Medical Events – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

August 25, 2023August 26, 2023

Have We Lost Our Mind, Or What?

Ex-NHS psychologists warn children are being over-diagnosed, over-medicated for gender dysphoria ...

Some people believe in things that are completely nuts. Look at “gender-affirming care” and the adults in positions of authority who have bought into it. Think about it: the self-diagnosis of a toddler or tween is sufficient to invoke a permanent life-altering trajectory as the result of a medical intervention that screams malpractice. Despite the indoctrination that is mislabeled as counseling, the kid will never be the same, either emotionally or physically, and can’t return to their former self.

After the victims’ exposure to the counseling/indoctrination, Lupron (AbbVie’s chemical castration drug and puberty blocker), cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, we’re starting to see regret in the form of the word “detransitioner”. Later comes the realization, after all of the changes to the body and mind, that the tween’s rash self-diagnosis for sex-transition can’t be fully undone. Cutting to the chase, this whole thing is c-r-a-z-y!

Of course, the response of the adult enthusiasts in the transition Borg when confronted with any reluctance to the treatment is a resort to the rhetorical equivalent of Defcon 1 (nuclear war is imminent or has already begun) – “Do you want a dead daughter or an alive son?” Heck, the affected are still committing suicide . . . after the transition.

I give you three cases of regret: one ends in suicide; the other is ending in a lawsuit; and still another concerns a whistleblower at a gender clinic.

The situation involving David Reimer (the full account below) will turn out to be a refutation of the behaviorist’s chief insight, that social conditions overwhelmingly define a person’s development. It was believed by some that the influences of biology can be replaced by the social engineering of “expert” interventions. Reimer was thrust into the trap of a psychologist’s effort – John Money, a Johns Hopkins University psychologist – to reengineer David from a boy to girl. It didn’t work. David committed suicide at age 38.

May be an image of 5 people, bangs, child and people smiling — David Reimer as Brenda (l) and the Reimer family

May be a black-and-white image of 1 person — John Money, Johns Hopkins University psychologist

The story begins 8 months after David’s birth in 1965 when his penis was accidentally removed during a surgical procedure. After consultation with John Money, his parents agreed to interventions to turn David into Brenda. 14 months later, David’s remaining male genitals were removed, artificial and rudimentary female genitals installed, and he started a regular regimen of estrogen injections. His upbringing as Brenda ensued.

An uneasiness would plague him for the rest of his life. And then he learned what happened to him. He would “detransition” back to David and replace his artificial female genitalia with artificial male genitalia. He got married, adopted 3 children, but continued to be consumed by depression up to the moment of his fateful decision to take his life.

He was misdiagnosed as an adult with “gender dysphoria” because he wasn’t “in the wrong body” so to speak – or maybe he was, put there by an “expert” whose ideological inclinations would prevent him from realizing the obvious truth that XY chromosomes signal the release of male hormones to the body and brain. The potential for harm is as great for the modern version of the John Money approach, “gender-affirming care”.

That brings me to the case filing of Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Inc, in early 2023. At age 13, Chloe fell into the arms of Kaiser’s gender team. According to her filing (see below), “a team of doctors (i.e., the Defendants) . . . decided to perform a mutilating, mimicry sex change experiment on Chloe.” Even more damning is the treating practitioners single-minded commitment to one approach – gender-affirming care – without adequately divulging the controversial nature of the treatment, risks, and the shortcomings of much of the research into it. How could anyone, let alone a 13-year-old, exercise informed consent under the pressure of doctrinaire activists in white smocks? Chloe’s formal complaint reads,

“Defendants [i.e., Kaiser] obscured and concealed important information such as the following: the conflicting studies in this area; the high quality evidence demonstrating poor mental health outcomes; the existence of only low to very low-quality studies purportedly supporting this treatment; the significant likelihood that desired outcomes would not be attained; the significant possibility of desistence, detransition and regret; and the lack of accurate models for predicting desistence and detransition.”

May be an image of 1 person and newsroom — Chloe Cole

Chloe detransitioned at age 17 and is now seeking legal redress for what can only be described as mental and physical mutilation by a branch of the medical industry that is more beholden to an ideology than real medical science. It’s nearly as horrific as anything that came out of the German SS Race and Settlement Main Office or the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics of the 1930’s with its fixation on other forms of malevolent flights of fancy under cover of “science”.

Now, other clinics and hospitals have earned suspicion and scrutiny for engaging in practices that can only be described as licensed mutilation. Jamie Reed, a former pediatric gender clinician at Washington University Transgender Center, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, blew the whistle on the hasty and obsessive herding of minors into gender-affirming care.

May be an image of 1 person — Jamie Reed

Former employee of St. Louis transgender clinic reaffirms allegations of misconduct • Missouri ...

Even the New York Times, frequently dismissive of such charges, has confirmed much of Reed’s story. They validated many instances of the facility’s staff jumping to transition counseling and testosterone before any underlying emotional issues were addressed. It became commonplace at the clinic, facing a social contagion of gender dysphoria among adolescents, particularly young girls, to reach for short cuts in processing the horde with a reliance on highly dubious outside examiners and the snap push into cross-sex hormones and the indoctrination of the patient into accepting that they’re the opposite of their chromosomes.

Manias based on dubious “truths” aren’t unusual in history. Astrology, phrenology (skull shape is determinative of a person’s nature), and bleeding (opening a vein, leeches) were integral elements of medical training and practice. Pre-Civil War, some races were said to be best suited for subjugation (slavery for instance, John C. Calhoun). It carried over into Jim Crow. An incomplete and rudimentary understanding of heredity led to the horrors of eugenics which fed into the Supreme Court’s Oliver Wendell Holmes’ stupefying opinion in Buck v. Bell (1927) – “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” – and Auschwitz, et al. Karl Marx was intent on uncovering a “science” of history which, when put into practice in the 20th century, led to over 110 million deaths. Far from enlightening, some “scientific truths” have been the harbinger of much misery.

Who knows, climate change in its current ideological form may join history’s many delusional offramps from real science.

