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For a while, I was interested in the old vocational videos that used to be given to high school students in the 50's and 60's.

11/17/21
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COVID › VIEWS

Iversen: Locking Down Unvaccinated-Only ‘Not About Science, It’s About Punishing People’
On the latest episode of The Hill’s “Rising,” journalist and political commentator Kim Iversen discussed strict lockdowns for the unvaccinated only in Austria, and the UK’s new policy requiring three shots as proof of being “fully vaccinated.”

1) upstroke - pulls in gasoline vapor and air mixture
2) downstroke - compress vapor mixture
3) upstroke - ignite fuel mixture just at it starts on the upstroke
4) downstroke - expel burnt air/fuel mixture

The cycles are called intake, compression, power, exhaust.

Writes AlmostWrong’s Newsletter ·13 hr ago
It cannot be ruled out it might be human nature to coerce others to do what you have already done because you feel insecure and underconfident about the possibility that what you have done is right.

If this is true, then forcing others to do things that you've already done might be a way to cope with uncertainty and existential insecurity. This doesn't lower the risk that what one did was wrong, just that you now have everyone on board and cannot take blame singularly.

The cycles are called intake, compression, power, exhaust. Or the mnemonic my edgy High School auto shop teacher gave it:

Suck
Squeeze
Bang
Blow

How did I get that upside down and backwards?

richwicks says

How did I get that upside down and backwards?

Because the crankshaft is on bottom and the piston goes down when it sucks in the gas.

I still think I got it correct? Piston is at the bottom

I always see the piston being below the crankshaft.

Engines are almost never built like that because of the problems of oil on the underside of the piston.

richwicks says

I still think I got it correct? Piston is at the bottom

See if this helps. This is the orientation usually used when describing reciprocating engine cycles.

So it fires every other rotation?

Nope, every other.

richwicks says

Nope, every other.

That's what I said...every other.

I used to think it fired every rotation

Nothing says I’m better than you than donning a mask for no particular reason at all and then posting a photo of it online to demonstrate that virtue!

During Coronamania, many people have validated and internalized others’ Covid fear level, because doing so is seen as "empathetic" and "nice." Some have told me they’re deliberately accommodating others’ fear. Others may be doing so reflexively. I‘m reminded of the Woody Allen movie, Zelig, in which the title character pathologically takes on the personalities of those around him in order to fit in and gain acceptance.

In sports, coaches or commentators sometimes sometimes say a team is “playing down to another team’s level,” i.e., playing poorly and out of synch because that’s what their opponent is doing. But should everyday people dysfunctionally descend into the viral fear abyss of those around them? Empathy isn’t always good; it can be misplaced and damaging. Acting as if Covid fear is rational enables more fear among the fearful. It’s the adult version of affirming that maybe there is a monster under your bed. It’s like buying beer for an alcoholic friend.

As members of this privileged, sheltered class, politicians and bureaucrats have absorbed the virus hysteria that they helped seed in their social milieu. ...

Merkel’s remarkable virus paranoia, quietly acknowledged by the press now for months, explains her fixation on social isolation, closures and curfews as the only acceptable pandemic policies.

She is a 67 year-old sedentary woman who likely suffers from one or more undisclosed health problems. And she is surrounded by other older, unfit government officials, like 73 year-old interior minister Horst Seehofer, who nearly died of a B19 virus infection in 2002, and so has a reason to fear viral infection. For months and months, all of these people have been taking every possible personal precaution – including house-arresting the entire domestic populations of the countries they govern – in the vain hope of escaping Corona.

You could feel their collective relief when the vaccines were rolled out. All of them eagerly accepted vaccination. ...

To the profound disappointment of Merkel and everybody like her, the vaccines have not eradicated Corona. Every day, the prospect of personal infection looms for these people as a new, uncomfortable certainty. Every day, they and the rest of the work-from-home bureaucracy become ever more terrified. The prime minister of Austria is so afraid that he has confined all unvaccinated Austrians to their homes. When asked, he declared that this measure would have no end date. The Chief Minister of Australia’s Northern Territory is terrified. New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is terrified.

You know who isn’t terrified right now? Everyone outside these circles. I and many of the people I know have had Corona, and we’re not terrified. Blue-collar workers have mostly been infected, and they’re not terrified. Grocery clerks, nurses, police officers and bus drivers aren’t terrified. All of the terror is at the top, blaring down at us all of the time. All these people know they are going to get sick in the next few months, and they are railing against this reality. ...

All in all, it is the hive-mind that has been vastly more successful at understanding what is going on – not only as far as Corona, but everywhere. This has been obvious now for years. It is even true in my own field, where the official discourse suffers from a pervasive, unoriginal banality, while alternative theories pondered by intelligent outsiders and anonymous Twitter accounts become every day vastly more interesting. The reasons are simple: There are more people involved; the barriers to publishing are lower; nodes that provide bad analysis are easily removed; the thinkers are more thoroughly networked to each other; they gather audiences solely on the basis of their ability; they consider everything, not just the official line.

