Only 6% - That's Something to Consider

 Quietly, with very little fanfare and absolutely no coverage in the mainstream news media, the Centers for Disease Control released “new” information on American Covid 19 deaths.  The CDC reported that of the 161, 392 deaths covered in the report, only 6%, or 9,684, had only Covid listed as a cause of death.  The other 94% had, on average 2.6 other diseases listed as “comorbidities”.  It is fair to assume that in most cases one or more of the 2.6 “comorbidities” predated the Covid, resulting in weakened immune systems, making contracting the Covid more likely.  Taking the CDC report at its face value, any thinking person must wonder why we’re still acting like this thing is the “black death”?

People who were paying attention questioned the death toll numbers after about two weeks of the constant reporting.  “Experts” warned that New York City would need 50,000 ventilators and thousands of additional hospital beds. President Trump used war time powers to force manufacturers to produce ventilators.  He sent the Army Corps of Engineers to New York to build field hospitals in Central Park and to convert the Javits Convention Center into a medical facility.  To meet the projections of the “experts”. The President also sent the US Navy hospital ship “Comfort” to NY.  All told, the Government added nearly 5,000 beds to the city’s treatment capacity.  Doctors stopped seeing non – Covid patients and stopped doing all but life essential emergency surgeries.  The entire nation’s health care system poised, primed to treat the hundreds of thousands of expected China virus victims.

All that planning and preparation and the hundreds of thousands of dying people failed to materialize.

The Comfort staff only treated 182 patients before the Navy recalled her.  By mid – April, the City and the Federal government cancelled the construction of the field hospitals.  The tsunami of deathly ill Covid patients never materialized.  Hospital beds stood empty; tens of thousands of ventilators waited – before the “Wizards of Smart” realized that ventilators killed more than they helped. Hospitals around the country were laying off nurses, technicians and doctors because there were no patients.

Thinking people couldn’t help but begin to wonder what was going on. Logic and common sense told those of us who were listening that something very odd was going on with these numbers.  Bear in mind that in March and April, while the nation waited the coming horror, the only health guidance had given us was stay away from crowds, stay home if you don’t feel good, cover your coughs and sneezes, wash your hands, and use hand sanitizer.  Somehow, the experts got it wrong and the China virus did not crush the nation’s healthcare system.

Soon, dozens of county coroners around the country went public complaining that the States were inflating the death counts.  Like this past weekend’s revision in the CDC numbers, the mainstream news media ignored the coroners’ complaints.  But thinking people couldn’t help but wonder.

Remember, if you can, back on the 13th of March when President Trump declared a national emergency and asked for our patience for “15 days” to “flatten the curve”.  Looking back 172 days now, there wasn’t ever a curve that we needed to flatten.

I am fighting the urge to let my rage and sarcasm have full sway here, but there are some valid things that I want to say.  Part of me just wants to unload the gallows humor, the harsh verbal slings, the zippy one-liners guaranteed to enrage a huge chunk of people, but I’d rather have my Faithful Readers give some serious thought to the words that I am writing.

Nothing happens in a vacuum.  People, and therefore by extension, organizations take actions for reasons, or motives, or for some expected gain.  There was a reason that the statisticians at CDC and the various state Health Departments chose to report the deaths this way.  They didn’t just flip a coin, there was a reason, motive, or expectation of gain in the decisions to report deaths “with” rather than simply report deaths “by” Covid 19.  The results of this method of reporting led to a series of bad decisions by a host of governors and others in authority.

One can never make good decisions if all the information one has is flawed.  Consider, if you will, the route that information about the Covid infection took to get to CDC and the governors of our sovereign states.  The outbreak began deep in the heartland of China.  The Chinese government controls the news media with an iron fist.  China also refused to let foreign medical people travel to Wuhan to see conditions for themselves.  We truly do not know how serious the Covid was in Wuhan or in other parts of China.  We have no way of knowing just how accurate the information coming out of China was.

