Bleeding Edge

Am quite certain that all of you would agree that it is astonishing how much the world has changed during this past year…

As a matter of fact, in a matter of months, those of us living in the Liberal Democracies of the Anglo-Saxon part of the world — went from being Free Societies, to an Orwellian dystopia as described in the the book 1984.

And if you haven’t read the pivotal “1984” book, then maybe the film by the same name “1984” might inspire you to act in defense of Liberty. You can find it here for free on YouTube:

And the original is wonderfully filmed, acted and directed, however, bellow you can also find the trailer for the newer version of the film 1984, that was released as the newest movie version of Orwell’s book 1984 visual interpretation cast with John Hurt, in the lead role, thus lending an air of modernity to this sage of human bondage and slavery to the seemingly safe forces of evil and totalitarian darkness … wholly erasing human beings for the supposed benefit of the “whole” of Society.

Reminiscent of today’s world — George Orwell’s novel of a totalitarian future society that has already arrived — in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love, this is a wake up call for all of us…

The story synopsis follows a simple script pattern as set by Orwell himself, and it leads the viewer to a time after the “Atomic War” reminiscent of the “Cold War” the world is divided into three main states. London is the capital of Oceania, ruled by a party who has total control over all its citizens. Winston Smith is one of the bureaucrats, rewriting history in one of the departments. One day he commits the crime of falling in love with Julia. They try to escape Big Brother’s listening and viewing devices, but, of course, nobody can really escape… Released on Directed by: Michael Radford Starring: John Hurt, Richard Burton, Suzanna Hamilton, Cyril Cusack, Peter Frye, etc:

Movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52wis_sLT1I

1984

Released on December of 1984 this new version of the classic went on to win new audiences to the cause of Liberty, Humanity and Equanimity..

And here is the audiobook as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scqLliarGpM

Recently I was having lunch in Washington DC with a friend and was discussing some trips I had planned.

We were still speaking as if the decision to cancel or go ahead with these trips would be up to me, that I would make a rational risk assessment and proceed from there on…

I jokingly said that a trip to the moon right now — wouldn’t be such bad idea…

A random person that overheard our conversation objected in a serious way as any xenophobe would object, and the next minute I was derided as a grandma murderer, because I had hinted at having to see the rest of the world as it is today in the midst of this panic attack that masquerades as a pandemic of ungodly proportions…

That changed the mood rather quickly in our conversation but my friend was a good sport and decided to go down the street for some street life photography where she would pose in her best sexy sultry pose…

That shifted the mood rather quickly and reminded me that what also changed very quickly, was the rationale for the draconian measures taken by the local, state and even the world’s governments in response to the panic epidemic that we are coursing through now…

You know that things have changed when you see this travesty of misery taking over all of us swiftly … yet it seems that the world has gone mad over Health and Safety, and has steamrolled over our Constitutional Rights, as well as our Human Rights and Civil Rights and even our Freeborn natural and divinely given rights altogether, without any regard to the value of life of the individual…

Of course, I can speak most confidently about the United States, where I live, however I also travel extensively even during these difficult times and have first hand knowledge of the state of affairs globally and in the darkest totalitarian corners of this earth. Indeed we are all turning off the lights of freedom during this pandemic that has given authority to the darkest impulses of our “Control Freaks” to usher a new state of emergency procedures that rob all of us of our Humanity.

Mind you, in the United States and the UK, first we were urged to “flatten the curve” which meant to spread out the infections over time, rather than allow them to spike all at once, and thereby overwhelm the hospitals and the public health infrastructure…

Then it was the howling of all the “Health Experts” advocates of “flattening the curve” who believed that doing so could, in addition to minimizing the strain on the system by spreading out the deaths, also reduce the overall number of deaths. But this more nuanced position was not conveyed by the major spokesmen of the “flattening the curve” strategy, as best expressed by the Governors of California, Washington State and New York State, along with the rationally efficient voices of Dr Fauchi, Bill Gates (Anti-Virus software magnate), and the great authority on virology Alyssa Milano, who has spread more STDs to her willing and unwilling sex partners than is reasonably possible, even by a professional sex worker…

And yet all three of these illustrious public personas, carry the same virtue signaling flag of pushing people and popular culture to accept that all Americans should enter into a state solitary confinement, AKA home incarceration for the foreseeable future…

Yet, after most people had been confined to their homes for two or three weeks, the goalposts began to change. “Flattening the curve” became like Qbert and the Rubik’s Cube. Now it was: “If it saves only one life.” We heard this from Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, and plenty of people since then: if we save even one life with all these draconian measures, they will have been worthwhile.

It became impossible to have a rational conversation. If you doubted any of this, you wanted people to die.

But there are perfectly good reasons to doubt it. For one thing, in no other circumstances would we think this way. If the saving one life criterion were honestly believed, we should ban all kinds of dangerous pastimes. We should restrict movement. We should prohibit the sale of very many different kinds of products, sports, and all civil engagements, marches, and even military engagements…

But we don’t.

Oh, but those things aren’t contagious, came the reply from folks we shall call herewith “The Merchants of Doom” or the “Chicken Littles” of our day.

But that’s not the point. If the standard is saving only one life, contagiousness is of no relevance.

We don’t ban the things I mentioned even though they can cause death because we value liberty, and because these are things that make life worth living in the first place.

For another thing, here are three recent items that pose a challenge to the glib “if it saves only one life, we must continue the lockdowns” school:

All other types of deaths not related to Covid-19, have surged in extreme rates, due to the diversion of care and resources from the critical care facilities for patients suffering from many maladies, illnesses, and preventable causes of death, such as suicides, cancers, and all other long term illnesses, because all of our resources have been given up to the illusory never ending battle against the ever mutating Wuhan Coronavirus. Even malaria deaths are up in all the countries of the world that are still ravaged by this mosquito born disease, such as Africa, SE Asia, as well as Central and Latin America.

As an example, of this trend of despondency, the UK’s newspaper of record, the Sunday Express, reports that increased cancer fatalities resulted from the redeployment of health resources caused by COVID hysteria. In fact, says Richard Sullivan, a professor of cancer and global health at King’s College London and director of its Institute of Cancer Policy:

“The number of deaths due to the disruption of cancer services outweighs the number of deaths from the coronavirus itself. The cessation and delay of cancer care causes considerable avoidable suffering. Cancer screening services have stopped, which means we miss our chance to catch many cancers when they are treatable and curable, such as cervical, bowel and breast cancers. Sadly, when we do restart normal service delivery after the lockdown is lifted, the backlog of cases will be a huge challenge to the healthcare system…”

Today, a new United Nations report, warned that economic hardship generated by the radical interruptions of commerce, food supplies and critical infant care, resulted in hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020. The report further warned that upwards of 66 million children have fallen into extreme poverty as a result of the shift of the attention of all Hospitals, Emergency Clinics, Health Ministries and NGOs, to the Wuhan Coronavirus panic, during this time of a massive global crisis.

Professor Benjamin Miller of the Well Being Trust in Oakland, California, is the co-author of a study that seeks to determine how many “deaths of despair” (from drug or alcohol abuse or suicide) will occur as a result of the pandemic.

Their estimate: about 1,175,000.

To be sure, some of this has to do with anxiety about the virus itself, but according to the study it’s also related (obviously) to the unprecedented shutdown, extremely high unemployment, and months-long social isolation with no clear end of these policies in sight. Keep in mind that when there is solitary confinement of a whole population the dynamic curve of suicide becomes exponential, as we have seen in the concentration camps of NAZI Germany, and even within the Warsaw ghetto and all other quarantined communities.

And what is worse today, is that we are self isolating and self quarantined, and thus the alienation the aloness and the downright horrible loneliness, is what kills most of us.

We have turned our beautiful society into a terminal archipelago of Gulags albeit with material comforts for some of us, but overall with a death sentence hanging over all of our heads…

Today, professor Miller says it’s crucial that people be allowed to get back to work. “People have to be working and we have to get people connected to other people,” he said.

Dr. Elie Aoun, vice chairman of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Addiction Psychiatry, said that this result, while shocking, wasn’t surprising: “I’ve been seeing this in practices and my colleagues have been talking about it, too.”

