Global Warming is the Mother of all Moral Panics!

by Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris | Jun 8, 2021 | Climate Change, Politics

 

In his newly published book, “Green Fraud,” Marc Morano, publisher of the influential Washington DC-based Climatedepot.com, explains, 

“Global warming hype and hysteria dominate the news media, academia, schools, the United Nations, and the U.S. government…School-skipping teen climate activists testify before the U.S. Congress and the United Nations, and young children are recruited for lawsuits against the U.S. government for its alleged climate ‘inaction.’ The phrase ‘climate emergency’ has emerged as the favorite for climate campaigners.

“But the arguments put forth by the global warming advocates grossly distort the true facts on a host of issues, ranging from rising sea levels and record temperatures to melting polar caps and disappearing polar bears.

“In fact, there is no ‘climate crisis’ or ‘climate emergency.’ The UN, climate activists, the media, and academia are using the climate scare as an opportunity to lobby for their alleged ‘solutions,’ which require massive government expansion and central planning.”

Early in the 20th century, the famous American journalist H.L. Mencken described what our nation is suffering through, perhaps now more than ever, when he said,

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamoring to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Human-caused climate change/global warming can be considered the mother of all hobgoblins.

Greta Thunberg, AOC, and countless others tell us it’s time to panic about climate change!

We actually think the opposite. It’s time to calm down.

What we’re concerned about is the distinct possibility that catastrophic man-caused climate change is now what sociologists call a “moral panic.” In other words, the panic surrounding climate change is far more dangerous than the issue itself.

It’s fascinating how human beings can whip themselves into a fervor over a supposed problem.

They don’t stop to consider the possibility that the problem is likely to be manageable. Or that the problem…may not even be a problem. It is just as British writer and publisher Tom Stacey explains in the “Prefatory Essay” to the late Professor Bob Carter’s 2013 book, 

“Catastrophilia is ever with us, accompanied by wild-eyed summons to action.”

As far back as the 16th Century, we had a moral panic in Europe, which led to the burning of thousands of innocent women claimed to be witches responsible for crop failures. The Friends of Science Society write: 

“’Weather Cooking’ was a crime that witches were accused of in the Medieval and Little Ice Age periods. When the weather got bad – it was clear to the ‘locals’ that someone had been up to something. So – witches were executed for ‘cooking’ bad weather.”

No one has been burned today, but careers by the scores have been destroyed for those in academia who admit to not believing humans control the thermostat of planet Earth. 

Let’s consider a couple of modern examples of moral panics that had huge costs in either funds wasted or lives lost (or both):

Y2K

When complicated computer programs were first written in the 60s, software designers used a two-digit code for the year, omitting the ‘19.’ As 2000 approached, the worry was that systems would not interpret the 00 properly, therefore causing major problems in the system.

In the late 1990s, nearly every tech expert agreed we needed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to avoid a so-called ‘Millennium Bug,’ or Y2K catastrophe. The Orlando Sentinel reported: “The world spent an estimated $500 billion or so to keep the Y2K bug from supposedly throwing us back into the stone age.”

Despite that huge expenditure, we fell far short of fixing everything. Yet, on the morning of January 1, 2000, practically nothing happened.  Planes did not crash, trains did not collide, and life went on as normal. National Geographic explained:

“In the end, there were very few problems. In Ishikawa, Japan, a nuclear energy facility had some of its radiation equipment fail, but backup facilities ensured there was no threat to the public. The U.S. detected missile launches in Russia and attributed that to the Y2K bug. But the missile launches were planned ahead of time as part of Russia’s conflict in its republic of Chechnya. There was no computer malfunction.

“Countries such as Italy, Russia, and South Korea had done little to prepare for Y2K. They had no more technological problems than those countries, like the U.S., that spent millions of dollars to combat the problem.”

Sentinel Staff member Ramsey Campbell summed up the situation well (“EXPENSIVE Y2K BUG NIBBLED AWAY MILLIONS,” January 12, 2000):

“It was all a big fuss over nothing. It’s like that old joke about a gimmick for keeping elephants away: “There aren’t any elephants in Florida,” says one guy. “See – it works,” replies another.

