Quotulatiousness

February 26, 2024

QotD: Lockdown rebuttal

Filed under: Government, Health, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

First, lockdowns were neither prudent nor essential. It’s not as if government officials considered the collateral damage to be inflicted on the economy, society, and health – not all health problems are caused by covid – by the lockdowns and then rationally concluded that the benefits of locking down outweighed these costs. No. The collateral damages were ignored. As the New York Times‘s Joe Nocera and Vanity Fair‘s Bethany McLean – authors of the just-released The Big Fail – write, “But there was never any science behind lockdowns – not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.”1 In no universe is such a policy prudent.

Nor were lockdowns “essential”. As Nocera and McLean note,

    … the weight of the evidence seems to be with those who say that lockdowns did not save many lives. By our count, there are at least 50 studies that come to the same conclusion. After The Big Fail went to press, The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust – the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”.)

Second, the lockdowns were, contra Mr. Orrell’s claim, utterly unprecedented. Isolating individuals known to be infected, such as Typhoid Mary, is a categorically different measure than locking down whole societies. Such lockdowns were never used until China locked Wuhan down in early 2020. Here again are Nocera and McLean: “On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days – two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it ‘unprecedented in public health history’.”

It’s jarring to encounter in an essay that features many excellent arguments – as Mr. Orrell’s does – such irrational and utterly uninformed claims as Mr. Orrell offers about lockdowns.

Donald J. Boudreaux, responding to an article by Brent Orrell in Law & Liberty, 2023-10-31.


January 12, 2024

“… normal people no longer trust experts to any great degree”

Theophilus Chilton explains why the imprimatur of “the experts” is a rapidly diminishing value:

One explanation for the rise of midwittery and academic mediocrity in America directly connects to the “everybody should go to college” mantra that has become a common platitude. During the period of America’s rise to world superpower, going to college was reserved for a small minority of higher IQ Americans who attended under a relatively meritocratic regime. The quality of these graduates, however, was quite high and these were the “White men with slide rules” who built Hoover Dam, put a man on the moon, and could keep Boeing passenger jets from losing their doors halfway through a flight. As the bar has been lowered and the ranks of Gender and Queer Studies programs have been filled, the quality of college students has declined precipitously. One recent study shows that the average IQ of college students has dropped to the point where it is basically on par with the average for the general population as a whole.

Another area where this comes into play is with the replication crisis in science. For those who haven’t heard, the results from an increasingly large number of scientific studies, including many that have been used to have a direct impact on our lives, cannot be reproduced by other workers in the relevant fields. Obviously, this is a problem because being able to replicate other scientists’ results is sort of central to that whole scientific method thing. If you can’t do this, then your results really aren’t any more “scientific” than your Aunt Gertie’s internet searches.

As with other areas of increasing sociotechnical incompetency, some of this is diversity-driven. But not wholly so, by any means. Indeed, I’d say that most of it is due to the simple fact that bad science will always be unable to be consistently replicated. Much of this is because of bad experimental design and other technical matters like that. The rest is due to bad experimental design, etc., caused by overarching ideological drivers that operate on flawed assumptions that create bad experimentation and which lead to things like cherry-picking data to give results that the scientists (or, more often, those funding them) want to publish. After all, “science” carries a lot of moral and intellectual authority in the modern world, and that authority is what is really being purchased.

It’s no secret that Big Science is agenda-driven and definitely reflects Regime priorities. So whenever you see “New study shows the genetic origins of homosexuality” or “Latest data indicates trooning your kid improves their health by 768%,” that’s what is going on. REAL science is not on display. And don’t even get started on global warming, with its preselected, computer-generated “data” sets that have little reflection on actual, observable natural phenomena.

“Butbutbutbut this is all peer-reviewed!! 97% of scientists agree!!” The latter assertion is usually dubious, at best. The former, on the other hand, is irrelevant. Peer-reviewing has stopped being a useful measure for weeding out spurious theories and results and is now merely a way to put a Regime stamp of approval on desired result. But that’s okay because the “we love science” crowd flat out ignores data that contradict their presuppositions anywise, meaning they go from doing science to doing ideology (e.g. rejecting human biodiversity, etc.). This sort of thing was what drove the idiotic responses to COVID-19 a few years ago, and is what is still inducing midwits to gum up the works with outdated “science” that they’re not smart enough to move past.

If you want a succinct definition of “scientism,” it might be this – A belief system in which science is accorded intellectual abilities far beyond what the scientific method is capable of by people whose intellectual abilities are far below being able to understand what the scientific method even is.

January 10, 2024

The unexpected rise in “Unknown Cause”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Steyn rounds up some interesting details on that long-forgotten-by-the-media pandemic and corresponding heavy-handed government interventions that made things so much worse:

The obvious problem with appeals to authority, at least for anyone more sentient than an earthworm, is that across the western world the last four years have been one giant appeal to authority – and the result of mortgaging the entirety of human existence to the expert class is the rubble all around. Just for starters:

US scientists held secret talks with Covid ‘Batwoman’ amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly

You don’t say! When would that have been? Oh:

…just before pandemic

Well, there’s a surprise!

    A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.

You got that right. Wuhan is the virological equivalent of a CIA black site in Pakistan: it’s where the Deep State goes to do the stuff it can’t do in suburban Virginia.

