Author: Ray

This is for all those who don’t believe that science has become totally politicized and therefore totally corrupt — climate science perhaps most especially — who have hounded and harassed me and others like me a long time now for pointing out that the peer-review process has long become a farce and the scientific method, once an epistemic gold-standard for all human thought, has been thrown out the window and replaced with postmodernism’s logical elaboration. I offer you this latest proof of corruption.

The indefatigable doctor James M Todaro, about whom I’ve written before, has doggedly pursued this corruption through the entire Covid-19 panic, and it is largely through his efforts that this scandal has been exposed. Quoting from an article he just published:

Misinformation is bad. Misinformation in medicine is worse. Misinformation from a prestigious medical journal is the worst. Herein is a detailed look at the controversial Lancet study that resulted in the World Health Organization ending worldwide clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine in order to focus on patented therapeutics.

In brief, the Lancet study is a multinational registry analysis assessing the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without macrolide therapy (e.g. azithromycin) in treatment of COVID-19 in hospitalized patients. The study was very large (perhaps impossibly so, but we will address that later) and included 96,032 patients, of which 14,888 were in treatment groups. The study found that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine with or without macrolide therapy resulted in significantly increased risk of both in-hospital mortality and de-novo ventricular arrhythmia during hospitalization. In summary, the authors concluded that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are actually harmful and increase risk of death when used for in-hospital treatment of COVID-19.

The Lancet study was released on Friday, May 22. After deliberating over a weekend, on Monday, May 25, the World Health Organization hastily announced the cessation of all COVID-19 clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine in 17 different countries. Instead of performing its own due diligence, the WHO immediately relied on an observational study cloaked in the reputation of the nearly 200-year old medical journal The Lancet.

After its publication, a grass-roots investigation by hundreds of physicians and researchers worldwide revealed irreconcilable inconsistencies in the data that The Lancet’s peer-review process overlooked. The study is now found to have inconsistencies with data from national registries of hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The authors continue to hide data sources in a black box controlled by an unknown corporation called Surgisphere.

(I urge you to read the full article here.)

Also, did you know that in the United States about 250,000 people die every month, many of those naturally occurring?

As more and more places open up around the globe, Covid-19 cases continue to fall. Team Apocalypse will not, however, let it go so easily.

Dr. Wooten has, in short, endorsed models utterly inaccurate. Accordingly, her assertions are a statistical impossibility with what we currently know about the disease — especially given that they’re aren’t enough people in San Diego for her projections.

In the way of all elitists who believe they are better suited than we ourselves are to determine how best to live our lives, you can now expect plenty more of their ridiculous pyrrhic celebrations. There will also be more vain cheering in the halls of power, and no apology whatsoever for the unspeakable destruction they unleashed and then cheered on. “I’m the government,” you will be told, “and I helped.”

In other elitist news, corrupt Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine announced along with the governor that they won’t allow (please note that word) Pennsylvania to reopen, nor will they allow people to gather — and then the governor, who said businesses which “disobey are cowards,” proceeded to march in protest. They actually have the nerve to attempt legitimizing limitless protests in the street while simultaneously standing by the draconian, non-evidence-based restrictions:

This, for example, is not an illegal protest against governmental force and the unconstitutional wiping-out of millions upon millions upon millions of livelihoods overnight, but rather a legal protest against excessive force.

In answer to your next question, no: they were not all wearing masks, nor practicing “safe social-distancing,” but it was legal, nonetheless. Why? Because government bureaucrats said so, and individuals, as you know, do not exist by right but only by permission.

For his independence of thought and his factual, statistical analysis, Leonydus Johnson, with whom I don’t always agree but whom I admire a great deal, has gotten a lot of heat and hatred from the cult-of-liberal-conformity:

Sources:

2017 FBI UCR

2018 FBI UCR

2017 Police Shootings

2018 Police Shootings

Injustice should always be pitilessly condemned and brought to light — injustice of all and every kind, no matter the backlash from whatever tribe, clique, or cult — and the following is a good article:

Neither is racism or slavery, throughout all of human history, confined to any one country — and yet the countries who still, in the 21 century practice slavery, get a pass.

Why?

And why is the only true and universal principle rejected — by both the left and right?

The following is a tiny glimpse of mob mentality at its most nihilistic: the mentality of the cult. This is what happens when the rational faculty is not recognized as the defining characteristic of all individual human beings.

This is what happens when non-essential characteristics of individual human beings — regardless of their race, sex, sexual-orientation, color, class, creed, gender, brawn, beauty, or any thing else — are held to have primacy over the human brain.

These individual human beings were killed yesterday or the day before:

This man (who happens to be black) was lynched for protecting his store from looters:

This woman, who happens to be black and a business-owner, had her place of business destroyed by Black Lives Matter drones. She has something to say.

As I noted six months ago:

Racism does not only “work against people who are already oppressed” — as one writer recently described it — and oppression is not the defining characteristic of racism.

Racism, the most barbaric form of tribalism, is the belief that each human intellect and each individual’s moral worth and character are determined by genetic lineage and biochemistry.

Tribalism, collectivism, the cultic — whatever you wish to term it — is the subordination of the individual to the tribe or group. On a smaller scale, it is the subjugation of the individual to the cult, clique, community, gang, et cetera, with which one associates.

Tribalism in any of its variations and manifestations is the antithesis of individuality.

No matter its specific form and no matter the levels of equivocation or rationalization involved, all doctrines of racism hold to the conviction that, in some significant measure, humans are to be evaluated not on the basis of their actions which stem from their reasoning brains — an act of choice — but by the unchosen biochemistry of one’s ancestry and pedigree.

Racism is in this way another form of determinism: humans are determined not by their brains which shape their actions but by their blood, over which humans have no ultimate choice or control.

As such, racism purports that the thoughts and ideas which make up each individual mind are not chosen but merely inherited, and all values and character-traits are thus determined by biochemical-physical factors beyond any individual’s control.

Racism seeks to nullify that human attribute which is our defining characteristic: the faculty of reason and choice — which is to say, the rational faculty.

In the latest (quasi) arguments and iterations, you’ll often hear that there is no such thing as reverse racism because “only privileged white people can be racist.”

This is disastrously, dangerously wrongheaded.

It seeks to correct injustice with more injustice.

This will not work. It cannot work. It is a mathematical certainty that it cannot work. It will, in the end, breed — as indeed it has bred — more and ever more racism and racial conflict.

That is the only possible outcome of such a philosophy.

It’s also why today, leaders of the free world can say explicitly racist things — “My grandmother was a typical white person” (Barack Obama, 2008) — and most won’t even recognize it as racism.

Something else you should know — something closely related with the subject of reverse racism as it’s now come to be understood:

Except for the very poorest people in the world, everyone is “privileged.” That’s what this non-word — “privilege” — has come to mean.

It is an attempt to negate human health, wealth, and well-being.

If, therefore, you’ve bought into academia and its jargon, this is what you’ve bought into: nobody, not even the poor, deserves the fruits of her ideas nor the wealth, however small or large, earned through her effort and work. It is all a “privilege” — and do you know why?

Answer: because there are people in the world who do not have the “privileges” you have.

You will never, of course, hear any mention whatsoever about government privilege — in much the same way that you will never hear categorical condemnation of the government regimes, so often marxist, that keep the poorest of the world in their continual state of grinding poverty.

Nor will you ever hear discussion of where real wealth derives, which is the essence of the entire subject of so-called privilege.

The absolute fact of the matter is this: any individual — no matter that individual’s race or skin color — can be racist.

Every human, no matter the genetic lineage, can act in a racist manner.

I’ve known Native American racists. I’ve known Mexican racists. I’ve known Asian racists. I’ve known black racists. I’ve known Jewish racists. I’ve known Middle-Eastern racists. I’ve known Scandinavian racists. I’ve know white-trash racists. I’ve known mixed-breed racists. Et alia.

Racism is a very specific thing, and even in spite of all the torturous equivocations and the postmodern vocabulary twisting — that specific thing is basic and simple to understand:

Racism is the belief that human virtue is determined not by choice but by race. Racism is the view that human character is determined by genetic bloodline.

But neither character nor virtue are in actuality so determined: virtue and character, rather, are chosen. By definition, they are chosen. Anything outside the realm of choice is outside the realm of virtue: neither virtuous or non-virtuous, neither moral nor immoral but amoral — as animals precisely for this reason or amoral.

Racism is as commonplace as it is cliche. It is as banal as it is dangerously stupid — and stupidly boorish — and, as you know, there is no sin except stupidity.

To claim that only “institutionalized white people” can be racist is foolish and embarrassing. It is to commit an error of staggering yet elementary proportions. It is also to perpetuate more racism. Indeed, it is a kind of racism.

Which is precisely why and the way in which racism is being perpetrated today, and will continue to be perpetrated — largely by academic-and-political elites — until the entire deadly doctrine of determinism is extirpated once and for all.

In the realm of human virtue — which is to say, human action — only that which is chosen is relevant. In this realm — the moral realm — race is meaningless because race is unchosen.

The human faculty of volition — of mind and morality — exists in all human-beings, regardless of skin color or race or, for that matter, sex or gender. And no matter how furiously people wish this weren’t so — and no matter how many wish it weren’t so — this human faculty is not nor ever will be replaced by biochemical predestination.

To try to do so will only sow greater strife and disrupt the natural goodwill and the sisterhood and brotherhood which exists among human-beings, no matter their race or biochemical pedigree.

Because the individual human mind with the choice to think is the root of all things good and and beautiful and true.

It’s not merely for money that healthy humans work.

Before free-exchange which created specialization which created the division of labor, the vast majority of human exertion was directed toward one thing only, and that was the production of food.

For most of human history, people labored their entire lives, from sun-up to sundown, six or seven days a week, and they did it just to survive, and life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Free-exchange changed all of that.

Free-exchange created specialization which created the division of labor, which unleashed human ingenuity and human productivity.

Consider what your shoes and your clothes would look like now if you had to find the time to make and stitch and skin and tan and sew all the material yourself — in between the never-ending labor of producing your food.

