Silver Lining: Corona Communism Helps You Lose Weight

An often overlooked detail about communism is how much more slender the people are.

The Cuban government to this day offers their people a weight loss plan.

It’s a mandatory plan that comes from preventing a functioning marketplace from working. The weight loss plan got more restrictive for a few years after the Soviet Union crumbled and stopped propping up Cuba. People went hungry. It got worse again after even petroleum-rich benefactor Venezuela fell apart at the hands of leaders with communist ideas.

Venezuela too has a weight loss plan that has resulted from the once prosperous country’s own experiment with communism. Venezuelans lost 19 lbs in 2016.

Then there is the horrific Holodomor, in which proud farmers in the USSR said they wouldn’t be subjected to the silly communist ideas from the flakey ne’er-do-wells  who led the putsch a decade earlier. Entire villages were declared excluded from the economy of the USSR and possession of a single grain of wheat could be punishable by death. Far worse than Cuba or Venezuela, those Ukrainian farmers living under communism grew so slender that they just disappeared into the ground. How many millions of men, women, and children died in the Holodomor is a subject for debate by historians. This took place in the breadbasket of Europe.

The perennially chubby Mao called his Chinese diet plan “The Great Leap Forward.” Again, exactly how many tens-of-millions died because of the forceful destruction of functioning markets and the politicization of food under Mao’s communist ideas is a matter for the historians. The number was too high.

Looking to pay homage to his neighbor’s efforts to encourage weight loss, Pol Pot called his diet plan “The Super Great Leap Forward.” Years of sheer human misery followed for millions of Cambodians. . Echoing Stalin, who would kill for a grain of wheat, or Mao, who would kill for a potato, Pol Pot’s government of Democratic Kampuchea stated “Hands off the people’s property! Not a single grain of rice, a single chilli, a single needle!”

Leaving individuals to their own devices allows the world to work pretty darn well. Central planners tend to poison virtually anything that they touch. The more powerful the central planner, the more toxic their touch. The more vital the industry they touch, the more toxic their touch. This lesson has been taught repeatedly throughout history and often requires use of arms by the more down-to-earth common folk for the intelligentsia and central planners to knock it off.

Somehow, America, the nation of immigrants, has not taken the time to learn the horrors that their ancestors escaped from. These horrors took place at the hands of central planners, and Americans have increasingly turned their country over to central planners.

Not only is the centrally planned health system unequipped to handle shock when we most need it to – further, predictable evidence that central planners should not be trusted with a health system – but now the central planners are being given control over virtually the entire economy in de facto martial law declarations now affecting many of the states.

America has received a 30-day free trial of communism. Recent announcements indicate it is being extended to a 60-day free trial.

So far I’m hearing rave reviews from some of the people I encounter throughout my day

“Thank goodness we’re safe,”

“I exercise a lot more,”

“I get to spend more time with my family,” and

“Look at the silver lining: at least it’s a chance to lose weight.” These are just some of the comments I’ve heard in the last 19 days of the shelter-in-place order. The silver lining is not an indication of how humans want to act, it’s a behavior under the most artificial and restrictive circumstances.

People do not want to lose weight. Their behavior when left to themselves indicates what they want to do. Homespun wisdom taught that to many of us in the phrase “You don’t judge a person based on what they say, you judge a person based on what they do.” Needing a near total shutdown of an economy to find the time and opportunity to exercise and lose weight is a certain indication that one cares very little about weight loss.

Forgive what may appear as pessimism but there is no silver lining to consider.

In fact, you’d have to be a real a-hole at 10 a.m. on 9/11/2001 to say “look at the silver lining.”

The only reason those people aren’t self-aware of their a-hole status is that they don’t seem to see that it is only 10 a.m. on a “day” that will turn out to be a lot worse for America than that horrible 9/11 was.

There is no silver lining apparent to me in the tremendous human misery that has been brought to this world in the name of communism.

The effect of corona communism will be more death, more economic damage, more loss of life than 9/11.

And some may call it pessimism because I’m not looking for the sick, complacent silver lining of the problem at hand, a problem that is said to be “out of our control.”

If we don’t take it into our control, they’ll keep extending our free trial of communism.

Look. It say so right here.

The March 16, 2020 Neil Ferguson, Imperial College paper is cited by leaders globally as support for why the extreme lockdowns are good (which Ferguson doesn’t really say). What Ferguson et al., does say is that the 18-month quarantines that he proposes must be welcomed by the quarantined population for them to last.