So how’s that working out for the planet? Way back in 2022, The Mark Steyn Show reported that “Unknown Cause” was now the leading cause of death in Alberta. According to the somewhat lethargic lads at Statistics Canada, taking eighteen month to catch up with yours truly, that same year it was the fourth leading cause of death across the entire country. “Unknown Cause” is rampaging from Nunavut igloos to the Hamas branch office in Montreal: Between 2019 and 2022, it was up almost five hundred per cent.

Does “Unknown Cause” have an awareness-raising ribbon like Aids or breast cancer? Are there any celebs who’d like to headline a gala fundraiser or do an all-star pop anthem?

Apparently not. Gee, it’s almost as if taking too great an interest in “Unknown Cause” can lead to a bad case of cancer of the career. Nevertheless, the official StatsCan numbers are, to put it at its mildest, odd. By the end of 2022, Canada was one of the most jabbed nations on earth, with a Covid vaccination rate of ninety-one per cent, the highest in the G7, by some distance (UK and US both at eighty per cent).

And yet, if these government numbers are to be believed, something very strange happened. In the most jabbed member of the G7, Covid deaths went up. As The Western Standard‘s Joseph Fournier noticed, while almost nobody else did, Covid deaths per annum across the Deathbed Dominion shot up 25 per cent from the days of curfews, and arrests for playing open-air hockey:

    2020 15,890

    2021 14,466

    2022 19,716

So, in Jabba Jabba Central, more people died of Covid in the most recent annual round-up than at the height of the pandemic. In fact, on those numbers, Canada has yet to reach “the height of the pandemic”. Here’s another striking feature – again, direct from Statistics Canada:

    During the first year of the pandemic, older Canadians (65 years of age and older) accounted for 94.1% of COVID-19 deaths, while those aged 45 to 64 years accounted for 5.3%. In 2021, while the number of COVID-19 deaths among individuals aged 65 years and older (82.0%) remained high, the proportion of deaths among those aged 45 to 64 years nearly tripled to 15.5%.

So, in the most vaxxed nation of the G7, middle-aged persons account for three times the proportion of Covid deaths than they did at “the height of the pandemic”.

Like I said: odd.

Canadian life expectancy? Down. Oh, just by four months or so. But that’s three times the size of last year’s drop.

Excess mortality? Indeed: In 2019 the age-standardised death rate was 830.5 per 100,000 people. In 2022 it was 972.5. As I’ve pointed out a gazillion times on telly, that’s the opposite of what’s meant to happen post-pandemic: After the Spanish Flu, the mortality rate fell because people who would otherwise have died in 1924 had already died in 1919. That phenomenon is visible in Eastern Europe, but nowhere in the Dominion of Death.

Last year I mentioned en passant to my friend Naomi Wolf that the Covid vaccines were beginning to remind me of the scandals of her old chum Bill Clinton: one such can do a politician in, but, if you have (as Slick Willy did) a multitude of ’em, who can follow it all? If Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca just caused, say, myocarditis, maybe people would find it easier to focus on. Instead, it causes myocarditis in men and infertility in women and, if you manage to dodge the latter, the mRNA shows up in newborn babies; it brings on Guillain–Barré syndrome and Ramsay Hunt syndrome and lightning-speed turbo-cancers. Alternatively, you could get a dose of the SADS and drop dead on stage or on the footie pitch, or at home watching the telly. It’s a lot to keep track of.

Or maybe, as in Alberta, you just die of … whatever. And nobody cares to find out.

January 4, 2024

“It is difficult to understand why our politicians are not locked up for life after successful prosecution for crimes against humanity”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Part nine of Paul Weston‘s “beginner’s guide to Covid”:

Lockdown was never referred to as “lockdown” in March 2020. We were “asked” to stay at home for a few weeks, thus allowing our health services to get up to speed without being swamped. As we now know, a few weeks became months became 2021.

I simply cannot believe this was not planned. The logistics involved in keeping a country afloat after closing down the economy are extremely complicated. Months – if not years – of planning must have gone into it.

One of the strangest things about the first lockdown in the UK was the enforcement date of March 26, one week after the government declared on March 19 that Covid-19 was being downgraded from a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID). The reason given for the downgrade was a low mortality rate …

Anyway, the world locked down. When it became apparent the lockdowns were going to stay in place until a miracle vaccine was discovered, the governments promised us that detailed cost/benefit analyses would be conducted. They never were. But they very much should have been.

The principal reason they should is all to do with deaths. Closing down the country also meant partially closing down health services to non-Covid patients. Inculcating fear meant many people were too scared to go anywhere near a hospital. Patients with cancer and heart problems stayed away, voluntarily or involuntarily. Many died as a result.

On July 19 2020, the Daily Telegraph published an article based on Office for National Statistics figures claiming that 200,000 people could die (mid to long term) in the UK due to lockdowns. Similar figures were published in countries all around the world.

Here is a brutal truth. Governments which locked down essentially stated the following: “We are going to murder XYZ thousand people. We undertake this crime because we think we might save other people from Covid-19 deaths.”

Even more remarkably, the death rates were completely normal before lockdowns were initiated. Lockdowns were not the forced result of having to deal with large numbers of deaths. Rather, large numbers of deaths were the forced result of government-ordained lockdowns. It is difficult to understand why our politicians are not locked up for life after successful prosecution for crimes against humanity.