We must not forget that the Chinese government was not pleased with President Trump and the United States during the last half of 2019.  Trump had come down hard on the Chinese during trade negotiations, taking back significant giveaways that previous US administrations had awarded to China.  At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, is it possible that China hyped the severity of the epidemic, hoping to disrupt the American economy?  Stranger things have happened.

Nor can we know with any certitude if the World Heath Organization truthfully and accurately analyzed and reported their data to the rest of the world. Remember, there is always a reason why an organization chooses to do something.  I am sure that many of us want to believe that the UN and the WHO are only interested in what is best for all of us, but the reality is that the people who make up the UN and the World Health Organization are PEOPLE and can be driven by less than honorable motives.  We cannot assume, considering the long-standing anti-American attitudes in the United Nations, how well-intentioned guidelines coming out of the WHO might not have been.

It is possible, more possible than not, that China brought pressure on the leaders of the WHO to do their bidding with regards to hyping the virus.  It is very possible, that China “bought” the Director – General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to help in their disinformation campaign against the United States.  “Honorable” men have been bought throughout the history of the world.  There are a very, very few men who cannot be bought.

I write these paragraphs to suggest that our own CDC MAY have been working with very inaccurate data in the beginning.  It is very likely that the Chinese and the WHO had supplied bad data, and the CDC accepted it as being valid. It is likely, that CDC over estimated both the transmissibility and severity of the virus.  It is almost a certainty that the information that our CDC had was faulty, at best, fraudulent at the worst.

One of the most difficult things for anyone – and therefore by extension, any organization to do – is to admit they are wrong.  Once the President asked for the 15 day “quarantine”, CDC could not, or would not, admit that they were wrong.  Perhaps they took the “in for a penny, in for a pound” approach.  

There is, also, the very real possibility that some of the decision makers within the CDC willingly went along with the disinformation campaign to hurt the President’s chances of re-election. The “Deep State” is real and reaches into all levels of the Governments.  It doesn’t really matter, though, what caused China, WHO, and CDC to do what they did.  The result, considering that less than 10,000 people in America have died from Covid 19 alone, has been catastrophic.  

Perhaps it needs an essay of its own, but the complicity of the main stream news media to question and investigate the death counts is the saddest part of this whole ordeal.  Real journalists, real news hounds, would have started digging around back in April when New York City was not hit as hard as the experts projected.  Real journalists would have tried to find the truth.  Our current news stooges are content to parrot the Democrat Party talking points trying to destroy the president.  the vaunted “4th Estate” has fallen so far from the days of Watergate.  Back then, they brought down a president – now they are political lapdogs for the Democrats.

It has become one of my fondest hopes that the whole Covid-19 hoax will someday be exposed.  I’m not counting on it.

That Mask Ain't No Hero's Cape

I think that the virulent militancy of the pro – mask people might concern me almost as much as the blatant attack on our human and civil liberties by certain Democratic governors.  Voters in the affected states will eventually remedy the actions of the governors, but I am afraid that the damage that the “mask, no – mask” controversy has done to our society may never heal.  The level of anger that the pro – mask people are expressing is frightening.

Almost as troubling, and assuredly more annoying, are the self – righteous, sanctimonious, arrogant posts that some of the pro – mask folks are posting on social media.  To their view, they are so much more intelligent, sophisticated, caring, and socially conscious than the rest of us. Frankly, I find myself disagreeing.

Pro – mask folks, you are not more intelligent than we are.  Intelligent people do not accept what the so-called “experts” tell them without applying critical thinking, knowledge guided by experience, their own research, and in the case of anything that comes from any government through any news organization – a hearty dose of skepticism.  For every “scientific” statement supporting masks there is one suggesting they don’t work.  Often, these conflicting statements come from the same “scientific” entity on different days.  You can pick and choose whether the WHO or CDC is in favor of masks or against them.  Both have put out conflicting statements.

