20-2021, 05:34 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:

(03-19-2021, 06:30 PM)flower2 Wrote: No country in history has ever hated freedom as much as the USA does. You know that all hope is lost when you talk to 5 Americans in one day and one says that the Bill of Rights should be repealed, another says blacksmithing should be illegal, one swears wearing fur should be a crime, one says private charities should be outlawed, and another says bump stocks must be banned.

Disgusting.

You would benefit from a trip to Saudi Arabia or North Korea 

Oddly he reminds me of the Rick Blaine character at the start of Casablanca, a self-loathing character who left America with some huge chip on his shoulder and would eventually learn the hard way after hearing plenty of sob stories from people who had legitimate causes for those sob stories, like having to leave behind a banking fortune in the Netherlands, like being sought by the Gestapo, like fleeing the crushing regime of Francisco Franco in Spain... if Casablanca was Purgatory, fascist Europe was Hell, and America was Paradise. 

Rick Blaine had to find out the hard way how good it is to be an American. 

1. The only controversial point about the Bill of Rights is the poorly-written Second Amendment. I'm guessing that on the rough frontier in which might have encounters with bears, cougars, still-hostile Indians, miscreants living on the edge of civilization who return only to raid the diligent frontiersman or settler for whatever he is too lazy to make or earn, or who might need to shoot a deer for a family feast, firearms might be necessary. Hunting rifles and military rifles were one and the same. Also, the States needed their own militias as there was not to be a large standing army that could go wherever it was needed. A private navy would have been out of the question, but a navy would have been necessary for suppressing pirates, deterring invasions, and enforcing the laws at sea (including by 1807 the prohibition of the importation of slaves). 

Do the People as a whole (meaning State governments) have the right to maintain militias or does everyone have the right to own whatever weapons one desires? Apparently, tanks, artillery weapons, and bombs are out of the question, although if America ever had occupying Nazis bedeviling any part of America we would have been quite lenient on the ownership of those. 

...people can be free and have practically no "gun rights" (Britain under Thatcher), and can have extensive "gun rights" and utterly lack political freedom (Brezhnev's Soviet Union). The political cultures that make the most out of weaponry as their identity seem generally on the totalitarian side.

For a more reliable defense of property and loved ones, get a dog. A barking dog warns a criminal of a serious mauling. It is telling that the Nazis quickly prohibited Jews from owning dogs, as they might figure out what some SS thug was up to. 

2. What is wrong with blacksmithing? This may be one reliable means of getting a necessary part for an old machine, and if it should ever be necessary to make some Katusha-style rockets for use against an occupying power it might be a good idea to have some trained blacksmiths. 

3. We have good-enough synthetics that we don't need fur. Wool is almost as good as fur. A leopard fur looks better on a leopard than on a person, even if a leopard is a truly nasty creature. It takes eight dead leopards to make a leopard fur. If you want a fur coat around, then let it be on a creature that might have some affection for you, like a cat or a dog. Wool is a renewable resource. 

4. Who advocates the outlawing of private charities on the whole? Charity scams, of course.

5. Bump stocks make semi-automatic weapons into fully-automatic tools of massacre.  

Reference to another movie: in Forrest Gump, the author Winston Groom puts these words into the mouth of the dullard Forrest Gump: 

"Stupid is as stupid does".

Or less cinematically: in Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, in which he tears apart the idea that people who think outside the box are exempt from concerns about their good will... he shows that intellectuals are often no more honorable than the shamans of old times or cranks of modern time. Know well that Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Vidkun Quisling, and Joseph Goebbels took great pride in their intellectual prowess. Brilliant people can't get away with every whim.

[David Horn]

(03-20-2021, 05:34 AM)Captain Genet Wrote:

(03-19-2021, 06:30 PM)flower2 Wrote: No country in history has ever hated freedom as much as the USA does. You know that all hope is lost when you talk to 5 Americans in one day and one says that the Bill of Rights should be repealed, another says blacksmithing should be illegal, one swears wearing fur should be a crime, one says private charities should be outlawed, and another says bump stocks must be banned.