“But that $500 billion did go somewhere…Somebody ought to make a movie about it. I already have the perfect title – Revenge of the Nerds: With a Vengeance.”

Fukushima

It has been almost a decade since a major earthquake, and a devastating tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. 

Approximately 160,000 people were evacuated from the Fukushima nuclear power plant area shortly after it was damaged by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami because of fear of radiation exposure. It is estimated that 1,600 people died prematurely from stress-related illness in the evacuation process. While there were indeed thousands of lives tragically lost due to the tsunami and subsequent pollution from wastewater, there was not a single case of radiation-induced illness or death due to escaped radiation. 

The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation issued a press release two years later that said:

“Radiation exposure following the nuclear accident at Fukushima-Daiichi did not cause any immediate health effects. Eight years later, still, none have appeared. It is unlikely to be able to attribute any health effects in the future among the general public and the vast majority of workers…To date, there have been no health effects attributed to radiation exposure observed among workers, the people with the highest radiation exposures.”

The ‘precautionary’ action, taken in response to hypothetical health risks, was more harmful than the risks themselves.

Moral Panics

Here’s what you need to know about moral panics. There are five defining elements: Concern, Consensus, Hostility, Disproportionality, and Volatility.

It begins when people become concerned about a problem that they believe threatens community interests. The danger of a changing climate meets that requirement.

A Consensus arises that there is an urgent crisis. This “consensus” is typically not real, just a manufactured perception. The absurd unsupportable claim that “97 percent” of scientists agree that burning fossil fuels is creating a climate catastrophe fits nicely as a moral panic phenomenon. The junior author of this article discussed this at The Heartland Institute’s rebuttal of the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit.

Anyone who disagrees with this so-called “consensus” is met with hostility, and more, as we said above. No better example is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island wanting dissenters imprisoned.

Sociologists call them folk devils, or in this case, ‘science deniers.’

The solution to the problem is Disproportionally out of scale with what is actually known.

Spending inconceivable amounts of money to change every aspect of how we live…yeah, that’s certainly disproportional.

And, finally, moral panics are typically volatile. They flare up but then go away pretty quickly. Have you heard anything about Y2K in recent years? This is where climate change doesn’t fit the model, and it seems clear why.

There is always a storm, drought, flood, record high, or even record low temperature in any given week. There’s always something an alarmist can point to and say, ‘see⏤climate change!’

It doesn’t matter⏤those weather extremes are a constant in nature……Or that there is no proof man’s activities are causing some extreme, unnatural variation. The panic has become familiar… and… predictably….valuable.

While there may be a legitimate cause for concern initially, the panic gets amplified by people and organizations capitalizing on the fear people feel.

The news media hypes the panic because exploiting fear and creating conflict is the foundation of their business model.

People who sell expertise or products designed to fix the problem encourage the hysteria.

Remember, during Y2K, lots of tech companies and software developers made a fortune.

Panic can be highly profitable.

Of course, those who seek power use the scare to seize as much as they can, as fast as they can. Consider how Governors and Premiers in the US and Canada jumped quickly to enforce draconian lockdowns across society, ruining small businesses and doing far more damage to the health and prosperity of their citizens than the Coronavirus likely ever could. Two papers that should be read by all politicians include:

• October 2020: “COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink,” by Dr. Ari Joffe, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at University of Alberta; 
• April 2021: “Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature,” by Professor Douglas W. Allen of the Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia.

Finally, this is the most important thing about many moral panics… those pushing the hysteria often have the same goal in mind. That goal is to create a compelling incentive for changes in public policy that favor those stoking fear. 

So, what do you think? Climate alarmists say there is no time for debate or private sector innovation. They assert that we must spend unfathomable amounts of money and blindly trust the politicians and bureaucrats who will spend it. We must sacrifice many freedoms… capitalism… even our way of life. We don’t know about you, but that’s what we’re concerned about. 

