Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Climate Lockdowns Are Coming: Part II

What About the Roads | October 16, 2020

In this three-part series we will exam the transformation from COVID lockdowns to climate lockdowns. In Part I we established a timeline of the dark side of the environmental movement and now we’ll be looking into the specifics of what a climate lockdown really means, and what impact current lockdown measures have had on the environment. In Part III we will see how it fits into the bigger picture of sustainable development as described by international organizations such as the United Nations and what can be done to derail this agenda.

As we saw in Part I of this series, the environmental movement has a dark streak running through it. Many of the architects of the movement hold a Malthusian, eugenics-obsessed view of the world and their fingerprints are all over the growing call for a global climate lockdown. A movement based on the best of intentions is once again being hijacked to centralize power and eviscerate human rights.

With that established it is time to closely examine what exactly Mariana Mazzucato is proposing when she threatens a climate lockdown. In her view, and those on whose behalf she writes, humanity must be willing to undergo a total restructuring of society at the hands of the elite in order to save the planet or continue to live in lockdown. The brave new world she envisions is a sort-of technocracy, a government based on the management of society by unelected technical experts. Ultimately, this vision is less about driving electric cars and switching to a plant-based diet and more about a hostile takeover of the world’s resources.

The Calls for A Climate Lockdown Begin

With Mazzucato’s questionable climate science already addressed it’s time to move on to investigating her criticisms of society as we know it. But first we need to understand where this message is coming from. Mazzucato’s story comes to us from Project Syndicate, a news organization which distributes “high-quality commentaries to a global audience.” The publishing of these commentaries is made possible by funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation, and the Google Digital News Initiative among others. Let’s just say her view doesn’t exactly represent the disenfranchised or any grassroots movement.

Mazzucato’s opinion piece is more of a threat than anything else. She believes we are living through a series of crises during the “disease of the Anthropocene,” an anti-human echo from her environmental forefathers, that center around the climate, economic and social inequality, and public health. Neither government nor the private sector are capable of addressing such catastrophic situations in her estimation so we must undergo a “green economic transformation” or else be locked down like prisoners until the problem is resolved.

What she has to say on what would happen during a climate lockdown itself is actually quite brief:

Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.

The brevity of this proclamation is curious as these propositions for reducing carbon emissions and “going green” are nothing new. Environmentalists have been advocating for these changes for decades now, though notably without the need for literally confining people to their homes. The bulk of the article is dedicated to the overhaul of the economy, revealing her true message to the masses.

The Future In Her Eyes

This transformation entails building whatever an “inclusive, sustainable” economy is and requires that government assistance to the private sector be reigned in. Not by stopping the public-private revolving door, upholding justice through the legal system, enabling a free market, or simply ending taxpayer bailouts, but continuing all of these practices so long as the government attaches strict conditions to how that money is used. Governments should also add new taxes on raw materials and legislate “job guarantees” into existence somehow. Under this system the political and economical elite still siphon off money from the lower classes, but by dictating that “firms need to listen to trade unions and workers’ collectives, community groups, consumer advocates, and others” this fascist system will solve the problem of inclusivity.

The state must also continue to steer the course of finance through investments. When the financial crisis hit in 2008 it wasn’t the cozy relationship between Washington and Wall Street that kept money circulating through the financial sector rather than entering the larger economy, but “bad investments” on the government’s part. Bad because they didn’t invest long term in eco-friendly energy like wind power or support green infrastructure projects according to her. She gives no explanation as to how these investments would allow money to flow into Main Street.

When looking for positive examples of state investments she cites New Zealand’s “Wellbeing Budget” and the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB). The Wellbeing Budget is the name given to the New Zealand federal government’s fiscal budget for the year 2019 and represented a shift away from making monetary decisions based on GDP and towards spending based on “wellbeing”. It made for an excellent public relations move which portrayed a government concerned about the wellness of its people but in reality transferred many budgetary decisions to experts and bureaucrats rather than elected officials, a hallmark of a technocratic society. New Zealand has enacted one of the world’s harshest lockdowns in the name of the coronavirus which may be why it gets a nod here.

The SNIB is set to launch by the end of 2020 and while she doesn’t mention it in her article, Mazzacuto has played a key role in developing this institution. This state-owned institution will offer grants, soft loans, credit guarantees and co-investments to companies in pursuit of certain missions. These missions are still being finalized but aim to mimic the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals which center around climate change, shifting demographics, and economic inclusion. Like New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget, the SNIB framework ultimately takes power out of the hands of the public and into the hands of a technocratic elite. The figures who will run the SNIB and direct it’s funds will be unelected and unaccountable to the public but will use taxpayer funds to steer the direction of the economy nonetheless.

These examples are the blueprints all nations should be using according to Mazzucato. In a follow-up interview with the Irish Times, she makes it unambiguously clear that central economic planning is the proper role of government:

This crisis, and the recovery we need, give us an opportunity to understand and explore how to do capitalism differently. This requires a rethink of what governments are for: rather than simply fixing market failures when they arise, they should move towards actively shaping and creating markets to take on society’s most pressing challenges… This will secure the direction of travel we want – green, sustainable, and equitable.

Given her connections to some of the world’s most powerful people it is highly unlikely that “we” refers to the common man. It seems clear that she is speaking on the behalf of the elite behind the scenes.

Mazzucato’s final claim, dropped out of nowhere and without citation or follow-up, is that an economy centered around renewable energy is the antidote to our otherwise disastrous future. She then menacingly reminds the reader that “radical change is inevitable,” so either go along with their plan, or face climate lockdowns while they do it anyway.

How Have Lockdowns Impacted The Climate So Far?

With much of the world under house arrest, carbon dioxide emissions declined in the first half of 2020 as one would expect. Correspondingly, air pollution dropped off in many industrialized areas. This was touted as a victory for the climate, especially when photos of the Himalayas, free of their usual smog in India, went viral. This was a relatively short-lived victory however as numbers began rising again in the second half of the year.

While air pollution dropped more plastic waste has ended up in our oceans than ever before. Disposable face masks have been worn, and disposed of, in the billions this year and are contributing to environmental degradation, littering in public places, and increasing the levels of microplastics in the oceans. Takeout dining has been a staple for many during lockdown which has meant single-use plastics have become more prevalent and sadly ended up in in the sea in increased numbers as well.

More studies and information will surely come out in the months and years ahead but as of now this is the picture we have of the climate in a locked down world and it isn’t very convincing that by continuing these practices the world will be free of man’s impact on it. The desire for clear skies, clean air, and habitable oceans are all noble and improvements can and will be made but the idea that in order to achieve these things we need society reshaped at the hands of a shadowy elite is still insane and speaks to a larger agenda at play.