December 13, 2023

Ontario discovers that even “great ideas” with the “best of intentions” sometimes go wrong

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Adam Zivo reports on Ontario’s “safe supply” drug program running into another one of those pesky human nature problems that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen:

Image courtesy of Meme Generator

New research from Ontario has yielded further evidence that Canada’s “safer supply” drug programs are being widely defrauded and putting addicts’ lives at risk.

These programs claim to reduce overdoses and deaths by providing drug users with pharmaceutical alternatives to potentially tainted illicit substances. In Canada, that typically means distributing large volumes of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin, in the hope of reducing consumption of illicit fentanyl.

Addiction experts have widely reported that, based on their clinical experiences, drug users regularly trade or sell (“divert”) some (perhaps much) of their safer supply on the black market to fund the purchase of stronger substances. This has flooded some communities with hydromorphone, crashing its street price by up to 95 per cent over the past three years while spurring new addictions, especially among youth.

The federal government denies that these problems exist and has said that any evidence of harm is “anecdotal” — but two addiction experts working in a hospital in London, Ontario recently used patient data to show that the problem is indeed very real.

Dr. Sharon Koivu and Allison Mackinley (a nurse practitioner) examined the charts of 200 patients who had been referred to Victoria Hospital’s addiction medicine consultation service between January and June 2023.

The review showed that 32 per cent of patients who were not in a safer supply program had self-reported using diverted hydromorphone — the vast majority of these patients indicated that their hydromorphone came from purchasing drugs provided to someone else as part of a safer supply program.

“It was more common for them to actually specify safer supply than to say they didn’t know the source,” said Dr. Koivu in an interview. “They said things like, ‘The person in the apartment beside me goes and picks up her safer supply and when she comes back I get 20 of her pills’. It was quite specific.”

Diversion was not the only problem that was validated.

The chart data suggested that safer supply clients were roughly five-to-10 times more likely to be hospitalized than drug users receiving traditional, evidence-based addiction medications, such as methadone or buprenorphine (these medications are known as “opioid agonist therapy“, or “OAT”). Compared to OAT patients, drug users on safer supply were more than 15 times more likely to be hospitalized for serious infections.

These findings were so concerning that when a group of 35 addiction physicians recently wrote an open letter calling upon the federal government to reform safer supply, they included this data in their accompanying evidence brief.

(This chart, included in a recent evidence brief, compares the number of hospitalized patients with the number of drug users in London, Ontario who receive safer supply (250), methadone (2,000), and buprenorphine (300).)

Safer supply patients also had a slightly higher hospitalization rate, and only slightly lower infection rate, than patients who were receiving no addiction treatment at all, which suggests that the health benefits of safer supply may actually be negligible.

Dr. Koivu said that the hospitalization rate seen among safer supply patients was “alarmingly high” considering that safer supply programs provide significant wraparound supports (i.e. access to doctors, housing and social assistance) in conjunction with free hydromorphone. Any patient who receives such supports should see substantially improved health outcomes.

December 9, 2023

All those (officially unexplained) “excess” mortalities

Filed under: Australia, Europe, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Steyn discusses European and Antipodean statistical reports that echo what Maxime Bernier was talking about the other day on the as-yet officially unexplained huge rise in “excess mortality” since the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

We are now three years into the administration of the Covid vaccines, and we have many startling statistical anomalies, including the most basic one of all: a huge mound of extra corpses. Per the EU’s official statistics agency:

    Among the eighteen EU Member States that recorded excess deaths, the highest rates were in Cyprus (13.9%), Finland (13.4%), the Netherlands (12.7%) and Ireland (12.5%).

Those percentages are sufficiently high that in the Netherlands, formerly one of the healthiest nations on earth, they’re reducing life expectancy. The ongoing excess deaths are at odds with the normal post-pandemic pattern, such as the Spanish Flu a century ago. The intro to this new scientific paper sets out what’s meant to be happening:

    Our approach takes into account age and gender, but also under-mortality that you would expect after a period of excess mortality.

“Under-mortality” occurs because, if the Spanish Flu killed you prematurely in 1920, you weren’t around to die when you otherwise would have done in 1924. Hence, excess mortality is followed by under-mortality. So:

    If this under-mortality does not seem to be happening, it is actually hidden excess mortality.

That’s an important point. What Eurostat identifies as an excess mortality rate in Ireland of 12.5 per cent is, as a practical matter, actually higher – because it should be measured against not the pre-Covid baseline but the under-mortality one would have expected four years on. So persistent excess mortality is deeply weird, and, unlike those killed by the virus (where the median age of death by Covid is above most developed nations’ life expectancy), the extra deaths, as we have discussed on The Mark Steyn Show, are skewed towards the young and middle-aged:

    We note that excess mortality in the Netherlands remains consistently high during 2020-2022 and has shifted from high to low age and towards men.

In other words, it’s not a general trend of excess deaths, but something more particular. Which, in a normal environment, would suggest something particular is causing it. Aside from excess deaths in “low age”, we also have excess deaths at no age – the babies who aren’t being born. The western world’s jabbed and re-jabbed citizenry has seen a catastrophic slump in newborns. Scandinavia:

    The whole region reported sharp declines in fertility rates in 2022. Finland had the lowest fertility rate of all Nordic countries, 1.32 children. This is also the lowest Finnish rate since 1776 when monitoring of fertility rates first started.