---

NOTE: We have Mark Mathis of the Clear Energy Alliance to thank for portions of this article. See Mark’s four-minute video on this at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qesALW45okw.

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government and many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he received the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers.

Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute. He has 40 years experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer, and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament.

Why Is Everyone in Texas Not Dying?

Jeffrey A. Tucker  – March 26, 2021

 

 I'm sitting at a bar in Texas, surrounded by maskless people, looking at folks on the streets walking around like life is normal, talking with nice and friendly faces, feeling like things in the world are more-or-less normal. Cases and deaths attributed to Covid are, like everywhere else, falling dramatically. 

If you pay attention only to the media fear campaigns, you would find this confusing. More than two weeks ago, the governor of Texas completely reversed his devastating lockdown policies and repealed all his emergency powers, along with the egregious attacks on rights and liberties.

There was something very un-Texan about those lockdowns. My hotel room is festooned with pictures of cowboys on horses waving guns in the air, along with other depictions of rugged individualism facing down the elements. It’s a caricature but Texans embrace it. Then a new virus came along – as if that had never happened before in Texas – and the new Zoom class took the opposite path, not freedom but imposition and control. 

After nearly a year of nonsense, on March 2, 2021, the governor finally said enough is enough and repealed it all. Towns and cities can still engage in Covid-related mischief but at least they are no longer getting cover from the governor’s office. 

At that moment, a friend remarked to me that this would be the test we have been waiting for. A complete repeal of restrictions would lead to mass death, they said. Would it? Did the lockdowns really control the virus? We would soon find out, he theorized. 

I knew better. The “test” of whether and to what extent lockdowns control the virus or “suppress outbreaks” (in Anthony Fauci’s words) has been tried all over the world. Every serious empirical examination has shown that the answer is no. 

The US has many examples of open states that have generally had better performance in managing the disease than those states that are closed. Georgia already opened on April 24, 2020. South Dakota never shut down. South Carolina opened in May. Florida ended all restrictions in September. In every case, the press howled about the coming slaughter that did not happen. Yes, each open state experienced a seasonality wave in winter but so did the lockdown states. 

So it was in Texas. Thanks to this Twitter thread, and some of my own googling, we have a nice archive of predictions about what would happen if Texas opened. 

• California Governor Gavin Newsom said that opening Texas was “absolutely reckless.”
• Gregg Popovich, head coach of the NBA San Antonio Spurs, said opening was “ridiculous” and “ignorant.”
• CNN quoted an ICU nurse saying “I’m scared of what this is going to look like.”
• Vanity Fair went over the top with this headline: “Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary With Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans.”
• There was the inevitable Dr. Fauci: “It just is inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.”
• Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas revealed himself to be a full-blown lockdowner: It’s a “big mistake,” he said. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s also a cult of death.” He accused the governor of “sacrificing the lives of our fellow Texans … for political gain.”
• James Hamblin, a doctor and writer for the Atlantic, said in a Tweet liked by 20K people: “Ending precautions now is like entering the last miles of a marathon and taking off your shoes and eating several hot dogs.”
• Bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald flipped out: “Goddamn. Texas already has FIVE variants that have turned up: Britain, South Africa, Brazil, New York & CA. The NY and CA variants could weaken vaccine effectiveness. And now idiot @GregAbbott_TX throws open the state.” He further called the government “murderous.” 
• Epidemiologist Whitney Robinson wrote: “I feel genuinely sad. There are people who are going to get sick and die bc of avoidable infections they get in the next few weeks. It’s demoralizing.”
• Pundit Bill Kristol (I had no idea that he was a lockdowner) wrote: “Gov. Abbott is going to be responsible for more avoidable COVID hospitalizations and deaths than all the undocumented immigrants coming across the Texas border put together.”
• Health pundit Bob Wachter said the decision to open was “unforgivable.”
• Virus guru Michael Osterholm told CNN: “We’re walking into the mouth of the monster. We simply are.”
• Joe Biden famously said that the Texas decision to open reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
• Nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding said that the decision makes him want to “vomit so bad.”
• The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party said: “What Abbott is doing is extraordinarily dangerous. This will kill Texans. Our country’s infectious-disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down, even as we make progress towards vaccinations. Abbott doesn’t care.”
• Other state Democrats said in a letter that the decision was “premature and harmful.”
• The CDC’s Rochelle Walensky didn’t mince words: “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.”