Dr Elie Aoun went on to say that social isolation has more consequences for the many vulnerable patients who suffer from depression, anxiety and addiction. “Addiction patients are relapsing, and a lot of patients who don’t have drug use or alcohol problems are drinking more now, sometimes every day from 4 or 5 p.m., and they don’t stop until they sleep,” he said.

These three items above, go to show that shutting down the world, coupled with demands that we accept living like vegetables as the “new normal,” has consequences. They also suggest that those people who have taken the opportunity presented by COVID-19 to portray themselves as morally superior to others – unlike you selfish people, they say, I’m willing to stay home and save lives! – are not so unambiguously heroic.

Obviously, all of these issues and the many hundreds of other reasons that ordinary people have expressed to me, and to anyone who cares to listen — all reveal the barrenness of the demand that we “listen to the experts” who lead us like the “Pied Piper” to the river to drown us and our voices for ever.

Because even if someone may have a great deal of expertise in his field, such that we would indeed be foolish not to listen to him, such as when I need my car repaired and I go to an expert mechanic, and pretend to understand what he tells me — I still get a second a second opinion if the matter at hand is not my jalopy but it is my body that requires a major surgery…

Do you get my drift here?

Am saying all this, because there’s no college class that, say, an epidemiologist can take that teaches him how to balance mitigation of a virus against the secondary consequences that will follow, like the cancer deaths, child impoverishment, and deaths of despair — the massive waves of suicides that we spoke about above, not to mention the scores of other avoidable causes of deaths, handicaps and massive miseries brought on by the involuntary lockdowns, and the solitary confinements that our people have been subjected to for so very long.

Couple that with the lack of community support, a hug and a kiss from a friend or relative, the lack of spiritual and religious services and you see that most people’s rudders have been seriously unsettled, in such a way that the uncertainly causes all of us to feel rudderless, as if the little boats that we traverse the life’s waters on, are floundering.

Our hastily and clumsily constructed lives have been upended and the floodgates have opened to consume our tents, our tipis, and our tarps, and drown all of us in a torrent of delusion, despair and death.

And on top of that, we have the professional “Merchants of Doom” and their speakeasy dolls, dildos, and marionettes, who all together scream in unison: “We are all gonna die,” we are all gonna die, we are all dead and dying anyway — so we might as well enter our own tombs willingly.

“Listen to the science,” urged the young climate activist Greta Thunberg [obviously a great Medical Doctor, an Epidemiologist, a virologist and famous Public Health expert, all rolled into one cocky full of BS teenager with such hormonal imbalances up the kazoo, that her eyes are popping out of her head], during the middle of the COVID crisis. Science, however, is not a neat set of infallible statements but an ongoing search for the truth.

Naturally, “The Science” has been all over the place in this crisis: how the virus spreads and doesn’t spread, the role of children (do they transmit the virus to others or not?), whether Sweden’s approach is a good idea (in April the head of the Health Emergencies Program of the World Health Organization praised Sweden’s avoidance of a lockdown as a “model”!), why some countries do so much better than others (the hysterics have ghoulishly rubbed their hands together in anticipation of a Japanese outbreak that never occurred), whether lockdowns even work (the numbers show pretty much no correlation between timing and severity of lockdowns on the one hand and the health outcomes on the other), and on and on.

We’re supposed to “listen” to a cacophony like that? Moreover, when the “experts” act as if their concerns should be society’s only and singularly important concern … in all of our lives.

And we can discuss “ad infinitum” which methods more effectively preserve biological life for as long as we want — but death remains the only certainty in life, because according to our current 45th President, the other certainty, that of “Taxation” has become a so-so proposition.

But even if we were to somehow secure a mere biological life — long or short as that life might be — yet lived in solitary confinement, would that life be worth living?

Obviously this is not a question that the so called science “experts” are anywhere close to being qualified to answer, because that is the most privileged question best left up to the individual human being… and his or hers, Soul, God and Spirit.

And the answer in many cases as we have seen by the tsunami of suicides, drug overdoses and self induced alcoholic poisonings, more than a Million deaths in the United States alone — say that this kind of life is not worth living.

Because if our people’s hopes, dreams, and aspirations are all dashed for an indefinite period of time, which purveyors of the present strategy almost flippantly propose – is that really living?

We have been told right now for Hanukah as well for Christmas and for all the New Year’s holidays that there should be “No large gatherings for Now and for a very long time the foreseeable future.”

How long?

And what are “large gatherings”?

Oh, just all mosques, synagogues, temples, music concerts, cinemas, theaters, lectures, churches, sporting events, public speeches, competitions, galleries, and all the arts in general – pretty much everything that makes life worth living.

Reminds me of the types of paintings habitually called “Still life” and of the kind of “life” that is an image of life stopped. A representation of life that is a simulacrum of Life, yet it has neither a vivid pulse and certainly no soul.

If I may dwell on the “large gatherings” issue for a moment…

Because for anyone who performs in front of an audience – starting form the circus performers, the Opera actors and divine singers, to the lowly trapeze artists along with the high wire walkers, and all the dancers, musicians, comedians, magicians, athletes, singers, actors, whatever – the present pandemic strategy means your hopes and dreams are on indefinite hold, and may never be able to be fulfilled.

Dr Zeke Emanuel of the ironically named Center for American Progress contends that we need to be on serious lockdown for at least some 18 months more until after there’s a vaccine, and that vaccine is administered to all – assuming that there necessarily will be a vaccine that works with all the nasty mutations of this Wuhan Coronavirus, knowing that just in my state Washington state alone — there have been more than 75 strong mutations of the Coronavirus… 

Still not knowing that reality or unperturbed by all visible reality, Dr Zeke Emanuel goes on and he says:

“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 … we have to give up all of all of our cherished things for a very long time to come. Things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family. Conferences, concerts, sporting events, religious services, dinner in a restaurant — none of that will resume until we find a vaccine, a treatment, or a cure. We have to be realistic.”

Dr Emanuel urges us to be realistic, and thus accept that we will be giving up all of our life in community, all of our spiritual existence and certainly all of our cherished things for a very long time to come. “Things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family.”

You read that right.

“Things like schooling and income and contact with our friends and extended family are forbidden for now and for the foreseeable future…“

This is insanity.

The response, meanwhile, has proceeded as if everyone of us, was equally at risk. But the extraordinary thing about this virus, an aspect we had no right to expect, is that it takes a particular toll on the elderly and very little on everyone else…

Now let’s get the usual objection out of the way. 

I know that some younger people have died. 

Tragic as these deaths are, they amount to a rounding error. “But my friend knows someone who died at age 23” is a frequent response I hear from people who claim to be listening to “The Science” and to be doing all they can to save lives, by doping up, ordering munchies through DoorDash, and watching Netflix until they start stinking and the neighbors call the police reporting a dead person…

Sure — if you are a stoner — paranoia will kill you faster than anything else and if you choose to be responding to statistics with anecdotes, you are not even qualified to enter college level introductory course of Science 101, because It’s like hearing someone say: “Men are generally taller than women,” and coming back with, “What? My girlfriend is 6’1”!” 

Ha ha ha…

The fact remains: Far more people over the age of 90 have died from Covid 19 than any people under the age of 65.

And according to Neil Ferguson, the principal architect of the major UK model of the virus, between one-half and two-thirds of all people dying from COVID-19 would have died within a matter of days, weeks, or months in the absence of the virus.

That means that instead of spreading our necessarily limited resources very thin, we can focus our efforts specifically on assisting the elderly until such time as an effective and widely available treatment becomes available (if it hasn’t already), or until it runs its course.

In New York City, for example, the hardest-hit part of the United States, we’ve seen 11 deaths per 100,000 people aged 18-44. For people 75 and older, the rate is 80 times that.

If you’re wondering about people under 18, their death rate per 100,000 is zero. 

But the 18-75 group where most all of us people of voting age belong to — is to be deprived indefinitely of all the wonderful things our older folks enjoyed as they grew up, despite of our being at virtually no risk of death from the virus.