Meanwhile, it is only official, curated information that is allowed to inform bureaucratic decisions. Products of the hive-mind are deliberately excluded, via gate-keeping mechanisms like peer review and credentialism. All of the terrified Angela Merkels of the world act within an environment of outdated, poor-quality information, all the time. ...

The problem with curated information isn’t just that it is slow, subject to inertia, and produced by insular out-of-touch functionaries. Because the information has political importance, there are incentives everywhere to manipulate and degrade its quality. Bureaucratic actors will lie about what is going on to curry favour, save face or evade blame. What is more, many advisers, analysts and modellers are only in the position of providing analysis in the first place, because we need more women in STEM, or because they tell the Faucis of the world what they want to hear, or because they have the right combination of sociopathy and narrow-mindedness necessary to ascend complex bureaucratic hierarchies.

Corona policies really are as stupid as they look. Politicians and bureaucrats have locked themselves into a sad parody of the film Contagion, and their increasingly unsustainable, erratic behaviour merely reflects their desperation.

The Ideology of Corona Containment
The system of political beliefs and demands that have grown up around mass containment increasingly resemble a novel, malignant ideological system. ...

First-world democracies are anything but systems for channelling the will of the people. Instead, with the rise of mass media and mass society, they have become elaborate consensus-farming operations. Unique in history, they are governing systems that use mass media to call into being the phenomenon of public opinion, which is then shaped by a combination of propaganda and political participation into a tool of governance and consensus in its own right. The majority is thus first acclimated to the agenda of the state, and then deployed to enforce governmental directives and to repress dissidents, the non-compliant and, increasingly, even the disinterested. Corona containment is an obvious product of a system like this, depending as it does on widely distributed consensus policies that are enforced less by the police than by enthusiastic majorities deputised by journalists.

The mainstream media notion that all people were at serious risk from this virus would not have made sense to those who considered real life, directly observed data about how very few people they knew—or knew of—had died with this infection, or how old or unhealthy those who died already were. Passing your local hospital would not have revealed lines of people laying on stretchers on the sidewalk. People should have noticed that people they knew had tested positive without manifesting serious symptoms. Multiple recent infections among the “vaccinated” people they know should reveal that the vaxxes have been badly oversold.

https://markoshinskie8de.substack.com/p/bus-rides-boxers-and-covid-myth-busters

The mainstream media notion that all people were at serious risk from this virus would not have made sense to those who considered real life, directly observed data about how very few people they knew—or knew of—had died with this infection, or how old or unhealthy those who died already were. Passing your local hospital would not have revealed lines of people laying on stretchers on the sidewalk. People should have noticed that people they knew had tested positive without manifesting serious symptoms. Multiple recent infections among the “vaccinated” people they know should reveal that the vaxxes have been badly oversold.

DECEMBER 1, 2021
An ‘Abundance of Caution’ Mentality Leads to Tyranny
Our public officials are pathologically incapable of humility.

Instead, try one simple question. The simplest possible. The public health equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s, Are you better off today than you were four years ago?

The question is this: If the vaccines work, what’s going on?

Remind them: We are almost a year into mass vaccination campaigns. Even before they began, public health experts and media and politicians explicitly and repeatedly promised that vaccines would end the epidemic if enough people took them.

Now the United States and especially Europe have vaccinated vast numbers of their citizens with mRNA and DNA vaccines that appeared hugely effective in clinical trials. In many European countries, over 90 percent of all adults are vaccinated.

Yet not only has Covid not disappeared, many of those same countries, like Denmark, are now seeing record levels of infections.

examples of this from “vaccine” to “herd immunity” to “woman” abound. the point is to erect a semantic smokescreen and weaponize language into politics. it becomes a tool to obscure rather than reveal and to slant rather than facilitate discourse.

this will snowball until it blocks out all the sunlight of reason. this is where intellectual blind spots and dark ages come from.

the only answer is to push back and push back HARD.

Caroline Stepovich has been a nurse for the past 37 years.

She got COVID and recovered. She still suffers from long-haul symptoms.

She isn’t vaccinated, she knows the vaccine are dangerous, she knows too many vaccine injured, and there is no way she’s going to get the vaccine. No benefit, only risk to her. It would be a really dumb decision.

She is shunned by all her vaccinated friends (including other nurses) who:

blame her for the pandemic

feel it is dangerous to be around her

say she is selfish

say that she isn’t “a team player”

claim she is evil for not doing the right thing by getting vaccinated.

She calmly tells her friends that as someone who is COVID recovered, she is much safer to be around since even if she gets re-infected, she cannot transmit the virus. And furthermore, if she does get re-infected, she won’t get hospitalized or die.

Caroline is superior to her vaccinated friends from both a risk and burden perspective. She can’t infect her friends and she isn’t a burden on society if she gets re-infected. Her friends don’t have a single advantage over her in any way.

Her friends tell her that what she said isn’t true and is misinformation.

Wow. What Caroline says comes right from the CDC (showing if you are COVID recovered you can’t transmit a subsequent infection) and a Harvard study (showing people who have recovered immunity don’t get reinfected).