The Big Picture

When looking into the environmental impact of lockdowns there is a chilling refrain in the mainstream media. The initial decrease in emissions is cheered on but the rebound is seen as a sign that while the current lockdowns are doing some good it just isn’t enough (see here, here, here, here, here, and here to see that message repeated).

What is needed according to these writers and groups is a reengineering of society. This Great Reset will come at the expense of the many, to the benefit of the few. In the final installment of this series we will see how climate lockdowns and the reconfiguration of society fits perfectly into the big picture that the elite have in mind.

December 23, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The five key events in the fake pandemic

By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | December 22, 2020

This article is a summary. I’ve written extensively on each of the five key events.

ONE: The false claim that a new virus was discovered and isolated.

No true isolation has been performed. The so-called genetic sequencing of the virus was actually a concoction, a cobbling together of pieces of data referencing segments of RNA. These segments were PRESUMED to be parts of the new virus—but researchers didn’t have the virus, so their presumptions amounted to fraud.

TWO: The erecting of a diagnostic test (PCR) for the virus they didn’t have. Obviously, no such test has meaning. It is built on the same sorts of absurd assumptions that led to the fictional discovery of the virus. However, strategically speaking, the test has produced millions of “positive results,” which are taken to mean “infected by the virus.” On this foundation of sand, the lockdowns were declared.

THREE: The Chinese lockdown of 50 million citizens, for no medical reason. This unprecedented event provided the model for other governments, and for the CDC and the World Health Organization. Now it was “acceptable” to imprison the global population and wreak economic devastation across the planet.

FOUR: The absurd computer prediction of 500,000 deaths in the UK and two million in the US, made by historically failed modeler, Neil Ferguson. His institute at the Imperial College of London is bankrolled by Bill Gates. Ferguson’s predictions were used to convince Trump and Boris Johnson that states of emergency and lockdowns were necessary.

FIVE: The forced premature deaths of millions of elderly people across the world—which were falsely called “COVID-19 deaths.”

These people were and are suffering from multiple long-term health conditions, made far worse by decades of medical treatment with toxic drugs. Terrified by a COVID diagnosis, then isolated from family and friends, they give up and die.

There are other important events, to be sure, but these are the key five.

The underlying fact that needs to be understood: what is called COVID-19 is not one condition. It is a variety of illnesses and effects stemming from different traditional causes RE-PACKAGED under the label, “COVID.”

Where authentic new conditions and causes may be involved, independent investigators need to look closely at such clusters of people, where they live. For example, the investigators should find out whether toxic vaccine campaigns were initiated in a community or region prior to declaration of the “COVID outbreak.”


TOPIC ARCHIVES:

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/virus/

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/testing/

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/pcr/

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/lockdown/

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/cases/

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/neil-ferguson/

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/old-people/

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/tag/nursing-homes/

(To join our email list, click here.)

December 23, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

What’s actually IN the US “Covid Stimulus Bill”?

The answer to that is nothing like as simple as you’d expect, given the name.

OffGuardian | December 22, 2020

The US congress just passed their Covid stimulus bill, or the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021” to give its official title. So what’s actually inside it? What has just been passed into law?

The answers to that is “nobody really knows”, least of all the members of congress, who passed the law without reading it, as they so often do. It’s the longest bill in US history, at over 5500 pages and it sailed through the voting mostly sight unseen.

We’ve downloaded a copy of the full document and will embed it for those of you patient or masochistic enough to tackle the whole thing. We’ve read some already, and will point out the highlights:

  • “Foreign aid” is a big winner. Egypt is getting $1.3 billion, Sudan, Israel and Ukraine get over 500 million each, and many other countries around the world sizeable contributions, much of which will be spent on “defense”. Which is to say sent straight back to America via massive arms purchases.
  • Not all the money being sent overseas is for buying weapons, some is for backing coups. Venezuela and Belarus get special mention here, each getting their own section of the bill detailing how terrible their “illegal regimes” are. There’s also a large section on “combating Chinese influence”.
  • For some reason there’s another section on copyright law, which makes illegal streaming copyrighted content a federal crime, punishable by up to three years in prison.
  • Nearly 300 million is put aside to develop influenza vaccines and prevent a future influenza pandemic.
  • 4 BILLION dollars for the Gates-funded GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
  • Vaccine “misinformation” is also a concern, and the bill provides for a pro-vaccine propaganda campaign – or rather a “PUBLIC AWARENESS CAMPAIGN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF VACCINATIONS”

So – huge amounts of foreign aid, support for various coups, totally irrelevant copyright laws, provisions for pro-vaccine propaganda campaigns… it’s not your typical “stimulus bill” so far, is it?

December 22, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ): The Suppression of a Proven COVID Remedy

By Barry Kissin | Global Research | December 22, 2020

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has been an FDA approved drug for over 65 years. It has been on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines since the list began in 1977. People have been safely treated with HCQ billions of times for malaria, lupus, HIV and rheumatoid arthritis. HCQ exerts both anti-inflammatory and antiviral effects.

Nevertheless, the FDA has caused many states to ban the use of HCQ to treat COVID-19 and made it very difficult to obtain a prescription elsewhere in the U.S. by foisting studies that greatly exaggerate a potential heart rhythm problem. In contrast, the CDC website says this about HCQ:

“With frequent dosing, rarely reported adverse events include cardiac arrhythmias in those with liver or kidney dysfunction … CDC has no limits on the use of hydroxychloroquine for the prevention of malaria … It can also be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers … and children of all ages.”

On Nov. 19, Dr. George Fareed from California testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee about successfully treating over 1000 COVID patients with HCQ. On Dec. 10, Fareed responded as follows to follow-up questions from Senator Josh Hawley:

“The earlier the treatment can be started after the start of the infection, the better … Sadly, many infected people and primary care doctors and doctors in ERs follow the NIH and Dr. Fauci stipulations with no effective treatments offered. We need to have the NIH/FDA/CDC formally acknowledge the importance of early treatment with moderately acting, safe anti-virals [like HCQ] so readily available. When (if ever) that happens, everything would improve dramatically.”

At c19study.com is an up-to-date list of the countries successfully treating COVID with HCQ, mostly in combination with zinc and an anti-biotic (azithromycin or doxycycline): India, South Korea, Indonesia, China, Greece, Russia, U.A.E., Turkey and countries throughout Africa, South America and Central America.

Suppression of HCQ is a central factor in why the U.S. has among the very worst rates of illness and death from COVID-19.

For example, BBC News published an article titled “How Turkey took control of Covid-19 emergency”: “Chief doctor Nurettin Yiyit says it’s key to use hydroxychloroquine early. ‘We have no hesitation about this drug. We believe it’s effective because we get the results.’”

