Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
Last week President Biden addressed the nation on the first anniversary of the coronavirus being declared a “pandemic.” It was a disturbing speech, warning us that the “hopeful spring” will only emerge “from a dark winter” if all Americans “stick with the rules.”
Whose rules? His rules.
The message from the president was clear: he will only allow us to have some of our freedoms back if we do exactly as he tells us. It was the language of extortion, of a bank robber who demands you do what he says or face the consequences. It was not the language of someone we are told is the leader of the free world.
In the speech Biden laid out a list of what was taken from us over the past year, “weddings, birthdays, graduations…family reunions, the Sunday night rituals.” It was as if somehow the virus, instead of authoritarian government officials, prevented us from enjoying these normal human activities.
Though we continue to see Covid disappear across the country with the end of the winter season, Biden was not about to let go of his perceived power to control our lives. He said, “if we do all this, if we do our part, if we do this together, by July the 4, there’s a good chance you, your families and friends, will be able to get together in your backyard or in your neighborhood and have a cookout or a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day. That doesn’t mean large events with lots of people together, but it does mean small groups will be able to get together.”
Imagine our Founders hearing this speech. The US president might – just might – allow small family gatherings at home in four months if we follow all of his rules. King George looked benevolent by comparison!
As Rep. Thomas Massie Tweeted shortly after the speech, “If you’re waiting for permission from the chief executive to celebrate Independence Day with your family, you clearly don’t grasp the concept of Independence.”
It seems like yesterday – it almost was – that Biden “asked” us to just wear the mask for 100 days. “Just 100 days to mask, not forever. 100 days,” he said. So from “just 100 days” to maybe you can have a small gathering by July 4th? Perhaps he just forgot his earlier speech?
As usual, the goalposts keep being moved because politicians cannot bear the possibility that they might have to give up some of that power over us they have grabbed for themselves. Fauci made the usual mainstream media rounds over the weekend and was asked by the fawning host when Americans might have permission to hold weddings again!
So now Americans need Fauci’s permission to get married? What is happening to this country? The propaganda is so relentless that it seems most Americans don’t see how not normal this is! In saner times, Fauci would be laughed off the stage. Now, he’s treated as some sort of divine source of truth.
Biden promised he was “using every power…as the president of the United States to put us on a war footing.” Of that I have no doubt. But Biden’s war is not against the virus. It’s against the US Constitution and liberty itself.
Authored by David D’Amato via Libertarian Institute & Libertarianism.org,
Recent research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques is allowing us to peer into the connections, yet shrouded in mystery, between local brain activity, cognitive processes, and partisan attachment. This developing body of knowledge has revealed the profound importance of evolution in shaping the ways in which our brains process all kinds of information, in particular political information. At the center of this evolutionary journey is the importance of groups—of being initiated and accepted into them, of aligning ourselves with them, of being loyal to them regardless of philosophical considerations. The social dynamics of group membership and participation are programmed more deeply into our brains than is abstract philosophizing. “In other words, people will go along with the group, even if the ideas oppose their own ideologies—belonging may have more value than facts.” Because we once moved from place to place as nomads, such groups are our homes even more than any physical locations are.
We now have decades of research suggesting—if not proving— “the ubiquity of emotion‐biased motivated reasoning,” reasoning that is qualitatively different from the kind operating when subjects are engaged in “cold reasoning,” where the subjects lack a “strong emotional stake” in the subjects at issue. Coupled with a growing literature on the startling character and extent of political ignorance, the current state has dire implications for human freedom. The stakes are high: in their 2018 study of why and how partisanship impairs the brain’s ability to process information objectively, NYU researchers Jay J. Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira note that “partisanship can alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments.”
One recent study, published last fall by a team from Berkeley, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, set out to better understand how partisan biases develop in the brain. The researchers had subjects watch a series of videos, using fMRI to explore the “neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real‐world political content.” The results showed that partisan team members process identical information in highly biased and motivated ways. The researchers locate this neural polarization in the part of the brain known as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with understanding and formulating narratives. The study also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that to the extent a given participant’s brain activity during the videos aligned with that of the “average liberal” or “average conservative,” the participant was more likely to take up that group’s position.
