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Lockdown Blues

By Rick Ackerman Posted on May 14, 2020, 11:00 pm EDT Last Updated May 15, 2020, 8:32 am EDT

Thursday’s dip got bought so ferociously that bears will think twice about getting in the way again, at least for a day or two. That was the purpose of the rally, even if there were no conspirators promoting it, just bears terrorizing themselves.  There was no news to have caused the explosive move other than the usual grim headlines. Another week has gone by with no change in anyone’s outlook. Mnuchin and Kudlow still believe the U.S. economy will be going gangbusters sooner than we think, but no one believes them. An effective vaccine is three months off — or two years at best, if ever, depending on which supposed expert you’re listening to.

The inevitable, ugly political war is over how quickly things should reopen. Fox viewers say it’s time to return to business, while CNN/MSNBC’s audience wants to keep things locked down more or less forever. Conservatives will win this one because everyone is going crazy sheltering at home. And for what? All the pain has done nothing to eradicate the virus, only to slow it down as long as we don’t venture out into the world. How long can that last? It will be a miracle if even the reopenings that have occurred so far do not kick up the death tolls and ‘positives’. We’ve all become expert enough about the pandemic to know that the experts themselves don’t know a heckuva lot more than we do about how the nation should proceed.

  • Ben May 15, 2020, 2:23 am

    “Conservatives will win this one because everyone is going crazy sheltering at home.”

    Sure, they will… IF we stop paying all attention to everything, after the re-openings. But with story after story of re-opened bars and restaurants, showing people swarming in without practicing the least bit of self-preservation? Yeah. We both know the plague is going to be the winner, ultimately!

    Anyway, God said to Noah, “Build an Ark”. To which Noah said, “I ain’t buildin’ nothin’! GFY! I’m a free man!”.

    Then God told Noah to gather two of every animal. Again, Noah played the “heroic freedom fighter” card… Only this time, with more gusto!

    Finally, God told him to stay on the Ark for forty days and nights. But after twenty (seconds), Noah couldn’t take any more cabin fever! And Donald Trump looked at him and said, “Hey… you got cabin fever, you got cabin fever. Go out. But don’t go out. Do not not go out, either!”. To that, Noah was confused. Nonetheless, he soon shouted, “Let God stay on the Ark forty days and nights, if that’s what He wants! _I_,as a free man, am going out!”

    So begins the seven last plagues of Revelation. I really did think it would be liberals that set those into motion. But, no. It was you conservatives. Nice going, mosquito brains!

    • John Jay May 15, 2020, 9:33 am

      Ben,

      For whatever reason, Government has seized upon an opportunity to politicize this Coronavirus.
      So, instead of going to the grunts in the trenches, the MDs, RNs, etc. to get their views and advice, they get guys like Dr. Fauci who has a big ax to grind, since he is a big fan of Bill Gates, WHO, and the Vaccine Industrial Complex.
      Remember the hundreds of thousands of respirators we urgently needed, and the USN hospital ships sent to NYC and LA?
      Not needed, and the respirators just hastened the death of those that could not be saved anyway.
      Panacea Hysteria.
      Any apology from Gov. Cuomo of NY, who was screaming at Trumps inability to cough up 30,000 of them in an instant?
      70% of the Covid 19 deaths in Connecticut were in senior care facilities, about 50% in NYC, and who knows what the true numbers were?

      I remember the coverage of the Vietnam War back in the day.
      If you wanted the truth, you got it from the poor drafted grunts who were doing the fighting and dying.
      If you wanted the Narrative, you asked General Westmoreland.
      In the end, the grunts were right all along.
      We even have the same inflated Body Counts ploy!

      In this Virus hysteria, right from the start, the Medical grunts were saying, you don’t quarantine the healthy, respirators are killing 80% of the people we put them on, and there are a whole host of cheap supplements that help those that can be helped. They were all mocked or ignored, and now, everything they said has been vindicated,
      and of course, no apologies from the MSM, the Governments, or the Dr. Fauci types.

      So now we can add another “Successful War” to this list
      War on Poverty
      War on Drugs
      War on Terror
      War on Death

      • Ben May 16, 2020, 1:58 am

        John, I thought you’d like this…

        https://sspx.org/sites/sspx/files/styles/dici_image_full_width/public/media/dici/med-gallery/spanish-flu-5.jpg?itok=Zr9Yec5g

        Why, they even closed healthy people places and restricted healthy people activities during that very early chapter of Vietnam!

        Oooh! those tyrants just make m’blood BOWL!!!