An intelligent person will consider the question and apply some common sense and real information to the question.  A virus is tiny. Some are as small as 0.001 microns. A micron, or micrometer, is equivalent to 1/1000 of a millimeter (0.000039 inch).  In real life, an American dime coin is just a little bit thicker than a millimeter.  I’m not sure I can do the math, but a virus is 1/000000 the width of a dime.  Or, stated another way, 100,000 Covid viruses in a pile would only be as tall as a dime is thick.

Most of us can’t even conceive of something that small. It is microscopic, it is tiny.

In comparison, the filter on the N95 mask is 0.3 microns.  The pore size on a surgical mask is 100 microns. Bandanas and other cloth masks have even much larger pore sizes – simply truth, viruses are small enough to penetrate all generally available masks. Your mask isn’t protecting anyone.

Pro – mask folks, you are not more “progressive” or “sophisticated than we are.  You are neither “progressive” nor “sophisticated” because you are wearing a rag across your face when common sense, logic, and about ½ of the published science says you ought not to.  To put it plainly, it’s stupid.  Telling each other that you are both “progressive” and “sophisticated” is simply feeding your delusions.

You all love to tell us how caring and compassionate you are because you’re wearing a mask, you are going to “make a difference”, you are going to “save the planet”.  No, you aren’t.  You are running around with a rag across your face, breathing in all kinds of bacteria and pathogens that are busily growing in that rag over your mouth and nose.  The moisture in your breath and the dark in the fabric make a great incubator for all kinds of organisms in your breath and in the air around you.  You aren’t protecting anyone, you are a freaking, walking, mumbling “typhoid Mary”, spreading God only knows what infectious crap in your wake.  No, you’re not caring and compassionate.  You are annoying and sanctimonious.  You are not making a difference, you are not saving the planet, you are wearing a rag on your face and starting fights with people who disagree with you and who might just know more than you do.

The sun will come up in the east tomorrow morning and will set tomorrow in the west whether you wear a Covid mask or not.  Regardless of what you try to do to stop it, spring time is going to follow winter every year world without end, Amen.  Nothing that you nor I can do will in any impact the natural, physical world around us.  “All we are, is dust in the wind.”

You ain’t no hero and that mask ain’t no cape. 

From where I see it, just having state governors “order” us to wear masks is a far greater risk to our lives than the Covid – 19 virus.  You stand a greater chance of dying in a car accident than you do of contracting, getting sick from, and dying from the Covid – 19 (or, “da Rona” as some of my friends down South call it.).  With each passing day, the news reports x number more cases – but they are counting asymptomatic and fraudulent positive antibody tests as “new” cases.  Almost every day, there is a new report of grotesque mistakes in reporting test results, or a report of unused tests returning with “positive” results.  Even one such report should make an intelligent, “progressive”, sophisticated person question EVERYTHING that the media and governments have reported. 

It is sad to me that one’s life can be so meaningless that one can become fulfilled and driven by wearing a useless facemask.  I am sad that so many people are willing to fight over something that doesn’t matter one wit in the final analysis.

Every one of us is going to die.  That is about the only thing that is certain in life.  Diseases caused by viruses have always been with and always will be.  Various types of the Corona virus cause the common cold.  Over 2 million years of human evolution and there is no “vaccine” to prevent the common cold.  There so – called vaccines for the flu but whether they help is hardly settled science.  I received a flu vaccine one time and as far as I can remember, that was the only winter that I ever got the flu.  I won’t take the pneumonia shot either.  There are countless causes for pneumonia, and the vaccine protects against 5 pathogens.  I’m not a mathematical wizard, but even I can figure out that I am far more likely to get pneumonia from one of the countless other causes and not one of the 5 that the vaccine protects against.  Putting alien material into your body without a huge guarantee of success seems rather stupid to me.

But I have been wrong before.

One of the great hall marks of our American character has always been a healthy “live and let live” attitude.  Until very recently, Americans have been mostly willing to let other Americans be themselves and express themselves with little interference.  Public America was pretty much a complete “free marketplace of ideas”.  A Libertarian heritage of “do what you want to do as long as you don’t hurt anyone else” was a hallmark of our People.  It is no longer.

