The World You Live In IV

 "As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have to determine if the wish of the patient is medically justified..." -- Jack Kevorkian, M.D.

"For who could be taught the knowledge of experience from paper? Since paper has the property to produce lazy and sleepy people, who are haughty and learn to persuade themselves, and learn to fly without wings...Therefore, the most fundamental thing is to hasten to experience..." -- Paracelsus

But...Muh Expertise!

It has happened again. An interminable argument returns to create frustration where there should be none, a point of contention where conflict need not arise. A little background, first.

Once a week, Mrs. Overlord receives a visit from one of the company of doctors who are entrusted with her care.

Yes, I know, that is shocking: that in 21st Century America, even in New York City, a doctor still makes house calls. Let us not digress on this point.

This physician and I have been engaged in a running commentary regrading the Wuflu shot. He insists that I should be vaccinated as a means of a) not getting the dreaded Chinese Lung AIDS, myself, and b) protecting the already-vaccinated Mrs. Overlord from a potential infection that her already-compromised pulmonary system might not be able to handle.

His position is that a vaccine, any vaccine, no matter how apparently useless (to judge from all the "breakthrough infections" among the injected -- this is a euphemism for "the fucking thing doesn't work") offers better protection than no vaccine at all.

There is certainly a logic to his argument, but only if the vaccine in question has shown to have much, if any, beneficial effect. I will return to this point in a moment.

My position is that the vaccines now being pushed upon the American public in the name of fighting a virus that kills fewer people than medical malpractice does, when it hasn't been adequately tested for the rush in which it was produced, utilizing a technology (mRNA) which is relatively new and untried, and for which there is no empirical data regarding long-term effects, essentially turns us all into lab rats.

The real lab rats, I will tell you (and only half-jokingly) probably never got these vaccines in a proper test, and if they did, the results were most likely colored by the facts that a) everyone was in a hurry and b) the sample sizes couldn't have been very large for reasons of haste.

This was a common theme in this discussion for several months last year until The Doctor apparently gave up trying to convince me of the utility of the shots.

This week he started in on me all over again. And since we've had this discussion multiple times, I already knew before he got there what his bullet points were going to be (there is a tendency to become a parrot in the medical profession which is quite concerning).

We'll deal with the two that are the most-troubling, so far as I am concerned.

The first is argument to experience. Normally, I would give this argument a great deal of thought, and perhaps accept it except that it is being made, in this case, by a Doctor of Physical Therapy. Yes, the man went to medical school, so he's one up on me there, but he's not an internist, an immunologist, pulmonologist, epidemiologist or any other ____ologist.

This doesn't make him an idiot, but it doesn't give him the claim to expertise in the subject of Shanghai Snotstorm that he believes it does.

The second is his heavy artillery barrage of "The CDC says..." and "the NIH recommends..."," the WHO encourages...", and this is where his sales pitch for the antidote to the Orient Distress falls flat. This "argument to authority", something the above-quoted Paracelsus fought against his entire life, is hardly a point in favor of your argument when:

We now know the NIH funded the Chinese research that created a Frankenvirus that no one wanted, no one needed, and which has now killed millions; the poster child for boldfaced non-veracity, the leftist-beatified "doctor" Anthony Fauci, has lied about everything COVID smugly and arrogantly; we know the CDC, NIH and WHO and the rest of the alphabet soup bureaucracies have consistently been less than forthcoming on all things COVID-19; we know the Chinese government has never told anything remotely smelling of truth about the disease from Day One. We know the CDC produced faulty test kits and the reformulated ones are about as accurate as the answers on Maxine Waters' math tests

Any authority -- and any claim to expertise, or trustworthiness -- these organizations ever had is no longer operative. Their actions (and non-actions) have been indefensible and obviously self-serving. None of them can be believed, considering their appalling actions taken in the wake of the first outbreaks, which have defied medical logic, experience, and even good taste.

Examples are the repeated, contradictory pronouncements concerning masks, the deliberate lie initially told about the inefficacy of even paper masks in order to reserve supplies for the medical establishment, the unanswered question of what happened to billions of dollars in anti-terrorism funding that was supposed to prepare the medical system for just such an emergency, and the reasoning behind, and sources of funding, of gain-of-function research.

I also don't buy the line that only a single virus escaped that Chinese charnel house of bacteria, and believe (although my evidence is scant, but this is what happens when "authority" deliberately lies to you) that all these "variants" are not just merely COVID-19 mutating as it travels through populations, but very likely to have been prototypes of the super-killer COVID that "escaped" simultaneously.

This, too, is a question -- are the variants a mutation of the original, or are they separate viruses? -- that has yet to be asked or answered, to the best of my knowledge.

The whole thing smells, badly, of the medical establishment (and it's government nexus) circling the wagons: they created this monstrosity, they failed to be prepared for it, and the GOVERNMENT-RUN PUBLIC medical system in the United States came critically close to complete failure, save for the actions of the Private Sector to find alternatives to or ramp up production of medical equipment, drugs, vaccines, and all manner of things needed on the fly.