Meanwhile, the self-diagnosis of tweens as a proper basis for life-altering treatment is farcical. Euphemisms like “gender-affirming care” can’t hide the ugly reality. Which leads to another profound question: Why does it seem that the vulnerable – the mentally limited, those powerless in slavery, the subjugated by military conquest, the people stripped of their power of self-defense, children – are chosen to be the guinea pigs? Harvard grads don’t usually show up in the casualty lists.

RogerG

The Sudden Crusade Against Disinformation; Drought; and the Inner Totalitarian

Lake Mead near the Hoover dam, seen from the Arizona side of the dam near Boulder City, Nev., July 19, 2022. (photo: David Becker/Reuters)

David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018) — David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma, Wa. (photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Why the sudden crusade against “disinformation”? Is our time plagued by a singular onrush of lying and deceit? Really? According to today’s referees of language – who themselves could be mired in modern cultural/political manias – disinformation is “false information that is spread deliberately and often covertly to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (Merriam-Webster). Slanting the truth or even outright falsehoods has been the stuff of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a little Dale Carnegie lingo) since people discovered other people. Moses’s biblical admonition against “bearing false witness” covers the topic quite nicely.

For years, some people insisted that taxing the rich at towering rates leads to more revenue, as if people blindly and willingly, like lemmings, lay themselves prostrate before the IRS. Does the British “brain drain” from high-tax Britain to elsewhere in the Anglosphere of the 1950’s to 1970’s remind you of anything? Tax havens in the Bahamas? For years, even today, some continue to persist in the belief that socialism leads to prosperity despite its long record of failure. Eugenics, at one time, was all the craze even as it treated people as if they were draft animals. I could go on. So, where’s the sudden crisis in bad information? Dis- and its cousin misinformation have been around as long as humans had the capacity for speech. Now the Southwest is in the midst of a harrowing drought. Watch the “disinformation” smears muddy the waters in how to deal with it.

Honestly, cut to the chase, this jihad against “disinformation” is actually a massive censorship campaign. By what standard are the Cassandras of disinformation labeling some opinions or factual claims fraudulent? As it turns out, these arbiters of truth are partisans who rely on partisans. It’s mental gunk relying on mental gunk to produce more mental gunk in order to control what people say. GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

GIGO case in point: Valerie Wirtschafter of Brookings and her piece, “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims” (see below), where she proclaims that the podcast world is too free, with much too much “disinformation”. Where’s she been? The advertising industry would never have been around to launch so many successful Madison Avenue careers without exaggerations and falsehoods. Coke and Pepsi lambasted each other for years with disinformation. Watch any Superbowl’s commercial breaks for your daily diet of disinformation. Joe McCarthy (Sen, Wisc., 1950’s) and the Socialist International would be minor footnotes in history without mis- and disinformation. It’s been the motivation for wars and invasions and the rhetorical bedrock for politicians in their climb up the greasy pole . . . forever. And, all of a sudden, “Dr.” Wirtschafter discovered it’s a problem.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science — Valerie Wirtschafter

Come on, these are biased people who don’t like what other people have to say. People like Wirtschafter hide behind the aura of other people’s credentials, their government positions, or undeserved media respectability to engineer a “study” to silence still others. To her, the government is always right, and so are the scribblers and mouths that populate the Big Media newsrooms, anyone mentally messaged in endless lecture halls like hers all the way to her “PhD”, and the millennials and Gen-Z’ers filling the cubicles of Snopes and PolitiFact.

Snopes and PolitiFact have been scandalous in their interventions in our political brawls. If it was up to them, we’d never know that there is a strong possibility that COVID-19 came out of a Communist Chinese lab. We’d continue to shutter the schools not knowing that children face a near non-existent threat while ignoring the long-term damage to their emotional and mental development. We’d still be suffocating behind masks, not knowing that masking has little effect in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus. We’d never know that the vaccines don’t stop the spread of the bug or that natural immunity is just as good (see below). Much that we now know to be true about the pandemic would have been strangled in the crib.

Thanks to the people whom Wirtschafter trusts, businesses would still be closed and a couple of adult generations would continue to be nurtured on the idea that they shouldn’t have to go to work. Snopes and PolitiFact would paste as “true” any mention of the low unemployment rate, leaving a below-average labor participation rate lying on the cutting room floor. The low unemployment rate talk is empty absent any discussion of the emaciated labor pool from which the number is calculated. The high portion of employed (and conversely the low number unemployed, hence the low unemployment rate) is drawn from a worker pool that shrunk after the federal government started bribing a good portion of current and potential worker force out of the labor pool with extended pandemic benefits. The money spigot wasn’t shut off till the damage was done. Often referred to as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and I Quit Movement, Gen-Z’ers and others have discovered that living in Dad’s basement and receiving a government check (er, debit card) ain’t so bad (see below). Bringing it up might incur the wrath of the self-deputized disinformation bounty hunters.

Should we pay for pajama boy’s college?

Partisan-laced industries abound in this age of institutionalized political correctness. Stifling voices is the name of the game in the anti-disinformation industry. Though, how can we see our way clearly on existential threats such as the drought in the Southwest when discussion is monitored by the disinformation police? Having long experience with the lefty tendencies of the classroom and faculty lounge, the kinds of people admired by Wirtschafter, there exists among this group a psychomotor tick for totalitarian lifestyle control. That’s the reason for the affection for the buzzword “conservation” and the knee-jerk suspicion about individual freedom. Any talk of increasing the general water supply so people can be free in their daily lives will be met with a smirk.

Let me send Wirtschafter, Snopes and PolitiFact into a tizzy by mentioning a piece by Ed Ring of the California Policy Center, “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit” (see below). He lays out the practical possibility that more than conservation is necessary to stave off disaster for states like California: the supply of water has to be increased. But don’t bring that up at the next Sierra Club confab or among the chattering classes attending a Wirtschafter soiree.

Ring points out a number of options to increase supply, even while taking into account the climate-change bugaboo. Climate change doesn’t mean that California will be the newest Sahara Desert in a century. Precipitation will still fluctuate in a wet season and over time and present opportunities to expand supply. One is the installation of French drains underneath the subsurface gravel beds of the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta’s natural channels. It would capture a portion of the excess flows (flood waters) that flush into SF Bay. The water could then be stored in off-stream reservoirs and delivered to users and/or utilized to recharge the depleted aquifers of California’s Great Central Valley. French drains, think about it.

