Society in General | Science Matters

The Forever Health “Emergency”

Posted on January 24, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Ryan McMaken writes at Mises Institute Why They Want to Keep the “Health Emergency” Going Forever. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Last month, Colorado governor Jared Polis ended statewide mask mandates and social-distancing provisions, stating that “the emergency is over.“ This, of course, does not mean Colorado is now laissez-faire in terms of covid. Public higher education institutions—thanks to Polis’ tacit approval—still have free rein in terms of imposing vaccine and mask mandates, and in forcing classes to “go online” whenever the college bureaucrats grow sufficiently alarmed about covid. Moreover, local officials were quick to react to the governor’s nonemergency by imposing a variety of mandates of their own.

More than 80 percent of the state’s population still lives in counties with mask mandates.

For even this extremely mild and timid move in the direction of personal freedom, Polis was raked over the coals by the state’s left-of-center activists. Within days, The Sentinel, a newspaper out of Aurora, Colorado, issued an unsigned editorial declaring “No, Gov. Polis, the pandemic emergency is not over.” The column excoriated the governor for daring to end mask mandates and for categorically refusing the idea of future lockdowns.

Polis was also forced to walk back comments he made about how it’s not the job of health officials to “tell people what to wear“ in an apparent reference to mask mandates. Polis rather unconvincingly “clarified” that what he really meant was this was not the proper role of state health officials; it’s fine for local officials to tell people what to wear.

The fact that Polis himself had earlier claimed this was, in fact, the role of health officials is now beside the point. Incoherence and inconsistency from politicians is a given. The point now is that when a governor—even a Democratic one—tries to slightly scale back covid mandates, he or she is likely to meet furious opposition from the Left.

The lesson here is that no matter what the policy is, there will be no shortage of covid-obsessed college professors, politicians, and activists who will vehemently demand that more draconian policies be imposed immediately and everywhere.

No moderation of any kind is to be tolerated.

Indeed, so many bureaucrats, politicians, and technocrats have doubled down on covid mandate maximalism, it’s difficult to see them ever letting go. We should expect them to search out new ways to extend current “health emergencies“ indefinitely into the future by forever moving the goal posts and finding new diseases that justify continued mask mandates and social distancing rules.

Moving the Goal Posts

Back in January of 2021, Karol Markowicz at the New York Post warned that there are many out there who want the covid emergency state “to go on forever.“ Nearly a year after the initial covid panic, when it was clear covid was not a civilization-ending disease and hardly “the plague of the century,“ these technocrats were pushing for more masks and more isolation for children.

Much of this strategy has long been pushed through constant movement of the goal posts. While vaccines were initially being sold to the public as a cure-all that would allow everything to go back to “normal“ this soon evolved into a series of explanations as to why vaccines actually changed nothing. Rather, vaccines might do some good, but the public should nonetheless be prepared to wear masks forever. Then they decided their “uniquely effective” vaccines were so effective that it was necessary to “protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated.” Even lockdowns were still on the table into late 2021. The story was then changed to a narrative in which so long as every single child is not vaccinated, schools must remain closed, and everyone must remain masked.

These mandates might also come in handy whenever some new bird flu or swine flu crops up. Yes, earlier flu-based “emergencies” had failed to command widespread hysteria as with the swine flu scares of 1976 and 2009. But now the health bureaucrats finally had seized the authority they always wanted: keep emergency “pandemic powers” in place forever so that if the CDC or the World Health Organization identifies a new “threat,” lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine passports can be forced upon the population until the “danger” is past.

Institute a Warning System

Another key challenge will be to keep the public always on the edge of alarm. On this, the mandate enthusiasts could take a page from the War on Terror propaganda employed in the wake of 9/11. In March 2002, the Bush administration instituted a color-coded terrorism threat advisory scale designed to indicate the terrorism “threat level.” This presumably allowed the public to gauge just how much they should be living in fear of terrorism at any given time. As propaganda it was helpful as a means of constantly reminding the public that the government keeps them safe, and that an all-powerful national security state is a necessity.

A similar scheme could easily be used to address health “threats.” Naturally, the scale would never be moved to “low” because if some actual epidemic did break out, that would make the “experts” look like they were asleep at the switch. So, naturally, the scale would always be at “guarded”—perhaps in the summertime—but would reliably be raised to “elevated” in the wintertime as hospital beds filled up with flu and pneumonia sufferers. Then, if any muttering of some new bird flu out of Asia hit the headlines, the technocrats could raise the threat level to “high.” This could then be used to justify the imposition of new mask mandates, vaccine requirements, or even lockdowns.

Then when summer weather returned and the hospital beds emptied, the experts would insist they had prevented disaster by imposing new mandates.

The only way these health experts will stop with their perpetual emergency is if they’re forced to. Health bureaucrats must be stripped of their far-too-expansive “emergency powers” and their agencies reined in. Their “scientific” opinions should be treated as the thinly veiled political statements they so frequently are. As I wrote in 2020, the pandemic only ends when the public decides it is over.

Some politicians have figured out that it’s dangerous to keep pushing the same old covid mandates into election season this fall. This is surely why Polis now appears uninterested in haranguing the public about covid on a daily basis as he was doing back in 2020.

But the academics and technocrats who can afford to live in their echo chamber—thanks to taxpayer money—are unlikely to relent. They’ll be singing the same tune twenty years from now and calling for new mandates—for the disease du jour—every year. Let’s just hope that the world will have finally stopped listening.

BMJ Calls for Vax Raw Data Now!

Posted on January 23, 2022 by Ron Clutz

The BMJ editorial by Peter Doshi is Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Data should be fully and immediately available for public scrutiny

In the pages of The BMJ a decade ago, in the middle of a different pandemic, it came to light that governments around the world had spent billions stockpiling antivirals for influenza that had not been shown to reduce the risk of complications, hospital admissions, or death. The majority of trials that underpinned regulatory approval and government stockpiling of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) were sponsored by the manufacturer; most were unpublished, those that were published were ghostwritten by writers paid by the manufacturer, the people listed as principal authors lacked access to the raw data, and academics who requested access to the data for independent analysis were denied.

The Tamiflu saga heralded a decade of unprecedented attention to the importance of sharing clinical trial data.

Public battles for drug company data, transparency campaigns with thousands of signatures, strengthened journal data sharing requirements, explicit commitments from companies to share data, new data access website portals, and landmark transparency policies from medicines regulators all promised a new era in data transparency.

Progress was made, but clearly not enough.
The errors of the last pandemic are being repeated.

Memories are short. Today, despite the global rollout of covid-19 vaccines and treatments, the anonymised participant level data underlying the trials for these new products remain inaccessible to doctors, researchers, and the public—and are likely to remain that way for years to come. This is morally indefensible for all trials, but especially for those involving major public health interventions.

Unacceptable delay

Pfizer’s pivotal covid vaccine trial was funded by the company and designed, run, analysed, and authored by Pfizer employees. The company and the contract research organisations that carried out the trial hold all the data. And Pfizer has indicated that it will not begin entertaining requests for trial data until May 2025, 24 months after the primary study completion date, which is listed on ClinicalTrials.gov as 15 May 2023 (NCT04368728).

