Plant Closures Threaten Americans with Crippling Flatulence, B12 Deficiencies

The meat frenzy is about to kick into high gear! Get ready for a couple of months of tofu and tabouli. Buy yourself some Beano or get used to driving with the car windows open.

What’s going on? Well, workers at certain meat plants are testing positive for COVID-19 at high rates, and our genius overlords are shutting the plants down.

Here’s the question an intelligent person must ask: what percentage of the C19-positive workers have symptoms? Also, how many have symptoms that aren’t extremely mild? Here’s a really good question: if a big percentage test positive and very few are significantly ill, what does it mean for the rest of us?

I’ll tell you what it would mean: the lockdowns were a bad idea.

C19 has been in the US since December, at the latest. There is no way to deny it. You can’t have an undetected yet vigorous epidemic in China, plus abundant air traffic between China and other countries, without spreading the infection abroad. It’s just not possible.

It’s starting to look like the infection rate in the US is very high, and that the only reason the official numbers are low is that we are very, very bad at diagnosing the disease. If this is true, then lots of good conclusions follow.

One conclusion is that the disease just isn’t that bad. If it were, we would have sick and dying people everywhere, and we don’t.

Another conclusion is that the epidemic is wrapping up due to herd immunity. If, say, 20% of Americans have already been infected, the body of vulnerable people has decreased greatly, and they are also separated from infectious people by a growing buffer of immune individuals. If this is true, the recent collapse of the acceleration of the infection rate is largely due to saturation and herd immunity.

“BUT THE LOCKDOWNS FLATTENED THE CURVE!” Did they?

The shortest likely incubation period for C19 is 3 days, and the average is 5 days. If lockdowns were saving us, the curve would have started flattening 3 days after they went into effect. Did it? Doesn’t look like it. The downturn didn’t even begin until the second week of April. Go look. The influence of lockdowns isn’t even visible on the graph at the time when it should have appeared.

As always, I’m relying on a graph which is based on squishy numbers, but then so are the authorities.

There is no doubt that lockdowns save some people, but then they would also save us from the flu, which kills people in numbers comparable to C19. We don’t have flu lockdowns. We don’t even force people to get vaccinated. We say, “Disease and death are inevitable, and freedom and prosperity are essential, so we accept allow free adults to make their own choices, and we accept some casualties.” That’s what we’re thinking, even if we don’t articulate it.

A cousin of mine is in the food industry, and he says the meat thing will hit hard in two weeks. This morning, after texting him, I felt like I should buy protein. I prayed about it. I was thinking maybe I would get three dozen eggs and pickle them. I thought I might buy 5 more rib eyes and maybe 8 pounds of chicken. I considered getting canned salmon. I like it, and it’s cheap. And almost no one else likes it, so it’s not a big hoarder priority.

I felt like God told me I could get a few cans of salmon and 4 pounds of chicken breast, but that was all. I saw some gorgeous bone-in rib eyes on sale for $5.49 per pound, and the temptation was serious, but I let them go.

I have enough protein to maintain a pretty decent level of consumption for something like 6 weeks. That will have to do. I’m not turning on the spare fridges.

The press is telling us millions of chickens will be slaughtered because farmers can’t sell them to plants. That sounds like a big deal, but we slaughter at least 10 billion chickens per year in the US. Also, chickens grow fast. Guess how old chickens are when we kill them? A year? Six months? Try 7 weeks. If we killed half the chickens in the US, we could be back on track in July.

What about cattle? I can’t speak for everyone, but the cattle on my land aren’t expensive to keep in hot weather. The grass grows, and they don’t require hay or silage. I would be surprised to learn that farmers were slaughtering herds this far into spring. Maybe a reader who knows more can tell me.

I have read that steers are generally slaughtered when they’re between one and two years old, so a panic massacre could presumably cause problems for a year or two.

I don’t think eggs are going anywhere. You don’t have to butcher eggs. Also, if meat production falters, chicken feed will be cheaper. Farmers will need to sell grain.

I was thinking about it today, and I realized the meat problem is not a big deal. I don’t think it will last long, and even if it did, life with a little less meat will not be difficult. Who cares? It’s better to do without than to be a hoarder.

One silver lining behind the meat cloud: squirrels. I have an endless supply, and shooting squirrels is one of the most virtuous things a person can do. They’re destructive and also quite tasty.

Squirrels are out of season here, but I contacted the authorities, and they told me homeowners are free to kill nuisance squirrels all the time. My squirrels are ALL nuisance squirrels. The other day I wrote about losing the fuel gauge on my lawn tractor to a stinking squirrel. I can shoot them whenever I want, legally. Squirrel works just fine in chicken recipes. Kung pao squirrel may be in my future.

Maybe the meat panic will wake people up and make them realize it’s time to go back to work. That would be nice.

In case anyone is interested, this county’s current C19 tally is 151. Barely moving. That may be a bad thing. It may mean we don’t have as much herd immunity as other places. It’s nice for now, however.

This morning at the store, I saw several packages of toilet paper, right out there where just anyone could grab them. I was awestruck. Things are getting better.

I can’t stop writing about coronavirus without mentioning the American major celebrity death toll: still zero. I’m also checking my used bench grinder poverty index. The number of used items that come up on an Ebay search for “Baldor bench grinder” is 39. This is down from 41 but a lot higher than last year. Maybe the economy isn’t as bad as I thought.

In other news, today I watched a video by Messianic rabbi Zev Porat. He interviewed a student of late rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, a revered mystic who died not long ago. Kaduri said he had met the Messiah. He left a note indicating that the Messiah’s name was Yehoshuah, which is the long form of Yeshua (“Jesus”).

