review of Mark McDonald M.D.'s "United States of Fear"

2100. "review of Mark McDonald M.D.'s "United States of Fear""

- credited to: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- published on my "Critic" website on July 28, 2022

- http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticFear.html

review of

Mark McDonald M.D.'s "United States of Fear"

by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - July 24-27, 2022

I was raised in a conservative Republican Christian household. My parents hated each other's guts & separated by the time I was 9. I found them both to be completely delusional, self-serving, & in denial. I suspect that many of my peers had similar experiences & that that's partially why so many of us became radicalized. But everything changes all the time & what might've been more alert & aware in 1970 might've deteriorated into imbecility by 2020. W/ this in mind, I read this bk, as I have others recently, w/ an attitude of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In other words, while I have basic disagreements w/ it philosophically, I found other parts to be accurate & worth considering. In fact, I found it, at 1st, to keenly express my own feelings & observations.

"In the summer of 2020, the mother of a fifteen-year-old boy with ADHD declined to bring him to my office for his three-month medication follow-up visit. "We haven't been going out much recently,""

[..]

"After insisting that an in-person visit would be necessary for optimal care, I suggested she drop him off at the building instead. He was old enough to come upstairs by himself. This launched her into a hysterical rant about the dangers of her son walking through a public building and the health risk he would assume, not to mention the possibility of the family contracting a terrifying, highly contagious disease.

"Despite evidence to the contrary-that children are essentially immune to the Chinese Wuhan virus and even act as barriers to its spread-she insisted that I was uninformed, unreasonable, and cruel for demanding that her son come to my office in person to discuss his medications. A day later, I received another email, this one from her husband, apologizing on behalf of his wife, thanking me for helping care for their son all these years, but announcing that they would be seeking a new psychiatrist." - pp 1-2

This brief quote on its own opens multiple cans of worms for me. 1st, I question whether ADHD as a diagnosis isn't just another way of saying that a person has plenty of energy & very little focus. I don't think that's an illness & don't think it shd be medicated. I also think that medication adds a whole other set of problems. But that's really a different matter than what the story's about. SO:

2nd, I think that the mass media's fear-mongering has generated a fear of a pandemic that's just the usual thing, nothing to be afraid of. People grow & decline physically & mentally. Eventually, something comes along that pushes the physical decline over the edge into death. If you want to postpone that happening take better care of yourself: don't get fat, don't be addicted to anything. But you can't postpone it forever, eventually you're going to die. Get used to it, maybe it's just the way nature works & not really something to be afraid of.

3rd, That brings us to the mother who's apparently just another neurotic hypochondriac. Don't let people like this run yr life, they'll ruin it & make you sicker than anything they're exaggeratedly afraid of is ever likely to.

4th, I might as well mention that calling COVID-19 the "Chinese Wuhan virus" seems loaded on its own. I don't think viruses have nationalities. Whether COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China, I don't know & I don't care. If it exists at all in the way that we're constantly being told it does doesn't really matter. It's just another virus. it'll do what viruses do (if they even exist) & that'll be that. It doesn't matter where it came from.

"When fear no longer protects from harm but simply inhibits one from living fully, it ceases to be helpful. When fear becomes the primary driver of decision-making, the quality of our decisions begins to suffer." - p 4

"In the extreme, when fear spreads throughout an entire society, the effect is paralyzing. Decision-making becomes irrational and reactive. The sensationalizing of outlier events and the pursuit of safety supplants sound public policy. Media begin covering the "fear story" and serving it to their audience on a regular basis." - p 4

& it's w/ statements like these that the good doctor & I are on the same page.

"Children and adolescents, for example, suffer more anxiety today than when I began my career. Although there are multiple reasons for this, the most important one, from my perspective as a clinician, is the rise of social media. Regardless of the country studied, the adolescent population shows a predisposition to internet and cell phone addiction, which strongly correlates with sleep deficit, anxiety, stress, and depression." - p 5

& that, too, seems reinforced by my own observations. The next bk that I'll be reviewing is Jaron Lanier's "Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now" in wch I think he gives an excellent analysis of the way commercially-driven behavior modification affects social media users. But w/o even referring to Lanier's take on such things any further at the moment, I see social media as what I call the PEER PRESSURE COOKER. On the one hand, I think it's potentially wonderful that people can establish an international group of friends that they can share text & images & sound w/ so easily. On the other hand, these 'friendships' are superficial - if only b/c of the limits of technologically interfacing as opposed to actual in-person encounters - although I think the problem goes much deeper than that.

Humans, perhaps all living creatures, are herd or hive animals. It seems to me that conformist behavior is a sort of safety reflex - if one creaure runs from a possible danger, all of them do - but I doubt that any other creatures have developed a meta-awareness of this behavior & further developed a sense of how to manipulate it for reasons irrelevant to danger-avoidance. Some humans have: commercial interests know that if they change what's fashionable they can sell new clothes, commercial interests know that if they make people insecure about the quality of their appearance they can then sell them products like make-up & jewelry that're sold as making their user beautiful. The list goes on & on.. but what social media seems to do 'best' is offer people the 'security' of 'being on the right side': by conforming to mass opinions that seem to carry moral authority they're given the self-delusion that they, too, are on moral high ground. What the people thusly manipulated seem to miss is that being so thoughtlessly manipulable they can be pushed in any direction whatsoever as long as the delusion of moral high ground is maintained.

& here, I think, is where the anxiety & stress enters: the constant checking of social media accts on one's portable computer carries the danger that one might be 'on the wrong side', that one might be 'out of fashion', that one is somehow 'losing the competition'. A plunge off the precipice is always imminent & it's not always clear what 'has to be done' to prevent falling off into the abyss of being an unacceptable 'non-person'. Basically, the surest way of not falling into ignominy is to conform to whatever the majority opinions are, to not intentionally or accidentally express something that seems strange or unacceptable to one's immediate herd. This must be particularly hard on children & adolescents who're growing into socializing, just beginning to figure it all out. Adults have reached a somewhat rigid phase of socialization where their behaviors are more solidly in conformity w/ whatever social group that've developed into, the challenges are fewer b/c the fluidity is less.

"When the pandemic arrived in 2020, a new expression of fear emerged. Across the full patient spectrum, complaints of worry, insomnia, and drug cravings increased. Patients of mine who had been stable for months or years suddenly required medication dose changes. Former patients returned for therapy because they were struggling to cope. New patients nearly universally cited anxiety as their reason for seeking help." - p 6

& I've heard from an anxiety therapist friend of mine that GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder) has indeed been on the rise since the quarantine. What I object to in the above is even referring to the "pandemic" instead of the lockdown &/or the quarantine b/c, IMO, it's the Draconian enforced restrictions on people's lives & the fear-mongering that's used to promote them that's the health problem. The so-called "pandemic", if there even is one, is of considerably lesser importance. It's no surprise that weak & impressionable people wd get bogged down in anxiety when every day they're barraged w/ nonsense about their being beseiged by something that's going to kill them if they aren't extremely vigilant. But, don't misunderstand, the author, McDonald, & I are basically in agreement, I'm only being nitpicky about the use of the word "pandemic".

"In April 2020, the director of the Didi Hirsch Suicide Prevention Center announced the hotline had received 1,800 calls in March compared to only twenty in February." - p 6

& if suicide hotlines were really interested in preventing suicide they'd've immediately launched major lawsuits against the fear-mongering mass media - b/c they're to blame - or, at least, made prominent public statements showing what bad affect all this pandemic publicity was causing. But, of course, these suicide prevention hotlines are part & parcel of the overall problem, not a solution to it.

"I noticed in my regular walks around the neighborhood that few people would greet or even acknowledge me. Many would avoid me entirely by abandoning the sidewalk in preference for using the street for their afternoon strolls. I never wore a mask outdoors, and I am certain this terrified them." - p 7

I remember walking thru my neighborhood early on (w/o a mask) when the stay-in-yr-homes mindset was strong & not seeing a single other person out on the streets. Even tho I was never paranoid enuf to think it was following me, for about 10 to 15 minutes of my walk a helicopter was flying overhead. That helicopter certainly added to the tension but I continued to walk to a park where I probably sat & read for awhile before returning home. There was a time when maybe 95% of the people I saw taking walks in the park wore masks even tho the most overkill health announcements didn't generally call for them when one was walking by oneself outside w/ no-one close around. The fear was preposterously exaggerated & completely unrealistic.

"Rather than explain the scientific basis for their decisions, politicians and unelected bureaucrats simply repeated empty slogans such as "Better safe than sorry" and "We're all in this together." In April 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo famously said, in defending his statewide lockdown policy, "If it saves just one life, I'll be happy."

"This absurd fallacy became the basis for many destructive policies to come , most of which accomplished little or nothing and, in fact, actually cost many American lives. In 2020, nearly 40,000 Americans died in traffic accidents according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report. Nearly all those lives could have been saved if we had reduced the speed limit to fifteen miles per hour. Of course, we would never do that because it would incapacitate the country." - pp 7-8

[..]

"In other words, there would be a cost. But the question of cost never came up when government officials chose to impose lockdowns." - p 8

& I agree w/ the author 100%. Imagine if we decided that the way to end crime was to strap everyone to a bed in a locked room & leave them there. They'd die but that sure wd lower the crime rate dramatically - except for the crime of confining them in the 1st place - &, to my mind, the imposition of the quarantine is a crime.

"Dr. Simone Gold, who went on to found America's Frontline Doctors, called me to ask if I would be interested in participating in a doctors' summit to bring attention to government and institutional mismanagement of the pandemic." - p 10

& these doctors were marginalized & ridiculed & censored but still managed to be widely listened-to anyway. I have a bk of Gold's that I intend to read & review eventually.

"One month later, I found myself standing alongside Dr. Gold and a dozen other physicians on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., speaking to a live audience of millions on the viral pandemic and the growing catastophe of the government response to it." - p 12

"Later that night, the original recording and all re-posts were taken down by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. As this was occurring, President Trump and his son tweeted links to our talk. The tweets were taken down, and Don Jr.'s account was suspended." - p 13

& b/c Trump supported the Frontline Doctors they were more easily stigmatized as 'right-wing' - but since when is pointing out fear-mongering & manipulativeness by the government & mass media 'right-wing'?! If the so-called 'left-wing' were doing its job of resisting the police state it wd've been out there supporting them.

"Much of the nation had disconnected from basic reality. I began to call this condition a "mass delusional psychosis."" - p 14

& that's a description that I find wholly appropriate.

"People who feel a lack of agency over their own safety often resort to aggressive attempts to control those around them. Given that, the appearance of the "Karen" phenomenon in American society was not all that surprising. Countless videos were uploaded to social media showing angry, hysterical women screaming at others for not wearing a mask, often chasing them and even physically attacking them." - p 21

"There is a reason why the name "Karen" was chosen to describe people who accost strangers and shame them for "unsafe" behaviors such as standing too close or not wearing a mask outdoors: These people are overwhelmingly women." - p 27

"Wherever there was a mandate, there was a Karen. Two men were assaulted by a young woman outdoors in Manhatten Beach in August 2020 when she saw them without masks and threw coffee in one man's face. A month earlier, a woman in San Diego emptied a can of mace onto a couple eating hotdogs-maskless-at a dog park." - p 77

I can add my own story to those above:

"The other day I was at a big park & I saw an old guy, masked, walking his little dog. He threw a little ball for the dog to chase. A woman, also masked, started running toward the old guy, screaming at him something to the effect of "What do you think you're doing?!" & flailing her arms as if she were going to beat him. The old guy cringed and the woman stormed away. Then the old guy went back to throwing the ball for his dog to chase. That was part of my inspiration to coin the word "quarantiniac"." - pp 251-252, "Unconscious Suffocation - A Personal Journey Through the PANDEMIC PANIC" ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2020.09PANDEMIC.html )

Note that I don't use the term "Karen", wch I was previously unfamiliar w/ before reading this bk. I suspect that the term is in more common use in 'conservative' political circles that I don't have much to do w/. Even tho my own "Karen" story features a woman as the attacker, I hesitate to generalize the phenomenon to being mostly women. After all, this one incident is probably the only one I personally witnessed. Hence, I'll stick w/ "quarantiniac" to mean a person driven insane by the quarantine.