Expanding and upgrading wastewater reclamation could be an additional route to take. Even if only for non-potable uses such as landscaping or ag irrigation, it would free large quantities of potable sources for human consumption. Of course, that would require budgetary restraint in not wasting money on zany efforts to kill off the next generation in unbridled and subsidized abortions, or turn the state into a parent-free sanctuary for teen sexual mutilation (transgenderism), or find new ways to ladle cash to new and old “oppressed” classes, or drive businesses out of the state in hyper-regulation and -taxation, or sink more public and private money into the thankless task of making unsustainable “sustainable” energy “sustainable”. Keep it simple: just try to maintain water pressure at the faucet.

Desalination is another option if the state can keep its militant eco-utopians and NIMBY’s at bay. It’s expensive, like any of the other options, but, honestly, can you think of a wiser use of taxpayer moneys than the provision of something so important that three days without it brings death? However, I suspect that the inner totalitarian of the conservation-only legion has too great a grip on the minds in Sacramento. These busybodies are just too obsessed with telling other people how to live, and conservation fits the bill. Yep, the inner totalitarian has a grip on power in the state.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate Photos dated 9/-/1981 — 1981 Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests in California organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate. (Photo: Steve Ringman/The Chronicle)

California has an aged 20-million-person water delivery system in a 39-million-person state. Granted, people are leaving so, who knows, maybe its population will eventually come to match its outdated supply. Still, if opportunities aren’t grasped, it’ll be a bumpy ride of brown lawns, metered restrictions and fines, and more of the Great Central Valley resembling the Sudan. Droughts should be anticipated in dry-summer climates but California would rather play the role of woke crusader. With the disinformation inquisition in full swing, you’ll never know that the anguish could have been avoided.

RogerG

Modern Mass Psychosis in Climate Change, Systemic Racism, and COVID

See the source image

Here’s a story for you. University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley refuses to admit that she was mistaken in recently cancelling her team’s basketball games with BYU. In a statement to a reporter, she said, “I continue to stand by my position.”

Why cancel games with BYU? Staley was reacting to a charge by a Duke University volleyball player, Rachel Richardson, who claimed some BYU fans heckled her with racial slurs. An exhaustive review by BYU of all available video and audio recordings and interviews with over 50 nearby spectators uncovered no evidence of the insults. Still, Staley refuses to back down. Why cling to an unfounded decision in spite of the evidence? She isn’t the only one. Lately, over at least a decade, and more incidents recently, we’ve gone through mass derangements over climate change, systemic racism, and COVID. Facts don’t matter. Despite, or maybe because of, trillions spent on education and the most intense networks of information ever devised, we seem not to be particularly inoculated from mass psychosis.

Investors should be aware of this thing called mass psychosis, typically referred to as mass formation psychosis. It happens in markets and occurs anywhere a large group of interconnected people exists. One source defined it in the following way:

“Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue. Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise. A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data. Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.” (Source: see below)

Evidence, proof, and real scientific inquiry are abandoned. Take the long-running issue of climate change with the adjective “apocalyptic” added for good measure. Beyond the reasonable assertion on the contribution of CO2 and fossil fuels, much else strays into the realm of speculation or mysticism. So many other questions on the subject – other contributing factors, their interplay, and impacts – cannot be answered with reasonable certainty, unless pure ideological bias qualifies for seasoned judgment. How’s that any different from the Heaven’s Gate cult? Besides, flagellating the most fuel efficient and clean society on the planet – ours – is pointless as over 2.8 billion people in China and India discover the joys of rising incomes, air conditioning, and affordable transportation. All made possible from the majesty of fossil fuels.

John Kerry is paid by us to jet around the world to cajole foreign rulers whose interests do not align with his fellow comfortable elites in their super-zip estates. He must be seen by them as a clown to be tolerated, maybe indulged a bit for photo-ops, but otherwise ignored.

John Kerry’s model is California. The cliché has it that California leads the way to the future. Maybe so, if that future is characterized by a mass psychosis in the mysticism of climate change. The rest of the country gets a bird’s-eye view of that fate. The state’s grid has been turned into a health hazard as the landscape dries out from the dry-summer climate’s periodic droughts. The state has made it difficult for anyone to clean out the surface debris in its wildlands, and 100 million dead trees await a spark. And eventually one will be provided by nature or from one of the state’s many urchins from its urban chaos.

The same psychosis that has turned the state into a fire trap is utterly destroying any concept of reliable, affordable energy. The altar of wind and solar isn’t a sensible means to appease Gaia. They are intermittent by nature, which strains the grid. Power lines are made for steady streams of electricity, not the boom and bust that is endemic in sunlight and bursts of air movement. Any grid under this steady strain breaks down if not assiduously maintained, which it isn’t. It just so happens, though, that California experiences an annual 5-month dry spell, alongside its endemic droughts, for the ruptures to send thousands fleeing the attendant flames hoping that they have enough charge in their EV to escape death-by-firestorm.

But don’t let the facts get in the way.

California is a self-made disaster. Their infatuation with air movement and sunlight energy has unknowingly made them dependent on steady-stream sources – fossil fuel, co-gen, hydro, nuclear – to buck up the losses from the night and calm days. But the state is busy torpedoing most of this backbone. Co-gen is mostly irrelevant. For the state’s ruling class, natural gas and coal are the devil’s brew. Hydro is undermined by eco-mandates for steady stream flows that has helped to turn the state’s reservoirs into puddles. Don’t only blame the drought. Every year is not a drought year, and no effort is made to store during the wetter times. Riparian habitats and dreams of the return of ancient salmon runs checkmate any other use.

The state’s dams have become the equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids. They are monumental but, as opposed to the pyramids, aren’t likely to attract many visitors three-quarters empty. The same fate has befallen the state’s two nuclear power plants: San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. Delayed maintenance while the state bullied the utilities into greenie fantasies put the kibosh to San Onofre, which cost the state 2.2 gigawatts of power. Diablo Canyon was scheduled for death in 2025. Blackouts have forced the state’s ruling party to back down on that one. How long? Well, it’ll probably remain open until the next spate of wet years gin up hydro for awhile, waiting for the next dry spell to once again reasserts itself to overtax the seas of solar panels and vast windmill forests that mar a once beautiful state. It’s a cycle of futility buttressed by a mass psychosis: a mystical belief in horrors that fact, reason, and science cannot dispel.