Over the past 50 years, we have seen in our nation a disturbing trend of intolerance for the expression of many legitimate ideas, social, and political opinions.  I think it began with the anti – American, anti – Vietnam War protesters.  When confronted with opposing ideas, they would shout down and out scream their opposition.  During the last quarter of the 20^th century, the “progressive” left added “political correctness” to their arsenal of censorship tools.  The political left has determined what things can be said in public discourse.  Should you present an unapproved opinion – you will be labeled as a racist, bigot, homophobe, or some other negative label.  And, once labeled as such, your opinion is no longer valid because you are whatever they have labeled you.  And no one wants to be labeled as an “enemy of decency”.

The “mask – no mask” conflict has moved thought control and censorship into new and dangerous territory.  The “progressive left” is now “virtue – signaling”, virtue – shaming”, and “team identifying” with their assault on those who won’t mask up.  Now, this is not entirely new – they have been using similar tactics with “climate change deniers” for half a generation.  Your value as a person – to the left – is not what you contribute, not what you create, not the help that you provide, but rather whether or not you hold the “opinions”.  One can be a disgusting, reprehensible, vile person, but if one expresses the correct opinions he remains with the “right” group.  Holding (or expressing those opinions) out weighs whatever short comings a person may have.  Identifying the compliant and the non- compliant will make it easier the next time a government wises to impose its will on the people.  They will know who will surrender and who will resist.

It does not matter to me which side of the “mask – no mask” controversy that you are on.  All that I care about is that you be decent, kind, and tolerant of others.  Please accept, as I do of mine, that your opinion may not be right.  Treat those who disagree with you with tolerance, forbearance, patience, and forgiveness.  As the Good Book says, “judge not, lest you be judged” and “do unto others as you would have done to you”. 

And if the masked folk are right, those of us who are “unmasked” are going to be dead before long anyways, so be kind to one another.

April in the Old Coal Mining Country (with apologies to Jack Kerouac)

March roared into our mountain world like one wild, super mean, hungry lion this year.  She pounced upon us with a viciousness that, in my humble opinion, was hardly called for.  The first two weeks of March were bitterly cold. In some ways, much more painful than the long cold spell that we survived in January.  The last two weeks were wet and windy and mean, even if they were not as cold.   Years ago, I read a description of March that has stayed with me across the long years: “ March is an old witch with big silver eyes and frozen rain in her wild hair.”  And so she is.  And March 2019, was no exception here in the old, coal mining country.

Mostly the mountains and ridges here in our country carried the fading gray of winter through March.  There were occasional skiffs of snow that brightened the hills, if only for a day or two, but the hills pretty much stayed that winter gray that we all know so well.  During the last few days of the witchy month, the woods began to quicken.  If you looked quick and sharp, by the last windy days, you could start to some of the earliest maples beginning to bud red, and the willows starting to turn bright yellow, and some of the greenbriars starting to show color.  But, you had to look quick and sharp, the gray still overwhelms the hills and hollows where the old men dug the coal.

Then April blew into the mountains here on the last of the March witch's winds.  But April is not March, and the winds blew warm and dried out the ground and picked up the last of last year's leaves and swept them across the land in whirlwinds, arabesques, and comically, wild dances.  Still not springtime, but there seems to be laughter and smiles in the April air.  Like the life rising in the trees around us, I think that Hope rises in our souls in the spring, too.  We have suffered and survived the winter, bound by the cold and dark, but Life returns to the land with the sun and we come back to Life as well.

