I’m stumped. When did Gates graduate medical school, do his internship and residency, then specialize in epidemiology?
Is it me, or is he just another elitist moron who thinks because he was successful in business, he’s somehow a medical/goobermint everything else genius? And isn’t that the height of arrogance?
.@BillGates on Covid: "Even through 2022” we should be prepared for life to not return to “normal”
Says “sadly" it’s "appropriate” for bars and restaurants to close over the next "four to six months" pic.twitter.com/cmDD8pv3XR
According to a Gallup Poll released on Monday (7th), frequent church attendees were the only group in the U.S. that did not experience a mental health decline in 2020.
Gallup has conducted its November Health and Healthcare Survey annually since 2001. The 2020 results show 34% of Americans consider their mental health “excellent,” and 76% consider their mental health “excellent/good,” both are all-time lows.
Forty-six percent of Americans who regularly attend religious services said their mental health is “excellent,” an increase from last year’s 42%.
We encounter plexiglass dividers everywhere both in indoor and outdoor settings to protect us against COVID-19. But the big question is: Do they really work? Princeton University researchers designed an experiment using a fog machine to find out if the plexiglass panels truly block airborne transmission.
Professor Howard Stone, who specializes in the mechanics of fluid transmission at the university, told Good Morning America that ”plexiglass dividers do compartmentalize air, and reduce the risk to some degree.” Continue reading “”
There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate. [Usefulness As A Narrative]
Why is COVID-19 being disproportionately hyped as such a dangerous threat, when the reality of the statistical danger is much less than the intense level of hype?… That is the key question.
The answer is… social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation, are the entry point for the goals and aspirations of the political left on a national and global scale. COVID-19 is a virus, but also a very important political weapon, and we are about to discover exactly what the purpose of the hype is all about. What follows will help understand; and when you encounter the fear it will help to reconcile what people cannot figure out.
Joe Biden is an avatar; a political pawn; a cognitively declining guy who has no idea what is happening around him. The people behind the Biden campaign, those in real control of what this is about, have not hidden their goals and aspirations. These are not stupid people. They are scheming, conniving, ever-planning, ever-manipulating & Machiavellian types within the political system; lusting for power, influence and affluence.
What they are planning to do is weaponize COVID-19 to attain ideological objectives. This is why they hyped the fear within it for almost a year. Nothing within their plan requires the approval or consent of any representative body in Washington DC. COVID is the tool to “fundamentally change” the way the United States exists.
On October 23rd, those behind the Biden campaign dropped all pretense, openly having their candidate state publicly his intention to control the lives of all Americans using the authority of a weaponized federal government to advance national COVID-19 regulations.
As you watch this video from Biden’s campaign it is important to remember state government officials have already moved to define “essential businesses” and “essential workers” during the forced shut-downs. That is going to become a bigger issue downstream; however, for now just watch closely what Joe Biden is saying here:
The Dept of Transportation would be the agency enforcing a national interstate transit mask requirement. However, don’t focus on the DoT part of what he was saying… that’s only one creek… Instead focus on the downstream use of all federal regulatory agencies and how they align within a Federal COVID compliance network… that’s the river.
Think about the Dept of Agriculture (SNAP/food stamps), the Dept. of Labor, the Dept of Education, the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Dept of Labor, Dept of Energy and how they would join with the DoT to create the aggregate raging river of regulation.
Think about the federal government using mandates for enforced national COVID-19 compliance rules. Think about USDA (Dept of Agriculture) and OSHA federal inspections for social distancing (etc) in all businesses, not just restaurants.
Think about the COVID-19 regulatory and compliance system and what political beneficiaries stand to gain.
Think about the Dept of Education using COVID to restructure the way education is taught and the downstream regulations on charter schools and non-compliant educational systems that do not meet the ideological objectives of the master control plan.
Think about how the Dept. of Labor (complaint division) can be weaponized against political opposition based on arbitrary inspections under the guise of employee health and safety…. using federal COVID compliance rules.
Think about required days off for the entire employee base if a single infection is identified in the workplace. Paid days off…. funded by Federal Government. Think about how that changes the income dependency dynamic.
Think about the larger Green New Deal (goals and objectives), and then contrast those objectives while aligning an overlay map of how federal COVID mitigation rules can be applied as a back door to the EXACT SAME objective.