And if we have people 18-44 who are still frightened, they are free to remain isolated, have their groceries delivered to them, and so on. But they are not entitled to a chunk of your life, making you live like a vegetable, destroying everything you’ve worked your entire life for, or putting your hopes, dreams, and goals on hold on a semi-regular basis from now until the end of time.

My own observations in the early days of some states’ reopening and then quickly reclosing, in a see-saw of indecision, has been this: It’s the older people who seem more eager to return to normal life than younger ones. A whole bunch of them have been saying: go out and live your life. I have no right to demand anything from you.

As an old man — an acquaintance of mine put it:

“I relinquish any claim on the lives of the young.”

“As an oldster who is presumed to be peculiarly susceptible to the ravages of COVID-19, I will not ask anyone to sacrifice days, weeks or months of their time, love, life, and livelihood on my behalf.”

“It is grotesque for the old to ask the young to sacrifice for them.”

“Go.”

“Live your lives.”

“Enjoy the beautiful nature, be social, be loving and go out into the world…”

“I have no claim on you for my welfare.”

“”Now I ask You this:

“Who among my fellow oldsters will release any claims on the lives of young people?”

That is one evolved human being.

One gimmick from the “Merchants of Doom” has been to ask, “Would you take a handful of jelly beans from a bowl of 100 in which three were poisoned?” This is supposed to show me that cowering in my house (the equivalent of refusing any jelly beans) is the only rational response to the virus.

But think about it – and we’ll leave aside the gross exaggeration of the risk involved, which is far lower than three percent, when the 3% is obviously poisoned but the poison is so weak that is not likely to seriously harm you unless you are a hemophiliac or suffering already from some extreme malady that reacts adversely with the poison.

I have many friends who are allergic to peanuts, but they do not go out steaming that in the name of Science, we demand that society bans peanuts all together, and for all others, ad infinitum. And yet this is what happens here and now with the Wuhan Coronavirus panic mongering from the merchants of doom…

Yet, even if you suffered from a peanut allergy, the question being asked of you still is this:

“Would you reach in the jar and take something if there was a 3% chance that one of these jelly beans contained a peanut, had come in contact with a peanut, or was somehow poisoned?”

Well, the most likely answer is this:

It Depends.

It depends on what you would suffer if you didn’t reach in.

Isn’t this the always ever present answer?

Doesn’t it make sense to test your limits of disbelief if you knew that even if you ate all of- three poisoned jelly beans – you were most likely to survive any ill effects and even be asymptomatic and not even notice any hindrance to your daily life?

Yet, today, all the well-meaning people using this analogy are misleadingly suggesting that my only possible concern is the virus.

But I have other concerns, too – namely, not spending months and possibly years living like a vegetable.

Because that is what happens if I don’t reach in the bowl of life to take any color jelly bean that I desire.

Because in the above analogy, my reaching into the bowl of jelly beans is the equivalent of returning to normal life, and thereby taking a risk. And yes, I am prepared to take that risk because I want to live a life that’s worth living.

If the jelly beans represent everything I’ve worked for my whole life, if they represent my ekklesia, my spiritual devotion in faith and my community, my social needs, my gainful employment, and my reasonable reassurance of being a person of value in Society, and thus earning my keep through the sweat of my brow, through the strength of my sinews and through the powers of my brain and the determination of my soul, and further living in financial solvency, and if these jelly beans represent all my hopes, dreams, and aspirations — you’d better believe I would grab a fistful of them and place them in my mouth to “suck the marrow of life” without the slightest hesitation.

Carpe Diem my friends.

Carpe fuckin Diem.

Suck the marrow out of life and don’t wait for anyone else to do it for you … or allow anyone to tell you that you cannot do that “Carpe Diem” for yourself.

Because only that “kind of living” approximates a life worth living.

The rest of what the so called cowed “scientists,” my misguided friend Billy Gato, Dr Faust, and Alyssa Milano along with the clown car of pseudo scientists and government officials treading on you — all will tell you in unison, to live the rest of your days like a hamster in a cage, running on a treadmill and hoping that someday, when you have out-served your usefulness as power-trip fodder, as a failed social experiment and as comedic entertainment for these fools — you will be flushed down the toilet, to put an end to your misery…

That is how they want you to live your life now, and that is what the media stars and your governors and most all public officials want to usher in as the new “normal” for our lives.

Meanwhile, the media has outdone itself in demonizing the dissenters (You and Me), because when it comes to treating people who dissent from the official version of events, who dare to even think that maybe Wyoming might need a different approach from that of New York City, or who think the secondary effects of fighting the virus might wind up causing more destruction than the virus itself — we are treated like outcasts where even our favorite coffee shops are placing us on an Embargo list, as my misguided and fairly innocent of intelligence (not stupid) friend Jeff, owner of the Hotwire cafe on California Avenue in West Seattle has declared me a “Persona Non Grata” in his premises, thus manifesting the hateful enmity arising against all those of us that are thinking somewhat different than the stilted masses, the stupid mobs and the legions of rats that are led by the aforementioned “Pied Pipers” down the river for a serious cold water bathing incident, called drowning in the common parlance of the ordinary people.

Note, for example, a story in the Sun (U.K.) regarding a public protest against the lockdown in Tennessee that urged the reopening of the state.

The entire story involved a single sign held by a single protester, whose sign read: Sacrifice the Weak, Re-Open TN. The article proceeded to explain to us that this was “vile” and “twisted.” Why, thank you, Sun reporter! Without that bit of profundity we’d never have realized there was anything objectionable about the sign! We sure couldn’t have been allowed to make up our own minds about it!

This paper must be written for people with IQs under 75. And of course: that protester was obviously a fake, a plant and a red herring, because nobody supporting reopening the state is going to say something as preposterous as “sacrifice the weak.”

What a surprise: the Sun didn’t even bother to interview her. Literally the entire story was about the sign. Even though the Sun is a neoconservative paper, this kind of behavior is fairly typical of the mass media of the left and center Democratic front, for whom it is impossible to conceive of how you and I could disagree with them apart from perverse wickedness. “Sacrifice the weak” was doubtless the best this woman could do in summarizing why she thought people disagreed with her about the lockdowns – in the same way that the reason people might disagree with her about the welfare state is that they “hate the poor,” or they surely oppose some racial set-aside, because they’re “racists,” etc.

This is projection, of course. The radically afraid, illogically fearful of the unseen virus and totally power hungry “Merchants of Doom” portray themselves as crusaders for great moral ideals. They espouse a lifestyle lived as members of a virtue signaling brigade, that like new age brownshirts and neo-nazis of the Antifa variety, order, corral and relegate people to concentration camps, AKA nursing homes where ether Covid-19 sick folks are mixing it up with the co-morbid elderly, so they can both be measured up for the coffin of a mutually assured destruction. Thank you Governors Cuomo and Newsom for your lack of imagination about what would happen when you mix the two populations under the same roof….

And if I may be more generous about them, than they themselves are, I’m sure some of them really believe that they save lives, somehow, somewhere and maybe in another planet — but for now, and right here on Earth, and in America — they are killing people left and right. Yet, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that some of them are driven by even baser motives: envy, hatred, and a lust to destroy.

So when they encounter people advocating, equal justice for all, they assume this must be cover for “racism” – because when they themselves advocate general principles, it is indeed a cover for something more sinister. Likewise, when they see people favoring a smaller public sector, this must be because those people “hate the poor.”

And when, amidst the lockdowns people advocate “freedom,” why, this must be cover for “sacrifice the weak.”

Needless to say, do not bother trying to hold a conversation with someone thinking like this, because they will drown you in the river through their hate and distinguished ambition to prevail upon your ideas…

Yet, not everything is attributable to lockdowns. In fact, based on data collected in the U.S., it is far from obvious that the lockdowns have helped.

All across America and Europe, many government officials are resuming lockdowns and tightening restrictions in the face of rising COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

The collateral damage of lockdowns, which has been well documented, includes widespread poverty, depression, bankruptcy, and unemployment. Meanwhile, the benefits of lockdowns remain murky. Several studies have shown adverse effects of the lockdowns and here are the tope five ones that are peer reviewed ad infinitum and are also key to the understanding of the situation at hand…

1. The Lancet, July

A study published on July 21 in The Lancet, a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal founded in 1823, indicated that government lockdowns were ineffective.