The lack of access to data is consistent across vaccine manufacturers. Moderna says data “may be available … with publication of the final study results in 2022.” Datasets will be available “upon request and subject to review once the trial is complete,” which has an estimated primary completion date of 27 October 2022 (NCT04470427).

As of 31 December 2021, AstraZeneca may be ready to entertain requests for data from several of its large phase III trials. But actually obtaining data could be slow going. As its website explains, “timelines vary per request and can take up to a year upon full submission of the request.”

Underlying data for covid-19 therapeutics are similarly hard to find. Published reports of Regeneron’s phase III trial of its monoclonal antibody therapy REGEN-COV flatly state that participant level data will not be made available to others. Should the drug be approved (and not just emergency authorised), sharing “will be considered.” For remdesivir, the US National Institutes of Health, which funded the trial, created a new portal to share data, but the dataset on offer is limited. An accompanying document explains: “The longitudinal data set only contains a small subset of the protocol and statistical analysis plan objectives.”

We are left with publications but no access to the underlying data on reasonable request. This is worrying for trial participants, researchers, clinicians, journal editors, policy makers, and the public. The journals that have published these primary studies may argue that they faced an awkward dilemma, caught between making the summary findings available quickly and upholding the best ethical values that support timely access to underlying data.

In our view, there is no dilemma; the anonymised individual participant data from clinical trials must be made available for independent scrutiny.

Journal editors, systematic reviewers, and the writers of clinical practice guideline generally obtain little beyond a journal publication, but regulatory agencies receive far more granular data as part of the regulatory review process. In the words of the European Medicine Agency’s former executive director and senior medical officer, “relying solely on the publications of clinical trials in scientific journals as the basis of healthcare decisions is not a good idea … Drug regulators have been aware of this limitation for a long time and routinely obtain and assess the full documentation (rather than just publications).”22

Among regulators, the US Food and Drug Administration is believed to receive the most raw data but does not proactively release them. After a freedom of information request to the agency for Pfizer’s vaccine data, the FDA offered to release 500 pages a month, a process that would take decades to complete, arguing in court that publicly releasing data was slow owing to the need to first redact sensitive information. This month, however, a judge rejected the FDA’s offer and ordered the data be released at a rate of 55 000 pages a month. The data are to be made available on the requesting organisation’s website (phmpt.org).

In releasing thousands of pages of clinical trial documents, Health Canada and the EMA have also provided a degree of transparency that deserves acknowledgment. Until recently, however, the data remained of limited utility, with copious redactions aimed at protecting trial blinding. But study reports with fewer redactions have been available since September 2021, and missing appendices may be accessible through freedom of information requests.

Even so, anyone looking for participant level datasets may be disappointed because Health Canada and the EMA do not receive or analyse these data, and it remains to be seen how the FDA responds to the court order. Moreover, the FDA is producing data only for Pfizer’s vaccine; other manufacturers’ data cannot be requested until the vaccines are approved, which the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are not. Industry, which holds the raw data, is not legally required to honour requests for access from independent researchers.

Like the FDA, and unlike its Canadian and European counterparts, the UK’s regulator—the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency—does not proactively release clinical trial documents, and it has also stopped posting information released in response to freedom of information requests on its website.

Transparency and trust

As well as access to the underlying data, transparent decision making is essential. Regulators and public health bodies could release details such as why vaccine trials were not designed to test efficacy against infection and spread of SARS-CoV-2. Had regulators insisted on this outcome, countries would have learnt sooner about the effect of vaccines on transmission and been able to plan accordingly.

Big pharma is the least trusted industry. At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars. One pleaded guilty to fraud. Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.

The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future. The same applies to treatments for covid-19. Transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.

Twelve years ago we called for the immediate release of raw data from clinical trials.1 We reiterate that call now. Data must be available when trial results are announced, published, or used to justify regulatory decisions. There is no place for wholesale exemptions from good practice during a pandemic. The public has paid for covid-19 vaccines through vast public funding of research, and it is the public that takes on the balance of benefits and harms that accompany vaccination.

The public, therefore, has a right and entitlement to those data, as well as to the interrogation of those data by experts.

Pharmaceutical companies are reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims. The purpose of regulators is not to dance to the tune of rich global corporations and enrich them further; it is to protect the health of their populations. We need complete data transparency for all studies, we need it in the public interest, and we need it now.

Jordan Peterson Fed Up with DIE Ideology

Posted on January 19, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Jordan Peterson writes at National Post Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.

All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.

Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here. The Implicit Association test — the much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II. The same social psychologists, broadly speaking, also casually regard conservatism (in the guise of “system justification”) as a form of psychopathology.

Banaji’s continued countenancing of the misuse of her research instrument, combined with the status of her position at Harvard, is a prime reason we still suffer under the DIE yoke, with its baleful effect on what was once the closest we had ever come to truly meritorious selection. A close friend and one of the few colleagues that remain friendly to me (and someone clearly liberal left, by the way) told me flat out that the new crop of his university’s psychology graduate students, selected without the objective Graduate Record Examination (GRE), cannot handle the first-year statistics class. The result: bubbling innuendo that the content is racist.

By the way: everything in the social sciences (and medicine, for that matter) stands or falls with honest and competent statistics.

Furthermore, the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation. That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy. Similar moves are afoot in other professional disciplines, such as medicine and law. And if you don’t think that psychologists, lawyers and other professionals are anything but terrified of their now woke governing professional colleges, much to everyone’s extreme detriment, you simply don’t understand how far this has all gone.

Just exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor, hired on DIE grounds? Manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face to a truly meritorious young outsider. And perhaps that’s the point. The DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.

And for those of you who think that I am overstating the case, or that this is something limited in some trivial sense to the universities, consider some other examples: This report from Hollywood, cliched hotbed of “liberal” sentiment, for example, indicates just how far this has gone. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) embarked on a five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?) “to diversify our organization and expand our definition of the best,” They did so in an attempt which included developing “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars,” to, hypothetically, “better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.” What fruit has this initiative, offspring of the DIE ideology, borne? According to a recent article, penned by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, but posted on former NY Times’ journalist Bari Weiss’s Common Sense website (and Weiss left the Times, because of the intrusion of radical left ideology into that newspaper, just as Tara Henley did recently, vis a vis the CBC): “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. … How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. … Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”

And this is everywhere — and if you don’t see it, your head is either in the sand or shoved somewhere far more unmentionable. CBS, for example, has literally mandated that every writers’ room be at least 40 per cent BIPOC in 2021 (50 per cent in 2022).

We are now at the point where race, ethnicity, “gender,” or sexual preference is first, accepted as the fundamental characteristic defining each person (just as the radical leftists were hoping) and second, is now treated as the most important qualification for study, research and employment.

Need I point out that this is insane ? Even the benighted New York Times has its doubts. A headline from August 11, 2021: Are Workplace Diversity Programs Doing More Harm than Good? In a word, yes. How can accusing your employees of racism etc. sufficient to require re-training (particularly in relationship to those who are working in good faith to overcome whatever bias they might still, in these modern, liberal times, manifest) be anything other than insulting, annoying, invasive, high-handed, moralizing, inappropriate, ill-considered, counterproductive, and otherwise unjustifiable?