Kaduri’s son claimed the note was a forgery, but Kaduri students have come forward and admitted that Kaduri did, in fact, believe Jesus was the Messiah. So much for the forgery claims.

In the interview, the student suggests mainstream Orthodox Jews believe Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe who died many years ago, is the Messiah. Schneerson was the leader of a big sect called Chabad. Many thought he was a Messiah candidate, but the official hard-line rule was that no one who died without fulfilling his mission could be the Messiah, so Jews with integrity abandoned his candidacy when he passed away.

I already knew that certain Jews thought he was the Messiah, and you can find them online saying they pray to him. They believe he is immortal; a god. Some think he will rise again. It’s a big kerfuffle. Allowing Jews to worship a Messiah could open doors they work hard to keep closed against a certain well-known individual from Bethlehem. Defining Jesus out of monotheism is extremely important in a culture beset by Christian missionaries.

You can see the dilemma. Anti-missionaries have objections to Jesus. One is their belief that the Messiah can’t be a god. Another is that he can’t die before fulfilling his mission. If a strict Orthodox Jew says Schneerson is a god and admits he died, what happens to two very strong objections to Jesus? POOF.

Anti-missionaries dismiss the miracles of Jesus as magic, and they say you miracles don’t prove someone is righteous or approved by God. But Schneerson’s worshipers say he worked miracles and cite them as proof of his Messiah status. Problem.

The official Jewish posture is that if you believe Jesus is the Messiah, even if you were born Jewish and continue practicing Judaism, you are no longer a Jew. Just like that. But what if you accept Schneerson? How does one rid the faith of followers of one putatively false Messiah while embracing others?

Schneerson denied that he was the Messiah. I don’t think he can be blamed for what happened after he died.

There are followers who claim he did’t die. That’s really something. He had heart attacks. There were witnesses. A doctor signed a death certificate. The body was seen. It’s in a hole right now.

Christians admit Jesus died, so our situation is different. There is no body. There are no bones. There never was any physical evidence that he remained in the tomb. The Gospels say the Romans put soldiers around the tomb to prevent his followers from stealing the body, but it vanished anyway. The penalty for the soldiers was death. You can look that up. I did. It’s not like they would have taken their job lightly.

I didn’t realize how big Schneerson Messianism was. I thought it was a few fringe characters. Now that I’ve seen the video with the Kaduri student, I realize it may be a much bigger movement than I thought. I looked around online, and it appears to be a major phenomenon.

What will the repercussions be? Will the Schneerson movement make more Jews open to embracing Yeshua? Will it make them more determined to exclude Messiah impostors? Will it lead to the termination of the Jewish status of Schneerson worshipers?

My guess is that they will refuse to confront the issue. I think it’s a can of worms they will run away from. That appears to be what’s happening now. I don’t think they’re ready to expel thousands of Jews. I think they want to hang onto all the religious Jews they can get. They worry about numbers. It’s a very big issue with them.

Is this a double standard? I don’t know enough to judge. It doesn’t look too good.

It’s very interesting how the policy of expelling Messianics has made Jesus seem like a huge problem. If Jews don’t expel them, then Messianics can be seen as annoying Jews who are still brothers. If Jews expel them, their conversions become reductions in the total number of Jews, and conversion, which would otherwise be a mere nuisance, becomes an existential threat. Suddenly, Jesus isn’t just a Messiah pretender. He’s a potential end to the existence of the Jewish people.

It looks like the rabbis have chosen the threat of annihilation over the possibility of tolerance.

If they don’t expel Schneerson worshipers, in the minds of reasonable people, the Messiah contest may come down to a competition to see who has the best candidate. That will be weird.

I guess it’s a good thing they don’t stone people any more. Walking in Mea Shearim would be like crossing an asteroid field.

It will be interesting to see if the Schneerson faction gains ground. I think it’s certain the Kaduri faction will be unpopular for the foreseeable future.

While I’m writing about God, I should mention a testimony I just got from my friend Mike. I had the honor of baptizing him last year.

I didn’t know he had serious arthritis in his neck. He couldn’t turn it normally without pain. Last week, he was in bed, and he started praying in tongues. He raised his hands, and he felt a sudden sensation in his neck. As soon as it passed, he was able to move his neck without pain. He said he has 90% of the motion he had before arthritis set in. He is completely freaked out. Overjoyed. Really nice.

I have my own testimony, as always. I believe it was last year that I wrote about a growth on my hand. It had a funny color to it, so immediately I thought of melanoma. I decided to take the Christian route. I did not go to a doctor. I prayed, and I cast things out and so forth. I spoke healing to myself.

I will not lie. I did a few other things after praying for permission. I put hot sauce on it, because hot sauce and other things like curcumin and green tea have made growths dry up in the past. For a brief time, I also applied a prescription drug that belonged to my dad. These things didn’t seem to help. I threw the drug out. On a lark, I also tried fenbendazole, which is an interesting deworming drug that people are using to fight cancer. I gave it up, too. Didn’t seem to do anything.

I don’t have worms. That’s for sure.

I forgot about the growth for several weeks. The one day I remembered it and checked. There wasn’t much going on.

Right now, it’s not easy to see where the growth used to be. There was a pronounced raised place, and it was getting bigger. Looks like it’s history.

One less thing to worry about, as Forrest Gump would probably say.

God always tells me, “None of the things you worry about will come to pass.”

I’ll take that.