It’s good that in my sphere of detection, lots of people are taking it a bit easy this weekend. I doubt that it’s so much jubilation over a resurrection from the dead to save all of humanity 2,022 years ago. …Rather it seems like a lot of people might be getting weary of narratives designed to influence and control them, while not making particular distinctions.

Leave it to the left to push that way too far. The more conservatively inclined have skillfully used fantasy narratives to reign in unbridled proclivities for centuries and it works decently and contributed to quite a building of a rather amazing human civilization out of dirt. That’s why I’m not an enemy of religion anymore (a slightly bitter pill, I admit), am often an ally, but I can’t fucking stand the left. And I mean: none of it.

So that’s my position. Let’s swipe through some stuff, for the 1,000 Free Members here. The unwashed can get cleansed and resurrected with a free membership and the already free members are cordially invited to purchase the holy sacrament of paid membership. Here’s what’s in store this time:

• A personal take on Russia vis-a-vis the just-like-Covid narrative that’s for everyone
• But the United States can’t seem to let it go
• Is there any point in denying effective treatment for Covid, anymore?
• Stop with the good vs. evil crapola; It exposes your deep bias and lazy thinking
• When Walgreens does better data than any government on earth
• What happened to my US Navy?

It’s totally unbecoming for an Easter post, but happy [belated] Easter holiday anyway.

A personal take on Russia vis-a-vis the just-like-Covid narrative that’s for everyone

My general rule for a long time is that when everyone is saying the same thing, it’s for sure wrong and bullshit (saturated fat is bad; cholesterol is bad; meat gives you cancer…). Because people are largely stupid sheep, there must be a reason to have them all baaaa baaaa baaaing the same bleat, that’s centralized, if it was obvious there would be no need for such propagandistic efforts if actually real, so basic herd-and-follow mentality is used against all the fucking dumb…which means almost everyone.

I can begin with basic facts. Russians are people. Ukrainians are people. People have problems sometimes. Some problems are real. Some problems are made up. And some “problems” are created where they didn’t otherwise exist or ever need to exist.

I’ve already written about how so many problems were created externally, over years and needlessly, since the abrupt fall of the USSR in 1993. You can scroll or search for those if you want.

…During the USSR, while I spent a lot of time in the South China Sea, we played gentlemanly war games with the Soviets. With ships and airplanes. On a daily basis. There was a mutual respect. Never a mishap. Only gotchas. For example, for us on USS Reeves—a guided missile cruiser—we had purview over the air theater in term of protecting the carrier—USS Midway at the time…first with F-4s, then later with F/A-18s. The rule was, no Soviet aircraft gets within 200 nm of the carrier without armed fighter escort. A whole wave of Soviet bombers is welcome to fly right over the carrier (so long as they’re maintaining peaceful posture), just that they will be escorted within a 200 nm radius in all directions.

Sometimes it was opposite. We’d troll 12 nm off Vladivostok and had constant company in terms of Soviet ships and aircraft. 12 was the limit, and they were OK with that, but they’ll keep a watchful, escorting eye.

This was how the military men of the time behaved.

Simple, good training for both of us, and gotchas were the thing. Not often, but sometimes we’d intercept way out at 400 (with good “spook” intel), and sometimes we didn’t get ’em until 100 (bad “spook” intel).

We always called them Soviets, or commies. We never called them Russians. Especially now in retrospect, my sense is that we understood the whole thing to be a bad idea born of revolution, and for my part at least, I had empathy for Russians and was so glad when the Soviet Union came tumbling down. Would you be aggrieved of Arkansasians if the USA had tumbled down?

I had no understanding at the time that the US was so intent on keeping an enemy, any enemy. And since Russia wasn’t really interested in being one…but rather more interested in maintaining security and building a semblance of a world-trading economy, oligarchic warts and all (look in your damn mirror)…I personally felt a sense of victory over a true global threat and left the US military in 1992 to challenge and enhance other interests and prosper. I’ve never had a gram of trepidation over that realm of the world since. I also have no fear or trepidation over China. Ants, bees, and borg. They’ll easily sacrifice any million soldiers over anything. They’re all just ants, bees, and borg…there are no true individuals to sacrifice to the collective—there is no true individuality to Chinese. Very unlike western civilization. Easy to destroy and annihilate, if it would ever come to that. I hope it does not.

But the United States can’t seem to let it go

I guess the lesson is that when you have 100s of billions in investments in the whole enormous institution of war, it’s a tough thing to say ‘we won,’ pick up arms, pack it in, and go home. US politics doesn’t work like that.

Since Russia and its former satellite states had better things to do than challenge the US during the 1990s, the US had to pick other fights. It’s fucking pathetic. They pick Islamic extremism—extreme since its goat-and-sheep fucker founding in about 600 AD.

IT’S A GEOPOLITICAL THREAT, NOW!!!