And if you think DIE is bad, wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores . Purporting to assess corporate moral responsibility, these scores, which can dramatically affect an enterprise’s financial viability, are nothing less than the equivalent of China’s damnable social credit system, applied to the entrepreneurial and financial world. CEOs: what in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you see that the ideologues who push such appalling nonsense are driven by an agenda that is not only absolutely antithetical to your free-market enterprise, as such, but precisely targeted at the freedoms that made your success possible? Can’t you see that by going along, sheep-like (just as the professors are doing; just as the artists and writers are doing) that you are generating a veritable fifth column within your businesses? Are you really so blind, cowed and cowardly? With all your so-called privilege?

And it’s not just the universities. And the professional colleges. And Hollywood. And the corporate world. Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When they worship at the altar of DIE, and insist that the rest of us, who mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough. Enough.

Finally, do you know that Vladimir Putin himself is capitalizing on this woke madness? Anna Mahjar-Barducci at MEMRI.org covered his recent speech. I quote from the article’s translation:

“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags, as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs, and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones — all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices — which we, fortunately, have left, I hope — in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past — such as Shakespeare — are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what color or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

This, from the head of the former totalitarian enterprise, against whom we fought a five decades’ long Cold War, risking the entire planet (in a very real manner). This, from the head of a country riven in a literally genocidal manner by ideas that Putin himself attributes to the progressives in the West, to the generally accepting audience of his once-burned (once (!)) twice-shy listeners.

And all of you going along with the DIE activists, whatever your reasons: this is on you. Professors. Cowering cravenly in pretence and silence. Teaching your students to dissimulate and lie. To get along. As the walls crumble. For shame. CEOs: signalling a virtue you don’t possess and shouldn’t want to please a minority who literally live their lives by displeasure. You’re evil capitalists, after all, and should be proud of it. At the moment, I can’t tell if you’re more reprehensibly timid even than the professors. Why the hell don’t you banish the human resource DIE upstarts back to the more-appropriately-named Personnel departments, stop them from interfering with the psyches of you and your employees, and be done with it? Musicians, artists, writers: stop bending your sacred and meritorious art to the demands of the propagandists before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition. Stop censoring your thought. Stop saying you will hire for your orchestral and theatrical productions for any reason other than talent and excellence. That’s all you have. That’s all any of us have.

He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. And the wind is rising.

Why “Sustainability” Isn’t

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Peter Wood explains what’s wrong with the cult of “Sustainability” and its continuing threat to scientific knowledge. His Spectator article is E.O. Wilson and the climate cult My run-in with the late sociobiologist. Excerpts with my bolds and added images.

E.O. Wilson, as it happens was one of the founding members of the organization over which I now preside, the National Association of Scholars. He served on its board of advisors starting in 1987 and gave a keynote speech in 1994 at one of NAS’s early national conferences. But I crossed paths with him only once, and it was not a happy occasion. I’ll tell it my own way.

In spring 2008, a faculty member at the University of Delaware alerted me that the university office of residence life has imposed a peculiar dorm-based form of ideological indoctrination on students. It involved all sorts of arm-twisting to get students to vocally support various racial claims, gay marriage and socialist goals. At first the university denied it was doing any such thing, but we had documents as well as witnesses, and the administration eventually climbed down. Those documents, however, looked even more peculiar when we started reading them more carefully. What jumped out was that the whole indoctrination program was presented as a “sustainability” initiative.

Thus began what became a seven-year project by NAS to track down exactly what this meant, culminating in 2015 study we titled Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism. What did and what does “sustainability” mean? The answers aren’t so simple, though one place to begin is with a 1987 United Nations report Our Common Future, better known as the Brundtland Commission report. It defined sustainability as “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” That sounds nice, but if you stop to think about it, how are we supposed to know what future generations will need? Could generations past have predicted the need for coal, oil, uranium or rare earths? Plainly we can predict some future needs. People will need breathable air and drinkable water, and we best not use these all up.

But the concept of sustainability, launched in that UN report, still has something fishy about it. Part of what is fishy is that its proponents were in a hurry to take a concept about “development” and the “environment” and move it quickly into seemingly unrelated areas. “Sustainability,” according to the mandarins at the University of Delaware in 2008, was only one-third about the environment. Another third was about “economic fairness” and the last third was about “social justice.”

In short, sustainability was a master concept that wrapped together a whole new Marxist utopian view of society.

By 2008, that included the idea that planet Earth was in the midst of manmade catastrophic global warming. But don’t lose track of the chronology. The sustainability movement was launched in 1987, a year before NASA scientist James Hansen lit the fire that became global warming hysteria. The two movements, however, quickly found one another and became the great quasi-religious pantheist dogma of our age.

I did my best for a decade to steer clear of “global warming” theory as a topic that would do the NAS no good. Clearly a lot of academics, including NAS members were enthusiastic votaries at that shrine. Apocalyptic thinking had secured a profoundly emotional hold on the modern mind. But the more I read, the more “climate deniers” I encountered and found to be level-headed folks, and the more preposterous became the pronouncements of the Carbon Doom Cult, the more difficult I found it to dodge the topic. A strange pseudo-science whose devotees insisted that they were upholding “true science” against a rabble of fossil fools were in ascendency.

And so I began to steer NAS into the dangerous waters of skepticism, not just towards “sustainability” but towards the whole idea that carbon dioxide, the gas that make up four one-hundredths of one percent of Earth’s atmosphere, was melting the glaciers, thawing the Arctic, whipping up hurricanes, drowning coastlines and turning croplands into deserts. Now we learn that the Arctic was being warmed by the Atlantic long before Exxon and Mobil started business; Greenland’s glaciers are growing; and increases in CO2 are so marginal as to mean nothing.

Not that I expect mere facts to arrest anyone’s enthusiasm for an exciting theory. We have too much invested in dismantling a modern energy-intensive economy to stop now. No matter that wind and solar are technological busts.

One of the early gurus of the ecology movement was Barry Commoner who way back in 1971 laid out his Four Laws of Ecology, including the first law, “Everything is connected to everything else.” It would be hard to find another platitude that has caused so much trouble. For sure, with an infinity of degrees, my shoelaces are somehow connected to the Great Wall of China, but it is not a connection that need detain us. Everything-is-connected is really a postulate of New Age religion and it is an invitation to descend into irrationality. Thus it follows that if we can’t prove a connection between the internal combustion engine and a tornado in Kentucky, we can just assume one. That’s what global warmists call “the precautionary principle.”

Sometime in the summer of 2015 I picked up the phone and called my NAS advisory board member E.O. Wilson to tell him where I was headed on this topic. He was appalled. In his view global warming was real, catastrophic and putting the whole web of life on our fragile planet at risk. After twenty-eight years on the NAS board, he abruptly resigned and so ended my call.

Of course, I knew he had often expressed his deep concern for the extinction of species and the loss of diversity in the plant and animal kingdoms, but I also knew him as someone who had a steely commitment to rigorous scientific inquiry and contempt for science that embroiled itself with political and ideological causes. It was arresting to see how he had settled down into an Al Gore conception of our blue speck in the vast universe.

