Gang, this is how the political world really works.
BREAKING: New audio of Hunter Biden talking about his partner “the f**king spy chief of China”
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 27, 2020
“I’m receiving calls from SDNY” @TheNatPulse pic.twitter.com/vDYnxNTvo6
I am really glad we got a crack head on the inside to expose it all. Thanks, Joe, nice move putting Hunter in the middle of all this.
-RW
The Center for Disease Control will not be collecting data on the flu this year.
The CDC webpage, U.S. Influenza Surveillance System: Purpose and Methods, contains this notice:
What gives? Does the CDC fear that there will be more cases of the flu rather than COVID-19? That more people will die this coming flu season from the flu rather than COVID-19?
That flu cases will be counted as COVID-19 cases and the major drop in flu cases will be very easy to spot?
The idea that this is some kind of capacity problem doesn't wash. The number of flu specimens is nowhere near the number of COVID specimens tested.
Something looks very shady.
Governments never end programs, ever, unless they have something to hide.
-RW
The self-described radical leftist Slavoj Žižek is a much more damn interesting thinker than many who describe themselves as libertarian or conservative but always lean in the direction of political correctness.
Žižek is not afraid to tell it like he sees it (49 seconds).
The City of Brotherly Love is displaying hate toward coppers tonight after a man with a knife was shot by the police.
Cops run from rioters in Philadelphia as ATMs are smashed and businesses looted.
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 27, 2020
Some store owners attempted to protect their stores by linking arms.
The crowd remains violent.
pic.twitter.com/j99PEDcsWv
#Philadelphia
— Shane B. Murphy (@shanermurph) October 27, 2020
BREAKING
A large black pick-up truck just sped through the area striking at least two police officers. Multiple officers down, requesting back up immediately.pic.twitter.com/oEvn2Cb40o
A police SUV is on fire at 52nd and market, surrounded by a crowd of a couple hundred pic.twitter.com/dwSFbNoMgs
— Anna Orso (@anna_orso) October 27, 2020
Rioting and looting have kicked off in #Philadelphia following the fatal police shooting of #WalterWallaceJr. pic.twitter.com/SKelc7fH9M
— It's Going Down (@IGD_News) October 27, 2020
This is what triggered the rioting:BREAKING: Mass looting in #Philadelphia, Pennsylvania pic.twitter.com/e8ehZ8NjtB
— SV News 🚨 (@SVNewsAlerts) October 27, 2020
His name was #WalterWallace Jr, 27
— Maurice Ash (@TheMauriceAsh) October 27, 2020
He had a Knife and was at least 10ft away when 2 West #Philadelphia Police officers shot at least 10 times killing him.
He was a Father, a twin, and a son.
Another Black life taken at the hand of Police. Sickening!!! pic.twitter.com/0NWGU58p0P
Gary Cornell, who has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Brown University and has been a visiting scientist at IBM’s Watson Labs and a program director at the National Science Foundation, explains why any vaccine introduced any time soon to battle COVID-19 will be of unknown efficacy for seniors (the most at serious risk from the virus).
He writes:
The risk of both hospitalization and death from Covid 19 increase greatly with age. Approximately 80% of the deaths from Covid 19 are people over 65 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/older-adults.html). The unfortunate truth is that a vaccine that is proven highly effective for seniors is not likely for a very long time, unless we dramatically increase the number of seniors in current trials now.
Why? The gold standard to determine efficacy is a large, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trial. There are currently eight vaccines in large Phase 3 trials. But it is very unlikely, maybe even impossible, that any of these vaccine trials will give us definitive information about how effective these vaccines are for people over age 55 — well, unless they change how they are currently setup.
Why? To begin with, none of the four trials that have released their protocols are properly stratified. While they aren’t lumping seniors into the same group as the 18 to 55-year-olds, they should be using three groups i.e. one for each age decile: 55 to 64, 65 to 74, and 75 and older. To be sure, it’s possible to tease out information about how different strata of seniors react to the vaccine even if they are lumped together in one group. However, it likely would take more data because you have to tease out the information for each age decile from a larger group.