"Meanwhile, with everyone stuck at home in front of a screen, media had a captive audience." - p 22

Another, IMO, completely valid & important point. & the media hammered out more ridiculous overkill sensationalist fear-mongering than I've ever witnessed before - all to keep as many people as possible addicted to this fake 'news' in order to up their advertising revenues. After all, people just had to tune into the next imaginary thing that was going to kill them!

"Nor was there any mention of outpatient treatment options unless they were being attacked as ineffective and dangerous.

"These attacks began in early 2020 with hydroxychloroquine, a fifty-year-old medication that had been used safely and effectively throughout the world to prevent malaria in infants, pregnant and breast-feeding women, and the elderly. Any positive news of hope from this treatment was ridiculed" - p 23

I 1st heard of hydroxychloroquine from my liberal neighbor who ridiculed it something along the lines of 'Trump has been telling people they can use something like household bleach for COVID. It gives them heart attacks!'. I had no idea what he was talking about. His story had obviously come from the mass media. Later, I investigated this more & reproduced some of an article on the subject in my PANDEMIC PANIC bk:

"How the World's top medical journals were cynically exploited by Big Pharma

"Elizabeth Woodworth

"SUMMARY

"A publishing scandal recently erupted around the use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat Covid 19. It is also known as quinine and chloroquine, and is on the WHO list of essential medicines.

"The bark of the South American quina-quina tree has been used to treat malaria for 400 years. Quinine, a generic drug costing pennies a dose, is available for purchase online. In rare cases it can cause dizziness and irregular heartbeat. In late May, 2020, The Lancet published a four-author study claiming that HCQ used in hospitals to treat Covid-19 had been shown conclusively to be a hazard for heart death. The data allegedly covered 96,000 patients in 671 hospitals on six continents.

"After the article had spent 13 days in the headlines, dogged by scientific objections, three of the authors retracted it on June 5."

[..]

"- https://off-guardian.org/2020/06/23/the-deadly-hydroxychloroquine-publishingscandal/"

- pp 602-604, "Unconscious Suffocation - A Personal Journey Through the PANDEMIC PANIC" ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2020.09PANDEMIC.html )

I have no idea whether hydroxychloroquine is of any use in treating respiratory problems but I do know that I wd've never recognized it as Quinine, something that I'd heard of many times, from my liberal friend's description.

"The Brown University Department of Pediatrics has found that babies born after January 1, 2020 show an IQ point loss of twenty points, presumably caused by the deprivation of home confinement and universal mask-wearing that impeded normal brain development." - p 24

I have mixed feelings about that one: on the one hand I think depriving a child of facial expressions is a form of child abuse & I think that people have generally become much more stupid since the widespread acceptance of cutting off facial expressions & proper breathing, on the other hand a 20 point IQ loss is so extreme that it's hard for me to not see that as yet-another fear-mongering exaggeration (wch is what I hope it is).

All of those things that I more or less completely agree w/ are in the introduction. It's when I got to "Chapter 1: The Terrorization of Women: A Brief Cultural History" that I found myself more at odds w/ the author.

"Men and women differ in other ways, too. Evolutionary psychology has shown there to be significant differences between the personalities of men and women. Numerous studies reveal that women report higher levels of neuroticism, extroversion, agreableness, and conscientiousness compared to men. Moreover, these differences become apparent early in life and persist into old age. This large body of research shows that male/female differences are not necessarily culturally dependent, nor are they developmentally mediated. These differences reveal themselves in my private practice, where anxiety disorders are far more common in my female patients than in my male patients. Phobic disorders, in particular, present almost exclusively in women." - p 30

Before we go any further, I shd explain that I'm a feminist - but I also need to explain what I mean by that since I'm sure that "feminism" means many things to many people. In 1970, on the small suburban street that I lived on that had been a rural area a mere 15 yrs before, I was the only guy in the neighborhood w/ long hair. I had a friend who lived a few doors down who was the only girl who wore what wd've then been called "army boots" - in other words, boots not intended for women. As such, we both deviated from the normal gender roles we grew up w/. This wasn't rc'vd kindly by many people in my area, it was common for people to shout insults at me from their passing cars, such gems of wit as "Are yooouuu a buoy or a guuurrrlll!" It always astounded me that these people were unable to tell the difference between the sexes. Anyway, my friend & I bonded over not wanting to conform to the established & highly oppressive gender role models. I had no desire to play sports, e.g.. We both wanted to look & act the way we wanted to look instead of the way other people told us to look & act. I had 3 queer friends, the girl wd've then been called a "Tom Boy", the guys were very neat & clean. I think for all of us it was naturally understood that we were all ok just the way we were. For the girls, this might've been feminism. The point is, we all supported each other, we were allies, not enemies. & that support for the girls from me was my feminism - it wasn't about claiming that we were exactly the same, it was about saying that we all had the equal right to be ourselves w/o other people lording over us.

Now since that time I've spent large portions of my life as an anarchist political activist. Sometimes this has involved a fair amt of meetings of political activists discussing proposed actions or just general concerns. I remember 2 meetings in particular that're relevant here: 1 was a meeting about sexual relations between women & men in our community. There were complaints about a particular guy who people found annoying in his ways of flirting w/ women; there was at least one guy who put on a display of contrition b/c of a specific sexual incident. During this discussion all sexual relations were described in socio-political terms. I brought up biology as an important factor. One angry woman from out-of-town insisted that biology was socio-politically determined too. I disagreed, thinking that physicality was key. Since people didn't seem to be inclined to discuss biology as a physical thing I told them I'd drop the subject & I left the room. One woman came out w/ me & expressed her solidarity w/ me & we both a laugh about the melodramatic displays that we'd just left.

2 was the 1st meeting of an anarchist book club. One very academic woman dominated the entire meeting womansplaining to everyone that those of us who feel comfortable talking volubly shd be mostly quiet so that shy people wd be able to relax & express themselves. Basically, this was her telling the men to shut up so that insecure young women wd have more room for talking. Since I'm very comfortable w/ talking I was one of the ones who stayed mostly quiet to not interfere w/ this process. This establishment of the protocols went on for 3 very tedious hrs w/o a single word ever being sd about bks, our ostensible subject for disccussion. I, personally, felt that the meeting wd've been more successful if we'd just broken up into smaller groups, partying style, where those of us who aren't shy wd've drawn out those who were. Instead, the meeting was dominated by one very inflexible woman seemingly blissfully unaware of how much she personified that type of person she was essentially accusing the men of being. I never went to another bk club meeting, I'm not sure there were any but if there were they didn't last long - the woman managed to kill any life they wd've naturally had otherwise.

I bring up that background to try to establish a little about why I agree w/ some of the author's claims & disagree w/ others.

"One of the most prominent environmental activists today is an eighteen-year-old Sweish woman named Greta Thunberg. This poster child for environmental awareness and activism has since childhood suffered from multiple mental illnesses, including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anorexia. She also claims to be autistic. Her famously impassioned speech before the United Nations in 2019 excoriating world leaders for their "betrayal" of young people over climate change revealed her to be emotionally unstable and irrational.

"Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC), at age twenty-nine the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress, apparently agrees, as she promised in 2019 that "The world is gonna end in twelve years if we don't address climate change."" - pp 33-34

I haven't pd much attn to either of these 2 public figures. I imagine that Thunberg was propelled to prominence b/c her youth & articulateness make good grist for the mass media theater mill. Both obviously touch a nerve, making some people feel that they're going to address a dire apocalyptic situation in a more straight-forward manner than the old established fogies. I don't think the world is going to end in 2031 but I do think that humanity is degrading the environment in ways that are having long-term negative effects that'll only get harder & harder to fix. I'm at a point in my life, however, where apocalyptic predictions seem more like dramatic displays meant to appeal to histrionic states than they are accurate.

"Racially motivated hate crimes against blacks are declining, while religiously motivated hate crimes, primarily against Jews, have dramatically increased. Moreover, the perpetrators of anti-Jewish hate crimes are predominantly black, as are those of the recently sensationalized anti-Asian hate crimes in urban areas scattered throughout the United States." - p 35

I seriously doubt that there're reliable statistics that support this or just about any other claims about who kills who for what reasons. It seems to me that the author is more than a bit caught up in the 'conservative' 'news' sources that share his philosophical opinions. As for "hate crimes against blacks are declining"? I hope that's true but to most political activists, myself included, it's hard to not see the murders of black people by police as hate crimes & they seem plentiful.

As for anti-Jewish hate crimes being primarily perpetrated by blacks? Well, that's news to me, maybe I'd find statistics to the effect convincing but the most glaring example in my neck of the woods was the Tree Of Life Synagogue mass shooting: "The congregation, along with New Light Congregation and Congregation Dor Hadash, which also worshipped in the building, was attacked during Shabbat morning services on October 27, 2018. The perpetrator killed eleven people and wounded six, including several Holocaust survivors. It was the deadliest attack ever on the Jewish community in the United States." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting )

That shooting was by a white male: "A lone suspect, identified as 46-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers, was shot multiple times by police and arrested at the scene. Bowers had earlier posted antisemitic comments against HIAS (formerly, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) on the online alt-tech social network Gab. Dor Hadash had participated in HIAS's National Refugee Shabbat the previous week. Referring to Central American migrant caravans and immigrants, Bowers posted a message on Gab in which he wrote that "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting ) I don't know whether Bowers' weapons were acquired legally or not.

"A related bogeyman pushed by media to frighten Americans is the phenomenon of mass shootings. Guns in general have been vilified by Democrats and liberal activists for many years." - pp 35-36

Personally, I wish guns had never been invented - but it's too late now. Contrary to McDonald, I find mass shootings to be a problem worth being concerned about. According to an article in the Washington Post:

"There have already been more than 300 mass shootings this year in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The shooting at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill. that left six people dead and dozens injured was one of fourteen mass shootings over the long weekend. There have been just over 100 since a rampage at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., left 19 children and two teachers dead on May 24.

"Mass shootings, where four or more people - not including the shooter - are injured or killed, have averaged more than one per day so far this year. Not a single week in 2022 has passed without at least four mass shootings."

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/02/mass-shootings-in-2022/

According to the New York Times:

"From 1966 to 2019, 77 percent of mass shooters obtained the weapons they used in their crimes through legal purchases, according to a comprehensive survey of law enforcement data, academic papers and news accounts compiled by the National Institute of Justice, the research wing of the Justice Department."