Consider what our transportation would look like if it was up to each to come up with our own means of it — whether horse, camel, boat, wheel, or airplane.

Consider how much would be required for each to produce the fuel alone for an automobile or airplane.

Or our medicine, including care for broken bones, strep throat, appendix bursting, gallbladders, abscessing teeth, birth control.

Now consider how we have all this and so much more at our very fingertips. The reason for this is so basic that most people don’t fully see it: free-exchange and the division of labor.

Because of free-exchange, we can trade with others who have things that we ourselves want and cannot do or do not want to do — be it all manner of food production, shelter, clothing, medicine, transportation, light, entertainment, and much much more.

This process is the essence of economic growth.

Because of specialization, more and more people are doing what they want to do, and not what they must do for bare subsistence.

Because of specialization, our work has now increasingly become an expression of what we love and become good at — an expression and an emphasis of it — and this is one reason that work has become such a fundamental component to human happiness: it expresses our efficacy as we keep doing it — practicing it, in essence — becoming better and better. Work gives direction and expression to the movements of our bodies as dictated by our brains.

Work — all work — is our person and personality concretized in human action and human motion.

Work gives physical form-and-shape to our psychological-epistemological existence.

In fostering and developing a sense of self-efficacy and productiveness, work also, as a corollary — a necessary by-product — develops a sense of self-worth.

This life-affirming truth about work is one of the countless things which power-lusting politicians, in their reckless, impulsive, uninformed responses to Covid-19 and their push to establish dependency among voters, have completely missed:

Successfully panicking the majority over a virus that makes sick only a small portion of the population and kills even less, the same voter-obsessed politicians expressed their panic by means of the only method at their disposal: force. The forced shutdown of economic activity.

If you remember nothing else, I ask you to remember this: Government is by definition an agency of force.

Thus, terrified by something beyond their powers of comprehension, government agents substituted their myopic, minuscule knowledge for that of an incomprehensibly vast marketplace — putting millions and millions and millions of human beings instantaneously out of work thereby and exploding millions and millions and millions of businesses into which people had invested their entire lives.

Reader, if Covid-19 has blinded you to the sheer monstrosity and injustice that this is, you are beyond beyond, and I mean that as much as I’ve ever meant anything in my life.

Having enacted overnight an economic collapse that wiped out the livelihoods of tens of millions of human beings, these same politicians then proceeded doubling down and then tripling down in their reckless panic: acting still in blind-panic and uncertainty, extracting trillions of dollars from the private economy, and accordingly they began throwing money indiscriminately at this problem largely of their own devising. Let us also note and let us never forget: they were only able to do this (albeit temporarily) thanks to the economic growth that has nothing to do with politicians and absolutely everything to do with people becoming passionate about their work.

No matter what your political convictions — no matter how far to the left or no matter how far to the right, no matter the political-moral ideologies you’ve grown up among or learned in school or anything else, no matter what you’ve come to believe and accept, whether implicitly or explicitly — I ask you to grasp that last thing, and this is why I reiterate it and will continue to reiterate it. Because it is the truth:

The only reason any government can spend any money on any problem in any realm of human activity is this: the economic growth created and produced not by politicians and their bureaus but by people who care about their work.

I ask you in all sincerity to pause for a moment and consider that.

Human ability is rooted in the human brain, and what we ultimately become grows out of this root, and nothing more fundamental than work is required for the life we want for ourselves. No matter what moral code anyone tries to force upon you, whether secular or non-secular, the true measure of value is found in our work: in our effort and passion for learning and striving and becoming better.

The truth is that only a small minority of the world’s population understands firsthand how jobs are created, how income is generated, how payrolls are met. The majority of the world’s population thinks wages and wealth appear more or less magically. If businesses are shutdown for our own good, therefore, surely those business-owners will simply wave their magic wand to conjure their magic wealth in order to start up those magical businesses all over again, when, at last, this panic has ended.

The fact that business-owners and entrepreneurs are being sacrificed in such an appalling manner now — because of a virus that overwhelmingly, irrefutably affects a specific demographic and age-group — is of no importance to elected politicians. Most people know, at least implicitly, that this is how politicians operate. The real crime and the most terrifying and dangerous thing of all is that most non-politicians (i.e. voters) also now do not care about this colossal destruction.

That is how thoroughly the terror-campaign which has grown alongside the real Covid-19 pandemic has infiltrated the world in less than two month’s time.

“It is only a government that can count on the support of the governed which can establish a lasting regime. Whoever wants to see the world governed according to his own ideas must therefore strive for domination over human minds. It is impossible, in the long run, to subject people against their will to a regime that they reject.”

Wrote Ludwig von Mises.

For this very reason, I say, we are not witnessing a usurping regime now imposing unpopular measures on a resistant but helpless citizenry. What we are witnessing is a version of mob-rule, the central characteristic of which is rule by the majority, without regard for the rights of dissenting minorities. The government may now, at this moment, be ruling by decree, but it is in most places doing so with the approval of the vox populi.

That is the most horrifying part.

And if it doesn’t horrify you, this is only because you’ve come to fully accept an ideology that is anti-individual-rights and pro-state.

Politicians have told us that a certain type of worker can’t be trusted, just as certain types of businesses can’t be trusted to remain open during a pandemic. Their message was that they’d lock us down for our own good — and yet try to pay us off by means of the economy they’d simultaneously shut down, while we were at the same time forced by governmental decree to remain idle.

How these out-of-touch elitists miss the entire fucking point:

Precisely because so many working-people love doing the work they do and have become good at it, these selfsame workers would have made all manner of changes to their daily routines so that they could continue to work.

How can I be so sure? Because free workers already had made all manner of adjustments in their working habits to avoid spreading a virus, so that they could do what makes them shine — what makes them happy — and they began doing it before mandatory lockdowns.

Chef Eric Ripert in his book 32 Yolks described the star-like “charisma that comes from those who are truly good at what they do.”

I think every politician and bureaucrat on the planet should read this book. It doesn’t matter at all that the overwhelming majority of them wouldn’t understand the truths expressed therein about the nature of work and the joy and passion and self-worth that humans beings derive from their work — the importance of competency and skill, how the meaning of life can be found precisely there, in purposeful action, the motions of the human body in concert with the human brain — it doesn’t matter at all, I say, because for one out of a thousand of these bureaucrats, it just might spark a light inside the mind. And that is enough: because for this one-in-a-thousand few, they might then begin to grasp why work is so much more than merely a way to pay the bills:

Work is the physical expression of our thoughts.

Work gives shape to our minds.

Work is the literal extension of our selves — our very person.

Work is the flesh to our spirit, the body to our brains.

?

continued …

As the graphics above indicate, there is no proof that lockdowns decreased transmission of the Covid-19 virus.

That is the first thing to note.

The notion that “lockdowns saved a million lives,” as Snopes recently put it, is not merely an unsubstantiated claim: it may well turn out to be the precise opposite of what the lockdowns actually did. And this, mind you, doesn’t even begin to take into account the horrific death counts caused by biblical-sized famines which these governmental-decreed lockdowns have the real potential of unleashing. Snopes does not mention that, for some reason.

I think it is impossible to take anyone seriously who ignores such unspeakable destruction.

There is, moreover, the work of people like Professor Isaac Ben-Israel — head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development — who published a detailed worldwide study comparing locked-down places with places that stayed open. As the Times of Israel puts it, and essentially confirming the truth of Farr’s Law:

Simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it (source).

The next thing to note is this:

Even if these outrageous lockdowns had decreased transmission, that decrease is temporary. This fact has gotten lost in all the fatuous zealotry. No epidemiologist or infectious-disease specialist I know of disputes this at all. The virus does not go anywhere. In addition to that, lockdowns prevent the development of population immunity in low-risk people — most significantly in elementary schools. As one commentator recently put it:

So let’s just grant that it is possible that lockdowns can be credited with slowing the spread of the virus, and perhaps preserving hospital capacity (which turned out to be unnecessary). Still, the virus doesn’t then get bored and move by to Wuhan or to another planet. It still sticks around, so at best, these measures only “prolong the pain,” in the words of Knut Wittkowski.

So even if lockdowns slow the spread in the short run, it’s not clear that they have saved lives from the coronavirus, even if it results in more death overall from deferred surgeries and diagnostics, suicides, drug overdoses, and depression.

Over the course of eight weeks (and counting), we have endured the loss of our independence, our liberty, our work, and the prosperity that comes naturally from these things. And we’ve done so all in the name of “virus mitigation,” or flattening the curve, as it’s already become so cliche to put it. The psychological toll of this has been indescribable:

We thought we had certain legally guaranteed, morally sanctioned rights — rights so basic and self-evident that even a hampered, compromised westernized government wouldn’t dare strip them away, precisely because these rights are so self-evidently basic — only to discover that in 48 hours time, in March of 2020, our rights were not regarded as morally inalienable nor were they guaranteed at all, and that, instead, in the eyes of government officials and government-lovers, we exist more by permission than by right.

This injustice was decreed so swiftly and with such undisguised authoritarianism that many among us simply could not fathom it — it seemed dream-like and surreal. Yet even more unfathomable still was how this unequivocal act of authoritarianism was cheered on by thousands and thousands of mainstream-media articles and broadcasts, which continue daily, up to the present moment, all actively calling for even greater authoritarianism: freedom must be indefinitely replaced by government-control because this particular strain of SARS is a fraction of a percent more lethal to a certain segment of the population (though far less lethal to other segments) than most other known strains.

This ideological belief has in turn created at record speeds a dogmatism so ferocious and fanatical that there is no real precedent for it: a lockstep adherence to brand new customs and creeds — such as “official social-distancing guidelines,” which are neither evidence-based nor confirmed by actual scientific method (as I discuss near the end of this post, with sources cited) — which, overnight, have transformed seemingly independent, thinking humans into indoctrinated housebound conformists who now worship militantly at the alter of government bureaus; who furthermore clamor for government to make us all increasingly dependent upon government handouts and bailouts and who demand more of our inalienable human rights be replaced by government-granted permissions, and this, I repeat, was all done because of the mere suggestion of a virus with an estimated lethality of less than .05 percent. For this, these citizens could not line up fast enough to sell away not just their human freedom, which would have been bad enough, but yours and mine as well.

