Boosting acflory’s post The Swedish Experiment

[Video link]

DR. JON TOLLINGER BLOWS THE WHISTLE ON SWEDEN’S PLAN FOR COVID-19 ELDERLY PATIENTS

I don’t do this often, but this one seems very important to me.

I have been skeptical of the ‘Swedish Experiment,’ the official Swedish response to the covid-19 pandemic, because anyone who know about epidemiology and vaccines knows that ‘herd immunity’ requires a huge majority of the population to be immune (est. 80-90%).

Then herd immunity makes it unlikely (not impossible) for people to catch the virus from each other, because there are fewer people carrying the virus around.

From the beginning, they said they were relying on people distancing, wearing masks, and behaving like civilized adults, and that this would allow them to not have to shut down the economy.

My friend acflory, on her blog post on Meeka’s Mind, quotes from Dr. Tollinger’s Youtube video above:

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The Swedish Experiment

By acflory

I almost missed this interview in which Dr John Campbell talks to Swedish whistleblower, Dr Jon Tallinger. I was shocked. Then I went to Dr Tallinger’s Youtube channel and watched him tell the world the truth about the so-called Swedish experiment. In brief, it boils down to this:

• Sweden didn’t expect Covid-19 to hit and hit hard,
• the Swedish government did not have a plan for dealing with Covid-19,
• once the virus hit, the plan became to ‘let it rip’ with minimal interference,
• All the way from the top to local councils, the directive was to not treat Covid patients over 80, or the over-60’s if they had co-morbidities,
• People from this vulnerable population were not to be sent to hospital if they presented with Covid-19 or Covid-19 like symptoms,
• Instead, care homes and GPs were to administer palliative care only,
• This palliative care included morphine to make the patients comfortable, but also to make them appear as if they were not suffering when family came to visit,
• Morphine is contraindicated for people with respiratory diseases because it depresses their breathing. In other words, it speeds up the moment of death.
• The people in this vulnerable population were not even to receive oxygen to help them breathe. Top health officials lied about this directive saying that administering oxygen outside of a hospital setting was too ‘dangerous’.
• This is a lie with just enough truth in it to make it plausible to the public. A small number of people with certain kinds of respiratory problems shouldn’t be given oxygen, but almost all Covid-19 sufferers should. Remember Boris Johnson of the UK? When he was hospitalised with Covid-19, the press made a big point about how he needed oxygen but wasn’t sick enough to need a ventilator.
• There has been a cover up at all levels of government, and the reason could be that health care for these unproductive members of the Swedish population is just too…expensive.

These damning accusations don’t begin until minute 8:30 because Dr Tallinger clearly fears he won’t be believed and because…this is his own country doing what amounts to involuntary euthanasia.

See the rest at Meeka’s Mind.

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Palliative care that speeds death with morphine instead of supporting life with oxygen

is not palliative care, especially when, as above, it makes the patients docile and hides their desperate air hunger from the only people who protect them, their relatives who visit.

It is well known that the most important thing to a person in a care facility is relatives who visit to make sure the person is actually being cared for.

So this is a deliberate attempt to hide the true state of the person in care from the relatives who visit – and it is not going to be any better when those relatives aren’t even allowed to visit.

Oxygen would keep them alive – consuming resources; morphine will get rid of them.

Don’t listen to me – listen to Dr. Tolliver

who is appalled at what is going on.

Listen to The New York Times: Sweden has become the world’s cautionary tale. (This article came out today, after I had started writing this post about acflory’s post.):

Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.

This is why I won’t go out

I am in that cohort (which has been moved down to the age of 60). When US hospitals are full of patients who need support, they have plans – to deny coverage to people based on age, on perceived value, on assumed quality of life.

I resent the thought that they think some young person who went out partying and voluntarily exposed himself to the virus and caught it is somehow more important than me, who am being very careful (yes, I know – because I can). Those who put themselves into groups of unmasked other people and drink to oblivion.

Our local hospital’s covid beds are full now.

Enjoy your beer.

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Thanks to acflory for permission to copy her summary, which is concise and coherent, and terrifying.

Dr. Tollinger has asked people to boost his message; I’m assuming the links to his video are okay with him. He also has a Facebook page.

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PLEASE BE CAREFUL: THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN OR THAT OF SOMEONE VERY DEAR TO YOU.

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Fiction: the SECOND-BEST path to empathy

DIRECT EXPERIENCE – BEST PATH TO EMPATHY?

