“America’ COVID Response Was Based on Lies” This is a Newsweek article, published today. In other words, a tactical ‘information’ release by some faction of our government. I’m not a student of the internal power struggles that characterize emerging oligarchies, so I have few thoughts on why, after three long years, an organ of the oligarchs is saying what every scientifically literate and non-terrified person was saying since April of 2020. Somebody perhaps wants to see certain people swinging from lamp posts, or at least fire a shot across the bow to keep opposing factions in line. Or maybe something else – but nothing gets published these days without getting run by some faction or other of the Ministry of Truth.
Here’s the list of lies from the article, along with some light commentary in italics. I could link back to articles here on this blog showing where I said pretty much the same damn things, but I’m beyond sick of this crap.
1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than the flu by several orders of magnitude. The coof is bad cold level dangerous. People forget the common saying: “Catch your death of cold”. Old people – and the median age at death “from” Covid is around 80 – very commonly die from pneumonia, where a cold or flu settles into their lungs for keeps. The coof is no different, and no more dangerous.
2. Everyone is at significant risk to die from this virus. If you’re under 50 and reasonably healthy, you might as well worry about getting struck by lightening as dying of the coof. If you are reasonably healthy at ANY age, coof adds very little to your overal risk profile.
3. No one has any immunological protection, because this virus is completely new. The very concept of a “completely new” virus reveals complete ignorance of basic biology and logic.
4. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread. Here is a classic reversal: rather than the people making a claim providing the evidence that their claim is true, they assume they are correct, and attempt to make people challenging the unsubstantiated claim provide the proof. No. The way it works: you want me to do or believe something? You convince ME. I don’t have to prove to you that asymptomatic people spread a disease – YOU need to prove to me that they do. But such transmission was conclusively presumed, and anyone who pointed out the utter lack of evidence that it was true was vilified.
5. Locking down—closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel—will stop or eliminate the virus. Now we’re playing the game of pretending these brutal, totalitarian measures ‘worked’ in some vague sense, but certainly not the sense in which, you know, they slowed or stopped the spread of the virus.
6. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread. Ignoring 100 years of studies and the experiences worldwide during the Spanish Flu, our betters produce the famous 70 studies within weeks all purporting to prove that masks slow the spread of the Coof, and vilifying anyone who dares disagree. Riiiiight.
7. The virus is known to be naturally occurring, and claiming it originated in a lab is a conspiracy theory. “Known to be” – how? How does one even go about proving such a thing?
8. Teachers are at especially high risk. Right. 80 year old teachers with cardiovascular failing in nursing homes, maybe.
9. COVID vaccines stop the spread of the infection. Too stupid to even address.
10. Immune protection only comes from a vaccine. Huh? Again, relying on the public’s complete ignorance of how immunity works.
And I’d add a Lie #11. More than 1 million American died from Covid. As Dr. Atlas more properly puts it: More than 1 million American deaths have been attributed to that virus. The processes by which they were so attributed guarantee that that number wildly overstates the true number of deaths *from* Covid versus deaths *with* Covid. Our CDC staunchly refused to collect and publish the data that would enable a reasonable person to determine how much the official death numbers overstate Covid deaths, but studies from other nations show something under 10% of attributed deaths were caused *by* Covid, as opposed to a person dying anyway but being diagnosed with Covid – such as the 50-60% of the Covid deaths that happened in nursing homes, where Americans go to die.
I was able to find one person in the U.S. — little Sally Rodriguez, 3rd grade, from Akron, Ohio — who was surprised yesterday to learn that the CDC’s vaccine approval committee (“ACIP”) met, took public comment, and then voted 15-0 recommending that covid shots be added to the childhood vaccination schedule.
Two of the 15 committee members, who supposedly are experts or something, were wearing a mask ON ZOOM. They actually believe covid travels over the internet. Or maybe they think they can get it from THEMSELVES. Either way, it was a bad sign right from the jump.
Um, yeah. Tinfoil hats make more sense.
The committee, who were all sitting in little boxes in a dystopian version of “Celebrity Jeopardy,” never discussed the fact that covid poses a miniscule risk to healthy kids. The committee never discussed natural immunity. The committee never discussed adverse events.
The CDC hasn’t yet officially added the shots to the standard school schedule, but given the unanimous recommendation from the committee, it’s a sure bet, likely to happen today or tomorrow.
As soon as that happens, the vaccine makers will permanently enjoy liability protection, and the national state of emergency that is currently shielding them can end. So that’s a blessing. Then it will be up to each state whether to follow the CDC’s new guidance and include the mRNA shots in its list of vaccines required to attend school. Many states allow religious exemptions, and a few states have recently eliminated exemptions.
To recap: generally, before 2020 and even with all the interested parties (that would be both the drug makers and the government approval agencies) playing the hell out of our flawed and biased drug approval process, it took 8 to 10 YEARS and about a $1B to get a new drug approved. Now, after less than 2 years OF FIELD TRIALS – that means WE ARE THE GUINEA PIGS – and, effectively, none of the usual trials done before a drug is approved FOR ANYONE, the CDC MANDATES a drug FOR CHILDREN who are, according to their own numbers, effectively at no risk. After two+ years of shouting down, demonizing, and destroying the careers of people who pointed out the bald refusal of the drug companies and the CDC to follow any of the basic science standards (e.g., no ongoing control groups, no double-blinds, no support for adversarial positions (to put it mildly), no serious adverse affects studies, no cost-benefit analyses) they MANDATE this drug FOR CHILDREN.