Please read this:

The manner in which governments dealt with foundational principles of modernity has been shocking. They put half the country under house arrest and managed every movement in disregard for the Bill of Rights and all legal precedent, to say nothing of the Constitution. It felt like a coercive unraveling of civilization itself. It’s like we are all waking up from a bad dream only to look around and see the wreckage that proves it was all real….

The trouble here is that certain features of this experience stand out to contradict the idea that lockdowns are saving lives over the longer term. In New York, two thirds of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 were in fact sheltering in place during the lockdown, essentially living in forced isolation. The lockdown didn’t help them; it might have contributed to making matters worse.

Meanwhile, despite the media hate poured out against Florida’s youthful spring break revelers, where hundreds of thousands declined to socially distance at the height of the virus risk, I’ve yet to find a credible report of fatalities beyond two that were probably unpreventable. This is because the risks to the younger population are negligible, as we’ve known for a long time now.

In many countries, 30% to 60% of excess deaths trace to nursing homes. The numbers in the U.S. are shocking.

These environments are neither locked down nor open; the virus spread among the most vulnerable population after even just one exposure due to possible negligence and distraction by mass frenzy. In the midst of locking down the whole world, and our politicians were consumed with the desire to enforce stay-at-home orders and forced separation, the population that needed the most care was neglected. Even worse, in New York, California, and New Jersey, nursing homes were forced to take in COVID-19 patients.

So how can we deal with this terror that befell us? One way is to figure out some aspect in which our sacrifice has been worth it, maybe not on net given the consequences, but surely some good has come out of this. If my email and feeds are correct, this is how many people have been justifying this. The psychology here is rooted in the sunk-cost fallacy: when you commit resources to something, even when it is a proven error, you tend to find justifications by doubling down rather than just admitting the mistake.

Sovereign immunity creates a two-tiered society: those above the law and those below it; those whom the law fails to bind and those whom the law fails to protect. This legal doctrine almost guarantees that no politician will face any personal liability for their shutdown dictates.

Even New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who callously compelled nursing homes to accept COVID patients, will have no legal culpability for a policy that contributed to more than 5,000 nursing home deaths in his state. Pennsylvania Health Czar Rachel Levine issued a similar order, contributing to thousands of nursing home deaths, and then removed her own 95-year-old mother from a nursing home to keep her safe.

Politicians presume they are blameless for destroying jobs as long as the victims receive temporary unemployment compensation. Actually, it is worse than that: politicians claim a right to seize a slice of the paychecks of people still working to recompense people whose jobs they destroyed. Would a private corporation be able to escape punishment for breaking people’s legs by giving free crutches to its victims?

“Better safe than sorry” is damned risky when politicians have no liability for what they ravage. There is no way that politicians can compensate American citizens for all the damage they have inflicted in this pandemic. This COVID shutdown catastrophe should be a permanent black mark against the political class and the experts who sanctified each and every sacrifice.

“Will the Political Class Be Held Liable For What They’ve Done?” by James Bovard

Reuters recently reported this:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. authorities are not yet seeing spikes in coronavirus cases in places that are reopening but it was still too early to determine such trends, health secretary Alex Azar said on Sunday.

“We are seeing that in places that are opening, we’re not seeing this spike in cases,” Azar said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “We still see spikes in some areas that are, in fact, closed.”

(Read the full article here.)

Sean Trende, of RealClearPolitics, recently wrote an article titled The Costly Failure to Update Sky-Is-Falling Predictions. In this article, he discusses how far afield any number of the wild coronavirus predictions flew — predictions made by supposedly intelligent people who’ve relinquished the power of their individual intelligence and replaced it with “consensus.”

Here’s an excerpt:

On March 6, Liz Specht, Ph.D., posted a thread on Twitter that immediately went viral. As of this writing, it has received over 100,000 likes and almost 41,000 retweets, and was republished at Stat News. It purported to “talk math” and reflected the views of “highly esteemed epidemiologists.” It insisted it was “not a hypothetical, fear-mongering, worst-case scenario,” and that, while the predictions it contained might be wrong, they would not be “orders of magnitude wrong.” It was also catastrophically incorrect.

The crux of Dr. Specht’s 35-tweet thread was that the rapid doubling of COVID-19 cases would lead to about 1 million cases by May 5, 4 million by May 11, and so forth. Under this scenario, with a 10% hospitalization rate, we would expect approximately 400,000 hospitalizations by mid-May, which would more than overwhelm the estimated 330,000 available hospital beds in the country. This would combine with a lack of protective equipment for health care workers and lead to them “dropping from the workforce for weeks at a time,” to shortages of saline drips and so forth. Half the world would be infected by the summer, and we were implicitly advised to buy dry goods and to prepare not to leave the house.

Interestingly, this thread was wrong not because we managed to bend the curve and stave off the apocalypse; for starters, Dr. Specht described the cancellation of large events and workplace closures as something that would shift things by only days or weeks.

Instead, this thread was wrong because it dramatically overstated our knowledge of the way the virus worked [my emphasis]. It fell prey to the problem, common among experts, of failing to address adequately the uncertainty surrounding its point estimates. It did so in two opposing ways. First, it dramatically understated the rate of spread. If serological tests are to be remotely believed, we likely hit the apocalyptic milestone of 2 million cases quite some time ago. Not in the United States, mind you, but in New York City, where 20% of residents showed positive COVID-19 antibodies on April 23. Fourteen percent of state residents showed antibodies, suggesting 2.5 million cases in the Empire State alone; since antibodies take a while to develop, this was likely the state of affairs in mid-April or earlier.

But in addition to being wrong about the rate of spread, the thread was also very wrong about the rate of hospitalization. While New York City found its hospital system stretched, it avoided catastrophic failure, despite having within its borders the entire number of cases predicted for the country as a whole, a month earlier than predicted. Other areas of the United States found themselves with empty hospital beds and unused emergency capacity.

One would think that, given the amount of attention this was given in mainstream sources, there would be some sort of revisiting of the prediction. Of course, nothing of the sort occurred. This thread has been absolutely memory-holed, along with countless other threads and articles from February and March. We might forgive such forays on sites like Twitter and Medium, but feeding frenzies from mainstream sources are also passed over without the media ever revisiting to see how things turned out.

Consider Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis was castigated for failing to close the beaches during spring break, and critics suggested that the state might be the next New York. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, but Florida’s new cases peaked in early April, at which point it was a middling state in terms of infections per capita. The virus hasn’t gone away, of course, but the five-day rolling average of daily cases in Florida is roughly where it was in late March, notwithstanding the fact that testing has increased substantially. Taking increased testing into account, the positive test rate has gradually declined since late March as well, falling from a peak of 11.8% on April 1 to a low of 3.6% on May 12.

Notwithstanding this, the Washington Post continues to press stories of public health officials begging state officials to close beaches (a more interesting angle at this point might be why these health officials were so wrong), while the New York Times noted a few days ago (misleadingly, and grossly so) that “Florida had a huge spike in cases around Miami after spring break revelry,” without providing the crucial context that the caseload mimicked increases in other states that did not play host to spring break.

Or consider Georgia, which one prominent national magazine claimed was engaging in “human sacrifice” by reopening. Yet, after nearly a month, a five-day average of Georgia’s daily cases looks like this:

(Link to the full article.)

What has played out these past two months is nothing short of a full-blown epistemic crisis — horrifying yet gruesomely fascinating to see unspool in real-time, so that anyone and everyone watching could see in as stark a terms imaginable the real-life ramifications of what happens when societies reject and abandon the methods of induction and deduction and replace it with a bad epistemology: specifically, by basing all political-economic policy on computer-models whose inputs are woefully unequipped to deal with anything approaching this kind of complexity, with this many unknown variables. (Climate is vastly more complex — from deep ocean currents, to solar rays, to sun spots and the extreme unpredictability and complexity of clouds and cloud cover, to much, much, much more and how it all influences each discrete part, including virtually endless unknown variables, such that no model imaginable could begin to input for it.)

I close, speaking of climate and climate models, with what you knew was coming next — something that will make much more comprehensible CNN’s choosing Greta Thunberg as a Covid-19 “expert,” a bizarre move that had many pro-lockdown progressives throwing up their hands in disbelief and confusion. Now they’ll know:

These are both recent photos — and they pretty well encapsulate everything significant about the Covid-19 disparities and vicissitudes and inanities:

This first one is Malmo, Sweden — one of the few countries which, as you know, did not succumb to mass hysteria, nor conform nor cave to the intense consensus pressure which is still being applied.

These Swedish children are children allowed to be children, even in the face of worldwide insanity:

This, upon the other hand, is panic-driven, postmodernistic, progressive absurdity:

The children playing together in Sweden have not been put at abnormal risk, nor are their parents acting irresponsibly, nor are the children in any sort of danger — and, in fact, the seasonal flu, about which no one is talking or even thinking (though it’s still out there), is far riskier to children.

How people react to those two photos tells you in an instant a great deal about the person’s entire philosophy.

Speaking of consensus — specifically the stupidity of making consensus your epistemic standard:

If you’ve ever wondered how something like NAZI Germany could have happened — when after the Reichstag fire, an executive order was decreed into law (the fire, incidentally, almost certainly started by Herman Goering and his men, because “emergencies,” as Frederich Hayek so well noted, even fabricated emergencies, “have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty [may be] eroded”), President Hindenburg and Chancellor Adolph Hitler declared a temporary state of emergency amid the societal panic created by the fire, suspending civil liberties thereby, and doing so rapidly and on a shocking and widespread scale, and this, in turn, gave rise to President Hindenburg signing, in March of 1933, the Enabling Act, which legally granted arbitrary powers to the state, Chancellor Hitler then, one year later, right after President Hindenburg died, declaring himself Führer und Reichskanzler, or Supreme Leader and Chancellor, which superseded both the Presidency and Chancellorship — this that you and I are witnessing right now across the entire USA and much of the world is precisely how such things like NAZI Germany happen. And please don’t be duped, no matter what you think of these particular lockdown measures today, don’t be duped into thinking that people today and societies today are too enlightened, having learned from the past, or too sophisticated or too hip, too politically correct or savvy:

It can happen again.