Incidentally, that Finnish rate – of 1.3 children per woman – is what demographers call “lowest-low fertility”, from which no society has ever recovered.

Fortunately for officialdom, there was enough Covid circulating in Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, etc that the ever higher mountain of corpses can be shrugged off as most likely “Long Covid” or maybe, if necessary, “Extra-Long Covid”. In the Antipodes, they can’t get away with that. Australia and New Zealand enacted some of the most draconian public-health measures on the planet, and in effect quarantined their entire nations. As a result, pre-Omicron they had all but negligible accounts of Covid. But they obediently submitted themselves to the mass vaccination regime. And, whaddaya know, they too have extraordinary rates of excess death.

Clare Craig, a favourite guest of The Mark Steyn Show, has published a detailed analysis of the post-vaccination years Down Under. It makes for sober reading.

In 2021, for example, they had officially 1,224 deaths from Covid.

But also in 2021 – the first full year of the vaccines – they had 876 excess deaths from ischaemic heart disease alone. Plus another 583 excess deaths from other cardiac diseases.

Death by ischaemic heart disease had been in decline in Australia in the pre-vaccine years, but, having shot up in 2021, it went up even further in 2022. (Same trend with strokes.) So, having shut down the country for those 1,224 Covid deaths, you would think the public health bureaucracy might show a smidgeonette of interest in those 1,359 excess cardiac deaths.

But apparently not.

Now, across the Tasman Sea, we have a Kiwi whistleblower, Barry Young, who has released an avalanche of data with some quite disturbing takeaways that I referenced on Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A. I was careful to qualify my remarks with a lot of “ifs”, but our friend Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University, has taken a look and The Conservative Woman has published his findings. I see that on the Internet the kneejerk reaction was that Mr Young had simply leaked a lot of vaccination stuff from the old folks’ homes where the Covid centenarians would have died anyway. So it’s a biased sample.

In reality, it does not appear to be a “sample” at all:

    [Steve Kirsch] says that there are widespread misunderstandings about the data and it is not biased. For a start he says that the dataset is the complete set of ‘pay-per-dose’ vaccination records and therefore there is no biased sampling at all. He says:

    “The people within the group is representative of the total population. There are 2.2 million people in the group, and there are 4 million records. Each of those records is a Vaccination Record.”

2.2 million is over forty per cent of the population of New Zealand. That’s some “sample”. Nevertheless, Professor Fenton is being scrupulously cautious:

    Even accounting for inevitable “survivor bias” (the more jabs a person gets, the quicker they are likely to die after their last jab) there was some evidence of increased risk the more doses a person gets. Moreover, given Steve’s comments about the datatset being the complete set of “pay-per-dose” vaccination records, this conclusion seems robust even if there were a biased proportion of vaccinee deaths in the dataset. Also (as per my above quote in Steve’s presentation) I felt that the data provided further support for the hypothesis that the vaccine was increasing the mortality rate in the older population (something which we had already concluded based on the most recent ONS data).

It’s interesting that such questions never come up at Britain’s official “Covid inquiry” which is increasingly risible in its palpable determination to find that the only mistake that was made was not to lock down harder and faster.

The other takeaway mentioned by Professor Fenton is the fatality rate of individual batches. Take a look at this handy graph:

I suppose it would be possible to argue that all 711 jabs of Batch #1 were administered to residents of the Shady Acres Retirement Home for Centenarians with Stage Four Ebola. But it’s difficult to make the same case with Batch #62 which went into the arms of 18,173 New Zealanders and killed 831 of them. Which, all by itself, is two hundred times the country’s official death toll from the vaccines. Which is to say, according to His Majesty’s Government in Wellington, precisely four Kiwis are dead of the vax.

December 8, 2023

“An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are”

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Snowden notes the proliferation of media and public advocacy groups warning us about “junk food”:

On Monday, the front page of The Times led with a speech from Henry Dimbleby and a cost-of-obesity estimate from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — the perfect start to the week for any Times reader. According to Sir Tony’s think tank, “the effect on national productivity from excess weight is nine times bigger than previously thought”. An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are (the previous estimate only came out last year), but Mr Dimbleby saw it as further proof that food should be treated like smoking.

    The NHS “will suck all the money out of the other public services” while “at the same time, economic growth and tax revenue will stagnate. We will end up both a sick and impoverished nation,” Dimbleby will warn.

Would it be unfair to point out that the USA has much higher rates of obesity than the UK and also has much higher GDP growth?

As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.

Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.

Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.

The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.

Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.

Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …

    The findings come after an analysis found this week that Britain’s weight problem is costing the state almost £100 billion a year.

December 7, 2023

Burying the lede … and the victims

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier sent out a fundraising letter to PPC supporters that included some disturbing new data from Statistics Canada:

As usual, the biggest news in Canada is being ignored by all of our crooked establishment politicians and the dishonest corporate media.

Last week Statistics Canada released a report on deaths in Canada (causes of death, overall life expectancy, etc), which include the latest data from 2022.

I’m not a doctor, a scientist, or even a statistician, but when I saw the table below, a few things jumped out at me.

First, deaths related to covid-19 (check the fourth line) were at an all-time high in 2022!

Can you believe that? There were more covid deaths in 2022 than the two years before.

And yet that same year saw the end of mask mandates, vaccine passports, and most covid measures.