Satanic.
Another Coffee and Covid reference from a couple days ago:
A new pre-print study published on medRxIV last week titled, “Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly informed from pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies.” In the study, researchers calculated the current worldwide ‘infection fatality rate’ for covid. You remember the IFR — it’s the ratio of number of deaths to number of confirmed infections.
Back in the day, you could get canceled for comparing covid’s IFR to the flu’s IFR.
The researchers found, for unvaccinated and for previously uninfected, the median covid infection fatality rates were:
0.0003% at 0-19 yrs
0.003% at 20-29 yrs
0.011% at 30-39 yrs
0.035% at 40-49 yrs
0.129% at 50-59 yrs
0.501% at 60-69 yrs
I probably don’t need to say this, but for all cohorts under 50, these IFR’s are far below the flu. For 50-59, the covid IFR is comparable to flu. And, flu IFR’s are also higher for older people, I just don’t have those figures handy this morning.
So.
Long-time readers may recall that, early on in the panic, I (along with many others) pointed out the absurdity of the CFR – Case Fatality Rate. In a disease with a huge percentage of asymptomatic infections, and where even symptomatic infections tended to have very minor symptoms, it is inevitable that huge numbers of infections were going to go unnoticed or otherwise unreported. This, before noting the panicky, highly incented drive to overcount infections and deaths. Put it all together, and I (and, again, many other people) pointed out that simply applying a little logic to the picture, and the IFR, meaning, the chance of anyone dying from a Covid infection, had to be at least an order of magnitude under the scary-sounding CFR.
The above numbers suggest that even that idea was overly pessimistic. A person under 20 stands a three in a million chance (per year, I assume, since these numbers tend to be annualized) of dying from a Covid infection. That’s what we numbers guys tend to call noise, in the big picture. Of all the bad things that can and do happen to young people, this ain’t the one to worry about.
While I have been too busy to follow the news much, we have been, as the Canadians would say, oot and aboot. Two things:
We had lunch at an alehouse in Auburn. Turns out that they refused to comply with any of the Coof restrictions and remained open the entire last 2+ years with no restrictions. They even posted signs to the effect that they saw no obligation to obey rules issued by unelected bureaucrats. And their beer is good. So, apart from the calorific and cash leakage issues, I’m going back there as much as I can.
On the flip side, there are still people masked up herein the Sierra foothills. Not many, but some. I’m torn between wanting to point and laugh, and feeling sorry for them. Note: it’s in the 80s during the day, nice healthy mountain air to breath – and I still see the occasional solo driver masked up in his car. Masks truly are magic talismans.
Had a nice talk with a lady at church, who alternated between mask fully up, nose exposed, and chin mask, without seeming to notice. After years of training, most people simply can’t or won’t make the distinction between what is reasonable and what they are told to do. What they are told to do IS reasonable, end of story, crimestop, you are evil to point out the idiocy.
Our explorations of the area:
There are many areas of utterly beautiful small farms. Some are clearly trophies, such as Italianate villas with vineyards and horses (not knocking that – if money were no object…) with others that look more humble, but still beautiful. Green pastures in the rolling hills, with Sierra streams flowing through them, are simply lovely.
There are also McMansions, but mostly in the places you probably wouldn’t want to farm anyway – 3-4 acres on rocky hillsides. People with money seem to want upscale suburbia with better scenery (and rattlesnakes, cougars, and bears, oh my!)
The most jarring are the more basic tract homes just sort of stuck here. The place we are staying is very nice, very modern. To get to it, one turns off Highway 49, drives past gas stations and strip mall businesses, and reaches a signal where, straight ahead, it’s beautiful country, but turn left, and it’s generic modern suburbia.
Out in the country parts, there are the occasional run down places with 8 cars and trucks parked out front and waist high weeds. Not too many, though.
Dog Bar Crossing Bridge over the Bear River. Crossed this narrow bridge following GPS ‘shortcut’ to one of the houses we wanted to look at.
As mentioned here previously, I occasionally attend the same morning weekday mass as the kids from the local Catholic school. I get to see first hand how this whole masking thing is working out. If it weren’t for the panic and terror used on kids to make them comply, it would be hilarious.
Today, the kiddos were again at mass. The total masking percentage seems to have fallen somewhere just under 50% Remember, the kids are no longer *required* to mask up, so what we’re seeing here is kids who either on their own initiative or at mommy’s or maybe daddy’s insistence keep masking up.
Saw a new one today – the Neck Mask. That’s a mask worn under the chin. Two kids were doing this for a while; one eventually pulled his mask back up to full upright and locked position, Later, he took it off completely. Somebody is getting mixed messages. While many still wore their masks right and proper – predominantly, the older girls, but not exclusively – others were doing all sorts of mask improve. Under the nose, chin masking, constant fiddling with it.