I promise you it can.

People are as susceptible now — and almost certainly more so because of social media and the groupthink it fosters — to the cultic and conformist mentality as ever before. And the cost of conformity is colossal.

This is why if you have even a vestige of the independent-thinker within you, you must stand up against this unprecedented power-grab, and the propaganda campaign that largely fueled it. Even if you’re perfectly okay with the state now having this kind of power over this particular thing, I beg you to realize there is no longer any check on it: it was decreed by executive order, and that power is automatically unchecked, and horribly dangerous, therefore.

Do not worship at the shine of governmental power. Do not. Government is force. It is nothing more and it is nothing less.

No matter what your political leanings, I beseech you to recognize the inherent danger of unchecked power — any and all unchecked power.

This is not a partisan issue, at root.

Think of that unchecked power turning, for no reason or just cause, against something (or someone) you hold dear — because I promise you that it is only a matter of time before this unleashed power-source spreads into other areas.

Power and bureaucracy once established are impossible to retrogress away from.

Freedom once gone is gone forever.

Freedom is a birthright: it is not a permission. 

This pandemic does not in any way warrant the abrogation of individual rights.

What’s been done is a wild and arrantly unjust seizure of power. It is wrong.

In addition to which, it is totally unnecessary. It has not helped the pandemic but hurt — and in the process it’s also completely exposed, in as stark a terms as you could ever conceive, the bumbling ineptitude inherent in government and its bureaus. Have you noticed how we stopped hearing about ventilators? Do you know why? (There is a very specific reason.) One day they were the panacea, the next day they were completely out of the discussion. The “experts” and their “consensus,” despite their lack of knowledge and the epistemic crisis (which crisis and which lack of knowledge will never stop the “experts” nor their bureaus), put 36 million Americans out of work in a ponderous act of bumbling. Ask yourself: how did this temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into three months (and counting) of near-universal house arrest? How did it end up causing furloughs at 256 hospitals, a near total cessation of international travel, 40 percent job loss among people earning less than $40 thousand per year and staggering every economic sector —  to say nothing of the mass confiscation of private property with the state-mandated closures of millions of businesses, all enacted overnight on the basis of incomplete knowledge?

How?

Think for yourself.

I implore you: think for yourself. 

Covid-19 may have an overall lethality that’s closer to seasonal flu than previously thought, but in the following two ways it is not like seasonal flu:

If it were like the flu, 700 children would now be dead and 150 infants would be deceased.

As it is, 17 deaths across both age brackets have been recorded in U.S. total for Covid-19. 

That is a stark and important difference.

The following story is 100 percent bullshit — promulgated by CNN and Rachel Maddow, among others:

Reader, I urge you to please process this: Texas’s case numbers are up because their testing has surged.

Look at percent positive over past seven days. All it takes is one graphic to prove this entire story is complete propaganda. Yet go read the comments: people totally believing it and demanding Texas shut down.

In other news, Swedish epidemiologist Johan Giesecke, who like all sensible people — scientists especially — realizes the intractable nature of the horrific policies enacted by force overnight, had this to say in an interview today:

Speaking of sensible people, it’s just been reported that the head of New York City’s public hospitals pushed to keep the city open, but was overruled by stupidity.

“This virus doesn’t change who your friends are: it reveals who your friends are.”

A friend sent me that earlier today, and I think it’s true.

Today Denmark, which reopened its schools on April 15th, declared its first day of no Covid-19 deaths since the pandemic began. Denmark’s state epidemiologist also recently said a second wave is “very unlikely.”

Full article via Reuters:

The following if from 2006 survey of disease mitigation strategies by several top epidemiologists, who back then called lockdown-style quarantines “a throwback to antiquated disease theory.” They said furthermore it should be eliminated from serious consideration as a disease mitigation measure.

This one comes from a recent paper by Benjamin Born, Alexander M. Dietrich, and Gernot J. Müller:

(Link)

On the subject of the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69, which killed more than a million people worldwide, some of us who’ve written about it have come under fire, first on putatively factual grounds — specifically, that it wasn’t true — and secondly for daring to suggest that it could be in the same realm as the mythic Covid-19. Now, however, since the facts speak entirely for themselves — and the only thing required is to read a little history — the “fact check” genre has shifted to the genre of “It’s true, but we don’t like that it’s true.”

Here, for reference, is an August 1969 interview with Woodstock’s organizer at the event itself, in which it’s acknowledged that virus precautions they were taken:

USA Today concedes:

Even Snopes, which definitely leans left, as well concedes.

Yet their wild claim that today, for Covid-19, without draconian lockdowns “one million Americans would have died” is absolute unequivocal conjecture — nonsense, actually, completely unsubstantiated by any data and beyond the realm of believability. If anything, the lockdowns will have caused more death. Don’t believe it? Keep reading.

Also, this afternoon the state of Colorado just cut its reported #COVID deaths by almost 25 percent: from 1150 cases to 878:

UPDATE: This will make you sick — not with Covid-19 but with disgust. It’s from the British Medical Journal (BMJ), which is one of the oldest and most venerable medical journals in the world, its provenance dating back to 1840, when it united with the London Journal of Medicine:

… David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, said that covid-19 did not explain the high number of deaths taking place in the community.

At a briefing hosted by the Science Media Centre on 12 May he explained that, over the past five weeks, care homes and other community settings had had to deal with a “staggering burden” of 30?000 more deaths than would normally be expected, as patients were moved out of hospitals that were anticipating high demand for beds.

Of those 30?000, only 10?000 have had covid-19 specified on the death certificate. While Spiegelhalter acknowledged that some of these “excess deaths” might be the result of underdiagnosis, “the huge number of unexplained extra deaths in homes and care homes is extraordinary. When we look back . . . this rise in non-covid extra deaths outside the hospital is something I hope will be given really severe attention.”

He added that many of these deaths would be among people “who may well have lived longer if they had managed to get to hospital.”

Underlying causes

David Leon, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, agreed. “Some of these deaths may not have occurred if people had got to hospital,” he said. “How many is unclear. This issue needs urgent attention, and steps taken to ensure that those who would benefit from hospital treatment and care for other conditions can get it.”

Also at the briefing was Jason Oke, senior statistician at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, who explained that equivalent data on excess deaths in Scotland2 were classified by the underlying cause of death—including dementia, as well as circulatory, cancer, and respiratory causes. In the first week after lockdown a spike in deaths occurred from all causes, but “we now have a return to normality for all except dementia,” he explained. He called for the ONS to report on excess deaths in a similar way.

Responding to the latest figures, Jennifer Dixon, chief executive of the Health Foundation think tank, said, “Today’s data show that action to tackle the coronavirus pandemic in social care has been late and inadequate, and has highlighted significant weaknesses in the social care system due to decades of neglect and lack of reform. Covid-19 has ultimately magnified the human impact of decades of underfunding in the sector and policy neglect.”

In total, England and Wales have recorded 34?978 covid-19 deaths from 28 December 2019 to 9 May this year. More than 22?600 of the deaths occurred in hospitals and 7400 in care homes.

(Link)

Light is life.

Light is light.

This fellow has been indefatigable.

The real scandal and outrage in this whole ghastly spectacle has been the criminal policies enacted anent nursing homes and the elderly. Remember that. It is not going away, and I, for one, will make sure that this bureaucratic abomination be exposed.

Assuming 10:1 infection-to-PCR ratio, IFR by age group:

Ages

30-39: 0.01%
40-49: 0.03%
50-59: 0.04%
60-69: 0.19%

More here from none other than the CDC on the questionable science of masks.

It’s important to note also that it’s been over two weeks since the state of Georgia opened up. Fear-mongers told us Georgia would by now be overrun with Covid-19 sickness and death. Georgia has not been overrun — not remotely — and this is great news. Yet it’s not being treated as great news. On the contrary, in fact, the fear-mongers, in a warped way, want the sickness and death because anything less is an attack on the worldview they’ve built-up in two-months time: Covid-19 is not a virus to vanquish but an ideology by which to live.

Here as well is the Covid-19 story that “public health experts,” like this guy below, don’t want to discuss:

Obesity Rates

Japan: 4.3%
China: 6.2%
S Korea: 4.7%
Singapore: 6.1%
USA: 36%
Spain: 24%
Belgium: 22%
France: 22%
Sweden: 21%
Italy: 20%
Ireland: 25%
UK: 28%

Do you know the real reason that pointing out the good news that #SARSCoV2 is not overly dangerous to most people who contract it comes across as “offensive” to these people?

The answer is the exact same as the answer above: this has become an ideology into which people have invested their entire lives — their entire sense of self.

Even the New York Times is beginning to back-pedal a little — and they should be: this whole thing has been a fiasco of unspeakable proportions.

The following excerpt, from WJAC News, gives more evidence that Covid-19 was in America in December of 2019. It also hints at more bureaucratic corruption:

Those with COVID-19 antibodies, who’ve recovered, added to counties’ total case count

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (WJAC) — A Johnstown-area couple says they tested positive for having coronavirus antibodies and that they were counted with current cases.

The couple, who wishes to remain anonymous, says they fell ill in December and the husband was hospitalized.

Both went through several tests like influenza A and B and strep throat.

Those tests came back negative.

The two had antibody testing recently completed at I-Care and found out last week that they tested positive for the presence of COVID-19 antibodies, meaning they had the virus but have since recovered.

The Department of Health told them that they would be counted as Cambria County’s positive cases 34 and 35.

“It brought up a concern for us because we are antibody positive, we’ve already had this, we are past the infectious stage. And we are being counted with the current case counts for Cambria County, it doesn’t seem right,” said the local woman. “They should be able to separate that out some way, but at this point in time I was told they are not doing that and our numbers are, or were, counted and they are being counted in the current case count.”

The Department of Health told 6 News Friday that positive antibody cases fell under probable cases and therefore were not counted.

