Wednesday Post 1.5: Some extra reading
In which I try to justify and legitimise my time-wastage and net-surfage
How I make my procrastination time work for YOU!
I really need to finish my latest icon commission. In theory I’ll be going away for a weekend with friends at the seaside on Saturday and wanted to take it with me. So what I really need to be doing right now is not surfing - or as I used to call it when I was a journalist, “data-gathering” - but painting.
It’s just that I’ve been finding this new World of Hilarity project so diverting and useful! And the more people sign up and tell me they like it, the more I want to do it. So, I’m going to just do this quickie to try to get some of the itch out of my system. Then I swear I’ll sit down and paint. Really.
Given the positive responses to the Wednesday Post, “Without work we go mad,” I thought y’all might enjoy some further reading from other sources. Below I’ll toss up a few links and snippets from interesting and useful related reading from around about, stuff that won’t be making it into what we still, for some reason, call the “mainstream” news.
In other words, I surf the net so you don’t have to. I follow an increasing number of writers and thinkers - often people with serious credentials in science, medicine and policy - and very often they are also turning to alternative means of getting their ideas out there, after having been effectively cancelled and ostracised from the gate-kept mainstream outlets
So consider this something like a supplement to yesterday’s Main Post. Less me, and more other people you might find interesting. A lot of people have said they really appreciate my “perspective” and that it’s helped them keep their own wits about them and not freak out as much. I’ve found this a bit odd, because all I do is keep track of things and pay attention.
But it crosses my mind just now that blogging is actually a skill. I've always sort of thought of it as "fooling around and wasting time on the internet." But I think I've picked up a few things over the years - like sifting and comparing data points - that makes me good at it and that could be helpful to other people who haven’t spent the last 20 years watching the damned Asteroid.
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Some quick parenthetical housekeeping notes: what’s the plan for the site?
So, as far as it’s developed: I’ll post the Official Two Bi-Weekly Posts on Wednesdays and Saturdays. These will be the “Theme of the Week” - this week’s Theme of the Week is “Work”.
After I’ve monetised - when I’ve finished getting through the Italian banking procedures, which I hope will happen next week - I’ll make the Wednesday Post free for anyone forever. Not always, but very often, the Saturday Post will be a related piece, or a follow-up, expansion or even conclusion of the Wednesday Post.
As far as I can tell, the Substack site isn’t set up to allow individual posts to be set to pay-to-read; you either subscribe to the whole site and get all the subscriber-only material + the free material, or it’s free for everyone. But all posts will include a link to the PayPal button at the bottom for anyone who wants to throw a few shekels into the tip jar.
In between the Two Main Posts, and usually following the Theme of the Week, I’ll add supplemental bits and pieces as time and inclination allow. Most of the time these supplemental posts - which won’t be scheduled - will be subscriber-only.
Though the site allows you to make them subscriber-only, comments on all the free posts will always be open to everyone. I hate the bait-and-switch thing of letting people read a thing but not comment - what’s even the point of that? The whole point of all this is to generate a community, and you can’t do that by shutting people out of the discussion.
I’m also going to keep cross-posting from here and Ko-Fi, “Hilary White; Sacred Art.” because I just really want more people to follow the art and spirituality stuff. (Well, I think it’s interesting, anyway.)
Moreover, I’m open to ideas and suggestions on how to make this more community-oriented, more supportive and more fun for both honoured Free Folk and Citizens. Up to and including guest posts.
I’m jotting down notes for Saturday’s Official Post:
“Recovering productivity: games and tricks to play on your brain to overcome inertia, and therefore depression/ennui/paralysis.”
“Making things, as opposed to watching things: recovering agency.”
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First: for the girls…
Imagine having Alan Rickman come and read poetry to you every day…
Le Sigh…
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Now, something to listen to while you read…
Jordi Savall
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One of the ways you know they’ve been lying to us is when they say, “Due to Covid…”
Ah, no. The virus didn’t cause the economy to collapse and millions to be out of work and lose their businesses. The governments’ insane, dangerous, damaging, short-sighted and power-mad lockdowns did that. They need to stop acting like it was something unfortunate that “just happened.” It didn’t “just happen.” They DID it to us.
And more people are saying it:
Government Lockdowns, Not The Virus, Booted Millions Of Women From The Workforce
In an interview for “CBS Evening News” on Super Bowl Sunday, Joe Biden acknowledged the catastrophic loss of almost 3 million women from the labor force over the past year constitutes a “national emergency.” We have 10 million fewer jobs since last February, a dramatic spike in long-term unemployment, and nearly 40 percent who have been out of work for more than 6 months, and it is women who have borne the brunt of these losses.