What Caroline says comes right from the CDC (showing if you are COVID recovered you can’t transmit a subsequent infection) and a Harvard study (showing people who have recovered immunity don’t get reinfected).

this is how you turn a society against itself and families members against one another.

it’s how you take the reach of the state into every corner of every home.

it is intentional and it is calculated.

they will get you used to this.

they will get you agitated and scared enough to think that this is righteous.

they will vilify and other and seek to describe those who do not submit as unfit, immoral, and unclean.

it has happened before.

it’s happening again. ...

it’s about authoritarians vs free people. and there is no sustainable middle ground there. either your rights are inalienable, or they are not rights at all and you’ll spend the rest of your life in a negotiation about what privileges you can keep. you have to ask what your bedtime is, you cannot just decide for yourself.

Dr. Desmet argues that “mass formation is a specific phenomenon that emerges if certain conditions are met”:

The conditions are:

1. A lack of social connectedness;
2. A lack of meaning;
3. Free-floating anxiety (that is unconnected to any mental representation); and
4. Free-floating frustration and aggression.

(Obviously our modern society met all of these conditions prior to COVID.)

And then he argues that “a narrative is distributed via mass media that focuses anxiety and aggression on a certain object” (in this case a virus).

I think the antidote needs to match the four conditions that Desmet describes in the beginning. Our alternative must be:

1. More social connectedness;
2. More meaning-making (through spirituality, honest work, time with family & friends, and experiencing nature);
3. Properly identifying the source of our anxiety as our hurry up culture and helping people take the off-ramp to a parallel economy; and
4. Properly identifying the source of our frustration and aggression as the predatory system of monopoly capitalism and helping people take the off-ramp into a parallel economy based on mutual respect.

The last two years have felt a lot like a cosmic joke. I sometimes like to recap it to myself, just in the hopes of actually believing everything that’s going on.

There’s a virus that strikes the elderly and obese and spares children, and two years later the most common mitigation strategy is putting ineffective and dirty cloth masks on schoolchildren. For adults in many blue areas, we’re forced to wear masks in a restaurant from the door to our table. In New York City, it’s even worse: you have to show proof of a vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission in order to enter an indoor space, and also wear a mask.

Yet it was at just the moment that life became laughably absurd that comedians stopped daring to tell jokes. Now, we’re hectored with moralistic progressive haranguing from those who supposedly make a living being funny.

Making jokes could be construed as going against the prevailing narrative of Covid mania, er, caution. And as such, few comedians have dared. Enter Adam Carolla, who does dare to do that in a new comedy special produced by the Daily Wire, called Truth Yeller.

Within the first five minutes, Carolla describes traveling during Covid with mask theater in place. He jokes about how nonsensical the rules are; he is yelled at to pull up his mask one minute, and then served hummus, which he eats with his hands. He quips, “Do you think anyone has died because they snacked on an airplane? What would their obituary read?”

Carolla links these nonsense TSA rules with those we’ve been begrudgingly living with for years, like liquid limits to pass through security. These regulations have never made much sense; they’re the products of unthinking bureaucrats unable to utilize common sense in their enforcement of the rules. Carolla uses the example of a nearly empty tube of toothpaste labeled “4 oz.” that isn’t permitted through, while sneaking through the technically allowed amounts of alcohol.

We understand how ludicrous these post-9/11 rules are because we’ve seen them in practice for over a decade; we know dumping out our water bottles at the security line and then buying new bottles for $4 each isn’t saving any lives. We’re not allowed (yet) to mock Covid regulations on masks because doing so is, for many elites, a threat to public health.

Carolla (and his first guest, Jay Leno) are doing a vital and subversive public service: they’re breaking the seal on mocking the Covid theater we’re all subjected to.

There’s some part of all Americans that understands that we are living in some sort of absurd simulation. Kids in schools are masked all day, often in ineffective and dirty cloth masks, while adults are shoulder to shoulder in bars, restaurants and sporting events. Where I live in Montgomery County, kids are still playing outdoor soccer in masks, and our county executive is hinting at what is essentially permanent masking requirements, as are already in place in Oregon.

But like in Oregon, the politicians passing such regulations aren’t scared enough of Covid to follow the rules they’ve imposed upon us all. In the last month alone, four members of the Montgomery County Council have been spotted at indoor public events where masks were removed (I documented it here on Twitter).

We should be able to point and laugh at this absurdity: kids in preschools and daycares are required to be masked, but at a legislative breakfast in the ballroom of a large local chain hotel, all of the adults could remove their masks because there was food in front of them. What would it take to unmask toddlers here? Maybe we can convince them to hold their sippy cups and an animal cracker all day; because we know that food and drink somehow neutralizes the airborne virus.

I’m joking, of course, but this is all a joke. None of it makes sense. We should all be openly mocking the ridiculous world we’ve been forced to live in by hypocritical bureaucrats attending networking events and parties unmasked while lecturing us about how dangerous this virus is. It’s nice to see Carolla doing so. Here’s hoping he starts a trend and inspires other so-called comedians to take aim as well.

As an extraordinary period in which social life was upturned, the covid-19 pandemic will be over when we turn off our screens and decide that other issues are once again worthy of our attention. Unlike its beginning, the end of the pandemic will not be televised.