“At this time, people with positive antibody tests are not being added to our case counts,” Department of Health press secretary Nate Wardle said in an email exchange with 6 News. “For those individuals who have a positive antibody test and showed signs and symptoms over the last few months, they would be considered a probable case.”

However, the coronavirus case count on their website lumps confirmed and probable cases into one total.

Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine was asked Monday about antibody testing counts.

Here’s what Levine had to say:

“We have been getting that data, and no, we’re not reporting it in a separate or different count.”

(Link)

This is how irrational the world has become. It is no joke:

Somebody must tell Greta the sheer amount of mining — rare-earth minerals included — as well as the fossil-fuel energy that were required in order to produce her laptop and those earphones.

This is from the Miami Herald:

At least 26 people who contracted COVID-19 started showing symptoms in late December or January — and at least eight of them both had not traveled and did not have contact with another person infected by the virus. The trend continued into February.

Read the full article here.

The following video-interview with Sweden’s leading epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, covers, among other things:

– Sweden approached this pandemic like other pandemics

– Their hospital system was never overloaded

– Immunity does exist

– Skepticism of masks + contact tracing

– Children are not at risk

“It is quite certain that immunity does exist. And I think there is a lot of proof of that. For all the cases we have had in Sweden, there has not been one single person who had this disease twice…There is no way we would miss a person who had it twice.”

“There is no such evidence whatsoever [that children are spreading the virus at high levels]. We see extremely few cases among children. Among the 15,000-16,000 cases in Sweden, only 200 were among people less than 20 years of age…. And then people say, ‘OK, children still have the disease but don’t get very sick.’ Children do have the virus now and then. But there is very little evidence that this spreads the virus from children to adults.”

“[At] no time during this pandemic in Sweden where we have had less than 20 percent of the beds free. And then beds are really beds, they are beds with staff, facilities, everything in place.”

“We started out using the methods that we always use in public health. Having sort of a conversation with the public, putting a lot of trust in the public and giving a little responsibility to the individuals.”

Finally, author and scientist Matt Ridley, whom I’ve long admired, confirms what a few have been saying for some time: lockdowns were based on a lot of guesswork, and augmented immunity (i.e. herd immunity) does NOT necessarily require 60-plus percent of the population be exposed: more like 20 or 30 percent.

Link.

This video clip shows real human beings, young and old, lining up for the food pantry in South Africa.

This is a glimpse of the appalling toll that forced lockdowns are already taking upon Africa. You may be certain that it will get much worse quickly.

Starvation has a 100 percent fatality-rate.

Covid-19 has a fatality rate of less than 1 percent.

What these government-forced lockdowns are doing, their global repercussions, which have only just begun, is nothing short of criminal.

“Not another death” the pro-force, pro-lockdown people say. What about all the incalculable death that forced lockdown will cause? Why no equal compassion or concern for these innocent victims?

Who will answer for this harrowing death-toll, and who will take responsibility?

Who?

The footage comes via Luke Rudkowski, but also posted by Reuters.

The Guardian newspaper, as well, has a good article on the subject — titled “Famine of Biblical Proportions.”

As one commentator said (and I quote):

“As a lifelong progressive, the lockdowns are the biggest humanitarian catastrophe of this century. The effects on the developing world got me involved in anti-lockdown movements. China deliberately pushed these lockdowns.”

In that late autumn of 1968, a novel virus swept across the entire world, entering America in December of that same year– a virus that quickly became known as the Hong Kong virus. It was, as Bojan Pancevski recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, a virus “responsible for eventually killing more than 1 million people, over 100,000 of them in the U.S.

“The novel virus triggered a state of emergency in New York City; caused so many deaths in Berlin that corpses were stored in subway tunnels; overwhelmed London’s hospitals; and in some areas of France left half of the workforce bedridden. Severely ill patients suffering from acute pneumonia were put on ventilators.”

A few commentators, some of whom are smart and sensible, have said that in terms of total fatalities, Covid-19 will probably end up being worse than the Hong Kong virus, but I’m not so sure: if you adjust for all factors, as you must in order to get a more accurate idea, the metric changes — with regard to infant deaths and death among the elderly over 70, in particular. We now have well over a million more people in the country than in 1968. In addition to which, the population then was less obese. The average life expectancy then was 70. Today it’s 78. This is significant because, among those over 70, the Covid-19 fatality-rate, particularly in nursing homes, is astronomically high, whereas there were many more infant deaths with the Hong Kong virus than with Covid-19. Extrapolating from these demographics, it is reasonable to say that the Hong Kong virus could have killed more than 300,000 today, and that is not my estimate. Of course, no one can know for certain either way. But two things that I think are certain:

First, by any standard imaginable the Hong Kong flu was very bad — certainly in the same realm as Covid-19 — and, second, if Covid-19 were the Hong Kong virus today, the collective hysteria and societal panic would be at the same crazed pitch that it is right now, with Covid-19.

Can you guess how it played out in 1968?

There were no shutdowns or lockdowns at all: no school closures, no daycare closures, no business closures of any type. The restaurants, diners, pubs, bars, night-clubs and concert venues were open for business-as-usual, and there were not even masks or modifications made. As a matter of fact, Woodstock’s famous festival happened near the very peak of the Hong Kong flu pandemic — August of 1969 (July and early August was the peak) — and yet no one gave any undue thought to the virus.

Governments did not issue draconian mandates. Congress did not hear any legislation, let alone pass any. The Fed did nothing. The stock markets did not crash. No state governor decreed social-distancing guidelines — forced or suggested — and even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized because of this flu, there were no laws banning crowds or gatherings of any size, as there were also no attempts to “flatten the curve.”

Private citizens were not fined for wanting to get out of the house, and parents were not handcuffed in front of their children for taking them to the playground.

Taser-wielding police did not punch people for failing to social distance properly.

State governors did not shut down all beaches — and this was not because these governors were aware that virus doesn’t do well in open air, or when exposed to UV light.

Neither was there a spike in unemployment rates.

As there was no spike in suicides, spousal abuse, child molestation, and no surge either in drug overdoses because of the virus; neither any spike in binge drinking.

The only actions governments took [during the Hong Kong pandemic] was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses. And it’s not as if we had governments then unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history.

Why, then, was this different?….

Was the difference that we have mass media invading our lives with endless notifications blowing up in our pockets? Was there some change in philosophy such that we now think politics is responsible for all existing aspects of life? Was there a political element here in that the media blew this wildly out of proportion as revenge against Trump and his deplorables? Or did our excessive adoration of predictive modelling get out of control to the point that we let a physicist with ridiculous models frighten the world’s governments into violating the human rights of billions of people? Maybe all of these were factors.”

(Link)

We could learn an inestimable amount today from reading about the history of the 1968-69 pandemic, and the reason I’ve written about it here is to partially illustrate how we all — the entire world — has been bludgeoned by politicized science and corrupted journalism.

The following is something you should see — an unadulterated example of CNN’s manipulation and propagandizing:

If you’re asking yourself how a major media organization could be so obvious in its manipulation tactics, the answer is that they don’t care if people discover it. Ninety-nine percent of readers and viewers won’t even notice the error at all, as CNN and all the others of course realize, and these same people will now have it in their minds that Orange County indeed saw a twenty-two percent increase in Covid cases — all because of these hateful ignorant protesters who don’t care if they spread the disease. These same people will then mention it to their friends and family and post or repost it on all their social media and so on, and in this very way the propaganda spreads.

The propaganda machine, meanwhile, will have accomplished its mission, which is the spreading of untrue and scientifically impossible information, and they then move onto another. The fact that a comparative handful spotted the deliberate manipulation doesn’t register as a blip on CNN’s radar because it’s meaningless compared with the sheer volume of CNN’s successful manipulation.

Similarly, when the New York Times got caught and called-out for falsifying dates so that they could to manipulate the Covid timeline, the Times’s editors made the changes after being publicly called out, but never admitted the error. And so it goes.

As recently noted:

Whether the crisis is environmental, terroristic, proletarian, pandemic, privilege, labor, geo-political, racial, religious, or any others, both known as well as the yet-to-be-conceived, or any cross-combination, the forces that work tirelessly against individual rights are legion and multiplex — and they are constant because, like virus, they can’t survive exposure to light, and they thus mutate from year-to-year, decade-to-decade, generation-to-generation: God-or-Devil-appointed kings and queens one generation, Monarchy the next; Marxism one generation, Socialism on the NAZI pattern next; Neo-Marxism one generation, environmentalism the decade following — right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union; deep ecology one decade, inequality the next; privilege one year and then the year following, democratic socialism is all the rage. And so on. One generation plagiarizes another. The only thing different about them are the concretes: the principles remain precisely the same.

In this same vein, Wired magazine today put out a shameful hit piece on Stanford epidemiologist Dr. John Ioannidis, who is guilty of committing the unpardonable sin of questioning Covid-19 dogma, and who, along with some of his Stanford colleagues, refuses to toe the party-line and instead prefers doing precisely what scientists should do: investigate actual data and conduct studies.

The results of these studies, about which I’ve recently written, infuriated those for whom Covid-19 has become a religion, with scriptures and edicts the disobeying of which will incur the wrath of the almighty masses and social-media mobs.

Yet the most spectacular thing about Wired magazine’s hit piece is that the writers cannot and do not name a single thing that contradicts Dr. John Ioannidis’s studies. None. Read it and see for yourself. Which is a remarkable thing indeed when you stop and think about it, since the entire reason Wired commissioned this hit piece was in an attempt to discredit and refute Stanford’s seroprevalence studies — which, incidentally, have been confirmed by a number of other studies and locations.

The article failed. Arrantly. The only thing these writers could do was attempt to smear John Ioannidis with puerile points of ridicule, and even those were pathetically unpersuasive. Ioannidis and his work remain untouched, and Wired degenerates deeper into third-rate, tendentious journalism.

The following is a fascinating and exceptionally instructive piece by a Swedish economist named Joakim Book
?

Michael Ryan at the WHO’s Health Emergency Program caused indignant headlines to ripple across the globe faster than the corona virus can infect your respiratory tract cells. Sweden’s somewhat diverging corona fighting strategy has been treated with outrage, anger, and disbelief in global news coverages.