Whether sociobiology is a signal contribution to human understanding of the living world and will prove sustainable to meet the intellectual needs of “future generations,” I have no clear idea. It is a model that works well with ants, and that’s something. To what degree are we like ants? I’d say not very much, but we do have an enormous capacity to fall in line, which is good myrmicine behavior.

If conformity is our central characteristic, then yes, we are ants. But I think we can do better.

Footnote from Vaclav Smil

I absolutely hate the word sustainability because there is no such thing. Sustainability cannot be defined. Sustainable for what? Over next year? Over 10 years? Over a millennium? On a local basis, on a planetary basis? I mean, there are so many time and space dimensions to it you cannot define what is sustainable. If somebody is boasting what they are doing is sustainable, it’s a total laugh. There is no sustainable thing.

Jordan Peterson: Canada’s Crushing Covid Obsession

Posted on January 13, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Jordan Peterson writes at National Post Open the damn country back up, before Canadians wreck something we can’t fix. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The country is growing more authoritarian in response to fear

I am not accustomed to feeling particularly sympathetic for the travails of large, successful enterprises: banks, airlines, utilities and the like. I expect a certain standard of service, so that I can conduct my own affairs effectively, and am impatient when delays unnecessary in the normal course of things emerge. The letter from the bank stopped me and made me think, however. It wasn’t just the bank. It was also the airline. It was the empty shelves in the grocery store in northern Alberta. It was the daughter of the man I once worked for as a cook, back when I was a teenager. It was the shopkeepers and small business-people I have spoken with on this trip.

We are pushing to their breaking point the complex systems upon which we depend and which are miraculously effective and efficient in their often thankless operation.

Can you think of anything more unlikely than the fact that we can get instant trouble-free access to our money online, using systems that are virtually graft- and corruption-free? Just imagine how much work, trust and efficiency was and is necessary to make that a reality. Can you think of anything more unlikely than fast, reliable and inexpensive jet air travel, nationally and internationally, in absolute safety? Or the constant provision of almost every consumer good imaginable, in the midst of plentiful, varied and inexpensive food?

These systems are now shaking. We’re compromising them seriously with this unending and unpredictable stream of restrictions, lockdowns, regulations and curfews.

We’re also undermining our entire monetary system, with the provision of unending largesse from government coffers, to ease the stress of the COVID response. We’re playing with fire. We’ve demolished two Christmas seasons in a row. Life is short. These are rare occasions. We’re stopping kids from attending school. We’re sowing mistrust in our institutions in a seriously dangerous manner. We’re frightening people to make them comply. We’re producing bureaucratic institutions that hypothetically hold public health in the highest regard, but subordinating all our properly political institutions to that end, because we lack leadership, and rely on ultimately unreliable opinion polls to govern broadscale political policy. I’ve never seen breakdown in institutional trust on this scale before in my lifetime.

I was recently in Nashville, Tennessee. No lockdowns. No masks. No COVID regulations to speak of. People are going about their lives. Why can that be the case in Tennessee (and in other U.S. states, such as Florida) when there are curfews (curfews!) in Quebec, two years after the pandemic started, with a vaccination rate of nearly 80 per cent? When BC is still limiting social gatherings? When we are putting tremendous and unsustainable strain on all the complex systems that have served us so well, and made us so comfortable, in the midst of the troubles of our lives?

The cure has become worse than the disease.

I have spoken with senior advisors to provincial governments in Canada. There is no end game in sight. The idea that Canadian policy is or should be governed “by the science” is not only not true, it’s also not possible, as there is no simple pathway from the facts of science to the complexities of policy. We are deciding, by opinion poll, to live in fear, and to become increasingly authoritarian in response to that fear. That’s a danger, too, and it’s increasingly real. How long are we going to flail about, hiding behind our masks, afraid to send our children (who are in no danger more serious than risk of the flu) to school, charging university students full tuition for tenth-rate online “education,” pitting family member against family member over vaccine policy and, most seriously, compromising the great economic engine upon which our health also depends?

Until we decide not to.

There are no risk-free paths forward. There is only one risk, or another. Pick your poison: that’s the choice life often offers. I am weary of living under the increasingly authoritarian dictates of a polity hyper-concerned with one risk, and oblivious to all others. And things are shaking around us.

Enough, Canadians. Enough, Canadian politicos. Enough masks. Enough social gathering limitations. Enough restaurant closures. Enough undermining of social trust. Make the bloody vaccines available to those who want them. Quit using force to ensure compliance on the part of those who don’t. Some of the latter might be crazy but, by and large, they are no crazier than the rest of us.

Set a date. Open the damn country back up, before we wreck something we can’t fix.
Time for some courage. Let’s live again.

Voters, Beware Your State’s Secretary of State

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Ron Clutz

While waiting for something to actually happen to expose the corrupt US election apparatus, here’s more insight into what is broken. Jay Valentine explains at American Thinker When a State’s Secretary of State is in on Voter Fraud. Excerpts in italics with my bold.

We coined the term “sovereign fraud” right here on American Thinker. At the time, it was a concept, until we started doing voter anomaly analysis for one large, Midwestern swing state.

We have now finished state 15, on the way to 30 or more; we can say with certainty that the Secretaries of State are unlikely to lead voter roll clean up. In many states, they thwart it with flagrant data tricks.

Let’s take you through our excellent adventure working with voter integrity groups across the country. You need to understand their dedication, resilience, and the odds they face when the reddest states’ Secretary of State is in on “it.”

“It” means they know their voter rolls are replete with phantoms, but they deny it, evade it, some hide it. Let’s go there.

Most people have downloaded a file. It’s easy. Except if you live in a swing state on the southeast U.S. coast — and the file came from the Secretary of State’s office. When you process the file, it contains about every way of screwing up your search capability.

For instance: it is supposed to be comma delimited but it isn’t. It has non-ASCII characters embedded. That means search engines will flail with no result. It has half quote marks which means there is no end of quote so it will not process. There are nonsensical control characters throughout the data set.

This is deliberate data sabotage, intended to make it almost impossible for citizens using traditional tools to parse the data paid for with their taxes.

This example is a Republican Secretary of State in effect saying: “well, if I have to give you the voter roll, here it is, now just try to search it!”

Unfortunately for this guy, our team uses Fractal Programming and while it set us back half a day, that data is cleaned and in the hands of citizens who want to get some answers. They will.

Let’s visit another eastern seaboard state. These diligent citizens downloaded their Secretary of State data and innocently tried to process it. Within minutes of loading the data, all the lights went on. Control characters throughout the data deliberately inserted to thwart conventional search.

This is an example of active data sabotage from the sovereign entity – Secretary of State – making it hard or impossible for citizens to see the voter rolls.

It gets better. We presented data anomalies to some Republican secretaries of state; they got to see their “voter data,” live and in person. Be the fly on the wall. The Secretary of State for a bright red Southern state is assembled with his entire team. Lawyers all over the place, us presenting.

First, we showed the 4,300 people over 100 years old on their rolls. Some were 121. Those were the kids. The really old ones were almost 2,000 years old, and there were a bunch of them – and they voted.

To my surprise, one of their guys got right in my face (a camera really, I was remote) and denied we had their rolls. He claimed only 300 people over 100. His face was crimson with anger. He had this roll of paper in his hand – maybe their scammy voter roll, who knows?

