So it’s been a year and a half since I posted on here. I only remembered because once again someone happened on my post about The Susan Show and added another comment. That little reminiscence sure had legs! I’m glad I could do a little good for folks who remembered that show from when they were very young, like I did!
So…in the last 18 months the world has changed, and not for the better. Too many people live in fear for a highly contagious but not very deadly disease. How can I say that, with over 200,000 deaths in the USA attributed to Covid? Because there are so little clear data about how many people died OF Covid as opposed to WITH Covid. I refer you to the research done by Alex Berenson, former investigative reporter for the New York Times. He has two small reports with many links to the data. Here are the Amazon links to his reports:
He is also on Twitter as @AlexBerenson. I don’t share his politics, or a lot of other beliefs he has, but he is a voice for (as he puts it) Team Reality as opposed to Team Apocalypse; I see that as a good thing.
Just before the lockdown started in March my wife and I returned from the trip of a lifetime, to Australia and New Zealand. I may share some photos on here from that trip if I have the time. Fortunately, we got out of NZ just in time, before they went completely bughouse nuts about Covid. They now are forcibly quarantining people for Covid. Now, Kiwis are really paranoid about introducing anything dangerous into their environment. Being separated from your nearest neighbor by a thousand miles of ocean makes that possible. They’ve kept out a lot of insect pests that could have been very damaging that way. Without a whole ecosystem evolved with checks and balances, an insect easily dealt with by birds, other insects, etc. in other countries could wreak havoc in New Zealand, so I get it. But now they are locking out people, taking very extreme measures while having almost no cases and very few deaths. (They’ve had less than 2000 cases, total, since the pandemic began; they’ve had 25 deaths. That’s all.)
But you can’t prove a negative. They would say it proves them right. It’s their country, they can do what they wish. But I’m glad we got home when we did. The people in both countries were very nice and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. But I don’t think we have to go back.
I just believe we have allowed ourselves, not just in the USA but all over the world, to be crippled not by the Covid virus but by fear. There will always be risk. We’ve even had sort of a soft-coup revolution in the USA over this. Lockdowns led to crashing the economy, which could then be blamed on the President. Fear of Covid drove millions of Americans to mail-in ballots, which could be manipulated far more easily than voting in person. The margins in the Presidential election in a half-dozen states are razor-thin. Was there fraud? Almost certainly. Was it enough to change the outcome of the election? We’ll see. I fear it was. Many people (most of whom support his opponent) say no, and we should just let it go and get on with it.
That alone tells me we should not. If there was widespread fraud, we need to know now. It doesn’t take more than an election or two for a disheartened electorate to stop voting entirely, and that would be the worst possible thing that could happen in our Republic. Not a virus like Covid, but a virus of despair.
Sorry I’m not more upbeat, but for the first time in my 66 years, I fear for our Republic.
On a happier note, it looks like the first real commercial crew flight for NASA by SpaceX should happen this coming Saturday!
The Old Gray Cat 