“If we are to reach a new normal,” said Ryan, “Sweden represents a future model.”

That can of worms should have remained closed, reasoned newsrooms across the planet. How dare you celebrate this irresponsible, cruelly capitalist exercise in human sacrifice and their Don’t-Care approach to the biggest global disaster and suffering of our times?

Yes, hysteria and overreaction have been major features of the world’s response to this virus, among politicians, journalists, and everyday people alike.

To recap: the Swedish government, judging its country to be sufficiently different from others and on advice of their surprisingly competent public servants, opted for less restrictive tools in fighting this disease. Sweden did not do nothing. The chief epidemiologist of the Public Health Agency, Anders Tegnell, has repeatedly stressed that Sweden follows the same strategy everyone else does: reduce the transmission of the disease; flatten the curve; expand hospital capacity; protect vulnerable groups.

The difference so far has been that Sweden does so by trusting that its citizens would opt prudently. That is: work from home if you can, which hip companies like Spotify urged their employees to do before the authorities did; avoid gatherings, which meant that a bunch of festivals, concerts, and events cancelled on their own and frequently reimbursed participants; wash your hands and use hand sanitizers, so universally embraced that even my town’s coolest kids – whose classes are naturally not cancelled – do so with fervor; don’t cheek-kiss your friends and family, which no self-respecting and intimacy-shy Nordic person would do anyway.

In other words, these are some of the same social distancing advice that various U.S. governors have forced down Americans’ unwilling throats. In addition to that, Sweden avoided policies that projected political decisiveness but had no scientific rationale behind them, like closing borders and schools.

Life here is completely different, but still remarkably normal. Runners and park visitors keep their advised distance; supermarkets open early for the elderly and put out hand sanitizers for all to use; restaurants separate their tables a bit more – and everything else stays open.

With extremely individualistic inhabitants that trust their public institutions to a remarkable degree, austere epidemiologists merely had to issue guidelines to get a large behavioral effect – strengthened by a media that arranged nuanced Q&As with professors and other specialists reporting statistical reality and prudent advice rather than clickbait-y hysteria and political pie-throwing.

(Link)

Finally, Farr’s Law continues to be vindicated:

Protests are springing up everywhere, and they are doing so for good reason:

It’s fascinating and incredible to watch how Covid-19 coronavirus has created a partisan divide — and the primary issue is this: end the lockdowns or not. Let human beings act voluntarily, or use state coercion to force humans into the behavior you want.

The original and stated goal of the lockdowns — to slow the rate of Covid-19 infections so that hospitals aren’t overrun — has long been jettisoned in favor of the notion that it’s the omnipotent state alone capable of managing and micro-managing our lives and our work during this indefinite time of epidemic, and the state will do so by the only means it has at its disposal: force.

Initially, the state seized control not by majority vote (which would have been bad enough) but by executive decree. The stakes involved in this issue could not be higher: Forsake your freedoms to the omnipotent state who will make all significant decision for you about your work and your businesses — as well as many decisions that are not about your work: curfews, closures, driving, being outside, what you wear, and more.

Or: stand up for your rights and your freedom.

It has been said that most people don’t want freedom: they want comfort. This may well be true, but it remains to be seen if those who understand the paramount importance of freedom are the stronger voice — because, like all things when distilled down to the foundations, this issue is an issue of principle, which means it’s an issue of ideology and philosophy.

Educated people, as I’ve recently mentioned, even the most highly educated, are as susceptible as anyone to groupthink and cognitive bias, and not only can the most educated be stupidly naïve and ignorant: they are frequently so. It happens, in many cases, more often than not — especially concerning political-economic philosophy because postmodern leftist-progressive Neo-Marxist theory, in one form or another (and they’re all preposterously antiquated and have been proven wrong time and again), dominates academia around the globe, and has for many decades. Millions and millions of nominally educated people are thus inculcated up to the gills with this poisonous doctrine — this mathematically impossible economic theory of forced egalitarianism and altruism at the point of gun — and the overwhelming majority of these millions can’t even see that they’ve been inculcated with it, let alone think outside of its parameters.

What so many of these nominally educated people fail to grasp is the boundless possibilities which arise naturally from voluntary action, non-coercive adjustments, and human intelligence when left free of force — both by individuals acting with free agency and by businesses run by such individuals.

The more you treat human beings like helpless babies, the more human beings will expect to be treated this way — and therefore the greater the growing dependency on that monstrous leviathan known as the state, which is by definition an agency of force and as such cannot spend a single penny unless it first either taxes, borrows, or prints: until in a very short time, there is no end to the things that people, even once self-reliant people, come to expect the state (rather than voluntary transactions and peaceful exchanges among humans) to provide for everyone — all in exchange for your and my inalienable right to life and property, and that of course includes the limitless ingenuity and progress and health and wealth and civilization brought about by conditions of freedom and the protection of our inalienable rights.

There is a very specific reason that all societies governed predominantly by authoritarian states exist in widespread poverty and complete suppression of the individual’s rights, as there is a precise reason that all societies governed by a predominately laissez-faire state have, exactly to that extent, flourished and freed the individual.

Freedom once gone is gone forever.

This is why people must stand up against this unprecedented power-grab, and the propaganda campaign that largely fueled it.

Think of this:

Even if you’re perfectly okay with the state now having this kind of power over this particular thing, realize there is no longer any check on it: it was decreed by executive order, and that power is automatically unchecked, and horribly dangerous. Think of that unchecked power turning, for no reason or just cause, against something (or someone) you hold dear — because I promise you that it is only a matter of time before this unleashed power-source spreads into other areas. Power and bureaucracy once established are impossible to retrogress away from.

As epidemiologist Dr. Johann Giesecke says in this short video clip: People are perfectly capable of adjusting to emergencies and crises without the need of force and coercion.

These are huge new findings — the first one out of Iran (click the image to read the report):

“A true random antibody sample of households finds that 21-33% of people [in Iran] have been infected and the true infection fatality rate is roughly 1 in 1,000 — among the lowest figures yet published.”

This study out of Japan (click the image to read more):

“Study out of Japan suggests the real infection rate there is 400 to 800 times(!) the reported rate. They excluded people who went to the ED or the “fever consultation service” [my italics].

For those who think that mainstream media outlets would not resort to manipulation and propaganda, I call your attention to this recent headline from the New York Times. The news is actually good news — which they eventually say, deep into the article — but you would never know it from the headline:

Swiss Public-Health Expert: “Lockdows An Imbecile & Lethal Policy”

The following is a transcript of an interview with Professor Johan Giesecke, M.Sc., M.D., Ph.D., the State Epidemiologist from 1995 to 2005 and the leading consultant on the so-called Swedish model — so-called, I say, because it is in my opinion a horribly sad testament to the indoctrination that’s taken place in one-month’s time: indoctrination which has made inconceivable, for many millions, the true idea that voluntary action among free humans is far more effective than authoritarian control and force.

The transcript is not boring at all, nor overly technical, and I urge readers to read it through. It is a levelheaded analysis, and it gives a great deal of real insight. It also vindicates what many have said from the beginning — and his last statements are sure to shock and outrage many millions among the masses who have not chosen to undertake the task of sifting through the data themselves, weighing it in the totality of context, but rather chose the method of dogmatism and blind-or-purblind belief. Please take special note also of how the initial goal of forced social distancing — easing or slowing the burden on hospitals — has completely shifted, as many warned, to an indefinite lockdown: a total and unequivocal violation of rights, both person and property, and the danger from which cannot be overstated. If any of you have any doubt at all that power once gotten cannot easily be torn away from power-holders, your doubts will shortly be dispelled.

But first this news, which is bad — very bad — yet will be made even worse if government institutes policies aimed at “stabilization,” which means price controls, which in turn create greater shortages:

Professor Johan Giesecke worked as infectious disease clinical doctor working with AIDS patients during the 1980s and trained at the London School of Tropical Medicine in the 1990s before returning to Sweden. Since then he has been chief scientist at the European Center for Disease Control, provided advice to the World Health Organization’s Director-General, and continues to serve as a consultant advisor to Anders Tegnell at the Swedish Agency for Public Health.

Dr. Giesecke speaks out against draconic measures, which so far are not evidence-based, elaborating on how the Swedes have done things differently and how they could have done even better.

Q: There’s been a lot of confused thinking and a lot of confusion about what the correct response to a threat such as COVID-19 and should be – and I just wanted to begin by getting your, kind of summary, thoughts of – of you know, how Sweden is differing from other countries and why you think that is.

A: The main reason is that we, or the Swedish government, decided early in January that the measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence-based. And when you start looking around for the measures that are being taken now by different countries you find that very few of them have the shred of evidence base. But one we know, that’s known for a hundred and fifty years or more, and that is washing your hands is good for you and good for others when you’re in an epidemic. But the rest – like border closures, school closures, social distancing – there’s almost no science behind most of these.

Q: So what is the current policy in Sweden? Social distancing is part of the policy, isn’t it? What is the regime that Sweden has gone with?

A: The main difference to other countries is that there is no – you’re not locked up in your home. If you go out to buy food, or groceries, or drugs – I mean medicines – there’s no police to stop you in the street and ask you what you’re doing here. That’s one thing. People are asked to stay inside, but there is no reinforcement or enforcement of that. People do it anyway. So that’s one. We have the rule that the crowd cannot be bigger than 50 people.

Q: So I can still have an event for 49 people? (Although I won’t.)

A: Yes, you could. The schools – the upper schools are closed; secondary education and universities closed; schools up to age 15, 16 schools are open. What more do we have? Don’t – the nursing homes, or houses for old people, are closed to visitors.

Q: So it sounds like it’s a moderate social distancing regime then, at the moment?

A: Yes, it is. Sorry it’s very similar to the one that the UK had before there was a famous paper in – by – the Imperial College, by the modelers who made models for infectious diseases that came out on the day after you made a u-turn in England.

Q: Yes, tell us the original strategy in the UK and became known as a kind of herd immunity strategy, that’s what it was called. Before we get on to talk about the Imperial model – which I would like to talk about – is it correct to call it herd immunity and, and is that the Swedish strategy?