Researchers collected data from the 50 countries with the most cases and found lockdowns were not associated with mortality reductions in critical COVID-19 cases, although factors such as obesity, smoking, and life expectancy were.

“…government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality,” the study concluded.

2. Frontiers in Public Health, November

Similarly, a study published by Frontiers in Public Health several months after The Lancet paper found neither lockdowns nor lockdown stringency were correlated with lower death rates. Researchers crunched data from 160 countries over the first 8 months of the pandemic, testing numerous factors—such as public health, demographics, government policy, economy, and environment—to determine how each correlated with COVID-19 mortality.

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

3. Tel Aviv University Study, October

Research from Tel Aviv University published in October on the website medRxiv said that strict lockdowns may not save lives. Researchers analyzed mobility data collected from iPhones and found no statistical association between lockdown severity and the number of COVID-19 fatalities.

“We would have expected to see fewer Covid-19 fatalities in countries with a tighter lockdown, but the data reveals that this is not the case,” the researchers explained.

4. Bloomberg Analysis of Oxford University Stringency Data, May

In a May Bloomberg article titled “The Results of Europe’s Lockdown Experiment Are In,” data journalist Elaine He shared several visuals based on work done by the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, which tracked a range of government stringency measures across Europe.

COVID mortality, He said, did not appear to be associated with lockdown stringency.

“While not a gauge of whether the decisions taken were the right ones, nor of how strictly they were followed, the analysis gives a clear sense of each government’s strategy for containing the virus,” He writes.

Some — above all Italy and Spain — enforced prolonged and strict lockdowns after infections took off,” He continues. “Others — especially Sweden — preferred a much more relaxed approach. Portugal and Greece chose to close down while cases were relatively low. France and the U.K. took longer before deciding to impose the most restrictive measures.

But, as our next chart shows, there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities — a measure that looks at the overall number of deaths compared with normal trends,” the report concludes. (emphasis mine)

Public health officials believe they can manage a virus through effective central planning, but this is folly and hubris. Human behavior and action are incredibly complex, far too complex for bureaucrats and political officials to control through policy directives (many of which are prima facie senseless).

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Pandemics are serious problems, but the belief that they can be effectively managed by central planners who refuse to recognize the limits of their own knowledge and power poses a much graver threat to human freedom and prosperity in the long-run.

In his Nobel Prize-winning speech, economist F.A. Hayek warned that such a hubris had the potential to make man “not only a tyrant over his fellows, but … the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

The recognition of the overwhelming limits to his knowledge should teach the student of society a lesson of humility, Hayek believed.

Tragically, our leaders are about to receive a strong dose of it.

In the Wall Street Journal T.J. Rodgers wrote:

5. Do Lockdowns Save Many Lives? In Most Places, the Data Say No

The speed with which officials shuttered the economy appears not to be a factor in Covid deaths.

By T.J. Rodgers — Wall Street Journal

Do quick shutdowns work to fight the spread of Covid-19? Joe Malchow, Yinon Weiss and I wanted to find out. We set out to quantify how many deaths were caused by delayed shutdown orders on a state-by-state basis.

To normalize for an unambiguous comparison of deaths between states at the midpoint of an epidemic, we counted deaths per million population for a fixed 21-day period, measured from when the death rate first hit 1 per million—e.g.,‒three deaths in Iowa or 19 in New York state. A state’s “days to shutdown” was the time after a state crossed the 1 per million threshold until it ordered businesses shut down.

We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of Covid-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)

No conclusions can be drawn about the states that sheltered quickly, because their death rates ran the full gamut, from 20 per million in Oregon to 360 in New York. This wide variation means that other variables—like population density or subway use—were more important. Our correlation coefficient for per-capita death rates vs. the population density was 44%. That suggests New York City might have benefited from its shutdown—but blindly copying New York’s policies in places with low Covid-19 death rates, such as my native Wisconsin, doesn’t make sense.

Sweden is fighting coronavirus with common-sense guidelines that are much less economically destructive than the lockdowns in most U.S. states. Since people over 65 account for about 80% of Covid-19 deaths, Sweden asked only seniors to shelter in place rather than shutting down the rest of the country; and since Sweden had no pediatric deaths, it didn’t shut down elementary and middle schools. Sweden’s containment measures are less onerous than America’s, so it can keep them in place longer to prevent Covid-19 from recurring. Sweden did not shut down stores, restaurants and most businesses, but did shut down the Volvo automotive plant, which has since reopened, while the Tesla plant in Fremont, Calif., was shuttered by police and remains closed.

How did the Swedes do? They suffered 80 deaths per million 21 days after crossing the 1 per million threshold level. With 10 million people, Sweden’s death rate‒without a shutdown and massive unemployment‒is lower than that of the seven hardest-hit U.S. states—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Connecticut, Michigan, New Jersey and New York—all of which, except Louisiana, shut down in three days or less. Despite stories about high death rates, Sweden’s is in the middle of the pack in Europe, comparable to France; better than Italy, Spain and the U.K.; and worse than Finland, Denmark and Norway. Older people in care homes accounted for half of Sweden’s deaths.

We should cheer for Sweden to succeed, not ghoulishly bash them. They may prove that many aspects of the U.S. shutdown were mistakes—ineffective but economically devastating—and point the way to correcting them.

—Mr. Rodgers was founding CEO of Cypress Semiconductor Corp.

I also wish the “Merchants of Doom” “would have at least a little humility. They think everything is reducible to a glib answer. Why, this state must be doing better than that one, because it locked down sooner! Oh, really? We ran a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown, which ranged from minus-10 days (some states shut down before any sign of COVID-19) to 35 days for South Dakota, one of seven states with limited or no shutdown. The correlation coefficient was 5.5% – so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and would have moved on, in order to find the real cause of the problem…”

In early May, Governor Andrew Cuomo noted that 66 percent of a survey of 1000 recent COVID-19 hospitalizations involved people who had been – wait for it – staying at home.

“This is a surprise: Overwhelmingly, the people were at home,” said Cuomo. “We thought maybe they were taking public transportation, and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation, but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”

For whatever reason, the virus has refused to behave the way these “Merchants of Doom” have assured us it must. Supporters of “The Science” told me in mid-March when Hong Kong was reporting a doubling of “confirmed cases” that I should start expecting deaths within a couple of weeks. Eight weeks later, not one additional death. For that matter, why did the wave of deaths predicted for Japan never materialize?

This one is a particularly interesting case study in how Doomers have operated. Despite plenty of contact with China and only modest coercive measures taken, Japan experienced very few COVID-19 deaths. Doomers had a ready answer for this: why, Japan is covering up the deaths because it doesn’t want to jeopardize the Olympics!

Then the Olympics were “postponed” or rather cancelled for the foreseeable future. No stream of hidden deaths appeared.

In early April the Japanese government asked for voluntary compliance with further social distancing policies. The press was full of “too little, too late” gloating, and grim warnings of – what else? – overwhelmed hospitals.

At last Japan would pay for its laxity! The ghouls were practically licking their chops. It was deranged.

Two weeks went by. Three weeks. Four weeks. And then five weeks and more and yet Japan’s daily death toll continued to fall…
How did the Merchants of Doom account for this?
Well, the Japanese people are very concerned about hygiene, and wear masks, and don’t shake hands, etc.
Well, yes, but all these things had already been true for many years. If these things were enough to stave off disaster, then why did the “Merchants of Doom” predicted disaster in Japan in the first place? Were they so ignorant that they didn’t know these features of Japanese life? Or are they trotting them out now out of sheer desperation, because according to their cartoonish view Japan really should be awash in deaths and they have no idea why it isn’t?

For that matter, why was Iran hit so hard, and neighboring Iraq barely at all?

What is so hard about admitting: we aren’t really sure what’s going on here? I realize that, that isn’t as exciting as predicting the apocalypse, but it would be more humble, and more responsible.

Technical details aside, what it all boils down to is this:

Either we are going to live, or we are not.