- https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/legal-gun-purchase-mass-shooting.html

McDonald disputes this saying: "despite all evidence to the contrary, legal gun owners are frequently blamed for cimes committed using guns when, in fact, it is illegally owned guns that are used in the commission of crimes in nearly all cases." - p 36

It seems to me that McDonald has shifted the focus here: he went straight from talking about mass shootings as a bogyeman into most crimes being committed using illegal guns - bypassing the issue of whether most guns used in mass shootings are legally purchased or not. Now, I admit to doing what I think most people do: trusting statistics that support what I think is probably true & distrusting the ones that conflict w/ that. As such, I don't necessarily trust either the Post or the Times but I tend to believe the articles quoted above. Maybe I shdn't. But McDonald's shifting the focus is a bit too transparent: I can easily believe that most crimes are committed using illegal guns - but mass shootings are in a different category from most crimes - they're not committed for financial gain, they're usually just committed out of some exaggerated hate for a group that the shooter usually perceives as an enemy & this perception is often nurtured by hate media.

So what's to be done about it? As far as I'm concerned, we're not going to get rid of the guns, this is a country of gun nuts. As w/ any revolution that seems worthwhile to me, the gradual discrediting of hate groups & of gun mania is going to be a very slllooooooowwwww one & it's not going to be accomplished by censorship or by abolishing the right to bear arms but by an increase in common sense - something that I find almost totally absent currently so I can't say I'm very optimistic.

"Between 1950 and 2010, not a single mass shooting occurred in an area where general civilians are allowed to carry a gun." - p 36

Again, McDonald seems to be shifting into irrelevant territory: after all, >it's also illegal to be committing mass murder< so regardless of whether the shooters's weapons are legal or not a crime's being committed. People who're in favor of more gun control just want the weapons to be harder to get. My proposal, & I think it's quite a good one, is to make the person who sells the gun to the shooter partially responsible for the crime. That wd make the vetting process a bit more serious.

"Now comes a highly contagious, lethal virus let loose on the world from a lab in Wuhan, China, that has saturated every inch of America." - p 37

This is where McDonald's beliefs become more iffy to me. I don't think it's proven that the hypothetical virus originated in a lab, I don't have any problem believing that that's possible, I just don't think it's proven. I also have my doubts about the "highly contagious, lethal" part of it. If it were so "lethal" I think more people wd've died from it who didn't have pre-existing health conditions. To me it's like this: if you're drunk & standing on the edge of a precipice & standing on one foot & waving yr arms about recklessly & a wind comes along & you fall over the cliff you don't blame it on the wind, the wind is just part of a whole, the being drunk & standing on one foot by a precipice is really the important part. Furthermore, the attribution of its origin to a chemical/biological warfare lab tends to support believing that it's more lethal than any other natural respiratory ailment that we've already encountered & lived or died thru. This belief in exceptional human-engineered deadliness increases the fear factor, something that McDonald is hypothetically opposed to.

It's when McDonald comes to gender roles that he & I part ways the most:

"according to the Deseret News, "When it comes to marriage, women are more satisfied if they are half of a religious couple embracing traditional gender roles." In my own experience, the more religious the couple, the truer this is." - p 40

The reason why I began this review w/: "I was raised in a conservative Republican Christian household. My parents hated each other's guts & separated by the time I was 9." is b/c I was foreshadowing reaching this point. My mom was very religious but my dad was more of a conman & probably didn't care about religion as anything other than a cover story to hide the commission of crimes. SO, in that sense, maybe McDonald was right when he says: "the more religious the couple, the truer this is" b/c I don't really think that I can credit both my parents w/ being religious. Nonetheless, my point is that I don't think I cd ever believe any generalizations about under what conditions women are "more satisfied". Some people are happy, others aren't. If I thought that there really were a believable system for guaranteeing this happiness we might see more people adhering to it but I think human emotions are generally in a state of chaos. My conservative family was certainly never happy & my liberal friends haven't necessarily been that much better. They all have their ups & downs & their philosophies don't assure much of anything.

"My suggesting that they surrender even a portion of their autonomy to their husband to achieve greater security would be viewed, at best, as an odd recommendation, and, at worst, as an insult to their capacities as women to survive on their own." - p 41

Obviously, I'm only quoting small bits in order to avoid much longer, but more thoroughly explanatory, quotes. This was preceded by the author's mention of his professional women patients priding themselves on their independence. This chapter concludes w/:

"Originally a liberal movement aimed at providing more freedom and opportunity for women, feminism evolved into a more radical movement that peddled a negative view of men as tyrants and toxic abusers.

"It is to this issue we now turn to understand why during the pandemic American men failed so dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives with consequences that have affected every one of us." - p 41

Ah.. This is where I part ways almost completely w/ McDonald. There're certainly women who see men as "tyrants and toxic abusers" who will nonetheless use us to do whatever they can't do, probably even turning on the charm for as long as it takes to try to get free labor before cutting off the charm again & putting up their "toxic abusers" defenses. That, however, is neither here nor there to the protective instincts that some of us have, both men & women, & how those protective instincts manifest themselves.

For me, when a couple unites, regardless of the genders, there's some trust involved & that trust enables a letting down of one's guard. It involves each partner wishing the other one well & being naturally inclined to do things that protect that wellness. How strong that relationship is, how strong the well-wishing is, can be measured by how naturally the protection of the wellness comes. I don't think this is only a function of the male. & there're limits, regardless of whether we want there to be, regardless of romantic hero narratives. No-one can protect anyone from everything. Still, at our best, we do our best. McDonald's conservative traditional gender roles are exactly what my neighborhood friend & I were rejecting when we were teenagers & I reject them still. Feeling some strength in autonomy isn't such a bad idea since even in the best of couples the other person isn't going to be there forever. Codependence can be a pleasure but it can also be destructive.

Chapter 2 is called "Dereliction of Duty: How Feminized American Men Failed Their Women"

"In late 2020, a woman was overhea[r]d commenting on how she felt leaving her house every morning and seeing men, both alone and with their wives, walking on the street with masks covering their faces: "This does not make me feel safe. On the contrary, it scares me. If I were married to one of these men, what would he do the moment a real threat appears? He would throw me under the bus and run for the hills. I'd be left to fend for myself."" - p 43

The author sees this as symptomatic of the loss of masculinity & the loss of women's faith in emasculated men. I see it more as neurotic. Personally, I'm irritated when I see anyone wearing a mask since I think it's just something imposed on us for no good reason & I see the people who go along w/ it as weak & gullible. I wore them when I went into stores that required them b/c I was already aggravated enuf by the state-of-affairs & didn't want to get into an argument w/ a store employee while trying to shop for food. I stopped going to the stores w/ the most outrageous 'safety precautions'. I defied the rules as often as I cd w/o turning it into a war. I stopped wearing them altogether as soon as the rules relaxed. But the woman's complaint about men she doesn't know & isn't married to is entrenched in so many "What if?"s that it's more of an irrational fantasy than it is anything else.

"Whenever I talk about the emasculation of American men, I see heads start to nod. Without fail, at the end of every talk, a number of women come up to thank me for calling out one of their greatest concerns. These women struggle to put into words what they have been feeling strongly for many years-a loss of masculinity in the American man." - p 44

Obviously, he's preaching to the converted. I look at the author's photo on p 103. He has short hair & a trimmed beard. He's wearing a suit jacket & a light colored button-down shirt. He projects a typical male image. But, to me, this image is a fraud. As a person who's been flagrantly unusual looking my whole life I know all too well that as soon as one deviates from the typical male image one comes under attack. I've been threatened & insulted from people in passing cars & groups of 2 or more men (more often at least 3) more times than I care to remember. It takes courage to maintain one's identity in the face of vicious conformist people. It takes no guts at all to look the way McDonald does. Men like McDonald aren't 'masculine', they're hiding behind a group identity, their 'courage' is rooted in knowing that there're millions more like them, that they're part of a gang. The average drag queen has more guts.

"A woman I know who recently began a new relationship learned that the man knows how to use a gun and keeps one at home. "I hate guns," she told me, "but when he told me that, it made me feel safe."" - p 45

Again, that just seems neurotic to me. If people want to have guns that's their business but I don't see it as increasing anyone's safety. It just increases the possibilities for mayhem. If you have a gun next to yr bed & someone breaks into yr house & shoots you before you get to it then the gun's useless. So where does the paranoia stop? When you sleep shd you sleep w/ the gun in yr hand 'just in case'? Shd you always carry at least one gun on you at all times 'just in case'? Shd you carry 2 or 3 or more guns on you at all times 'just in case'? What if one of them gets knocked out of yr hand & you need another as a back-up? The fear is endless. Having a gun makes people feel more powerful - but so does cocaine. Even if I were an expert marksman & carried a gun at ready at all times I cd still be shot in the back or shot by a sniper or blown to bits by a bomb or gassed or whatever.

"In 2017, over 7 million American men aged twenty-five through fifty-four were living in their parents' basement, not working and not looking for work." - p 47

Frankly, I find that statistic hard to believe. I don't know a single man of any age living in his parents' basement & not working. I assume they exist.. but 7 million?! At the back of this bk there're references. They aren't exactly endnotes, they're organized by chapter & subject. The source for this statistic is apparently this:

"https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/failure-to-launch-syndrome/

"Scientific American article notes the rise of home-dwelling men age 25-54 who live in their parents' basements, not working, with no desire to work. One reason: Safety." - p 115

I looked at the article. It's very superficial & there's no source provided for the statstics. Here's the relevant quote:

"No matter the culture or the label, failure to launch cases are mostly, but not all, young men. Numbers indicate the problem is increasing. Indeed, in 2014, over seven million American men ages 25-54 were neither working nor looking for work, up 25% from 10 years prior. And while the stereotype of a basement-dwelling man-child evokes labels of "loser," "dropout," or other unflattering descriptors, the phenomenon is more complicated than simplistic labels might indicate."

Given that I 1st left home when I was 17 to start hitchhiking around North America, I cd hardly get out of my mom's house fast enuf - but I didn't managed to completely get out until I was 22. I have girlfriends who left when they were 12 & 14. We were all in a hurry to get out into the world & away from the all-too-familiar oppression of home. So, yeah, I admit to being generally repulsed by guys who live w/ their parents after they've become (or delayed becoming) adults. Still, if I knew one I'd probably see his POV quickly enuf so I'm not going to completely pass judgement. I did have a woman friend who was living in her mom's basement when she got into her 50s. Alas, she's dead now - I don't think living in the basement helped. She had, however, "launched" & rebounded back to her mom's.

"The result of these cultural changes has been catastrophic for the mental health of both men and women. Although part-time work has long been found to have a beneficial effect on the psychological well-being of married women, a 2018 US Census report showed that two-thirds of working mothers have been working fulltime." - p 50

& why is that? In the 1950s, when I was born, it was most common for the man to be working & supporting the whole family & for the woman to be staying home & taking care of the children & the household. But if one or the other became dissatisfied w/ that arrangement what then? Divorce was certainly a commonly taken option. Then, if the father turned out to be a 'deadbeat dad' & didn't pay alimony or child support, as was the case in my family, the woman was forced by economic necessity to try to support the family on her own. Many of these women, having been in conservative traditional gender relationships by preference, suddenly found themselves ill-prepared for trying to make a living. As such, the family existed in dire financial crisis until another marriage cd replace the old one & the stepfather cd fill in the lacking income.

In the meantime, the children saw what was happening & the girls decided to not be caught in the same trap so they got jobs & learned how to make a living. Even then, if they were believers in the conservative lifestyle that McDonald espouses, they might've gotten married to a 'good conservative Christian' expecting it not to turn out as bad as their parents' marriage - only to have the pattern repeat again when the father jumped ship, bored & frustrated by the constraints. Having seen this happen 1st-hand, I'm not in the least convinced by McDonald's POV.