Far beyond masks…. Workspaces being forced to be redesigned. New rules on labor density. New rules on labor/manufacturing and office proximity. New rules on uniforms. New rules on hand-washing stations. New rules on sick pay, shift hours, time-off when a COVID infection is detected in the workplace.
Think about everything from rules on surfaces, to rules on packaging, to rules on ALL business operations as an outcome of federal regulatory policy under the guise of CVOID-19 mitigation. OSHA, Labor, Agriculture, Transportation, Energy, Education, Housing, Health and Human Services, and even federal building permits… the entire regulatory system and compliance network.
Think about Housing and Urban Development (HUD) having new rules about dwellings and complexes for housing grants. Population density; the need to move into the suburbs and the confiscation of private property to “ensure the common safety” of the citizens.
If you think this is fear-mongering, I want to to evaluate that cynicism while contemplating this recent example from California:
Think about those types of business regulations applied on a National level…. and then, as seen in prior Democrat administrations with IRS etc, think about them also being enforced through the prism of political affiliation. Continue reading “”
BLUF:
During the Black Death, the day’s public-health experts prescribed public floggings to stop the plague. Today’s experts favor a less bloody but more damaging form of penance. Instead of prescribing simple and easy steps like taking vitamin D, they insist the public suffer lockdowns.
In 1349, as the Black Death ravaged Europe, a new pandemic-control strategy was adopted in cities across the continent. The protocol was precisely regulated by the experts. Three times a day, for a total of exactly eight hours, hundreds of men known as Flagellants would march in single file through town, wearing caps with a red cross and carrying scourges of knotted ropes studded with nails. “Using these whips,” one witness reported, “they beat and whipped their bare skin until their bodies were bruised and swollen and blood rained down, spattering the walls nearby.”
This specific strategy is no longer in favor among public health officials, but the spirit of the Flagellants lives on. Instead of beatdowns, today’s regulators favor lockdowns, which are less bloody but inflict more social pain. For all the talk about following science, the authorities—and much of the citizenry—can’t resist the primal intuition that a pandemic can be quelled only through public penance. Consider two strategies for dealing with the Covid-19 virus: urge the public to spend time outside in the sun to build up their vitamin D, and to take supplements of the vitamin, repeatedly demonstrated to protect against viral infection; or shut down most businesses, deprive children of classroom education, and order everyone to stay home, a strategy never previously tested and yet to prove effective. Continue reading “”
Did you hear the news? Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have volunteered to take a COVID-19 vaccine publicly in order to promote awareness and public confidence in the vaccine upon its approval by the FDA. How great! How wonderful! Right?
Umm, where were they months ago when former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris were publicly sowing the seeds of distrust in a COVID-19 vaccine?
“As we enter the height of election season, President Trump should assure us all that the White House will respect the independent authority of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to decide, free from political pressure, if the vaccine is safe and effective,” Biden said in July. Continue reading “”
They’ve been “contact-tracing” for nine months. Either that’s been a total waste of time and money, or we should know the answer by now.
Well, they’re demoncraps, and if they didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any at all. What’s surprising is their propaganda organ is calling them out on it.
.@brikeilarcnn rolls the tape on Democratic officials caught not following their own Covid-19 guidelines:
"The past few weeks, brought into relief a pattern of leaders, failing to lead by example. Asking Americans to make sacrifices that they, themselves, are unwilling to make” pic.twitter.com/V6Xq9gRxrw
President-elect Joe Biden has issued a dire warning about the spread of the coronavirus over the next two months, predicting as many as 250,000 deaths.
Biden, who has warned of a “dark winter” ahead, did not offer details to back up his assessment, which is far bleaker than projections by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other experts. His transition team did not immediately respond to a request to clarify the remarks.
Biden made the remarks Wednesday in a livestreamed roundtable with workers affected by the pandemic, making an appeal to Americans to take the virus seriously.
“We’re likely to lose another 250,000 people dead between now and January,” Biden said. “You hear me? Because people aren’t paying attention.”
He added: “You cannot be traveling during these holidaysas much as you want to.”
Isn’t that a great attribute to have in a President?
BLUF Options:
Joe Biden is knowingly engaged in fear-mongering by using numbers that have no basis in reality, and the press won’t call attention to it.