For two years the elites blasted us with propaganda and warped our society around this mild illness, but when deaths were rising, they were silent. Bizarre!

To be clear, I am not advocating for any of these unnecessary draconian restrictions to return, I am just demanding some honesty and consistency from our morally corrupt politicians, public health officials, and media!

It has never been so obvious that covid restrictions were not scientific, they were just about politics and control.

But the most disturbing part is what I have circled at the bottom of the table. Deaths with “ill-defined or unspecified causes” have been steadily increasing since 2020.

These deaths have almost TRIPLED since 2020 from 6,841 to 16,043 in 2022.

What could be causing this? What happened in 2021 that could have caused this explosion of unexplained deaths over the last 2 years?

An experimental pharmaceutical product was rushed to market and forced on Canadian society, is what happened.

They told us it was “safe and effective” but over the last few years we have learned more and more about how that covid shot was neither.

Now more and more Canadians are dying from causes very likely related to the covid shot.

And where is the accountability?!

There is no admission of any possible error on the part of the government. On the contrary, it’s still encouraging everyone to get boosters!

There are no demands for an inquiry by the opposition parties to investigate the potential risks associated with the covid jab.

There are no investigative journalists trying to get to the bottom of one of the biggest medical scandals in Canadian history.

No! They’re just trying to sweep it under the rug and move on!

We can’t wait for the political establishment to hold itself to account. We saw throughout the covid years that the government, the opposition, and the media will all work together to protect themselves and each other.

And we can’t let them get away with it!

October 26, 2023

“… despite all the evidence, British people still believe the NHS is the single best thing about Britain”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The picture Jess Gill paints of Britain’s National Health Service is equally true of Canada’s various provincially run socialized medical systems, and largely for the same reasons:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

It’s clear that Britain’s National Health Service is failing. 7.6 million people are on a waiting list, and 41% of them say their health has gotten worse while waiting for treatment. Compounding the problem, the UK has significantly fewer hospital beds, doctors, nurses, CT scanners, and MRI units than the OECD average. Furthemore, the UK has the second-highest rate of treatable deaths in Western Europe.

Yet despite all the evidence, British people still believe the NHS is the single best thing about Britain. From the country clapping outside their houses to “thank our NHS” during the Covid-19 pandemic, to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition attending a mass ceremony to celebrate the NHS’s 75th anniversary, praise for this institution is everywhere.

Even though it’s self-evident the emperor has no clothes, the NHS is treated like a sacred cow. This begs the question: why are people so loyal to a system that is clearly failing them?

There is a prevalent conspiracy theory that the NHS is being intentionally underfunded by the Conservative Government so that the resulting poor outcomes will provide justification for them to privatize it and transform it into the American model of healthcare. This theory is pushed by the establishment: from senior members of the British Medical Association, journalists, and Members of Parliament.

This theory achieves two things. One, it shifts blame for poor outcomes away from the NHS as a system itself and toward the politicians in power. Two, it frames the debate with the assumption that privatization is a bad thing, causing any meaningful reform to be met with fear mongering.

This narrative has caused a massive issue for opponents of the NHS as there are multiple levels of misleading rhetoric. The fact of the matter is that the Conservatives are not privatizing or underfunding the NHS. Furthermore, whether it be a fully privatized system or even the mixed system as seen in other European countries, free-market reform would significantly help patients and doctors.

October 22, 2023

A lawyer in “deep blue” Pennsylvania discovers that elected bodies don’t have to listen to the voters

Chris Bray on the details of a case from Pennsylvania where an active and involved parent tried to get answers from the elected school board on how they justified imposing masking requirements without a shred of legal power to do so:

In December of 2021, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that officials in that state had implemented mask mandates that they had no legal authority to impose. The decision in Corman v. Beam is not written in stirring language, and makes no bold declarations about truth, freedom, and the American way; it’s a workmanlike examination of statutory language, quite dull to read. Test me on that characterization, if you want. But the court concluded, importantly, that the mandate had been invalid ab initio — not from the moment the court struck it down, but rather from the moment it was issued. Mask mandates had never been enforceable in Pennsylvania.

In an affluent, deep blue community in the Philadelphia suburbs, a lawyer and parent named Chad Williams took the ruling as vindication. With four children in the local schools, he’d been telling school officials — clearly and often — that they had no legal authority to require masks on campus. To say that they hadn’t listened would be an understatement.

In August of 2020, during a Zoom meeting to decide on in-person school for the soon-to-begin school year, the nine-member Unionville-Chadds Ford school board muted Williams when he asked about the legal basis for the choice.

Repeating the performance, school board members cut the microphones and walked out of one of their own subsequent meetings, in August of 2021, to avoid listening to Williams when he didn’t stop speaking at the three-minute mark during their public comment session. Other parents concerned about forced masking for children received a similarly warm reception. The school board voted unanimously that same night to again impose a mask mandate on their campuses for the new school year.

For Williams, the repeated experience was a shock. He was an experienced lawyer, a parent, an established member of the community, and a volunteer coach at the high school — and he couldn’t get anyone to listen to a reasonable question. He asked his school board to explain the legal basis for a new policy, and “the school board president just cut me off.” Officials were acting in lockstep, without apparent authority, and refusing to explain their choices. “They just wouldn’t answer,” Williams says. Many of us have had this experience.

