Russell Roberts's Blog, page 173
February 20, 2022
Some Covid Links
One Taylor Dysart recently opined in the Washington Post about the Canadian truckers’ protest. In her poorly written gusher of much goofiness she favorably shared a notion from one Tyler Stovall: “The notion of ‘freedom’ was historically and remains intertwined with Whiteness, as historian Tyler Stovall has argued. The belief that one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of White supremacy.” In response to this nonsense, el gato malo asks:
if “a belief in one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of white supremacy” then why did all the people who were slaves want freedom so much?
because unless our textbook is super wrong, i’m pretty sure they were not white supremacists!
(DBx: The far left has perfected the art of self-parody.)
In response to this report of some of the handiwork of Canadian strongman Justin Trudeau, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
Drawn straight from the playbook of modern public health, asset seizures are a tactic guaranteed to gain the confidence and trust of the whole public.
Brilliance from the Babylon Bee.
Steve Cuozzo reports on the wokes’ addiction to public hysteria. A slice:
Propelled by propaganda about infrequent, short-lived instances of “overwhelmed hospitals,” the fear factor gave cover for every woke pipedream. Normally sane people were so scared, they put up with locked-down stores, offices, restaurants, schools and still off-limits subway toilets. The government, without resistance, seized control over business, our social lives and even the number of inches between masked-up school kids.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo went so far as to limit movie theater capacity to exactly 33% even though he sent thousands of elderly COVID victims to certain deaths in nursing homes. This wasn’t “following the science.” Cuomo was, like his fellow power-hungry Democrats, high on public paranoia, issuing edicts based on whims. Biden even embarked on a $3 trillion remaking of American society — all in the name of a Covid “emergency,” of course.
Harry de Quetteville reports, in the Telegraph, on a new book by British epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse. Four slices:
Whatever happens, one thing is certain: we will be told that lessons will be learnt. But which lessons? In politics, wise old hands talk about the importance of learning from mistakes, of knowing history and acting accordingly. But the wrong lessons, as epidemiologist Prof Mark Woolhouse shows in a devastating new assessment of Covid lockdowns, can also lead us terribly astray.
British scientists and politicians were primed to respond disastrously to Covid-19 long before the virus was even heard of, he argues in his book The Year the World Went Mad – and precisely because of their experience with previously known diseases.
First of these was influenza, on which our pandemic preparation was based. That was why Covid models included schools, which are key drivers of flu transmission, but not care homes – with catastrophic consequences.
The second diversion was a specific outbreak of flu – the swine flu epidemic of 2009-10, largely forgotten because it killed fewer than 500 people. Those who do remember it are sure to include the parents of around 70 British children who died. “Many more [children],” as Woolhouse, 63, a father of one daughter, points out, “than died from novel coronavirus infection in 2020.”
Yet schools stayed open then. “It seems that our collective assessment of the balance of harms changed dramatically over the intervening 10 years.”
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Lockdowns, Woolhouse says, emerged from the idea that Covid could be eradicated. And the idea that Covid could be eradicated emerged from a third misleading encounter with disease – that other coronavirus, Sars, which in 2002 was confined and ultimately crushed in one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. The problem is that there was a critical difference with Sars. It was almost exclusively transmitted by patients who were obviously sick. “Isolating symptomatic cases stopped most of the spread,” says Woolhouse. But Covid spreads asymptomatically, too, making eradication effectively impossible. Yet convincing those in power to give up on the dream of killing off Covid proved impossible.
“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.
Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid.
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“The first good data on this started to emerge in late February 2020,” he says. And as Britain endured the first Covid wave, this data was borne out in the facts. Those over 70 had at least 10,000 times the risk of dying as those under 15 years old. “This is a highly discriminatory virus,” Woolhouse says, still exasperated today. “It’s ageist, it’s sexist, it’s racist. And we certainly knew [that] before we went into lockdown.”
Yet the Government decided that telling half the population that they were at extremely low risk would dilute adherence to the harsh rules it was imposing, and instead ramped up the threat warnings. “We are all at risk,” noted Michael Gove in March 2020. “The virus does not discriminate.” But it did then, and it does now.