Joe Biden has trouble with numbers — plausible since Joe Biden’s room-temp IQ has been a well-established fact in Washington for nearly 5 decades.
Joe Biden has dementia which makes the words he speaks meaningless in his own mind as they tumble forth from his mouth.
I’ve not written much on the disgusting and wholly fallacious fear-mongering of the Democrats/media in general and the Biden campaign in particular.
From nearly the very beginning — having been “trapped” for the first couple weeks away from my family and with nothing but time on my hands to read and learn — I’ve long known that the number of “deaths” CAUSED by COVID-19 would be wildly exaggerated in that once there was a financial incentive to “ID” COVID-19 deaths every other categorized “cause of death” would dramatically decline while COVID-19 “caused” deaths would skyrocket, as that would promote the narrative in the press/campaign that the Trump Administration was incompetent. It was simply a given, and the claims would be impervious to actual facts — like tens of thousands of people, mostly elderly, die each year from all types of other viruses because their bodies are not able to fight off the infection. People who might have died mere weeks faster while suffering from “end-stage” cancer are being classified as COVID-caused deaths if they were infected prior to passing. Morbidly obese individuals who were walking and talking strokes and heart attacks waiting to happen become COVID-caused deaths because they become infected with a virus that has a 99% recovery rate.
And now we are in the middle of a “second surge” that is being blamed on government policies, guidance, and/or unwillingness of people to follow the same when the truth of the matter is that back in March and April infectious disease efforts predicted the virus would begin to spread more rapidly AGAIN in Oct-Nov. when cool weather returned, people went indoors more, and the “cold and virus” season got underway.
It’s a virus. This time of year is called the “cold and virus” season for reason. Continue reading “”
We’re expected to suffer discomfort, economic pain, and emotional distress or else pay fines or serve jail time. Government officials, meanwhile, take offense when called out for violating the standards they created……………
In early November, as health officials warned of an impending COVID-19 spike, Austin Mayor Steve Adler hosted an outdoor wedding and reception with 20 guests for his daughter at a trendy hotel near downtown.
The next morning, Adler and seven other wedding attendees boarded a private jet for Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where they vacationed for a week at a family timeshare.
One night into the trip, Adler addressed Austin residents in a Facebook video: “We need to stay home if you can. This is not the time to relax. We are going to be looking really closely. … We may have to close things down if we are not careful.”
In hosting the wedding and traveling internationally, Adler said he broke neither his own order nor those by Gov. Greg Abbott.
But at the time, the city was recommending people not gather in groups of more than 10, and, the day after Adler’s departure, Austin’s health authority warned that “it’s important that we drive the (COVID-19) numbers down in advance of Thanksgiving.” Continue reading “”
BLUF: Again, there is only one possible conclusion you can reach, based on months and months of appalling hypocrisy from the media and our ruling elite: they think lockdowns are for you, not them. They think pandemic rules are for you, not them. They think suffering hardships and doing as you’re told are for you, not them. Why? Because they hate you and think you’re stupid.
One thing should be abundantly clear by now, after ten months of this pandemic: our political leaders hate us and they think we’re stupid. Nothing else can explain the blatant hypocrisy we’ve seen, mostly from Democrat governors and mayors who are eager to impose harsh lockdowns and strict rules for the public at large but then turn around and do whatever they please with their own families, friends, and cronies.
Examples abound, but this week brought a fresh spectacle of hypocrisy in the form of a nervous, patently disingenuous apology from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was caught dining at an opulent birthday dinner for a top California political operative at a fancy French restaurant in Napa earlier this month, in apparent violation of his own COVID-19 protocols.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. On Monday Newsom announced he was “pulling the emergency brake” on reopening his state amid a spike in COVID cases, dealing a crippling blow to shuttered businesses and out-of-work Californians who have been struggling for months under rolling lockdown orders.
Only after Newsom was widely criticized for his rank hypocrisy did he offer an attenuated mea culpa, explaining that upon his arrival he was surprised to find there were “just a few extra people” at the party, but quickly added it was an “outdoor restaurant” in Napa County, which has looser restrictions compared to other areas of the state. Blinking incessantly and smiling tightly, Newsom finally got around to saying, albeit in the passive voice, that “the spirit of what I’m preaching all the time was contradicted.” Indeed it was, governor. Continue reading “”
Elderly citizens are exceptionally vulnerable to COVID-19. Ninety thousand, or 36% of official deaths, have been recorded in long-term care facilities. Strategies like lockdowns are intended in part to protect this population from the ravages of the virus.
