Europe’s Unlikely Haven From Hysteria

April 6th, 2020

Coronavirus: Sweden Gets Something Right

First of all, my coronavirus prediction equation.

Today’s prediction: 1,263,839.

Actual figure: 1,286,409.

Error as a percentage: 1.75.

Discuss among yourselves. I can’t explain a result this good.

Sweden has not immersed itself in the lockdown Kool-Aid. A while back, their leaders announced that there would be only modest precautions. They haven’t closed elementary schools, but they have closed high schools. People are still free to move about.

When asked if it was a good idea for Sweden to “experiment” during a PANDEMIC PANDEMIC PANDEMIC, an official said Sweden was not experimenting. He said the rest of the world was.

Ouch.

Today I checked up on the situation, and guess what? Our press is lying about it.

I found an article which says Sweden is wrong because it has a higher death toll (per million residents) than neighboring countries. All of the tolls were very low. Dozens.

Why is it wrong, in cases where very few people have died, to look at the death toll as a primary indicator of an epidemic’s severity? It should be obvious.

Because there are very few deaths in the entire region, the statistics are guaranteed to be lumpy and deceptive. If COVID-19 hits one old folks home in a country in Scandinavia, it can kill 100 people pretty quickly while the overall population does better than it does in other countries.

I looked at the overall infection numbers. Sweden has around 10 million residents. Norway has around 5 million. Nice, easy numbers to work with. Norway infections: 5,760. Sweden infections: 7,206. Even if both countries had taken the same approach, you would expect over 11,000 cases in Sweden. Sweden has taken a more relaxed, sane approach, and it has 37.5% FEWER cases per capita.

The article cited Finland, which has a very low death rate. Finland shares a relatively short border with Sweden, and that border is in an area which contains very few people. Norway runs the entire length of Sweden. Which country is more analagous? Which country is part of the same basic pool of potential victims? Which country has more travel to and from Sweden?

Finland is more like Russia, which has a low COVID-19 rate, than Norway. Finland shares a long border with Russia.

I saw a disturbing figure online. Some “expert” is predicting 32% unemployment in the US. It’s not a good trade. Poverty will probably cause more deaths than coronavirus ever had the potential to. Poverty doesn’t just kill by starvation. It kills by poor nutrition, poor medical care, greater risk-taking in exchange for money, overwork, stress, and so on. Poverty is bad. It’s not just inconvenient.

The Swedish say, rightly, that you can’t confine entire nations for months. No matter how scared people are, they will eventually realize that a little risk is acceptable compared to living in FEMA tents. People will start going out no matter what, even if they have to riot.

The Swedish say they’re focusing on protecting those who are most likely to be harmed seriously. Gee. Didn’t someone recommend that on a blog somewhere?

If a foreign enemy appeared on our coast and said it would attack and destroy our economy through war, we would go to war and accept the possibility that 100,000 or 200,000 people might die. We lose more people than that to cigarettes. Right now, we are destroying our own economy because we fear that something like 100,000 people will die, even though maybe half of those deaths are unpreventable. Does this make sense?

I am not a fortune-teller, and I can’t tell you the Swedish approach will continue to work, but it sure looks good, and we have had ample time to test it.

This epidemic is exposing neurosis in many, many people. Neurosis isn’t fear. It’s unrealistic, unfounded fear. If, in normal times, I wash my hands before I eat, I’m not necessarily neurotic. If I shower every time I come home and spray my entire naked body with alcohol, I’m neurotic. Being concerned about an illness which has a small likelihood of doing you severe harm is normal and prudent. Buying 300 rolls of toilet paper and 100 bottles of hand sanitizer, and then wearing a mask when you mow your yard…that’s nuts.

If you can’t sleep at night because of fear of the disease itself, and you and your loved ones are not in high-risk groups, you need to man up. No other way to put it. To families like yours, the odds are like body armor. If you’re afraid of being put out in the street because you aren’t allowed to work, that’s different.

There are people who seriously believe this is a plague that could kill a big percentage of Americans. There is absolutely no reason to think that. Even the “experts” don’t believe it or say it.

Part of me hopes I get coronavirus. I do well with respiratory problems, and God heals me all the time. If I got infected and had 10 days of coughing and sneezing, I could then go on with life and think about other things. Like the flu, which is just as threatening.

Some people are saying we’ll be infected over and over again because we don’t develop lasting antibodies. Where do these ideas come from? “Experts” aren’t saying this. We have very little research to stand on. What we do have suggests that we develop immunity. Monkeys do. We’re also expected to have a vaccine in a year or so. On top of all that, Trump turned out to be right about the off-label drugs that are used to treat the disease. Treatment is getting better, fast.

I almost wish the Magical Nobel Peace Unicorn were still president. When he had a huge pandemic, and did nearly nothing, no one in the press crucified him, and the world kept turning. Trump keeps saying things that are correct, and the press treats him as though he were advocating something atrocious and diabolical, like, say, tearing the arms and legs off unborn babies.

For diehard hysterics, I have what will, oddly, feel like good news. An celebrity who isn’t completely obscure in America has died. It wasn’t George Clooney or Jennifer Lopez. Don’t get your hopes up. It was Tom Dempsey. He was an NFL kicker a long time ago. He was missing part of a foot. He was very old, and he was in bad health. He was suffering from dementia. Sad story.

He’s not what panic-mongering journalists had hoped for. Not a major celebrity by any means. He may be more famous than Joe Diffie, who was the most famous person they could scrape up prior to today. Maybe I’m wrong.