“I heard [the official] argument caricatured as: everyone died, but at least no one was saved unfairly,” notes Woolhouse. Policy became a form of epidemiological communism, with imposed equality, even if it was equality of misery. “BBC News backed up this misperception by regularly reporting rare tragedies involving low-risk individuals as if they were the norm,” notes Woolhouse.
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The result was the worst of all worlds – a reaction that failed sufficiently to protect those who were at risk while imposing hugely damaging lockdowns on those who were not.
“Sadly, the virus itself – particularly the variant Omicron – is a type of vaccine. That is, it creates both B cell and T cell immunity. And it’s done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.” – Bill Gates
Sadly?
Some Non-Covid Links
But this announcement from the DOJ is more than just a fishing expedition. It suggests that the mighty law enforcement apparatuses of the federal government are following Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) into the fantasy world where the profit motive is responsible for inflation. That cockamamie conspiracy theory becomes less funny when the FBI is empowered to charge companies for “illicit profits” as they try to keep shelves stocked in an environment of scarcity.
Warren has been trying to blame corporations for inflation since last year. She’s lobbed attacks at big oil companies and small grocery stores—a famously low-margin business—for trying to take advantage of supply chain issues to screw customers. As if businesses suddenly became more greedy within the past year after previously not caring about profits, I guess?
This week, Sanders climbed into the clown car too, tweeting that “Gas prices are at the highest level in 7 years” due to “corporate greed, collusion & profiteering.”
These are economically illiterate takes, though hardly unexpected ones. Warren is a broken record when it comes to blaming billionaires and corporations for everything from high college costs to the lack of affordable housing to the current supply chain problems. Just as reliably, she ignores the role that government has played in creating or worsening those problems—by subsidizing student loans, imposing restrictive zoning laws, and implementing trade-limiting rules like tariffs and the Jones Act, for example.
Tunku Varadarajan writes about economist John Cochrane. A slice:
He traces the present inflation to the pandemic and the government’s response. Starting in March 2020, “the Treasury issued $3 trillion of new debt, which the Fed quickly bought in return for $3 trillion of new reserves.” The Treasury then sent checks to people and businesses, later borrowing another $2 trillion and sending more checks. Overall federal debt rose nearly 30%. “Is it at all a surprise,” Mr. Cochrane asks, “that a year later inflation breaks out?”
He likens this $5 trillion in checks to a “classic parable” of Milton Friedman (1912-2006), the great monetarist at the University of Chicago, where Mr. Cochrane was a professor for 30 years before moving to Stanford in 2015. “Let us suppose now that one day a helicopter flies over this community and drops an additional $1,000 in bills from the sky, which is, of course, hastily collected by members of the community,” Friedman wrote in “The Optimum Quantity of Money” (1969). If they spent the money, inflation would result.
The Covid checks, Mr. Cochrane says, were “an immense fiscal helicopter drop. People are spending the money, driving prices up.”
David Henderson has an excellent idea for reining in ‘big tech.’
GMU Scalia School of Law professor Todd Zywicki warns that cancel culture is infesting banking. A slice:
Vague regulatory standards bear little resemblance to the rule of law. The same regulators who devised these standards can prevent entry by new banks that might be willing to serve unpopular individuals and industries. The burdensome nature of these (and other) barriers to entry is evidenced by the fact that only 44 new banks, including state and federal banks, have been established since the financial crisis. Virtually all of these new banks are small, geographically circumscribed community banks that cannot fill the gap left by mega-banks.
Jesse Walker reports on the history of the vague term “neoliberalism.”
“How the Coddled Kids Graduated But Never Grew Up.”
Juliette Sellgren’s latest podcast is with Gary Leff on airline travel and bailouts.
The Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom celebrates its 20th birthday.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 93 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the essay from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on March 13th, 2020):
Intellectual trends – including the idea that human agency and personal responsibility are radically attenuated in complex societies – have produced a curdled politics emphasizing victimhood and resentments. These sour preoccupations make people susceptible to the infantilizing temptation of tantrum populism that demands the benefits of economic dynamism with none of its inevitable frictions and dislocations.
February 19, 2022
Some Covid Links
Here are Nick Gillespie’s sensible thoughts on the Canadian truckers’ protest.
Emergency powers, threats to freeze the finances of peaceful protesters, and smearing critics as terrorists—it has to be China, right? But no, it’s our neighbor to the north, under a leader with a bad case of China-envy. For all the world to see, a panicky Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is throwing a tantrum over protests against restrictive pandemic policy that warns us how quickly an established democracy can lose its mind. It’s an advertisement for the value of cryptocurrency and other means of escaping the reach of the financial police state.
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Srinivasan’s comparison of Canada to totalitarian Venezuela may be more apt than Canadians like. Trudeau got into trouble in 2013 for praising the ability of China’s “basic dictatorship” to act quickly, as he now can under the Emergencies Act. He may have inherited the sentiment from his father, Pierre Trudeau, who not only invoked the War Measures Act, but openly admired thugs such as Fidel Castro.
“We see evidence of the Trudeau family’s long love affair with the world’s autocrats and tyrants,” Mark Mike noted in a 2018 Maclean’s magazine piece.
The truckers protest against vaccine mandates, vilified by Mr. Trudeau as “racist” and “violent,” has been peaceful, but not every peaceful protest is legal. Blocking roads and border crossings disrupts lives and commerce. Government’s job is to maintain public order while respecting civil liberties.
Canada has failed on both scores. For weeks authorities tried to wish away the problem. When that failed, Mr. Trudeau overreached, invoking new powers before Canadian jurisdictions had tried to enforce existing law. Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly was a progressive reformer. He criticizes the “reactive enforcement model” of policing, and when truckers took over his downtown, he failed to react. Mr. Sloly resigned Tuesday.
On Thursday Ottawa police, with provincial and federal help, finally came out in numbers, blocked highway exits, set up a perimeter and checkpoints and arrested blockade leaders. All of this could have been done under existing law. On Friday police began mopping up the protests methodically, with occasional scuffles and use of pepper spray. This too could have been done, albeit differentiating between the lawful and unlawful, and without threatening media with arrest for covering the action.
Ramesh Thakur adds his wise voice to the discussion of Canada’s truckers’ protest. Two slices:
The Freedom Convoy is the largest, longest and noisiest honkfest of a demonstration against a Canadian government in decades. It has laid bare the stark reality that lockdowns are a class war waged by the laptop class on the working class, by the cultural elites on the great unwashed outside urban centres and by the virtue-signallers on independent free thinkers. The world’s emoter-in-chief solemnly intoned in Parliament on 9 February that the truckies were ‘trying to blockade our economy, our democracy and our fellow citizens’ daily lives’. That he himself has been guilty of all three charges for two years testifies to lack of self-awareness.
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The narrative seems to be collapsing fast inside Canada. Trudeau’s own Liberal MPs have begun to attack his confrontational handling of the protests as divisive politics that’s pitting Canadians against one another instead of providing a roadmap out of the pandemic. Polls show around half of Canadians expressing sympathy and understanding for the truckers’ concerns and supporting an end to all Covid restrictions – even if most don’t support the protests. Five provinces have announced a rapid lifting of restrictions like vaccine passports and mask mandates. These developments might also be influencing other governments to begin dismantling increasingly unpopular restrictions. Who’d have thought that the country best known for its law-abiding and phlegmatic population would lead the world in trumpeting the message: we are done with Covid restrictions, mandates and government running our lives.
Ella Whelan is dismayed by the silence of so many ‘progressives’ as tyranny erupts in Canada. A slice:
But as real, material authoritarianism raises its head in Canada, many of those same laptop bombardiers keen to call out fascism wherever they see it seem conspicuously silent. Canadian PM Justin Trudeau might not exactly be Mussolini, but his decision to invoke the Emergencies Act against protesters in the nation’s capital is a watershed moment. With these new powers, Trudeau is effectively able to wage war on thousands of truckers and supporters camped out in Ottawa.
Deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland smiled and chuckled as she told reporters that the law change allowed banks to freeze the accounts of protesters without any need for a court order, adding that vehicle insurance for anyone involved in the convoy could also be suspended. The interim police chief in Ottawa told a press conference last night that the police were working with social services to “remove” children from the area – as many of the truckers are accompanied by their families (pictures of trucker-installed bouncy castles and play areas were circulating over the weekend).
In short, the Canadian government has granted itself the power to strip citizens of their money, their transport and their kids. Several organisers have been arrested, despite the fact that bar a few fringe incidents, the vast majority of the thousands-strong convoy has maintained a peaceful (if disruptive) approach to getting their voices heard.
Just imagine the uproar that would ensue if Trump had taken children from Black Lives Matters protesters who took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, or Boris Johnson had used the banks to starve out the costumed climate-changer obsessives who took over Trafalgar Square before the pandemic. You don’t even have to imagine it – when visiting Kenosha amid the riots and protests of 2020, Trump said “these are not acts of peaceful protest but really domestic terror”.
In response, CNN ran analysis which argued that Trump’s naming of protesters who disagree with him as terrorists “puts him in the company of the world’s autocrats”. The T word might not have spilled out of Trudeau’s mouth just yet, but his use of the Emergencies Act (last invoked by his father 50 years ago to combat a real terrorist threat) allows his government to broaden the Terrorist Financing Act, shutting down the fundraising sites used by the truckers’ “Freedom Convoy”.
Kate Andrews laments this reality: “Covid has made politicians like Justin Trudeau power crazy.” A slice:
It’s becoming a case study in how much control governments wield over the technological systems we’re building – not to mention a reminder that the definition of an “emergency” often comes down to what is giving politicians a headache at any given time. The powers Trudeau has invoked will allow his government to cripple politician dissenters, with plans to stop just short of using the military to act as police officers (an act Trudeau says he wants to avoid, though a statement from the Canadian Armed Forces insisting it would be playing no such role raises questions over who tipped him against the move.)
But there’s another lesson from Trudeau’s increasingly heavy-handed approach to the protesters: the period in which government decrees were met with little to no resistance is coming to an end. Between Covid and lockdowns, politicians have spent two years growing increasingly accustomed to citizens doing, more or less, exactly as they say. Even being told to stay home, forgo loved ones’ funerals and stay away from family and friends was met with begrudging acceptance for far longer than most governments expected people to comply. Politicians like Trudeau have perhaps enjoyed that power a bit too much, and have forgotten that the art of governing is based on winning over hearts and minds, not cracking down on dissent with tactics that – if they were coming out of a country like Russia or China – we would not hesitate to categorise as dangerous overreach.
Canada’s Prime Minister has also forgotten the fundamental principles that underpin a strong economy: free enterprise thrives because it’s voluntary. People’s desire to work, trade and mutually prosper off of each other’s contributions is what enhances prosperity. As much as lockdowns may have given politicians like Trudeau a taste for decrees, no leader can force people to return to work if they don’t want to do, or work in a way they don’t feel comfortable with, and expect to get the same results.
“Masks have been the most visible part of America’s pandemic response, but one of the least consequential,” science journalist Faye Flam writes in a Bloomberg Opinion essay. “The states with mask mandates haven’t fared significantly better than the 35 states that didn’t impose them during the omicron wave. Rhode Island, where I live, has had a mask mandate since mid-December; nonetheless, we saw our January surge rise far higher than any other state. There’s little evidence that mask mandates are the primary reason the pandemic waves eventually fall—though much of the outrage over lifting mandates is based on that assumption. Many experts acknowledge that the rise and fall of waves is a bit of a mystery.”
The Editorial Board of the New York Post warns against the “insanely cautious CDC.” A slice:
Even if you discount this insanity, the CDC can’t keep its own COVID story straight. It caused months of chaos with its back-and-forth recommendations on masking and other hygiene theatrics. And its forthcoming “update” is clearly motivated by politics, not public health.