Life returns to our mountain world with the rising of April.  It is subtle at first – a few trees begin to bud; red, yellow, and white buds begin to color the gray woods.  The first spring flowers begin to show, the daffodils, the forsythia, and the tulips.  Suddenly, the lawns and fields are full of robins, hunting flocking, mating, nesting.  The silent air of winter is gone, replaced with the chirping and tweeting and singing of flocks and flocks of birds that are back for the summer.  If you sleep with your bedroom windows open, the odds are that you have been awakened once or twice already by the pre-dawn symphony.  That is one of the few things that I don't mind interrupting my morning sleep.  There is pure harmony and joy in the bird's pre-dawn singing.

How can we speak of the capriciousness of April without commenting on the oft poetically referred to “April showers”?  Although March, in almost any place that I have lived, tends to be wet, somehow we have come to relate rain “showers” with April.  I was thinking about “April Showers” as I spent the day driving through torrential rainstorms and near hurricane force winds yesterday.  There was nothing nurturing, nor loving, nor whimsical about yesterday's April shower.  It was nasty, cold and brutal.  Yesterday's April rain was as miserable as anything January can dish out.  Even with that wintry rain, the trees pushed leaves out all day, giving a much different look to the woods by evening.   But, then I remembered the shower last week that left that marvelous smell of warm, summer thundershowers; the smell of warm, wet asphalt, spring soil, and the sweet, sweet smell of growing things.  April is capricious, wild, and wildly unpredictable.

If March is an old witch with big silver eyes and frozen rain in her wild hair, then April is a giggly, teenaged girl, who can't decide on what she wants to wear to the party.  She has windblown blonde hair and wears flowers in her hair.  Her peaches and cream complexion belie her flashing wild eyes.  She takes us from the last gasps of winter, through a wild ride of changing weather, while Life, and warm weather, return to the hills and hollows, the mountains and valleys of the old, coal mining country.  April is a wild ride with a giddy woman-child whose mercurial whimsy keeps us guessing as the sun climbs higher into the sky over the abandoned tunnels and lonely, empty strip jobs.

Those empty strip jobs rare their hunched backs into the vast dome of the sky over our mountains.  Some of them just beginning to grow the wild grasses, some of them covered with rich, carpets of grass that have developed over the long, sweep of years.  On some of the old domes, the brush has begun encroaching on the grasslands as the inevitable, endless, perfect cycle of reforestation works its way through time.  Some of the older stip jobs are forested now, that many years have swept through this land where the old men dug the coal.

And true to keeping with her wild-child, capricious, giddy adolescent persona,  April delivered a marvelously beautiful spring day today.  The morning sun lifted above the eastern hills, riding up in the clear and glorious sky.  A few puffy white clouds rode the soft wind and the air was as clear as crystal.  All across the neighborhood, the rhythmic hum of lawn mowers drowned out the flocks of birds, if only for a while.  The afternoon smelled of newly mown grass.  Not a person in the world could have ordered a more perfect day!

Darkness covers our mountain world again, tonight, as April wanders inexorably toward May.  The air is soft and warm, with just a bit of chill in it – perfect for the last few days of April.  March is a witch kitty everyplace where I have ever lived, and April drives you crazy 'cause it's not quite springtime.  This land where the old men dug the coal is no different.  Hold on to Hope, summer is just over the horizon.

A Matter of Perspective, I Reckon

It has been fun the last couple of weeks reporting on and writing about some of our neighbors who are upset with the new chief of police here in New Bethlehem. A lot of us don't handle changes well and Chief Malnofsky and the new police force is definitely a change from the reign of Chief Ryan. Far be it from me to say one system was better than the other – but, policing in New Bethlehem is different than it used to be. What is interesting to me, is how differently some of us are seeing the same thing.

Most of the complaints about the new chief and his officers are coming from several of the social clubs in New Bethlehem and East Brady. It seems like some of the members of these clubs think that the new New Bethlehem Police Department is singling out club members for harassment. According to these spokespersons, it seems like the NB cops are spending an inordinate amount of time "stalking" club members and skulking around the parking lots looking for people to harass on car safety violations and DUI's and such.

It is not paranoia when they really are out to get you.