A study in India, where HCQ is being widely used as a prophylaxis (preventative medication), concluded that:

“The pivotal finding of our study was the noteworthy benefits of HCQ prophylaxis … [T]he National Task Force for COVID-19 in India recommended once a week maintenance dose for seven weeks …”

Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., is a renowned Professor of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health, author of over 300 peer-reviewed publications. This is how he describes the situation:

“There’s been a massive disinformation campaign that stretches from government to the media … The evidence in favor of hydroxychloroquine benefit in high-risk patients treated early as outpatients is stronger than anything else I’ve ever studied … The F.D.A. has relied on Dr. Fauci and his N.I.H. advisory groups to make a statement saying that there is no benefit of using hydroxychloroquine in outpatients … That’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who could have been saved by usage of this drug … People need to be writing or calling their congressmen and senators … [The] bureaucracy is in bed with other forces causing [it] to make decisions not based on the science …” (emphasis added)

HCQ is generic and costs a few dollars for an entire course.

As of the end May, there were over 150 million doses of HCQ in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS). This stockpile is currently wasting away in government warehouses. On June 22, the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS) filed suit for an injunction against the March 28 order of the FDA that prohibits the use of this stockpile except for already-hospitalized COVID patients for whom it is too late. See aapsonline.org/hcqsuit

The only drug approved by the FDA for the outpatient treatment of COVID-19 is Remdesivir, a largely ineffective medicine manufactured by pharmaceutical giant Gilead, that costs over $3000 for a course.

The immensely wealthy pharmaceutical industry which cannot profit from a cheap and available remedy like HCQ is largely responsible for its suppression through its influence upon government agencies and the media.

An illustration of how the system works is described by the editors-in-chief of the two most prestigious medical journals in the world, namely The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, who cite the “criminal” pressures put on them by pharmaceutical companies, thus explaining how a series of negative HCQ studies got published. In the words of the editor of The Lancet, Dr. Richard Horton:

“If this continues, we are not going to be able to publish any more clinical research data because pharmaceutical companies are so financially powerful … Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”

“Medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies,” wrote Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

*

December 22, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

There are thousands of Covid strains, so this new scare is NO big deal, but politicians just love the new authoritarianism

How the Grinch stole Christmas..starring Boris Johnson (Twitter)

By Peter Andrews | RT | December 21, 2020

The UK’s virus mutation is nothing but recycled alarmism, with no substance to justify the cancellation of Christmas and plunging us all into yet more misery. It’s unscientific, unjustifiable and unforgivable.

Let me set the scene. The world (we are told) is in the grip of a deadly plague. Health services (we are told) are on the brink of collapse. And just when you think things cannot get any worse, the horrific news comes down from on high that our invisible enemy has mutated into an even scarier form. Although it is too early to know anything of substance about it, it is entirely possible that it is more contagious, or more dangerous, or – who knows – maybe both.

Was that the situation at the weekend as the UK was plunged into what’s rapidly become its worst crisis since World War II (and certainly the worst self-induced one), just ahead of Christmas?

No, this was the precise situation FIVE MONTHS AGO, when I wrote about Spike D614G, a mutant variant of coronavirus that we were told could be up to NINE TIMES more contagious. You may not remember because that mutant strain turned out to be a total nothing burger. So why would this one be any different?

The name game

This time around, our Covid commissars haven’t even bothered to give the new strain a flashy name – it is called ‘VUI2020/12/01’. For those interested in what evidence ‘the experts’ have to excuse the panic they are sowing, here is their own one-page justification. Unsurprisingly it is a scant, wishy-washy patchwork of hasty findings, centring on already debunked PCR tests and the mystical ‘R number’. There is absolutely no suggestion it poses any additional threat.

These experts, styling themselves as NERVTAG (why do they love to come up with acronyms that sound as they came from a James Bond movie?), say they have “moderate confidence” that VUI2020/12/01 is more contagious than the supermarket-brand coronavirus. (Would it also be fair to say, then, that they have “moderate confidence” that it is not more contagious?)

In any case, I am tickled to see the name of our old pal Neil Ferguson pop up in NERVTAG, the man who screwed his mistress, screwed us all, and – we thought – screwed his career in the process. I think I am actually starting to like this nutty professor, who must have a neck of the purest, untarnished brass. Maybe it’s something you pick up on the London swinging circuit. As the old saying goes, you just can’t keep a good man down!

Meanwhile, a top Scottish doctor has remarked that there isn’t a shred of evidence that this strain is any more contagious (let alone deadly). Professor Hugh Pennington even notes that the timing of the announcement is ‘’very handy to cancel Christmas.” An entire group of anti-lockdown scientists have issued a challenge to Health Secretary Matt Hancock to back up his claims about the new variant. Professor Carl Heneghan is still waiting for evidence for the claim that the new strain is, precisely, 70 percent more contagious. And I hardly need to tell you by now that the fantastic Dr Mike Yeadon is having none of it.

Nothing new under the sun

Back in July, I made the argument that it would actually be a good thing if the Spike D614G strain was more contagious. I explained the school of thought that says that seasonal respiratory viruses, like the one that causes Covid, evolve to become less dangerous as they spread through a population. This is because respiratory viruses always have thousands of variants, some that increase the deadliness and some that reduce it. The deadliest ones sicken or kill their hosts quickly, before they have a chance to spread it to other people. But the least deadly ones, which cause no or mild symptoms, can hitch a ride in their hosts to many people who they can then infect and multiply. Thus, natural selection favours the mildest, most contagious strains.

I still believe in the logic of that theory, and I think it explains why the coronavirus is now endemic (i.e. everywhere) and by extension why all further restrictions are completely pointless and do only harm. I will not give Hancock and the rest of SAGE’s anti-scientific advisers the satisfaction of directly addressing this so-called new strain: as Prof. Pennington has suggested, it looks like a ploy designed to mislead the public into sacrificing Christmas, the only glimmer of hope that had got them through this harshest of winters.

One should be wary of caricaturing Boris Johnson and the rest of his cronies perpetrating this crime on the people as ‘Grinches’. They are nothing so amusing or cuddly. They are far, far worse than that, and make no mistake about it, they know full well what they are doing. The irrepressible Peter Hitchens has pointed out that Britain now resembles the cursed land from CS Lewis’ Narnia books, where it is “always winter but never Christmas.” I never thought the nightmare worlds of my childhood reading would manifest in reality; but this year, they have.

Peter Andrews is an Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in the life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics

December 21, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Government, Not Coronavirus, Is Killing Small Businesses

By Ron Paul | December 21, 2020

A video of a confrontation between Ventura County, California health officials and restaurant owner Anton Van Happen has gone viral. The health officials were ordering Mr. Van Happen to close his business because he allegedly violated California’s ban on outdoor dining. Mr. Van Happen asked the health officials if the government will pay his employees and his rent while his business is indefinitely closed.