None of this matters one twit to the zealots who run the state. Evidence be damned. Electoral majorities in the state are in the grip of a mass mania that jettisons all reason and fact. All that remains is blackouts, skyrocketing electricity rates, hillsides aflame, and no effect on climate change.

Would it be better to simply enjoy the extended growing season and build more nuclear and low-emission power plants to enjoy the glories of air conditioning? Regardless, India and China will see to it that CO2 emissions continue to glut the atmosphere with or without the ministrations of John Kerry or the ladies on The View.

Climate change isn’t the only opportunity to go crazy. We have another one in “systemic racism”. What is systemic racism? Does it exist? Hard to say since “systemic” means that it is hidden and therefore not directly observable. Thus, we have to rely on others to simply announce its existence as they make an affluent living on their soothsaying.

The racism “experts” are actually grifters. Racial disparities occur in all sorts of areas such as incarceration rates, educational outcomes, birth rates, marriage, incomes, and social status. Thus, they insist that racism persists, but not in the Jim Crow way: obvious, in-your-face, and therefore open to rational inquiry. It’s easier for them to proclaim that the disparities are the proof of racism, even though they haven’t proven it, because they can’t, because the imprecision of the thing makes it immune to empirical testing (falsifiability). The “ghost in the machine” kind of thing. Instead, they claim to possess the special gnosis to expose it and how to remediate it as they go to the bank with thousands, if not millions, in book sales, consultant fees, and speeches. A new industry of charlatans is born. It’s as if astrology and the four humors in medicine are making a comeback.

The parallels with medieval medicine are glaring. People in earlier times noticed that fevers were reduced by bleeding a patient. The ancient Greek philosopher Galen and his four-humors paradigm was proven correct, or so they thought. It was, however, the classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy at work: two events occur sequentially with the first one assumed to be the cause. For our current race hustlers – Kimberle Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, et al – systemic racism is proven by unequal outcomes by race. Poor educational outcomes on assessment tests by race, for instance, must mean that the test and its providers are “systemically” racist. It’s tantamount to saying, “Fever fell after bleeding, and patient is cured.” It’s nonsense.

Still, two full seasons after the death of George Floyd, “End Racism” dons the helmets of some NFL players. Viewers and our kids are barraged by the effort to ferret out something mysteriously within them and lurking in everything that surrounds them. It’s tantamount to the 17th century Salem witch trials in the modern form of a bogeyman in a Klan outfit.

The whole campaign rides on the inequalities in academic measures by race. The cause is presumed – racism – but only because “family structure” is excluded. Kids swim around in social circumstances that have greater impact on academic performance than melanin count or more money in the bank accounts of the NEA membership. Commissioned by the US Office of Education in 1966, the Coleman Report levelled a blow at the ego of the education industry’s special interests when it concluded, “. . . the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.” Yep, chaotic home life and slums have greater bearing on admission to MIT than school funding, teacher salaries, and the racism bogeyman. But you won’t find outcomes by family structure anywhere in the various measures. Strange. You’ll see math, reading, and science scores by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, etc., but nary a word about the home.

The missing link between the social measures and their cause is never filled with anything resembling empirical proof. Unequal stats by race are said to automatically point to racism. That’s it, and we’re off to the races to follow the “experts” in the secret gnosis. COVID gave to us another example of the same phenomena: trust the “experts” to fill the gap between a development and its treatment.

Filling the shoes of Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the overpaid founders of CRT, is Dr. Fauci and his peers in government, the NGO’s, many in BIG Pharma, Democratic Party potentates, et al. The lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking, social distancing, the vaccine decrees, the overall suffocation of a society, were persistently avowed without a real scientific basis. Other approaches to maintain the functioning of civilization and protect the vulnerable were treated to covert and tacit censorship. Therapeutics, targeting safeguards on those with certain health conditions, natural immunity, the costs to children, the canceled or forgone medical appointments, the strain on a population quarantined in the four walls of their home (many more walls if you live in the super-zips), and the huge economic losses from the waterboarding of work and production were shunted aside in a mad rush to stamp out the virus, the very opposite of “follow the science”.

Once the “experts” had their foot on the pedal, they never let up, in spite of the growing evidence that they were prescribing a suicide pill. By summer 2020, it was widely established that the young ran little risk. So, forcing kids into filthy masks and into isolation behind plexiglass in schools that opened their doors was more than pointless. It was harmful. The schools most beholden to the blinkered “experts” were in Democrat strongholds, the inner cities, and they closed the longest. The academic performance gap morphed into a Grand Canyon. To no great surprise, the principal victims of this enthusiastic pursuit of school lockdowns and other tortures were minorities, putting a lie to “black lives matter”, especially for young ones.

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Data began to stumble out that the states who were the most religious in following Fauci and CDC mysticism fared no better than those who were more agnostic about what Florida’s Gov. DeSantis called “Fauciism” (see below). Claims were made by our health elites in power that the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, school closures, mandatory vaccines, et al, would “stop the spread” or “bend the curve” when one of the tiniest things in biology and profusely evolving – a virus – will in all likelihood evade the best laid plans of mice and men. Their interventions were heralded as the holy grail and natural immunity was ridiculed. Two years after the pandemic’s onset, we’re still grappling with a shape-shifting virus and infections persist.

Who’s to blame for this disorder by mass psychosis? Certainly, trillions spent annually on schools from K to grad school have monumentally failed at truly and broadly educating the population. Education is enlightenment. Are we enlightened? Evidence to date says “no”. Conversely, it may be the source of much of this mass psychosis.

What then is the value of our enormous communication network on the net and through satellites, cables, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and the infinite variety of radio signals? What are they communicating? Much that is spewed spikes mass psychosis. We seem to be great at inventing things but no so good at using them.

All our inventions haven’t altered the crooked timber of humanity. They have only magnified its prese nce. Immanuel Kant’s famous line from the 18th century remains true: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Credentials are certainly no guarantor. Civilizations over millennia have created civil society to grapple with our fundamental pretzel character. You know, faith, family, morals, and neighborly affiliations in local self-help organizations came into being. People like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Robert Nisbet wrote of the virtues of these “little platoons”. Well, the centralized welfare state carpet-bombed their importance.