Disgusting.

You would benefit from a trip to Saudi Arabia or North Korea 

I suspect (s)he is a refugee, or the child of one, from just such a country.  There are no greater zealots than converts. 

[pbrower2a]

(03-20-2021, 08:31 PM)(Poison) PenLady Wrote: Americans seem to think they are free because checkpoints, NSA wiretapping, and TSA groping only happen in other states.

OVER 10% OF THE ENTIRE U.S. population has been fully vaccinated for the coronavirus, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.n numbers: 23 million in UK receive first jab
[/url]

More than 33 million people have received either both doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech or Moderna vaccines or a single dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Roughly 64 million people have received at least one dose of a vaccine.

With more than 29 million [url=https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6]documented cases of the coronavirus in the U.S., more people have now been fully vaccinated than have been reportedly infected with the virus.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-03-11/cdc-10-of-total-us-population-fully-vaccinated-for-coronavirus



................


We may not be at the beginning of the end for COVID-19, but we are certainly past the end of the beginning.





That depiction is now more than a week late. Americans are getting inoculated faster than COVID-19 is finding human bodies to occupy. I am not the most optimistic of thinkers, but the statistics satisfy my reservations about optimism. The two-dose inoculation consists mostly of people who expect a second dose which is scheduled in one month after the first one. I have gone from one of those with one dose of a two-inoculation regime into that group who now has less than two weeks for nearly 100% protection against COVID-19. I now have more cause to dread vehicle crashes (and I am prone to that due to sleep apnea... I have started to doze off on a round trip of 120 miles only fifteen miles from home and decided to play it safe. I stopped in the parking lot of a Dollar General, picked up a soda, drank it down, and then drove off safely.

Wise people assess the risks before doing anything. We can't fully excise risk from our lives, but we can make our adjustments.



Because the Indiana Toll Road has long stretches between interchanges I do not drive it. Had I known of this peril I would be living in a big city with solid mass transit (like Chicago) instead of a rural area.  The county sheriff has seen me pulled to the side of a modestly-traveled road and has asked me what was wrong. It wasn't alcohol.

COVID-19 has already killed like a war. We have passed the equivalent of D-Day against a menace that has killed 554 thousand people in America alone. Whether we are past the Battle of the Bulge as an equivalent is much in doubt. Inoculation is now swifter than infection. I have good cause to expect a rapid drop-off in infections as Americans gt hed immunity as the sensible (if only because they are scared) people literally hed thelmselves into sites wherein they get inoculations.

[dragonfly2]

If you teach Americans to love morality, freedom, peace, and balanced budgets and then turn around and tell Americans to embrace immorality, tyranny, war, and debt, don't be surprised if people become insane.

[pbrower2a]

(03-20-2021, 09:36 PM)dragonfly2 Wrote: If you teach Americans to love morality, freedom, peace, and balanced budgets and then turn around and tell Americans to embrace immorality, tyranny, war, and debt, don't be surprised if people become insane.

Most people must sell out their dreams at some point just to survive. Many people recognize that the best thing that they can do to achieve life, liberty, and some pursuit of happiness is to make the great sacrifice of being overworked and underpaid under harsh management in a job that they hate so that they can convince the people who have the discretion to invest productively or indulge destructively that they will invest in the plant and equipment that allows one to earn a highly-compromised life, very limited liberty (severe poverty is a sick parody of liberty) and a limited opportunity to seek happiness (even if that is only getting a little break to watch some stupefying garbage on the Idiot Screen in one's awful flat.  

Those who don't sell out their dreams have often dedicated (as Malcolm Gladwell estimates it) about ten thousand hours of rigorous preparation so that at a certain stage they can meet the standards reliable for not messing up at a critical moment. The pro athlete, the concert pianist or vioolinist, the high-powered attorney, the physician, the research scientist, the quality engineer, the actor or artist who isn't starving... that's where it is. Fall short and you will at best get mediocre results. Push too hard despite inadequate preparation and you will make a fool of yourself, and you may go from being a journalist to being a retail clerk. 