Mr. Van Happen is hardly the only small business owner worried about how to pay bills during the lockdowns. Many small businesses operate on a narrow profit margin, so being forced to “temporarily” shut down or limit the number of customers they can serve is a virtual death sentence.

The lockdowns have already caused as many as 200,000 small businesses to permanently close. Lockdowns, by shrinking the number of employers, lead to long-term unemployment or lower wages for many workers.

While governments have terrorized small businesses, they have typically deemed the big chain stores “essential businesses” so they can remain open. The lockdowns are thus another government policy that gives big businesses a competitive advantage over their smaller competitors.

The benefits big businesses get from the lockdowns — including fewer competitors, more customers, and a job market with more workers competing for fewer jobs — may explain why many big businesses are not fighting the lockdowns. Instead, most big retail chains are requiring their workers and customers to wear masks. Many big businesses may soon deny service to those who refuse to receive a Covid vaccine.

One would think that progressives who claim to oppose policies that benefit big corporations like WalMart, Target, and Amazon would oppose the lockdowns. Sadly, even many progressives are unquestioningly parroting the Covid propaganda and demonizing those who dissent.

By slowing down the development of herd immunity among the population, the lockdowns could put those truly at risk in greater danger. Lockdowns have also had negative effects such as increases in drug and alcohol abuse and increases in domestic violence. Meanwhile, many schoolchildren are deprived of the opportunity to interact with their teachers and their peers. Instead, these children are subjected to the fraud of “virtual learning.”

Resistance to Covid tyranny is growing as more people figure out that lockdowns and mandates are both unnecessary and harmful. This resistance was largely started by small business owners faced with a choice between obeying the government or making sure they, and their employees, can feed their families. Small business owners have been leaders in recent anti-lockdown protests across America.

Eventually the resistance will grow to the point where the politicians will be forced to either double down on authoritarianism or admit the lockdowns were a mistake. Either way, those of us who know the truth must resist the Covid tyranny until government officials no longer terrorize small businesses for the crime of serving willing consumers.

Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute.

December 21, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

2020: The Year we Sold Our Liberties For a Medical Tyranny

By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | December 19, 2020

This year has seen what looks like the birth of a new religion. Let us call it Covidianity. It has its Prophets (eg. Neil Ferguson); its Priesthood of experts (eg. Whitty and Vallance); its own Soteriology (eg. The Vaccine of Salvation); its evangelists (eg. Piers Morgan); its own eschatology (eg. The New Normal); and of course its heretics (anyone questioning the data or the narrative).

Not everyone who has adopted the bizarre practices of Covidianity is a Covidian. Many have been cowed into it somewhat unwillingly; many have been bamboozled into it somewhat unwittingly; and many others just do not seem to have thought through what is being done to them, much less whether it is right, necessary and proportionate. But there are definitely true Covidians, and you can recognise them by their insistence that all bow down to their cult, and that those who refuse should be shamed.

In one sense, this religion has come upon us at warp speed. There we all were, going about our business at the start of the year, not particularly suspecting that there would be anything particularly out of the ordinary in 2020, and suddenly, wham! Yet in another sense, many of the ingredients were already in place long before this year, and they were simply brought together in one large melting pot to produce a toxic brew of fear, hysteria and irrationality on a truly epic scale.

Those ingredients include: A society that had abandoned belief in the Triune God and hadn’t quite managed to find a replacement to fill the void; a society obsessed with Safetyism, and the general sterilisation of life; a society glued to the Propaganda Box in the corner of the room with millions hanging on the every word that proceeds from it as if it were the very Oracle of God; and a society that had, by and large, utterly forgotten what freedom actually means.

What this has given us is a society seeking an arche (first principle) to hold everything together; one trying to stave off death by eliminating every potential risk; one that looks unquestioningly to the Government, the media and assembled experts to tell them how to do this; and one that has proved itself willing to give up freedoms won through blood, sweat and tears centuries ago to achieve it. In short, we have arrived at the planned, technocratic oligarchy that C S Lewis warned of us of over half a century ago:

“The new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend.”

And here’s Dwight Eisenhower saying much the same thing in his farewell address in 1961:

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Sound familiar?

The irony of all that has happened this year is that in our apparent attempt to eliminate risk, we have given up our lives. That is, we have placed apparent safety so high up on the list of priorities that it has become a god, governing how we are to live, breathe and have our being, and it so dominates our everyday lives, that it makes normal life impossible, sucking out joy, meaning, and purpose. It is, as Lewis said, a tragic way to live:

“Now I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.”

One can understand how people in a plague situation would accept the suspension of normal life for a time, since you don’t mess about with an illness that wipes out something like 60% of the population. But for a coronavirus with an Infection Fatality Rate of around 0.2% – 0.26%? For a virus which has caused deaths — as a proportion of the population — to return to levels not seen since … ooh … those dark days of 2000:

 

And yes, I know that Covidian Logicians will claim that the deaths are not higher because we did all that weird stuff like shutting down the country and wearing bizarre face gear and making sure we didn’t sing loudly and so on. Then again, Covidian Logic claims lots of things which aren’t true, and the fact is there is no evidence whatsoever to show that these measures had any effect in terms of altering mortality rates.

For the illusion of safety — a mess of pottage — we have sold the heritage, and the liberties that were bequeathed to us by those who have gone before, which it was our duty to preserve for those who are to come. As Edmund Burke taught us:

“Society is indeed a contract … It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

We have betrayed our ancestors and our descendants, and the idea that we will just get these liberties back is a woeful misunderstanding of how the world works. Firstly, human nature being what it is, those in power who have developed a taste for authoritarianism rarely like to give it up. And secondly, liberties take centuries of long hard work to grow up, but can be hacked down in a short time — as has happened to us in 2020. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for reinstating them speedily.

Having said that, perhaps there is still time. Perhaps there is still a window of opportunity for us to step back from the brink of this absurd Medical Tyranny, with its false promises of safety, and instead embrace life and freedom. But this would mean rejecting this misery of Covidianity without any further delay, and taking a good long draught of whatever it was they used to drink in Rohan:

“Eowyn: I fear neither death nor pain.

Aragorn: What do you fear, my lady?

Eowyn: A cage. To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valour has gone beyond recall or desire.”

December 21, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

2020: The Year we Let Ourselves be Infantilised and Dehumanised

By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | December 17, 2020

I recently wrote a satirical speech by our Prime Minister, in which I imagined him coming up with all sorts of absurd rules for the Christmas season. It was really hard. Not because I was unable to come up with hundreds of such rules, were I minded to do so, but because the whole point of satire is to raise the absurdities up a step or two, in order to highlight the ridiculousness of what is happening. But how do you do this when the real-life absurdities have already been turned up to 11 on the amplifier? I kid you not when I tell you that my original list included a rule against playing certain board games over Christmas — which I rejected — only to see a few days later SAGE coming out and advising against the playing of board games.