Tough being him because our team bought their voter registration roll for $30,000 and I had their data live, in his face. Did make an impression.

We then showed them the “girl’s ranch.” Here is a place in the woods for young ladies to get attention and care. Focus on “young” and “ladies.”

They said, no big deal, there were 45 people registered there. They knew the owner, it’s OK.

We swept right and showed the names of the “young ladies.” 15 were men. Then we swept further right and sorted by age. Most were 61 to 35. Some “young.” Some “ladies!”

How about the 21 active voters in the county jail in their largest city? You would think that made an impression? It did, but not enough to look into it.

For the first time the sleepy sinecure — the stepstone to Congressman, Senator, or Governor – the Secretary of State office is getting checked out.

And they do not like it.

They liked it even less when they learned two weeks later, their data was turned over to the canvassing teams in their deep red state now doing the job the Secretary of State refuses to do – clean up voter rolls – with technology that makes voter rolls transparent to citizens.

A Secretary of State may be all in on voter fraud. In deep-blue states, we found leftist groups with real-time electronic access to voter rolls able to enter voters – real or fake.

In deep-red states, we found 18 registered voters living in a house the size of a panel truck. We did not find one or two, we found hundreds, meaning there are thousands. The canvassing groups are outing them.

We found 23,000 people claiming the same phone number on their voter registration form – for over 30 years. Some extended family!

We found people registering from a UPS Box calling it an apartment.

Canvassers found absentee ballots, hundreds of them with the same phone number, delivered on the same day. We checked the address: it was a cognitive care facility where many of those voters were unable to remember their children’s names, let alone vote.

Welcome to ballot harvesting at enterprise scale.

Voter rolls are a mess – all of them. That is why many Secretaries of State too often charge $30,000, $25,000, $5,000 for a single snapshot of the rolls – how many citizens can write that check?

One swing state deliberately uses multiple voter ID number sequences to thwart evaluation and insert voters without detection. In others, there are 40 years of built-up junk like people in UPS Boxes with their buds in the vacant lots, churches, and RV parks.

Anyone who thinks voter fraud is a Democrat party thing will be disappointed: voter roll fraud is a truly bipartisan enterprise.

Democrats are better at inserting phantom voters – particularly in large urban areas. The Republicans hold their own in deliberately salting voter rolls so citizens cannot easily find what their Democrat pals inserted.

The one constant is the Secretary of State’s office, whether Democrat or Republican, lies somewhere along the denial curve – from acquiescence to denial to outright instigation of sovereign voter fraud.

There is no way to guarantee free and fair elections until citizens receive 100% visibility to all voter rolls, without writing a $30,000 check, to keep these sovereign outlaws or lazies honest and active.

Jay Valentine led the team that built the eBay fraud detection engine and the TSA No-Fly List. Jay and his team are working with over 30 states cleaning up their voter rolls. Jay can be reached at Jay@ContingencySales.com

Resisting Covid Tyranny

Posted on January 9, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Several thousand protesters march against restrictive pandemic policies, in Montreal on Jan. 8, 2022. (Noé Chartier/The Epoch Times)

Noé Chartier reported in Epoch Times Thousands of Protesters March in Montreal to Denounce COVID ‘Tyranny’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

MONTREAL—Several thousand protesters took to the streets of downtown Montreal Saturday to voice their opposition to the province’s pandemic measures—whether the recently imposed curfew or the vaccine passport.

Not all were unvaccinated, with some taking a stand for freedom of choice or having received the first two doses and refusing a third due to constantly changing goalposts.

People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier, who’s been vocal in criticizing the restrictions and mandates, was in attendance with a group of his supporters.

“I’m here like everyone else to tell the Trudeau and Legault governments that enough is enough. It’s not by trampling on our rights and freedoms that we’re going to solve the pandemic,” Bernier told The Epoch Times.

“They’re trying to turn the non-vaccinated into the scapegoats of this pandemic. It’s completely unjust, discriminatory. The real scapegoats are the politicians ruling us. They’ve had years to change the health-care system, which is a totalitarian, socialist, the state controls all—and that’s why the system is crumbling.”

Bernier says we should learn to live with the virus and protect the most vulnerable while letting others get on with their lives.

“I’m here to defend and protect freedom against the tyranny, against the darkness that ruins everything,” said Mohamad Reza Zeinali, a nurse who hasn’t been working since April 2021, refusing to be tested three times a week or to take the vaccine, which he calls “experimental.” “It takes at least five to ten years to know how safe it is,” he says.

“The [tyranny] has to stop, it’s gone too far. I’m here to stand up for my rights, my kids’ rights, everything,” said Marshall Golding, who works as a delivery truck driver.

Throughout the march from Old Montreal and through downtown streets, a 70-year-old woman was walking a bit ahead of the main body, leading the procession. Claire refused to give her last name and have her picture taken, but said she was attending her 15th or so protest against government measures. “We’re sick of this criminal government,” she said. “Everything we’re going through is ridiculous. The masks, the curfew—they’re lying to us all day long.”

A Montreal police spokesperson said the protest went smoothly with no tickets given or arrests made.

On Jan. 1, police handed out 57 fines to protesters who defied the curfew in Montreal and made one arrest for an assault on an officer, CBC reported. Fines for breaking the curfew can go as high as $6,000.

Quebec reimposed a 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew on Dec. 31 to try to stem the rise in cases, and the government announced this week it would further restrict unvaccinated people’s access to the public space.

From Jan. 18, those without a vaccine passport will be barred from entering the state-owned liquor and cannabis stores, and the government says it is consulting with the industry to reduce even more the access to other non-essential services. The province also seeks to eventually require three doses to qualify for the vaccine passport.

Federal Minister of Health Jean-Yves Duclos said on Jan. 7 that he’s in favour of the provinces making vaccination mandatory.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

People Dying From Anti-Covid Policies, the Virus Itself Not So Much

Posted on January 3, 2022 by Ron Clutz

At Center Square is this revealing report Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64. H/T Andrea Widburg Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.

“We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.

Davison said the increase in deaths represents “huge, huge numbers,” and that’s it’s not elderly people who are dying, but “primarily working-age people 18 to 64” who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.

“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic,” he said.

“Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”

The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319.

These deaths were for people of all ages, however, while the information referenced by Davison was for working-age people who are employees of businesses with group life insurance policies.

At the same news conference where Davison spoke, Brian Tabor, the president of the Indiana Hospital Association, said that hospitals across the state are being flooded with patients “with many different conditions,” saying “unfortunately, the average Hoosiers’ health has declined during the pandemic.”

In a follow-up call, he said he did not have a breakdown showing why so many people in the state are being hospitalized – for what conditions or ailments. But he said the extraordinarily high death rate quoted by Davison matched what hospitals in the state are seeing.

The number of hospitalizations in the state is now higher than before the COVID-19 vaccine was introduced a year ago, and in fact is higher than it’s been in the past five years, Dr. Lindsay Weaver, Indiana’s chief medical officer, said at a news conference with Gov. Eric Holcomb on Wednesday.

Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients – just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions.

