In a recent essay, columnist and scholar Joakim Book quotes economist and social philosopher Ludwig von Mises: “I set out to be a reformer, but only became the historian of decline.” Surely, this sentiment applies to anyone trying to chronicle what COVID-19 hysteria—above and beyond the disease itself—has wrought.
As Book puts it: “We are watching, in real time, the destruction of our own civilization. In the history books, events like these seem so quick and inevitable, following one upon the other until rescue from madness is too late. With the benefit of hindsight that plagues most history, this makes caricatures of the past: Really, ask even precocious middle schoolers, couldn’t the secessionists or democrats or the nationalists or the Bolsheviks have anticipated what their inane beliefs and actions would lead to?”
Of course, the sorts of bad actors involved in these cataclysmic decisions never see the downside. After all, these actions are for the greater good. Even outright criminals usually see a higher value in what they’re doing. The guy the hit man is killing is a scumbag and deserves it; the robbed bank has insurance and the thief needs the money more than they do; the dirty cop or politician are only working the system, and this is a justifiable perk for all their time and effort in helping the public.
Melinda Gates admitted that—regarding the lockdowns—”What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” Easy to say, I guess, if you’re a billionaire. She must truly believe that the virus—and not the lockdowns—are what is tanking the world economy. Consider that it was her husband Bill who put the power of computing into the hands of the common man, at exactly the time when mainframes and minicomputers fueled primarily large institutions and the elite.
Alas, Gates became an elitist and a would-be autocrat. But then, Julius Caesar was also a hero of the common man before becoming a dictator. Gates and his ilk would dearly love to cross the Rubicon into their delusional paradise run by globalists and technocrats.
You want hysteria and overreach? How about an airline kicking a couple and their two-year-old off the plane for alleged non-compliance with their mask policy? According to the parents, they were being compliant. The mother posted a video which soon went viral, and then was taken down by social media. Instagram threatened to cancel her account, and the family has been banned from the airline. All airlines have the same mask policy, but one wonders if it would have been enforced so aggressively.
As is well known and simultaneously ignored, there is little risk of COVID-19 transmission from young kids to adults. Moreover, the widely touted Pentagon study praising the low concentration of particulates/aerosols speaks mostly about the HEPA filters, and says little about the contribution of masks.
Then there is the matter of restaurant closures. This is nothing more than a sick power grab. New York State’s own contact tracing data, derived from the study of 46,000 COVID-19 cases determined the top 30 exposure sources. Here are some interesting findings:
- Restaurants and bars accounted for 1.43% of the cases
- Religious activities accounted for 0.69%
- Hair and personal care accounted for 0.14%
- Gyms accounted for 0.06%
Now, there was one source that accounted for 73.84% of the cases. And that was “Households/Social Gatherings.” You will search in vain for a definition of this category. Perhaps it is contained in the actual report, for which no media outlet has provided a link. An old trick with statistics is to lump disparate categories together to either hide something or “prove” a point.
Are we talking about many people gathering in private homes, combined with just catching the virus from your own family in its home? How many cases occurred in each of these sub-categories? No one seems to know. Note that restaurants and bars are also combined, even though there are obvious differences.
Nonetheless, they can’t hide the fact that virtually all the places that at one time or another were closed during lockdowns are small factors, indeed. Your leadership class at work. I have to keep invoking the late Richard Farina: “We are the children of darkness, and the prey of a foul command.”
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