There are probably hundreds more such warnings, predictions, and demands, all stated with absolute certainty that basic social and market functioning is a terrible idea. The lockdown lobby was out in full force. And yet what do we see now more than two weeks out (and arguably the lockdowns died on March 2, when the government announced the decision)? 

Here are the data. 

The CDC has a very helpful tool that allows anyone to compare open vs closed states. The results are devastating for those who believe that lockdowns are the way to control a virus. In this chart we compare closed states Massachusetts and California with open states Georgia, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. 

What can we conclude from such a visualization? It suggests that the lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation. 

On the other hand, the lockdowns destroyed industries, schools, churches, liberties and lives, demoralizing the population and robbing people of essential rights. All in the name of safety from a virus that did its work in any case. 

As for Texas, the results so far are in.

I’m making no predictions about the future path of the virus in Texas. Indeed for a full year, AIER has been careful about not trying to outguess this virus, which has its own ways, some predictable and some mysterious. The experience has, or should have, humbled everyone. Political arrangements seem to have no power to control it, much less finally suppress it. The belief that it was possible to control people in order to control a virus produced a calamity unprecedented in modern times. 

What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them. After a full year and directly observing the inability of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” to manage the pathogen, the experts are still wedded to their beloved lockdowns, unable or unwilling to look at the data and learn anything from them. 

The concept of lockdowns stemmed from a faulty premise: that you can separate humans, like rats in cages, and therefore control and even eradicate the virus. After a year, we unequivocally know this not to be true, something that the best and wisest epidemiologists knew all along. Essential workers still must work; they must go home to their families, many in crowded living conditions. Lockdowns do not eliminate the virus, they merely shift the burden onto the working class.  

Now we can see the failure in black, white, and full color, daily appearing on our screens courtesy of the CDC. Has that shaken the pro-lockdown pundit class? Not that much. What an amazing testament to the stubbornness of elite opinion and its bias against basic freedoms. They might all echo the words of Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

READ MORE

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.

He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Jeffrey is available for speaking and interviews via his email.  Tw | FB | LinkedIn

Books by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The media will surely not tell the truth about the end of COVID during the election

August 30, 2020 By Jack Hellner

The media, the so-called experts and Democrats have intentionally tried to scare the public for months about COVID. For that, they've kept schools shut, put out excessive mask warnings, shut down fresh-air beaches, and refused to permit even scrupulously socially distanced operations, such as gyms and churches, to open.

Now the facts come out:

This story will be buried!

Oops: It Looks Like the Vast Majority of Positive COVID Results Should Have Been Negative
According to The New York Times, potentially 90 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 have such insignificant amounts of the virus present in their bodies that such individuals do not need to isolate nor are they candidates for contact tracing. Leading public health experts are now concerned that overtesting is responsible for misdiagnosing a huge number of people with harmless amounts of the virus in their systems.

"Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time," warns The Times.

And it's not even that big a surprise..........To Read More....

•  It seems that the Wuhan virus’s risks have been grossly exaggerated

Tin foil hats, amulets rule America's response to WuFlu

By A. Dru Kristenev —— Bio and Archives--August 9, 2020

Superstition has reached new heights reminiscent of the Middle Ages. Showing up as discrimination, it’s not only unchecked racism dividing the nation, striking deeper into the culture is the required fashion accessory that serves as much purpose as a tin foil hat or a garlic amulet – the facemask.
Panicked individuals sporting paper or fabric face coverings, ranging from haute couture  (á lá Speaker Pelosi) to a kerchief tied around their heads, have been videoed screeching accusations of genocide at barefaced shoppers and dog walkers. The vile charges rise from ignorance of the efficacy of mandated masks, barely legal (mostly unconstitutional) edicts made by otherwise powerless authorities.