Even when both parents are working it turns out that they don't make enuf money. Sure, in the 1950s, dads cd support their families on their own but, as soon as the moms started working too, capitalism just made sure to exploit people even further so that working people still found themselves in desperate straits. There's nothing like artificially-induced inflation not accompanied by adequate wage increases to make working insufficient to make ends meet.

"Clearly, most women are not happy with the contemporary redefining of traditional gender roles in male-female relationships. Many are afraid to speak up-intimidated into silence by their fear of being seen as unsupportive of feminist doctrine." - pp 50-51

It's not so clear to me that a generalization about "most women" can be supportable. It seems more likely to me that McDonald travels in conservative circles in wch, once again, he's preaching to the converted. On the other hand, I'm sure there are women who're "afraid to speak up-intimidated into silence by their fear of being seen as unsupportive of feminist doctrine" - esp in dominantly liberal circles such as academia. It seems to me that it might be 'academic suicide' to be a woman professor who professes non-feminist opinions - except for in conservative Christian colleges. It seems to me that "traditional gender roles" aren't necessarily good for either men or women - while women who feel oppressed by them might think that they're only beneficial to men, my own observation is that the pressure on the male to BE the patriarch is potentially unbearable.

"Media frequently report that one in four college students has been sexually assaulted-an alarming statistic. If it were true, it would be hard to imagine any parent allowing their daughter to attend college. Yet it is simply another lie invented to malign and intimidate men and frighten young women." - p 53

On pp 119-120 there're multiple links under the heading of "RAPE CULTURE". One of them is: "https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/press-releases/aau-releases-2019-survey-sexual-assault-and-misconduct Association of American Universities 2019 survey of sexual assault." so I looked at that one.

" 1 The overall rate of non-consensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent since a respondent enrolled as a student at their school was 13 percent, with the rates for women and transgender, genderqueer, and non-binary (TGQN) students being significantly higher than for men.

" 1 For the 21 schools that participated in both the 2015 and 2019 surveys, the rate of nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent increased from 2015 to 2019 by 3.0 percentage points (to 26.4 percent) for undergraduate women, 2.4 percentage points for graduate and professional women (to 10.8 percent), and 1.4 percentage points for undergraduate men (to 6.9 percent). The changes for TGQN students were not statistically significant (which were 23.1 percent in 2019 and 14.6 percent in 2019 for undergraduate and graduate/professional students, respectively)"

I find the above statement to be rather confusing. Oh, well. I have plenty of friends who attended university, I don't recall any of them recounting being raped except for one gay male friend who described himself being taken advantage of by one of the professors. In the rare instances when I have heard of rapes of people I don't know occurring it's been more or less exclusively frat boys raping sororiety girls - making it seem that the more conservative traditional gender role models involve guys getting girls drunk &/or incapacitated by rufies & then gang-raping them. Maybe that's a misrepresentation.

What I think of is an ex-girlfriend of mine who attended university & anonymously posted a list of every male on campus as "Potential Rapists". She was definitely a feminist of a confrontational nature but, really, I had to laugh at what she did (& she laughed too) b/c it was so over-the-top as to be ludicrous. It was a calculated provocation, meant to pull people's chains, & I'm sure it worked - but calling someone a "potential rapist" just means they have a penis, it doesn't mean they're ever likely to actually BE a rapist.

"Authors Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly describe in The Flipside of Feminism exactly how women have become less happy as they have gained more freedom, more education, and more power." - p 54

Show me a time when people have been absolutely happy & satisfied b/c of the system they're living in & I'll show it to you in a mirror as propaganda. In other words, nah, I don't believe it. Some people are happy, others aren't; the conditions under wch this occurs are a bit of a crapshoot. Personally, I think I'd be happiest having a woman partner who doesn't feel oppressed by me & isn't oppressive to me, who's very knowledgable & curious, & who feels strong & confident. That, to me, is a loving attitude.

"The surrender of real courage by men inevitably produces fearful women, and fearful women channel their fear into controlling others.

"I encountered a consequence of this dysfunctional dynamic on a local level in early 2020, when the home-owner's association (HOA) in my neighborhood in Los Angeles closed the nearby park after receiving a report that several small children were seen rolling on the grass. To make the park "safe," the entire ground was sprayed with a disinfectant. The disinfecting of the grass was simply a pretext to close the park, however, because once the spraying had ended, the park remained closed for nearly an entire year." - p 55

Yes, I find that completely insane - but why blame it on emasculated men not keeping 'their' women under control? I'm friends w/ many women whose jobs involve taking c/o young children. At least 3 of them think that the whole quarantine is as insane as I do. 2 of them are anarchists, 1 of them has become more sympathetic to conservative POVs after being liberal her whole life. 2 of them have been forced into following rules that they think of as reprehensible b/c they'll lose their jobs, wch they're dependent on, if they don't. In some cases, their male partners aren't 'weak' as much as they are BELIEVERS in the PANDEMIC. Hierarchy, & a lack of individual power, a very conservative thing, is what keeps them 'in their place.' I wish they had more power so that they'd be able to hold their own against the authorities that make the decisions at their work places.

"Chapter 3 Fanning the Flames: The Role of Media and Government

"In march 2020, newspapers and television news programs launched tracking boards, updated daily, that announced the reported cumulative death toll from the Wuhan virus. Early on, evidence suggested these numbers were wildly inflated, as even the CDC noted that only five percent of all deaths attributed to the virus had no additional causes listed on the death certificate. Yet they were reported on page one of printed news and in the opening segment of broadcast news every day for months, providing the false impression that healthy Americans were dying throughout the country in alarming numbers and that the viral pandemic had become the greatest current threat to public health.

"Motorcycle accidents, suicides, and even drug overdoses were all categorized as deaths caused by the virus, so long as the victim had a positive nasal swab before, and-in some cases-after death." - p 57

As soon as McDonald gets back to the subject of the fear-mongering surrounding the so-called pandemic & gets away from blaming it on non-traditional sex roles I find myself agreeing w/ him. The constant pushing of death statistics into the public's mind & the ridiculous inaccuracies of these statistics served no good purpose whatsover - but it DID serve a purpose: viz: to produce a terrified & cowering populace easily manipulated into anything stupid.

"Fear-porn," as it came to be called , served both the economic and political interests of its purveyors." - p 58

"Even with corrupt data collection, it became harder and harder to find enough dead people to fuel the ongoing fear pandemic, so the media pivoted and replaced daily death and hospitalization trackers with a new statistical category: "Case Numbers."" - pp 59-60

& here's my own comment from July 3, 2020, from my own bk:

"Could I be any more sick of this? We're entering a shutdown again. It's basically being blamed on young people who've been celebrating summer & being released from their cages. I'm 100% on their side. Here's an excerpt from a relevant article with my own comments interpolated:

"After a week of record-shattering COVID-19 case numbers,

"By which it's meant people testing positive. It DOESN'T MEAN THAT ANY OF THOSE PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY SICK. That's the statistics manipulation that I'm most sick of. Is that a form of COVID-19 sickness too?"

- p 652, "Unconscious Suffocation - A Personal Journey Through the PANDEMIC PANIC" ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book2020.09PANDEMIC.html )

"In May 2020, the President of Tanzania famously reported having tested a goat and a pawpaw fruit. Both the goat and the pawpaw were positive. Neither developed symptoms." - p 60

That's almost too bad - I wd've enjoyed seeing a pawpaw fruit coughing w/ a runny nose. Still, it's good to know that pawpaws are a deadly carrier b/c they grow in SouthEastern PA. Obviously, that part of the state shd be nuked - just to be on the safe side. Can it be arranged for Governor Wolf to be present at the ceremony at Ground Zero?

"The phenomenon of social contagion is illustrated clearly in Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage, which investigates the explosion of transgenderism among adolescent girls. What had always been an extremely rare event-a girl announcing she was actually a boy-has recently become a common occurrence in junior high and high schools throughout the US. In a permissive environment that encourages "affirmative" receptivity to such transitions, girls download and share videos on social media that legitimize transgenderism as the best explanation for common adolescent angst." - p 63

Oi Veh! Here's a subject that's a lose-lose for me no matter what I say. The 1st person I ever knew who was getting a so-called 'sex-change' was a guy I knew in Baltimore around 1977. He explained to me that he had a girlfriend who wanted to be a man & that he wanted to be a woman. To my mind, I didn't see why it wasn't adequate just to role-play. They cd dress in drag. She cd wear a strap-on dildo & fuck him in the ass. At least that way they'd keep their sensitive genitalia that they were born w/. Instead, he was going to have his penis cut off, he'd get a fake vagina & fake breasts. He wdn't be able to give milk, he wdn't be able to be impregnated. A man w/ his penis cut off, who has fake breasts, who dresses in drag is not a woman, he'll never be a woman. But, then, it was his business, not mine, so he shd do what he thought best.

I've worn dresses before, I did it for the fun of it, I did it b/c I wanted to wear something different, I had no desire to 'be a woman' & didn't think wearing a dress wd make me one. IMO there's no 'law of nature' that says that men have to dress a certain way or that women have to dress a certain way. When I was a boy, men, for the most part, had short hair, women, for the most part, had long hair. These were societal norms, both sexes cd grow their hair long or cut it short. To my mind, there was nothing intrinsically masculine or feminine about either. Hence, I grew my hair long starting in early 1968 at age 14. I endured an enormous amt of abuse as a result but I had the strength of character to not let assholes dominate me. To be brief, I don't think men have to be a particular way, we're still men - even if we're so-called effeminate, we're still men. Same goes for women: all the societally dictated norms of behavior are irrelevant.

Alas, these days it seems that the 'politically correct' position is taking a stance I wd've previously associated w/ the most oppressive conservatism - w/ a twist. Viz: Now if a man wears a dress he's a woman. That's it, all biological differences are irrelevant. Ok, that's not quite right, men can wear dresses w/o being instantly declared a woman. The point is that gender role models seem even more oppressive to me despite some things having opened up enormously.

Furthermore, as a person who's highly critical of the Medical Industry I see the widespread emphasis on gender restructuring via surgery to be a wet dream for sadistic mad scientists - under the guise of being 'understanding' of people's gender needs we have surgeons willing to do just about anything, as long as there's lots of money involved, that gives them the opportunity to maim people, to show their 'skill'. It was bad enuf when people were encouraged to believe they were ugly & then convinced to get dangerous tummy-tucks & face-lifts, now it's even worse. There's even the idea that vaginas can be ugly & shd get plastic surgery to make them 'beautiful'. Insanity. It seems to me that alotof very rich people get off on the idea of making people infertile so that the population growth will drop off in an approved direction. So, is it 'understanding' or is it an ulterior motive of weeding out genes?

"Some of my speeches were even removed by YouTube for "spreading misinformation about the pandemic"-exactly as though my ideas and arguments were the equivalent of a contagious disease. All of the data in my speeches were taken from either government publications or peer-reviewed medical journals. But that didn't matter because the findings conflicted with the official narrative." - p 66

I certainly can't disagree w/ him about that one. The PANDEMIC PANIC has been used as the ultimate excuse for censorship & YouTube has been a prime offender. Even if we give the people calling the shots credit for desperately trying to be socially responsible they're ultimately just being short-sighted fools. Open the door to censorship by oppressing opinions contrary to the monolithic narrative regarding the so-called pandemic & it'll make censoring ideas & opinions about anything else much easier to get away w/. Goodbye freedom of speech.