The study accords with years of previous research showing that partisans’ opinions on important social, political, and economic issues are affected by subconscious brain processes—processes of which they’re neither aware nor in control. This ought to be deeply concerning to everyone who belongs to a political team: processes are taking place in your brain, underneath or beyond the level of direct awareness, that are informing your conclusions about important social and political issues. To reflect on this for even a moment should fill anyone who aspires to critical thinking or rationality with a kind of dread, for loyalty to the team seems to be overriding the higher faculties of the mind.
But, the authors are careful to note, it’s important not to interpret these results as pointing to some kind of determinism, whereby we can’t choose how to think or what we believe. As one of of the study’s authors, Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, says, “Critically, these differences do not imply that people are hardwired to disagree.” Rather, these neural pathways seem to be carved largely by the kinds and sources of the media we consume. From the data yielded by such research, among many other similar studies, a picture begins to emerge of partisanship as a kind of mind poisoning, an infection that leads to serious and, importantly, measurable cognitive impairment. Evidence suggests that, under the influence of partisanship, we can’t even understand our own thoughts and opinions.
In another important, recent experiment, researchers wanted to understand the relative accuracy of participants’ introspective constructs. The researchers set out to gauge people’s ability to understand their own choices, to see clearly “the elements of internal argumentation that lead to [their] choices.” In particular, the researchers wanted to know how subjects would deal with choices that had been manipulated—that is, whether subjects would “notice mismatches between their intended choice and the outcome they are presented with.” Would subjects recognize that something was off? If they failed to notice the manipulation, would they offer justifications for choices they had not even made? The assumption is that subjects who fail to notice the mismatches must not really understand the reasons for their choices or “the internal processes leading to a moral or political judgment.”
The results revealed a conspicuous “introspective blindness to the internal processes leading to a moral or political judgment.” People didn’t seem to understand why they had made the decisions they’d made (or had not made), though some exhibited what the researchers call “unconscious detection of self‐deception“—these subjects were unable to detect the manipulations of their answers, but they did register lower confidence in the manipulated choices, which the authors suggest points to “the existence of a neural mechanism unconsciously monitoring our own thoughts.”
Once one has chosen and joined a team, she has very little control over her own thoughts. When they are introduced, new data are distorted, misinterpreted, or discarded based on their consistency with what we may describe as a program running in the background: partisanship leads the team member into a cognitive position of unconscious self‐deception. Few of us, if fully understanding this phenomenon, would choose it for themselves—at least that’s the hope of many who study this area. As the authors observe, “reflecting on our beliefs may help to develop free societies.” They suggest that if citizens better understood the brain mechanics of the cognitive impairment and self‐deception brought on by partisanship, they’d be positioned to make better decisions. Research has shown that “reflecting on how we make decisions leads to better decisions.”
Similar research on self‐deception in politics has also confirmed the presence of the Dunning‐Kruger effect (to summarize, people think they know a lot more than they actually do). Further, the effect is exaggerated within the context of politics, with low‐knowledge participants describing themselves as even more knowledgeable than usual once partisanship is made a conspicuous factor. Vitor Geraldi Haase and Isabella Starling‐Alves posit that the kind of self‐deception that is such “a major characteristic of political partisanship…probably evolved as an evolutionary adaptive strategy to deal with the intragroup‐extragroup dynamics of human evolution.” Objective truth, meaning roughly an accurate model of reality, is not important, at least not anywhere near as important, as conformity and indeed submission, which we may associate with social reality.
Whatever its flaws, evolutionary psychology offers us several promising leads on the question of just why the brain isn’t able to perform on partisanship. This notion of social reality is an important clue. At this juncture, it is important to underline the fact that when we speak of partisanship, we are not speaking of ideology; the relationship between partisan identification and political ideology is complicated, the connection between the two not particularly strong. Ideologues tend to think systematically, and the philosophical contents of their beliefs are deeply important to them. What is important to the partisan is not what she believes, but that she aligns her beliefs with those of her team or in-group—or else, as may be the case, that she is loyal to and supportive of the party group despite any real or perceived ideological nonconcurrences.
Americans tend to vastly overestimate the differences in political ideology and policy preferences between Democrats and Republicans. In fact, most Americans are not at all ideological, can’t describe ideologies accurately (as their proponents would describe them), and have almost no information on either the history of ideas or the empirical evidence that bears on particular political or policy questions. Interestingly, partisanship doesn’t necessarily seem to be about politics in the normative or philosophical sense, as “people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth.” There are actually relatively weak correlations between partisan identity and concrete policy preferences. “[P]artisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes.”