Masks are no better than a placebo that supplies a delusion of protection from a virus that is too small to be restricted by the cloth or paper contraptions hanging from a person’s ears.

In this “information age,” the information being disseminated about the coronavirus’ origin, spread, deadliness and elimination amount to an official rumor mill of censored and manipulated data.
Forcing the populace to don facemasks is the institution of fallacy. Government officials may as well have ordered people to put paper sacks over their heads with eye cutouts. They’d actually be more useful to the wearer in that their lungs would be better oxygenated, relieving the headaches and other maladies mask wearers are suffering.

The superstition that masks guard against spreading infection has caused hysteria among the foolish to the point that properly informed individuals are hounded and refused service in a supposedly free society. (I underwent that myself being refused entry into a Dollar General the other night. Luckily, another DG down the road knew better than to turn away a paying customer and literally spite their own face.)...........Demanding that everyone wear masks is a symptom of an unhinging society that will bow to unreasonable fear to the extent of absurdity...............To Read More....

This Coronavirus Scare is Hysterical Insanity, With Years of Negative Consequences to Follow!

"Inside Every Progressive Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out" - David Horowitz

By Rich Kozlovich, Tags:

This coronavirus scare is insanity! I've been storing articles to support that statement for some weeks, and it's time to organize the information I've gathered, and share it with you.

In the past I made this observation:

This article will be another expansion on my regular coronavirus updates, which I've posted regularly in recent weeks.  I would think there would be, at the very least, a modicum of outrage over the truth versus the hyperbole being promoted by a corrupt media.  Shockingly, there isn't!  In spite of the fact the vast majority of people I talk to, many of them wearing masks because they have to for their jobs, believe this is all nonsense.  Oh, there are those who are panicked, make no mistake about that, but almost every one of the people I talked to agreed infectious diseases are a part of life, that people get sick, and people die, and it happens every year, and will happen every year hereafter.  But no one shut down the economy over it.

So that bodes well these two questions:

• Are we to shut down the economy and destroy people's lives every year from now on for every new infectious disease that strikes?   
• Are the rantings of a corrupt and hysterical media to be the criteria for deciding public health issues from now on?

I've to show this "pandemic" is mostly politically motivated media driven hysteria.  And in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, we're accepting insanity versus reality.  Here are the actual numbers.

The COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) keeps a running total of deaths and proven infections.  As of 5:30 AM on June 29, 2020 here are the coronavirus rates of infection and the rates of mortality based on a worldwide population of 7,800,000,000 and an American population of 330,000,000 using this internet calculator.

Here are the results:

• Worldwide infections, 17,619,378. Infection rate, 0.2%.
• Worldwide deaths, 680,092. Mortality rate, 0.008%.
• Confirmed infections in the United States, 4,564,973. Infection rate, 1.3%
• United States deaths, 153,378. Mortality rate, 0.04%.

Again, and again, and again I emphasize the substantial difference between the infection and mortality rates of coronavirus and past virus attacks.

• In 1968 the Hong Kong flu killed over 1,000,000 people worldwide. Worldwide population in 1968 was 3,534,000,000. The mortality rate was 0.3%! America lost 100,000 that year, and morality rate was 0.05%.
• In 1957/58 the Asian flu, which originated in Guizhou, China killed up to 2,000,000 people in a worldwide population of 2,900,000,000 had a mortality rate 0.068%. America lost 116,000 people. The mortality rate was 0.07%. 

No one sought to shut down the nation then when the infection and mortality rates were higher. Why are we now?

Worse yet, the rate has clearly been inflated by fraudulent reporting by as much as 25%.  We know they're cooking the books here, and misrepresenting them here, here, and it continues.  The "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield,  acknowledged the number of COVID-19 deaths could be inflated where someone who had the virus actually died from something else, but it was recorded as a COVID death." 