The state’s online dashboard shows that the moving average of daily deaths from COVID-19 is less than half of what it was a year ago. At the pandemic’s peak a year ago, 125 people died on one day – on Dec. 29, 2020. In the last three months, the highest number of deaths in one day was 58, on Dec. 13.

Widberg:

The two years of COVID mismanagement may also mean that myriad other health conditions are causing these deaths. Those people whose chronic or fatal conditions (e.g., heart disease, cancer) went untreated with lockdowns may finally have succumbed. We may also be seeing the terrible assault on immune systems, not from jabs, but from depression, economic stress, substance abuse, lack of exercise, lack of sunlight, and lack of human contact.

The one thing that’s clear is that the bean-counters whose businesses depend on getting the numbers right are telling us that Americans’ health under Dr. Fauci in Year One and the Biden administration (and Fauci) in Year Two has been disastrous. We can expect Year Three to be equally bad because the same management is in place. The only thing that will change this trajectory is to throw the bums out, first in the November 2022 election and again in the November 2024 election. Their mismanagement is killing us.

Footnote

There is a parallel with climate policies doing much greater damage than the supposed threat. See series of posts on World of Hurt from Climate Policies

Reality Vs. Covidia

Posted on January 2, 2022 by Ron Clutz

Rob Slane writes at his blog Reflections on Another Year of Covidian Lies and How the Truth Will Ultimately Prevail. H/T Tyler Durden Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images.

As we come to the end of the second year in Covidia, I reflect on just how much the instigators of the entire scam have managed to reshape reality in an amazingly short timeframe, such that what was considered normal 12 months ago is now considered abnormal, and what was considered abnormal 12 months ago is now seen as normal.

For instance, a person would have been called a Conspiracy Nut, had one predicted 12 months ago that after “vaccinating” the elderly and those considered vulnerable, which was the “route back to freedom”, the Johnson Regime and countless others around the world would:

Proceed to push the injection onto all adults
Move on to getting it into children
Make thousands jobless who do not wish to partake in the experiment
Begin the introduction of Vaccine Passports
Announce that the allegedly 95% effective products wane so quickly they’ll need to be taken every few months
Start talking about the possibility of mandatory jabs
Reintroduce the restrictions that these injections were supposed to do away with

Yet a year later the same person is called a Conspiracy Nut for opposing these very things they got called a Conspiracy Nut for predicting, but which are now reality.

There is something horribly ironic, and also deeply chilling about this. For it shows not only how easily manipulated so many people are, but also just how easy it has been for the Covidian Regimes to reshape reality such that millions have come to accept as normal the very things they would have dismissed just months earlier as the product of deranged minds.

The last two years has felt like people are living in parallel universes, so much so that it’s almost tempting to wonder whether Zuckerberg’s hideous Metaverse is already a thing, with millions having unwittingly entered it in early 2020 without noticing.

Metaverse Vs. Real World

In the Metaverse, SARS-CoV-2 is a new Black Death that kills indiscriminately no matter what age. In the real world, it is a virus that has a 99.9% Survivability Rate, and there are effective early treatments available to the 0.1% for whom it might potentially be lethal.

In the Metaverse, Lockdowns of healthy people are how we’ve always dealt with outbreaks of transmissible illnesses. In the real world, other than a hastily ended five-day trial in Mexico during the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak, the quarantining of the healthy was never been done before the Chinese Communist Party implemented it in early 2020, to be copied all over the world by Governments ignoring their own long existing pandemic preparedness plans.

In the Metaverse, masks are about loving your neighbour because wearing them stops you passing on the virus you don’t have to others. In the real world, masks do not and cannot stop viral transmission, and thus they are a not a health aid, but a political and psychological tool of subjugation and dehumanisation, designed to humiliate and perpetuate fear.

In the Metaverse, a public health crisis caused by a virus has zero medical advice given out to people, but just a relentless barrage of talk about cases, hospitalisations and deaths, with all knowledge of effective early treatments ruthlessly suppressed. In the real world, a public health crisis caused by a virus would see Governments, health officials, and doctors recommending cheap and effective ways of boosting one’s immune system, such as Vitamin C and D, Zinc, Quercetin, sunshine and plenty of exercise and fresh air.

In the Metaverse, people who aren’t ill can spread the illness they don’t have, and so must take a test which cannot diagnose illness and which gives huge numbers of false positives, after which they must stay in their house for a prolonged period to stop the virus they don’t have from spreading. In the real world, if you’re well, you go about your daily life; if you have what are called “symptoms”, you stay home and rest.

In the Metaverse, the injection of billions of lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA, which has never been injected into people before, which tricks the cells into allowing it to enter, which then causes billions of cytotoxins to be produced in cells throughout every organ, and which the manufacturers have indemnity but no proper safety data for, is hailed as a saviour. In the real world, this is the most dangerous, reckless medical experiment ever performed on masses of people without their knowledge of what they are being given, and the long-term consequences could be unimaginably disastrous, as Professor Sucharit Bhakdi explains in this horrifying warning.

In the Metaverse, a product which doesn’t prevent infection, doesn’t provide immunity, and which requires top-ups every three months, is a vaccine, even if it needs the dictionary definition of what a vaccine is to be changed to accommodate it. In the real world, the Groucho Marx rule about ducks applies — if it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck then it probably is a duck. Thus if it doesn’t stop infection, doesn’t provide immunity, and wanes after 10 weeks, then it probably isn’t a vaccine.

In the Metaverse, willfully going along with abnormal, illegitimate and authoritarian rules & behaviours is the way back to normality and freedom. In the real world, willfully going along with abnormal, illegitimate and authoritarian rules & behaviours is about conditioning us to accept abnormality, the end of a law based society, and the long term loss of freedom.

In the Metaverse, bringing in Vaccine Passports for nightclubs and other large venues is about keeping people safe, and of course won’t be extended to other venues. In the real world, Vaccine Passports are a Trojan Horse, firstly to be extended into other venues of much smaller size (as has been the case in many European countries), but ultimately to facilitate the creation of a Digital ID Social Credit Hellhole where your every move and transaction can be tracked, you have credits not money, and freedom as we knew it is a thing of the past.

In the Metaverse, people who refuse to submit to the mass medical experiment only have themselves to blame if they find themselves excluded by law from entering certain venues, doing certain jobs, buying certain goods, and even being able to avail themselves of the basic necessities of life. In the real world, this unscientific, unholy, sinister apartheid system shows that we are edging eerily close to repeating the ugliness and depravity of certain 20th century regimes that we smugly told ourselves we were not capable of repeating, due to our apparent goodness.

It is baffling that people can view what’s going on so differently, but I would point out that all the views in the real world are derived from facts, data, reason, logic and historical examples, whereas all the views in the Metaverse are taken from Government and media propaganda.

One of the exasperating things in dealing with this is that whilst there are an endless potential number of lies that can be told, there is only one truth. And what the Government and media are very skillful at doing is layering lies upon lies upon lies, such that whilst the critical thinkers and data analysts are busy trying to debunk lie number one, lies number two, three, four and following are already being laid on that foundation so that by the time the original lie has been shown to be false, things have moved on and hardly anyone can remember, let alone care about the original claim.