& it's not even a matter of people using or not using their brains - there're the algorithms. One algorithm sd that I cdn't monetize a movie of mine b/c I used a certain song in it & the copyright holder of that song wd want money. There was no music in the movie at all - not even in the background! SO, I appealed it, pointing out that the song wasn't there. I won the appeal but whether I won or not was completely determined by the claimant - if they'd insisted that the song was there, they wd've won. Reality didn't matter, their litigious position was all that counted - & this type of idiocy, this AU (Artificial Unintelligence) is everywhere, all the time.

"I argued that there is no scientifically based medical reason to ever place a mask on a child in school. In fact, I declared it child abuse." - p 67

AGAIN, I'm w/ him 100% here. The extent of the psychological damage to children, esp young children, by enforced mask wearing & social distancing & the lot is untolled but bound to be substantial. I honestly wd like to see the maniacs resposible for this inflicted suffering be put on trial - & I'm an anarchist so my anger is far beyond its usual bounds.

"FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb joined Pfizer's boad of directors in June 2019. Mark McClellan, FDA head from 2002-2004, sits on the board of Johnson & Johnson. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson both received emergency use authorization from the FDA to bypass safety and efficiency testing in bringing its experimental vaccine products to market in early 2020." - pp 68-69

A quick check to verify one of the claims above yielded:

"Former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Mark B. McClellan, to Join Johnson & Johnson Board of Directors

"New Brunswick, N.J. (October 14, 2013) ­Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) announced today that Mark B. McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., Senior Fellow in Economic Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Value and Innovation in Health Care, Brookings Institution, will join the Board of Directors on October 15, 2013.  Dr. McClellan will serve on the Regulatory, Compliance & Government Affairs Committee and the Science, Technology & Sustainability Committee of the Board.

"As former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2002 to 2004, and as the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2004 to 2006, Dr. McClellan has more than two decades of public service and academic research experience. From 2001 to 2002, he served as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and senior director for health care policy at the White House. During President William J. Clinton's administration, Dr. McClellan held the position of deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy."

- https://www.jnj.com/media-center/press-releases/former-fda-commissioner-dr-mark-b-mcclellan-to-join-johnson-johnson-board-of-directors

&, yes, it does seem like there might be some conflict of interest involved.

"Government health authorities initiated what I consider to be the single greatest act of harm in 2020: closing schools and businesses." - p 69

Understand: I'm quoting the things I agree w/ & those I disagree w/ for a reason: viz: that I think it's important to listen to other people's opinions thoroughly instead of dismissing them or accepting them en masse b/c of one reason or another that might not really validate or invalidate everything. People have deeply entrenched philosophical opinions that might skew some things one way while not really effecting others.

"The RAND Corporation reported in September 2021 that not only did lockdowns not save lives, "To the contrary, we find a positive association between shelter-in-place (SIP) policies and excess deaths." - p 70

AGAIN, I agree - from personal experience I know how harsh this time has been for me & I extrapolate from there to how harsh it must be for people worse off than me - either b/c of mental instability or b/c of other health problems that've gone unaddressed b/c of the way emphasis on COVID has dominated the health care systems. When people ask me why I think masks are bad for people's health the question amazes me: How can these people be so oblivious to having something strapped across their mouths?!

"Masks have served no one but those in positions of authority and power. They have only made America sicker-physically, emotionally, and psychologically. As early as April 2020, the CDC admitted that mask wearing offered essentially no benefit in preventing the spread of the virus. Their function has been purely symbolic, an emblem of fear, anxiety, and compliance. Even the New England Journal of Medicine concurred, describing them as nothing more than "talismans."" - pp 70-71

& here's info about a movie of mine mocking mask-use:

625. "Wearing Masks Saves Lives"

- 1080p

- 1:18

- shot & edited July 9-11, 2020 (Vision)

- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/oQBsMuVgnmU

- on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/wearing-masks-save-lives

There's an age-restriction on it on YouTube that's ostensibly b/c it includes pictures of dead people. These same pictures are available elsewhere on the internet w/o age-restriction. It seems probable to me that the age-restriction is really to limit the influence of my political satire.

Alas, McDonald continues to harp on women as a root cause of this whole mess. Personally, I'd fault the government figures & conniving billionaires above all.

"In fact, the experimental Wuhan virus vaccines-made available without FDA approval under an Emergency Use Authorization-are associated with the deaths of more people in the first half of 2021 than all vaccines combined over the previous ten years.

"Yet the forced march toward the universal vaccination continues. The demand for government control over every aspect of our lives has increased a hundredfold over the past year and a half, driven largely by anxiety and fear. Women, in particular, have been willing agents in this movement because their traditional source of security-men-has largely disappeared." - p 72

& yet it's largely men in positions of authority who're encouraging this anxiety & fear so it seems more accurate to me that the women McDonald's referring to are doing what he wants them to - following orders from domineering males.

"In New Jersey, Atilis Gym was fined $1.2 million for refusing to shut down under the state's business closure mandate." - p 78

More destructive bullshit that only helps the rich who're trying to monopolize business as much as possible. In Pittsburgh, there's a similarly defiant restaurant called the "Crack'd Egg". I've eaten there. Not only has it been fined but it's been defamed as a racist place b/c the typical propaganda lie is that anyone who's against the lockdown must be a hateful right-winger. Strangely, the manager of the restaurant is a black guy.

"Countless videos emerged in 2020 from Trader Joe's stores, where small groups of maskless protestors descended on different locations in a display of solidarity against the mask mandate. Without fail, staff refused to ring them up." - p 78

Trader Joe's had been the supermarket that I shopped at. Unfortunately, they pushed the quarantine insanity further than anywhere else I'd ordinarily go to. Customers were not only required to wear masks but were only allowed in in small numbers. B/c of this, people had to wait outside in a line waiting to get in. Apparently, waiting outside in the rain & snow & cold was healthier than risking being around other people, w/ a mask on, in the store. I remember one particularly aggravating time when I was waiting to be let in when 2 people left. That meant there was 'room' for 2 new people so when the person in front of me started to go in so did I. But, Oh No!, the employee called that to a halt. Apparently the math was too complex for him. I made a movie there on May 4, 2020 & soon thereafter stopped going there at all. I didn't return until their mask mandate ended.

619. "You'll Never See A Billionaire Standing In A Food Line"

- clandestine car iJones camera: ProjectileObjects; all else: tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

- 4:55

- 1080p

- shot May 4, 2020 (Vision), edited finished May 5, 2020 (Vision)

- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/I_r8F-oMtYE

- on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/youll-never-see-a-billionaire

"Even the airline industry followed suit, jumping ahead of the federal government in April 2020, and ordered all passengers into mask compliance. They later lobbied the CDC and FAA to make masks a federal transportation requirement. That requirement went into effect on February 1, 2021, has been extended twice, and shows no sign of ever going away." - pp 78-79

April 18, 2022:

"Federal officials stopped enforcement of a federal mask mandate Monday in transportation settings after a federal judge struck down the requirement, raising public health concerns and prompting several airlines to announce that face coverings are optional on domestic flights." - https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/04/18/mask-mandate-transportation-airplanes/

Thank goodness, one piece of the overall insanity defeated.

"Chapter 4 The Way Forward: Working Our Way Back to Sanity"

[..]

"The path forward will be different for each person, but several recurring themes will almost certainly emerge.

"For men, it will require a display of courage. They will need to stand up to hysteria and refuse to allow it to drive decision-making. Self-emasculation must end.

"For women, it will require emotional restraint. They will need to confront, to the extent they have succumbed to it, the hyper-emotionality that has led them to respond to the current crisis in unhealthy ways." - p 81

It seems to me that I, personally, have displayed courage throughout this entire madness & that the result has been an almost complete hatred & shunning of me by both men & women. Here's a sample of my psychological approach to this dilemma:

665. "Check out of the Mass-Formation Roach Motel"

- 37:40

- 1920 X 1440, 30fps, Stereo

- on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/vWIyZ5vKdAY

- on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/roach-motel

Was it something I sd?

"Just as with my physician colleagues, my therapist colleagues have been a profound disappointment to me. Unable to overcome their own fear and irrationality, they have abandoned their profession-and their patients-and refused to offer their professional help in the only setting that truly works for most patients: face-to-face." - pp 84-85

I feel a similar disappointment w/ political activists: succumbing to the mass psychosis, they've immediately lost all trace of any ability to analyze & critique the control systems of this society - turning into mouthpieces & slaves for the Medical Industry Police State.

"Men are frequently told to control their physical and sexual aggression, but what about women? Are their natures equally flawed, or are they born perfect, with no need to control their natures? When women are allowed or even encouraged to develop hysteria and express uncensored, unrestrained hyper-emotionality, they can wreak havoc on society. Smothering, intrusive, nanny-state behavior can predominate, with an emphasis on a fear-driven obsession for safety and a disregard of the need for intrepid, risk-taking behaviors that display courage." - p 87

Alas, I wish I disagreed w/ this more than I do.. but it's been my frequent observation that anarchists, both men & women, refer to patriarchy as an ultimate evil while never criticizing matriarchy one whit. &, yet, "anarchy" means "an" (without) & "archy" (rule by). That includes matriarchy (rule by women or by the mother-figure) as much as patriarchy (rule be men or the father-figure). I find that women always expect to be considered the equal of men in every way except when it comes to taking responsibility for something harmful: that's usually blamed on men. That's a double standard. But, in my own experience, women are often extremely harmful - so being in denial of that is something that just adds to the harm. As for courage? I've known plenty of women who are very courageous.

"Men need to start pursuing being men again, stop apologizing, and push back against the fear-driven women-in reality a vocal minority of mostly white liberal affluent women-who are wrecking our world." - p 88

It's almost a relief to so vehemently disagree w/ him here after agreeing w/ some of his last quote. I don't think that being a man has to be any particular thing so I can't agree there. It's also more than a little difficult to blame women for "wrecking our world" when wars, to cite an obvious example, are primarily a creation of men - & men & women alike are creating the PANDEMIC PANIC - but I think men probably have even more responsibility for it at the administrative & business levels.

"If no local group exists, then you must create one. Telegram and Signal are excellent phone apps that can be used to organize people into a group and share meeting updates. These two apps also have the added benefit of being largely secure from hacking and government spying, inaccessible to the NSA." - p 89

Alas, such independence from control by government organizations doesn't usually last very long. Consider this Reclaim the Net report from March 21, 2022:

""On Friday, Brazil's Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the banning of Telegram because of its failure to comply with Brazil's laws and for allowing the spread of "fake news."

"On Sunday, he revoked the suspension, saying that the company had complied with censorship requests to ban accounts.

"After the suspension, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov apologized for his company's "negligence" in complying with court orders.

""Over the past 24 hours, we've integrated technical means to flag specific posts in one-to-many channels as potentially containing inaccurate information," Telegram announced.

""These notices can now be added to the end of any message on Telegram and will also remain visible when those messages are forwarded from the channel to private or group chats.

""To better identify these posts, we are establishing working relationships with important fact-checking organizations in Brazil, such as Agência Lupa, Aos Fatos, Boatos.org and others."

"the Los Angeles Times reported that thousands of first responders have announced they are refusing the vaccine, and a group of Los Angeles police officers had filed a lawsuit against the city, demanding that any officer who has recovered from infection be made exempt from the vaccine mandate." - p 90

The sadness goes on & on.. The mere fact that these folks even have to go thru the trouble of taking legal steps to resist this unjustifiable medical intrusion into their lives is what's truly sickening.