The school district finally dropped its mask mandate in March of 2022, after the decision from the state Supreme Court. And that was the end — except for one thing. A formal policy of the Unionville-Chadds Ford School District, Policy 906, establishes “a fair and impartial method” for the examination of parent complaints. You can find that policy here, in the section labeled “Community”. The policy is detailed and unambiguous, and starts requiring written reports after the failure of early and informal stages of resolution:

    Third Level – If a satisfactory solution is not achieved by discussion with the building principal or immediate supervisor, a conference shall be scheduled with the Superintendent or designee. The principal or supervisor shall provide to the Superintendent or designee a report that includes the specific nature of the complaint, brief statement of relevant facts, how the complainant has been affected adversely, the action requested, and the reasons why such action should be taken or not taken.

    Fourth Level – Should the matter not be resolved by the Superintendent or designee or is beyond his/her authority and requires Board action, the Superintendent or designee shall provide the Board with a complete report.

    Final Level – After reviewing all information relative to the complaint, the Board shall provide the complainant with its written decision and may grant a hearing before the Board or a committee of the Board.

Williams used Policy 906 to ask the school board to think about what it had done, conducting an independent review of its policy decisions during the pandemic. Why had school officials implemented policies they had no legal authority to impose? Why had they refused to discuss or address parent questions? Why had they stonewalled requests for documents and information — not only from parents, but from a state senator who took an interest in the matter? Williams asked for an apology and “changes in oversight” to prevent a recurrence of unlawful and unexplained policy decisions, using formal school district policy that requires the district to act on complaints.

They haven’t bothered. The Unionville-Chadds Ford School District continues to ignore Williams, not responding to his complaints or opening the inquiry their own policy requires them to pursue. He’s had one sort-of response: In an exchange over the handling of the complaint, the district’s lawyers, at a private law firm, threatened him with legal action — a threat they so far haven’t made good. But from school district officials, the only response to three years of questions is unbroken silence.

October 18, 2023

The greatest sin of Twit-, er, I mean “X” is that it allowed us hoi polloi to peek behind the curtains of governments, universities, and major corporations

The latest book review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf begins with a brilliant explanation for the coming fall of western civilization at the hands of Twit-, er, I mean “X”:

The greatest gift bestowed by admittance to elite institutions is that you stop being overawed by them. For instance, there was a time when upon hearing “so-and-so is a Rhodes Scholar”, I would have assumed that so-and-so was a very impressive person indeed. Nowadays I know quite a lot of former Rhodes Scholars, and have seen firsthand that some of them are extremely mediocre individuals, so meeting a new one doesn’t phase me much. My own cursus honorum through America’s centers of prestige has been slow and circuitous, which means I’ve gotten to enjoy progressive disenchantment with the centers of power. Trust me, you folks aren’t missing much.

I have a theory that this is why Twitter has been so destabilizing to so many societies, and why it may yet be the end of ours. Twitter offers a peek behind the curtain — not just to a lucky few,1 but to everybody. We’re used to elected officials acting like buffoons, but on Twitter you can see our real rulers humiliating themselves. Tech moguls, four-star generals, cultural tastemakers, foundation trustees, former heads of spy agencies, all of them behaving like insane idiots, posting their most vapid thoughts, and getting in petty fights with “VapeGroyper420.” There’s a reason most monarchies have made lèse-majesté a crime, there’s a level at which no regime can survive unless everybody pretends that the rulers are demigods. To have the kings be revealed as mere men who bleed, panic, and have tawdry love affairs is to rock the monarchic regime at its foundations. But Twitter is worse than that, it’s like a hidden camera in the king’s bedroom, but they do it to themselves. Moreover it seems likely that regimes like ours which legitimate themselves with a meritocratic justification are especially fragile to this form of disenchantment.

This is also why the COVID pandemic was so damaging to our government’s legitimacy. I’ve been inside elite institutions of many different sorts, and discovered the horrible truth that most of the people in them are just ordinary people making it up as they go along, but one place I hadn’t quite made it yet was the top of our disease control agencies.2 So in a bit of naïveté analogous to Gell-Mann amnesia, I just assumed that there was some secret wing of the Centers for Disease Control which housed men-in-black who would rappel out of helicopters and summarily execute everybody in Wuhan who had ever touched a bat. And I was genuinely a little bit surprised and disappointed when instead they were caught with their pants down, and a bunch of weirdos on the internet turned out to be the real experts (the silver lining to this is that now we all get to be amateur scientists).

So much for public health. But if there’s one institution which still manages to shroud itself in mystery while secretly pulling all the strings, surely it’s the Federal Reserve. You can tell people take it seriously because of all the conspiracy theories that surround it (conspiracy theories are the highest form of flattery). And there’s a lot to get conspiratorial about — the Fed manages to combine two things that rarely go together but which both impress people: technocratic mastery and arcane ritual. The Fed employs a research staff of thousands which meticulously gather and analyze data about every aspect of the economy, and they have an Open Market Committee whose meeting minutes are laden with nuanced double-meanings that would make a Ming dynasty courtier blush, and which are accordingly parsed with an attention to detail once reserved for Politburo speeches.

And they also control all of our money! Is it any wonder that people go a little bit crazy whenever they think about the Fed? I can’t think of a more natural target for the recurring cycles of ineffectual populist ire that characterize American politics. So it is with great regret that I’m here to report that they, too, are making it all up as they go along.