But the bigger problem is that even if these trials give us some information about efficacy for seniors, they are unlikely to tell us everything we need to know quickly enough unless we have a far larger number of participants over 55 than the current trials are enrolling. Why? Since Covid-19 can be so deadly in older people, they and the communities they live in have generally been taking better precautions than the general public against becoming infected with the virus SARS-CoV-2 that causes Covid-19. For example, the CDC reports (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6939e1.htm#T1_down) that, as of August, roughly speaking, the prevalence among people >75 years old is 1/15 that of people 18–55 years old. And, even if you lump all people over 55 into one group, it is roughly 1/3. And, of course, we are all hoping that prevalence among seniors has gone down significantly since August. But prevalence is what determines the time needed to have a statistically significant efficacy signal from a vaccine trial...
To summarize: given what I feel are the inescapable ethical issues in completing any placebo controlled study on seniors once you have a safe and effective vaccine based on trials in healthy 18–55 olds, we must enlarge the number of seniors in the trials quickly. Failing to do so means that we likely won’t know enough about how well the original vaccine worked in one or more age decile group of seniors. Your castle will be built on little if any foundation.
In other words, the phony "follow the science" government officials will likely be ordering up a vaccine that will have unknown efficacy for the one group that is of serious risk from COVID-19.
What a scam!
-RW
Back in June, in a podcast episode, I called out the lockdowns as driven by dread risk fear followed by herd risk fear.
These concepts are now gaining traction. Although the terms dread risk fear and herd risk fear are not being used, the concepts are.
In a recent post, Herd Immunity is Not About Killing Grandmothers, I quoted Stanford's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration:
Lockdown policies...reflect, Dr. Bhattacharya says, a “sort of monomania.” The world “panicked in March, and the focus came to just be on Covid control and nothing else.” People saw pictures from Wuhan, China, and Bergamo, Italy, and concluded that they had to do “something very, very drastic in order to address this drastic thing that’s happening.” There was “an action bias that led to the adoption of lockdowns as a form of contagion itself.”
On the heels of the Bhattacharya comment. Dr. Ari R Joffe, MD, who teaches in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Critical Care Medicine, University of Alberta and Stollery Children’s Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and is a member of The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, writes in a new paper:
The public health goal of lockdowns was to save the population from COVID-19 cases and deaths, and to prevent overwhelming health care systems with COVID-19 patients. In this narrative review I explain why I changed my mind about supporting lockdowns. First, I explain how the initial modeling predictions induced fear and crowd-effects [i.e., groupthink].
This is also hinting about dread risk and herd risk fear though Bhattacharya is more spot-on citing the initial pictures coming on out of Wuhan, China, and Bergamo, Italy, than the later initial modeling predictions. If those pictures weren't beamed to the masses from the two cities, the off-the-wall modeling forecast would have been greeted with a yawn.
But the element is developing that panic, not based on science, was behind the lockdowns. My initial thinking was that the recognition of this fact might take years, so it is good to see that recognition of the role of fear in the lockdowns is already starting to emerge.
Also noteworthy is one of the other reasons Joffe lists for turning against lockdowns:
I describe how reality started sinking in, with information on significant collateral damage due to the response to the pandemic, and information placing the number of deaths in context and perspective...I present a cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 that finds lockdowns are far more harmful to public health than COVID-19 can be.
Back in April, I warned of some of the collateral damage:
It's Time...
...to get mad as hell. Aside from the one-size-fits-all horrific risk-reward ratios imposed on all of us by government power freaks through lockdowns and other tyrannical measures, there are zero scientific studies that indicate total lockdowns make any sense.
The lockdowns put the healthy potential carriers of COVID-19 in close quarters with many elderly who may be especially vulnerable to harsh consequences from infection.
It deprives most with outdoor sunlight, sunlight which provides healthy means by which to battle COVID-19 and other diseases.
The lockdowns have resulted in more suicides, domestic abuse, child abuse and child rape.
It is time to do your part in your way to help end the madness.
The collateral damage was not difficult to see coming. Joffe lists additional types of damage.
Sanity is returning at the edges by the thinking crowd. This is a good sign.
But the politicians will continue to push different versions of lockdowns as long as polls show that the masses support "action to fight COVID-19." They along with the evil Dr. Fauci and the rest of the CDC are fueling the fear.
And thus a good chunk of the masses remains in a state of irrational fear about COVID-19. This is the big problem. Bhattacharya and Joffe chipping away at this irrational fear is very important work right now.
-RW
Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal published an interview with two of the authors, physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff , of the Great Barrington Declaration.