We just created more bullhorns for mass psychosis.

See the source image

RogerG

Sources:

* “What is Mass Formation Psychosis?”, SWFI, 1/2/22, at https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/90470/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis

* Ivan Rowe at the American Enterprise Institute wrote of the missing ingredient of family structure in most reports of our social condition. One column on this subject can be read at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/students-family-background-matters/.

* Skepticism is always warranted when people go beyond what the science gives. Climate change ideology is a classic example of the phenomena. Those in the field of science who have managed to keep their wits exist. Princeton’s Freeman Dyson outlined his critique in the NYT Magazine at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?sq=Freeman. Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg is another. Kevin Shapiro’s review of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, can be found in Commentary Magazine at https://www.commentary.org/articles/kevin-shapiro-2/the-skeptical-environmentalist-by-bjorn-lomborg/. Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh argues for more complexity in the dynamics of the atmosphere than John Kerry would admit. An account of his views can be found in the Orange County Register at https://www.ocregister.com/2008/06/18/japanese-ipcc-scientists-says-global-warming-worst-scientific-scandal/. The Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, and Nobel Prize winner, equates the climate change crusade with a religion. A talk by him on the subject is available through Foreign Policy Journal at https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/01/nobel-laureate-ivar-giaever-on-climate-change/. There are many others out there.

* The Federal Bureau of Economic Research in spring 2022 issued a report on how states fared in their response to COVID-19. Biases marred the analysis of the report. Some with blue-state leanings say that the BER paper proved the wisdom of aggressive COVID measures, while others of a red-state tint say the opposite. Blue-state biases downplayed or ignored the secondary damages of children’s developmental and education losses, the harms from delayed or absent medical treatment, the increase in suicides and depression, the massive disruption to the economic life of the country, etc. One analysis from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity appears more accurate than most. It can be read at https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/final-report-card-on-state-responses-to-covid-19/.

* A report on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on student achievement was made by the Brookings Institute in March 2022 and can be read at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/03/03/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/.

July 26, 2022

California, A Sanctuary for Modern Gender Lysenkoism

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What is Lysenkoism and what does it have to do with California? Lysenkoism was a Soviet theory of biology that illustrates the corrupting influences of ideology on science. In addition to the bloodthirsty nature of communism, it would prove to be a force multiplier for famine in the 1930’s in the Soviet Union. In like manner, today, transgenderism is just the latest edition of the attempt to have ideology guide science, and still call it “science”. It too will have dire consequences particularly for the young who will be swept into it. California is trying to establish itself as the mecca for this latest thought experiment with our children as guinea pigs.

While pursuing this transgenderism delusion, California has a hard time keeping its people and businesses. For the second straight year, the state has registered an absolute reduction in its population, down some 117,552 in 2021 alone. From 2000 to 2020, the state shed a net of 2.6 million people. Similarly, increasingly, businesses in the state are decamping for parts beyond the reach of California’s legislators, tax collectors, and regulators. The consulting firm Spectrum Solutions counts a total of 265 relocations of California-headquartered enterprises from 2018 to June 2021. It’s undoubtedly an undercount since many fly under the radar – like the number for “apprehensions at the border”.

The published 2021 list of business out-migrations is quite impressive and includes Apple and Oracle (now Austin, Tx.) and Nestle USA (now Arlington, Va.). If the state won’t be hospitable to the spirit of enterprise, the state seems to be salivating at the prospect of becoming a kind of Vatican for the grisly arts: snuffing out unborn life and mutilating the bodies of confused tweens. Abortion from conception to birth (and maybe beyond) is lauded and subsidized, going so far as to advertise for out-of-state “customers”. The “gender affirming care” (euphemisms abound in the grisly arts) of double mastectomies, hormonal injections, castrations, genital reconstruction operations, and psychological indoctrination is favored in ways the real economy is not. Fascinating.

This medical assault on the bodies of the young is justified under “transgenderism”, today’s ideological clone of Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism is an artifact of the Marxist belief system dictating the architecture of science. The inherent qualities in basic biology are rejected – nothing is inherent in Marxism but all is said to be a product of socio-economic power structures. Sound familiar to the rantings of the race hustlers of critical race theory? Trofim Lysenko, Soviet biologist who was heralded in Soviet propaganda as a genius, rejected genetics and based his agriculture advice on discredited 18th century notions of inheritance (Lamarckism). The whole idea easily conformed to the pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. The result was the catastrophic crop failures leading to the Holodomor, the famine in the Ukraine and Donbas, the vast breadbasket of Russia and Europe.

Thus, what happens when ideology guides science? You have massive calamities. Like the Soviet-inspired famines, we will have cohorts of impressionable adolescents equally damaged, growing up psychologically scarred and physically mutilated, and it will all be chalked up as “gender affirming”. For many, they’ll end up like the 60-year-old regretting the body-covering tattoos, now fading and wrinkled, of their twenties. Only worse.

Inspired by the conceit of transgenderism, California State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a bill that would create an interstate underground railroad for sex-change operations, in effect, neutering the laws of the other states, according to Jeremy Redfern, press secretary of the Florida Department of Health. Children from Florida, or wherever, could be placed in California foster care, with or without parental notice and consent, and in essence Mengele-like experiments would be conducted on their bodies (Josef Mengele was the sinister Auschwitz doctor). The bill promises to prohibit the enforcement of another state’s arrest warrant if the warrant is related to that state’s restrictions on sex-change treatments.

Mengele was galvanized by a faith in another popular pseudoscience of the early 20th century: eugenics, or the idea that we should breed a “better” human being like we could a horse. Many academic, medical, and public health organizations of the day jumped onboard the eugenics train. Transgenderism has the same groupie effect, and sadly it’s frequently reported by the same people who have next to no understanding of science. What’s more astonishing is the ideological capture of people who should know better. The gambit was blown wide open when the American Academy of Pediatricians guidelines on transgenderism were shown to be written by a trans activist with a degree not in science but “women’s, gender and sexuality studies”. All-too-often, such organizational policy stands are written by a narrow claque of activists. It is neither reflective of the science or the membership.