‘En carne propia‘ – ‘in your own flesh’ – is always the best way, subject to the limitation that reflection is necessary to develop empathy, and a certain amount of facility with the concept of sharing something emotional with another human being, which is not necessarily evident in all cases of shared experience.

Having cancer does not confer automatic empathy with other victims of the disease.

And direct experience also has the flaw of actually being divisive if the two people with the same experience have reacted very differently, and they put that down to some inherent quality in themselves. This results in the ‘I got cancer, and I did X, and now I’m far better than those lazy sods who won’t make the effort to do X…’ phenomenon.

Because direct experience doesn’t include another person.

You’d think it would make people empathetic, or at least sympathetic toward the others in similar circumstances, but no.

Fiction is a largely underused way to deliberately develop empathy

The fiction-based trick is that you can be pulled into experiencing what another person – a character in a book – experiences, IF there is enough information in the writing.

On August 22, 2017, I had a guest post on Big Al’s Books and Pals, and I posted the link to that article here. The title Al chose out of the ones I supplied as suggestions was ‘Want to be someone else? Read fiction.’ Which is true, but didn’t mention empathy. My bad – I should have chosen my own title.

I had a couple of interesting conversations there with readers of the blog who commented, and that was the extent of the feedback.

I’m reproducing the whole post here:

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Fiction is uniquely positioned to develop and increase empathy, because it provides a way around and under and through the barriers most people put up around their hearts and minds.

Humans think in stories. Why? Because we spend our lives learning the rules that ensure our survival.

Our brains are wired to learn in two ways: first, by direct personal experience – a hard way to learn some rules. Our feelings then cement the lessons, make them unforgettable.

And second, by empathy – acquiring knowledge through the experience of others.

For this, reading fiction is the best way to learn. The rub is the experience has to feel real for it to serve that purpose, exactly as if it happened to us. And the way we do that is through our emotions, which are engaged when the experience is ours.

Fiction is better than facts: facts have no emotional component to make them stick. We store them away, hope to remember them when we need them. Going on a hike across the desert? Bring water. Check.

Fiction is better than non-fiction: reports of the experience, say, of crossing the Antarctic in the middle of winter, are both entertaining and raise in us sympathy for the sufferings of the explorers. Poor guys!

And reading fiction is much better than video input for one simple reason: we can’t pretend video is happening to us when it is so clearly happening to someone else. Sympathy, not empathy.

And that’s the key: reading fiction is the best way we have to feel the emotions created by experiencing something as directly as possible without it happening to us. Because, as we read, we have to put in the effort to create, out of black marks on a page, the actual experience in our minds.

Listening to stories works almost as well, but requires a storyteller, and the emotional component is affected by that teller.

Reading is just you and the book.

Oh, and the author.

Most fiction invokes the sympathetic response in the reader – the entertainment value hooks the reader, and we’re off on an adventure. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, because we need entertainment to relax after our own lives, however crazy or calm. Lots of entertainment.

But the best fiction aims deeper: to ‘grab the jugular.’ To ‘feel like a punch in the gut.’ Or the dreaded, to make you think. Which is really to make you experience, to fully engage your empathy, to make you feel as if it happened to you. To teach you. To change you.

Here is where another of the rules of life comes into play: humans hate being preached to. The preaching is an overt attempt to change the reader or the listener, via logic backed up with emotion. Usually negative emotion, fear: you are bad, you will go to hell, you must change! You are bad, you will destroy the Earth, you must change! If you touch the stove, you will get burned, don’t!

So the author without the moral authority of the preacher or the physical authority of the dictator has to be sneaky. Covert. Tease and wheedle rather than command. Better still: make you complicit in your own change. Make you want to change.

And how does the author do that? By pulling you in with superior entertainment value (remember, we need lots of stories) up front, and by layering the experience which creates the empathy for the new experience under that. Great stories, story moral picked up by the reader from being the character, having the story happen directly to him.

We then come full circle to Show, Don’t Tell. Show the character having the divorce or being attacked by terrorists or marrying the prince. If you have your parameters right, if you’re telling the story the right way, the reader has identified with the character, and the reader is getting divorced. The reader has to escape the terrorists to save the President. The reader walking down the aisle just realized the rest of her life is proscribed by royal protocol.

The author’s power is very real.

Authors don’t always use this power to its fullest, because there is a final step: choosing the purpose of the empathy, choosing the change for a higher aim: the good of humanity.

Sounds horribly preachy, doesn’t it?