In the past 12 months, American women’s unemployment rate has almost doubled, and the employment participation rate fell by 2 percentage points. For women aged between 25 and 54, around 2.6 million jobs have been lost.
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How to get a bigger perspective
A huge part of the problem we’ve been having is that governments, in a state of what seems to be blind panic, have been viewing the Covid situation exclusively in epidemiological terms and totally ignoring all other aspects of the situation, including the health-related risks of shutting down their countries. People who watch politics a lot will understand that the framing of the issue is often as important as the facts. Getting a perspective based on more than one kind of consideration is a huge part in understanding what’s actually happening more fully.
Economic Lockdowns Kill People–Yes Literally
It’s important to understand that the trade-off isn’t just the economy vs. lives. It’s also lives vs. lives.
A recent Bloomberg article discussed the opposing arguments in the debate over COVID-19 lockdowns. The article described the epidemiological way of thinking versus the economic way of thinking. In the simplest terms, epidemiologists think in terms of reducing the spread of disease, while economists think in terms of balancing trade-offs.
While expert epidemiologists are much needed during a pandemic, if we fail to think as economists, we may find ourselves with policies that cause more pain and deaths than necessary. It is also important to understand regarding the present crisis that economists do not only deal with trade-offs between lives and economy as the Bloomberg article asserts. But rather, we also deal with lives versus lives—both without lockdowns and with them. That is, COVID-19 causes deaths, but so do lockdowns, although it is somewhat more difficult to see them in the latter case.
These casualties will be more visible if we view the lockdowns through the lens of economics.
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How to do responsible data-gathering
Some of these posts, obviously, come with a caution; keep your mind open and take stuff in, but then sift it, compare it with other things, keep the thinking process going. Work hard to keep in the forefront of your brain that everything written really comes down to one person saying things. You have to check. Some of it is one-sided. Some of it will leave things out for rhetorical purposes. It’s your job as a responsible reader to discern clearly where the gaps might be and fill them in. Very often websites run by Some Guy will be biased, weird or even hysterical. But the links will take you to more useful stuff. Follow the links to reliable sources.
This is by way of a caveat that any article that starts with “the science is settled” is something to approach with a critical lens. But our task is the collection and examination of data; we should be bees buzzing all around collecting data like pollen. The axiom of a responsible journalist is the same for the reader: All true data is good data. The real task is figuring out how the pieces all go together.
The Science is Settled. Lockdowns are More Deadly Than the Virus and Masks Don’t Work.
A deadly combination of exponentially increased suicides, drug overdose, homicide, alcohol consumption, calorie consumption, delayed cancer screenings, spousal abuse, tuberculosis, and more is occurring. Researchers conclude this combination will outweigh deaths from COVID by multiples.
Data show very clearly that lockdowns have not only been completely ineffective, but they have been potentially as much as ten times more deadly than the coronavirus itself.
According to the UN there are 10,000 additional children dying a month during the lockdowns, and 550,000 additional children suffering malnutrition. There will also be 1.4 million additional people to die from untreated TB.
Almost 7,000 scientists, virologists, and infectious disease experts recently signed a declaration against lockdown measures, urging that citizens across the west should be able to get on with their lives as normal, and that lockdown rules in both the United States and the UK are causing “irreparable damage.”
Oxford University professor Dr. Sunetra Gupta was one of the authors of the open letter that was sent with the petition, along with Harvard University’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
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Are you sleeping weird? I know I am. Are we using the wee hours of the night to steal back some agency and freedom? Apparently I’m not the only one who has gone to war with my circadian rhythm, and this might be a way of understanding that better. Someone has actually named it:
What is revenge bedtime procrastination?
Our brains are trying to score some extra "me" time, whether it's good for us or not. No, it's not just you.
The daily realities of life in a pandemic continue to be challenging at the best of times, whether monotonous, chaotic, demanding, and in many cases traumatic, life-threatening, or otherwise awful. It’s no wonder that people are looking to their late-night hours to reclaim some of the lost calm and control.
The first documented use of the phrase can be traced to a blog post from November 2018 by a man living in the Chinese province of Guangdong. In the post, he writes that he “belongs to someone else” during the workday and can only “find himself” and exert power over his life when he gets home. He wrote that the revenge bedtime procrastination was sad because it impacted his health, but it was also “great” because he could have a bit of freedom.
Read the rest.
OK, that’s it. Probably talk to you tomorrow. Try not to worry too much.
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Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom. For the time being, until I can wade through the Italian banking system, those who want to support me can make a direct PayPal donation here. (If you’re already a subscriber at Hilary White: Sacred Art, deffo consider yourself done. And thanks again.)
Thoroughly enjoyed this article. One nit: data is good (data are good)...