If ever there was an argument to be made AGAINST government-run healthcare, anywhere, it was COVID-19. European medical systems in Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom were practically gutted by the outbreaks. The Swedes probably saved theirs by not listening to "the experts". But in any case, systems in which doctors deliberately chose who would live and die due to severe shortages and rationing of resources is not exactly a ringing endorsement of "national health".

Here, in the United States, the worst-hit areas were all cities and states run by leftists, who generally celebrate the "success" of such socialized systems, and who proved their own cut-rate versions of them were wholly inadequate.

If you're still locked in your basement almost two years later, understand that this is a primary reason why; if you weren't frightened to death about catching a virus that has a 99% survival rate for people who are healthy, you might have noticed the government/socialist model failed totally and completely and had to be rescued at the last moment by capitalism.

And a primary plank of the left's political platform would vanish overnight. Don't get me started on the rest of their platform which includes unfettered illegal immigration of infected individuals, shutting down economies to provide the basis for a new system of government entitlements, and all the ecological nonsense surrounding urban living, mass transit, and the all-powerful-all-knowing technocratic state

The pro-vaccine argument, then, falls upon deaf ears. Even more so when the deaf ears have already had COVID-19 (before anyone knew it was COVID-19) AND HASN'T BEEN TRULY SICK A DAY SINCE.

(That tale is told here).

And this complete and utter failure of supposed expertise has spread to all areas of American Life. Sez me, it was always there, but it took a stunning cascade of deadly failures to make it painfully obvious to even the dumbest motherfucker on your block.

As I've written previously, history is re-written and tortured to produce a result that bears no relation to the actual facts, so that no one who studies it is in possession of either accurate knowledge nor any basis of agreement on irrefutable truths. This is not "a mistake", it is not even the "continuing investigation and evolutionary nature of historical research", it is a systemic attempt by "experts" to tell deliberate falsehoods because it gives them prestige and influence, or soothes their shattered feelings. This attitude affects not only the social sciences, but has completely engulfed the Humanities, and is slowly creeping into the hard sciences, as well.

You can turn on your television at any moment and be fed the most-outrageous garbage by someone pretending to be "a journalist", knowing full well that what they tell you can't possibly be truth, but hiding behind the shield of supposed 'expertise", only to discover the "story" (i.e. "narrative") you've just been spoonfed by a teleprompter-reading moron is poorly-sourced, often unverified, and probably had it's origin in some dipshit scanning the Internet for items that appear "newsy" on Twitter or their Facebook feed, or which can be packaged for a network's target audience.

There is nothing as hilarious, nor as disheartening, as to watch battalions of "experts" on subjects various and sundry make confident prognostications on everything from who wins the Big Game on Sunday to what Congress or the Resident is likely to do, to the state of the economy, to the events and activities taking place all over the globe, only to have such premonitions often be falsified within hours, if not minutes, and the Dumbfuck Brigade is back the very next day with a new set of erroneous tea-leaf reads to do it all over again, often for years on end.

Few activities are as time-wasting and ultimately pointless than to hear a politician recite a litany of "talking points" on subjects they obviously know nothing about, and attempt to feign expertise on whatever subject they may be blathering about. They come prepared with "facts" and figures, none of which has any resemblance to reality, and which, one gets the general impression, are little more than the recitations of the pious hopes of some bureaucrat working in the basement of the Department of Stupid Shit Chuck Schumer Says.

But all of these consider themselves "experts". Mostly because of the positions they hold and not because of any tried-and-tested...you know...demonstrable EXPERTISE. These folks very often passed the right tests, went to the right schools, and attached themselves to the right politicians or businessmen and were rewarded for their fealty and their brown-nosing with highly-paid sinecures they otherwise would be unqualified for.

If you believe, judging from the current state of the country that you can discern with your own senses, at this point in time -- does it appear to you that ANYONE who has been given authority, is assumed to have knowledge that you don't (or can't find for yourself), and who apparently cannot ever be fired for being an incompetent fucktard is deserving of the title of "expert"?

And yet these people, proven failures and unproficient in everything except Public Relations, scapegoating, perjury, ass-covering, and ineffectuality lecture us every day on how we should live -- how we should think, what we're allowed to say, how we are to conduct ourselves in public, when we can work or not, how our children are to be educated and raised, right down to insisting an unproven vaccine should be forced upon us otherwise we Non-Conformists are to be threatened by a shitstorm of perpetual unemployment and social non-approbation.

We are to be, as Orwell called it, "vaporized" and "unpersoned" -- based upon little more than the recommendations of completely impotent imbeciles who have been wrong on every possible thing it has ever been possible to be wrong about.

The first step, Sez me, is to not give into this mad rush to get "the shot" before anything is known about it and against the backdrop of what we know about the people who advocate for it. Simply say "NO", and when "no" does not suffice, to forcefully remind the "expert" in the room -- the doctor of physical therapy, for example -- that he's obviously out of his depth on this subject and should probably fuck off until next week.