Life is riskier in the age of COVID-19.

That’s true.

But for the vast majority of people, it’s not that much riskier.

Thankfully, we know precisely the kinds of people who require special consideration and attention. We had no right to expect this from a virus. This should help us as we try to cope with it.

Or so you would think.

Instead, the ever-present Merchants of Doom genuinely want to discontinue those life-giving pleasures that give meaning and fulfillment to otherwise drab existences.

Oh, well, they say, there’s nothing we can do.

I disagree…

I disagree, because there is something heroic that you can do!

You can live!

Carpe Diem.

Live each and every day as if it were your last and you will at least know that you have LIVED>

Live free and know that you have an infinitesimally small chance of being someone who contracts anddies from COVID-19

Was your risk level precisely where you needed it to be, down to three percent 3% change out of the One Hundred percent 100% chance t.hat we are all going to die for sure some day. A day that we do not know when it will arrive, and that no precautions will shelter us from?

And think this through once again: Were the three 3% chances of risk of death more prevalent in your everyday life, before this virus came along? Because that would be an extraordinary coincidence, as if you were at just the right risk profile that you could tolerate in your life, and then a very slight increase in risk meant you had to shut your life down.

But you could transmit the virus to someone else, they say.

And that is true.

This is why people most likely to suffer serious consequences from it should probably isolate themselves – but I’m certainly not going to render judgment on a grandmother who decides she’d rather take her chances embracing her family members than spending her time isolated in a nursing home, wasting away physically, mentally, and emotionally.

If we don’t agree to focus our efforts on safeguarding the elderly in particular (remember, far more people older than 100 have died from COVID than have any people died under 30), then life becomes a miserable series of deprivations.

Consider this social-media testimony from a choir singer. Imagine living like this: “I’ll sum up for those who couldn’t attend the ACDA/NATS/ChorusAmerica/BarberShop/national Pandemic webinar: There is no safe way for choirs to rehearse together until there is a vaccine or 95% effective treatment in place, most likely one to two years. Perhaps occasionally outside in small groups, but only when the wind is not at your back. Masks and spacing do not protect your singers from contagion, and singers are super spreaders. Though there may be some mitigation using a combination of UV lights and fan/atmosphere scrubbing inside, it is not 100% effective and the UV in particular may be both expensive and dangerous. No concerts or public performances this fall, and frankly, maybe not for 1, 2 or 3 years, though we actually don’t know. Once rapid testing becomes available, possibility to rehearse with immediate testing before every rehearsal with ironclad agreements from choir members. AUDIENCE: liability insurance for your arts organization. Temperature checks at the door and required masks.

–All these conditions above are from the US government’s phase THREE recommendations, for actual safe return to public performances.

So instead of isolating the sick and vulnerable, every activity that brings people joy is to be reprimanded, and even if it is to take place, its to be made miserable or wholly discontinued….

I wonder this:

When will someone get up and say: 

“We refuse to live like this”

As a matter of fact, we already have some elderly and immunocompromised people, including friends of mine, saying: 

“We don’t even want you to live like this!”

“We’re not asking for this!”

“Go enjoy the one life you get, and we will do our best until conditions change!

We don’t want our grandchildren’s lives ruined, and we don’t want to spend our final days staring at a computer screen!

At least that way we can focus our resources on people who really need it, instead of fruitlessly trying to ship millions of “tests” all over the place.

In the UK, Lord Sumption just wrote:

“What sort of life do we think we are protecting? There is more to life than the avoidance of death. Life is a drink with friends. Life is a crowded football match or a live concert. Life is a family celebration with children and grandchildren. Life is companionship, an arm around one’s back, laughter or tears shared at less than two meters. These things are not just optional extras. They are life itself. They are fundamental to our humanity, to our existence as social beings. Of course death is permanent, whereas joy may be temporarily suspended. But the force of that point depends on how temporary it really is.”

Right on.

Please bear in mind that we need to stop being obedient to this tyranny.

“No one elected Bill Gates, Dr. Fauci, or the Infectious Disease Cartel to Perform a Social Science Experiment on the American People” –Article by David Stockman

David Stockman served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, and publishes the indispensable David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

We didn’t know that Bill Gates had been elected to any public office.

But apparently the Wall Street Journal thinks otherwise, as indicated by today’s [May 6, 2020] top-of-the-fold headline, claiming “government officials” are making dire new warnings about the COVID:

U.S. Officials Warn of New Virus Surge as States Reopen: U.S. Death Toll Could Reach 135,000 by Early August.

The very first line of the story, however, backpedals to “researchers and officials” and then cuts to the chase. This whole scary headline story and doubling of the COVID mortality estimate comes not from elected officials at all, but from Bill Gates’s personal think-tank and PR agency called the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

The latter has received upwards of $400 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation over the years and has established itself as the go-to modeling joint for the WHO, CDC and other government health agencies:

They told us that the U.S. death toll from Covid-19, could approach 135,000 by early August, according to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produces a COVID-19 forecast sometimes cited by the White House.

The institute doubled its previous death-toll projection to reflect increasing movement of people and the relaxation of social-distancing guidelines in some places as many states start to reopen their economies, the institute said.

Alas, the bolded sentence tells you all you need to know. If officialdom dares to allow citizens to move about freely and resume normal economic life, they are purportedly issuing a death sentence to tens of thousands of Americans…

Folks, that’s unadorned malarkey. It not only threatens the very foundations of public health, liberty and capitalist prosperity, but it is also junk science.

The model’s equations falsely presume that the natural and virtually unstoppable spread of the coronavirus among the human population can be reversed by a state-ordered lockdown regime, which it can’t; and that whenever such regime isn’t toggled “on” in the model, the spreading virus generates a fixed probability rate of death among the exposed population.

That’s self-evidently a case of junk in, junk out. That’s because the overwhelming evidence is that the COVID mortality rate is a massively variable function of the age and health condition of the affected population, not the degree to which the state’s social control regime thwarts the spread of the coronavirus.

You can’t even remotely explain by the “increasing movement of people” why there has been a mortality rate of 194 per 100,000 in the Bronx versus a rate of 3 per 100,000 in Texas.

Indeed, you can’t even explain the massive variability within the state of New York – which is by all accounts ground zero of the pandemic – by the social control regime, which has been equally brutal from Buffalo to Montauk.

Yet the mortality rate ranges from 194 and 185 per 100,000 in the Bronx and Queens, respectively, to 125 on Staten Island, 84 in Suffolk County (eastern Long Island), just 17 per 100,000 among the 6.7 million New Yorkers who live outside the New York City metro area, and less than 3 per 100,000 in many out-state counties within the latter group.

Stated differently, when the same social-distancing/plenary quarantine regime produces a 12:1 difference in mortality outcomes among separate but adjacent multi- million populations, then even almighty “science” would suggest you look for other explanatory variables. And, of course, those are age and medical condition – neither of which are given the time of day in the Lockdown orders or the above cited IHME models.

As to the former, here is the age gradient for New York for the same data that embodies the massive regional differences cited above. To wit, the mortality rate per 100,000 for New York state overall as of May 3rd was:

• 0-29 years: 1.0;
• 30-49 years: 19;
• 50-59 years: 70;
• 60-69 years: 175;
• 70-79 years: 407;
• 80 years +: 1,893.Q.E.D!

When the risk of death from COVID-19 infection is nearly 1900X higher for the octogenarian population relative to those 29 years and under, then the point of across-the-board house arrest is self-evident: namely, in his “wisdom,” Governor Cuomo (and the infectious disease cartel for which he shills) have taken the 7.5 million New Yorkers under 30 years of age hostage, and made them involuntary instruments of a state-imposed maneuver to protect the elderly and infirm by stopping the contagion.

Stated differently, up to 20% or more of these 7.5 million New Yorkers under 30 years have already been infected based on the state’s own antibody studies, and doubtless 50-80% of those so infected have been asymptomatic, while most of the rest have recovered from a mild illness in the normal course of shaking off the flu. Actually, there have only been 78 reported COVID deaths in this entire age cohort.