"With the advent of Zoom school in 2020, parents became aware first-hand of the focus not on the teaching of critical skills but rather the indoctrination pervading both public and private schools. Sexual politics, critical race theory, and revisionist history are now the norm throughout the country. Many teachers are simply professional activists in disguise." - p 91

That, of course, is the conservative perception of the state of things. As for teachers being "professional activists in disguise"? That doesn't really seem accurate to me. I've been friends for many decades w/ activists & I'm one myself. Are any of us "professionals"? When I think of "professionals" I think of people who're highly pd - very few, or NO, activists I know are pd at all, ever. Instead, we dedicate our lives & our, often limited, funds to trying to create a more just society. As soon as money enters into that there's always the chance of corruption. Therefore, the idea of a "professional activist" is a sort of oxymoron to me. It's the people who're activists b/c they're passionately committed that I respect; people who're pd to pursue a particular political agenda might not do so if there weren't something in it for them. I'm sure there're plenty of teachers who sincerely try to do their best for their students - wch includes protecting the vulnerable - but I doubt that there're (m)any who're getting pd extra to bias their politics, therefore being "professional activists". Instead, they might misguidedly just push their own agendas w/o realizing that this might be uncalled-for & unethical.

As for "[s]exual politics, critical race theory, and revisionist history"? That's certainly a conservative perception. To address these in reverse order: What, exactly, is meant by "revisionist history" here? Usually, it refers to the claims of holocaust deniers that millions of Jews weren't systematically & genocidally murdered by nazis. I doubt that that's very widely taught institutionally anywhere. I don't think McDonald is referring to that. Instead, he's probably referring to liberal history or, in particular, feminist history that he might think of as inaccurate.

I can provide an example that I doubt that McDonald wd be aware of: Delia Derbyshire. Derbyshire was born in 1937 & worked for the BBC starting in November, 1960. In 1963 she made an electronic arrangement of Ron Grainer's theme song for the TV program Doctor Who. According to Wikipedia, "Grainer attempted to credit her as co-composer, but was prevented by the BBC bureaucracy because they preferred that members of the workshop remain anonymous." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delia_Derbyshire ) A recent documentary about her made a claim to the effect that 'she invented electronic music as we now know it.' Given that she was born in 1937, that's feminist revisionist history at its most despicable. In 1886, Thaddeus Cahill developed the teleharmonium, wch he patented a yr later, arguably the 1st electronic instrument. Even if we don't include the teleharmonium, the theremin was invented in October 1919 & patented in 1928 & the ondes martenot was invented in 1928 - both of them electronic instruments, both of them immediately composed for & both of them before Derbyshire was born.

As such, 'electronic music as we know it' must mean 'electronic music as people who don't know it pretend to know it'. Even if we were to ignore the theremin & the ondes martenot & the music composed for them, electronic music has a long history that predates the rather simple electronic version of the Doctor Who theme - all of this music being considerably more original & complex. So, yes, there IS revisionist feminist history that makes false claims for women just b/c they're women.

On the other hand, certainly there're women who've been neglected & uncredited b/c patriarchical attitudes undeservedly consigned them to inferior roles. Rosalind Elsie Franklin, e.g., probably deserved more credit in connection w/ the discovery of DNA.

Still, back to McDonald, I suspect that much of what he considers to be "revisionist history" is probably something I'd consider to represent history made in defiance of the history of the victor.

Then there's "critical race theory":

"Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race, society, and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. The word critical in its name is an academic term that refers to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people. CRT is also used in sociology to explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution through the lens of race. For example, the CRT conceptual framework is one way to study racial bias in laws and institutions, such as the how and why of incarceration rates and how sentencing differs among racial groups in the United States. It first arose in the 1970s, like other critical schools of thought, such as critical legal studies, which examines how legal rules protect the status quo." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

It seems to me that whenever I've run across the term recently it's been implied to be some sort of deranged perception of social realities. Really, I find it astounding that there're people who still act like racism is some sort of self-serving fantasy, mostly on the part of black people. I remember going into a restaurant, I think it was on my 43rd birthday, run by a Korean man. The clientele were all apparently upper-middle-class white people. I was carded, seemingly in the hope that I wdn't have an ID on me so that the owner cd have an excuse for denying service to a scruffy-looking person obviously of a 'lower class' than the desired patrons. The only other person I saw carded was a black woman, who looked to me to be in her 50s. She was the only black person in there & she was obviously not under 21. It seemed clear to me that the owner didn't want to serve us. When the black woman was carded she looked very flustered & embarrassed - she knew exactly what the msg was: no black people welcome here. That was 1996, not so long ago. SO, Critical Race Theory? I'm all for it - as long as it doesn't involve oversimplistic racist generalizations of any kind. People need to understand that it wasn't that long ago that Jim Crow laws existed in the United States, that black & white people were separated as if we were practically different species - instead of just fellow humans.

As for "[s]exual politics"? That's trickier for me. I've been informed by at least one friend working at a school that gender agendas are being pushed to very young children. To me, children shd be left alone to discover & nurture their own sexual identity w/o being pushed & prodded by adults - that includes not imposing a heterosexual narrative as well as not imposing any other narrative. Protecting kids from persecution for belonging to a sexual minority is one thing, promotion of a 'politically correct' narrative is quite another. 'Political correctness' is just another oppressive norm.

"In 2020, after a full year and a half of mandatory masking of children, many districts are moving toward mandatory vaccination as a condition of re-enrollment." - p 91

The reader of this review will've long since realized that I find that completely egregious. I think there're valid reasons for finding vaccination dangerous & that it's 1st & foremost the decision of the parent or guardian whether children under their care shd be vaxxed. I don't believe for a second that any school board, health department, or political entity shd have the right to override the decisions of parents or guardians. Furthermore, I don't think that vaccination even fulfills the grand preventative claims made for it. Many of my friends have been vaccinated, many of them have also gotten sick. Vaccination has never been proven to my satisfaction to be anything but an idiotic risk taken in the name of shaky theory at great profit to the vaccine industry.

"No matter how emotionally healthy a child's parents are, it is not possible to protect any child from pathologic fear and anxiety in this sick and abusive environment. It's time for parents to remove children from the existing school system.

"Many are now doing exactly that. Homeschooling is taking off in the United States. Between just 2020 and 2021, the number of homeschooled children nearly doubled from three million to over five million." - p 92

It seems to me that Christian families have opted for homeschooling more than most b/c of an objection to the separation of church & state. Christians don't want their children exposed to atheistic opinions. Even tho I'm an atheist, I can be sympathetic to that b/c I can understand parents wanting to preserve their values in their children. I went to public schools from 1959 to 1971. I hated them. Nonetheless, I don't think they did me any lasting harm & I'm sure I learned many useful things. I don't have any children but if I did I'm sure I wdn't want them in schools that require masks & social distancing b/c I think that the psychological harm done to a person in formative yrs by those things is a very serious matter. Nonetheless, I think that homeschooling carries a different danger, the danger of making the child's environment too claustrophobic. One thing that I think was healthy for me about public schools was simply that I was in a social environment where I got to make friends & to learn about people other than myself & my immediate family & neighbors.

So what's the alternative to schools where the administrative policies are harmful to the students? Perhaps a communal homeschooling where parents share responsibility for teaching & child-care. There wd have to be agreements among the parents to not proselytize. As an anarchist I think I cd agree to not teach anarchism as long as other parents wd agree to not preach Christianity, e.g.. It wd be only fair to try to make the education provided be acceptably neutral to all the parents. Alas, creating such an alternative system wd be quite a burden on parents who might already be overburdened just trying to support their families.

"The most high-profile case in recent years occurred in 2017 at Evergreen College when biology professor Bret Weinstein was forced to resign after challenging a "no whites day" as racist." - p 93

I'm not familiar w/ this case. The idea of a "no whites day" is clearly racist to me regardless of what justification for it is provided so there's no way I'd comply w/ it either. Then again, I wd've never been hired in the 1st place. I hope that some non-whites objected to the "no whites day" as much as some whites did. If they didn't, then the state of anti-racism is pathetic.

"All of the major medical journals, including JAMA, the Lancet, and the NEJM, have disgraced themselves by publishing fraudulent articles to support the pharmaceutical industry and political interests. They can no longer be trusted as reliable sources of information any more than the New York Times or CNN." - p 96

I don't mind aspersions being cast on any of the above but I think that excluding Fox 'News' is an unacceptable omission. Furthermore, a bk that roundly disgraces the pharmaceutical industry is Marcia Angell, M.D.'s "The Truth About the Drug Companies - How They Deceive Us and What to do About It" (see the beginning of my review of that here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3719233146 ) & she was the chief editor of NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) for 20 yrs.

"Freedom of speech and a free press are essential to a functioning democracy and a free people. There is no example in history of a dictatorship or totalitarian regime that allowed for either. Today, the United States is no longer a free country by these standards. The level of censorship of individual citizens and the press is unprecedented." - p 97

I agree that censorship is at an insane high. I'm not sure that the US was ever as much of a 'free country' as it's made out to be. It seems more likely to me that conservatives are unhappy about this censorship NOW b/c it's being applied to them but that they probably found censorship to be just dandy when it was applied to anarchists & communists & other political (&/or sexual, etc) orientations that they find objectionable. By the same token, it seems that 'leftists' are now fine w/ censorship against conservatives b/c, HEY!, 'everybody knows the conservatives are the bad guys' & it's not the 'leftists' who're being censored as much at the moment. I'm against censorship for anybody but, at the same time, I think it's up to the individual's conscience whether they'll support things they find egregious. Hence, if I were a printer I'd probably decline printing any txt calling for genocide of ANYBODY for any 'reason'.

"It really is up to the individual to start thinking for himself, or, as Henry David Thorough wrote, "Others will think for you without thinking of you."" - p 101

1st, to get the obvious out of the way, I'll give the author the benefit of the doubt & assume that the misspelling of "Thoreau" as "Thorough" is one of those idiotic spellcheck mistakes that're one of the many reasons why I don't use such apps.

2nd, I'm surprised to see McDonald quote Thoreau at all since he's been a favored figure for non-traditional political thinking. That, however, is a sign of our topsy-turvy times: it seems that conservatives are more inclined to quote literary figures who were previously considered anathema to traditional values. George Orwell & his "1984" comes to mind. After all, Orwell fought w/ the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM ­ Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) in the Spanish Civil War. He was an anti-fascist & the side he was opposing was in favor of the king & the church. Traditionally, conservative values support hierarchies, such as royalty, & religion. As such, conservatives pointing our similarities to "1984"'s dystopia & current conditions more than leftists seem to is a bit shocking. The same goes for Thoreau.

The references go from pp 105-134. They're extensive. I've marked quite a few of them to be checked & quoted. This extends my reviewing task considerably but I'll take a go at it.

https://didihirsch.org/media/recent-coverage/l-a-suicide-hotline-sees-rise-in-coronavirsu-related-calls-counselors-feel-the-pain/

As is not too uncommon w/ URLs this link didn't work but I did find this similar article:

"A Los Angeles suicide crisis hotline has received more than 1,500 calls about coronavirus, and calls about COVID-19 have increased 75-fold over the past month, DailyMail.com can disclose. 

"Didi Hirsch's Suicide Crisis Line, which runs one of the largest suicide line call centers in the country, warned the number would grow exponentially over the coming weeks, as people buckle under the pressure of lost loved ones, lost jobs and the nationwide shutdown.

"The charity said top concerns among callers were 'anxiety, stress, fear of eviction, inability to paying utilities and take care of family, unemployment, health concerns or losing loved ones to the virus.'"