A: It’s not a strategy, but it’s a by-product of the strategy. But the strategy is to protect the old and the frail; try to minimize their risk of becoming infected, and taking care of them if they get infected. If you do that – the way we’re doing it – you would probably get herd immunity and then – but that’s a byproduct order, it’s not the main reason to do it.

Q: So you were saying and so the initial UK response seemed to be similar to what you – Sweden – is doing now, and you thought that was better?

A: Yeah. No, I think it is very good actually, and we were very pleased we were having the same policies as the UK: that gave some credibility to what we were doing. But then Mr. Johnson made his hundred and eighty degree turn.

Q: Yes, so there might have been a lot of other political factors involved. He was definitely under a lot of pressure, because lots of European countries were doing a formal lockdown at that point, but the turning point did seem to be that Imperial College report which forecast 510,000 deaths in the UK with a completely unmitigated approach 250,000 deaths with a mitigated approach – which is roughly equivalent to what you’re doing in Sweden – and then it suggests that he might be as few as 20,000 if we did a full suppression or lockdown. What was your impression of that paper?

A: I think it’s not very good. And the thing that they miss little is, any models for infectious disease spread are very popular – many people do them, they’re good for teaching – they seldom tell you the truth because, I make a small parenthesis, which model could have assumed that the outbreak would start in northern Italy in Europe? Difficult to model that one. And any such model – it looks complicated, there are strange mathematical formulas and integrals signs and stuff – but it rests on the assumptions, and the assumptions in that ought to be heavily criticized for – I won’t go through that it; would take to the rest of your day if I went through them all. The paper was never published – scientifically – it’s not peer-reviewed, which scientific paper should be. It’s just an internal departmental report from Imperial, and it’s fascinating, I don’t think any other scientific endeavor has made such an impression on the world as that, rather debatable, paper.

Q: So it’s your impression that it was overly pessimistic?

A: Yes – oh yes, very much so.

Q: So what you know I mean I guess it comes down to some degree of speculation but, what’s your impression of how serious the disease is and what kind of fatalities we would be looking at if we had a more moderate or more mitigated approach?

A: What’s the number of deaths in the UK now? I don’t know. [13 thousand.] So you’re getting close to 20 now. [Yeah.] But probably not 510,000. I think – well let me go back one step. One thing that the model has missed is that it assumes that a hospital capacity will remain the same, and that’s not what’s happening anywhere. I mean in Sweden we tripled our intensive care capacity, and I think there’s happening in the UK as well, but the paper completely overlooks that. It’s, as I said it’s such a static thing.

Q: Hmm. So just to sort of to come back on this, we had the argument, what people watching will be asking – and I think what most people who support the lockdown would say, and that is the overwhelming majority of people in politics and in the media – is that the reason the curve is now flattening, and the numbers of deaths are gradually coming down on a daily basis, is because of the lockdown and that it shows that the policy has worked. And Professor Neil Ferguson who wrote the, or led the Imperial papers, suggests that he stands by his prediction that 500,000 people would have died had that not taken place. So if it wasn’t the lockdown that has been flattening our curve what else could it have been?

A: One thing is immunity; the other is that the people who are frail and old will die first. And when that group of people is sort of thinned out, you will get less deaths as well. The other thing is that when you start your exit strategy – that’s the favorite word now in all this public effort: the exit strategy – when you start that one you’ll have some other deaths that we had already.

Q: Yes so, I mean, does that mean then that, as the disease passes through the population, you know, are we gonna see second and third spikes now after this?

A: It would be part of the exit strategy, because the only way to check that your, if you’re taking away one restriction and – say we open the schools again as an example – how do you evaluate that? You have to see numbers are going up again; more people are dying. We have to stop that. We have to pull back that softening and try another. That’s what exit strategy will be in all countries. Countries will ease up a little on a restriction; see what happens over the next 2-3 weeks. “Oooh, it didn’t work very well, we’d assumed that.” We try another restriction. Well if that one – “Oh, it worked!” And that so this is every country will have to do it that way. And that means that the increasing number of deaths will be part of checking which strategy should be kept and not…

Q: So what should we be doing instead?

A: Well you can’t. When I first heard, which is now six week ago, about the different draconic measures that were taken I asked myself: How are they going to climb down from that one? When will they open the schools again? What should be the criterion to open schools? Did any one of them – strong and very decisive politicians – even think about how to get out of this when they introduced it? And I think that would be a problem for the UK as well.

Q: So yes let’s take as a comparison your – the neighboring countries in Scandinavia. A lot of people are sending around these charts that show that Denmark and Norway and Finland have had much fewer deaths on a per capita basis and Sweden the rate is still climbing and they take that as proof essentially that Sweden should have gone into a more draconian lockdown. What do you say to those people?

A: Well first it’s not crooked Denmark. Secondly, one important thing is that Norway – the nursing homes in Norway are usually quite small. Whereas the nursing homes in Sweden are quite big, with hundreds of people. Which means that if you get in – if the virus gets in to one nursing home in Norway which will affect far fewer people than a big one. So that’s part of the reason, not all of the reason. For Finland the epidemic never really took up to cope there: they started their measures before it had even started. But I think we should have this discussion a year from now – let’s decide that on the 17th of April 2021. I think that the difference between countries would be quite small in the end.

Q: So that you don’t think that the severity of these intervening measures are gonna make that much difference?

A: No, I don’t think so. I think it – should I tell you what I really think? [Please.] I almost never do this. I think what we’re seeing is a tsunami of a usually quite mild disease which is sweeping over Europe – and some countries do this, and some countries do that, and some countries don’t do that – and in the end there was very little difference.

Q: So when you say it’s a usually quite mild disease, what do you mean by that?

A: That most people who get it will never even notice they were infected.

Q: So does that mean that you think the actual fatality rate of this disease is much lower than the numbers that have been talked about?

A: Much, much lower.

Q: So do you – have you made any speculations as to what sort of zone the real fatality rate might be in?

A: I think it would be like a severe influenza season, the same as, and which would be an order of 0.1 percent maybe.

Q: So that would suggest then, for a country like the UK that has already had its heading towards 20,000 deaths, that would suggest that millions – many millions – of people have already had it?

A: Yes.

Q: And you believe – do you think that is also true in Sweden then? That a substantial percentage of the population has had it?

A: Yep. I’m rather certain on that, actually.

(Link)

As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internet:

The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here

I close with the following data, compiled and painstaking plotted by el gato (statistician), and what you see below shows in no uncertain terms the mathematical truth about social distancing (SD, he abbreviates it) and the actual effects on death reduction. Please take a moment and process it:

Please consider what I have already said in previous posts. Please: the power which the state has seized by executive decree is a newfound power that’s unchecked, and even if you agree wholeheartedly with the motive and desired results of this particular power-play, remember the following and think about it carefully: it is an unjustly acquired state power over individuals and their property, yours included, and all your loved ones’ as well, and because it’s unchecked, it is a power that can now move in any direction, into any arena of human life, at any time.

“Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.

— Friedrich Hayek

During seasons of great pestilence men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was coming. Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity.

— Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles MacKay

Something you should know at the outset, if you don’t know it already:

“The latest figures on overall death rates from all causes show no increase at all. Deaths are lower now than in 2019, 2018, 2017 and 2015, slightly higher than in 2016. Any upward bias is imparted by population growth” (source).

Bill Gates, whose political-economic philosophy is an unintegrated farrago of hackneyed shibboleths, recently said this: “Normalcy will only return when we’ve vaccinated the entire global population. The economic hit [will be huge] but we don’t have a choice.”

He is flatly, unequivocally wrong.

As is the elitist tool Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who was the main architect of the Obamacare debacle (yes, the same man caught on video advocating actual death-panels for the elderly [watch that video, please]), who recently called for a mandatory 18-month lockdown, and who also recently said this:

“How are people supposed to find work if this goes on in some form for a year and a half? Is all that economic pain worth trying to stop COVID-19? The truth is we have no choice.”

Reader, we have a choice.

I repeat: we have a choice.

We have a choice, and that choice is the correct choice, and it is the one that should be chosen precisely because it’s the right one.

I want you to please notice first and foremost the sloppy logical-fallacy — called a false dilemma fallacy — pathetically smuggled in by both of these clownish charlatans who would dare to presume to make decisions for the rest of us: either we shut down the economy for many months to come and live as slaves to an elite bureau of central planners, or we do nothing.

You either support the lockdowns, in other words, or you want everyone to die.

You know what you do with that sort of obvious tactic — that sloppy pathetic attempt at argumentation?

This: you swat that strawman into oblivion and then you crush it into the dirt with the heel of your boot, and you tell these elitist tools that neither they nor anyone else, even the most elite bureau of planners imaginable, has rightful jurisdiction over your person or property.

I do sincerely believe that one of the primary reasons people buy into such ridiculous nonsense is that people simply cannot imagine that ostensibly educated human beings, like scientists, doctors, lawyers, computer scientists and so on, could be so stupidly naïve and ignorant concerning such basic things. It is therefore often concluded that these people must be right.

I want to assure you that educated people of all varieties — even the most highly educated — not only can be so stupidly naïve and ignorant: they are frequently so. It happens, in many cases, more often than not, I believe — especially concerning political-economic philosophy because postmodern leftist-progressive Neo-Marxist theory, in one form or another (and they’re all preposterously antiquated and have been proven wrong time and again), dominates academia around the globe, and has for many decades. Millions and millions of nominally educated people are thus inculcated up to the gills with this poisonous doctrine — this mathematically impossible economic theory of forced egalitarianism and altruism at the point of gun — and the overwhelming majority of these millions can’t even see that they’ve been inculcated with it, let alone break out of it.

This is also a testament to the fundamental importance of thinking about and establishing the philosophical principles which undergird all subsequent knowledge — a testament as well to the widespread practice of tendentious reasoning and confirmation bias.

Please be assured of the following, if nothing else: a great many secular beliefs held even by successful and seemingly intelligent people are every bit as dangerous and dogmatic as the fanatical non-secular beliefs that get so much more attention, and if you doubt me at all, then don’t click this link.

