Dennis Dale   “Unteathered”

“Time is on their side, yes it is…”

Dennis Dale, Sunday, May 10, 2020:

The one thing the layman can trust is he can’t trust the experts. Because they don’t trust him.

Experts, if they aren’t fake or paid shills, come with a particular professional bias as well as the general contemporary bias by which Western elites are alienated from the common man.

There’s a pattern crises follow now: campaigns of misinformation, opportunistic looting by financial actors, the consolidation of power in the hands of the people who as often as not are responsible, and ending with society’s energies diverted to a cause with little or no relationship to the original crisis. A cause to which the people themselves may have no relationship or interest—the 2003 Iraq War is a stark model.

The first significant action taken in the current crisis (as opposed to significant inaction) was a campaign of misinformation. Faced with the very real prospect of a run on medical-quality face masks the experts lied to us about their effectiveness.

It’s not their fault, you might say; fault the outsourcing of the manufacture of basic medical equipment. But that misinformation campaign about masks was nestled like a Russian doll in a greater misinformation (or just mis-informed) campaign—that our hospitals would be overwhelmed with corona virus patients.

How many lives were lost to this? How much time was lost? Might we have avoided the shutdown and the coming economic depression if we had a system capable of honest action in the public interest?

Squint through the snowstorm of information and look into the heart, such as it is, of the elitist: aside from his objective appraisal of the current crisis (leaving aside his atrophied capacity for objectivity in the Current Year) what about the shutdown appeals to him, emotionally? He sees it as a crude device for a crude people—us. Faced with the prospect of formulating a set of rules for going about life and business or just telling the dumb bastards (us) to stay home, they opted, of course, for the latter.

They want you to “shelter in place” because they don’t trust you to carry out basic instructions.

Common to all crises now is the absence of accountability. Let’s not expect it. But it’s becoming increasingly suggestive the still-touted strategy of shutting down is misguided and may even be counter productive.

...numerous epidemiological studies have shown that infection rates for C19 are higher when people are exposed to it for prolonged periods in confined spaces. Locking people up in their homes is probably the worst thing you could do if you wanted to reduce the infections and the duration of the outbreak.

This is well known to the World Health Organisation. In their joint study with Chinese authorities, published in February, the WHO stated that airborne spread wasn’t reported for C19 and was not considered to be a method of transmission.

They found that most infections occurred within families where the chance of infection was as high as 20%. However, the chance of infection in the community was estimated to be between 1-5%

The elite’s reaction to the crisis was delayed and dishonest; so will be any reaction to the present strategy failing—recognition of which censorship will delay as long as it can. The media can be expected now to portray the inevitable waning of the pandemic as a vindication of the shutdown. This too will delay any abandonment of the strategy.

But for other reasons they are in no hurry. The shutdown hurts the little people, for whom it is crafted. It’s like a flood threatening to leave only the commanding heights above water.

The shutdown strategy retains the support of the experts, so the typical bugman can enjoy the disparate impact it has on the middle and working classes without feeling guilty. Indeed, he unthinkingly plugs it directly into his psychological matrix of understanding: it is a case of us dummies ignoring “science” and valuing “jobs” over “lives”.

That it accelerates the dis-empowering of certain people is inevitable, he might say (not that anyone is asking) like globalization and white decline.

Whatever the case, if wealth and cultural status are to remain wildly uneven in the favor of those in charge, the shutdown will have to be uniform across the country.

Why, you might ask, would Bakersfield, with its dearth of cases, have to observe the same drastic measures as Manhattan, and go down the drain of economic decline?

Because if New York, with its vast importance to the status quo we call Globo Homo, is to be shut down for months (because it’s acquired a nasty virus, as a result of being the center of Globo Homo) then by God so must the rest of the nation. We can’t have people and business, the very power, of New York migrating out to the hinterlands! Therefore a crude strategy must become cruder still.

Meanwhile some people are doing extremely well in the current atmosphere. The Daily Mail:

American billionaires are enjoying multi-million dollar increases to their net worth as the country’s unemployment levels rise to record highs amid the coronavirus lockdowns

Eight ‘pandemic profiteers’ have seen their net worth surge by over $1billion each since the start of the global pandemic.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, 56, has added $25billion to his own wealth since January 1, 2020, as the company’s staff protest their poor working conditions and he makes a return to the company’s day-to-day running.

According to a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, American billionaires added $282billion – nearly a ten percent increase – to their combined wealth between March 18 and April 10, as the U.S. unemployment rate approached 15 percent.

Time is on the side of the powerful.