- https://didihirsch.org/media/recent-coverage/daily-mail-los-angeles-suicide-hotline-has-received-upwards-of-1500-calls-in-march-75-times-the-previous-month-over-fears-of-getting-coronavirus-and-related-anxiety-about-eviction-inability-to/

*****

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-care/underlyingconditions.html

That link is still good. Here's a relevant excerpt:

" 1. Higher risk for severe COVID-19 outcomes is defined as an underlying medical condition or risk factor that has a published meta-analysis or systematic review or complete the CDC systematic review process. The meta-analysis or systematic review demonstrates good or strong evidence, (depending on the quality of the studies in the review or meta-analysis) for an increase in risk for at least one severe COVID-19 outcome.

Asthma

Cancer

Cerebrovascular disease

Chronic kidney disease*

Chronic lung diseases limited to:

Interstitial lung disease

Pulmonary embolism

Pulmonary hypertension

Bronchiectasis

COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)

Chronic liver diseases limited to:

Cirrhosis

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease

Alcoholic liver disease

Autoimmune hepatitis

Cystic fibrosis

Diabetes mellitus, type 1 and type 2*¦

Disabilities¦

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Cerebral Palsy

Congenital Malformations (Birth Defects)

Limitations with self-care or activities of daily living

Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Learning Disabilities

Spinal Cord Injuries

(For the list of all conditions that were part of the review, see the module below)

Heart conditions (such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies)

HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)

Mental health disorders limited to:

Mood disorders, including depression

Schizophrenia spectrum disorders

Neurologic conditions limited to dementia¦

Obesity (BMI >30 kg/m2 or >95th percentile in children)*¦

Primary Immunodeficiencies

Pregnancy and recent pregnancy

Physical inactivity

Smoking, current and former

Solid organ or hematopoietic cell transplantation

Tuberculosis

Use of corticosteroids or other immunosuppressive medications"

*****

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-during-pandemic-have-lower-iqs-us-study-finds

This link worked. The problem I have w/ the article is that they say "pandemic" instead of "lockdown". The pandemic, such as it is, has nothing whatsoever to do w/ the conditions described. Those conditions were completely artificially created by the quarantine & the engineers of that deserve the blame.

"Children born during the coronavirus pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor and overall cognitive performance compared with children born before, a US study suggests.

"The first few years of a child's life are critical to their cognitive development. But with Covid-19 triggering the closure of businesses, nurseries, schools and playgrounds, life for infants changed considerably, with parents stressed and stretched as they tried to balance work and childcare.

"With limited stimulation at home and less interaction with the world outside, pandemic-era children appear to have scored shockingly low on tests designed to assess cognitive development, said lead study author Sean Deoni, associate professor of paediatrics (research) at Brown University."

*****

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/16/many-americans-continue-to-experience-mental-health-difficulties-as-pandemic-enters-second-year/

This link works. I have the same complaint about it as I do about the quote above.

"One year into the societal convulsions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, about a fifth of U.S. adults (21%) are experiencing high levels of psychological distress, including nearly three-in-ten (28%) among those who say the outbreak has changed their lives in "a major way." The share of the public experiencing psychological distress has edged down slightly since March 2020 but remains elevated among some groups in the population. Concerns about both the personal health and the financial threats from the pandemic are associated with high levels of psychological distress."

*****

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/426353-ocasio-cortez-the-world-will-end-in-12-years-if-we-dont-address

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Monday said she thinks that there is an urgency needed in addressing man-made climate change, warning that it will "destroy the planet" in a dozen years if humans do not address the issue, no matter the cost.

"During an interview at the MLK Now event in New York City honoring Martin Luther King Jr., Ocasio-Cortez told interviewer Ta-Nehisi Coates that younger Americans are looking for bold solutions to climate change, and are not concerned about the cost.

"{mosads}"Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we're like: 'The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don't address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?' " Ocasio-Cortez asked Coates."

Promises, promises.. another politician typically giving an empty sensational speech that's unlikey to result in much of anything. She promises the end of the world by 2031, don't hold yr breath.

The problem w/ such an 'end-of-the-world' scenario is that it's really predicting an end to human-life-as-we-know-it. Given that humans are purported to be the cause of the problem it wd seem that the end of human-life-as-we-know-it might be the optimal solution for everything else on the planet.

*****

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm?fbclid=IwAR3-wrg3tTKK5-9tOHPGAHWFVO3DfslkJ0KsDEPQpWmPbKtp6EsoVV2Qs1Q

The most important parts of this webpage are graphs wch I can't cut & paste here. As such, I'll make an admittedly biased & abridged selection of the 1st 3 lines of the "Place of Death (Table 2)" chart:

"Year in which death occurred: 2020-2022"; "State: United States"

"Place: Decedent's home; All Deaths involving COVID-19 [1]: 94,306; Deaths from All Causes: 2,878,140; Deaths involving Pneumonia [2]: 66,794; Deaths involving COVID-19 and Pneumonia [2]: 25,411; All Deaths involving Influenza [3]: 2,116; Deaths involving Pneumonia, Influenza, or COVID-19 [4]: 138,878

"Place: Healthcare setting, dead on arrival; All Deaths involving COVID-19 [1]: 1,000; Deaths from All Causes: 23,284; Deaths involving Pneumonia [2]: 584; Deaths involving COVID-19 and Pneumonia [2]: 252; All Deaths involving Influenza [3]: 20; Deaths involving Pneumonia, Influenza, or COVID-19 [4]: 1,352

"Place: Healthcare setting, inpatient; All Deaths involving COVID-19 [1]: 688,044; Deaths from All Causes: 2,714,555; Deaths involving Pneumonia [2]: 703,652; Deaths involving COVID-19 and Pneumonia [2]: 433,043; All Deaths involving Influenza [3]: 7,689; Deaths involving Pneumonia, Influenza, or COVID-19 [4]: 966,669"

When interpreted in the typical way, the "Healthcare setting, inpatient" wd be those patients only inpatients b/c of extreme duress &, therefore, the likeliest to die. Under that assumption, the statistic that all deaths involving COVID-19 at home total 94,306 while the same type of death involving inpatient care totals 688,044 wd seem to make sense. However, an admittedly perverse take on this might conclude that if one were in the hospital w/ COVID-19 one might be 7.3 times as likely to die. I wonder what the survival rate statistics are?

Otherwise, HEY!, it's worth noting that the inpatient "Deaths involving Pneumonia, Influenza, or COVID-19 [4]: 966,669" while the "Deaths involving Pneumonia [2]: 703,652" & the "Deaths involving Influenza [3]: 7,689". If one subtracts the influenza deaths from the combined deaths one gets 966,669 - 7,689 = 958,980. If one further subtracts the pneumonia deaths from that figure one gets 958,980 - 703,652 = 255,328 exclusively attributable to COVID-19 if one doesn't factor in other comorbidities. Now, if one takes the "Deaths involving COVID-19 [1]: 688,044" again & subtracts the 255,328 from that, one notices that the more definite figure for deaths attributable to COVID-19 is 432,716 less.

Now that's only in "Healthcare setting, inpatient" so let's take a large overview from a part of the chart not so-far quoted:

"Total - All Places of Death; Deaths involving Pneumonia, Influenza, or COVID-19 [4]: 1,434,881; All Deaths involving COVID-19 [1]: 1,021,212; Deaths involving Pneumonia [2]: 927,785; All Deaths involving Influenza [3]: 12,096"

Following the same procedure, we subtract 12,096 from 1,434,881 to yield 1,422,785 from wch we subtract 927,785 = 495,000. Yes, Fun with Math! Maybe I'm overlooking something important, maybe my math is wrong - both are possible. If I'm right, however, that makes 495,000 deaths in the US exclusively attributed to COVID-19 over a 2+ yr period. That's 526,212 deaths less than the deaths involving COVID-19 = 1,021,212 figure given.

Now, let's compare that to the death-from-COVID predictions from the same time. I found "7,198,770 reported COVID-19 deaths based on Current projection scenario by November 1, 2022" ( https://covid19.healthdata.org/global?view=cumulative-deaths&tab=trend ) Get to work, people!, 6,703,770 of you have to die in the next 3 mnths! OK, that's not fair, that's a GLOBAL prediction, not one just for the US. Now the CDC elsewhere has this to say about as-of-August-20, 2020: "The national ensemble predicts that a total of 1,035,000 to 1,048,000 COVID-19 deaths will be reported by this date." ( https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/forecasting/forecasting-us.html ) Let's take the smallest of the 2 figures, no sense in being alarmist, right? That only yields 540,000 that have to die in the next 24 days, that's not so bad, now, is it?!

But, HEY!, why just rely on these old fuddy-duddies? I have a really smart former friend who emailed me on March 21, 2020: "you can't downplay this virus any more than you could downplay the Spanish Flu. 50 to 100 million died of the Spanish Flu (2.5% mortality rate)". Well, there you have it! A completely reliable projection from a really smart guy: 50 to 100 million people might die from COVID-19 b/c it's just like the so-called Spanish Flu. (Ok, that's not exactly what he sd but you get the idea, I'm being sarcastic b/c I think this guy is a pompous asshole.)

*****

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/

I found this one particularly interesting b/c multiple 'fact checkers' mostly substantiated a claim by Senator Scott Jensen (also a physician) that hospitals get paid more if Medicare patients are listed as having COVID-19 and three times as much money if they need a ventilator. Jensen, who's gotten in trouble for his outspokenness, is quoted as stating:

"Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate. Why? Because if it's a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for ­ if they're Medicare ­ typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000. But if it's COVID-19 pneumonia, then it's $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000."

*****

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7024e1-H.pdf?fbclid=IwAR153webZWliXPJyr0SUM7QGKV2J-5XoFpwVfvmNBZC2Lvi6NyIBya6uTBM

It took me awhile to get the URL right bc the lower-case 'el's & the 'one's look very similar in the bk (& the lower-case "el"s & the upper-case "eye"s look identical in the font I'm typing this in) but I got it right in the above so I saved you the trouble of trying to copy it from the bk. Here's a brief excerpt from the beginning of that:

"Beginning in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and response, which included physical distancing and stay-at-home orders, disrupted daily life in the United States. Compared with the rate in 2019, a 31% increase in the proportion of mental health­related emergency department (ED) visits occurred among adolescents aged 12­17 years in 2020 (1). In June 2020, 25% of surveyed adults aged 18­24 years reported experiencing suicidal ideation related to the pandemic in the past 30 days"

*****

https://www.pe.com/2021/03/30/southern-california-suicides-down-during-coronavirus-pandemic-but-not-among-young-eople??utm_email=E44D9493A4BD7421C57244AB74&g2i_eui=l1hHBZmxw9%2F3BUTOPT%2B8ItN%2BinSLPkLj&g2i_souce=newsletter&utm_souce=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Read%20more&utm_campaign=scng-ivdb-localist&utm_content=curated&fbclid=IwAR0ok8GLiXYapcV6wYmdz26EK_t-nF3O15_zrVgua8sYrxTCFlpPeEPq1wU

Copying that URL from the bk was a bit challenging but I was reasonably meticulous about it. It didn't yield a result but I was recognized as a probable subscriber wch means that McDonald is presumably a subscriber. I tried doing a search for "southern california youth suicides 2020" but that didn't work so I gave up.