My friend Mike Shaw outlines how and why this is happening, in his articles, More COVID-19 Misinformation  and  Still More On COVID-19  saying: Don't believe the numbers, and shows why!

No doubt, you’ve heard about the astronomical infection rates being seen in Florida. But when many labs were reporting 100 percent positives, a TV station decided to look into this. In the case of Orlando Health, their reported 98% positives were really 9.4%. The Orlando VA Medical Center showed 76% positives, but this was really 6%. The discrepancies were explained as failure of certain labs to include both positive and negative results in their reports to the state. If you think that sounds a bit fishy, you’re not alone.

We still see the infection rate numbers going up substantially, while the mortality rate, the number that really counts, is remaining low, and is dropping.  Why? Because they're testing large segments of the population for this virus now.  That was not done to this degree in the past, and that makes things look far worse than they are. Mortality rates are what count, and even with all the false reporting to make the number far scarier than they actually are, they're still not comparable to the Hong Kong or Asian flu.

To give balance to all this Mike Shaw comes to the nation's rescue in his article, COVID-19 Panic Porn explaining how all this testing is misleading.

He notes:

An oft-repeated figure suggests that there are 1031 virus particles on Earth, and that at least one of them infects every living cell on the planet. Need more? Considering that the size of a virus ranges from 20 - 300 nanometers, if you could lay them end-to-end, the column would extend almost 200 light years into space. And, speaking of space, there are over ten million times more viruses on Earth than there are stars in the entire universe.

Before you freak out too much about how many people are testing positive for SARS-CoV-2), note that Human Herpesvirus 6 is found in almost 100% of humans, and is associated with many diseases far more serious than COVID-19. HHV-6’s little brother HHV-4 (aka Epstein-Barr) is “only” present in 90-95% of us, and while well-known as the cause of infectious mononucleosis, it is also associated with certain cancers and chronic fatigue syndrome. And, Herpesviruses come with a bonus. Once you’re infected, the virus remains in your body forever.

Varicella-zoster virus, commonly known as the cause of chickenpox, hangs around and can manifest later in life as the very nasty disease of shingles.

Still, it is important to realize that the vast majority of viruses do not cause disease in humans. Typically, when a virus jumps to humans from another species, there can be problems, as our immune systems must now confront this new invader, and will sometimes overreact—this overreaction causing disease. A virus will self-defeat if too many hosts die. Usually, new viral outbreaks tend to become less harmful with time; and potential hosts develop better immunity.

1. In June, we tested over 2,231 patients (data through [23 June]). Positive rate is now close to 20% (was 4-6% in May). Vast majority of the cases are mild to very mild symptoms. Average age of the people getting tested in mid-30s.

2. Very different patient (in terms of age) than we’ve seen before June. Most of these patients would not have met criteria that we previously had (and all the health facilities had) for COVID testing. Now with more testing kits we are able to test a broader group of patients.

3. Clinically, we’ve had very few hospital transfers because of COVID. Vast majority of the patients are better within 2-3 days of the visit and most would be described as having a cold (a mild one at that) or the symptoms related to allergies.

4. In terms of what is driving them to the ER—Roughly half have been told by their employers to get a test. They have a sneeze or a cough and their employer tells them to go get tested. The other half just want to know.

5. Heard several stories of how discharge planners are being pressured to put COVID as primary diagnosis— as that pays significantly better.

6. Overall, based on what we are seeing at our facilities, the above information is really a positive story. You have more people testing positive with really minimal symptoms. This means that the fatality rate is less than commonly reported.

Governor Cuomo is now complaining he's taking political heat for the fact that almost half of all the coronavirus deaths in New York linked to nursing homes.  Nursing homes he forced to take in coronavirus patients.  (and Here).  Furthermore, this post claims that some states had 77% of all their coronavirus death were connected to nursing homes.  But they say they just follow the science.  Hogwash!