According to New Bethlehem's Borough Council President, Sandy Mateer, reorganizing and restructuring the police department was in the works before Chief Ryan decided to see if the grass really was greener on that side of the fence. Mrs. Mateer says that a lot of residents have been expressing concern about the lack of policing going on in the area. Adequate police protection is essential for the orderly growth, or revitalization, of a community. That is one of the driving forces behind many of the civic leaders in New Bethlehem here in the second decade of the 21^st century; to revitalize and renew the community in New Bethlehem and the Redbank Valley.

Part of the plans for reorganizing the NBPD was adding more full-time officers, having at least 2 officers on each shift, and splitting the coverage territory into 2 districts – New Bethlehem area and the Rimersburg - East Brady area. Longer range plans would eventually see a police substation in East Brady. With 2 officers on duty each shift and the work area clearly defined, Borough Council hoped to have greater police visibility and coverage. It's always good to have a plan.

Having a plan “b” is usually a good idea, too.

There are 2 pretty well-defined sides to the current NB cop debate. One side wants more policing and the other side, not so much policing. What is best for the community as a whole? Who really should decide how the police do their work? In an ideal, Libertarian world, everybody would respect everybody else and we wouldn't need police. That ain happening on this side of the Pearly Gates, so we have to accept some amount of policing as part of the price that we pay for living in a civilized society. Such as it is.

But, I digress. There has to be some amount, some degree of police enforcement in order to maintain that civil society. We don't always realize just how many laws, regulations, and ordinances we have allowed the Ruling Class to impose upon us! It is likely that every one of us breaks a bunch of laws every day without ever knowing it. No police department in the world can enforce all of the laws that we, living in the supposedly "land of the free" are bound by. Every police department has to be directed by a legislative body to prioritize the laws, regulations, and ordinances to enforce. The New Bethlehem Police Department is under the direction of the New Bethlehem Borough Council. The priority of enforcement, then, comes from the Borough Council.

In theory, we “the people” direct the Police Department through the Borough Council.

In theory. Seriously.

I think that if we are honest, each of us has things that we think the police should pay more attention to while paying less attention to other things. I imagine that some of us think that Ordinance enforcement is a waste of the police's time, while some of us probably don't think car safety (brake lights, turn signals, etc.) are an awfully big deal. Most of us probably think that violent crimes against people and property should be a priority of any police department – probably not much disagreement there. The disagreement comes in how much enforcement we want to see in other areas of our mutual communal interactions. I think that likely, our preference about non-violent crime enforcement comes from the things that we do, or leave undone, in our daily lives.

I'd like to see the police spend a whole day ticketing people who stop past the white line at the intersection of Broad and Wood Streets, but that's just me.

The social clubs say that the “nit-picking” police are hurting business at the clubs and that this is going to hurt the community as the clubs financially support school and community events. The police say that they are not targeting the clubs. Chief Malnofsky says that his officers don't have time to “stake out” the Moose, VFW, and Eagles. Personally, I would hope that he is right. One has to wonder though, how much damage the members of the clubs are doing by posting cop warnings on social media on Friday and Saturday nights.

It seems to me like our community is going through some changes and maybe we all need to calm down and let things settle for a bit before we get all “take to the streets” and protesty. The new chief hasn't hired up a full roster yet. The department is re-organizing and rebuilding. Be patient, give it time, things will fall into place with a new normal before too long.

In the meantime, I am going to go scrape the snow off my headlights and tail lights and make a quick turn signal and brake light check before I go over town. Maybe next time I'm at the bar, I will leave one beer sooner than usual. And, maybe I'll stop posting cop warnings on my Facebook page telling folks not to come to town. Maybe I will be a little more cautious driving through town. Maybe I can do some little things to help make the situation better.

By the way, the New Bethlehem Police are having a “meet and greet” Saturday, February 2, 1 PM at the Community Center. It will be interesting to see how many “concerned” residents will turn out.

Meanwhile, I'd still like to see more enforcement at the Broad & Wood Streets intersection.