It’s definitely not science-based. The risk to kids from COVID is, statistically, near zero. The total US death toll for under-18s in the entire pandemic so far is about 800. That’s out of almost 1 million dead. And a big chunk of the young people who died had other health problems.
Here’s the plain truth: COVID is very dangerous to the elderly and those with underlying conditions. But its mortality rate outside those groups doesn’t justify anything like the world-altering precautions the CDC demanded.
The Editors of the Telegraph urge the British “to move on from Covid for good.” A slice:
Then there is the continued risk aversion of some local authorities, schools and hospital trusts. Already, some public sector leaders have made it clear that they intend to keep some protocols in place for longer – seen, for example, in Sadiq Khan’s insistence that masks be worn on the Tube. This cannot be allowed to continue. The point of living with Covid is that individuals should make their own minds up about the level of risk they are prepared to accept. That is impossible if arms of the state still feel entitled to tell people what to do.
Martha Fulford, J. Edward Les, and Pooya Kazemi advise parents to beware of misinformation about the risks that Covid-19 poses to children. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Two slices:
Media reporting on COVID has been replete with doom, gloom and hysteria. A research report by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that American media coverage of COVID has a significant negativity bias, with 91 per cent of stories by major U.S. media outlets being negative in tone, versus 54 per cent for major non-U.S. sources and 65 per cent for scientific journals.
This negativity bias is very apparent when it comes to coverage of COVID in children. While the death of a child is always tragic, stories of pediatric COVID deaths are often sensationalized by media outlets and elevated above other more common causes of death in this age group. Some media outlets, even when they admit that COVID deaths are rare in children, stoke an atmosphere of fear by running hyperbolic stories about such conditions as Long COVID, suggesting that large swaths of children with a history of a SARS-CoV-2 infection are condemned to a life of disability.
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Some of the most sensational media stories relate to Long COVID, a term used to describe persistent symptoms after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Definitions for Long COVID include over 200 symptoms, many of which are nonspecific and also common among kids who have not been infected with COVID. Media coverage would have parents believe that Long COVID affects 15 to 25 per cent of children who are impacted by COVID. But a careful and unbiased analysis of the published medical literature shows that Long COVID is uncommon in children. A recent meta-analysis on the topic, conducted by some of the world’s foremost pediatric experts, concluded that “the frequency of the majority of reported persistent symptoms was similar in SARS-CoV-2 positive cases and controls (i.e. children who were not infected).” Another review paper came to similar conclusions. And, the largest study ever published on the topic was just released in the European Journal of Pediatrics; it concludes, “Long COVID in children is rare and mainly of short duration.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 150 of Ludwig von Mises’s 1951 essay “Profit and Loss,” as reprinted in the 2008 Liberty Fund edition of Mises’s 1952 collection, Planning for Freedom:
An entrepreneur earns profit by serving the consumers, the people, as they are and not as they should be according to the fancies of some grumbler or potential dictator.
February 18, 2022
Tyranny In Canada
How will those of you who deny the reality of Covidocratic tyranny justify this fact?: Canada’s House of Commons is being prevented today from holding a session to debate strongman Justin Trudeau’s power grab, and the reason given for this blockage of a parliamentary session is nothing other than strongman Trudeau’s power grab.
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Spending other people’s money”
My January 25th, 2012, column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is the second of a two-part series on the dangers of government borrowing. You can read my column in full beneath the fold.
Some Covid Links
Vinay Prasad explains “how the CDC abandoned science.” Two slices:
Throughout this pandemic, the CDC has been a poor steward of that balance, pushing a series of scientific results that are severely deficient. This research is plagued with classic errors and biases, and does not support the press-released conclusions that often follow. In all cases, the papers are uniquely timed to further political goals and objectives; as such, these papers appear more as propaganda than as science. The CDC’s use of this technique has severely damaged their reputation and helped lead to a growing divide in trust in science by political party. Science now risks entering a death spiral in which it will increasingly fragment into subsidiary verticals of political parties. As a society, we cannot afford to allow this to occur. Impartial, honest appraisal is needed now more than ever, but it is unclear how we can achieve it.