…To a nation with enough nukes, ships, planes, and troops to take over anything it wants. Yea, 7th Century, dirt-scratching savages are the US military’s pick for enemy, so as to keep all the contractors happy while keeping their campaign donations rolling in. And that’s on Republicans…just as bad, but in different ways…

I never thought it was about the geopolitics of middle-eastern oil and energy. Too many other options…including, ironically, Russia of the former USSR. Plus, America has plenty for now itself, provided it didn’t engage in the smoke & mirrors for the sake of some of the dumbest fucktards on the planet: environmentalists, who wouldn’t know what a balance sheet is.

…It took eight years for the US to elevate Islamic, 7th-Century, dirt-scratching fucktardism to levels where they’d send some smart but indoctrinated and disintegrated patsies to go learn to taxi, take off, and fly airplanes…but not land them.

What a formidable enemy, and American fucktards have been paying the price for 20 FUCKING YEARS!!! since 2002 in all the indignities endured just to catch a damn flight. IMAGINE IT!!! how a dozen or so incel-wanker goat-fuckers changed the world for billions of scared sheep globally. Ironic.

…And at that level of pathetic scaredy-cat shit—where even AMERICANS!!! have been hoisting their dirty butt holes high in the air for two decades—is it really any surprise that when the scare-call came out, all the American pussies said ‘sure, we’ll close the churches, schools, restaurants, businesses, bars, wear a face diaper…any higher we can jump?’

America is pretty disgusting and pathetic. Like the French Revolution is the root of all commie decay in the West, so is 9/11 the updated version of that, with a new security state everywhere so the fearful sheep have pleasant-sounding baaaa’s.

The US-Political-Military-Industrial-Complex got everything it wanted. Almost 10 years of poking the little badger in the Arab desserts, then 20 years of perpetual war in the middle east, all ending in abject, 100% failure on any score….after trillions spent. And the indignity of Afghanistan? Jesus.

It’s way worse than the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988 and 1989. Anyone remember that? One in one-fucking million? I fucking doubt it. It’s not just way worse. It’s that the Soviets did a proper military withdrawal and the Americans did a clown-car cluster-fuck that’s worthy of abject derision for centuries to come. America becomes a global laughing stock, and well fucking deserved.

And now here we are. 30 years of really laughable US military operation globally. All because the political-corporate fascism that is America could not declare victory when the Soviets lowered the flag over the Kremlin on New Year’s day, 1993.

America has to keep an enemy to save lives, no matter how many lives it costs.

I remind you. I got out of the military in April of 1992, nearly 30 years to the day of writing this. I’m not saying I foresaw any of this disaster. I simply had a spidey sense that there wasn’t a real war anymore, but a desire to make them up.

Is there any point in denying effective treatment for Covid, anymore?

There’s thousands of diseases and maladies in the world. Part of the role of a physician, a doctor, is to practice medicine. I love that term because it implies a license, of sorts, to try. That goes back thousands of years because obviously, there were people who could observe, track, and be honest about the data.

Assuming they were seeking amelioration or cure (and status too), those doing the best were the best at honestly gathering and tracking data on the various herbs or compounds they were using, plus proto-surgical techniques and simply wound-cleaning. I imagine that many became very adept at treating flesh-wound infections that can kill you, in various ways.

In evolutionary terms, it’s not so long. In human knowledge terms, a few thousand years is quite a thing. Starts slow, but knowledge builds upon knowledge…or you could say, errors engender corrections…

It has all run fairly swimmingly for hundreds of years, getting better and better. But there’s a big problem. Well, there’s a number of them and it’s hard to know how to start. Patents are a blessing and a curse. They’re a blessing because a patent bestows limited monopoly status, so a company has incentive to make the development investment with confidence they’ll recoup it and profit. It’s a curse because it’s only for very big players and that excludes anything cheap and impossible to patent.

A classic example is aspirin. It’s not a natural herb, but is purportedly derived from willow trees which was a known medicinal forever. The history is cloudy, but in the late 1890s, over 120 years ago, the Bayer company synthesized acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin).

Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is a novel organic compound that does not occur in nature, and was first successfully synthesised 1899. In 1897, scientists at the drug and dye firm Bayer had begun investigating acetylated organic compounds as possible new medicines, following the success of acetanilide ten years earlier. By 1899, Bayer had created acetylsalicylic acid and named the drug ‘Aspirin’ going on to sell it around the world. The word Aspirin was Bayer’s brand name, rather than the generic name of the drug; however, Bayer’s rights to the trademark were lost or sold in many countries. Aspirin’s popularity grew over the first half of the twentieth century leading to fierce competition with the proliferation of aspirin brands and products.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aspirin

The pertinent point is that it was never patented. All anyone could ever do is trade secret, or trademark. The former is like Coca Cola. The formula is a trade secret. No matter if it’s duplicated to 100% in taste-test surveys…the company simply says, ‘nope, not Coke…our formula is secret.’ Bayer had a trademark for a while on the term ‘aspirin,’ but it didn’t eventually matter and there was no possibility of a trade secret, since the formula was public.

So, the next realm is marketing, which is simply differentiation.

‘Bayer is better because our label is really classic looking.’

