A White Christmas. Disagreements about doctors. What's happening with Covid? How heavy of a 2 x 4?
20211224
We don't often have white Christmases here in Kyiv, but we definitely will tomorrow. Nighttime temperatures have fallen into the single digits the last three days. We have about two or three inches on the ground and light fluff falling periodically.
My home diagnosis of the winter crud I've written about is walking pneumonia. The Mayo Clinic's description fits me to a T. The only thing that they don't mention is how persistent it is. That to me is the strongest clue – it doesn't make you sick, but it doesn't go away.
Oksana insists I should go to the doctor to have him listen to it. I assure her that my experience with doctors is that they cannot figure out anything that I cannot on my own. At best it would be a waste of time. I remind her that the last time I went to see a doctor about walking pneumonia he gave me a free sample of ciprofloxacin that caused a muscle in my leg to break. Just as the counterindications said might happen, had the doctor been familiar with the literature. Or if I had had sense enough not to trust the doctor in the first place and read them myself.
I mentioned that experience in my Toastmasters speech about doctors last March. It is the only video that YouTube has taken down for medical misinformation. I still don't see the misinformation, but as I recently wrote they decided for a second time that it was not something they would allow. I have posted the speech here for your amusement.
I happen to have some azithromycin on hand as part of my Covid 19 preparations. I continue to take the vitamins C and D and zinc daily, and ivermectin weekly, to keep from getting infected. The antibiotic is part of the cure, which I haven't needed so far. Anyhow, I took the first pill from the packet of three this morning. I will let you know if it works. I will also of course let Oksana know, but experience indicates that however successful it may be, I'm not going to change her mind.
Speaking of changing minds, how heavy of a 2 x 4 does it take to do that? I have recently exchanged emails with one of you. I sent links to this morbidly humorous takeoff on "It's Beginning to Look A Lot like Christmas" showing people keeling over dead right and left, this one of Tedros, the head of the WHO, saying that it is a shame that "some countries are using the boosters to kill children," and this one showing documentary evidence of collusion between Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, to discredit doctors who question their program of injections through the Great Barrington Declaration.
I find such evidence overwhelmingly hard to dispute, but obviously others do not. How can you say that Tedros didn't say that? How can you say that athletes have been dropping over dead for years and we never noticed? How can you say that the CDC and NIH were trying to get to the bottom of Covid 19 when the emails they were exchanging to cover it up are so blatant that they don't even lie about them? Exchanging emails with my correspondent turned out to be fruitless. I just don't have the time. However, there is a comments facility here at Substack if any of you would like to weigh in.
Although the Covid wave is just about over here in Ukraine, the restrictions remain in place. Fewer and fewer people even bother with masks on the bus. If the azithromycin works as hoped on this cough, I will soon venture onto the Metro. I went out to lunch with one of you last week. The seafood restaurant asked us for vaccine cards; the Italian place next door did not.
I continue to tinker with my piece on how Covid is likely to change society. As I have said before, my intent is not to convince any of you, simply to put a foundation in place for myself. I need to have a set of working assumptions about the world that my children will inhabit in 10 or 20 years in order to prepare them.
Political correctness has placed so many fields of inquiry off-limits that people who depend on academia for a paycheck are severely limited in the questions they can pursue. We deplorables should have a field day – there are so many interesting avenues open to us. I am not looking forward to publish anything that will make money or please people in authority. I am therefore free to write about the world as I see it and simply comment on the changes that I expect, and how to prepare my children.
I find this a surprisingly positive exercise. If one assumes that Covid 19, the coming financial collapse, and the absurdities of the woke culture will work themselves out in the short term, it means that in the timeframe that my children are grappling with adulthood they should be at liberty to identify real problems and look for real solutions. With that happy assumption, I am going back to conventional education: scientific method, history as I learned it, the human condition as I learned it.
Ukraine is happily removed from most of the craziness of Western society. I don't think my children need to have a deep understanding, and I don't think I need to indoctrinate them in how evil and counterproductive it is. Simply give them the tools to investigate and think things through on their own, and they should come out okay. With the caveat, of course, that the American neocons have not driven Ukraine into a war with Russia that gets us all killed. They seem to be working really hard to do so.
I invite your feedback on this piece, whether in an email to me or by a comments. In truth, I am not optimistic that there will be much discussion. That's okay – I will soldier on on my own.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong, the women are good looking, and the children will have their grandparents to impress for the next week. Grandparents are amazingly easy. I had hoped to be one myself by this point in life.