Indeed, strong partisanship is necessarily an impediment to ideological thinking insofar as ideology is predicated on an integrated and consistent approach to policy questions, as against the blind, team‐rooting approach associated in the literature with partisanship. Ideological people, whatever their flaws, hold political actors and government bodies to account. Partisans change positions readily and shamelessly, depending on anything from who is living in the White House, to the vagaries of party leaders, to what is perceived as popular at the moment. Further, individual Americans’ political opinions are remarkably unstable over time, vacillating between glaring contradictions, relying on a confused amalgam of elite opinions. Partisanship as we know it rather seems to be a holdover from humankind’s history of tribal loyalty, with “selective pressures hav[ing] sculpted human minds to be tribal.” That is, evolution selected for just the kinds of cognitive biases we find in partisans on both sides today (importantly, neither “team” is immune).
A recent paper published by the American Psychological Association suggests that from a cognitive and psychoneurological standpoint, partisans of the left and right are much more like each other than they are like nonpartisans. As study co‐author Leor Zmigrod writes, “Regardless of the direction and content of their political beliefs, extreme partisans had a similar cognitive profile.” Specifically, partisans of all stripes show lower levels of cognitive flexibility; importantly, even when processing information that has no political character, they are more dogmatic, less adaptable, and less able to complete tasks that require an “ability to adapt to novel or changing environments and a capacity to switch between modes of thinking.”
Partisanship quite literally makes one dumb—or is it that dumb people are just more likely to be committed partisans? Zmigrod is careful to point out that the study can’t give us the answer to that question, that we would need longitudinal studies in order to better understand the causal direction and causal phenomena at play. As soon as partisanship is introduced, as soon as a question mentions a politician or political party, subjects are unable to accurately assess basic facts. Indeed, remarkably, tinging a question with a political shade renders many subjects unable to answer a simple question even when they are given the answer. Relatedly, studies have shown that one’s political affiliations even affect her ability to perform basic math: given an operation that yields a statistic contradicting a subject’s partisan view, the subject will tend to question the result rather than updating based on the evidence or attempting to reconcile the new information with her politics.
In a groundbreaking study published last summer, a team of researchers led by the University of Exeter’s Darren Schreiber attempted to address the lack of brain imaging research specifically aimed at better understanding nonpartisans, a group that has been neglected as almost all such research has focused on the differences between the brains of partisans of the left and right. The study found that nonpartisans’ brains are different from those of their brainwashed brethren, particularly in “regions that are typically involved in social cognition.”
It may be that the next stage in human evolution will involve rewiring our brains to accept the fact that current groups are artificially and arbitrarily defined—that all human beings are one people. For just as there is harmful, toxic tribalism, there is also socially beneficial, cooperative, cosmopolitanism. As social policy expert Elizabeth A. Segal writes, “Ultimately our goal should be to build the tribe we all belong to: that of humanity.” Libertarians take this lesson quite seriously, for we tend to see ourselves as part of a common global community of connected individuals who are perfectly capable of dealing with one another through peaceful and mutually‐beneficial interactions. We celebrate social, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences as the spice of life rather than see them as dividing lines or impediments to willing collaboration. If we can understand and think clearly through partisanship, we can begin to build a freer world based not on arbitrary divisions and compromised reasoning, but on mutual respect and renewed emphasis on rigorous critical thinking.
The latest data from the United Nation World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) showed that 32 percent of destinations worldwide – 69 in total – are now completely closed for global tourism as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Of those, just over half – 38 destinations – have been completely closed for at least 40 weeks, and 34 percent of all destinations are still partially closed to international tourists.
According to the UNWTO report, the emergence of new variants of the Covid-19 virus has prompted many governments to reverse efforts to ease restrictions on travel, with total closures to tourists most prevalent in Asia and the Pacific nations, and Europe.
“Travel restrictions have been widely used to restrict the spread of the virus. Now, as we work to restart tourism, we must recognize that restrictions are just one part of the solution. Their use must be based on the latest data and analysis, and consistently reviewed so as to allow for the safe and responsible restart of a sector upon which many millions of businesses and jobs depend,” said UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili.
The report said that regional differences with regard to travel restrictions remain. “Of the 69 destinations where borders are completely closed to tourists, 30 are in Asia and the Pacific, 15 are in Europe, 11 are in Africa, 10 are in the Americas, and three are in the Middle East.”