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Manufacturing alarm at the very moment an age or other demographic cohort is targeted for vaccination has become a pattern for the CDC. On May 10, 2021, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization for the 12- to 15-year-old cohort to receive the Pfizer vaccine. On June 11, the CDC published a study in MMWR claiming to demonstrate rising hospitalization among this age group; widespread media coverage of the study quickly followed. But the absolute rates for this age group were, in reality, amazingly low: Less than 1.5 per 100,000, which was lower than they had been in the previous December. Meanwhile, a safety signal was being investigated—myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle—which was more common after the second dose, and reported to be as frequent as 1 in 3,000-6,000, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health. Other countries became reluctant to push two doses within the standard 21- to 28-day timeline for these ages. By July, the U.K. had decided against pushing vaccines for this cohort, a decision that was walked back only slowly.
David Henderson decries the tyranny that now is strangling Canadians.
After GoFundMe shut down the crowdfunding effort for Canada’s trucker protests, and before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to freeze, without court orders, bank accounts linked to the protests, supporters turned to a small website called GiveSendGo.
The Christian crowdfunding platform had received more than $8.7 million from individual donors intended for the “freedom convoy” opposing Canada’s vaccine mandates. On Sunday GiveSendGo was hacked and shut down by political opponents, who exposed the names, emails, locations and other personal information of 92,845 donors. Public harassment followed.
On Feb. 5, the owner of Ottawa’s Stella Luna Gelato Café made a $250 donation to the protest. When this became public, callers threatened to throw bricks through her store window. She ordered the shop . On Tuesday she recanted her support for the truckers to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.
Twitter users are posting names, jobs and locations of donors—from corporate executives and civil servants to masseuses and taekwondo instructors. One account doing the “doxxing,” itself anonymous, clarifies: “If you disagree with the views of businesses listed here, do the Canadian thing: Do not patronize them, or write a sternly worded letter. That’s it.” Harassment will follow anyway, but even if not, do we need more boycotts? Liberals boycotting right-wing real-estate agents and conservatives boycotting left-wing graphic designers?
Major news outlets in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. are contacting the donors, asking them to justify their contributions. Many donors feel pressure to recant or desist from further financial expression of their views. For many journalists, that is no doubt the goal.
“Our gentle neighbor to the North rushes toward grim authoritarianism” – so reports Reason‘s Brian Doherty. Two slices:
As Canada tries its best to keep donations of cryptocurrency from helping protesters against the country’s vaccine mandates on truckers, as detailed by Reason‘s Liz Wolfe, the Canadian Bankers Association has announced its intention to make sure that those associated with the protests are thoroughly locked out of all traditional financial services as well.
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What Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is trying to do here, with the obedient collusion of the banking sector, is far beyond acceptable business as usual for a Western government; it is vile authoritarianism, in service of a policy goal of little objective importance given the existing Canadian rate of vaccination, and it ought to destroy both the moral and actual authority of his regime.
Among those reflecting wisely on the tyrannical actions of Canadian strongman Trudeau is David McGrogan. Two slices:
Justin Trudeau’s confrontation with the Canadian truckers may be the single most significant event of the Covid pandemic – not because of its eventual outcome, whatever that may be, but because of what it symbolises. It captures, in perfect microcosm, the tensions between the competing imperatives of the age: freedom versus security; the rule of law versus flexible ‘responsive’ governance; the priorities of the workers versus those of the Zooming bourgeoisie; the need for real-world human interaction and belonging versus the promises of splendid online isolation; the experiences of the common man, who knows where it hurts, versus those of the professional expert class, who know nothing that cannot be expressed as a formula.