So even if only 10% of the under 30 population has been infected, the implied IFR (infected-fatality rate) is just 0.01% (78 deaths/750,000 cases) – or barely more than the odds of being struck by lightning.

Needless to say the infectious disease lobby does not give a whit about either the infinitesimal risk to, or the liberty of, these 7.5 million citizens. They are just pawns in an arrogant but futile quest to stop the spread of a virus than cannot be stopped, save for shutting down modern society for an extended period of time that is literally unsustainable.

If any proof is needed on that score, merely consider the fact that a few dozen meat processing plants have been shut down, and already wholesale prices are soaring and grocery chains are rationing customer purchases of steak and hamburger.

Indeed, if the above New York data is split at the 60-years of age demarcation line, the folly of the plenary lockdown orders and the spurious IHME models on which they are based is plain as day.

Even in hard-hit New York, the mortality rate as of May 3rd for the 15 million New Yorkers of school and working age (under 60) was just 17 per 100,000 or not even 3% of the annual mortality rate of this demographic; and as we show below, even that risk factor is concentrated heavily in a small share of the under-60 population that already suffers from hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, and coronary artery diseases, among a handful of other serious medical conditions.

We are not stupid — we just need to exercise our brains and wake up and start using them in order to figure this thing out…

Think about it.

Because what that means, of course, is that the WHO/CDC/NIAID/Gates Cartel has actually taken the 15.3 million New Yorkers, who account for 80% of the state’s population but only 15% of COVID-deaths, hostage to a social science experiment which has no precedent whatsoever.

Again, the implied IFR for the entire under 60 population at a conservative 10% true infection rate is just 0.17% (2,595 deaths/ 1.532 million infected), or spot on the rate ordinarily attributed to the common winter flu.

Surely it can’t be rational to flatten the economy and the very livelihoods of the state’s population to protect these working-age and school-age citizens against a tiny medical risk for their own good.

Moreover, we are using an assumption of 10% of the population to establish the denominator in these IFR calculations, when the state’s own studies showed population-adjusted infection rates of 21% in New York City and nearly 15% for the state overall.

The obvious point is that even that the minority of elderly and infirm above 60 years of age, who account for 85% of the COVID deaths in New York state to date, can be protected, shielded, assisted and treated directly. Just like in every other historic outbreak of viruses and related infectious diseases, the right solution has been to quarantine the vulnerable, not arrest the healthy.

Moreover, a further break-out of the New York State data on health conditions demonstrates that isolation and treatment of the vulnerable could be efficiently and precisely targeted based on the known health status of the elderly populations.

For instance, New York’s small population of 382,000 persons 80 years and over account for 38% of all with-COVID deaths in New York; and actually 11% of all COVID deaths in the entire USA.

Yet among this very small population, where the mortality rate is 1900 per 100,000 to date, the 7,230 deaths were associated with comorbidities as follows:

• Hypertension: 4,508 or 62%;
• Diabetes: 2,267 or 31%;
• High Cholesterol: 1,667 or 23%;
• Coronary artery disease: 1,109 or 15%;
• Dementia: 1,596 or 22%;
• Renal Disease: 761 or 11%;
• COPD: 671 or 9%;
• Arterial fibrillation: 921 or 13%;
• Cancer: 650 or 9%;
• Stroke: 544 or 8%.
• Other illnesses 5%
• In all, more than half of this population died in retirement and nursing homes, and suffered from a total of 14,700 of the top 10 co-morbidities or 2.0 per deceased. Yet, apparently, the geniuses who operate the Infectious Disease Cartel did not have enough common sense to recommend and help execute a full court press on the nursing homes and the sub-population of the elderly being treated for these conditions by their own doctors and other health care providers.

Indeed, the 16,320 deaths among the 60 years and older population, which account for 85% of total New York with-COVID deaths as of May 3rd, consisted of persons who were literally afflicted with the above itemized comorbidities.

That is, this vulnerable population suffered from 32,160 instances of these 10 comorbidities, or 2.0 per deceased, including 10,430 cases of hypertension and 6,275 cases of diabetes.

Would it have been beyond the capacity of the New York health department along with help from the federal Medicare/Medicaid agencies and the local hospitals and health service providers to identify this 1-5% of the state’s population truly in harm’s way and come to their assistance?

We think not.

And we also think that this giant social science experiment was utterly unnecessary based on the plain record of past pandemics, which have been equally contagious.

For instance, the Asian Flu outbreak of 1957 ended up with a mortality rate of 67 per 100,000 or more than triple the 19 per 100,000 attributed to COVID-19 at present.

That’s the equivalent of 172,000 deaths at the current US population level, but there was no national lockdown and no mass hysteria even remotely similar to the present MSM-fueled madness.

Jeffrey Tucker brilliantly put the matter in context in a recent post entitled “Elvis Was King, Ike Was President, and 116,000 Americans Died in a Pandemic”:

The year was 1957.

Elvis’s new movie “Jailhouse Rock” was packing the theaters. The last episode of “I Love Lucy” aired on television. The show “West Side Story” held tryouts in Washington, D.C., and opened on Broadway in September. Ford’s new car the Edsel rolled off the assembly line. The Cold War with Russia was on and “In God We Trust” appeared on U.S. currency. The first Toys R Us store opened.

Also that year, the so-called Asian Flu killed 116,000 Americans. Here is the full summary from the Centers for Disease Control:

In February 1957, a new influenza A (H2N2) virus emerged in East Asia, triggering a pandemic (“Asian Flu”). This H2N2 virus was comprised of three different genes from an H2N2 virus that originated from an avian influenza A virus, including the H2 hemagglutinin and the N2 neuraminidase genes. It was first reported in Singapore in February 1957, Hong Kong in April 1957, and in coastal cities in the United States in the summer of 1957. The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.

Like the current pandemic, there was a demographic pattern to the deaths. It hit the elderly population with heart and lung disease. In a frightening twist, the virus could also be fatal for pregnant women. The infection rate was probably even higher than the Spanish flu of 1918 (675,000 Americans died from this), but this lowered the overall case fatality rate to 0.67%. A vaccine became available in late 1957 but was not widely distributed.

The population of the U.S. at the time was 172 million, which is a little more than half of the current population. Life expectancy was 69 as versus 78 today. Even with shorter lives, it was a healthier population with lower rates of obesity. To extrapolate the data to a counterfactual, we can conclude that this virus was more wicked than COVID-19 thus far.

What’s remarkable when we look back at this year, next to nothing was shut down. Restaurants, schools, theaters, sporting events, travel – everything continued without interruption. Without a 24-hour news cycle with thousands of news agencies and a billion websites hungry for traffic, mostly people paid no attention other than to keep basic hygiene. It was covered in the press as a medical problem.

The notion that there was a political solution never occurred to anyone….

On the day before Thanksgiving, the Supreme Court delivered a 5-4 victory for religious liberty for churches and synagogues who were discriminated against while attempting to hold worship services. For religious services held in designated “red zones”, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo placed an attendance cap of 10 people, regardless of building capacity. However, businesses deemed “essential” were not restricted as to the number of people allowed in the building. 

The Court’s decision, which is a brief but fascinating read, powerfully affirms: “even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.” Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed: “Government is not free to disregard the First Amendment in times of crisis….The only explanation for treating religious places differently seems to be a judgment that what happens there just isn’t as “essential” as what happens in secular spaces … That is exactly the kind of discrimination the First Amendment forbids.” 

This ruling became the basis for the Supreme Court’s recent order which asked a lower court to reconsider its previous decision against a California church that is challenging Governor Newsom’s indoor worship restrictions. 

Our founding fathers recognized that God is the source of our freedoms, and therefore religion and morality are cornerstones of a free society. Because a person’s beliefs dictate his actions, religion is a key component to securing a stable society. In contrast to our founders, many elected officials today only pay lip service to religion, while consigning it to a lower tier of protection. The Court’s opinion affirms why freedom of religion is the first right listed in the First Amendment. 