We have now had nearly nine months of being treated like utter imbeciles. A once great country with a once free people has been reduced to the level of being governed by pathetic, childish slogans. And for some reason we have allowed ourselves to be infantilised.

I am utterly baffled as to how people can have sat through some of these slogans being introduced without responding with howls of laughter.

“Stay Alert. Control the Virus. Save Lives.”

What on earth is this actually supposed to mean? Stay Alert? For what? Are we supposed to be on our guard for a virus that is approximately 120 nanometres, or around 1,000th the width of a human hair? Are we to carry an electron microscope around with us wherever we go, just in case? One of my favourite signs is an electronic one I sometimes see on my occasional drives into the office. On one day, it says, “Stay Alert. Control the Virus.” On another, it says, “Stay Alert. Watch out for Cyclists.” It should be noted that cyclists are considerably bigger than 120nm and even often wearing the kind of hi-vis jackets that coronaviruses refuse to wear.

Control the Virus? Say what? You mean they actually think we’re stupid enough to think they’re clever enough to devise schemes that can actually control those little invisible 120 nm virus particles that are in the air and on surfaces. Apparently so.

Save Lives? I am yet to hear a convincing argument as to how I and my family, not having any symptoms and thus not being infected by the virus, can possibly stop the spread of said virus that we don’t have by staying at home or wearing a piece of cloth over or respiratory passages, such that we save lives.

More recently, it has been decided that the slogans were maybe a bit too high-brow and needed to be simplified further, this time into monosyllables: “Hands. Face. Space.” Although I tend to avoid watching Comrade Johnson and Co as they spout this nonsense at their regular stand-ups, on the occasions when I have had that misfortune, it has felt eerily like suddenly being thrust into the world’s largest Kindergarten with teacher talking down to his little charges as if they were really, really stupid.

I won’t sport with your intelligence by mentioning all the other mind-numbing slogans we’ve been fed this year, suffice it to say that phrases such as “social bubble” and “Covid-secure” would be deeply funny were it not for the seriousness of the situation into which those coming up with such tripe have placed us (as an aside, are such buildings for which it is claimed that they are “Covid-secure” also “Flu-Secure” and “Cold-Secure”?)

But the infantilising of an entire population is by no means the worst thing they have done to us. Worse by far has been the dehumanising of millions of people, which has been done via a number of enormously destructive methods.

Chief of them is the idea that we must all avoid each other. I cannot even begin to think how destructive this has become. In a normal society, if you or I have symptoms of a particularly nasty seasonal respiratory illness, which is what Covid-19 is, we would avoid one another. Obviously. But the idea of perfectly healthy people avoiding other perfectly healthy people must qualify as one of the most absurd concepts ever dreamt up. Not only is it self-evidently unnecessary, it is bound to have long-term consequences for the way we view one another, the way we relate to one another, the way we behave around one another. It turns us from seeing one another as humans, made in the Image of God, to walking virus carriers and a potential risk. Some people now literally behave as if they are navigating their way through a crowd of potential terrorists, rather than simply walking through a group of fellow humans.

People avoidance is not just deeply destructive from a psychological and social perspective, it is also deeply cruel. The idea that a grandparent cannot have contact with their children or grandchildren is just obscene. And the very thought of the elderly being left to fester away in care homes, rather than being allowed contact with their families is sick. Yet that’s what we’ve done, or allowed to be done.

And of course, I cannot leave off talking about dehumanisation without mentioning masks. These wretched things were introduced in the Summer, long after the epidemic had waned, at a time when they could not possibly have done any good, even if they had been capable of doing any good. Why were they introduced? Partly to keep the fear-narrative going, even though there was extraordinarily little risk of dying of a seasonal respiratory virus at that time of the year. But even more important, they are a sign of submission. They are a, “we can do with you what we like moment.” They are nothing to do with health. They are a psychological mask, and even more than the social distancing, they have served to alter the way we see one another and are seen by others.

Millions of people humiliated by the Marketing Team of Covid-19 and their infantile slogans. Millions of people dehumanised by having their faces, their smiles, their laughter, their thoughtfulness etc covered to make them into expressionless drones. That was the year we just lived through. Will 2021 be the year a critical mass try to escape the Kindergarten and return to being human?

December 20, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence

American Institute for Economic Research – December 19, 2020

The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion.

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.

Much of the following list has been put together by data engineer Ivor Cummins, who has waged a year-long educational effort to upend intellectual support for lockdowns. AIER has added its own and the summaries. The upshot is that the virus is going to do as viruses do, same as always in the history of infectious disease. We have extremely limited control over them, and that which we do have is bound up with time and place. Fear, panic, and coercion are not ideal strategies for managing viruses. Intelligence and medical therapeutics fare much better.

(These studies are focused only on lockdown and their relationship to virus control. They do not get into the myriad associated issues that have vexed the world such as mask mandates, PCR-testing issues, death misclassification problem, or any particular issues associated with travel restrictions, restaurant closures, and hundreds of other particulars about which whole libraries will be written in the future.)

1. “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes” by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, Sheila Riazi. EClinicalMedicine 25 (2020) 100464. “[F]ull lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.”

2. “Was Germany’s Corona Lockdown Necessary?” by Christof Kuhbandner, Stefan Homburg, Harald Walach, Stefan Hockertz. Advance: Sage Preprint, June 23, 2020. “Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the coronavirus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions became effective. Several reasons for such an autonomous decline have been suggested. One is that differences in host susceptibility and behavior can result in herd immunity at a relatively low prevalence level. Accounting for individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to the coronavirus yields a maximum of 17% to 20% of the population that needs to be infected to reach herd immunity, an estimate that is empirically supported by the cohort of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Another reason is that seasonality may also play an important role in dissipation.”

3. “Estimation of the current development of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Germany” by Matthias an der Heiden, Osamah Hamouda. Robert Koch-Institut, April 22, 2020. “In general, however, not all infected people develop symptoms, not all those who develop symptoms go to a doctor’s office, not all who go to the doctor are tested and not all who test positive are also recorded in a data collection system. In addition, there is a certain amount of time between all these individual steps, so that no survey system, no matter how good, can make a statement about the current infection process without additional assumptions and calculations.”

4. Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown? by Simon N. Wood. Cornell University pre-print, August 8, 2020. “A Bayesian inverse problem approach applied to UK data on COVID-19 deaths and the disease duration distribution suggests that infections were in decline before full UK lockdown (24 March 2020), and that infections in Sweden started to decline only a day or two later. An analysis of UK data using the model of Flaxman et al. (2020, Nature 584) gives the same result under relaxation of its prior assumptions on R.”