On April 26, 1933, the interior minister for the German state of Prussia issued a decree creating a new secret state police, or Geheime Staats Polizei, abbreviated: Gestapo.
The Gestapo was tasked with stamping out all opposition to Germany’s new Chancellor and the party he brought to power one year earlier.
It operated by collecting tips from ordinary citizens, including even school children. And this network of Gestapo informants changed Germans’ behavior almost overnight.
Even a joke about the ruling party could land you in a Gestapo interrogation room. Talking politics around your children became a dangerous gamble.
According to Erik Larson’s book In the Garden of Beasts, 37% of denunciations “arose not from heartfelt political beliefs, but from private conflicts with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial.”
For example in one case, a grocery store clerk reported a customer who insisted on receiving the wrong change. The customer was accused of tax fraud.
Another man lent a banned book to his friend, and was quickly denounced by his friend’s wife.
The new Chancellor— who encouraged the behavior — was so shocked by the citizens’ eagerness to rat out their neighbors that he remarked, “We are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”
That Chancellor, of course, was Adolf Hitler.
The secret police didn’t need wire taps in every home or spies on every street corner. They found an army of willing, eager informants in the general population.
The volume of denunciations was so great, in fact, that the Gestapo actually had to ask people to stop reporting political crimes to them, because they were overwhelmed and found it impossible to process them all.
Obviously Germany in the 1930s is an extreme case, and I’m not saying that the West today is in the same boat. Not even close.
The similarity, however, is how quickly things changed.
In Nazi Germany, the entire culture changed literally within a few months. In early Spring of 1933, people were still civil to one another. By the summer, they were ratting out their friends and neighbors to the secret police.
Similarly, it wasn’t that long ago that people in the west felt free to speak their minds and state an opinion.
Today saying the wrong words can get you fired, cancelled, and your life turned upside down.
For example, lately there’s been a number of so-called “fact checkers,” i.e. self-appointed censors, who are upset about a new app called Clubhouse.
If you haven’t heard of it, Clubhouse allows people to discuss different topics in audio-only chat rooms.
The audio-based content does not allow recording. And that means there is no record of conversations.
As one fact-checker laments:
“…there are no screenshots. There is no way to drag up old Clubhouse posts years later like a user might do on Twitter. There is no way to record conversations—meaning there is no way to prove that someone said anything controversial at all. . . Users on Clubhouse know, or at least believe, that they can openly speak their mind with zero repercussions.”
The horror!
This drives the ‘fact checkers’ bananas. They want people to be afraid to speak their minds. They want people to fear being denounced if they do not adhere to the doctrine of wokeness.
One particularly angry fact checker penned a virtriolic article noting that the Chinese government has already banned Clubhouse.
She then asks the reader, “If Xi Jinping’s administration isn’t ignoring Clubhouse, why should fact-checkers? Why should you?”
Apparently, the repressive Chinese regime is a shining example that the fact checkers think we should all follow.
Just like the West followed China’s lead on imprisoning people inside their homes in the name of stopping the spread of Covid-19, the West should apparently stamp out any platform that allows intellectual dissent.
Of course, intellectual dissent covers a lot of ground these days.
For example, a professor at John Hopkins School of Medicine wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal recently predicting “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April”.
The author has impeccible credentials; in addition to his MD, he obtained a Maser of Public Health from Harvard, served at the World Health Organization, and was recommended by the American College of Surgeons to become the Surgeon General of the United States.
But the fact checkers don’t think that his view should be repeated.
So Facebook’s fact checkers stuck a “misinformation” label on the article, stating: “Missing Context. Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.”
Sure, there are scientists who think that herd immunity is a long way off.
But Facebook’s fact-checkers decided for everyone which scientists’ opinions were ‘correct’ and which scientists’ opinions should be censored.
The aim of these people is to put reinforce a specific narrative, and denounce anything contrary to that narrative as “misinformation” or “hate speech”. And anyone who is caught sharing or espousing such views is derided as a conspiracy theorist… or worse.
Accept the opinions they tell you are correct, or be denounced.
Authored by Thomas Harrington via The American Institute for Economic Research,
There is an important issue that, in the midst of all the talk of vaccines, has not gotten nearly the attention it deserves: the civil rights of those who have already developed natural immunity to the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is said to cause Covid.
Yesterday, I got the results of the test I took to detect whether I had developed a T-Cell response to the virus.
Like the antibody test I took almost 2 months ago, it was positive.