I found this exchange on herd immunity enlightening:
We circle back to the idea of herd immunity, which Mr. Kulldorff calls “the most misunderstood term of 2020.” He jokes that use of the term can invite “accusations of mass murder,” and Dr. Bhattacharya laments its frequent “mischaracterization.” The words, he says, are a “technical term that comes out of standard models of epidemic spread.” It is the “end state of any epidemic where some immunity actually happens after infection. It’s a biological fact. It’s not something nefarious or strange.” Many media outlets, he complains, have said that “we’re advocating a herd-immunity strategy. That’s a propaganda term. After all, the lockdown-until-a-vaccine strategy will also end with herd immunity.”
“As an epidemiologist,” says Mr. Kulldorff, “it’s weird and stunning to have this discussion about herd immunity—flockimmunitet in Swedish.” He likens it to gravity: “You wouldn’t have physicists talking about whether we believe in gravity or not. Or two airline pilots saying, ‘Should we use the gravity strategy to get the airplane down on the ground?’ Whatever way they fly that plane—or not fly it—gravity will ensure eventually that the plane is going to hit the ground.”
Also of note from the interview:
Lockdown policies...reflect, Dr. Bhattacharya says, a “sort of monomania.” The world “panicked in March, and the focus came to just be on Covid control and nothing else.” People saw pictures from Wuhan, China, and Bergamo, Italy, and concluded that they had to do “something very, very drastic in order to address this drastic thing that’s happening.” There was “an action bias that led to the adoption of lockdowns as a form of contagion itself.”
The China and Italy scenes that Bhattacharya identifies as the scenes that caused the "action bias" toward lockdowns are exactly the two points I identified in my podcast episode, Dread Risk Fear And Its Role in the Current COVID-19 Fear, as the events that caused the dread risk fear.
-RW
 |
| Rudy Giuliani being "interviewed" by Maria Bakalova |
He is being smeared by the crackpot leftist Sacha Baron Cohen.
Cohen is out with another of his sophomoric films where he sets up scenes that place people in awkward positions.
The main target in his latest film, Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, is Giuliani.
The left can't stop talking about Giuliani's sexual overtures that were allegedly made to someone he thought was a 15-year old.
This is a representative sample (4 minutes and 6 seconds):
 |
| Maria Bakalova |
-RWAre you kidding me?????
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) October 24, 2020
Borat is nearly the most racist movie in history, overtly degrading the pple of #Kazakhstan. Yet many get "cancelled" for misusing a certain words out of context.
So Sacha Baron Cohen & authors get a free pass by the "left" because he attacks Giuliani? pic.twitter.com/s4v9OWbnCB
By Becky Akers
Yep, not only do they inflict maskne and headaches, but masks also upload carcinogens into your lungs, according to Guy Crittenden, a former editor of HazMat Management. He posted this information on Facebook; thanks to David Mueller for sending it my way.
I happen to know a thing or two about masks and safety. Why? Because for 25 years I was the editor of an award-winning trade magazine called HazMat Management that covered such topics as pollution prevention and compliance with health & safety laws. We routinely published articles on masks, gloves, respirators and other forms of personal protective equipment (PPE). Now let me tell you a few things about that mask you’re wearing. And please note that what I’m about to share was also stated in the most recent edition of Del Bigtree’s program The Highwire when two OSHA mask experts spoke to the fact that the kinds of masks people are wearing were never (never!) designed to be worn for long periods and doing so is very harmful.
The blue typical mask depicted in the photograph contain Teflon and other chemicals. A Facebook friend reminds us: 1. Masks are “sterilized” with Ethylene Oxide — a known carcinogen. Many teachers in various school boards have been experiencing significant symptoms as a direct result of the effects of this chemical. 2. The masks contain (not sprayed with) PTFE which makes up Teflon along with other chemicals. I found and have posted the US patent to allow manufacturers to use PTFE as a filter in commercial masks… “breathing these for extended periods can lead to lung cancer.”
Don’t agree? Argue with the experts at OSHA, which is the main US agency, i.e., its Occupational Health & Safety Agency. These masks are meant to be worn only for short periods, like say if you’re sanding a table for an hour and don’t want to inhale sawdust. They don’t do anything whatsoever to stop the spread of any virus, and the emerging science of virology now understands that viruses aren’t even passed person to person. I know that sounds incredible, but it’s the case that the virus is in the air, you breath it in, there’s no way to prevent that short of living in an oxygen tent, and if you have a strong immune system you’ll be fine, and if you have a weak immune system you may have to deal with the effects of your immune system working to restore balance within your metabolism.