That last bit is the killer: not that logic or reason matter, but if in fact those masks worked at all, they’d be covered with Deadly Virus Particles, such that Rule #2, right after ‘mask up’ would be: keep you hands off them! The classic today: some little kid pulls down her mask, then does an elaborate sleeve wipe of her nose – then puts the mask back up. She’s just a kid, so OF COURSE she does the sleeve wipe.
I mean, you’re a kid. You’ve got a runny nose (It’s allergy season big time here.) It’s making the inside of your mask icky! Feels gross. So, without a moment’s thought, you take that stuff and wipe it on your sleeve (and spread it around on your face). THEN, you put the mask back up. Because… Kids gonna kid.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is SCIENCE! As I mentioned, if it weren’t for the panic, anxiety, bullying, fear mongering, and, frankly, child abuse, this would all be hilarious.
This morning, attended a morning mass also attended by most of the school children in the parish school. In the sample I could see, the percentage of kids masked has fallen to maybe a little over 50%. Saw any number of below-the-nose masking kids, and one admirable little boy going full chin-mask.
This among the minority of kids I could see, as we sit toward the front.
If it weren’t for the tragedy and child abuse involved in terrifying/cajoling children into making this otherwise pointless act of compliance, it would be funny.
So, despite the numbers – cases, deaths, hospitalizations – being as bad or worse than they were this time last year or, indeed, at the end of April of 2020, it has been decreed that we can stop with the COVID nonsense, for the most part. Simply dropping all the MANIFESTLY USELESS restrictions and mandates would invite people to point and laugh, so we must phase them out, making sure all the little people know that Our Betters can reinstate them without notice at any time in the future.
MANIFESTLY USELESS, I say, if we’re talking about reducing the spread and the severity of this particular disease. Follow the logic, please, and note that we’re using the numbers generated by the people behind the panic mongering: IF steps taken WORKED, THEN there would be FEWER cases, hospitalizations, and deaths ONCE THOSE STEPS WERE TAKEN. Do not pass go unless you understand this! Sure, any number of Just So stories can be and were generated as needed to explain WHY the damn virus just kept spreading and coming back and killing people despite all the absolutely essential and effective steps that were taken, but there comes a point – summer, 2020 was that point, if you’re taking notes – when, if any of these steps worked at all, we should have seen the spread of the virus crawl to a halt. But ‘we’ didn’t. So, Our Betters kept layering on the restrictions and requirements. We had to wait for a ‘vaccine’ before allowing people to take the horrible risk of going to church, say, or attending a class. So, we got ‘vaccines’ – never mind that the CDC had to change the definition of what a vaccine is in order to shoehorn in the experimental gene therapy Pfizer and Moderna were pushing; never mind that none, as in zero, therapies using this gene therapy had ever gotten past the testing phase in over a decade of testing and billions spent trying to get them approved. Never mind that all the safeguards and testing requirements – you know, the steps and procedures that take typically about 10 years to perform? – were waived. Never mind that – logic, again! – if you test anything for 3 months, all you can possibly know is that what you’re testing is safe and effective for 3 months! Anything that happens after 3 months is simply unknown. Never mind that these ‘vaccines’ were introduced as the solution to COVID in an atmosphere of total panic and fear, then quickly walked back with another bunch of Just So stories when they failed to perform. Your ‘vaccines’ didn’t work for you, because somebody else didn’t get the jab. Then boosters became required, then boosters to the boosters, the concept of ‘fully vaccinated’ became current to shift blame for the fact that the vaccinated were still getting sick and dying away from the makers of the ‘vaccine’ and onto those who were not ‘fully vaccinated’.
As one wag put it: if I got my dog vaccinated against rabies three times in one year, and he still caught rabies, I’d have some questions.
Now, we’re having a little war in Ukraine to distract us from all this – and Hunter’s laptop, assorted election fraud court cases, the farce of the January 6 ‘insurrection’, and an inconvenient number of younger, healthier people dropping dead after getting jabbed. (Note: confirmation bias works both ways, but if every 90 year old nursing home patient and overdose druggie death can be counted as Coof Doom, then by what reasoning do we dismiss all post-jab deaths as just one of those things? How about a real study of both sets of claims?)
Here, for example, is a chart of deaths attributed to COVID in Israel, one of the most heavily jabbed nations of earth, with almost every adult jabbed, double-jabbed, boosted, and boosted again:
After they started jabbing people, deaths went up. Then, we have the Just So story valley in April 2021 – see, it’s Just So that it took a few months for enough people to get jabbed for the wonderful, wonderful vax to be effective on the population! Never mind that airborne viral infections fall every damn spring and have for as long as they’ve been tracked – no! This fall is due to our wonder drugs and the sheeplike compliance of all good citizens!
Then, when the end of summer uptick happens, another story is generated. Pandemic of the unvaxxed! Then finally, once the winter flu season kicks in, and deaths are worse than ever, worse than they are anywhere that remained unvaxxed, we say – ?
It’s crazy-making. On a small local scale, I’ve been noting two phenomena. First, the number of ‘voluntarily’ masked people has fallen, but there is a persistent minority that still wears a mask outside in the sun or alone in their cars. We may be nearing some sort of sanity minimum, where the hard core of those still masked up are certifiably insane. At the sparsely-attended 6:30 morning mass I go to in Lent, there are maybe 3 or 4 masked up people out of 14-20 mass-goers; out shopping, the percentage seems a little higher.