The standards of excellent necessary for credible performance at many things keep rising. 

But know well: it is the person who is overworked and underpaid, who toils to exhaustion (perhaps needing two jobs because neither pays adequately) under brutal management and does not turn against the system with crime or revolution who makes the real investment in business. That someone else reaps most of the reward -- well, that is how a sick capitalist order works, does it not?

My solution is Capitalism with a Human Face. Take the cruelty out of neoliberal capitalism (which means to ditch the neoliberal philosophy in which only a small proportion of American society matters), and even if people sell out their dreams (let us say becoming a well-paid garage mechanic instead  of an actor) they will do well enough in life.

[pbrower2a]

deleted -- wrong thread.

[dragonfly2]

No one cares when the NSA unconstitutionally wiretaps them, but Americans lose their minds if Google records their web searches.

Americans don't mind if the Gestapo shoots unarmed Americans in the back, but Americans become batshit insane if Paypal is racist.

Americans shrug if CNN lies, but Americans completely flip out Fox News doctors a photo.

Americans scream that they are all victims.

Americans lose their heads if Communists use teens to push an issue, but why can't Nazis use kids to promote an idea?

Americans become rabid nutjobs when statues are torn down, but why don't Americans raise money to erect statues?

Americans became crazy with anger when Obama was nominated for a peace prize, but why don't Americans create a peace prize for Assange?

Americans foam at the mouth if there is an award show for homosexuals, but why don't Americans start an award show for teen entrepreneurs?

Americans don't care when the CIA tortues, but Americans explode if anyone protests tyranny.

WTF?

[Eric the Green]

If we had any sense, we'd still be in lockdown, or rather we wouldn't be because our previous lockdowns would have lasted longer. But, our leadership is lacking, thanks to libertarians like ours.

[VermontVote]

Americans say that the elites are nice for making Americans dependent on welfare and bankrupting the USA with debt.

[pbrower2a]

(03-27-2021, 05:06 PM)VermontVote Wrote: Americans say that the elites are nice for making Americans dependent on welfare and bankrupting the USA with debt.

We need some welfare to get people through this economic as well as medical calamity (it's a freaking war, dammit!). Maybe if we had had a tight lockdown a year ago nationwide we wouldn't be in the mess that has about 560 thousand people dead and that has ravaged our economic order.  

The economic elites need a welfare system to cover for their destructive activities.

[d1212]

Wow.

Americans scream that the government should burn the Bill of Rights and destroy the economy because someone might get the flu and then drive up the debt to give everyone welfare and bailouts.

[Einzige]

Let me explain something to you retards about welfare.

The only utility it has to the capitalist State is as a guarantor of liquidity and, hopefully, insurance against social revolution. That's why it exists. What we need is a proletarian revolution which abolished money.

[d1212]

Is Rand Paul the only American who still cares about freedom?

[Einzige]

(03-27-2021, 08:44 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(03-27-2021, 05:06 PM)VermontVote Wrote: Americans say that the elites 0i nice for making Americans dependent on welfare and bankrupting the USA with debt.

We need some welfare to get people through this economic as well as medical calamity (it's a freaking war, dammit!). Maybe if we had had a tight lockdown a year ago nationwide we wouldn't be in the mess that has about 560 thousand people dead and that has ravaged our economic order.  

The economic elites need a welfare system to cover for their destructive activities.

(03-27-2021, 09:43 PM)d1212 Wrote: Is Rand Paul the only American who still cares about freedom?

Lmao

Rand Paul wants to make abortion illegal.

[pbrower2a]

(03-27-2021, 09:43 PM)d1212 Wrote: Is Rand Paul the only American who still cares about freedom?

His idea of freedom is that enterprise is free -- to do whatever it wants to the common man. That's like the monstrous NAMbLA calling itself a civil-rights organization for sponsoring the freedom of adult men to have sex with underage boys.