        I’m so sick and tarred of being confined to a concentration camp, under house arrest! I can leave m’house any time I want and that ain’t right! It ain’t in the Constitution! And I’m dog tarred of being able to own an AR15 or 1,000! I’m so oppressed! I needs t’work, John! Gotta feed m’starvin’ family, John! I don’t wanna apply for some other job in the essential sectors, though! Nor do I wanna adapt m’business to some new, fake news media normal!

        Yeah. Anyway, I’m not mocking you because I’m a liberal that can’t stand other points of view. I hate liberals and I’ve no need for opinions, to begin with, so I care even less for differences between them.

        No, John, I mock because you army of “freedom fighters” and “truthers” saw the left winning the race, to take the country clear off a cliff, and said, “Oh, no they don’t… Someone hold my beer!”.

        You want the lead? You got it, buddy! And I’m gonna whip the whinning horse until it gets where it wants to go. Have a nice Vietnam 🙂

      • Ben May 16, 2020, 12:28 pm

        One more thing, John Nam Jay…

        John Nam Jay. Sounds like the name of Americanized Asian kung-fu star. You should adopt that name and start making movies. John Nam Jay, in… Vietnam MDCLXVI!

        Anyway, I know what the “real experts” think and say. I have several in my family tree. Here’s what the “real experts” WERE saying, back in January and February…

        “This won’t spread here; This isn’t bad; Nothing to worry about; Just stay away from airports and/or bat soup and/or Chinese people, and you’ll be alright LOLZ LOLZ LOLZ!”

        Some of them were hostile. My own brother tried to bite my head off, when I asked him, for the second time in a month*, if he had yet bought the masks I recommended, for himself and grand daughter.

        *(Oh, the ANNOYING horror of being asked something twice, in one month! What a monster I am!).

        But not a one of them sings those songs anymore. Where they haven’t seen first hand how serious this is — and how misleading myths about “mostly old people” and other tripe are — they know someone who is on the front line, that has. My brother knows someone who died from it. The man was barely into his 50s, in good health.

        And I’ve been asked, “How did you know, Ben?”. It’s no secret, though. It’s very simple. Pay attention, because I’m giving you _free gold_…

        I watched a lot of videos, JNJ. We live in a world where even people in communist China have tons of access to camera phones. All one has to do is search YouTube, LiveLeak, etc. using words like “virus”; “coronavirus”; “hospital”; “cremation”; “dead”; “morgue”, and such like. And with sites like these…

        https://translate.yandex.com/

        …you can search in foreign languages. Even Chinese!

        冠状病毒

        It’s all out there, JN. Hundreds upon hundreds of hours of video, each showing only what there is to show. World-wide. Impossible to fake. That’s the basis of my information. The objective. The inarguable.

        Oddly enough, I never seem to get any objective information from any pundit, thinkless tank, or parallels spinner, such as yourself. Nor do I ever get any _timely_ information from any “real expert”. Even more rarely do any of the aforementioned stand the test of being weighed vs real information.

        I guess it must be my standards that are broken.

        Meh… F it. We’ll see which song you’re singing in, say, a month. I’m telling you right now, thiough, after what I’ve seen these past two weekends, I’d head to a bunker if I had one. Dumbass people!

  • John Jay May 14, 2020, 11:35 pm

    From what I have found from my research, there has never been a successful vaccine made for any coronavirus.

    They have been working on a vaccine for the SARS virus with no luck since 2003!

    Here are two excellent articles explaining why it is so difficult.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-vaccine-ian-frazer/12146616

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/will-there-be-a-coronavirus-vaccine-maybe-not.html

    • Ben May 15, 2020, 11:53 am

      Finding a good enough vaccine is only the first hurdle, too. Even if it was a perfect, you know there would be a sizeable enough resistance movement in the population to getting it, such that herd immunity would fall short. Now imagine what it’ll be like with an imperfect vaccine, as it will surely be if they ever come up with one.

      Right. Forget the vaccine. Adapt. If people had done that from the get-go, we wouldn’t be as far up the shat creek as we are, to begin with.

      Of course, too many don’t want to adapt, either.

      • None May 16, 2020, 5:00 am

        “herd immunity would fall short”….???….Herd immunity is developed by people with healthy immune systems developing anti-bodies on their own. Vaccinations are redundant in a healthy population….See Swedish model…They developed herd immunity and didn’t destroy their economy….What the politicians in this county have done is criminal. The most egregious example is that POS Cuomo who sentenced 5000 (at least) elderly in nursing homes to an almost certain horrendous death. Dying on a ventilator is not pretty.


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