    1. And that lucky few have much to gain by maintaining the charade. A stable ruling class is one that has much to offer potential class traitors, so they don’t get any ideas. It’s when the goodies dry up, whether due to elite overproduction or to a real reduction in the spoils available, that things fall apart.

    2. That’s not quite true: I did once attend an invite-only conference at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The food was awful, and I wasn’t even able to find the lab where they created crack cocaine, HIV, and Lyme disease.

September 22, 2023

Political psychosis and the never-ending “narrative”

Chris Bray points out several instances of the legacy media continuing to push “the narrative” despite any inconvenient facts that cast doubt on the official story:

Every day is opposite day. Every day is a bucket of fake. The narrative is the narrative; once it’s established, nothing penetrates it. It rattles on down the road, impervious to inputs, convinced of its own truth without regard to events outside the shell. Psychologists have a term for this.

So Politico warns this week that faith in vaccines is falling, and anti-vaxxer narratives are “on the rise.” Sample paragraph, this one describing Health Secretary Xavier Becerra:

The summer of 2023, a claim made in June and credulously repeated in the bottom half of September: If you take Covid vaccines, you can’t get sick, but if you don’t take Covid vaccines, you die. Government leaders who don’t push the 7th and 8th doses of the mRNA injections “choose not to take care of their people”.

[…]

But the narrative rolls on, unperturbed. If you’re dying of Covid, it’s because you hesitated to get your 7,369th dose, anti-vaxxer! Maybe you should have stopped being such a Nazi! In the news media, it’s 2021 forever, and the virtuous science-lovers are rolling up their sleeves to rebuke the science-hating morons, who will not survive the … okay, well, who will not survive the next … okay, well, YOU’LL PROBABLY DIE AT SOME POINT because you didn’t get it. You’re facing a winter of severe illness and death by 2054, at the latest. No amount of evidence will force the storytellers to stop telling this story. It’s the story, so they tell it. The Politico thing ends by quoting Peter Hotez, by the way, as you knew it would.

Similarly, The Atlantic warns now that Donald Trump was a time bomb who kept nearly going off for four years, and only the courage of General Mark Milley kept him under control. Look at the premise at the top of the piece: Disobeying, resisting, and undermining the President of the United States, a military officer protected the Constitution.

How well does the story parse the constitutional issues at stake? This well:

The military decided to have an abortion travel policy, and to fund it. A senator is now interfering in military policy and the unilateral executive appropriations of the Department of Defense, a sign of the ongoing constitutional crisis that began with Trump. Typically, you see, in our constitutional order, the military does whatever it wants, and spends money on its own authority however it feels like spending it, but Tuberville is engaging in the “unprecedented” act of suggesting that Congress should decide how to appropriate federal funds and regulate the armed forces, which means that he hates the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 would like a word, in this obviously extremist description of the authority of Congress:

    To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

    To provide and maintain a Navy;

    To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

And so on. Why is Tommy Tuberville being such a Nazi?

September 17, 2023

QotD: One of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history

[In the 1960s and 70s, mob-controlled cigarette smuggling seriously cut into tobacco taxes.] What the PTB should’ve done at that point, of course, was simply repealed the taxes, learned to live within their means, and stopped trying to nag their citizens into good behavior …

Ok, ok, is everyone done laughing yet? Go ahead, get it all out of your system; I’ll wait. Everyone back? Ok, moving on:

What the PTB actually did, of course, was a multi-level propaganda campaign. It was brilliant. It took a few years, of course, but the evidence is all around you. Quick: When’s the last time you saw anyone smoking in a mainstream movie? Even period films about the Forties, say — the ones where they take infinite pains to get just the right period-appropriate shade of Formica on the diner’s countertops — ignore the obvious historical reality of people puffing away like chimneys.

Indeed, it’s all but universal now, and has been for a long time, that characters who smoke are the bad guys.

Here again, look at college kids. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but it’s really the best example I know of the phenomenon. Any time I taught the Early Modern period, I had to mention the massive economic and cultural effects of tobacco. So I encouraged kids to try it for themselves — everyone here is over 18, I said, so it’s perfectly legal. Want to know what all the hype was about? Just run down to the gas station, buy a pack, and light one up!

Around the turn of the century, I always had a few smokers in class, so I could say “bum one off So-and-So”. Even that would get me a few uneasy chuckles. A few years later, and not only were there no smokers in my classes, but the kids would be actively uncomfortable with the suggestion. By the end of my teaching career, when I couldn’t care less anymore, I was openly taunting them about it. You people have no problem with potheads, I’d say. I bet well over half of you are on Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax, Klonopin, shit that’s bad for you, in ways we don’t even understand yet, but you’re balking at one cigarette? It’s unsafe? Oh, come on, some of you are going to leave here and go light up a completely unfiltered ditch weed, and as for the rest of you, you know all about crazy sex fetishes I’ve never even heard of. You get blackout drunk at the football games every weekend, but oh no, you can’t have one cigarette, it’s so unhealthy.

Such is the power of propaganda, and it’s the only repression that works for the PTB when they’ve truly set their faces against a behavior …

Severian, “The Mob, Faux-tism, and the Ever-Rising Costs of Compliance”, Founding Questions, 2021-02-02.