In contrast, the euphoric and headlong rush into transgenderism is taking a pause in Europe and many states, except for the half-witted firebrands running the state of California, ironically as they run people and businesses out of the state. Dutch gender-dysphoria researchers call for “more research” before more definitive actions are taken. One Dutch gender-dysphoria specialist warned of the dangers in using sex-change chemical treatments by saying that “little research has been done so far on treatment with puberty blockers and hormones in young people.” Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) warned that “the risks [of sex-change treatments] outweigh the benefits at present.” They cited the “uncertain science” about the most popular sex-change prognoses. Thus, to put it succinctly, “gender affirming” is a nice way of saying “dangerous”. But still, California wants to go there.

It took 8-10 million dead in the USSR in the 1930’s and chronic crop failures to have Lysenkoism quietly go down the memory hole. What will it take for California to halt its breakneck slide into an “uncertain science”? How many kids will have to be disfigured and emotionally scarred before saner heads take over?

And to think that Governor Gavin Newsom is feted as a presidential contender for 2024. Given all that we know, who’d wish that on any nation, let alone our own?

RogerG

Sources:

*California’s population decline: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html
*Businesses flee California: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2021/08/27/businesses-are-fleeing-california-along-with-its-residents-and-president-biden-should-pay-attention/?sh=6fae8b722327
* Moms for Liberty Locked Out of Twitter after Criticizing California Gender-Transition Bill, National Review Online, Caroline Downey, July 25, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/moms-for-liberty-locked-out-of-twitter-after-criticizing-california-gender-transition-bill/
* Florida Is Following Europe’s Lead on Gender-Dysphoria Guidelines, National Review Online, Madeleine Kearns, April 27, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/florida-is-following-europes-lead-on-gender-dysphoria-guidelines/

June 27, 2022

A Mass Exodus from the Democrats’ America, Part II

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Anecdote is proof of nothing but anecdote. So goes logic, but some anecdotes are more notable than others. I was informed by a friend of mine in California that their neighbor moved to a state in the South, a red state of course. I don’t know the reason but it does seem that more and more neighbors have fled the not-so-Golden State over the past few decades. A Washington Examiner editorial sheds more light on the glaringly obvious trend in states run by Democrats. Indeed, “A mass exodus from the Democrats’ America”.

I’ve previously written that California would have lost two to three congressmen after the 2020 census, instead of just the one, if the 2021 population numbers were included. There’s more. 15 of the 15 fastest-growing cities and towns are in states under Republican rule: Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho. 14 of the 15 fastest-declining are in Democrat states. If we combine the 2020-2021 losses for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, we’d have the population of Miami.

It really doesn’t matter if an individual jurisdiction has more of a Republican lean if it still resides in a state run by Democrats. You can’t avoid the political suffocation coming out of the state capital.

Draconian COVID restrictions of Democrat governors certainly acted as an accelerant for the flight. COVID brought out the inner totalitarian in the governing class of lefty progressives. We should have known the inner totalitarian would be unmasked since wokeness and progressivism are functionally synonymous, and the thuggishness has been on display for quite some time in the “cancellations” on campuses and everywhere else its acolytes hold sway. Giving these people power is an invitation to “cancellation” of basic liberty, and more refugees. Who wants to live and raise kids under that, the governing equivalent of North Korea?

Further, two Democrat states – Colorado and Washington State – fell off the growth list after COVID. Apparently, Democrat governance is toxic to growth. I guess that making your state repellant to its residents is one sure way to achieve the lefty dream of zero population growth.

Chris Stokes, left, and Angel Zickefoose ... — Two Colorado residents openly smoke marijuana during the 4/20 event (day to celebrate pot) at Civic Center Park on April 20, 2017 in Denver. In Colorado, marijuana was legalized for almost any use in 2012.

The California boom of the 1950’s and 60’s is over and is going in the opposite direction. Other states who followed California’s lead into radical lefty rule saw their booms of the 80’s/90’s/early 2000’s evaporate as well. The key to personal, family, and state well-being is NOT to be like California . . . and New York, Washington State, Colorado, Illinois, etc., etc. Biden, are you paying attention? Are the rest of you paying attention?

RogerG

February 17, 2022February 19, 2022

Add Progressivism to History’s Failures (Eugenics, Fascism, Socialism, Communism): Look No Further Than the Response to the Pandemic

*It’s the unstated point in Jeffrey Anderson’s “The Masking of America: Faceless people make compliant subjects, not good citizens” in the Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2021.

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Homeless encampment along the beachfront of the LA area.

Hillary Clinton in a 2015 Anderson Cooper interview on CNN: “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive that likes to get things done.” Well, what is it that she claims to be in order to “get things done”? However defined, she isn’t alone. Today’s Democratic Party is almost the exclusive home base of it.

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Progressivism should not be confused with “progress”. Progress is a trend of improvement. Progressivism is an ideology, a belief system similar to a religion but without the supernatural. Call it a secular religion – and thusly an oxymoron – but that hasn’t stopped it from having its moment in the sun, which it still enjoys. The glow won’t last forever. At a certain point, it’s botches are too glaring to ignore. Is the trucker protest a sign of the dethronement?

Call it prog-thought. Many hear of it but few can describe it. Don’t expect to be enlightened by the schools. The schools give it curt treatment because emphasis is given to actions and historical personages, all of which they approve because they are caught up in prog-thought.

What you won’t get from the instructor is the fact that the ideological edifice is built upon Hegel’s idea of history as a chronology of improvements, one piling on top of the others over time. Improvement is defined as the heightened status of rationality in decision making, and rationality is best embodied in people like him, Hegel (professor at Heidelberg and Berlin Universities) – credentialed, degreed, many years of formal schooling. The purported efficiencies of the post-Napoleonic bureaucracies of his native Prussia were his ideal, which would blossom after his death under Bismarck and the Kaisers. Notice the absence of popular sovereignty in the scheme. The perspective’s early acolytes included 19th century Americans trained in German universities. It’s the beginning of the movement to train the apostles of the administrative state in the home of specialized PhD’s (college) who would infiltrate the subsequent and growing alphabet soup of unaccountable agencies.