More than all of that, though, it gives us a lens through which to view a much deeper, much older conflict of much larger scope – one which underlies not just the struggles of the Covid age, but of modernity itself. On the one hand, the state, which seeks to make all of society transparent to its power. On the other, alternative sources of authority – the family, the church, the community, the firm, the farm, and the human individual herself.
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Justin Trudeau’s contempt for the truckers is therefore genuine and profound. He sees in them not an obstacle to Covid policy or a potential threat to public health. Not even he could possibly be so stupid as to think it matters whether or not these people take their vaccines. No: he identifies in them a barrier to forces in which his political future is entwined – an ever-increasing scope and scale for governmental authority, and the opportunities to buttress his own legitimacy that would follow from it.
About the Canadian truckers’ protests, Kim Iversen tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Reasonable demands of a free people. In 100 years people will read about this and look at all the hardcore pro-mandate people as unreasonable, emotional and tyrannical.
Public school enrollment tumbled 3% last year. In December, National Public Radio found that most of the 600 districts it analyzed from across the country had a second year of declines. Many Catholic schools reopened while public schools remained closed. In Arlington’s Catholic diocese, all 41 schools were in person or hybrid by fall 2020. They were rewarded with a 7% enrollment increase of more than 1,100 students this year.
Insight from el gato malo. A slice:
of all the utterly discredited non-pharmaceutical interventions around covid, perhaps none stands as pervasive in its application and as universal in its failure as masks.
it was a flat out cargo cult belief set from the beginning and the inefficacy of this purported intervention was known and knowable beforehand and was confirmed, again and again, by all the emerging data.
the studies undertaken to “prove” efficacy were shams, lacked control groups, used cherry picked data, fraud, and methodologies so hilariously bad as to call into question the basic competence and honesty of those pushing them. the CDC has been a disgrace.
and yet the intensity of the push for this meaningless mitigation ratcheted ever upward. a certain class of person loved this, demanded this, needed this. no data could dissuade their desire.
even those who gathered the data that proved so helpful in proving this such as emily oster backed away from their own output because it so clearly contradicted the narrative of their tribe. she, an ivy league economics professor, disavowed her own discovery and flipped to team emotion. (another dark day for the gato alma mater)
it was sad to see, but altogether predictable.
masks are signs of subjugation. they dehumanize. they alienate. and this is WHY they are so attractive to so many.
this is why forcing them on kids to dominate them and force them into compliance with state over self or even parents is such a high priority goal for those that have collectivist plans for their futures. it establishes precisely who is in charge.
masks are not about public health.
masks are about hierarchy.
they not only represent a high visibility in-group/out-group tribal marker, but they have wonderous potential as a form of separating the powerful from the powerless, the nobles from the commoners, the dictators from the dictated to.
it has become the opiate of the classes.
Marc Siegel rightly criticizes those who refuse to let go of alleged reasons for Covidocratic authoritarianism. Three slices:
The COVID pandemic may finally be fading as the case numbers drop dramatically, but there are many who don’t want to let it go.
Virologists and public-health specialists who left their laboratories and lecterns to pontificate publicly do not want to relinquish the rush of a camera moment or the glamour of a satellite camera truck arriving outside their door. Professors who were used to students falling asleep in their classes suddenly entered a two-year hotbed of social-media warfare and saw their Twitter follower numbers swell into the hundreds of thousands.
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What isn’t valuable is continuing the restrictions far too long. What isn’t valuable is the mockery and the pomposity, the self-appointed experts calling out misinformation and marginalizing those who disagree on social media and on the Internet. Clearly there is a value to vaccines, therapeutics, masks, ventilation and rapid testing. But there is no value to political strategies that are purely self-serving. There’s no value to refusing to pull back the restrictions even as the numbers are dramatically falling.
The public is tired, not just of the pandemic but of the way it has been handled across the board, from the news media to the government, even to our best scientists.
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What we don’t need, and have never needed, is public-health scolding from a starstruck scientist or vote-seeking politician. They are sure to hold us back from assimilating COVID into our lives for their own purposes.