But saved them from what, exactly?
As reported by The Associated Press, “[A]dvocates for the elderly say a tandem wave of death separate from the virus has quietly claimed tens of thousands more, often because overburdened workers haven’t been able to give them the care they need.”
A nursing home expert who analyzed data from the country’s 15,000 facilities for The Associated Press estimates that for every two COVID-19 victims in long-term care, there is another who died prematurely of other causes. Those “excess deaths” beyond the normal rate of fatalities in nursing homes could total more than 40,000 since March. [Emphasis mine.]
In too many cases, stopping a COVID death has meant isolation, loneliness, and neglect in the patient’s last months.
I had occasion to share my thoughts on senior care back in September. Eldercare was a daily reality for me from 2014 until 2017, when both my parents passed away a few months apart.
Mom spent the last three years of her life in a nursing home. She was slowly slipping away with dementia, but remained as a sweet teenager still in love with my Dad to the end. He saw her nearly every day, but was unable to take care of her. These Depression-era savers lived modestly, which meant at the end Mom could afford a private sitter — an extra set of eyes and ears to insure proper care — in addition to the considerable expense of private nursing care.
There are good nursing homes and not-so-good nursing homes, but in the end, each one is a business. In 2017, my parents could afford a good sitter; with dementia, it’s more about preserving the patient’s dignity than it is about prolonging their life.
Take away visits from family and friends, and standards are bound to suffer.
Dad, by contrast, had all his faculties. We moved him into assisted living, a wonderful place where he made new friends. He never got used to the “chow”, as he called it. In his last three years, I listened to his old Navy stories many times over and came to appreciate just how socially engaged he was. … In a lockdown, Dad would have felt just as depressed and isolated as Mom [because he would have been denied his daily visits to her nursing home]. It may have been worse for him because he had the capacity to understand.
My parents died in their 92nd year, their 73rd year together as husband and wife. Neither was afraid to die. Toward the end …
… Dad became more patriotic than ever. He would tear up at the sight of a flag, and military displays on TV invariably caused him to weep openly. He spoke constantly of how he cherished our God-given freedoms and how his grandchildren and great-grandchildren represented our nation’s future.
Our nation has blundered in this pandemic because we have focused on counting that which is easily counted: COVID deaths and infection rates. Our strategy has been to keep those numbers low at all costs. When you’re an epidemiologist, every problem looks like a novel coronavirus.
Who is keeping score of the diffuse (but real) negative costs of our response? Not just hidden nursing home deaths, but suicide, drug overdose, domestic abuse, depression, anxiety, and mental illness are part of the tally. So are the consequences of delayed and deferred health care.
It remains to be seen if the vaccines will be effective and for how long. Political leadership seems to be slouching toward renewed lockdowns. We need clear-headed leadership who realizes that dealing with COVID is not a one-dimensional problem; interminable rolling lockdowns are of limited use.
A nasal spray that can provide effective protection against the COVID-19 virus has been developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham, using materials already cleared for use in humans.
A team in the university’s Healthcare Technologies Institute formulated the spray using compounds already widely approved by regulatory bodies in the UK, Europe and the US. The materials are already widely used in medical devices, medicines and even food products. Continue reading “”
Bottom line here, she’s holding her state hostage. No Biden, no end to lockdown. This is someone who ought to be impeached from office and swiftly thrown out.
For the past 200 days, Democratic governors have been commanding their states to go on lockdown, and ordering nursing homes to be seeded with COVID patients.
The result has been the twin disaster of broken economies and high COVID death tolls, way out of proportion to the rest of the country. And incredibly, they’re blaming President Trump for all of the bad consequences of their own acts, and reaping big political hay from it.
They do all the harm, Trump gets all the blame, they take all the glory.
What power-mad leftist wouldn’t want a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose setup like that? Torture your state, blame Trump, win big.
So it’s natural to expect that the worst of them might just keep holding their states on lockdown as a hostage act, at least until election day, to beat their citizens into submission. After that, the mask can come off.
Far-left Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, though, didn’t want to wait.