I occasionally see the school children at mass. They are still majority masked up, although many take the liberties I’ll describe next. The damage has been done; logic and evidence, never a strong suit for your average American, are dead and buried under an avalanche of panic and group-think.
The second phenomenon is more amusing: chin masking. We’ve all seen, I suppose, the skip-the-nose masking, common from the start of the masking fiasco. You wear a mask, but below your nose. You want to comply, maybe, but you’d also like to breath, so you go with the totally irrational and ineffective even in theory mask below the nose.
Now, I’m seeing an even more amusing use of masks – the chin mask. This is a mask worn in such a way as to cover neither the nose nor the mouth. It covers the chin. Those schoolkids mentioned above, when they aren’t fiddling with their masks, tend to do something like chin masking or skip the nose masking. Since mom isn’t around to panic, and the rule is that you don’t have to mask, so the teachers aren’t enforcing it, kids, especially the younger ones, tend to take it as the game it is. This would be a healthy challenge to authority and testing of limit, if it weren’t for the guilt-tripping and fear mongering these kids are no doubt routinely subjected to, often by their moms.
So the damage has been done. A generation has been tortured, lied to, forced to comply, taught to fear and dismiss any counterarguments. May God have mercy on us!
Next, MIL is back in the hospital – 3rd time in 2022. This time, she woke up with pain and reduced strength in her right side. While these are typical stroke symptoms, they also, as in this case, sometimes result for seizures. I didn’t know that. Preliminary tests show no stroke; MRIs are to be run today, which supposedly are more sensitive to these sorts of things. She’s 84, very demented, weak but otherwise physically doing OK – until now.
Of course, this is happening as we’re packing up to move and getting the house fixed up. The Eternal Brick Project of Doom is almost done – pics as events warrant.
Prayers for both my MIL and for our move would be appreciated.
Do something today! Practice agency! You are not a helpless cog!
On a positive note, at Mass today were more people than even OCD I could unobtrusively count, so don’t have numbers, but it looked like over half were unmasked. Progress, of a sort, but we can’t let this fraud and tragedy simply vanish as if it never happened. People MUST face the facts: the news is now 24/7 war in Ukraine (even though 6 other equally tragic and atrocity-filled wars are going on elsewhere at this moment- ever hear about them? Why not, do you suppose?) just as the news media, especially outside the US, is starting to acknowledge the tragedy and farce that was the COVID response. Masks? Never worked. “Vaccines?” Not so safe and effective. Deaths? Overcounted. And so on.
Overall, the obvious is coming out: the lockdowns, masks, panic, “vaccines”, and all the terror and disruption and destruction they inflicted did nothing to stop COVID, but caused irreparable physical, psychological, and political harm.
Nuremberg trials, or bust. We must not forget, and forgive only once people are in jail or dangling.
Sigh.
Next, as mentioned, in amongst a set of old papers were some compositions I’d started back when I was 25 and a private composition student of Susan McClain in Santa Fe. I transferred the music to one partial piece into MuseScore, a setting of the liturgical text
Domine, non sum dignus
ut intres sub tectum meum,
sed tantum dic verbo
et sanabitur anima me
In English (literal)
Lord, I am not worthy
that you should enter under my roof
but only say the word
and my soul will be healed (and healed will be this soul of mine)*
I’d only set the middle two phrases. Somewhere, unless I threw them out, are pages and pages of draft settings for the first and last phrases. I really liked the settings of the middle two, but could not come up with anything satisfying for the beginning and end.
After hearing what it sounded like sung on ‘ah’ by MuseScore, found I still liked it, enough to want to finish it. So I got on it.
I imagine this happens in writing or any art: one’s style or taste changes over time. I remember one piece I wrote in college, where it went through 3 or 4 style changes over the course of a 3 minute piece, such that the ending sounded nothing like the beginning – that piece never saw the light of day. It’s not automatic that one can recapture the style from almost 40 years ago. But I’m trying. Lots of fun, really want to finish this.
On a less fun note, we are now having to deal with stuff and memories packed away almost 10 year’s ago: our late son’s things. We didn’t have it in us to do anything more than pack it away at the time, but now we’re needing to at least put it into storage.
Yesterday, we moved out a bookcase he had made. He was maybe 18? 19? when he made it, with little help from me. He was our oldest, I had no other experience at the time working with my own children. I knew it was good – at least as good as the ones I make – but didn’t realize how amazing it is for a kid with very little woodworking experience to crank out something that nice first try. Very simple design, but the fit and finish are excellent. He went with a dark stain, and sanded between numerous coats, so it was very smooth and even.
No pictures, didn’t think of it. When we move his desk he made just before the bookcase, I’ll try to remember. Kid was a genius and a saint, with a craftsman’s soul. I miss him.
Anyway, bound to run across many other bits that trigger memorie3s. 27 years in the house, with 5 kids raised here.
Our youngest and I and hoping to finish at least the walls on the last planter today. there are also 4 little towers and a sort of connecting wall to be done, don’t know that we’ll get to them today.
I got to get out of this place. But it’s not like all the memories are bad.