However our Political leadership today doesn’t care an iota about what the Supreme Court ruled because they continue unabated to shut down our synagogues, our temples, our mosques, and our churches and all places of worship, without any reference to the decision of the Supreme Court about religious liberty…

And that is what splits our nation apart into segments that are ready to go to war against each other…

“The Three Nations of COVID and a Windbag Named Fauci” –Article written by David Stockman

If you don’t think our so-called mainstream rulers have gone off the deep end, just consider New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent menacing tweets to the orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, which has insisted on holding funerals, including one Tuesday [April 28, 2020] for a revered 73-year old rabbi attended by upwards of 2,000 mourners:

“Something absolutely unacceptable happened in Williamsburg tonight: a large funeral gathering in the middle of this pandemic,” the mayor said in one post. “When I heard, I went there myself to ensure the crowd was dispersed. And what I saw will not be tolerated so long as we are fighting the coronavirus.”

My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.

Well, NYC is nearly a ghost town and now its idiotic ruling pols are suggesting that, apparently, only ghosts may attend funerals without governmental permission!

But actually, the photo linked below from the offending funeral is another picture worth a thousand words.

That’s because by now, everyone, and we mean everyone, knows that COVID- 19 strikes the elderly, the frail and the already disease-afflicted; and that these vulnerable populations need to not only “social distance,” but actually stay home and keep out of harm’s way completely.

That appears to be exactly what happened at Rabbi Mertz’ funeral. If you can spot an octogenarian in this crowd, or even a grandfather, your eyesight is better than Clark Kent’s.

And besides being preponderantly way under 50-somethings, they congregated outdoors and virtually all were wearing masks. Yet claiming to speak for some latter- day “Committee of Public Safety,” Mayor Robespierre actually threatened to bring in the gendarmes.

As to whether these citizens should be jailed or fined, let’s start with a tale of two Lockdown Nations – New York City and the socialist Republic of California. Both have imposed severe stay-at-home and business shutdown orders almost from the day the Donald issued his unfortunate March 16 guidelines. Yet here are the results 45 days later with respect to their mortality rates, which is ostensibly the reason officialdom issued these draconian “cease and desist” orders in the first place.

To wit, the mortality rate as of April 28 was 143 per 100,000 in New York City and 4.6 per 100,000 in the state of California. Essentially the same public health policy lockdown, but night and day differences in the outcome.

Yes, New York is more dense than California on average, but that doesn’t even remotely explain the difference. That’s because by now there is overwhelming evidence that the severity of the quarantine regime has essentially zero impact on the mortality metrics.

And folks, even the Virus Patrol hardliners don’t claim their lockdown orders are designed to prevent 3-day hospital stays by people who get an unusually stubborn case of the winter flu. This is about death prevention and that’s why they run the Chyron of Death across the CNN screen day and night.

But there is zero correlation:

• California: Heavy lockdown, 4.6 deaths per 100,000;
• Iowa: No lockdown, 4.3 deaths per 100,000;
• Texas: Light lockdown, 2.4 deaths per 100,000;
• Washington state: Heavy lockdown, 10.0 deaths per 100,000;
• Colorado: Inconsistent lockdown, 12.2 deaths per 100,000;
• Georgia: Late Lockdown now lifted, 10.0 deaths per 100,000.
• Maine: Heavy Lockdown, 3.8 deaths per 100,000;
• Massachusetts: Heavy Lockdown, 45.7 deaths per 100,000.

We call attention to Washington state, Maine and Massachusetts especially because even though they all have severe statewide lockdown regimes and their overall mortality rates vary widely, from 3.8 per 100,000 in Maine to 45.7 per 100,000 in Massachusetts, they do share one thing in common. To wit, more than half 50-60% of their COVID fatalities have been inside nursing homes.

In Maine, 53% of COVID deaths were in nursing homes, meaning that the actual COVID mortality rate for the general population is just 1.8 per 100,000 and in Massachusetts 56% are nursing home fatalities, meaning the general rate is 21 per 100,000.

Ironically, Sweden has one of the least restrictive lockdown regimes in the world – schools, businesses, restaurants and retail remain open – yet its mortality rate of 22 per 100,000 is virtually the same as the lockdown state of Massachusetts.Self-evidently, what matters is not how economically suicidal the lockdown regime is from one jurisdiction to the next, but the age, health status and general frailty/vulnerability of the populations at issue. In the case of Washington state where the first SARS-2 Wuhan Coronavirus cases occurred, upwards of 80% of the 3,170 deaths to date, have been in nursing homes and amongst the elderly, and that is juxtaposed with more than 211 thousand cases of infections (99% of them asymptomatic) as seen through the most widespread testing than any other state, and that in turn means that our general population mortality rate is just 0.03 per 100,000 from the dreaded Covid-19.

As we amplify below, these bellow single-digit rates are rounding errors on the general scheme of things, even as all deaths are both sadly regrettable and since we are all going to die at some point, they are also totally inevitable. But by what rational calculation does Governor Inslee insists on keeping the whole of Washington state in Total and Severe Lockdown, while our citizens are totally desperate, our society is failing and our economy is heading into the drink, same as all of our fellow Washingtonians who are now the most alcohol infused, marijuana inebriated and over-caffeinated lot, amongst all the citizens of these United States — contemplate a cold water plunge from the Aurora bridge?

Someone might dare inform him that the general mortality rate from all causes for his citizens is 900 per 100,000 annually, and that, therefore, he is imposing the economic mayhem evident in these charts below owing to a risk of COVID death for the general population of his state that so far has been less than 0.02% of the normal average.

Stated differently, had Patient Zero (the traveler who flew in from Wuhan China) not been the victim of malpractice by the “Science” doctors led by Fauci and the Scarf Lady, he might have been advised to dial in on day #1 to the heart of the COVID threat. Namely, the 15,600 nursing homes in America, which domicile some 1.5 million residents, of which one-quarter (425,000) are over the age of 80 years.

In the case of Massachusetts, where the majority of deaths also have occurred inside nursing homes, the average age of COVID deaths has been 82 years.

Needless to say, you did not need to be entombed in the infectious disease tunnel at the NIH for 52 years like Dr Fauci, a pretentious 79-year old windbag who should have himself been put in a retirement home years ago, to realize that nursing homes are dense-packed with the frail, disease-afflicted elderly.

So rather than wipe out $4 trillion of GDP via Lockdown Nation they might have started with, say, $25 billion of incremental money for Medicare/Medicaid and the state public health agencies to zero-in on protecting, isolating and treating the nursing home residents.

After all, we find it easy to believe that spending $20,000 per nursing home resident might have saved or extended a lot more lives than the WHO/CDC/DrFauci blunderbuss assault on the entire US economy.

Indeed, with each passing update, the CDC data itself becomes an ever more dispositive indictment of the madness the Donald’s doctors have imposed on the nation. It is now strikingly clear, in fact, that when it comes to COVID-19 there are three nations in America, and that the attempt to shoehorn them into a one-size-fits- all regime of state control is tantamount to insanity.

There is first the Kids Nation of some 61 million persons under 15 years, where even by the CDC’s elastic definitions there have been just 5 with-COVID deaths thru April 28. You needn’t even bother with the zero-ridden fraction of 1 per 100,000 (it’s actually 0.008) to make the point.

That is to say, last year there were about 44,000 deaths among the Kids Nation – so coronavirus accounts for just 0.011% of the total, and in no sane world would it be a reason for shutting down the schools.

Of course, the Virus Patrol insists that the school closures are an unfortunate necessity because otherwise the Kids Nation would take the virus home to the Parents/Workers Nation. That is the 215 million citizens between 15 and 64, who account for the overwhelming share of commerce, job-holders and GDP.

Yet according to the CDC, there have been just 8,267 deaths with COVID in this massive expanse of the population, which figure represents a mortality rate of, well, 3.6 per 100,000.

But here’s the thing. The normal total mortality rate for the 15-64 years old population is 335 per 100,000. So we are talking about shutting down the entire economy owing to a death rate to date which amounts to 1.1% of normal mortality in the Parents/Workers nation.

Finally, we have Grandparents/Great Grandparents Nation, composed of 52 million citizens. But they account for 32,000 or nearly 80% of the with-COVID deaths as of April 28 – with 15,000 of these being among those 85 years and older. By way of computation, that’s 61 deaths per 100,000 for the group as a whole
and 230 per 100,000 for the 85 years and older.