September 16, 2023

Public health officials don’t seem to realize just how badly they’ve damaged their credibility

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the apparantly huge gap between how ordinary Canadians view their public health officials and how those officials think they’re viewed:

Throughout the pandemic, polls have shown a decline in confidence in public health: Researchers at McMaster University and Vox Pop Labs found that in March 2020, 59 per cent of Canadians had “a great deal of trust” in public health officials. Two years later that had plummeted to 37 per cent.

We have recently enjoyed months of being able to ignore COVID-19. Even the relentlessly, uniquely pessimistic Canadian media seemed to have exhausted themselves. So I found it a bit jarring to see Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, suddenly back on the TV this week admonishing us to “get your mask ready” for fall and book yourself in for a booster. Dr. Kieran Moore, Tam’s counterpart at Queen’s Park, is due in the coming days to give Ontarians what will likely be a similar update.

If this year’s flu/RSV/COVID season is as bad as last, it will be fascinating to see how Canadians react. Perfervid opposition to masking and vaccination are minority positions: In the midst of last year’s autumn surge in childhood hospitalizations, a Nanos Research poll found 69 per cent of Canadians would support a return of mask mandates “if authorities deem(ed) it necessary”.

But are people ready to hear it, again, from the same public-health officials who have all-but destroyed their entire field in the last three years — seemingly without realizing it? It will be intriguing to see.

Tam’s original sins remain totally unexplained — at an official inquiry, for example, hint hint — never mind expiated. For days and weeks in early 2020, while our peer countries were closing borders and preparing for a pandemic, Tam assured us “the risk to Canada is low”. She lied that World Health Organization rules prohibited us from closing borders. She told us masks were worse than useless, and the only excuse anyone can offer is that she was fibbing to prevent Canadians from hoarding PPE. (I think she actually believed it. Either explanation is a firing offence.)

Remember the utterly incoherent advice the Public Health Agency of Canada provided to incoming travellers in the early days? Remember the built-to-fail, purely political quarantine hotels that Tam said weren’t necessary until they suddenly were — just as she said 14-day quarantine at home wasn’t necessary until it suddenly was? We were weeks if not months behind most of our peer countries. Regardless of your position on any given restriction, none of it made any sense.

September 12, 2023

Justin Trudeau should just stay away from India … it’s an ill-omened place for him

Filed under: Cancon, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Paul Wells on the latest subcontinental pratfall of Prime Minister Look-At-My-Socks:

Later, word came from India that Justin Trudeau’s airplane had malfunctioned, stranding him, one hopes only briefly. It’s always a drag when a politician’s vehicle turns into a metaphor so obvious it begs to go right into the headline. As for the cause of the breakdown, I’m no mechanic, but I’m gonna bet $20 on “The gods decided to smite Trudeau for hubris”. Here’s what the PM tweeted or xeeted before things started falling off his ride home:

One can imagine the other world leaders’ glee whenever this guy shows up. “Oh, it’s Justin Trudeau, here to push for greater ambition!” Shall we peer into their briefing binders? Let’s look at Canada’s performance on every single issue Trudeau mentions, in order.

On climate change, Canada ranks 58th of 63 jurisdictions in the global Climate Change Performance Index. The country page for Canada uses the words “very low” three times in the first two sentences.

On gender equality, the World Economic Forum (!) ranks Canada 30th behind a bunch of other G-20 members.

On global health, this article in Britain’s BMJ journal calls Canada “a high income country that frames itself as a global health leader yet became one of the most prominent hoarders of the limited global covid-19 vaccine supply”.

On inclusive growth, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has a composite indicator called the Inclusive Growth Index. Canada’s value is 64.1, just behind the United States (!) and Australia, further behind most of Europe, stomped by Norway at 76.9%.

On support for Ukraine, the German Kiel Institute think tank ranks Canada fifth in the world, and third as a share of GDP, for financial support; and 8th in the world, or 21st as a share of GDP, for military support.

Almost all of these results are easy enough to understand. A small number are quite honourable. But none reads to me as any kind of license to wander around, administering lessons to other countries. I just finished reading John Williams’ luminous 1965 novel about university life, Stoner. A minor character in the book mocks the lectures and his fellow students, and eventually stands unmasked as a poser who hasn’t done even the basic reading in his discipline. I found the character strangely familiar. You’d think that after nearly a decade in power, after the fiascos of the UN Security Council bid, the first India trip, the collegiate attempt to impress a schoolgirl with fake trees, the prime minister would have figured out that fewer and fewer people, at home or abroad, are persuaded by his talk.

But this is part of the Liberals’ problem, isn’t it. They still think their moves work. They keep announcing stuff — Digital adoption program! Growth fund! Investment tax credits! Indo-Pacific strategy! Special rapporteur! — and telling themselves Canadians would miss this stuff if it went away. Whereas it’s closer to the truth to say we can’t miss it because its effect was imperceptible when it showed up.

In a moment I’ve mentioned before because it fascinates me, the Liberals called their play a year ago, as soon as they knew they’d be facing Pierre Poilievre. “We are going to see two competing visions,” Randy Boissonault said in reply to Poilievre’s first Question Period question as the Conservative leader. The events of the parliamentary year would spontaneously construct a massive contrast ad. It was the oldest play in the book, first articulated by Pierre Trudeau’s staff 50 years ago: Don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. It doesn’t work as well if people decide they prefer the alternative. It really doesn’t work if the team running the play think it means, “We’re the almighty”.

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