What They Don't Tell Us

No matter what happens, and no matter what the Press Poodles manage to dig up while it's happening, we never get to know everything we should know about any big event.

There's always a few details - usually a whole metric fuck ton of details - that we never get to see.

Once in a while, somebody cracks a little and we get The Pentagon Papers, but that's the exception instead of the rule. And given our commitment to "peaceful transition of power", we've evolved part of the system into a game of Stall 'Em.

Somebody shits the bed, and there's a bad reaction, and the people in power (some of them) get thrown out and new people come in, but the PR guys get to work and before ya know it, a few years have passed, and power has transitioned again, and deals are made and those details are lost until historians suss it out (sorta) and then we learn about some pretty fucking important stuff 30 years after it woulda made a real difference for us.

And here we are again.

WaPo:

U.S. deaths soared in early weeks of pandemic, far exceeding number attributed to covid-19

An analysis of federal data for the first time estimates excess deaths - the number beyond what would normally be expected - during that period

In the early weeks of the coronavirus epidemic, the United States recorded an estimated 15,400 excess deaths, nearly two times as many as were publicly attributed to covid-19 at the time, according to an analysis of federal data conducted for The Washington Post by a research team led by the Yale School of Public Health.

The excess deaths — the number beyond what would normally be expected for that time of year — occurred during March and through April 4, a time when 8,128 coronavirus deaths were reported.

The excess deaths are not necessarily attributable directly to covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. They could include people who died because of the epidemic but not from the disease, such as those who were afraid to seek medical treatment for unrelated illnesses, as well as some number of deaths that are part of the ordinary variation in the death rate. The count is also affected by increases or decreases in other categories of deaths, such as suicides, homicides and motor vehicle accidents.

Is there terminology that's any creepier than "Excess Deaths"?

Anyway - yes, dammit, we have a right to know stuff. Most stuff. Certain stuff. Stuff that wouldn't get the good guys killed if it we knew about it - assuming of course the good guys are who we're told they are, and we're not just being sold another Vaporware upgrade, and only because I believe the guys in charge as long as they're my brand of guys and as long as I'm relatively sure they aren't just fuckin' with me, pretending to be my guys when they really aren't.

So that's clear, right?

Anyway also too, one of the really big things about our slide into this Daddy State authoritarian ocean of shit is the degradation of our official-government-supposed-to-be nonpartisan data gathering and reporting.

The Daddy State must control the flow of information if it's to have any chance of dictating reality to us.

That's why they insist on not properly funding the research at various entities to keep us informed on the public health aspects of guns and pollution and the other profit-over-people activities of this bullshit version of Capitalism that they're always pimping.