Excess mortality will be good adjunct source of data to gain insight here too.
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Texas to Ease Coronavirus Lockdown Under Executive Order to 'Restore Livelihoods,' Governor Says
Some good news for you in Texas. I was considering moving from the Chicago suburbs to Houston, But more and more it's becoming apparent I need to get down there ASAP.
I'm tired of hearing JB Pritzker and his minion Lori Lightfoot telling me to "stay home, Stay safe"
My friend has this cousin. Really, a bunch of cousins. His aunt has lived as sort of a drug addicted train wreck who was pumping out children she wasn't even pretending to actually raise. Her sister (his mother) took in most of these cousins, except the eldest one who was an adult by that time. I met this guy once years ago. It was around Christmas time. I remember he was holding a nutcracker, and telling his younger brother to stick his finger in it. Obviously, the little kid knew what was going to happen if he put his finger in there and he didn't. So the older brother intimidated him into doing it. After smashing the kid's finger in the nutcracker, he laughed at and derided him for being "stupid" for putting his finger in there.
That gentleman is now a police officer.
Not that I am looking to disparage law enforcement or people involved in it in general, but sadistic people who get their kicks menacing others who have no recourse look at law enforcement and see a dream job. Unfortunately police departments don't seem to do the best job at screening against them.
This is starting to come out for Europe.
Excess deaths not attributed to Corvid19 are, in most cases, outnumbering excess deaths that are attributed to Covid19.
That is, a whole lot of people died who wouldn't otherwise have, and they weren't coded as having Covid19. Probably they did have the virus and just weren't tested.
Data from Economist:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mcharlton...72298281488385
The worst of it is that Pritzker the Hut imposed a one size fits all lockdown on the entire state when the real problem is Crook County. Better to have imposed a no travel in or out of Baghdad by the Lake. Most of the cases in Jackson County where I live resulted from an SIU student who went home to Chicago, got the Kung Flu and then returned to Carbondale and infected his dorm with it.
As depressed as this current state of snitching has developed something occurred to me last night. Despite our image of US citizens as better than we are, what is happening now has happened before during the Great War under Woodrow Wilson. He assembled a pervasive surveillance state, ostensibly for spies and saboteurs, but that also got used for surveilling Joe and Jane Citizen for signs of slacking and disloyalty to the US. It takes a little work to find the information, but we had eager snitches here even in the "good old days".
That's one of the most depressing realizations for me. It's not like society had to choose between cutting the red wire and the green wire and we lost our freedom because we cut the wrong wire, that if only we had cut the correct wire we'd still be a free country. We rolled over so quickly, so completely, and so enthusiastically (most of us have become scandalized and eager to snitch on our citizens for real or imagined violations of government edict) that our embrace of liberty can be finally put to rest as a pleasant fiction.
And up until now I had been generally skeptical of breathless hysterics in the other direction: "Federal subsidies for wind energy? What are we, NORTH KOREA???" But if "the government has the proper authority to lock you in your house, dictate which businesses are allowed to operate, and determine whom you're allowed to visit and when" isn't the end of the slippery slope it's very close.
This will be a process that tests the courage of our politicians. As soon as restrictions are eased even a little bit, Abbot (or any governor/mayor) will get absolutely blasted by the media and political opportunists for every single COVID death, and the panicked, hysterical citizenry will be all too receptive to the fear and outrage.
Word is now that the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls is closing indefinitely. 238 cases in their workforce (more than half the known cases in Minnehaha county).
This is going to be a very bad thing for pork producers in SD/MN/ IA. The plant processed 20,000 head a day. With other plants in the region also facing closures, and prices dropping like a rock they're probably going to have to start killing the young feeder pigs. Because who the hell can afford to feed them at this point?
The truth is that every society includes a certain percentage of pieces of shit. Previously, we have identified them as Leftist mob components, criminals, and politicians. Now we see the rest of them too, the JBTs in the police forces and their lapdogs that tattle on us. The lessons of history are being relearned.
As a class, politicians are among the most spineless of humans in existence. Every word they utter is carefully designed to produce the effect they desire -- the retention of their power. Truth is always and absolutely not a consideration. The "overabundance of caution" we keep hearing about is the new word we must use for "cowardice," just like "social distancing," a metaphor, is actually physical distancing (social distancing being what I do when I see your name on my phone and I don't answer because I don't want to talk to you). Their partners in the media have spent the past 3 decades developing control of the language to make this process easier, and we just follow along like good little boys and girls: how long did it take you to start mindlessly repeating the words "social distancing"? It had never been uttered before 6 weeks ago, and today it is the most common term in the whole goddamn world. Abbott said some interesting things early on, but someone had a talk with him and he rolled over like most all of them did. Granted, not as enthusiastically as the governors of Kentucky, Michigan, and New Jersey -- who were apparently criminals and politicians already -- but roll he did. We'll see if he rights himself, but some of us are not going to wait on him.