After proposing several paths, the paper concludes with: “We emphasise that it is not at all certain that suppression will succeed long term; no public health intervention with such disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time. How populations and societies will respond remains unclear.”

You heard it there from the most beloved expert of the moment: No one knows how people will respond, nothing like this has been tried, no one knows how long people will put up with it for.

It’s practically an invitation to revolt against the awful idea.

Do everything in your life to poo poo this idea.

•Get your church opened, especially on Easter as Becky Akers says – April 12, 2020. If your cowardly pastor can’t be bothered to let ten people sit social distanced from each other for an Easter Sunday service behind closed and locked doors fearful of the authorities like the early Christians did, the man’s a coward. Your suggestion and insistence might help him be a little more courageous.

•Practice civil disobedience. If you need some inspiration, American tax protestor Henry David Thoreau outlined the path of the American rebel so thoughtfully in his essay “Resistance to Civil Government.”

•Go outside as much as you can, especially where there is a shelter-in-place order. If you think someone might bug you – carry an apple with you in a shopping bag – to prove that you have made an essential trip to the store. That is the civil disobedience Italians have started engaging in.

•If you have something to say, get a bullhorn or a soap box and just start talking anywhere anyone will listen.

Many people disagree with what’s happening – government and the rest of us – but need some courage to do the right thing.

•Open your business. David Hathaway offers a reminder on what an “essential service” is, a category that many businesses fall into.

•Perhaps the most freeing civil disobedience is to psychologically refuse quarantine, government, and CNN as your only salvations and to take the attitude that you will reject their fear and take your own health and wellbeing into your own hands as Bill Sardi asks you to do.

•Turn on your camera and record what you see that doesn’t fit the narrative.

•Read widely. Find the narrative. Help others identify the narrative.

•Push the boundaries. Exceed the boundaries. Demand to live your life.

The intelligentsia, Neil Ferguson among them, has proposed an 18-month quarantine that is being rolled out to the public a few weeks at a time, as a temporary measure. You’re a damn fool if you think government will allow life to return to normal at the 18-month mark after they’ve dealt with the problem at hand.

This is 9/11 2.0 in front of us. The thousands who died on 9/11 and the billions in damage were nothing compared to the governmental response.

Since 9/11, millions have died as a result of the government response. There has been countless trillions of damage. Those people who died that day could have died for a purpose. They could have died in a relatively free society and taught us a lesson to live life bravely and to face death bravely just as many did on that day, to keep society even more free, and to get ourselves out of the affairs of others in all these backwaters. That could have been a lesson brought forth from an introspective examination of that day. They could have genuinely been martyrs for freedom.

That’s not what happened though. Many Americans didn’t let them become martyrs for freedom. Those deaths were made meaningless. Those deaths didn’t seem to cause a moment of hesitation to those who would destroy some of those freedoms that make the American way of life so unique. Those who died on 9/11 were conveniently used to further destroy America, and to wear away at those freedoms that have made America rather unique in the world. In their death they were turned into enemies of freedom, support for the authoritarian.

And today, we are faced with the prospect of countless more meaningless deaths. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The tiny number of men and women who die today over-and-above those who die on a regular day in America could just be part of what happens in a free society when people go through with their lives day-to-day. People die. Outbreaks occur. It doesn’t mean we should make that loss of life as impactful on the world as possible, and as harmful to as many people as possible. Death is part of life.

Some die in workplace accidents, some die in car accidents, some die from lifestyle diseases, some die innocently, some die from allergies, some die of heart attacks. That’s always been part of the American compact. You live your life the way you see fit and you deal with the consequences. We don’t follow it perfectly, but that’s mostly been the way the American compact works, and it’s mostly been supported by Americans.

Today is different. Today, the American compact is being abandoned in the name of illusory protection from a virus, protection that government can’t offer.

Presented with the options “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” American officials have suggested that a tiny fraction of lives can be prolonged by torching the American compact so that America looks a lot more like authoritarian China going forward. What an awful trade off.

That’s what these deaths are being used for. Those who died of Covid-19 are conveniently being used to make America look a lot more like China. To do away with the hard-earned recognition of the individual, and to do so in such a blinding, fear-filled, propaganda-fueled moment is such a waste of human achievement.

We’ve been offered our 30-day free trial of communism. The 60-day free trial has been announced. And the 18-month free trial is being planned. There’s little hope of turning back from this once we’ve followed much longer down this path.

That path is just wrongheaded. And needs those who know better to put an end to it. Or else, it will never end.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

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