5. “Comment on Flaxman et al. (2020): The illusory effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe” by Stefan Homburg and Christof Kuhbandner. June 17, 2020. Advance, Sage Pre-Print. “In a recent article, Flaxman et al. allege that non-pharmaceutical interventions imposed by 11 European countries saved millions of lives. We show that their methods involve circular reasoning. The purported effects are pure artefacts, which contradict the data. Moreover, we demonstrate that the United Kingdom’s lockdown was both superfluous and ineffective.”

6. Professor Ben Israel’s Analysis of virus transmission. April 16, 2020. “Some may claim that the decline in the number of additional patients every day is a result of the tight lockdown imposed by the government and health authorities. Examining the data of different countries around the world casts a heavy question mark on the above statement. It turns out that a similar pattern – rapid increase in infections that reaches a peak in the sixth week and declines from the eighth week – is common to all countries in which the disease was discovered, regardless of their response policies: some imposed a severe and immediate lockdown that included not only ‘social distancing’ and banning crowding, but also shutout of economy (like Israel); some ‘ignored’ the infection and continued almost a normal life (such as Taiwan, Korea or Sweden), and some initially adopted a lenient policy but soon reversed to a complete lockdown (such as Italy or the State of New York). Nonetheless, the data shows similar time constants amongst all these countries in regard to the initial rapid growth and the decline of the disease.”

7. “Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 in Europe: a quasi-experimental study” by Paul Raymond Hunter, Felipe Colon-Gonzalez, Julii Suzanne Brainard, Steve Rushton. MedRxiv Pre-print May 1, 2020. “The current epidemic of COVID-19 is unparalleled in recent history as are the social distancing interventions that have led to a significant halt on the economic and social life of so many countries. However, there is very little empirical evidence about which social distancing measures have the most impact… From both sets of modelling, we found that closure of education facilities, prohibiting mass gatherings and closure of some non-essential businesses were associated with reduced incidence whereas stay at home orders and closure of all non-businesses was not associated with any independent additional impact.”

8. “Full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic” by Thomas Meunier. MedRxiv Pre-print May 1, 2020. “This phenomenological study assesses the impacts of full lockdown strategies applied in Italy, France, Spain and United Kingdom, on the slowdown of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends. Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.”

9. “Trajectory of COVID-19 epidemic in Europe” by Marco Colombo, Joseph Mellor, Helen M Colhoun, M. Gabriela M. Gomes, Paul M McKeigue. MedRxiv Pre-print. Posted September 28, 2020. “The classic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered model formulated by Kermack and McKendrick assumes that all individuals in the population are equally susceptible to infection. From fitting such a model to the trajectory of mortality from COVID-19 in 11 European countries up to 4 May 2020 Flaxman et al. concluded that ‘major non-pharmaceutical interventions — and lockdowns in particular — have had a large effect on reducing transmission’. We show that relaxing the assumption of homogeneity to allow for individual variation in susceptibility or connectivity gives a model that has better fit to the data and more accurate 14-day forward prediction of mortality. Allowing for heterogeneity reduces the estimate of ‘counterfactual’ deaths that would have occurred if there had been no interventions from 3.2 million to 262,000, implying that most of the slowing and reversal of COVID-19 mortality is explained by the build-up of herd immunity. The estimate of the herd immunity threshold depends on the value specified for the infection fatality ratio (IFR): a value of 0.3% for the IFR gives 15% for the average herd immunity threshold.”

10. “Effect of school closures on mortality from coronavirus disease 2019: old and new predictions” by Ken Rice, Ben Wynne, Victoria Martin, Graeme J Ackland. British Medical Journal, September 15, 2020. “The findings of this study suggest that prompt interventions were shown to be highly effective at reducing peak demand for intensive care unit (ICU) beds but also prolong the epidemic, in some cases resulting in more deaths long term. This happens because covid-19 related mortality is highly skewed towards older age groups. In the absence of an effective vaccination programme, none of the proposed mitigation strategies in the UK would reduce the predicted total number of deaths below 200 000.”

11. “Modeling social distancing strategies to prevent SARS-CoV2 spread in Israel- A Cost-effectiveness analysis” by Amir Shlomai, Ari Leshno, Ella H Sklan, Moshe Leshno. MedRxiv Pre-Print. September 20, 2020. “A nationwide lockdown is expected to save on average 274 (median 124, interquartile range (IQR): 71-221) lives compared to the ‘testing, tracing, and isolation’ approach. However, the ICER will be on average $45,104,156 (median $ 49.6 million, IQR: 22.7-220.1) to prevent one case of death. Conclusions: A national lockdown has a moderate advantage in saving lives with tremendous costs and possible overwhelming economic effects. These findings should assist decision-makers in dealing with additional waves of this pandemic.”

12. Too Little of a Good Thing A Paradox of Moderate Infection Control, by Ted Cohen and Marc Lipsitch. Epidemiology. 2008 Jul; 19(4): 588–589. “The link between limiting pathogen exposure and improving public health is not always so straightforward. Reducing the risk that each member of a community will be exposed to a pathogen has the attendant effect of increasing the average age at which infections occur. For pathogens that inflict greater morbidity at older ages, interventions that reduce but do not eliminate exposure can paradoxically increase the number of cases of severe disease by shifting the burden of infection toward older individuals.”

13. “Smart Thinking, Lockdown and COVID-19: Implications for Public Policy” by Morris Altman. Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy, 2020. “The response to COVID-19 has been overwhelmingly to lockdown much of the world’s economies in order to minimize death rates as well as the immediate negative effects of COVID-19. I argue that such policy is too often de-contextualized as it ignores policy externalities, assumes death rate calculations are appropriately accurate and, and as well, assumes focusing on direct Covid-19 effects to maximize human welfare is appropriate. As a result of this approach current policy can be misdirected and with highly negative effects on human welfare. Moreover, such policies can inadvertently result in not minimizing death rates (incorporating externalities) at all, especially in the long run. Such misdirected and sub-optimal policy is a product of policy makers using inappropriate mental models which are lacking in a number of key areas; the failure to take a more comprehensive macro perspective to address the virus, using bad heuristics or decision-making tools, relatedly not recognizing the differential effects of the virus, and adopting herding strategy (follow-the-leader) when developing policy. Improving the decision-making environment, inclusive of providing more comprehensive governance and improving mental models could have lockdowns throughout the world thus yielding much higher levels of human welfare.”

14. “SARS-CoV-2 waves in Europe: A 2-stratum SEIRS model solution” by Levan Djaparidze and Federico Lois. MedRxiv pre-print, October 23, 2020. “We found that 180-day of mandatory isolations to healthy <60 (i.e. schools and workplaces closed) produces more final deaths if the vaccination date is later than (Madrid: Feb 23 2021; Catalonia: Dec 28 2020; Paris: Jan 14 2021; London: Jan 22 2021). We also modeled how average isolation levels change the probability of getting infected for a single individual that isolates differently than average. That led us to realize disease damages to third parties due to virus spreading can be calculated and to postulate that an individual has the right to avoid isolation during epidemics (SARS-CoV-2 or any other).”