* Doing a lot of word painting, so the words in the order they occur matter.
1.The Move prep continues. Got the house painted – came out nice – got the range replaced, got the plumbing and electrical work started. Aaaaand – made significant progress on the Insane Eternal Brick Project:
Last section of planter/wall/fence. My youngest daughter and her new husband, and our youngest son did a lot of the work. Old metal window bars repurposed as a gateWhere said gate will hang, separating the garden/orchard from the from walk.
Not to mention the 6 or so vanloads of stuff put into storage, and the hours spent looking for a rental an hour and a half drive away – the interwebs are both a blessing and a curse, as I’m sure I’m the first to notice.
2. Some Covidiocy progress: at mass this morning, I, OCD as I seem to be, counted 42 people in attendance. Hard to see all faces, but at least 18 were unmasked. So we’re around 40% saner people, but still have 60% cowering, obedient rabbits. This is down from at least 90% rabbits a mere 2 weeks ago.
Problem is, all these people are still almost certainly convinced that some terrible plague has torn through our country and they just were lucky enough not to die, and now can maybe, maybe, dispense with the mask sometimes.
Unless we can prevent the mass memory-holing of COVID and the duplicity of our ‘leader’ and their lapdog press, the scam worked. Nuremburg trials, or bust!
1.Saturday, I went on a retreat with our RCIA candidates (that’s Right of Christian Initiation for Adults, the 8 or 9 month process someone who is interested in getting (as needed) baptized, confirmed, confessed, and communicated into the Catholic Church goes through). Nice retreat house in the hills.
Of the 25 or so of us – the candidates, sponsors and team members – three wore masks. One stayed completely shields up the entire time. But two wore their masks on their chins. The entire 7.5 hours.
I can’t even. On the plus side, 80%+ of everybody was done with the masks. On the down side, even with the social pressure of being the only 3 people masked up in a group of nice folks, the three holdouts – and especially the two with the masks on their chins – just couldn’t let go.
2. Yesterday, my wife, who is a group leader, and I, a guest speaker, attended in a teen Confirmation prep class of about 100 kids. The meeting was outside in the lovely 70F sunshine. ALL the kids were masked up. My wife to her little group: you know, you’re outside, so you don’t need to wear the masks. Plus, you’re healthy kids, so it very unlikely to hurt you even if you catch it.
So, do the kids take off the masks? Nope. 100 young, healthy people sitting in the glorious sunshine – all masked up.
3. At daily Mass, since last June when the ‘outbreak’ ‘raged’ through Cape Cod killing no one and putting 4 people (out of a million plus visitors) in the hospital, my family was one of about 3 or 4 groups who had had enough and simply refused to mask back up on command of our cockroach overlords. Then, a few week’s back, the indoor masking order was lifted – as long as you were fully and officially jabbed. So, in a congregation full of very compliant and obedient people, almost all fully jabbed, do the masks come off? Several weeks into, and few old coots like me have done away with them – but we’re still around 90% face-diapered up.
4. When I go shopping – I have a route I take that includes up to 5 stores – I’m seeing masks everywhere. Costco for bulk items: 90% masked; local produce market and the local ‘health food’ (they have bulk high-gluten flour, fresh ground peanut butter, lots of bulk spices – things like that) maybe slightly less; Safeway, 90%. I haven’t been to the 2 ethnic specialty markets since the indoor masking mandate was lifted. The immigrants and 1st gen Americans who frequent those places are definitely a mixed bag: some barely complied under threat of getting tossed, but there’s probably 5 people who no doubt shower with their mask on for each scofflaw. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get some more curry ingredients and gyoza skins, just to check it out.
The mask I see when I see a mask. Insanity made concrete.
Several people have made the obvious point: Brandon has a speech to give on Wednesday. People are fed up. Don’t be fooled: if ‘improving’ ‘numbers’ mattered, this would have been over at the end of April, 2020. So our cockroach overlords have ordered their brown-nosing courtesans to detach their lips from the hind quarters of their betters and switch to Narrative 2.0, or make the Great Pivot, or reprogram the NPCs, or whatever you want to call it. See? We fixed it! Nothing to see here, move along. As some wit put it: What’s the difference between conspiracy theory and established science? About 2 months. SNL can now run skits mocking the Masks Forever crowd; the NYT can now say that lockdowns did little, if any, good – positions that got you – me! – labeled a ‘terrorist’ about a month ago. Vaccines? Not very effective, and kinda dangerous – say that a couple months ago, and get fired. Now? Well, maybe they’re not so good – and you can hear it from the ‘real’ press.
But most important, the key message of Narrative 2.0: We’re just going to have to learn to live with the Coof, just like the flu. This is what I, and greater lights such as Brigg and Berenson, have been saying from very early on back in 2020. All the steps – lockups, masks, social distancing, and especially the jab, have made no material difference to the better, and caused immeasurable harm. What is happening now, what would have happened by the end of May 2020 in a rational world, is that whoever is going to get it, got it. Whoever was already dying, died. And the few otherwise healthy that really suffered from Covid are just the inevitable unlucky, like the kid who catches his death of cold, or the poor sucker whose flu descends into pneumonia. These things happen. They didn’t happen to a panic-inducing degree with the Coof. Sane people could have stayed home when not well, washed their hands, tried not to sneeze on people – and the results would have been the same or better, except $7 trillion or so worth of the economy would not now be in the hands of gigantic corporations, millions of small businesses would still exist, and the population in general would not be terrified out of their wits.