(Are you keeping up with me on the sheep theme?)

…So the firebrand Steve Kirsch—the silicon-valley tech-millionaire—who went from typical dummy-Democrat for a million years to awake-the-fuck-up over Covid, did this sorta whoa, really? post the other day.

These people deserve the credit for the deaths of nearly a million Americans

Typically, I shy away from touting stuff like that whether I believe it’s understated, or not. I prefer to generalize:

1. Lots and lots died from purported Covid because of blocks on effective treatment; and, in favor of treatments that kill, like ventilator (follow the money)
2. Lots and lots have died because of stupidity, plus an insistence from all sides that they remain stupid and ignorant
3. Lots and lots have died, been seriously maimed, or have potential lifelong issues now because of the grand medical experiment on the planet where it’s now coming to light was a grand coverup of known and expected big-ass harm
4. Millions and millions of people are morally culpable in suborning murder and torture. Most of them are the ones just-doing-my-job administering the shots

I’m different. if I were God, I wouldn’t strike down the corporations and financiers licking the dirty-brown assholes of politicians. I’d strike down the little people just doing their jobs. Then, watch the world squirm like all fuck ever. But that’s just me…

Steve Kirsch, in that post, put out this chart which is rather wondrous. It covers a bunch of treatments for Covid that have actually been studied. He prefaces:

There are lots of other supplements and drugs that have convincing data.

Most all these drugs have a very low side effect profile and so anything where the green line is solely to the left of the vertical bar is highly likely to be helpful.

However, NIH doesn’t recommend any of them being used except for Molnupiravir, Paxlovid, and Remdesivir.

Now, I challenge you to cover the drug labels on the left and pick out those three drugs from the line up below. It’s impossible, isn’t it?

He adds, “Do you see a pattern here? The only drugs getting approval from the NIH are proprietary drugs from big drug companies. That’s the common factor.” Yea duh. And what else do you see? Some common supplements many of you take regularly or sporadically. Even the “drug” diet is on the list, presumably meaning a decent one—mostly whole food at least, eschewing junk, fast food, sugar, and fat laden…and not an abundance of calories, the only fucking thing that makes you fat.

Stop with the good vs. evil crapola; It exposes your deep bias and lazy thinking

If Putin and Russia are evil, so is Biden and America. If CNN and MSNBC are evil, so is Fox. They’re all just evil in different ways and that’s not helpful, because then you’re reduced, by your own terms, to picking the evil you’re ok with and the evil you’re not.

…Good is not such a problem, as it’s rarer than astatine.

Rather than using moralisms, subjective judgments, and tribal speak, try objective terms like accountability. How about integral, managed, audited, honest, firm, fiduciary, responsible. Et cetera, et cetera. Even the word honesty is operable where truth is not. Think about that. Truth, in political and social context is almost always defined by some authority. Honesty is weasel proof to anyone with half a brain…recognizing that opens a whole other can of worms.

In the current needless nonsense, no, Russia is not evil and Ukraine is not good. I’d be half inclined to flip that around and put USA, its CIA, the EU, and NATO on the evil side if it could only be evaluated on such dumb-ass moralistic terms.

The US CIA has been sucking Nazi cock since the end of WWII and it’s easy to verify. In addition to helping favored Nazis who could help us, they’ve supported Ukraine’s Nazis for decades because they thought they could help against the Soviets and then, Russia. The EU and NATO have migrated eastward, and always with an animus toward economically-developing Russia, the most natural-and-critical resource rich country on earth (hint hint).

Yea, shit tons of money from developing domestic and export markets for all that stuff went to the favored and privileged…the nomenklatura. Holy shit how evil! That never happened anywhere before, especially not in the good ole’ USA or beloved western Europe! Newah ewah.

All in all, it’s just better to soundly, economically, politically, socially, and mathematically evaluate: will it blend?

When Walgreens does better data than any government on earth

El Gato Malo—an internet presence out there for a long time—put up a cool post, US covid test positivity rates by vaccination status. He includes about 8 charts, but one will suffice. More is just a bad cat—that won’t capitalize letters just to piss you off—beating a dead horse.

He adds, “as can be seen, unvaxxed is outperforming every other category in the overall standings. vaccine fade from the <5 month category to the >5 month is also clearly visible.” He goes on to discuss age adjustments and you’ll notice that Walgreens gives you a nifty radio button to do that. But even at 65+, not much difference.

The vaccine gives you Covid. Amongst dozens of friends and acquaintances who got jabbed here, about every single one has had Covid once or twice since. I just acquainted with a new friend yesterday at the pool, a Canadian recently retired here. Yep, and he thinks he may have had it a second time.

It’s really fucking hard for me not to laugh openly.

What happened to my US Navy?

A reader sent me a post today with a single word, “interesting.” I can do little better, so, interesting. I’ll add just that in my time, the navy hovered between 550 and just shy of 600 active duty ships. Now it’s about 250. But, at least dudes can butt fuck on them now.

Such progress! especially in light of how that article is introduced.