These two things would appear to demonstrate that for all intents and purposes my body knew exactly what to do with this virus and that it probably has the equipment to dispose of it again were it, or one of its cousins, to revisit me in the near-to-medium term.
And even if one or another related strain were to visit me in that future, studies suggest strongly that the attack would be considerably less virulent than the one I overcame without excessive trouble in December.
In a halfway rational world, what to do going forward in regard to getting a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be something I’d discuss with my doctor in the discreet quarters of the examination room. Were it to be offered, I would politely refuse it. And he, seeing the test evidence in my file, would raise no objection.
And since the danger to me in the future from the virus is minuscule, and the science has clearly borne out what Fauci and Maria Van Kerkhove of the WHO flatly said was true before someone upstairs got to them—that asymptomatic transmission of respiratory diseases of this type is virtually nonexistent—I’d be free to live my life as I pleased without a mask, and with complete freedom of movement.
But instead of this, I am facing enormous pressure to get a vaccine in order to recover my basic rights as a citizen.
And even then, those in charge are saying, I will still have to run around with a completely useless, breath-robbing and personality-canceling mask on my face.
And all this for a disease that, even before the introduction of vaccines, gave those infected by it a roughly 997.5 out of 1,000 chance of survival.
The civil authorities have decided, in effect, that fully indemnified pharmaceutical companies, whose pasts are obscenely littered with fraud, and the calculated creation of crises in order to up revenues on their products (OxyContin anyone?), have the de facto “right” to force me to take an experimental vaccine that, in the very, very best of circumstances, will only match what my apparently well-functioning body has already given me without any side effects.
And this, while straight out telling me that even if I submit to their government-coerced medical experiment I will probably still not get my full constitutional rights back.
This is an important issue that needs to be addressed much more vigorously than has been the case up until now.
James Crabtree via Nikkei Asia
China’s hunger for technology has been on full display during the current Two Sessions meeting in Beijing. On Mar. 5, Premier Li Keqiang confirmed sharp increases in state spending for frontier areas such as semiconductors, as his administration grapples with crippling U.S. restrictions on Chinese tech companies.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden launched a review of supply chain resilience last month, pledging a brisk 100-day rethink of semiconductor policies. One outcome is obvious: those in Beijing hoping the U.S. will ease its tech war will be disappointed.Instead, Biden is likely to push forward with an evermore Chinese-style industrial policy, as he seeks both to cajole global chip suppliers to shift to the U.S., and deny China access to that industry’s most advanced products.
Global chip shortages give this review extra impetus, with U.S. automakers forced to stop or slow production. There is not much Biden can do about that, with supply delays reflecting a post-COVID bounce-back in chip demand. In the longer term, though, the U.S. faces dilemmas as it decides how to revitalize its own chipmaking sector and slow China’s technology advance.
Around half of global semiconductor sales are still controlled by U.S. companies, although their technological lead is mostly confined to research and design. Over recent decades chipmakers like Intel outsourced much of their production to Asian giants including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), alongside the likes of Apple, who design but do not make their own chips. U.S. strategists now view this as a mistake that leaves global chip manufacturing dangerously concentrated in Taiwan and South Korea, and thus vulnerable to Chinese interference. [“Chinese interference” such as being a good buyer and the US in the future perhaps not being able to stop the sales.]
Former President Donald Trump persuaded TSMC to set up what was originally slated as a $12 billion facility in Arizona, although media reports suggest it now could end up many times larger. [The much-touted plant won’t be capable of printing the newest 3nm chips.]Samsung Electronics is planning a $17 billion plant too, taking advantage of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tax breaks. More money is set to follow. Recent legislation offered up to $3 billion to any company planning a new U.S. fabrication plant. Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer has promised tens of billions more.
This financial splurge has its risks. Just as happens in China, the more the U.S. spends in sops, the more it is likely to waste, hence the downside of running an increasingly Chinese-style industrial policy. Even successful subsidies will take time. The new TSMC and Samsung factories are not likely to open until 2023. Any further new facilities would take even longer.
Biden then faces the more immediate problem of how to continue Trump’s moves to stop China from accessing chips its own companies do not know how to make. Behind the new U.S. plants lies an unspoken arrangement that TSMC and Samsung will make their most advanced products in the U.S., starting with 5-nanometer chips. [Nonsense. By 2022 TSMC will have moved onto 3nm which will be made exclusively in Taiwan.] This will help U.S. supply chain resilience by ensuring that, in emergencies, U.S.-made chips end up with U.S. companies. [LOL. What does the US even manufacture as to require chips? To desperately need chips you first need to be making stuff with chips in them.] But it is unlikely to satisfy those who worry about the security impact of China having those same advanced technologies.