So let’s say you don’t wear the blue packaged masks, and instead wear a homemade cloth mask — the kind people wear over and over and hang on their rearview mirror and so on. Those masks are completely useless against a virus, and are also very dangerous. OSHA would never condone a person wearing a mask of this kind for anything more than the shortest time. Re-breathing your own viral debris is dangerous to health, and the oxygen deprivation children suffer wearing such masks all day will certainly cause brain damage. I’m not making this up. Again, you might say, well, Guy, you’re not a doctor. True, but I did edit that magazine for 25 years. That’s a long time and many articles on masks and PPE. I’ve attended numerous OH&S conferences and listened to experts discussing these matters.
You may hear people saying that surgeons and nurses wear masks like this all day. Um, no. No they don’t. They’re trained in the proper use of masks, which is to wear them in the OR, then dispose of the mask when they leave that room. Are you aware that operating rooms are actually supplied extra oxygen, to compensate for the reduction in oxygen flow from mask wearing? To my mind, it’s criminal (not hyperbole) to force children to wear masks all day. Setting aside the very real psychological effects, we’re going to have a generation of brain damaged children. Ever heard the expression, “Not enough oxygen at birth?” That’s a joke at the expense of a mentally challenged person, but that’s literally what we’re doing. And we’re told it’s to “keep us safe”! We’re told this by doctors who actually don’t know about PPE and laypeople who have no clue.
So, you can choose to believe me or not, but I was the editor for a quarter century of a magazine that had a strong occupational health and safety mandate, and I can tell you that the mask wearing currently mandated by governments and private businesses offers no health benefit whatsoever, in no way protects you or anyone else from any virus, and actually does you damage beyond wearing it for a few minutes.Got that? Good. Now please share this message and get the conversation going with parents, who must end this masking of children immediately. This is a very serious matter. And related to that, let me just state this doesn’t end for me when the lockdown ends or the masking ends. No, this ends for me when every politician and bureaucrat who inflicted this travesty, this crime against humanity, on the population of Canada (and other affected countries) is in the dock, and faces their misdeeds in a court of law.
And as for those of you who have put masks on young children, I will have a long memory on that score. A very long memory.
END NOTE: The CDC and WHO have acknowledged that asymptomatic people do not spread the virus, so the case for masks for such people is moot in the first place.
RW comment:
I have been consistently pointing out that there is no significant study regarding what long-term mask-wearing does to the brain or other parts of the body. It is typical of these blunt instrument orders from government that they don't consider all the ramifications of the orders they issue.
My attempts to get answers from the San Francisco mayor, the president of Macy's and OSHA regarding the health ramifications of mask-wearing for prolonged periods have gone unanswered.
This is what I do know. The body excretes waste in three ways liquid, solid and gas. Mask wearing forces us to reinhale the gaseous waste which includes carbon dioxide and ethanol.
You have to be a buffon to claim that there is no harm from reinhaling such waste when there is no scientific studies to back up the assertion and there are hints that it is a serious problem for long-term mask wearers---aside from the chemical in the masks themselves that are inhaled as identified by Crittenden.
This is what the lockdown has come to.
Authoritarianism against individuals minding their own business in their own homes.
Police officers enter PRIVATE HOMES to find Jewish gatherings in Monsey, New York:
— SV News 🚨 (@SVNewsAlerts) October 23, 2020
“We came because we had a vehicle parking complaint. Then I look up and I see you have over 10 people in a crowd!” pic.twitter.com/hXsXpuKJeG
Against Jews no less. I seem to remember this happened to Jews one other time in history if I recall correctly.
They should have told the coppers it was a gathering that was protesting police brutality against black thugs.
#BlackThugsMatterPeacefulJewsDon't
-RW
Just take a look at this tweet by Bernie Sanders.
It is a typical socialist distortion:
Last night Trump attacked Medicare for All as "socialized medicine." Funny. I didn't hear him complain when he received the best socialized medicine in the world for free at a 100% government run hospital. Yup. Trump loves socialism for himself, rugged individualism for the rest.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 23, 2020
The implication is that under-socialized medicine all would receive quality healthcare which is a total lie.
Trump is a perfect example of what does happen when there is any degree of centralized medicine. Those in power or close to power get the best treatment and the rest get, well, VA hospital treatment.
Or am I missing something and VA patients now get their own private offices in their own private suites? And a staff of doctors running around with the name of the patient they are treating sewed on their medical garb?
What Trump got was the Castro treatment, the best medical treatment a country can offer financed by the people while the people suffer. This is what socialized medicine looks like.