Herd immunity isn’t just a good idea – it’s the law.
Bottom line, based on the observation above: the NPC reprogramming has a long way to go. I expect about 70% of the people will eventually succumb to the unspoken peer pressure of being surrounded by unmasked people – when they are. Maybe 30% will be wearing a mask as they are placed in their caskets.
The real problem: those kids. We have terrified the shit (pardon my language, but it’s the word) out of an entire generation of small children and teens. The damage has been done. I don’t know how to heal them, or if it is even possible.
Nuremberg Trials. Anything less, and we have failed.
Still need to look over the comments and reply – thanks for your patience, those who have inexplicably read my ramblings and even taken the time to comment on them, you’re the best – but, today, there’s a couple bits of covidiocy that need dissemination.
First off, the diligent William Briggs, who, like Socrates, deserves a pension from the polis for his ‘crimes’ rather than getting blacklisted for wrongthink, has analyzed a bit of nonsense masquerading as science – Science!, as we refer to such excretions around here. Chief points:
The study is obvious nonsense, if not fraud. (If it isn’t obvious to you, perhaps you don’t really get how science works. No shame in that, there are an infinite number of things worth learning and we are finite beings. The shame is when you can’t spot the obvious nonsense in the unlikely chance you even looked at it, yet claim to be ‘following the science’ or otherwise sneer at those who can and do understand it. Such behavior is loathsome.)
It’s from Harvard
it has been peer-reviewed
It presents no evidence. Instead, it presents model output as if it were evidence of anything beyond the existence of a model that produces output
It is, for now, politically useful
Let’s start with the title:
Model-Estimated Association Between Simulated US Elementary School–Related SARS-CoV-2 Transmission, Mitigation Interventions, and Vaccine Coverage Across Local Incidence Levels
The first two words tell us we are not dealing with the real world. Instead, we’re dealing with abstractions – “Models” and “Estimates”. These models and estimates come from somewhere, and it is tempting if one knows nothing about models, to suppose they come from somewhere other than the fancies of the model builders. As a man who worked models professionally for 25 years, I can tell you it works like this: you look at the world, take a guess, build a model that embodies that guess, then – and you can’t skip this part – you compare your model output to what actually happens in the real world. Then, you iterate, and if you’re good at it, the newer models output matches ever more closely with what really happens. Then you very carefully say: over the range of real-world observations our latest model was tested against, our outputs have proven useful.
Failing to perform this step of comparing the model’s output to the real world means the model is nothing but an expression of your prejudices expressed in fancy math. The output of such models is only evidence of hubris and ignorance. Or, increasingly, fraud.
This study nowhere compares model output to the real world. It should be obvious that, if you had the required real-world evidence, you would not need the model. You need to claim the model produces evidence precisely because that evidence does not exist! Or, because the evidence contradicts what you’d like to say.
Then, to kick the fantasy into magic flying unicorn land, we add the word “Simulated”. So, “researchers” didn’t research anything, in the sense that they did not go out into the real world and observe, note, or measure anything real, like, in this case, the spread or lack thereof, of the Coof in masked versus unmasked schools. Instead, they created a model. This model includes a “simulated US elementary school” – pause for a moment, and relish the fact that, while thousands upon thousands of elementary schools exist across America, our intrepid researchers are studying NONE of them. Instead, they are studying a simulation – something, again, that they made up.
This is a key example of why I rarely got past the abstracts of the various studies proposed to support the Coof Panic: with few exceptions, these frauds reveal themselves within a few sentences. Here, they reveal themselves two words into the study’s title! If the title was something like: “COVID Spread in Masked and Unmasked Schoolchildren in 400 American Schools” and then the first sentence of the abstract was something like: “Over a 6 month period and using now-current antigen tests of symptomatic children, we discovered that X% more children caught the Coof in 178 American elementary schools where masking was not required than in 222 schools where masking was required.” THEN I would be inclined to read the study, because – follow carefully here – it’s at least possible to find out something real using the implied methodology. If kids show us sick, and you then test them for COVID using antigen tests, it’s at least possible to say something not absurd on its face about the spread of this disease.
But when the very title of the piece precludes even the possibility that any science is being done, you can stop. Why go on? Using the approach here, it’s not even possible that the “researchers” could have come up with remotely scientific, which is to say, anything remotely requiring an honest man’s consent. In fact, this, this, thing requires an honest man to hoist the Jolly Rodgers and put a knife between his teeth, and take immediate remedial action, as it were.
Briggs, with his stronger stomach, actually read the damn thing. He came across these nuggets:
Anyway, there it is, bold as e-girl asking for donations, in “eMethods 2. Sources for Mitigation Ranges” (my emphasis below).
“Interventions in A, plus universal masking (a policy of masking all students and educators/staff): 60-80% assumed effectiveness.”
The interventions in A are “Simple ventilation and handwashing (open windows if present, portable air filters, maintain existing HVAC systems, and regular handwashing): 20-40% assumed effectiveness”.