The U.S. is now using its so-called entity list to deny sales to dozens of Chinese companies, including electronics giant Huawei Technologies and chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., better known as SMIC. But Biden’s policy review looks likely to bring in more explicit measures aimed at sustaining his country’s chipmaking lead. Eventually, the aim will be what Eurasia Group analyst Paul Triolo calls separate “blue,” or U.S., and “red,” or Chinese, semiconductor supply chains, forcing the likes of TSMC to decide which to join. Rather than denying access to specific companies, it will seek to deny advanced chip technologies to the entire Chinese economy.
Delivering this is not going to be easy. Extra money for domestic manufacturing is widely backed by U.S. technology companies. Limiting chip sales to China is not, given so many chipmakers sell to Chinese buyers. In the long-run, the measures may also be self-defeating, given they will spur China into evermore desperate catch-up investments, which eventually will probably be successful.
The U.S. will also have to persuade reluctant friends in Asia and Europe of the need for new restrictions. This might mean demanding Asian chipmakers stop manufacturing in China, for instance, or even using Chinese engineers. A small handful of European companies also play an important part in advanced chip manufacturing equipment, at a time when the European Union seems at best ambivalent about new moves that will antagonize China.
Ultimately, though, the U.S. is likely to decide these costs are manageable. Its strategy of technological denial also has a good chance of succeeding, in the short term at least. Washington knows such actions can work, as Huawei’s damaged business model attests. Faced with the choice between easing up on China and doubling down, Biden looks ever more likely to choose the latter.
Speaking in December the new U.S. President declared that dealing with China required “leverage,” adding: “In my view, we don’t have it yet.” Semiconductors remain one of the greatest advantages Biden has over China’s President Xi Jinping. And in a new Cold War, you fight with the weapons you have to hand.
“In 2009 Jacques Attali, son of a wealthy Jewish merchant, wrote the following statements in his column in L’Express magazine:
“Where the financial crash has failed, so far, a good little pandemic could force our leaders to accept the realization of a world government! “
https://solidariteetprogres.fr/actualites-001/attali-une-petite-pandemie
“History teaches us that humanity only evolves significantly when it is truly afraid!
“For this, it is necessary to organize: a world police, a world storage system (of resources) and therefore a world tax system. We would then arrive, much more quickly than economic reason alone would allow, to lay the foundations for a true world government. “
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
On Friday afternoon, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (still called the CDC, even though they added a ‘P’) released a heretical report about mask-wearing and COVID-19.
The report, authored by at least a dozen medical doctors, PhD researchers, and, bizarrely, a handful of attorneys, examined how mask mandates across the US affected COVID cases and death rates.
You’d think with all of the media propaganda about mask effectiveness… and all the virtue signaling, with politicians and reporters appearing on live TV wearing masks… that the data would prove incontrovertibly and overwhelmingly that masks have saved the world.
But that’s not what the report says.
According to the CDC’s analysis, between March 1 and December 31 last year, statewide mask mandates were in effect in 2,313 of the 3,142 counties in the United States.
And, looking at the county-by-county data, the CDC concludes that mask mandates were associated with an average 1.32% decrease in the growth rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the first 100 days after the mask policy was implemented.
Wait, what? Only 1.32%?
You read that correctly, they didn’t misplace the decimal: according to the federal government agency that is responsible for managing the COVID-1984 pandemic, the difference between mask mandates and no mask mandate is literally just a 1.32% difference.
And bear in mind, it’s entirely possible that the real figure is even lower than that, given all the questionable COVID statistics.
For example, the CDC reports that influenza cases in the United States have dropped to almost zero in the 2020-2021 flu season, down from 56 MILLION the previous year.
It’s amazing they expect anyone to take this data seriously.
Are we honestly supposed to believe that the flu has been eradicated?
Or is it possible, that, maybe just maybe, at least some influenza cases have been misdiagnosed as COVID?
If that’s the case, then the real impact of masks on COVID growth rates is potentially much lower than 1.32%.