What so many of these nominally educated people fail to grasp is the boundless possibilities which arise naturally from voluntary action, non-coercive adjustments, and human intelligence when left free of force — both by individuals acting with free agency and by businesses run by such individuals.

I’m well-aware that the books and essays against my position are endless and some even have the appearance of sophistication, the superficial veneer of something cogent. Some are award-winning and even sound closely reasoned. But essays on this subject get nowhere except back where they all began:

Do individuals possess the right to their own person and property, or not?

The fact is that there is no conflict between humanitarian and economic concerns.

It’s another false dilemma the world has presented you. I promise you it’s wrong.

A poorer country or society is always much less healthy and more vulnerable to illness, disease, pollution, and every other deleterious thing.

“When human societies lose their freedom, it’s not usually because tyrants have taken it away. It’s usually because people willingly surrender their freedom in return for protection against some external threat” — said former UK Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption. He called this “herding behavior” and said that herding behavior is precisely why “hysteria is infectious.”

You will not see a greater illustration of this fact than you’re seeing play out right now across the entire world.

Try this:

If you were handed two cards with lines on each, one clearly shorter than the other, could you tell the difference? If you think this is a ridiculous question, think again.

In one of psychology’s most famous experiments, Solomon Asch showed that if you’re in a group and most of the group members claim the shorter line is longer, you might just go along. In his book You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney reports, “In Asch’s experiments, 75 percent of the subjects caved in on at least one question [about the length of the lines]. They looked at the lines, knew the answer everyone else was agreeing to was wrong, and went with it anyway.”

Perhaps even worse, those who changed their correct answers to conform with others “seemed oblivious to their own conformity. When the experimenter told them they had made an error, they came up with excuses as to why they made mistakes instead of blaming the others.”

If you’re sure you would go against the grain, consider this: “The percentage of people who conformed grew proportionally with the number of people who joined in consensus against them.”

Imagine you are in a meeting, and a significant decision is to be made. You think your manager’s plan is ditzy. You are ready to speak out when you see everyone else in the meeting is agreeing with your manager. Would you behave like a mouse and go along? If you’ve ever gone along with a poor decision, don’t beat up on yourself; it’s tough to go against the herd.

Perhaps you think Asch’s experiments merely show there is no reason to dispute the crowd when the situation is trivial. Sadly, research shows when something significant is on the line, fewer people will buck the herd.

In his book The Science of Fear, Dan Gardner reports on experiments by psychologists Robert Baron, Joseph Vandello, and Bethany Brunsman which found that conformity goes up “so long as the judgments are difficult or ambiguous, and the influencing agents are united and confident.”

Gardner wondered, would new evidence “make us doubt our opinions?” The answer, Gardner found, is “Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that supports that view while ignoring, rejecting, or harshly scrutinizing information that casts doubt on it.” [My red emphasis.]

The latest evidence suggests COVID-19 is not as high a risk as initially thought. If you think such evidence will convince your neighbors or Facebook friends that it’s time to end the lockdowns, you will be endlessly frustrated. Our neighbors care what other people think. If you live in an area where support for the lockdowns is widespread, your neighbor will likely go along. Remember, the more nuanced an issue is, and the more critical the problem, the more the desire to conform goes up.

We are living through both a pandemic and a contagious madness of global proportions.

Politicians who led us down this destructive lockdown path won’t be changing their view until their “solution” is politically untenable.

(Link)

In 1850, the French economist Frédéric Bastiat aided the world in understanding “the seen and unseen costs” of authoritarian policies. What Bastiat was referring to is the fact that it’s simple to see how (for instance) the state giving millions of people a $5000.00 check will buy them groceries and pay rent. But it’s not so simple or obvious — and yet even more critical — to see the costs and harms of where such money must come from: the escalation of borrowing and taxation, the trillions in pointless spending that accumulate, the unprecedented amounts of new money created by the Federal Reserve, the ensuing inflation, which is a form of theft on people’s life-savings, and the countless other destructive ramifications and repercussions, which mushroom endlessly because in trying to fix the initial problems that the unseen costs create, more controls are levied and then more unseen costs accrue.

Yet the masses (i.e. the voters), unwilling to even consider the possibility of unseen costs, cheer for it because in their eyes government can magically create money from whole cloth.

Ladies, gentleman, and everyone else — please hear me: it is naïve to think that people won’t adapt to a threat, real or perceived. It’s equally naive to think that businesses won’t either — including shutting their doors, if they deem it most prudent, or if the customers determine it by their voluntarily deciding not to go out for drinks or food, entertainment or recreation, because they have concerns about the health and safety of themselves and their family — just as people already were doing without needing a government mandate; just as businesses deemed “essential” already have and just as businesses deemed “non-essential” already were before state-forced lockdown made it illegal.

The more you treat human beings like helpless babies, the more human beings will expect to be treated this way — and therefore the greater the growing dependency on that monstrous leviathan known as the state, which is by definition an agency of force and as such cannot spend a single penny unless it first either taxes, borrows, or prints: until in a very short time, there is no end to the things that people, even once self-reliant people, come to expect the state (rather than voluntary transactions and peaceful exchanges among humans) to provide for everyone — all in exchange for your and my inalienable right to life and property, and that of course includes the limitless ingenuity and progress and health and wealth and civilization brought about by conditions of freedom and the protection of our inalienable rights.

There is a very specific reason that all societies governed predominantly by authoritarian states exist in widespread poverty and complete suppression of the individual’s rights, as there is a precise reason that all societies governed by a predominately laissez-faire state have, exactly to that extent, flourished and freed the individual.

Freedom once gone is gone forever.

This is why you MUSTMUSTMUST stand up against this unprecedented power-grab, and the propaganda campaign that largely fueled it. Even if you’re perfectly okay with the state now having this kind of power over this particular thing, realize there is no longer any check on it: it was decreed by executive order, and that power is automatically unchecked, and horribly dangerous. Think of that unchecked power turning, for no reason or just cause, against something (or someone) you hold dear — because I promise you that it is only a matter of time before this unleashed power-source spreads into other areas. Power and bureaucracy once established are impossible to retrogress away from, and there is already a growing chorus of voices calling for no return to normal — which was hardly laissez-faire anyway, though much closer than this current cataclysm.

There is the threat of a virus, and this virus and the destruction caused by it are real and should never be taken lightly, but rather with measured and serious precautions — precautions which a free society with a free people rationally informed (by, for instance, the testing kits that the CDC bureau made illegal in favor of their own broken junk) are best equipped to handle — just as we should take seriously any influenza or other potential epidemic.

The dangers should not, however, be overblown, and neither should we be lied to, nor yanked around like puppets by bureaucratic puppet-masters who are philosophically bankrupt, so that the “cure” creates greater destruction (by far) than the disease. There has unquestionably been fear-mongering and outright prevarications, and it is an outrage and, in my opinion, a total scandal which, in the name of science and scientific integrity, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law that Neil Ferguson, the corrupt scientist largely responsible for the onset of this hysteria proper, still refuses to show anyone his thirteen-year-old computer code which he used to make his outlandish predictions about Covid-19. There has been a definite propaganda-machine behind much of the catastrophizing — a machine promoting misinformation, exaggeration, hysteria, and panic, and there has unquestionably been a huge governmental power-play as a result of that machine and the fear it thereby spawned and which the majority of people are permitting in total acquiescence to the whipped-up fear. Not even the New York Times, once the most admired and venerable newspaper in the United States, if not the world, now denies this — in large measure because they, too, bought into it.

There’s no end to the emergencies and crises that power-lusting politicians and bureaucrats, with their unslakable cupidity, are capable of generating — all of which to the detriment of individual rights: whether the crisis is environmental, terroristic, proletarian, pandemic, privilege, labor, geo-political, racial, religious, or any others, both known as well as the yet-to-be-conceived, or any cross-combination. The forces that work tirelessly against individual rights are legion and multiplex, and they are constant because, like virus, they can’t survive exposure to light, and they thus mutate from year-to-year, decade-to-decade, generation-to-generation: God-or-Devil-appointed kings and queens one generation, Monarchy the next; Marxism one generation, Socialism on the NAZI pattern next; Neo-Marxism one generation, environmentalism the decade following — right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Union; deep ecology one decade, inequality the next; privilege one year and then the year following, democratic socialism is all the rage. And so it goes. One generation plagiarizes another. The only thing different about them are the concretes: the principles remain precisely the same.

Quoting from a good article, with slightly confusing grammar and punctuation, by a writer named John Tamny:

It cannot be stressed enough that the political response to a virus, one that has broadly limited freedom with our “own good” in mind, has amounted to an obnoxious non sequitur. Death potentially looms due to an unknown, so restrain the very human capital that has felled all manner of past maladies with economic growth, creativity, and advances born of growth capital matched with the creative?

The lack of freedom that so many say is the coronavirus solution is in truth what blinds us to a solution. There’s so much we don’t know, and one reason we don’t is because there are too many rules, and too many not allowed by decree to produce information about the implications of people freely moving about and interacting.

That it took only the suggestion of the possibility of sickness, with an approximately estimated one percent lethality (and it is almost certainly lower), to render a nation once characterized by individuality, autonomy, freedom, innovation, creativity, industriousness, hard work, industry, and more into housebound conformists — it completely confirms what some non-conforming commentators have suggested: this is the most mind-spinning consolidation in the shortest span of time of millions and millions willingly acquiescing individual liberty to full power that you will ever see played out in real time. And I agree.

“It’s possible to believe that Covid-19 is potentially as lethal (or more) than even the highest estimates, contagion rates high or higher than estimates, and social distancing wise, while also believing that current government polices are misguided and tyrannical. They’re not mutually exclusive views.”

— Peter Earl, economist

Please consider what I already said above: the power which the state has seized by executive decree is a newfound power that’s unchecked, and even if you agree wholeheartedly with the motive and desired results of this particular power-play, remember the following and think about it carefully: it is an unjustly acquired state power over individuals and their property, yours included, and all your loved ones’ as well, and because it’s unchecked, it is a power that can now move in any direction, into any arena of human life.