Stated differently, the risk of death posed by COVID-19 is 7,600X greater for Grandparents/Great Grandparents Nation overall than for Kids Nation, and 29,000 times greater for the several million Great-Grandparents afflicted with severe comorbidity and likely as not to be in the care of a nursing home.
Needless to say, it did not take a catastrophic experiment with Lockdown Nation to figure this out. It was already known from China and the history of other coronaviruses.

If there were any reason or justice left in America, Dr Fauci and the Scarf Lady along with the whole CDC/WHO lobby that brought about this disaster would actually be headed for their own quarantine – the kind that doesn’t happen at home and which can’t be lifted by the whims of the Cuomo brotherhood, Mayor Robespierre, or Governor “stalin-lite” of the Pacific northwest…

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

My friends, please do keep in mind that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Obviously, these present policies are no exception to that rule, yet our nonsensical leaders seem to forget that the pied piper led the children to the river and not down the road to hell.

Methinks that a swift death awaits those who head down into the cold river unprepared, than the ones who take the easy road down to hell, where at least they can have a good time with all the other miscreants and happy-go-lucky types…

PPS:

As you know I am a Leader that always looks for Solutions and not for bitching and complaining about problems and that is why I offer you the answers to the age old question that I hear from all of you:

“What can we do now?”

” What should that approach look like?”

I say let us go back to the people and ask them what they want.

Because I want to assemble a large Coalition for a renewed call fo Civil rights today, much like the march helmed by Dr Martin Luther King that helped usher the Era of Civil rights in America back in his day — we now convene a new Civil rights movement.

And here are the steps that might bring about the solutions to all the wicked problems that we are facing today:

• First, of all I must remind you that Civil war is not the answer to anyone’s problems.
• Keep that first thing in mind, and let us find ways to Victory through Peaceful Disobedience.
• Secondly, let us find one brave leader who will get the ball rolling by forming an impromptu coalition of states, cities, tribes, and communities that are interested in staying open or reopening. Political pressure to go along with other states is strong, and the federal government has a long and sordid history of bullying states into compliance with national edicts using the carrot and the stick. The Trump administration thus far has been surprisingly reluctant to issue a nationwide shutdown, and governors looking for daylight should seize on this. They will need each other to stand against the tide and especially against the incoming administration of geriatrics that will ensure the Draconian decrees will continue and intensify… till all of us are serfs to a distant and unaccountable lord President, a Lord Governor, and a Lord anybody with the power who is a King in form but not in name.
• It is time to stand up for the Democratic Republic we hold dear to our hearts.
• To that end, today, I convene a Summit of Democracy, and wish to gather all those opposed to the Stalinesque lockdowns and who see to rebel against the totalitarians who in a nod to Vladimir Lenin closed the churches and wish to keep them closed till kingdom comes.
• Keep in mind that from the time of the Spanish influenza of 2018 — the Russian communists used that excuse and held the churches closed down, until the Soviet system collapsed in 1989. And methinks that this is what our current leaders want to do now again.
• To avoid that and preempt this action — I shall hold a press conference to announce the coalition of citizen communities, cities, counties, towns, tribes and Civic leaders, and we shall hold weekly in person and virtual calls to discuss all of our issues and especially the issues of our freeborn rights.
• This “Democracy In Action” revolution is open to all and the global media is invited along with the local American and indigenous journalists, radio, and television people as well.
• We shall discuss conditions, options, and ideas, but I must make it clear that each tribe, community, town, city, and state are wholly independent and that decisions are necessarily localized – so this is not to ever be seen as an interstate compact.
• Announce guidelines — not orders — to citizens along these lines: people over seventy are strongly encouraged to self-quarantine in a strict manner. Those over fifty who have existing medical vulnerabilities to the virus are encouraged to do the same. Healthy people under fifty are welcome to return to daily activities but are strongly encouraged to wear masks (proven to be effective in several Asian countries). Of course many residents will self-quarantine regardless, and some businesses will choose to shut down regardless, per their individual choices.
• Reopen government courts, and set a deadline of sixty or ninety days hence for resumption of contract enforcement (excluding evictions). Ask the state bar association to set up statewide centers for landlords and tenants to meet and renegotiate – using realistic numbers – rental agreements. Hard-line landlords can go to court, and hardline tenants can refuse payment, but evictions benefit neither party in the immediate term.
• In stages, reopen public schools and universities based on local conditions. Hold parental votes online to determine whether each school district will continue online classes or revert to physical attendance.
• Announce that restaurants, bars, and retail outlets are open as usual, with the strong caveat that provable cases of virus transmittal will be heard in state courts under a broad doctrine of premises liability. This will encourage the kind of measures by owners that have been seen in Taiwan and Singapore, ranging from using digital thermometers at store entrances to relentless scrubbing of surfaces in restaurants.
• Immediately bid out a statewide insurance claims facility for coronavirus deaths so that in worst-case scenarios families will be compensated for loss of loved ones. Insist that payments are retroactive to cover deaths prior to the bid, and use the model of airlines after crashes (quick payouts, little paperwork, claims personnel with good bedside manner). Payouts of $1 million would not be impossible to insure against in low-population states, where deaths likely will remain well under five thousand. Insurers themselves can go to the reinsurance markets, and insurance companies would have every incentive to test, treat, and take measures necessary to keep citizens alive. They would become de facto partners when it comes to securing medical equipment, hospital beds, and personnel. Insurance companies also would have a strong incentive, unlike politicians, to determine what constitutes death “from” the virus as opposed to death with the virus simply present in the body. Use bond revenue (discussed below) to cover premiums.
• Immediately bid out to pharmaceutical companies for a supply of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and other promising drugs. Eliminate unnecessary state restrictions on prescribing and dispensing such drugs, and consider making them available over the counter until infections subside. Distribute them widely across the state, and charge break-even (cheap) prices for generic versions.
• Issue state bonds for sale to private equity investors, hedge funds, foundations, andindividuals. Take a deep breath, and secure them with real estate owned by the state – make government, rather than taxpayers, sacrifice for once! Price them aggressively, with higher than market rates of interest (but not junk bond rates). Make these bonds nontaxable by the issuing state itself, both with respect to income and capital gains. Use the funds to provide insurance, medical equipment, hospital capacity, testing centers, and protective gear as needed.
• Encourage regional airlines, or major airlines serving the state, to relocate aircraft there and resume ”domestic” flights (and/or flights between “open” states).

None of these ideas is particularly difficult to implement per se, but do any of our current Leaders have the political will and the personal wherewithal to do so?

They should raise the stakes and get involved, if they were to take an honest look at the landscape of a country that is coming unglued.

We need real God fearing leadership right now, because each and every day there is less and less to lose, by trying something different.

We must act now, because in a crisis, it is only the “bold” who usually wins. So the choice at present appears to be a singular choice: Either we get a shot at “bold freedom” or we allow this bold tyranny to destroy us and all of our freeborn rights.

A simple yet stark binary decision awaits all of us.

Americans are reconsidering federalism and even nullification in an era of intensely polarized anti-Trump sentiment. The Left argues for soft secession in the form of “Bluexit” from the hated red states; conservatives such as Angelo Codevilla call for strategic defiance of the feds in what he terms a “Cold Civil War.” Golden State champagne-socialist governor Gavin Newsom even recently referred to California as
a “nation-state,” and why not? With 40 million people, a huge economy, tourism, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, ports and coastlines, and major universities, not to mention beaches, deserts, and mountains, the state easily could be an independent nation.

We were already in uncharted territory, but the coronavirus truly laid bare the deep and intolerable political divisions wracking our country. Governor Noem and others could begin the healing process now, literally and figuratively, by showing us a way forward without DC, or even without our State’s capitals, but with the Citizen’s heart in the right place it is the ordinary people that are called to do extraordinary things today.

May we utilize this crisis to bring about some real change in our world and hope that this virus could be the catalyst for a new map of America that leaves no one behind.

As for me — I live and die with the great shield of our nation:

E Pluribus Unum