Today, we are governed by the alphabet soup more than our elected representatives. Agency letter groups proliferated in the 20th century’s new and expanding field of public health in the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIMH, NIAID, etc., and the proliferation of state and local entities. The field of public health came to be the province of advanced-degreed specialists – the specialist possessing governmental power in the service of their specialty. The narrowness of perspective of the specialist is sharpened by a work life in the unique social eco-system in this expanding bureaucracy.

A climb up the greasy pole (in Churchill’s words) of career advancement places a premium on risk-aversion. The routine for career advancement remains the same throughout: don’t stand out, except as a compliant, ingratiating subordinate while avoiding black marks on evaluations. Steering clear of risks to one’s institutional reputation and the blinkered view of life spent in a specialty shapes a constrained, risk-averse personality for decision making. It showed during the Covid scare.

At the onset of the pandemic, instead of admitting ignorance of the virus, Fauci and others flip-flop on masks until resting on masking-forever, sometimes triple-layered. He must be seen as doing something and the default position is obsessive risk avoidance. It reaches absurd lengths, and a complete lack of common sense. Take a look at this gem of guidance for children from the WHO: “Before putting on the mask, children should clean their hands…at least 40 seconds if using soap and water…. Children should not touch the front of the mask [or] pull it under the chin…. After taking off their mask, they should store it in a bag or container and clean their hands.” Riiiiight! Picture that!

Fact is, the mitigations of mandatory-everything – lockdowns, church and school closings, masking, social distancing, vaccinations, deserted central business districts, the Zooming of life, etc. – is unprecedented. According to the historian Niall Ferguson, it wasn’t done in 1918 (Spanish flu), 1957 (Asian flu), or 1968 (Hong Kong flu). Back then, more people were cognizant of life’s risk calculus. Risk accompanies everything we do. As for diseases, they came and went with the suffering that is the flip side of life. The only difference is that today we have raised a population on the belief in a faux phalanx of “experts” to shield us from life’s vagaries.

How American life carried on as normal during the lethal 1968 pandemic — The 1968 Hong Kong flu didn’t interrupt the Woodstock festival, lilled 100,000 Americans, and infected President Johnson and the Apollo crew.

To no surprise, we have bred a mass of neurotics: people wearing masks while worshipping at the feet of tunnel-visioned experts and believing their pronouncements to be “the science”. You’ll see them everywhere in the Covid era from the masked while driving alone to the lonely outside jogger with labored breathing enveloped in the thing. A time traveler from the 1950’s, while viewing the scene, could be excused for thinking that the doomsday movies of his time were akin to biblical prophesies.

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The heralded “science” becomes less the search for truth and more the reflection of the more immediate needs of bureaucrats and their progressive patrons. Absent, or in spite of, the gold standard of randomized clinical trials, they reach for observational studies. The difference between the two is profound. The latter can have difficulty in determining causation. That won’t stop interested parties – bureaucrats and politicians – from manipulating and interpreting the observed findings.

We saw the corrupted practice during the pandemic. For example, New York under lockdown had fewer cases than wide open Florida at a certain moment. But New York’s results are due to unrelated factors peculiar to the state, and, given enough time, theirs jumps ahead of Florida. Averaged over the two-year lifespan of the pandemic, the experiences of the two are roughly the same — only Floridians are happier. During the interim, in the risk-averse blue bubbles, the populace became guinea pigs to placate the biases of politicized and narrowly-informed specialists.

In spite of it all, you can’t say that the actions of the hyper-active state worked. The virus continued to afflict more than the unvaccinated. It mutated and still spread. The guidance went from 15 days to stop the spread, to lockdowns to bend the curve, to school closures for up to two years, to mandatory mask-wearing and vaccination, to an end to fellowship in worship, to a retarded work ethic, to a crippling of small business, to the debilitating alternative reality of Zoom (or Skype).

What did we get for it? Looking across the immediate history, we got a summer of riots (2020), an emerging police state to squash resistance to the administrative state and party in power, inflation, empty store shelves, an unwillingness to return to work, loosey-goosey elections, and a loss of at least one academic year of educational achievement for kids in homes below the median income. It is a catastrophe for which we may have difficulty recovering.

We should not be surprised that the expertocracy led us to this impasse. These administrative functionaries are people with a very pinched background living a secluded life, and, as it turns out, residing in selective and exclusive locations as well. Fauci, Walensky, and the others hobnob in the blue bubble. Their social circumstances, and educational backgrounds, are as limited as their range of understanding. It’s an exclusive club populated by progressives. The club’s perimeters are policed by the high costs and exclusive zoning that require an ample income to afford the 5 or 6 Benjamins to take the family to a Senators game. For your information, Fauci’s annual take from the federal treasury is only $16,000 less ($384,000) than Biden’s ($400,000), and that doesn’t include his abundant investment portfolios from years of unstated influence peddling.

I don’t think that there’s a chance that we’ll see Fauci enjoying beer and chips with an Akron plumber, or any plumber for that matter, for the Superbowl. He and the rest of them live a world apart, and the world beyond the blue bubble is beginning to be weary of the expertocracy. Its reputation has taken a hit in polls and surveys. The CDC’s esteem in one survey fell from 60% in March 2020 to 41% in December 2021. The public’s opinion of the federal government flipped from a high of 70% in 1972 to 39% in 2021 in one Gallup poll. Pew put it at 73% in 1957 and 24% in 2021. The results are richly deserved.

Super Bowl LVI Scoreboard

Is a peasant revolt brewing? Truckers have had it. Moms and dads have had it. The only remaining question is this: Does the average person understand the connection between our current predicament and the reigning orthodoxy of progressivism as promulgated by an expertocratic priesthood? The root of all evil in the modern era is not mammon, but is more likely to be found in a blind faith in apparatchiks. It’s the one thing that eugenics, communism, socialism, fascism, and progressivism have in common.

RogerG

February 5, 2022February 5, 2022

A Second American Revolution?

“. . . nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.” ― Winston Churchill

Please watch a Virginia mom on February 3 lower the hammer on her school board’s policy of mandatory masks in school.

Something is afoot. In the first edition of the American Revolution, it was portrayed as a fight against aristocratic rule. That’s misleading. More correctly, it was a fight against violations of the rights of Englishmen. Key to the rights of Englishmen is self-rule. We rule ourselves though our elected representatives, thus the cry against taxation without representation. The king and Parliament were an ocean away and the colonists had no representation of their own choosing.