-RW |
| Ellsworth Toohey |
Paul Krugman writes in his latest New York Time column:
Donald Trump’s disastrous leadership is, of course, an important factor. But I also blame Ayn Rand — or, more generally, libertarianism gone bad, a misunderstanding of what freedom is all about... refusing to wear a face covering during a pandemic, or insisting on mingling indoors with large groups, isn’t like following the church of your choice. It’s more like dumping raw sewage into a reservoir that supplies other people’s drinking water.
Actually, Krugman makes a point more about himself more than anyone else. Only an Ellsworth Toohey type-character such as Krugman would compare exercising freedom with dumping raw sewage into a reservoir.
Toohey, in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, displayed Krugman type thinking:
The basic trouble with the modern world … is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is forced upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.
And perhaps the fetish for demanding by Krugman and government officials that all the public wear masks can be understood with another Toohey quote:
There’s nothing as significant as the human face. nor as eloquent. We can never really know a person except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance we know everything. Even though we’re not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.
They can't stand the beauty and power of the face of the individuals who can reject the desires of power freaks who want to control all the people of the world. They want the sameness of masks to prevent the powerful faces to be visible to all. But the fact that some refuse to wear masks even when demanded by them is really, from their perspective, throwing raw sewage in their mask covered faces.
-RW
Micah emails:
RW response:It is with a heavy heart that I share this one. I believe this will become a national story and I am surprised it hasn't already. Please do not use my name if you post it. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Steven Arauz was viewed as a model foster and adoptive parent, a single dad who gave talks to foster-parenting classes and urged others at his Seventh-day Adventist church to help needy children, too.Four years ago, the statewide Adventist organization put Arauz, a sixth-grade teacher at one of its Central Florida schools, and his newly adopted son on the cover of its magazine...But on June 23, after Arauz did an interview for the online magazine Gays With Kids — an interview he hoped would help more children in Florida’s foster system find good homes — the school fired him...Joe Saunders, senior political director of the statewide LGBTQ civil rights organization Equality Florida, said Arauz’s firing underscores the need to ban discrimination at private schools receiving vouchers.“Our position is that if you are a private school in Florida, you should not be discriminating against LGBTQ faculty or staff, and you shouldn’t be denying assets of the school to LGBTQ students,” he said. “But particularly if you are a voucher-funded school that is receiving public education dollars, you have an obligation to make sure that you’re open for all.”
From a libertarian perspective, this is an easy one.
Any private school should be allowed to hire or fire (if the contract allows) any employee for any reason or no reason.
Government is always about blunt instrument regulations that force private individuals to act in ways they don't want. Government should stay out of private sector schooling and, of course, government should stay out of funding schools in any way.
In October 2019, President Trump signed an executive order to establish a commission that Attorney General William Barr explained was intended to make the police “trusted and effective guardians of our communities.” The commission was made up entirely of law enforcement.
Some of the proposals coming out of the commission are truly shocking. It could result in a national facial recognition database and easier police access to information on your cell phone.
Phillip Atiba Goff explains in The New York Times:
The commission recommends providing America’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies, from small town departments to the New York Police Department, with more money for facial recognition technologies. Because federal agencies can set the reporting requirements and selection criteria for funding to local law enforcement, they often require data sharing. In this case, that could result in data collected at the local level being entered into a national database.
The commission also recommends that police departments be granted back door access to encrypted cellphones. This would make it easier for the authorities to access the most intimate details of your life. Whom you spend time with, your private messages, your financial information — all of it would be available to the government, along with any hackers who are able to take advantage of the same access point.
Goff continues:
Taken together, the upshot is clear. According to Tracey Meares, a professor at Yale Law School, if the recommendations became law, the consequences should worry all of us. With the support of a sympathetic judge, law enforcement would face a lowered barrier to searching the contents of your phone, or adding photos of you and your friends to a nationwide facial recognition database. If the officer used excessive force in the process of obtaining that phone and claimed qualified immunity as a defense, the federal government would be obligated to regularly affirm their support for that officer’s defense regardless of the evidence.
It’s not a full-fledged surveillance state. But it’s not far off.
To be sure, as Goff makes clear, there is a long way between a proposal and implementation but these proposals if they become law would advance the federal government ability to track all of us in myriad ways at the same time that the leftists desire such tracking to keep us all in line with their socialist agendas.
It is on topics such as this that the great weaknesses of Trump and his inability to appreciate liberty at a foundational level are revealed.
He could really march us into a police state by accident.
-RW