Did you see the word assumed? Did you see it was used twice?
And did you see the conclusion? “Mitigation measures [such as masking] or vaccinations for students substantially reduced these modeled risks” of “in-school SARS-CoV-2 transmission.”
In other words, our Harvardites began by assuming masks work. They then ran a model which assumed masks work. The model said, as it was told to, masks work.
Assume your conclusions, and your “proof” “proves” them. Handy, that, especially when there’s grant money to be had and jobs not to be lost.
Next, I’ve been reading a daily newsletter called Coffee and COVID, which covers the Coof news as it happens. Jeff Childers, who appears to be the chief writer, is witty and trenchant. Once, back in about June of 2020, when it became blindingly obvious that no facts would be allowed to interfere with the desired panic, and that stating the obvious got you labelled a ‘terrorist’, I simply stopped reading the ‘news’. Anything I found out was through links and quotes from the bloggers I follow. With Coffee and COVID, I get a digest I can endure and even, sometimes, enjoy.
C&C uses the terms Narrative 2.0 and the Great Pivot to describe the current attempts of the Weasel in Chief and his sycophants and nerdlings to get out of the bed they made, now that it’s on fire. Crandew, another fine source of information and opinion re the Coof, tends toward an understandably dark take, one I don’t entirely reject nor embrace. Things can and probably will get ugly. The only dispute is over how ugly? And can we do anything about it? C&C takes a more hopeful approach.
So, nobody asked for it, but here goes: my take.
The idea that there are a small number of very wealthy people who want to a) cull the herd, b) control everything and 3) reduce those of us who remain to serfs, is only some sort of wacky conspiracy theory if you don’t read or laugh off what these people SAY and DO. When members of the World Economic Forum write books and articles and give speeches outlining exactly this – what, you think they’re kidding? That it’s all a big misunderstanding? So, I take it as a given that, just as Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot existed and did the things they did, with the help and cooperation of many, many people, these men are perfectly capable of wanting to do all that and more, and getting legions of courtiers to follow them. That they say they’re bringing about some sort of Brave New World utopia is the whole point – in their eyes, nothing they do is going too far with such a noble goal. And of course, most if not all of these folks are raging sociopaths, so – all leashes have been slipped. There is nothing such people won’t do.
So, granted that there’s a Team Evil that wishes people like me dead, and that they between them hold the reins to the bit in the world’s economy and in almost all nations, what’s next? The image I just used, where a rider a fraction of the size and strength of a horse can make it do what he wants by means of a small piece of metal strategically placed in its mouth, is the key: All they needed to do is control the gatekeepers. With patience, gaining such control is childishly simple. You don’t go for the takeover directly, you seek to control the committees – hiring, promoting, firing, PR, steering. In business, you will meet some resistance, as there is always going to be some nut who imagines the business is guided by the need to make money; in government and non-profits, almost everybody is willing to hand over the boring and thankless committee work to whoever wants to do it. This surrendering of committees is slow death.
The schools, and especially the teacher’s unions, were taken over this way, starting in the 1920s and completed before 1980 at the latest. The unions in general fell. Ever wonder why so many jobs require a college degree, when essentially the same job used to be performed well by high school dropouts? In one of my first jobs, the older VP was a high school grad who had worked his way up, while all the younger hires, hired into essentially the same jobs the VP had done well enough to get repeatedly promoted, had college degrees. Why?
Why are most government jobs reserved for people with often insane college degrees? Who is on the hiring committees in both academia and the government? College grads? And, since 1980 at least, a college degree means first and foremost that the product has processed by the system. The product, with his degree, has learned that to fail to go along is to fail completely. He is a certified sheep. A Front Row kid, untethered from family, place, or any trace of morality – yet, as a duly certified ‘success’ he is incapable of imagining he is a stooge, a fraud, and empty suit. Behind the smug exterior, an unquenchable rage most often burns. If he didn’t take it out on us, he might explode. We are the enemy simply by being the proof of his insanity – especially when we are happier than he is.
One by one, over and over, every organization with any real power has fallen to the tools, sycophants, and useful idiots of the power mad.
We’ve seen the propaganda. We’ve seen the intimidation. We’ve seen the crushing of dissent. We’ve heard the bleating of the sheep. It’s a done deal, which is what Crandew and his worthy sources and readers see.
Yet – there are cracks. Sociopaths are happy dealing with the ambitious, who will do anything. As Machiavelli said in the Prince, when it is time for dirty deeds, a prince will never lack for men willing to do them. All powerful people are surrounded by ambitious wannabes trying to suck at the teat of power – and they will do anything to get the chance. Thus is has always been.
The problem is Highlander: there can be only one. Eventually, there needs to be a purge. Contrary to what people might think, revolutionary purges are not of enemies, essentially, but of supporters. The H-man gained power partly with the aid of the Brown Shirts, who beat up the commies and anybody else who opposed the Nazi. So, of course, a year after the Enabling Act passed (with the help of the Brown Shirts), their leadership was executed during the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler needed the support of the military, while the Brown Shirt leadership thought they were going to take over the military. So, despite their years of support and help getting Hitler into the position of dictator, they had to go – and they did. As did anyone who was too ambitious and capable in the eyes of the top levels of the Nazi leadership.