What prompted this post is that I don’t like a recent way this power is being used, to push an agenda which makes me sick to my stomach: the proposal, supported by carefully crafted stories, that people who are defective/handicapped/ill should remove themselves from the world because they are a burden to other people, and that this frees the other people to go on to something better.

Disabled people already face an uphill battle in many areas of their lives. Having society go back to an earlier model of disability which says that ‘they’ are a burden to other people, and therefore don’t have the right to the same hopes and aspirations as the ‘normals,’ is a huge step backward. To encourage them to consider removing themselves is a further abuse against their rights to live and to love.

As an author of fiction, I have the following tools:
I know how to create sympathy and empathy.
I know how to appeal to men and women.
I know how to entertain.
I know how to bury something deep in the fabric of a story.
I know how to make you identify with a character.
I know how to create situations that test the limits of character and privilege.
I know how to manipulate your emotions.
And I know that ‘disability porn’ – using disabled people to be ‘inspirational’ – is roundly despised by disabled people everywhere.

By picking the right story to tell, I believe I can make you buy my premise that disability is not the end of life as you know it.

Now that I’ve revealed many of my secrets, you still have to decide whether you’re going to let me try. And then decide if I know what the heck I’m talking about.

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Why repost my own post?

Because I don’t think readers of the original blog, which sends out daily emails with reviews of indie books, are used to posts that are not a review, and I’m hoping the ideas will resonate with readers of this blog.

 

Boosting the signal: SSA, lawyers, disabled constituents

GOOD READING FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND

And, IF that IS what has happened, ripping off disabled clients (allegedly – must maintain proper form here) is the lowest of the low.

The case of the SSA, the disability lawyer who is under investigation, and the 900 families affected by having their benefits summarily canceled (and then temporarily restored) as a result, is ongoing.

There are better places than here to read about it, but here are the latest links to The Disabled Cyclist’s blog, and he has the rest of the links:

https://thdcblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/ssa-fiasco-6-27-15/

https://thdcblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/ssa-fiasco-6-29-15/

https://thdcblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/ssa-fiasco-update-6-30-15/

https://thdcblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/ssa-fiasco-update-6-30-15/

https://thdcblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/ssa-fiasco-7-2-15-2/

Please note I have nothing against lawyers – one of my best friends is a lawyer!

The point is that bad lawyers give ALL lawyers a bad name.

Happy Fourth of July, all!

What would I do if I got well? Guest post by Gay Lyon

GAY LYON – ANSWERING A CFS SURVEY HAS A COST

This week I once again answered one of those surveys asking “What would you do if tomorrow you were well?” I did it because I know it helps put a human face on this disease. In a positive way, it shows policy-makers that we’re just ordinary people, and it lets them know that ME/CFS prevents us from doing things that healthy people take for granted. It’s designed to tug at their heartstrings, much the way the poster child did for polio.

But I find that answering that question takes a toll on me. It leaves me sad.

In the years I’ve been sick, I’ve learned not to dwell too much on the past, or to think too much about the future. I find it easier to maintain a positive outlook when I take each day as it arrives.

To ask “What would you do if tomorrow you were well?” is really rather cruel. It asks us to revisit the life we imagined we’d have, the life that this disease prevents. It reminds us of the dreams and plans we had, which we’ve had to abandon.

I feel the same deep sadness sometimes when I get a chance to visit my former life for a time. If I’m having a good day and manage to do something I used to enjoy, I find that the pleasure I have in doing it is mixed with sadness. Even something like watching travel programs or cooking shows or home improvement shows, which I used to enjoy, aren’t really enjoyable when I know I can’t actually do those things. Or visiting with an old friend, remembering the things we used to do together and the things we planned, which they now do without me.

I’m generally a cheerful person. And I work at staying that way. I find things to enjoy in my life as it is, here and now, even if they’re small things, like the way the light shines through the leaves, or how my cat bosses me around. I like to think that what my life lacks in breadth, I make up for by noticing details that give it depth.

But every time I’m asked to think about “What if…”, what if things were different, what if I were well, it makes me focus on what’s lacking, instead of what I have. And it leaves me sad for a few days, until I can forget about those dreams and expectations I had, and get back to cultivating gratitude for all that I have.

I’ll probably continue to answer the question when I think it will do some good. But I wonder if the people asking the question know the cost of answer it.

Or maybe it’s just me.

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Thanks, Gay. I don’t think it’s just you.