15. “Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison” by Christian Bjørnskov. SSRN working paper, August 2, 2020. “The lockdowns in most Western countries have thrown the world into the most severe recession since World War II and the most rapidly developing recession ever seen in mature market economies. They have also caused an erosion of fundamental rights and the separation of powers in a  large part of the world as both democratic and autocratic regimes have misused their emergency powers and ignored constitutional limits to policy-making (Bjørnskov and Voigt, 2020). It is therefore important to evaluate whether and to which extent the lockdowns have worked as officially intended: to suppress the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and prevent deaths associated with it. Comparing weekly mortality in 24 European countries, the findings in this paper suggest that more severe lockdown policies have not been associated with lower mortality. In other words, the lockdowns have not worked as intended.”

16.”Four Stylized Facts about COVID-19” (alt-link) by Andrew Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha. NBER working paper 27719, August 2020. “One of the central policy questions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic is the question of which non-pharmeceutical interventions governments might use to influence the transmission of the disease. Our ability to identify empirically which NPI’s have what impact on disease transmission depends on there being enough independent variation in both NPI’s and disease transmission across locations as well as our having robust procedures for controlling for other observed and unobserved factors that might be influencing disease transmission. The facts that we document in this paper cast doubt on this premise…. The existing literature has concluded that NPI policy and social distancing have been essential to reducing the spread of COVID-19 and the number of deaths due to this deadly pandemic. The stylized facts established in this paper challenge this conclusion.”

17. “How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe?” by Kata Karáth. British Medical Journal, September 15, 2020. “Belarus’s beleaguered government remains unfazed by covid-19. President Aleksander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, has flatly denied the seriousness of the pandemic, refusing to impose a lockdown, close schools, or cancel mass events like the Belarusian football league or the Victory Day parade. Yet the country’s death rate is among the lowest in Europe—just over 700 in a population of 9.5 million with over 73 000 confirmed cases.”

18. “Association between living with children and outcomes from COVID-19: an OpenSAFELY cohort study of 12 million adults in England” by Harriet Forbes, Caroline E Morton, Seb Bacon et al., by MedRxiv, November 2, 2020. “Among 9,157,814 adults ≤65 years, living with children 0-11 years was not associated with increased risks of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection, COVID-19 related hospital or ICU admission but was associated with reduced risk of COVID-19 death (HR 0.75, 95%CI 0.62-0.92). Living with children aged 12-18 years was associated with a small increased risk of recorded SARS-CoV-2 infection (HR 1.08, 95%CI 1.03-1.13), but not associated with other COVID-19 outcomes. Living with children of any age was also associated with lower risk of dying from non-COVID-19 causes. Among 2,567,671 adults >65 years there was no association between living with children and outcomes related to SARS-CoV-2. We observed no consistent changes in risk following school closure.”

19. “Exploring inter-country coronavirus mortality“ By Trevor Nell, Ian McGorian, Nick Hudson. Pandata, July 7, 2020. “For each country put forward as an example, usually in some pairwise comparison and with an attendant single cause explanation, there are a host of countries that fail the expectation. We set out to model the disease with every expectation of failure. In choosing variables it was obvious from the outset that there would be contradictory outcomes in the real world. But there were certain variables that appeared to be reliable markers as they had surfaced in much of the media and pre-print papers. These included age, co-morbidity prevalence and the seemingly light population mortality rates in poorer countries than that in richer countries. Even the worst among developing nations—a clutch of countries in equatorial Latin America—have seen lighter overall population mortality than the developed world. Our aim therefore was not to develop the final answer, rather to seek common cause variables that would go some way to providing an explanation and stimulating discussion. There are some very obvious outliers in this theory, not the least of these being Japan. We test and find wanting the popular notions that lockdowns with their attendant social distancing and various other NPIs confer protection.”

20. “Covid-19 Mortality: A Matter of Vulnerability Among Nations Facing Limited Margins of Adaptation” by Quentin De Larochelambert, Andy Marc, Juliana Antero, Eric Le Bourg, and Jean-François Toussaint. Frontiers in Public Health, 19 November 2020. “Higher Covid death rates are observed in the [25/65°] latitude and in the [−35/−125°] longitude ranges. The national criteria most associated with death rate are life expectancy and its slowdown, public health context (metabolic and non-communicable diseases (NCD) burden vs. infectious diseases prevalence), economy (growth national product, financial support), and environment (temperature, ultra-violet index). Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate. Countries that already experienced a stagnation or regression of life expectancy, with high income and NCD rates, had the highest price to pay. This burden was not alleviated by more stringent public decisions. Inherent factors have predetermined the Covid-19 mortality: understanding them may improve prevention strategies by increasing population resilience through better physical fitness and immunity.”

21. “States with the Fewest Coronavirus Restrictions” by Adam McCann. WalletHub, Oct 6, 2020. This study assesses and ranks stringencies in the United States by states. The results are plotted against deaths per capita and unemployment. The graphics reveal no relationship in stringency level as it relates to the death rates, but finds a clear relationship between stringency and unemployment.

22. The Mystery of Taiwan: Commentary on the Lancet Study of Taiwan and New Zealand, by Amelia Janaskie. American Institute for Economic Research, November 2, 2020. “The Taiwanese case reveals something extraordinary about pandemic response. As much as public-health authorities imagine that the trajectory of a new virus can be influenced or even controlled by policies and responses, the current and past experiences of coronavirus illustrate a different point. The severity of a new virus might have far more to do with endogenous factors within a population rather than the political response. According to the lockdown narrative, Taiwan did almost everything ‘wrong’ but generated what might in fact be the best results in terms of public health of any country in the world.”

23. “Predicting the Trajectory of Any COVID19 Epidemic From the Best Straight Line” by Michael Levitt, Andrea Scaiewicz, Francesco Zonta. MedRxiv, Pre-print, June 30, 2020. “Comparison of locations with over 50 deaths shows all outbreaks have a common feature: H(t) defined as loge(X(t)/X(t-1)) decreases linearly on a log scale, where X(t) is the total number of Cases or Deaths on day, t (we use ln for loge). The downward slopes vary by about a factor of three with time constants (1/slope) of between 1 and 3 weeks; this suggests it may be possible to predict when an outbreak will end. Is it possible to go beyond this and perform early prediction of the outcome in terms of the eventual plateau number of total confirmed cases or deaths? We test this hypothesis by showing that the trajectory of cases or deaths in any outbreak can be converted into a straight line. Specifically Y(t)≡−ln(ln(N/X(t)),is a straight line for the correct plateau value N, which is determined by a new method, Best-Line Fitting (BLF). BLF involves a straight-line facilitation extrapolation needed for prediction; it is blindingly fast and amenable to optimization. We find that in some locations that entire trajectory can be predicted early, whereas others take longer to follow this simple functional form.”