Same sort of thing happened in French Revolution and under Lenin in Russia. If you make revolutionary changes, where you are not just becoming the new king but are aiming to change society at its roots, you’re going to need to get rid of anybody with any ideas about maybe leading, especially if they have real-world success in a revolution.
Apply this to our cockroach overlords. At some point, they are going to need to sort out who is in charge for real. You look at obvious tools such as Biden, Newsom, and Trudeau, and it’s impossible to imagine they are anywhere near the inner circle of power. There are hard men, somewhere, within the structure; and for each of those probably 100 men who think they are hard men. There are people who are not nearly paranoid enough. Then there are the useful idiots by their thousands and tens of thousands.
It’s impossible these people can cooperate much longer. The lowlifes running states and health departments, who issue the orders under which people chaff, need to be assured they will survive politically if they keep doing idiot things. Can they be assured? The shift from propaganda to raw power will need to accelerate, because enough people are getting fed up with the propaganda to start making trouble. It’s important to remember that trouble to our cockroach middle management means only things that threaten them. We little people can get as mad as we want, just so long as management is assured nothing will come of it – for them.
The real fun begins when middle managers start getting hung out to dry. Say that reptile Trudeau gets driven from office, that enough people start making the connection between what’s going on in Ottawa and Nazis, such that his betters decide Little Castro is no longer worth protecting. (Not saying this is likely, but bear with me.) If this were to happen, every other tinhorn dictator wannabe – Newsom, Fauci, on down the line – starts taking notes: when (not if) will our cockroach overlords decide I’m expendable?
The psychology of courtiers is such that they can’t give up. Every one of them dreams of being king, works to make himself indispensable, and imagines Sir Richard Rich* is the goal. They don’t think they’ll end up like Wolsey, say, or any one of the French revolutionaries who were calling the shots one day, and having their heads suddenly removed the next. Or the endless stream of Russian revolutionaries marched off and shot if they made a single false move, or merely seemed in the way to someone above them. Nope, not them! They will be the one in one hundred that succeeds! Add in that these are the sort of people who enjoy the failure and sufferings of others – hell, that’s the major perk of the job – and watching the losers suffer and die not only doesn’t cause them to reexamine their life decisions, but gets them off.
Thus, when they see their peers going down, the only option is to try to position themselves to be the one in 100 who survives. History shows that strategy requires a lot of (sometimes literal) backstabbing and betrayal. Our cockroach overlords are playing a game, where they are trying to stay ahead of the next level of management, who would gladly knife them to get ahead themselves. And so on, down the line.
All this gets worse as our cockroach overlords succeed. Once the shift from propaganda to raw power gets far enough, they need less middle management and more Gestapo. The wannabes become at best a useless distraction. The cycle intensifies: as my peers get knifed, how do I stay alive? Who do I need to knife?
Now expand this to a world-wide situation. What seems to be happening is that the worst repression is in the richest countries, and especially in the outlying provinces. It’s brilliantly evil: a New Zealand, an Australia, a Canada are far, emotionally and geographically, from the centers of power, and have long traditions of doing things their own way. These are the kinds of places where real resistance might have the best chance of working. Therefore, they are the most brutally repressed. Control the colonies, as it were, and the homelands are secure.
But the risk to the takeover is very real: lose control anywhere in the First World, and there’s a real risk of resistance snowballing. Then things get ugly for our cockroach overlords, if people get the idea that insects can be crushed.
So are Canadians Saxons, a la Kipling? It appears some have been marched off to the gulags already, after the usual polite way of our neighbors to the north. But is that real? Solzhenitsyn has no kind words for those who allow themselves to be swept up without a fight, and even says they get what they deserve. Well? How is this going to work out?
Yet – I still imagine that the cockroaches in charge have overplayed their hands. Somewhere, hard men, many of them part of middle management, many more not, are piecing things together. Some are realizing their best options are to try to seize power or at least stop the current leaders; many more are seeing that the only light at the end of this tunnel is an oncoming train. The cockroach overlords have to keep all these people in line – while they purge them!
It could get really ugly, and I expect it to. But I can’t see how they can pull this off. Too many centrifugal forces are trying to pull it apart.
…
Those not into prayer can skip this.
Heavenly Father, hallowed be Your Name! All praise and glory be yours!
Please, we beg You, remember your promise of mercy, the promise You made to Abraham and his descendants forever. Do not judge us as our sins deserve; rather, for Your Name’s sake, for the sake of the Blood shed by your Son, and in the glory and power of Your Holy Spirit:
Forgive us yet again.
Send your angels to drive Satan and his minions from our midst, to bind them and cast them into Hell;
Grant us the grace to endure what we must, and to die to ourselves to live only for You.
Your will be done, in this and in all things.
*Rich clawed his way to very near the top by betraying Sir Thomas More to his death, then proceeded to serve both the Protestant royalty and Queen Mary, for example both destroying and restoring monasteries, torturing and executing both the slightly too Protestant and slightly too obviously Catholic trouble makers, until he, one of the richest men in Britain, died an old man. He was universally despised, but his heirs lived on in luxury for more than a century. THAT’S what middle management dreams of.
Yard Sale of the Mind 