Let's try and get this right once and for all.  Epidemiology isn't science!   It's statistics, speculation, guess work.  All of which are components of science, but in themselves, none of them are science.  Science must be observable and repeatable.  Epidemiological projections are incapable of demonstrating either.  Only time, observation and the actual documentation of events represent science.

There are seven reasons why epidemiology isn't science listed in Steve Bigler's article, " A retired physician's take on epidemiologists."   And what it all comes down to is this:  Epidemiologists are academically anointed well paid crystal ball gazers, only their crystal balls are computer models, and just as unreliable.  But they're always going to make it worse than it is because if they make the numbers large, and they turn out small, no one blames them. If they make them small, and the reverse occurs, everyone blames them. Their goal is to be well paid while having "no personal accountability for the outcome. Nice work if you can get it!"

One important aspect of this is just how infectious is this coronavirus, of which there are 40 of them.  Mike Shaw once again:

"Hendrik Streeck, MD PhD, Head of the Institute of Virology and Institute for HIV Research, University Hospital Bonn, Germany"............ “There is no significant risk of catching the disease when you go shopping. Severe outbreaks of the infection were always a result of people being closer together over a longer period of time.........“There is no significant risk of catching the disease when you go shopping. Severe outbreaks of the infection were always a result of people being closer together over a longer period of time....

As to spreading via surface contamination, Streeck noted that “When we took samples from door handles, phones, or toilets it has not been possible to cultivate the virus in the laboratory on the basis of these swabs. To actually [catch] the virus it would be necessary that someone coughs into their hand, immediately touches a doorknob and then straight after that another person grasps the handle and goes on to touch their face.”

There is also the recently confirmed finding that COVID-19 is a droplet infection and cannot be transmitted through the air. According to virologist Christian Drosten, coronavirus is extremely sensitive to drying out, so the only way of contracting it is if you were to inhale the droplets. There have been various reports touting long viability for the virus on surfaces, but caution should be exercised in comparing ideal laboratory conditions to real life............. 

Which brings us to the stunning findings of Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University who plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections of the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. As it happens, irrespective of whether the country quarantined like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus peaked and subsided in exactly the same way.

The claim was this virus was highly infectious. In fact, claims were made this was the worst of the worst! We now know that's blatantly false, but it was the excuse needed to force America into wearing masks, shutting down businesses, controlling the population. 

Let me say this as clearly as I can. Masks Are Neither Effective Nor Safe: A Summary Of The Science.  Please read this entire piece as it takes apart every false argument for masks we've been inundated with, using real science, not computer models, not epidemiological guesswork, not speculation:  Factual science.  And no matter how unpopular that science may be with the fomenters of this hysteria, the authors conclude with this.

In the summer of 2020 the United States is experiencing a surge of popular mask use, which is frequently promoted by the media, political leaders and celebrities. Homemade and store-bought cloth masks and surgical masks or N95 masks are being used by the public especially when entering stores and other publicly accessible buildings.  Sometimes bandanas or scarves are used.  The use of face masks, whether cloth, surgical or N95, creates a poor obstacle to aerosolized pathogens as we can see from the meta-analyses and other studies in this paper, allowing both transmission of aerosolized pathogens to others in various directions, as well as self-contamination.

It must also be considered that masks impede the necessary volume of air intake required for adequate oxygen exchange, which results in observed physiological effects that may be undesirable.  Even 6- minute walks, let alone more strenuous activity, resulted in dyspnea.  The volume of unobstructed oxygen in a typical breath is about 100 ml, used for normal physiological processes.  100 ml O2 greatly exceeds the volume of a pathogen required for transmission.

The foregoing data show that masks serve more as instruments of obstruction of normal breathing, rather than as effective barriers to pathogens. Therefore, masks should not be used by the general public, either by adults or children, and their limitations as prophylaxis against pathogens should also be considered in medical settings.

Let's try and get this right, there clearly is a cure, or at least a drug that works well enough for critical patients to recover. 