*****

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/12/cdc-study-finds-overwhelming-majority-of-people-getting-coronavirus-wore-masks/?fbclid=IwAR1j81e7lhGi15T1Q2ImbMmH2QvdZ6-dsc8xnAdJjnUa9_iqIyMw5lw_Ics

That URL didn't work for me either & might be, once again, b/c I typed it wrong but I did find this:

"The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University summarized six international studies which "showed that masks alone have no significant effect in interrupting the spread of ILI or influenza in the general population, nor in healthcare workers." Oxford went on to say that "that despite two decades of pandemic preparedness, there is considerable uncertainty as to the value of wearing masks." They prophetically warned that this has "left the field wide open for the play of opinions, radical views and political influence."

"A study of health-care workers in more than 1,600 hospitals showed that cloth masks only filtered out 3 percent of particles. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine stated, "[W]earing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection" and that "[T]he desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic."

"There are many other credible studies showing lack of mask efficacy, such as studies published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information, Cambridge University Press, Oxford Clinical Infectious Diseases, and Influenza Journal, just to name a few."

- https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/29/these-12-graphs-show-mask-mandates-do-nothing-to-stop-covid/

*****

https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idOVCCIUZCJ

"Tanzanian President John Magufuli has poured scorn on coronavirus test kits imported to his country after saying that a goat and a pawpaw had returned positive results for COVID-19. Emer McCarthy reports."

*****

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmp2006372

That URL didn't work either but I found the article easily enuf. Here're a few relevant excerpts:

"We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

"The calculus may be different, however, in health care settings. First and foremost, a mask is a core component of the personal protective equipment (PPE) clinicians need when caring for symptomatic patients with respiratory viral infections, in conjunction with gown, gloves, and eye protection. Masking in this context is already part of routine operations for most hospitals. What is less clear is whether a mask offers any further protection in health care settings in which the wearer has no direct interactions with symptomatic patients."

[..]

"It is also clear that masks serve symbolic roles. Masks are not only tools, they are also talismans that may help increase health care workers' perceived sense of safety, well-being, and trust in their hospitals. Although such reactions may not be strictly logical, we are all subject to fear and anxiety, especially during times of crisis. One might argue that fear and anxiety are better countered with data and education than with a marginally beneficial mask, particularly in light of the worldwide mask shortage, but it is difficult to get clinicians to hear this message in the heat of the current crisis. Expanded masking protocols' greatest contribution may be to reduce the transmission of anxiety, over and above whatever role they may play in reducing transmission of Covid-19. The potential value of universal masking in giving health care workers the confidence to absorb and implement the more foundational infection-prevention practices described above may be its greatest contribution."

*****

https://www.businessinsider.com/scott-gottlieb-goes-from-fda-commissioner-to-pfizer-board-member-2019-6

June 28, 2019:

"Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb just joined the board of directors at drugmaker Pfizer, about two months after stepping down as the head of the US drug regulator. 

"Gottlieb resigned from the Food and Drug Administration in April after two years on the job, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family.

"During his time at the FDA, Gottlieb won rare bipartisan praise, changing the image of the FDA. The FDA approved a steady stream of new drugs, hitting an all-time record last year, and pushed to crack down on youth e-cigarette use and tobacco products."

People have been known to notice before the completely coincidental connection between FDA employees, drug-approval, & new high-paying jobs at pharmaceutical companies. Of course, no-one wd be so foolish as to think that any conspiracy is involved.

*****

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

"Ferguson is one of the highest-profile faces in the effort to use mathematical models that predict the spread of the virus - and that show how government actions could alter the course of the outbreak. "It's been an immensely intensive and exhausting few months," says Ferguson, who kept working throughout his relatively mild symptoms of COVID-19. "I haven't really had a day off since mid-January."

"Research does not get much more policy-relevant than this. When updated data in the Imperial team's model indicated that the United Kingdom's health service would soon be overwhelmed with severe cases of COVID-19, and might face more than 500,000 deaths if the government took no action, Prime Minister Boris Johnson almost immediately announced stringent new restrictions on people's movements. The same model suggested that, with no action, the United States might face 2.2 million deaths; it was shared with the White House and new guidance on social distancing quickly followed"

Ha ha. These alarmist predictions always make the news but are NEVER accurate. Funny how that works. Note that Fergusen's own case of COVID-19 was so mild it didn't even interfere w/ his working. Cd he secretly be one of the dead he predicted?

*****

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28930/w28930.pdf

That URL led to an error msg that read "Blocked Plug-in". SO, I tried https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28930.pdf instead in case the repetition was a mistake. That led to the more usual "Page Not Found" msg. I tried a search on the National Bureau of Economic Research website for "Rand corporation lockdowns" & that didn't work so I tried "lockdowns ineffective". I didn't find what I was looking for then either so I moved on.

*****

https://nypost.com/2020/07/26/woman-maces-couple-for-not-wearing-masks-at-california-dog-park-video/

"A woman allegedly Maced a California couple for not wearing masks while eating at a dog park - a disturbing incident caught on videotape.

"The injured pair, Ash O'Brien and hubby Jarrett Kelley, said the lady, who was wearing a black mask, ambushed them with a can of the burning substance after ripping them for not donning face coverings and eating at the Dusty Rhodes Dog Park in Ocean Beach outside San Diego on Thursday afternoon.

"First she "automatically started saying stuff about us not wearing a mask when we were social distancing - there was no one near us," O'Brien told the local ABC-TV affiliate.

"O'Brien said the lady also took them to task for eating at a picnic table at the park while they were there with their 3-month-old puppy, claiming it was against the rules.

""If we knew there was a no-food policy, we wouldn't have brought it into the park," O'Brien told the TV station.

"The angry woman soon stalked off - only to come back a few minutes later and attack them, O'Brien said.

""She just came up without saying anything and just stuck the Mace can right in front of my face," O'Brien said. "My husband, being a good guy, walked in front of her and was like, 'Hey, calm down please don't do this' - and then she grabbed him and just starting macing him. She used the entire can on him.

""We drove to the hospital. He got treated and everything," O'Brien said - adding that her husband suffered injuries to his face while she was burned on her arms.

"A woman filming the incident shouted at the attacker, "What are you doing? You cannot be serious! You just Maced them!" - as a female weeps in the background, according to footage posted by the Daily Mail.

""What's wrong with you, lady?!" added the woman who caught some of the encounter on tape.

"The injured couple filed a police report afterward.

""I want her to go to jail - she assaulted my husband, and I'm angry about it," O'Brien told ABC."

That's the entire article. Ordinarily, I'd only excerpt a small portion but this one's short & such a good example of the madness that it's worth a full quote. Note that a woman was attacking a woman 1st & then the man who tried to protect the 1st victim & that then a 3rd woman shot footage of the incident & remonstrated w/ the attacker. That makes 2 sane women out of 3, a majority.

*****

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-13/vaccine-exemption-requests

"City officials pushed back a deadline last week for employees to seek an exemption to the vaccination requirement, instead giving workers until the end of Monday to indicate that they plan to pursue an exemption. Across all city departments, more than 6,200 employees did so."

*****

https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-leftists-try-to-cancel-math-class-11621355858

"If California education officials have their way, generations of students may not know how to calculate an apartment's square footage or the area of a farm field, but the "mathematics" of political agitation will be second nature to them. Encouraging those gifted in math to shine will be a distant memory."

*****

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/01/3-years-ago-bret-weinstein-endured-the-precursor-to-todays-riots

"Cancel culture has existed in this country for years on college campuses. Nowhere was that more apparent than at Evergreen State College, where campus-wide riots arose in 2017 when a biology professor named Bret Weinstein found himself on the wrong side of the student body over questioning an allegedly optional event.

"The Evergreen campus had, for years, engaged in a voluntary "day of absence," in which students and faculty of color would leave to highlight the important role they play on campus. However, in 2017 it was decided that, rather than non-whites leaving, it should instead be the white students. The idea was that the white and non-white students would engage in separate, specifically tailored events discussing race on campus.

"Weinstein was uncomfortable with this idea, and decided to send an email to the faculty and staff, stating: "There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles.and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself."

"The reaction of the student body was aggressive, to say the least. Weinstein was labeled a white supremacist, and protests broke out across the school. Along with calls for sweeping reforms in regard to how race was handled on campus, the students were calling for Weinstein's firing. Physical alterations occurred between Weinstein and protestors, with no aid from campus security. Weinstein alleges campus security was told not to intervene, neither to stop violence nor calm protestors."

Wow.

*****

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/med-schools-are-now-denying-biological

"During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he'd said at the beginning of class.

""I don't want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it," the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I'll call Lauren). "Again, I'm very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive." 

"His offense: using the term "pregnant women." 

""I said 'when a woman is pregnant,' which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you."

"It wasn't the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like "male" and "female."

"Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient's biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school "acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.""

To say that I find that ludicrous wd be an understatement. I like people to just be who they feel they are w/o bending to societal pressure - unless that means being a non-consensual aggressor such as a murderer or a rapist. But until a man who's undergone a 'sex change' operation actually gives birth I think I'll just stick to common sense & biology & continue to say that a person has to have a functional womb, etc, in order to become pregnant. (NOT) Sorry, but to me, test-tube babies don't count as 'pregnancies'. Call me old fashioned.

*****

https://thebl.com/us-news/gofundme-cancels-grieving-fathers-fundraiser-for-son-who-died-from-vaccine.html

I didn't find this story at the above URL but I did find it here:

https://fee.org/articles/why-gofundme-deleted-this-grieving-father-s-fundraiser-after-his-son-s-death/

"Ernesto Ramirez Jr. was one of hundreds of American children taken too early during the COVID-19 pandemic. Only, his life wasn't claimed by COVID-19.

"His father and media reports say Ernesto died five days after taking a vaccine that was supposed to protect him.

"'We Clearly Have an Imbalance'

"Two months after Ernesto's death, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that atypical levels of heart inflammation had been observed in some patients following COVID-19 vaccination, particularly in young men receiving a second dose of a mRNA vaccine."

Oh, well, more collateral damage, right? I mean statistically who cares, right?! It's such a small amt of deaths. Of course, the dead person's family & friends care - even I CARE & I didn't know the boy. Do you think that if this happened to Fauci's kids maybe the reaction wd be a little different?!

*****

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-health-coronavirus-pandemic-us-supreme-court-8d397f378c01c369f0d8618a4d9b3a83

"WASHINGTON (AP) - President Joe Biden may have averted a flood of evictions and solved a growing political problem when his administration reinstated a temporary ban on evictions because of the COVID-19 crisis. But he left his lawyers with legal arguments that even he acknowledges might not stand up in court.

"The new eviction moratorium announced Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could run into opposition at the Supreme Court, where one justice in late June warned the administration not to act further without explicit congressional approval."

What the hell (or shd it be WTF?), obviously Bidentity Crisis hasn't gone far enuf. I pronounce that I, as an exemplary citizen, no longer have to pay for anything, EVER AGAIN, b/c I might die someday & I want to Party Hearty between now & then.

*****

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-comes-to-el-salvador-first-country-to-adopt-crypto-as-national-currency-11631005200

"SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador-Tiny and impoverished El Salvador's move to become the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender got off to a bumpy start, as the government took its bitcoin e-wallet offline for several hours after tens of thousands of people tried to download the app, overloading servers.

"The administration of President Nayib Bukele, 40, plans to spend more than $225 million on the rollout, including a $30 credit in bitcoin to those who take up Chivo-local slang for "cool"-the government-run e-wallet that can be used for purchases in bitcoin or U.S. dollars."

*****

In conclusion, I'm not going to give this bk a star rating b/c even tho I agree w/ large portions of it & find the references at the back to be very useful, I don't want to give the impression that I share the conservative gender role opinions that McDonald has, I don't.

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