Whitmer told host Chuck Todd that lockdowns and COVID restrictions can end, if Americans just vote for Joe Biden. The governor, who has become one of the faces of hypocritical lockdowns for the Left over the last few months, insinuated that Trump doesn’t care that 220,000 people have died so far from COVID, and that 8 million positive COVID tests have been logged so far.
…and…
She also insinuated that the real victims of the lockdowns are the heroes who are staying closed and staying home indefinitely, and that Trump and anyone who wants to get back to living their American lives are, in fact, inciting violence.
“Every moment that we are not focused on the fact that there are 220,000 Americans who have died from this virus is good for him. So in that sense, as he incites additional violence against people who are just trying to save one another’s lives. It’s good for him. And that’s why I don’t want to talk about him endangering public servants lives. I want to talk about what he hasn’t done and that’s his job. The Trump virus response is the worst in the globe. I mean in the world, it’s the worst 8 million people have been have contracted covid-19, 220000 dead. We’ve got people in food pantry line who never would have imagined that they be there and no light on the horizon because our numbers keep going up.”
The mask is off. The secret slips out. She’s been holding them hostage all along. Facts, or even taking care of her own tax base, don’t mean a thing to her. Who needs a tax base when you’ve got Joe Biden in a position of power? Continue reading “”
Other events must get ‘advance’ permission to exceed 25 people
Want to go marching for racial justice? Don’t worry about Boston University’s 25-person gathering limit in the name of COVID-19 prevention.
Want to go marching for any other cause? Hold it, bub.
The private university seriously told Campus Reform that it’s evaluating Black Lives Matter gatherings under Massachusetts guidance on gatherings for political expression, while subjecting any other request to exceed its own 25-person limit to bureaucratic whim. Continue reading “”
Over the last year, I’ve tried to be fair to Dr. Anthony Fauci. I understand that a situation like the current pandemic is unpredictable and that even well thought out positions can often be wrong. But what I’ve never had patience for is arrogance in failure from bureaucrats who we have no way of holding to account because it takes an act of God to remove a government employee.
Dr. Fauci is now at that place. He doesn’t deserve to have his job anymore, leaving a string of highly damaging failures in his wake which he’s now couching in an incredibly insulting arrogance.
Here’s one of his latest whoppers.
Seriously? Dr. Fauci says he can’t think of any reason there would be “excess deaths” this year besides Covid pic.twitter.com/VsEjSvIptK
To this point, the destruction caused by state and Federal Covid-19 lockdowns has largely been expressed in aggregates. Yet along the same line as a popular critique of Keynesianism, economic aggregates present a greatly truncated story by smoothing over minute but revealing evidence at lower levels. Looking at the policy impact on a smaller scale – regionally, and in terms of industries/sectors – exposes the impact of mandated shutdowns in greater detail.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, widespread lockdown restrictions were imposed, ostensibly to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed and medical resources from being consumed to exhaustion. Whether policymakers purposely or out of ignorance disregarded them, the tradeoffs of stay-at-home orders were immediate and severe: a massive spike in unemployment, rivaling the Great Depression; similarly historic drops in GDP, and others. By looking at disaggregated data, though, the devastation of lockdowns becomes all the more apparent.
Organization
We examined the US economy in the period leading up to the Covid-19 policy implementations in two ways: regionally and in terms of industries.
For our analysis, U.S. geographic regions are broken into the following areas: New England, Mideast (Midatlantic), Great Lakes, Plains, Southeast, Southwest, Rocky Mountain, and the Far West. These were compared using data on GDP, imports, exports, business formations, and unemployment. Continue reading “”
Biden doesn’t even know how to wear a mask properly.
“This is positive news,” John Harwood comments, “but it’s not dispositive.” It’s good news on its face that Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen have tested negative for COVID-19, but the infection in the White House is recent enough that the Pences could still be in the gestational stage of the disease. Pence and Donald Trump had campaigned together recently, but it’s not clear when Trump first got exposed…………
With the Trumps sidelined for at least a week and probably two after their positive test, Pence will face pressure in both directions. The campaign will want him to pick up the slack on events to replace Trump. However, continuity-of-government risks will likely keep Pence close to home in case Trump’s case gets more serious. Pence will likely err on the side of caution, in part because Pence doesn’t generate the same kind of interest for rally-event attendance. He’d be better off fundraising at the residence over Skype at this point, especially since the White House now has to show it’s taking this seriously.
