Free Republic

Odd man out.

I was thinking the other day of what a bad person I must be to hold back the likes of Colin Kapernick and other black millionaire celebrity athletes from realizing their full potential.

Then I snapped out of it.

Could we also send our cheap mobsters? Of course that would be the government.

How about the Washington Social Distancers?

They will always be at least six feet from the opposition.

This regional anomaly extends into eastern Canada, Ontario and Quebec have higher rates of death and cases even when per capita stats are compared with western Canada. BC and Alberta have fared considerably better.

The similarities are higher urban populations and more contact with Europe. You would imagine BC would have the same outcome as WA or OR, but a combination of good luck and perhaps better planning has changed that outcome. The good luck was that BC’s spring school break was later than other Canadian provinces and at a time when the border was being closed down. The better planning was that BC went quickly to regulations preventing workers from going from one senior care home to another, and various other procedures that seem to have worked. There is remarkably little COVID infection in some parts of western Canada.

The president could order Democrats to wear masks. This would satisfy everybody.

Remember that suspicious death of a Chinese researcher in Pittsburgh a few months ago? Wonder what if any connection that has to this matter. Also it reminds me about the denied but not disproved story about Chinese researchers transferring viral materials from the Canadian lab to China several years ago. Weak and unconvincing denials have been issued a number of times, but they have the sound of a kid telling their parents, “I know the cookie jar is on the floor and my face is covered in chocolate, but it’s just a conspiracy theory that I ate the cookies.”

And some people say, yes, it’s just a conspiracy theory.

Well, I might as well sneak in from the back door and become an illegal too, at least I won’t vote Democrat. Would cancel out one DACA voter anyway. /s

IMAGINE IF YOU CAN A VIRUS SO UNTESTABLE

THAT YOU CAN HAVE IT ONCE IN EVERY FOUR TESTS

then the other stuff

There is obviously considerable manipulation of data involved in this, the only question being, is there a master planner working behind the scenes making contacts, or do all the drones in the hive mind “get what to do” and mindlessly they comply?

Could be partly one and partly the other.

A question that seldom gets asked is this — how many people get sick from the power of suggestion or the worry? There is such a thing as auto-suggestion. On our side, there is probably such a thing as auto-immunity.

I am chugging vitamins and zinc to the extent that I may set off metal detectors for years afterwards. :)

Cut it off and mail it in, dude.

Take no chances.

Was he also a guide for Lewis and Clark?

Thanks, that word came at a very good time for me today as I consider what to do next with a vision that I had. The COVID pandemic has played havoc with my plans since I can’t travel to where I need to go. But I won’t let that end the commitment I made to understand more completely what seemed at first to be a very challenging vision. It still seems challenging but I’ve dropped the “very.”

I think they are trying to restart the Vancouver based film industry but so many people involved in that need to travel across borders and that is only possible in limited circumstances with a two-week mandatory isolation to start the work visit, so it’s tough sledding. On the other hand, the infection rates are surprisingly low in Vancouver, given that it’s basically the Canadian Seattle/Portland.

The disparity of case numbers and deaths is certainly suspicious and points to a possible trend of over-reporting of marginal cases with the motive being either financial or political.

In Canada, where there is less financial or political motive to over-report, we have considerably fewer cases per capita and perhaps half the death toll per capita (which means 5% compared to the 10% that is our population vs US population) but the disparity goes away if we compare only Ontario-Quebec which are the most populated provinces with the largest cities (apart from Vancouver which has fared remarkably well all things considered).

The PGA tour is back in operation and its travelling participants are being tested regularly; the percentage of positive tests has been quite low and of those, only one or two people were actually feeling any symptoms. Then there was the report that one golfer’s child (not travelling with the players) went to hospital for an unrelated cause, had a positive test, then a day later had two negative tests.

So it makes you wonder, do they count people like that in the totals? And if so what does that say about the overall risk factor?

If anyone is confused by my response to Zhang Fei above, he quoted me from some other thread, I didn’t realize that until after I posted my response.

Maybe he’s holding back for the campaign.

Double edged swords all round as the media paint Trump as the guy who won’t wear a mask and wants a return to normalcy.

If 70% of the population feel the same way, then they are just giving him free campaign ads.

On Putin, perhaps he is just following the adage, “don’t apologize, don’t explain.” Especially when you have done nothing wrong.

He must be referring to Tom Brady and Drew Brees, the good quarterbacks.

I attended an event which I believe may have led to the rapid loss of power in Moscow.

Soviet propagandist Georgi Arbatov was, as communists go, an urbane, not thoroughly detestable, middle-aged bureaucrat in charge of something called the North American Institute in Moscow. The purpose of this group was to influence public opinion in North America in favor of the USSR.

I don’t need to tell this group of readers what general concepts that entailed. This was at the time when Gorbachev had brought out perestroika and glasnost.

Arbatov thought he would be speaking to a mixed but mostly liberal crowd in Toronto at a large auditorium on the university campus. He droned on about the wonders of glasnost and perstroika for some time, before segments of the crowd got restless and started chanting in east European languages.

It turned out that 95% of the people who attended this lecture were not gullible liberal students and bourgeoisie types, but hard-line anti-communists (that is essentially why I had gone out of my way to attend, my attitude was, Gorbachev is better than most communists, but his reforms would very likely destabilize the country and lead to a counter-revolution, so I wanted to see for myself what kind of people were running the show).

Arbatov eventually panicked, and retreated from the stage to some safe room guarded by burly KGB agents. The crowd were not particularly violent, but very agitated. At the moment he gave up trying, somebody was proclaiming very loudly in religious tones. I don’t speak east European languages but a friend of mine said he thought it was a curse from God being hurled at the Soviet representative on behalf of millions of persecuted Christians.

It was only a year later that the Berlin wall fell and the process of disintegration of the USSR began.

My belief is that Arbatov, a confident and probably within the politburo a persuasive figure, was broken by this experience and it must have become known back in Moscow when he returned (possibly before that).

I have always hoped to see a similar event destroy the confidence of this new form of communism we have in our own countries today. God knows we have all yelled at somebody, out of sheer frustration that nobody seems to get what is happening, but so far it hasn’t been as effective as the night in Toronto when they shouted down Soviet communism at its finest hour (which is not saying much, but if every Soviet leader had been as reasonable and capable as Gorbachev, the USSR might still be ticking along — and I know, it is, under Putin — that part remains a bit of a mystery but I accept that basically the communists are back just under a new branding, and irony of ironies, their biggest enemies seem to be western leftist politicians.)

Pray for that same voice to be heard again in the land.

I say leave the dude alone, second place in a presidential election is nothing to sneeze at considering he’s almost comatose.