Still no matinee idols. Still no NBA stars. Still no pop luminaries. Trump, with no mask, is still vertical. Four months in.

I had a fascinating talk with a young Spirit-led friend last night. He lives in Miami. He is much more in tune with the ungodly than I am. He is still on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and he spends most of his time with people who don’t know God. He says many people he knows are flipping out. His friends are generally under 30, and in all likelihood, not a single one will have a severe coronavirus episode, but they think civilization is coming to an end. It’s a shower of neurosis, and the press is doing nothing but feed it.

He thinks we’re going to become a very aloof nation. As people are forced to abandon jobs where they deal with the public, substitutes will take their places, and we will never go back to the old model. We already saw this coming with Amazon, Ebay, and electronic cashiers, but he thinks it may get much worse.

It makes perfect sense. Carnal people don’t understand the importance of human beings and social interaction. The universe was created for human beings; it has no other reason for existing. The purpose of creation isn’t to have perfect order in the natural world. If it were, the best course would be to exterminate all humans. Pollution would disappear. Nature would rebound. War couldn’t exist. But the world would have no purpose. As the word says, “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but there is much profit in the strength of an ox.” Reproduction is messy, but it’s the purpose of the earth, and God considers it worth the trouble.

I think the world is going to turn into a big vending machine. Electronics can’t replace all forms of commerce, but they can replace most of them, just as they have replaced millions of factory workers. We’ll go out much less. We won’t carry cash. We’ll sit at home and do pointless things, and we’ll wait for the UPS truck.

That actually sounds a lot like my life, but give me credit. I pray for God to use me to help people every day.

Fifteen years ago, we did not stare at our phones all day. We were not commanded and indoctrinated electronically throughout the day. Things are very different now, especially for the young. In about three years, we will have adults who don’t know what life without a smartphone is like.

The Internet and its sister, the phone universe, are becoming strings for puppeteers to pull. We’re becoming a colonial organism, like the Borg. We’re binding ourselves to each other in an extremely restrictive and unhealthy way.

It’s the Beast’s perfect storm. His mission is to create a worldwide army of people controlled through electronics.

I am not a joiner. I hate feeling that I’m part of a big organism, except for the body of Christ. It offends me when people try to tell me I owe unity and obedience to the secular world. It’s as though I’m a healthy arm, and someone is trying to attach me to a person with AIDS. I don’t want any part of the Beast. I want to be able to think and breathe.

I do not want to be part of your fake family just because we’re connected to the same Internet. The United States and the population of the earth are not my families. Step off!

No wonder I hate cities so much.

My friend says he’s not afraid for himself. He’s concerned about people he knows. They’re hysteria zealots. They have made coronavirus panic their religion. They have no protection. I reminded him of something. God has said, “A thousand shall fall at my side, and ten thousand at my right hand, but it shall not come near me; only with my eyes shall I behold and see the reward of the wicked.” Even if bad things don’t touch you, you will have to watch other people suffer.

You can’t help many people. They generally won’t let you.

Things continue to go very well for me. I enjoy life more and more. I’m starting to wonder if I should admit it publicly. My stress level drops every month. I do things I enjoy. I know there are maladjusted people out there who will be angry at me because I’m doing well and telling people what God is doing for me.

When someone else has a good life, it’s not an attack on you. Mature people celebrate other people’s happiness. The other kind, well, they put people on crosses.

If you’re hoping for me to apologize because I’m doing well, forget it. Grow up. I don’t pray for God to help me so I can turn around and pretend to feel bad about it when he comes through.

I pray for God to keep pampering me. “Pamper” is the word I use in my prayers. I’m not ashamed of it. Problems are bad. This is why we call them problems. Not wanting to have them is correct. I pray for God to do the same things for other people. I have a list of people I go through every day.

Glorying in suffering is for the proud. I want a nice, easy life. A lot of people take pleasure in being perceived as martyrs. Not interested. Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden was light, and I ask for this when I pray. If you like suffering, you are very misguided, and you will probably get what you want.

Jesus didn’t wander around Israel making people poor and giving them diseases. He didn’t afflict people so he could say, “Aww, poor baby! You’re even better than I am!”

People who have a perpetual victim complex are always looking for someone who is better off whom they can hate. I volunteer. It’s better to be blessed and hated than not to be blessed.

The fear we are seeing is disappointing. The anger is far more disgraceful.

I’m waiting for coronavirus to be blamed on Christians and Jews. We’re already getting heat for going to church. Some numbskull put out a theory that coronavirus was created in a lab in Israel. I wonder if Satan will find other rumors to use as nails. He did it when Nero burned Rome.

Yesterday, I saw a few seconds of a Fauci clip, and he said the curve was starting to flatten. Hope he’s right, but at the moment, the Johns Hopkins tally is adhering very tightly–as tightly as one could hope in one’s wildest dreams–to an exponential function with a slope that increases. And increasing slope means an increasing infection rate. I will assume that a person in his position knows a little more than I do.

He may be taking recoveries into account. I’m not doing that. I don’t know if the numbers are available to me. Johns Hopkins lists them for China. Maybe they’re available for the whole world. It hasn’t been a concern. I just want to know how many people have been diagnosed.

I still think we’ll see a big change in April. Not because of hysterical overreaction but because of the weather and because people who are easy to infect are disappearing. Of course, people will credit hysteria with the win, so next time we get a relatively minor pandemic, we will be expected to run for our burrows again.

After socialism, willing inundation by hostile immigrants, and Abba, I didn’t think Sweden could be right about anything. Looks like I was wrong.

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