COVID-19 Censorship demonstrating just how corrupt this has become including attacking those who advocate for children to return to school saying:

Disagreeing with politically correct opinion is one thing, but brutally censoring it is a whole different matter. It looks like that Star Chamber has come back to haunt us. Will it be coming for you next?

Here's what's real and we need to get this!

This coronavirus is with us now forever.  Every virus that's attacked humanity is still popping up every year, infecting and killing people every year, and so to will this virus.  That's life.  It's not going to change, so now do we destroy our economy every year when someone comes down with this virus?  How about when a new virus pops up?  And they're going to be with us forever, and new ones pop up continually, that's the nature of viruses, and that's not going to change. Here and Here.

What will be the long term negative consequences to society and small businesses?  None of this bodes well for small businesses, the economy as a whole, and for the continued stability of society, and it shouldn't take a degree in economics to understand that.

So now what about the children? Do they go back to school? Kids Should Be Going Back To School This Fall In-Person, July 27, 2020 By Michael D. Shaw, who points out it's not only acceptable, it's good for the kids, and ends with this comment:

My take is that at the very least, we need some sort of defined endpoint, and not a constant moving of the goalposts.

Recall that we were initially just trying to “flatten the curve” and not overload the hospitals. I had noted early on that our COVID-19 policy has pretty much been: Quarantine the healthy and ignore the vulnerable. Keeping children out of school continues to quarantine the healthy, while offering a poor substitute for education.

 So, what will be the "defined end point" for a return to normal?  

• No one tests positive for this virus again?  No!  
• No one dies again from this virus?  No!  
• A vaccine is developed, which will take years. No!
• A cure?  No  
• Trump is defeated in November? Yes!  Because that's what this is really all about.

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The Politically Powerful Control Men with Their Emotions, Not Their Minds

Art Robinson

In his famous tragedy, William Shakespeare has Julius Caesar say, “Let me have men about me that are fat: Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights: Yond Cassias has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”

With rare exceptions, those who seek or hold political power usually control men with their emotions rather than their minds. They prefer people who can be easily manipulated by oration, by imagery, and by fear, greed, and envy.

The media-produced emotional world of vicarious violence, trivialized sex, primitive primal “music,” and nonexistent morality and ethics of today is ideal for those who seek to manipulate unthinking Americans. The television-addicted public is saturated with whatever “thoughts” the controllers want them to “think,” and polls are continually taken to see whether their propaganda is having the desired effect. This is the “education” that is most desired.......To Read More....

Useful Idiots No More

The Trump administration pulls the plug on official Islamophilia.

 

George Neumayr  February 3, 2017

Tell him you are a Muslim, tell him you are a Muslim,” Nancy Pelosi instructed Congressman Andre Carson at an anti-Trump rally on Monday, moments after she had just introduced him as a “Muslim member of Congress.” She apparently felt that the crowd hadn’t sufficiently gotten the point.

Pelosi normally rattles on about the dangers of “religion in politics,” but on Monday night she very much wanted religion in it — and not just any religion, but the most patriarchal of them. To see feminists hawking Islam so feverishly is an amusing spectacle, especially since a day or so later Pelosi had recovered her fear of religion in the public square and creeping Christian patriarchy. She cast Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch as a gift to the religious right — one that imperils all women, not to mention those Americans who “breathe air, drink water, eat food, take medicine, or in any way interact with the courts.”

Pelosi’s comment, in sheer battiness, exceeds even Ted Kennedy’s histrionics over “Robert Bork’s America.” Kennedy envisioned Bork busting down bedroom doors, re-segregating lunch counters, forcing women into back alleys, and confiscating Darwin’s books, but he stopped short of accusing Bork of threatening to cut off people’s access to air......... The media is forever demanding that Christians take a “serious look” at their religion’s lack of modern enlightenment, then declare any criticism of the Koran “Islamophobia.”.....As jihadists chop off the heads of priests and drive Christians out of the Middle East, the bishops busy themselves with press releases about their “deep respect” for Islam and count the millions they collect from the government for “refugee resettlement.”....To Read More.....