Even the CDC seems to understand this, because at the end of its report, they inspidly conclude by stating that mask mandates “have the potential to slow the spread of COVID-19. . .” [the bold is mine, obviously]
Really? “Potential”? That’s HERESY! And an obvious contradiction to WHO guidance. It makes we wonder whether Google and Facebook are gearing up to censor this report, given they have self-appointed themselves as the Ministry of Truth.
Frankly it’s pretty incredible that the data was too weak for the CDC to make a clear assertion about the benefits of mask mandates.
(though I did say there were a couple of lawyers who co-authored this paper… and using non-committal language like “potential” certainly sounds like typical weasel lawyer-speak.)
Now, please don’t misunderstand the point of this letter. I’m not here to bash masks or say that they don’t work, or go on some anti-mask rant.
The point is that I’m pro-data. And pro-reason.
Public health policies come with consequences. There are always costs, and there are (hopefully) benefits.
The CDC has just published an official analysis of the benefits, quantified at precisely 1.32%.
What are the costs of their decisions? Well there’s plenty of data about that too.
For example, a recent study published earlier this month in the premier scientific journal Nature shows that Americans who wear masks are more likely engage in riskier activities, like, you know, leaving the house.
The study conclude that mask mandates “lead to risk compensation behavior” and mask wearers “spend 11-24 fewer minutes at home on average and increase visits to some commercial locations– most notably restaurants, which are a high-risk location.”
Other consequences are more grim.
There have been several studies which chronicle the alarming rise in severe mental health issues, including a spike in youth suicide, as a result of various public health policies, including mask mandates and lockdowns.
For example, another study published in Nature from early January reported that, in late 2020, suicide rates among children in Japan jumped 49%.
And the US government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service (SAMHSA) reported an incredible 890% increase in call volume to its nationwide suicide hotline last April.
Then there are the economic consequences to consider: Do mask mandates boost the economy by giving people more confidence to go out and spend? Or do mask mandates compel more people to stay home to avoid the hassle, and hence reduce economic activity?
There’s still no conclusive analysis on the subject. But you’d think that policymakers would want to know.
You’d think that they would look at all the data, all the pro’s and con’s, economic consequences, public health consequences, etc., and make an informed, rational decision.
But that doesn’t seem to happen anymore.
There can be no rational discourse on the topic. You’re not allowed to ask any questions or express any intellectual dissent, otherwise you’ll be denounced as a conspiracy theorist.
You have one job: obey. It’s not even about ‘trusting the science’ anymore, as we’ve been told to do over and over again during the pandemic. Because now the science tells us that mask mandates “have the potential” to reduce Covid growth rates by just 1.32%.
Not that you’ll hear this in the media.
There actually was a bonanza of coverage over the weekend about the CDC’s new report.
But very little of the media coverage bothered to mention the real data, i.e. the marginal 1.32% reduction in growth rates.
Just like the CDC’s influenza data, it’s incredible that the media expects to be taken seriously, or that they pass themselves off as an objective, unbiased source of information.
© Matt Cardy/Getty Images
BY JOHN BOWDEN via https://thehill.com/policy/international/europe/542036-3000-protest-coronavirus-restrictions-vaccines-in-The Hill
Thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital, Bucharest, on Sunday to protest COVID-19 restrictions and vaccinations, which they fear will become compulsory.
Photos taken by The Associated Press and others on social media showed large crowds carrying signs and other materials with anti-mask and anti-vaccine slogans, including one reading, “Say no to forced vaccination.”
ROMANIA pic.twitter.com/gfmq9sZDzz
— Micke Bäckström ️ Patriot (@BackstromMicke) March 7, 2021
The protests reportedly come in the face of a new round of two-week COVID-19 guidelines restricting parts of public life in the country. Romania previously relaxed COVID-19 rules earlier this year but faces a rising wave of new infections that health officials have yet to have much success in reversing.
The COVID-19 vaccine is not mandatory in Romania. It is provided to residents free of charge, and residents who have the vaccine are subject to fewer COVID-19 restrictions than others. Still, opinion polls in the country have recorded a high level of skepticism surrounding the vaccines, according to multiple media reports.
“This vaccine will certainly not be mandatory. Or let’s say these vaccines because we are talking about more than one,” Romania’s representative to the World Health Organization, Alexandru Rafila, said last year.
“Surely this vaccine will not be mandatory for children, adults or anyone else, and obviously the trust in the vaccine should be built not imposed, so I am convinced that this discussion about making it mandatory is not being taken into account, as least if we are talking about these new vaccines,” he said.