Douglas Murray reports on Covid-hysteria-inspired petty tyranny on Broadway. Two slices:
On the way into the theater, bouncer-like staff screamed at us to form the correct queues and have the right documentation ready. We appeared to be visiting Azkaban, not Hogwarts. It was just the first of the evening’s delights.
Inside the Lyric Theatre, they had tried to recreate the atmosphere of an English boarding school. As a survivor of such an establishment, I can tell you they did a grand job emulating the most sadistic aspects of such institutions.
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Soon a member of staff came to warn me that I had failed to pull my mask up fast enough after my most recent swig of beer. As the show began, someone with a name badge saying “Libby” came over and told off another member of our group for failing to bring their mask up swiftly enough after sipping another of the overpriced drinks the Lyric Theatre had just sold us.
As the show began, it seemed that Libby (a k a Dolores Umbridge) had identified us as troublemakers. Flagrant sippers. After the lights had gone low, I noticed Libby standing at the end of our row staring down it, hands on hips. There she stayed, glaring through the dark.
Brendan O’Neill denounces the masking double-standard. A slice:
The mask has slipped. Literally and metaphorically. On Sunday, at the Super Bowl, in an LA stadium heaving with people, there wasn’t a mask to be seen among the celeb set. The kind of self-righteous maskholes who have derived enormous pleasure over the past two years from telling the plebs to mask up went maskless to the game. Maybe they held their breath for three hours? There was actress Charlize Theron, not a stitch of cloth on her face, despite LA having a mask mandate. This is the same Charlize Theron who once Instagrammed a pic of herself in a fancy mask alongside the words ‘Don’t be an ass #wearadamnmask’. You see, it’s only you, the little guy, who has to wear a damn mask, not people as important and beautiful as Ms Theron.
The flagrant mask hypocrisy of the Super Bowl celebs has got social-media users hot under the collar, and with good reason. It seems that in the New Normal only ‘the help’ wear masks. So there was the doyenne of woke correct-think Ellen DeGeneres grinning for mask-free selfies while the stadium ushers were masked up. Audience members for Ellen’s TV show are still required to wear masks, too. Of course they are. We can’t have Ms DeGeneres breathing in the fumes of non-millionaires. This is the new Covid aristocracy – if you can afford the tens of thousands of dollars it costs for a plush box seat at the Super Bowl, you can bare your face; if you can’t, if you’re one of those folks who ekes out a living from servicing the Super Bowl, then you must be muzzled. It’s fine for the rich to expel their breath – it’s only the spittle and germs of poorer folk that must be stifled.
It wasn’t only the likes of Charlize, Ellen, J-Lo and the rest who flouted LA’s mask mandate (which stipulates that masks must be worn at ‘mega-events’). So did most of the 70,000 attendees of this clash between the LA Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals. There’s a positive element to this, of course: hordes of people sensibly refusing to muzzle themselves at a vast, joyous event that involves much eating, drinking, shouting and cheering. And yet the whole thing still highlights the deranged double standards of the masks issue. Schoolkids in LA are still muzzled in classrooms while thousands of sports fans can chant and splutter as freely as they like. As one observer put it: ‘Apparently Covid can’t touch you if you drop five grand on Super Bowl tickets. But tomorrow morning, schoolchildren – for whom Covid is nearly 100 per cent survivable – will wear masks for eight hours. Science.’
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 162 of F.A. Hayek’s profound 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, as this book appears as part of volume 13 (Studies on the Abuse & Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. [2010]) of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:
His [a merchant’s] special knowledge is almost entirely knowledge of particular circumstances of time or place, or, perhaps, a technique of ascertaining those circumstances in a given field. But though this knowledge is not of a kind which can be formulated in generic propositions, or acquired once and for all, and though in an age of Science it is for that reason regarded as knowledge of an inferior kind, it is for all practical purposes no less important than scientific knowledge. And while it is perhaps conceivable that all theoretical knowledge might be combined in the heads of a few experts and thus made available to a single central authority, it is this knowledge of the particular, of the fleeting circumstances of the moment and of local conditions, which will never exist otherwise than dispersed among many people.
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