However, the good news is that this is also the Achilles Heel of the Globalist’s narrative. Firstly, the more lies that are told, the harder it is to sustain the story because it can only be kept going by more lies, each of which tends to become increasingly blatant and absurd, such that even those who have been slumbering for two years begin to stir. For instance, if you try to assure the huge numbers of people that have had adverse events from the injection, or who know others that have suffered, that they must get the next one and it’s perfectly safe, clearly you are going to have your work cut out as stark reality highlights the lie in what is being told.

But the other part of this Achilles Heel is this: The Truth will win because The Truth must win. It is The Truth. It cannot not win. Attempting to suppress it is like trying to hold a cork under water. It will always be wanting to get to the surface, and as soon as you tire of holding it and release your grip, that’s what it will do. And so although these lies will continue, and although they will appear to prevail for some time to come, there is coming a time when they will be defeated because The Truth, not lies, is the ultimate reality:

“Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue is but for a moment.” (Proverbs 12:19)

As we look forward to 2022, although we do not know the details of what is to come, because it is very clear that the goal of the Covidian Regimes is to get everybody injected with their mRNA witches’ brew over and over again by carrot or by stick, by hook or by crook, we can be absolutely sure there will be many more lies, many more difficulties, and much more wickedness. Yet we can also be equally sure that these lies will ultimately be defeated, because he who is The Truth (John 14:6) is guaranteed the victory (Revelation 17:14), and he will suffer their lies only so far, until such time as he destroys their unholy, totalitarian, anti-human agenda. There will be a Reckoning. Just make sure that you are on the right side when it comes.

Escape from Covid in 2022

Posted on December 31, 2021 by Ron Clutz

With the end of 2021 many are wondering if there is light at the end of this tunnel, or do we face an oncoming train. This post takes up the issue in three parts: How Did We Get Here? What is keeping us here? What is the Way Out?

How Did We Get Here?

The best and briefest summary I’ve seen comes from C.J. Baker’s American Thinker article COVID-19 in 10 sentences. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

As we approach the end of annus horribilis 2 (also known as 2021 A.D.), it seems worthwhile to to look back and summarize the events that have brought us where we are in the COVID-19 saga.

Here, in ten sentences, is how we got here.

Since at least 2014, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), through Anthony Fauci’s NIAID division, have sent millions of U.S. tax dollars to communist China to fund research involving the genetic alteration of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Around October 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic began when a new coronavirus leaked out of the same Wuhan Institute of Virology and into the human population.
The Communist Chinese Party imposed a tight lockdown of its own population, while simultaneously allowing international travel to and from China, facilitating the virus’s worldwide spread.
As the pandemic unfolded, public health officials and the media used grossly overestimated death rates and false promises of self-limited measures (“two weeks to flatten the curve”) to promote unprecedented policies of prolonged, widespread quarantine of heathy populations, which continue to this day — two years later.
Simultaneously, in places such as New York State under former governor Andrew Cuomo, authorities knowingly put sick COVID-19 patients into close contact with highly vulnerable persons such as nursing home residents, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary and avoidable deaths.
Despite definitive evidence from the early stages of the pandemic that COVID-19 poses minimal risk of severe illness and statistically zero chance of death in children, and that children are not significant drivers of its spread, the Democrat party and the public teachers’ unions — with the help of health officials and the mainstream media — have forced schools to close for in-school learning for multiple school years, and continue to push for renewed school closures in many areas of the country.
As cheap, existing, and safe medications and treatments were identified that showed effectiveness in treating COVID-19, a systematic, worldwide movement to suppress and discredit such treatments was instigated by Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, the mainstream media, Big Pharma, and social media corporations, to protect their financial interests in vaccines and other proprietary medicines they had in development, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
As COVID-19 vaccines became available in the U.S. through Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA, these extremely new treatments were heavily promoted by Fauci, Gates, the media, Big Pharma, and social media under knowingly false pretenses, including repeated false claims that the vaccines 1) would provide herd immunity, 2) were equal or even superior to natural immunity, 3) stopped contraction and transmission of the virus, and 4) were safe and effective for all ages.
Even as the COVID-19 vaccines have now been shown to 1) lose effectiveness in a matter of weeks; 2) be ineffective at stopping transmission and spread of the virus; and 3) be inferior to natural immunity, and even as more than 20,000 vaccine-related deaths have been reported in the CDC’s own Vaccine Emergency Reporting System (VAERS) — with a similar level of reports in EudraVigilance (the E.U.’s reporting system), the likes of Fauci, President Joe Biden, current New York governor Kathy Hochul, and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio continue to press ever harder for repeated doses of these same vaccines, including among young children.
Although the current dominant strain of COVID-19 — the omicron variant — has been demonstrated to be more transmissible and much less deadly than prior strains, as well as dramatically mutated from the original strain after which the vaccines were modeled, Fauci, the Biden administration, the Democrat Party, and the mainstream media are now employing a policy of endless boosters with the increasingly obsolete yet lucrative vaccines, alongside the systematic scapegoating of unvaccinated persons, rather than employing the focused protection of the vulnerable and promotion of normal life and natural immunity among the healthy that has already been successfully implemented in numerous “free” states.

What conclusions can we draw from this series of events? Here are a few:

First, the “health care industry” is largely a syndicate run by government bureaucrats like Tony Fauci and Francis Collins, Big Pharma, and ultra-rich investor-influencers like Bill Gates.

Second, the mainstream media and major social media platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are diametrically opposed to freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas. In fact, their goal is the opposite: an Orwellian thought control of the population and the suppression of all dissenting voices.

Third, the Democrat party is utterly corrupt and power-hungry, while the Republican Party is hopelessly gutless and ineffective.

Lastly, the formula has been revealed for the permanent extinguishing of the civil liberties outlined in the Bill of Rights: declare an emergency, terrify the populace, control the message, stifle all dissent, and revoke the citizens’ freedoms indefinitely, all while grabbing and consolidating political power. Coming soon: the climate “emergency.”

What is Keeping Us Here?

There appear to be three principal obstacles to any pivot away from the Covid morass: Vested Interests, Addiction to Power, and Need to Save Face.

Vested Interests

Forbes reported in April 2021 Meet The 40 New Billionaires Who Got Rich Fighting Covid-19. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Shortly after the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, markets collapsed and economies around the world plunged into recession. At the same time, hundreds of billionaires fell from the ranks of Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list, capturing a snapshot of the pandemic’s impact on the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest people.

One year later, things couldn’t be more different: a record 493 new billionaires joined the list this year, propelled by a red-hot stock market and unprecedented economic stimulus. Among those newcomers are at least 40 new entrants who draw their fortunes from companies involved in fighting Covid-19. Some, such as Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and BioNTech cofounder Uğur Şahin, have become household names thanks to the vaccines they helped develop. Others got rich making everything from personal protective equipment and diagnostic tests to antibody treatments and software that helps authorities schedule vaccination campaigns, which will be essential in reopening economies and returning to normal life.

So the pandemic has morphed into an industry whose prosperity depends on continuing fearful demand for its products and services. It also boosted the wealth of the very richest moguls, like Amazon’s Bezos and Big Tech tycoons like Zuckerberg, because social lockdowns made their services essential. As Jeffrey Tucker noted, lockdowns divided classes:

The working classes were assigned the job of delivering groceries, tending to the sick, driving the trucks filled with goods, keeping the lights on, and keeping the fuel running. The professional class, among whom were the people who pushed lockdowns in the name of disease avoidance/suppression, were assigned the job of staying home in their pajamas and staying safe.

Addiction to Power

Kit Knightly writes at Off-Guardian The Covid narrative is insane and illogical…and maybe that’s no accident. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Maybe forcing people to believe your lies, even after you admit you’re lying, is the purest form of power.

We already know it’s not about a virus, it’s not about protecting the health service and it’s not about saving lives. Every day the people running the “pandemic” admit as much by their actions, and even their words.

Rather, it seems to be about enforcing rules that make little to no sense, requiring conformity at the price of reason, drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and demanding people respect them, making people believe “facts” that are provably untrue.

But why? Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?

If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.

You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you. You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.

True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.

To guarantee you have control, you must make people see things that are not there, make people live in a reality you build around them, and force people to follow arbitrary, contradictory rules that change day by day.

To truly test their loyalty, their hypnosis, you could even tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, but they need to follow the rules anyway.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story isn’t supposed to be believable. Maybe the rules aren’t meant to make sense, they are meant to be obeyed. Maybe the more contradictory & illogical the regulations become, the more your compliance is valued.

Maybe if you can force a person to abandon their judgment in favour of your own, you have total control over their reality.

The Need to Save Face

Let’s consider the plight of political leaders at local, state or province, and national agencies. Most are not getting rich or getting off on the power from telling pandemic-stricken people what to do. But they have gone along with the Covid narrative and instigated and enforced the crazy rules. How can they walk back the controls they claimed as necessary?

Some of us remember the backlash from Catholics in the 1960s after Pope Paul VI loosened fasting rules, declaring that eating fish on Fridays was not strictly required any more. It didn’t go down well that behavior considered bad enough to be confessed was now optional.

Laura Rosen Cohen writes at Newsweek Let Omicron Spell the End of the Pandemic—and the COVID Shaming. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The morality tale superimposed onto the virus persists. As people in blue states get infected with Omicron, they seem to be following a script in which they go out of their way to prove that their infection was not due to misbehavior, God forbid—they got the vaccines and the booster and wear their masks everywhere they go and regularly get tested. See Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Cory Booker, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson for examples of the template.

Why the need to go into detail about never having sinned? Some are saying the quiet part aloud: “There is a strange feeling of shame and embarrassment around us getting covid,” as one person admitted. “We did everything we thought was right to avoid it- masks, tests, vaccines, boosters- and we still got it.”

“As an ultra-cautious, triple vaccinated, always-masker I was shocked and very afraid,” another tweeted. “To my surprise, I also felt ashamed. And embarrassed. How could *I* have let this happen? How could *I* have put my family at risk?”

These people want you to know they are the “good” Americans, those who wear two or three masks, didn’t see family, travel or socialize for two years, and didn’t leave their houses. “We did everything right,” followed all the rules, and still got it!

It’s the new confessional, not Catholic but COVID. “Forgive me, Dr. Fauci, for I have sinned,” they cry out. And it’s not just individual citizens that are posting their COVID Confessions. It’s politicians and public health officials, journalists and other public figures. And it’s really weird.

These tweets and the culture they emerged from betray the truth about much of the “fight” against COVID that liberals seem unable to let go of, even when the virus comes for them. Rather than admit that a virus doesn’t care about your virtue, they experience getting infected with COVID as shameful—because they wanted others to feel shame.

Since when in human history has someone’s vaccination status ever been included in an obituary? These obligatory COVID/Vaccine Acknowledgement Statements are like some kind of new Land Acknowledgements for the COVID Zero faithful. If only blue state liberals could acknowledge the truth: that no one should feel guilt or shame for getting a highly infectious disease.

After all, we don’t shame people for getting chickenpox or seasonal influenza or any number of other highly contagious respiratory viruses or diseases. It’s something many liberals actually know in other contexts; they would never shame someone for getting an illness that is even related to their behavior, like obesity, alcoholism and some forms of diabetes. Why is this a thing with COVID?

Now especially, as we hopefully transition to the endemic phase of COVID-19, the COVID shaming has got to stop. The only entities that should feel guilt, shame or be blamed for the spread of this virus are China and the Wuhan Virology Lab. The “Scarlet C” belongs squarely upon them.

If only liberals would relinquish it.

What is the Way Out?

Jennifer Jones writes: As C.S. Lewis wrote in God In The Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (a quotation many of us have read more than once this year), “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. …those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” After close to two years of decisions being made for our own good, his words could not be more poignant.

At this point in the pandemic, there are two distinct paths: (1) Continue down the government’s rabbit hole of lockdowns, vaccine passports, triple jabs, quadruple jabs, segregation, masking, isolation, and divisive rhetoric erroneously blaming one group of people for the woes of the pandemic or (2) common-sense risk acceptance predicated on the belief that medical autonomy based upon being an informed consumer is a God-given right.

Fortunately, there are numerous jurisdictions that mostly avoided the “rabbit hole” and provide examples for a balanced approach to managing the virus. (Sweden, Japan, South Africa, Florida, Uttar Pradesh, etc.)

Clean Up the Dashboard

Recommendation:

Stop showing cumulative statistics all the way to beginning of 2020. These are not informative, only serve to drive fear of numbers that can only rise. The public needs to see what is the situation now.

Cease use of the categories “cases” and “hospitalizations”. Both have been corrupted from original definitions and can no longer serve. Instead report “inpatients” and “outpatients”. These are people who are in a physician’s care for sickness following infection with SARS-CV2.

Inpatients are those admitted into hospital with a prior covid diagnosis, not anyone testing positive after entering hospital for some other reason. Outpatients are those undergoing a treatment protocol at home under the supervision of a doctor who determined an illness deriving from SARS-CV2 infection.

The only other statistics are “covid deaths” which must be defined as dying from Covid19 not dying with Covid19. This outcome is only valid for inpatients and outpatients (no others) within 28 days of first diagnosed with Covid19. “Recoveries” should be reported daily, meaning patients who survive after 28 days.

Empower Primary Care for the General Population

Over-the-counter medical products should be provided comparable to those to treat cold and flu infections. People with mild symptoms should have access to home tests as well as anti-viral medicines and nutritional supplements shown to be effective against SARS-CV2.

Stop Discrimination Against Persons Based on Vaccination Status or Mask Wearing

Those who are vaccinated are protected and do not threaten others. Unvaccinated people are trusting their own immune systems. Likewise, wearing masks is an individual protection choice based upon circumstances.

Outpatients need to self-isolate during treatment, and when symptoms are over, new testing is not required. People who have contact with others who tested positive do not need to test or to self-isolate if they are without symptoms.

Basically, it is a return to common sense citizen responsibility for public health. When you are sick, you seek care and medical advice and treatment and isolate until you are well.

Resources:

Israel Mulls ‘Herd Immunity’ Covid Strategy As Global ‘Pox Party’ Pivot Continues

The end of the pandemic will not be televised

The Zoom Class Gets Covid

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