In this possibly emerging second edition, unaccountable experts have supplanted self-rule. The expertocracy, like the aristocracy of old, claim a kind of divine right, and too many of a leftist persuasion bend a knee before them. It’s the very essence of progressivism.

The pandemic is proving Churchill right. In an understandable reaction, moms and dads are raising the flag of opposition. Self-rule and the rights of Englishmen are making a comeback.

Marianne Jenson, go get ’em.

RogerG

February 2, 2022February 2, 2022

The Mendacious Scientific Consensus

In March of 2020, near the start of the government’s forceful reaction to the pandemic, I fretted that “We can’t do this!”, the this being the lockdowns and all the other strangulations of human interaction. I was worried that the virus would still get out and we would have nothing to show for it but a mutilation of our own well-being. Others more knowledgeable than I are starting to chime in. Most recently, a Johns Hopkins University study by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke paint a dismal picture of what we’ve done to ourselves in our COVID panic.

Cutting to the chase, the researchers concluded,

“They [lockdowns] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best . . . . lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”

Hindsight has not been kind to the “scientific consensus”. Fauci and company, and hyperactive and panic-riddled governors and mayors, mostly in the blue bubbles, have soiled themselves, and continue to do so. As a consequence, many people are coming to the realization that “scientific consensus” is not science. It’s an easy cover for people who don’t know science to lay claim to it for political advantage. As such, when the opinions hiding under the phrase’s veneer get exposed for their erroneousness, it starts to lack credibility . . . as if it ever had any.

Beware, beware of the “scientific consensus” on climate change. It is bandied about by the same actors pursuing similar goals in similar organizations with similar backgrounds and homogeneous worldviews.

Some have complained that the pandemic shouldn’t be about politics. Really? When has a “crisis too good to waste” not been about politics? Of all people, Clausewitz gave us the proper insight: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Just replace “war” with “scientific consensus”.

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RogerG

January 11, 2022January 15, 2022

Our Lousy Public Discourse

“Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.” Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s truism about freedom came to mind as more gibberish spewed from the mind of the self-styled Wise Latina on the Supreme Court, justice Sonia Sotomayor. In oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, she hysterically proclaimed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” First thing, it’s not true! 4 Pinocchios! Next, public imminences can’t be trusted any longer. And, really, should they ever have been?

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The latest plague apocalypse to go viral is Omicron. It’s certainly launching into our society. It may have launched into me. I can’t tell – wasn’t tested – but it turned out to be a 4-day flu. Tested or not, it was the flu whether as the ominous Omicron or not – a virus by any other name. Earlier in 2020, I had a brief bout with first-wave COVID and it was 2 days one-and-done. Both were characterized by a low-grade fever and fatigue and that’s it. The death cart making its regular rounds didn’t come knocking and I quickly resumed my domestic role as regular irritant to my wife.

According to the over-billed “experts”, I’ve got 2 strikes against me: I’m 69 and voted for Trump. Yet, no comorbidities, not obese, regular exercise, daily vitamin and mineral supplements, and no vices (other than popcorn and “The Lord of the Rings”) may have worked to counteract the age factor. As for the vote, sorry Rachel Maddow, I won’t do anything about it since I can’t endorse a doddering puppet of left-wing lunatics. That “comorbidity” stays.

Our time is not a period of calm reason. Wannabe totalitarians are out to make everyone, literally everyone, conform to their vision of vaccinations, endless boosters, Zoom school for the kids, and masks. These blinkered despots can’t bring themselves to even mention natural immunity and treatments. I’m up-armored by nature against the COVIDs going back to MERS and SARS. Vaccines are obviously part of the public health arsenal, not the entirety of it. Not a peep, though, from Walensky and company and The Big Wheels about natural immunity, monoclonal antibodies, and antivirals. When asked, they act like the kid in the cafeteria buffet line who can’t bring himself to request the broccoli in spite of mom’s insistence before leaving for school.

Instead, we’ve got a truncated public interplay between Vaccine/Vaccine/Vaccine/… on one side and on the other Vaccine/Microchip/One World Order by the people who gave us Q Anon and Death Rays from Space during fire season. Why can’t vaccines be an important element in a strategy without it being the focus of all our efforts? The nutter right, you can drop the resurgent John Bircherism anytime.

Tunnel vision behind the wheel doesn’t end well.

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RogerG

January 4, 2022January 15, 2022

Tyranny of Safetyism

The cartoon below captures the delirium of our times. It’s safetyism run amok. The obsessive/compulsive nature of safety-at-all-costs is destroying us.

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It took a virus to expose this latest contagion (pun intended) of the mind. We’ve lost all sense of balance. Safety-alone in all instances is as silly as having to wear a seat belt after a bad sunburn in a mad rush to the hospital for my wife to deliver our baby. No weighing of cost and benefit, comfort and discomfort, likes and dislikes, and personal assessment of risk. Somebody else – the government or the population of ninnies – claims the power to force us into their phobias.

If you really want to know the reason for the broad loss of credibility on the part of government-deputized “experts”, just look at their abundantly displayed lack of recognition of any other consideration other than the factoids of their narrow specialty. Fauci and Walensky wail about infections in a carpet-bombing of all the other things that make us human. Close the schools or open them with the kids isolated in pods, masks, plexiglass, and jabs; the germophobes screaming at other airline passengers for their refusal to continue suffocating behind a mask while eating; politicians ordering universal vaccination when the vaccine neither prevents additional infection nor its transmission; make it as difficult as possible for anyone to earn a living; prevent us as from seeking fellowship in worship; and effectually banish two thousand years of Christmas. Shocking and amazing.

The vaccines armor the many from hospitalization, but they can only do so much. They are not the “philosopher’s stone” of immunology. In fact, the unvaccinated 18 to 29 cohort run about the same risk as the vaccinated 50 to 64 according to OSHA’s own assessment (see https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/scotus-should-nix-bidens-vaccine-mandates/).

All the advice for sensible policy making isn’t limited to the kind coming out of a room full of lab coats. Their contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Necessary/sufficient isn’t a cliché. It’s a fact! I only wish politicians weren’t so eager to use the factoids of science as arrows in their political quiver. They end up besmirching themselves and science.

RogerG