December 19, 2020 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Billionaires’ Net Worth Grows to $10.2 Trillion During Pandemic

teleSUR | December 19, 2020

A report from Swiss bank UBS revealed that billionaires did “extremely well” during the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing their wealth more than a quarter to $10.2 trillion at the height of the crisis.

As millions of people lost their jobs and struggled to get by on government schemes, billionaires surpassed their previous peak net worth of $8.9 trillion at the end of 2017, while also increasing their ranks to 2,189 from 2,158 over the past three years.

The world’s super-rich currently hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the US Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century, when families like the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, and Carnegies controlled vast fortunes.

The wealthiest person on the planet, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, saw his wealth increase $74 billion so far this year, reaching $189 billion. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, has seen his wealth rise $76 billion this year, totaling $103 billion.

While the UBS report noted that 209 billionaires had publicly committed to donating $7.2 billion in COVID-19 disaster relief, the figures represent just .07% of all billionaire wealth, with less than one in ten billionaires committing to contribute anything at all.

Luke Hilyard, executive director of the High Pay Centre, which researches excessive pay, said the “extreme wealth concentration is an ugly phenomenon from a moral perspective, but it’s also economically and socially destructive. Anyone accumulating riches on this scale could easily afford to raise the pay of the employees who generate their wealth, or contribute a great deal more in taxes to support vital public services while remaining very well rewarded for whatever successes they’ve achieved.”

Josef Stradler, head of UBS’ global family office department that directly deals with the world’s wealthiest individuals, said that the fact that billionaire wealth had increased so much while hundreds of millions of people worldwide are struggling could lead to public and political anger, having previously warned that the inequality gap between rich and poor could potentially lead to a “strike back.”

December 19, 2020 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

2020: The Year we Lost the Plot

By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | December 14, 2020

“Our Government, along with Governments around the world will shortly announce the quarantining of whole populations for a seasonal respiratory virus which leaves 99.8-99.9% of those who get it in the land of the living. What is more, they will also announce a shutdown of the entire economy for months and then, when the epidemic has actually gone, will mandate that you cover the lower half of your face with a bit of cloth. They will do this by frightening people into compliance with a barrage of propaganda, slogans, data entirely taken out of context, and the threat of massive fines.”

Anyone making this claim at the beginning of the year would rightly have been thought to have mislaid the plot and their marbles, long ago. But here we are, at the end of that same year, and it is precisely what has happened.

Only it is much worse than that.

Had you somehow been persuaded to give credence to this insane prophecy, you would probably have been comforted by the following thought: “They’ll never get away with it. The people will never stand for it.”

Not a bit of it. Somehow, millions of people across the country, and in fact across the world, were persuaded to accept it. By far the majority somehow thought that quarantining whole nations of healthy people for a virus, for the first time in history, was a good idea. Well, actually the second time in history to be precise. It was tried in 2009 by the Mexican Government during the Swine Flu outbreak, but they had the good sense to end it after a couple of weeks after realising how much it would devastate the country.

Yet not only do we have our imaginary conspiracy loon’s mad ravings come true, but those same people who have accepted it look upon those of us who have been pointing out the madness of it all as if we were those who had taken leave of our senses. Oh irony, thou hast had a field day in 2020. As St. Antony the Great put it:

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”

To cut to the chase, we have gone and thrown out reason, rationality and proportionality this year. A coronavirus, which posed a danger to a very small proportion of our society, but which actually has an Infection Fatality Rate of around 0.2% – 0.26% (not too dissimilar to a bad seasonal flu), and which could thus have been dealt with proportionality, somehow became the catalyst for the biggest mass hysteria in the history of the human race. Indeed, many were so taken in by the great hypnotic spell set in motion by charlatans with their “hard-hitting emotional messaging,” that they adopted practices so irrational and disproportionate to the threat, one wonders how they managed to live before this year.

The history books tell of one of our great Kings, Canute, demonstrating to his courtiers that contrary to their supposition, he could not in fact control the waves. In our day, it’s like King Canute has gone rogue, telling his subjects that he can control the waves and viruses, and his subjects have responded by not only believing him, but by taking any action he tells them they must do to stop the waves or the virus, including confining themselves to their homes, closing their businesses, wearing cloths on their faces, along with umpteen other truly bizarre and wholly useless diktats. Then, when the waves or the virus continue doing what waves and viruses do, a wave of Covidian Logic bursts over us and we find it is our fault that they have not been controlled. We didn’t shut down hard enough or long enough, or we played board games at Christmas.

In the real world, the only thing that got controlled this year was not a virus, but people. That all went off spiffingly, or spaffingly as Comrade Johnson might put it. People were suppressed, people were controlled, people were — you might say — owned. And by and large they acquiesced in putting their hand to this National Suicide Plan.

Of course, the reply that comes the way of anyone who points this out is, “Ah, but if we hadn’t locked down and masked up, the deaths would have been in the hundreds of thousands.” To which the answer is simply, “Nope. Lockdown cannot be shown to have saved a single life.” Sweden, by not turning itself into a basketcase, failed to have anything like wave of mass deaths predicted by the Enthusiasts for Lockdown. Nor did other nations that took a similar approach. A recent peer-reviewed study from France, looking at 188 countries, has confirmed what should have been obvious all along:

“Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.”

Then of course there was the Danish RCT study, which showed no significant statistical difference between infection rates of those wearing surgical masks, and those with no masks.

Imagine that!

Imagine that we were put under house arrest for months, made to cover our respiratory passages with bits of cloth, forced to alter our lives, and threatened with fines for non-compliance — and none of it made any difference to mortality.

Imagine that this Government and Parliament caused the complete shutdown of the economy for months, putting millions on the dole, wrecking 1,000s of businesses, causing the worst recession in 300 years, and piling up a future of debt, poverty, mental health issues and reduced life expectancy — and none of it saved any lives.

Imagine that we are still in this situation, with people still acquiescing in the destruction of their own country, the Government and media still feeding us lies, and with no real plausible end to this madness.

Actually, you have no need to imagine it. Even though it is so outlandish that even the most unhinged, basement-dwelling “conspiracy nut” on the planet could not have come up with this, it is indeed the year you just lived through. We lost the plot in 2020, and the most pressing question is: will we get it back in 2021?

This piece is the first in a series of five articles I will be publishing over the next couple of weeks looking at various aspects of our new Covidian State in 2020. These pieces are also due to be published on The Conservative Woman website from 27-31 December.

December 19, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment