Quotulatiousness

May 23, 2023

The Diamond Princess – the “worst case virus mill” during the Covid-19 pandemic

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

Dr. Todd Kenyon looks at the data from the situation onboard the Diamond Princess early in the pandemic:

Diamond Princess is a cruise ship owned and operated by Princess Cruises. She began operation in March 2004 and primarily cruises in Alaska during the summer and Asia in the winter along with Australia cruises. Diamond Princess and Sapphire Princess were both were built in Nagasaki, Japan by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Photo by Bernard Spragg, NZ via Wikimedia Commons.

The Diamond Princess cruise ship departed Japan on January 20, 2020. Five days later a passenger disembarked, later became ill and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection. On board this ship were 3,711 persons, of which 2,666 were passengers (median age of 69) and 1,045 were crew (median age of 36). Nearly half (48%) of the passengers were said to have underlying disease(s). Passengers and crew began testing positive with some becoming ill, but the passengers were not quarantined in their cabins until Feb 5. Until that time they had been engaging in a variety of typical social activities including shows, buffets and dances. Once quarantined (confined to cabins), most passengers shared cabins with 1 to 3 other passengers. Cabins used unfiltered ventilation and the crew continued their duties and mixed with passengers. Evacuation began in mid February and was completed by March 1.

A total of 712 individuals (19%) tested positive via PCR, and as many as 14 passengers were said to have died, though there are differing opinions as to how many of these deaths should be attributed to Covid. Except for one person in their late 60s, all deaths occurred in those over 70. Not one crew member died. Half of the deaths occurred several weeks after leaving the ship, so it is unclear if they actually died from infections caught onboard. Three ill passengers were given an experimental treatment of Remdesivir once hospitalised on shore; apparently all survived.

The Diamond Princess was termed a “virus mill” by one expert while another remarked that cruise ships are perfect environments for the propagation and spread of viruses. The quarantine procedures inflicted much duress on an already frail passenger base and may have done more harm than good. There was panic and confusion both among passengers and crew, and densely packed passengers sharing unfiltered ventilation were only allowed out of cabins every few days for an hour. Meanwhile the crew continued to prepare meals and mix with passengers, but otherwise were kept confined below the waterline in their cramped multi-resident quarters. Some passengers ignored the quarantine entirely. The so-called “Red Dawn” email discussions among government researchers in early 2020 described the DP as a “quarantine nightmare”. The DP was also termed by this group as representative of a large elderly care home (passengers). Based on all these observations, the DP event should provide a nearly worst case scenario for the first wave of Covid. The question is, how did New York City (NYC) fare versus this “worst case”, and what can we learn from the comparison?

We can start by looking at the infection rate on the DP: 25% of those over 60 and 9% of those under 60 were reportedly infected. On the DP, the case fatality rate (CFR) for those over 60 was 2.6%. This assumes that all 14 deaths of passengers were caused by a Covid-19 infection contracted while on the DP. On the other hand, the CFR for those under 60 years of age was 0.0%, since none in this age bracket died.

Diamond Princess mortality (scaled) compared to New York City all cause mortality. DP week 1 = first week quarantine imposed while NYC week 1 = first week of lockdown orders (week 12, 2020). DP fatalities are scaled based on relative populations of individuals over 65. It is unclear whether the DP fatalities at the tail end of the curve are attributable to C19 infection contracted months prior on the DP. NYC data: www.mortality.watch

May 7, 2023

QotD: The long-term instability of bison hunting on the Great Plains

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unlike in Mongolia, where there were large numbers of wild horses available for capture, it seems that most Native Americans on the Plains were reliant on trade or horse-raiding (that is, stealing horses from their neighbors) to maintain good horse stocks initially. In the southern plains (particularly areas under the Comanches and Kiowas), the warm year-round temperature and relatively infrequent snowfall allowed those tribes to eventually raise large herds of their own horses for hunting and as a trade good. While Mongolian horses know to dig in the snow to get the grass underneath, western horses generally do not do this, meaning that they have to be stall-fed in the winter. Consequently in the northern plains, horses remained a valuable trade good and a frequently object of warfare. In both cases, horses were too valuable to be casually eating all of the time and instead Isenberg notes that guarding horses carefully against theft and raiding was one of the key and most time-demanding tasks of life for those tribes which had them.

So to be clear, the Great Plains Native Americans are not living off of their horses, they are using their horses to live off of the bison. The subsistence system isn’t horse based, but bison-based.

At the same time, as Isenberg (op. cit. 70ff) makes clear that this pure-hunting nomadism still existed in a narrow edge of subsistence. From his description, it is hard not to conclude that the margin or survival was quite a bit narrower than the Eurasian Steppe subsistence system and it is also clear that group-size and population density were quite a bit lower. It’s also not clear that this system was fully sustainable in the long run; Pekka Hämäläinen argues in The Comanche Empire (2008) that Comanche bison hunting was potentially already unsustainable in the very long term by the 1830s. It worked well enough in wet years, but an extended drought (which the Plains are subjected to every so often) could cause catastrophic decline in bison numbers, as seems to have happened the 1840s and 1850s. A sequence of such events might have created a receding wave phenomenon among bison numbers – recovering after each dry spell, but a little less each time. Isenberg (op. cit., 83ff) also hints at this, pointing out that once one factors for things like natural predators, illness and so on, estimates of Native American bison hunting look to come dangerously close to tipping over sustainability, although Isenberg does not offer an opinion as to if they did tip over that line. Remember: complete reliance on bison hunting was new, not a centuries tested form of subsistence – if there was an equilibrium to be reached, it had not yet been reached.

In any event, the arrival of commercial bison hunting along with increasing markets for bison goods drove the entire system into a tailspin much faster than the Plains population would have alone. Bison numbers begin to collapse in the 1860s, wrecking the entire system about a century and a half after it had started. I find myself wondering if, given a longer time frame to experiment and adapt the new horses to the Great Plains if Native American society on the plains would have increasingly resembled the pastoral societies of the Eurasian Steppe, perhaps even domesticating and herding bison (as is now sometimes done!) or other animals. In any event, the westward expansion of the United States did not leave time for that system to emerge.

Consequently, the Native Americans of the plains make a bad match for the Dothraki in a lot of ways. They don’t maintain population density of the necessary scale. Isenberg (op. cit., 59) presents a chart of this, to assess the impact of the 1780s smallpox epidemics, noting that even before the epidemic, most of the Plains Native American groups numbered in the single-digit thousands, with just a couple over 10,000 individuals. The largest, the Sioux at 20,000, far less than what we see on the Eurasian Steppe and also less than the 40,000 warriors – and presumably c. 120-150,000 individuals that implies – that Khal Drogo alone supposedly has [in Game of Thrones]. They haven’t had access to the horse for nearly as long or have access to the vast supply of them or live in a part of the world where there are simply large herds of wild horses available. They haven’t had long-term direct trade access to major settled cities and their market goods (which expresses itself particularly in relatively low access to metal products). It is also clear that the Dothraki Sea lacks large herds of animals for the Dothraki to hunt as the Native Americans could hunt bison; there are the rare large predators like the hrakkar, but that is it. Mostly importantly, the Plains Native American subsistence system was still sharply in flux and may not have been sustainable in the long term, whereas the Dothraki have been living as they do, apparently for many centuries.

Bret Devereaux, “That Dothraki Horde, Part II: Subsistence on the Hoof”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-12-11.

April 17, 2023

The lingering pandemic of fear

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

Liz Hodgkinson on the pattern of fear that the state, media, and public health messaging instilled into so many people during the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The Stoics of ancient times believed that in many cases it was possible to control pain by thought alone. To achieve this, they stoically, as it were, accepted painful or unpleasant sensations, viewing them with studied indifference. As such, the pain often went away of its own accord, although to be fair they did use a painkiller known as theriac, which contained opium.

The opposite is also true, in that you can induce pain or disease by thought alone, causing acute and sometimes lasting physical symptoms. Although ancient and tribal societies understood that the power of suggestion can be so strong that it may make people well or ill, this seems to have been forgotten in modern, mechanistic medicine with its insistence on tests, scans, screens and so on.

Because of this, I am now wondering whether as many people would have gone down with Covid (or what passed for it) if, instead of a flu-like illness being ramped up as the worst and most dangerous disease ever to affect humankind, it had been ignored.

As it was, around 80 per cent – and it may have been more – of the world’s population were gripped by such a fear of the bug that they actually thought themselves into illness. Once the PCR test was introduced, people began testing themselves, sometimes hourly, and if the test showed positive they waited for symptoms to appear. More often than not, they obliged.

Then people became terrified to step out of the house without wearing a mask, even though all the evidence showed that these muzzles were more or less ineffective and that even the surgical-quality ones lasted only a couple of hours, at most. People were also nervous of getting close to anybody else, edging away if somebody came within a few feet of them. Only the other day, as I was in a queue waiting to pay for an item, a masked woman in front of me turned round and said crossly: “Do you mind not standing so close to me?” I wondered about making a quick riposte but decided that there was no way I could penetrate this kind of stupidity.

There was also the handwashing ritual where shops, doctors’ surgeries, solicitors’ and estate agents’ offices, for instance, forced hand sanitiser on to you, and sometimes took your temperature as you walked in.

The cleaning nonsense went even further, with hotels, gyms and other places where people gathered announcing “enhanced cleaning”. This may or may not have halted the virus in its tracks but it certainly increased fear. I still see people in the gym furiously scrubbing down bikes, treadmills and other equipment in case a germ from a previous user has had the audacity to linger on the machine.

April 12, 2023

QotD: Karen

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

Back in March, I was certain this whole thing [the pandemic] would blow over in a matter of weeks. It’s a Karen-driven phenomenon, I argued, but unlike everything everything else they do, this time Karen’s going to have to shoulder the burden herself. She’ll have fun berating the manager of the local Starbucks for not closing down … until she realizes there’s no place to get a half-caff, triple-foam, venti soy latte frappuccino. Nor is there any place to dump her self-propelled lifestyle accessories kids while she gets exalted at hot yoga and the nail salon, now that school’s out. Give her a week without Starbucks, I said, locked in her house with Kayden, Brayden, Jayden, and Khaleesi, and she’ll demand we never mention the word “flu” again.

In other words, I misunderstood the essence of Karen. Karen is — first, foremost, and always — a victim. I of all people should’ve known better, because I was surrounded by Karens all the time in my personal and professional life. I’ve mentioned this story before, but bear with a quick repeat: At one of my first teaching gigs, at the big directional tech that makes up a lot of “Flyover State”, the department’s women got it into their vapid little heads that they — women — were being systematically excluded from positions of power. The fact that the department chair was a woman, and in fact the whole department, emeritus through first year grad student, was something like 65% female should’ve been their first clue, but nevertheless, they persisted. They got together a blue-ribbon commission, as one does, and studied the shit out of the problem. The much-ballyhooed report revealed …

… that all the positions of authority in the department, every blessed one, was held by a female. At which point, without missing a single fucking beat, they started complaining that being forced to hold all these positions of authority was keeping them from making adequate career progress.

I shit you not.

That’s Karen, my friends.

Severian, “The Civil War That Wasn’t”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-09.

March 26, 2023

Plandemic? Manufactured crisis? Mass formation psychosis?

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, James Delingpole lets his skeptic flag fly:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus …

Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the “pandemic”, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the “pandemic” became.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this “pandemic” remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis”.

In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this “pandemic” really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since “Spanish Flu” a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.

Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, “Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.” But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.

Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.

This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.

It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.

We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.

March 24, 2023

A very different take on the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic

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

At The Conservative Woman, Dr. Mike Yeadon lays out his case for doubting that there ever actually was a novel coronavirus in the first place:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve grown increasingly frustrated about the way debate is controlled around the topic of origins of the alleged novel virus, SARS-CoV-2, and I have come to disbelieve it’s ever been in circulation, causing massive scale illness and death. Concerningly, almost no one will entertain this possibility, despite the fact that molecular biology is the easiest discipline in which to cheat. That’s because you really cannot do it without computers, and sequencing requires complex algorithms and, importantly, assumptions. Tweaking algorithms and assumptions, you can hugely alter the conclusions.

This raises the question of why there is such an emphasis on the media storm around Fauci, Wuhan and a possible lab escape. After all, the “perpetrators” have significant control over the media. There’s no independent journalism at present. It is not as though they need to embarrass the establishment. I put it to readers that they’ve chosen to do so.

So who do I mean by “they” and “the perpetrators”? There are a number of candidates competing for this position, with their drug company accomplices, several of whom are named in Paula Jardine’s excellent five-part series for TCW, Anatomy of the sinister Covid project. High on the list is the “enabling” World Economic Forum and their many political acolytes including Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern.

But that doesn’t answer the question why are they focusing on the genesis of the virus. In my view, they are doing their darnedest to make sure you regard this event exactly as they want you to. Specifically, that there was a novel virus.

I’m not alone in believing that myself at the beginning of the “pandemic”, but over time I’ve seen sufficient evidence to cast strong doubt on that idea. Additionally, when considered as part of a global coup d’état, I have put myself in the position of the most senior, hidden perpetrators. In a Q&A, they would learn that the effect of a released novel pathogen couldn’t be predicted accurately. It might burn out rapidly. Or it might turn out to be quite a lot more lethal than they’d expected, demolishing advanced civilisations. Those top decision-makers would, I submit, conclude that this natural risk is intolerable to them. They crave total control, and the wide range of possible outcomes from a deliberate release militates against this plan of action: “No, we’re not going to do this. Come back with a plan with very much reduced uncertainty on outcomes.”

The alternative I think they’ve used is to add one more lie to the tall stack of lies which has surrounded this entire affair. This lie is that there has ever been in circulation a novel respiratory virus which, crucially, caused massive-scale illness and deaths. In fact, there hasn’t.

Instead, we have been told there was this frightening, novel pathogen and ramped up the stress-inducing fear porn to 11, and held it there. This fits with cheating about genetic sequences, PCR test protocols (probes, primers, amplification and annealing conditions, cycles), ignoring contaminating genetic materials from not only human and claimed viral sources, but also bacterial and fungal sources. Why for example did they need to insert the sampling sticks right into our sinuses? Was it to maximise non-human genetic sequences?

Notice the soft evidence that our political and cultural leaders, including the late Queen, were happy to meet and greet one another without testing, masking or social distancing. They had no fear. In the scenario above, a few people would have known there was no new hazard in their environment. If there really was a lethal pathogen stalking the land, I don’t believe they’d have had the courage or the need to act nonchalantly and risk exposure to the virus.

Most convincingly for me is the US all-cause mortality (ACM) data by state, sex, age and date of occurrence, as analysed by Denis Rancourt and colleagues. The pattern of increased ACM is inconsistent with the presence of a novel respiratory virus as the main cause.

If I’m correct that there was no novel virus, what a genius move it was to pretend there was! Now they want you only to consider how this “killer virus” got into the human population. Was it a natural emergence (you know, a wild bat bit a pangolin and this ended up being sold at a wet market in Wuhan) or was it hubristically created by a Chinese researcher, enabled along the way by a researcher at the University of North Carolina funded by Fauci, together making an end run around a presidential pause on such work? Then there’s the question as to whether the arrival of the virus in the general public was down to carelessness and a lab leak, or did someone deliberately spread it?

March 7, 2023

The lab leak in Wuhan was bad, but the cover-up after the fact is much worse

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore outlines some of the recent confirmations of so many conspiracy theorists’ speculations about the origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

More than three years after the Covid-19 outbreak, the world is still reeling from the virus and the global response to it.

Some 6.8 million people have already died from the virus, according to official statistics, including an estimated 1.1 million Americans. Each day the toll climbs higher; globally, more than 10,000 people die each week.

A bevy of government assessments now indicate that the likely source of the virus was not a wet market, but the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which for years has dabbled in the creation of chimeric coronaviruses.

Last Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Energy had concluded the Wuhan lab was likely the origin of the pandemic. Days later the FBI chimed in, declaring that “the Bureau has assessed that the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China”.

If true, it’s not hyperbole to say this would be the greatest scandal of the century.

As the Washington Post reported nearly two years ago, State Department cables had previously warned of safety issues at the WIV, where researchers were studying bat coronaviruses. The cables were sent after science diplomats made a January 2018 visit to the Wuhan lab on behalf of the US embassy in Beijing. What the officials found at the lab, which in 2015 had become China’s first facility to achieve the maximum level of international bioresearch safety, shocked them.

Bad, even shocking, to those who refused to listen to the whistleblowers early in the pandemic. Worse, however, is the complicity of western government and media in the cover-up:

While the US government’s involvement in the Wuhan lab leak scandal may have been inadvertent, its attempt to avoid potential responsibility and conceal the truth is now apparent.

From the beginning of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci — the same Dr. Fauci whose agency awarded a $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab — became the leading voice denying the possibility that Covid-19 could have emerged from the WIV.

It was “molecularly impossible” for viruses at Wuhan to have mutated into the current viral strain, he claimed in October 2021. In April the previous year he called the lab-leak-theory “a shiny object that will go away soon”, later noting that the virus’ “mutations” were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human”. In May 2020, he told National Geographic that “everything … strongly indicates” that the virus “evolved in nature”, calling the lab-leak theory a “circular argument”.

Scientists are of course entitled to their opinions, but there are two big problems that accompany Fauci’s public statements.

The first problem is that while these statements were being issued publicly, a different conversation was taking place privately, The New York Times noted Tuesday.

“… in 2020, many of those scientists who would become the most stalwart critics of the lab-leak theory privately acknowledged that the origins of the pandemic were very much up for debate”, writes David Wallace-Wells, “and that a laboratory leak was a perfectly plausible — perhaps even the most likely — explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan a few months earlier.”

We know this because a series of emails obtained by BuzzFeed through FOIA requests show that some of the world’s top virologists initially believed that the lab-leak hypothesis was at least as plausible as natural evolution theory. Specifically, the virologist and natural biologist Kristian Andersen described the new virus as “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. In another email, Jeremy Farrar, the incoming head scientist of the World Health Organization, summarized the perspectives of scientists who concluded the “accidental release theory” was the likeliest scenario — “70:30” or “60:40” in favor. (Farrar put the odds at 50-50.)

These views were not made public, however. And following a Feb. 1 conference call arranged by Fauci, scientists published a paper in Nature expressing their belief that the most likely scenario was that the virus naturally evolved on its own.

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”, the scientists, including the initially skeptical Andersen, emphatically noted.

So just a few months into the pandemic, scientific researchers were raising concerns in private, but governments pushed legacy media and social media platforms to police public discourse and to actively suppress public doubts of exactly the same sort that the experts were discussing among themselves.

March 6, 2023

How the powers-that-be got drunk on (practically unlimited) power with the pandemic lockdowns

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Brendan O’Neill on the revelations from the release of British government officials’ informal chats on WhatsApp as the initial lockdowns were imposed:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

They were laughing at us. They didn’t only lock us down. They didn’t only suspend virtually every one of our civil liberties, including a right none of us ever expected to lose: the right to leave our own homes. They didn’t only spy on us with drones, and encourage us to snitch on that neighbour going for a sneaky second jog, and fine teenagers life-ruining sums of money for holding house parties. They also chuckled about it. It was funny to them. In one of the most startling WhatsApp chats revealed in the Daily Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files, a senior civil servant says the following about Brits returning from trips abroad who were forced to quarantine in a stuffy hotel room for 10 days: “Hilarious“.

It was Simon Case, the UK’s top mandarin. In February 2021 he had a breezy virtual chat with Matt Hancock, the then health secretary. A policy had just been introduced stipulating that any Briton returning from a “red list” country – which eventually included 50 states around the world, including India and vast swathes of Africa – would have to quarantine in a hotel at a cost of £1,750 per person, later rising to £2,285. A total of 200,000 British citizens and residents endured this painful, expensive quarantine. To Hancock and his civil-service pals it was all a big laugh. “I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premier inn shoe box”, chortled Mr Case. He later asked Hancock: “Any idea how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday?” Locked up in hotels. Hancock replied that 149 people “are now in Quarantine Hotels due to their own free will!”. “Hilarious”, said Case.

Hilarious? Tell that to the people whose lives were ruined by this policy. The idea that it was just reckless rich folk jetting off to exotic destinations that were on the “red list” is ridiculous, as academic Aleksandra Jolkina has explained. Consider the NHS worker who travelled to Ethiopia to visit his dying uncle and look after his sick mother. While he was there Ethiopia was added to the “red list”, meaning he could not return to the UK; he couldn’t afford to. Or the Briton who travelled to Pakistan to visit his terminally ill father. He was forced to raid the family savings to pay the return quarantine fee. As a result, his “family’s ability to survive financially” was put “at risk”. Or think about the many Brits who did not go abroad, to one of those supposedly toxic countries, because they didn’t have the funds for that stay in a “premier inn shoe box”. People who, as Jolkina describes it, could not “visit their ill relatives or wish them a final farewell”. Hilarious, right?

The sinister cruelty of lockdown is laid bare in this grotesque vision of officials laughing over a policy that caused so much heartache and hardship among often low-earning Brits whose only crime is that their families live overseas. You couldn’t have asked for a better snapshot of the feudalistic authoritarianism that underpinned the ideology of lockdown. Civil servants working from their plush homes having a giggle about a policy that inflicted severe financial pain on the diverse working classes. A health secretary breaking his own guidelines to snog his mistress while sending snide WhatsApp messages about a policy that prevented poorer citizens from kissing the cheek of a dying relative. For me, this is the most important thing about the Lockdown Files – their revelation of just how morally cavalier and even inhuman the political elites can become when they are drunk on power, when they are liberated from democratic accountability to pursue whatever extreme policies they like.

The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files are based on more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent and received by Matt Hancock in the pandemic years. Hancock gave the messages to Isabel Oakeshott when she was co-writing his book, Pandemic Diaries, and now Ms Oakeshott has given them to the Telegraph. They provide only a partial insight into the machinations of lockdown, of course. Hancock is not the centre of the universe, whatever he might think to the contrary. And he says some of the messages are being taken out of context. Perhaps. Nonetheless, the Lockdown Files represent our first serious reckoning with lockdown, our first glimpse at what was happening behind the scenes of this unprecedented exercise in social control. And it’s not a pretty picture.

January 13, 2023

Is the French Resistance Defeated by 1944? – War Against Humanity 095

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 12 Jan 2023

While the Soviet Union declared they will annex parts of Poland, the Western Allies fear that the broken French Resistance may ruin the plans for D-Day.
(more…)

January 7, 2023

Propaganda to support the narrative

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray is definitely possibly most likely not kidding around here:

We can’t award the gold medal yet, because the contestants are still showing up at the starting line.

Elsewhere at Substack, A Midwestern Doctor recently highlighted some of the most egregious vaccine propaganda that appeared during the current forever-pandemic, in a piece that has the potential to safely and effectively vaccinate your mind against bullshit:

But now we need to add a new example from the current week, because Peter Hotez exists and keeps publishing. His latest piece of analysis calmly warns that the new variant is maybe possibly or not the Most Worstest Evuh, in a huge rhetorical first that tries to overcome Covid exhaustion with louder hysteria:

tHiS oNe iS diFFeReNtttttttttt&#*$*$%^#&@, Version 957,1095,397.02. Your next winter of severe illness and death will be everything you were promised in your first winter of severe illness and death, we swear. If you died last time, JUST WAIT UNTIL YOU DIE AGAIN THIS TIME, FOOL.

How can you spot propaganda? Like this, from a paragraph near the bottom of Hotez’s latest:

    Unfortunately, XBB.1.5 is still too new to have clinical data in-hand to show exactly what vaccines mean in terms of warding it off. At the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, we, like other groups, are scrambling to look at our own vaccine’s effects on XBB.1.5. However, the writing is on the wall here — boosting is your best bet at protecting yourself and your loved ones.

First sentence: We have no data about this. Third sentence: The thing we have no data for is your best bet to do the thing that we have no data for.

Every claim Hotez makes is a version of this maybe-definitely-uncertainty-certainty soup, telling you he doesn’t know while telling you that he knows

December 8, 2022

Orwell wrote about the dangers of letting well-worn phrases do most of your writing for you back in 1946 – it’s still valid today

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

I posted a short paragraph from Orwell’s brilliant “Politics and the English Language” essay as a QotD entry earlier this year:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

As Chris Bray shows, things are, if possible, even worse today than in Orwell’s day:

We do not advance. The dominion of the ready-made phrase doesn’t provide a path for advancement. It provides a locked language for a long stalemate that edges into steady decline.

(Stella Morabito covers this ground in a new book, The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer, excerpted here in a short package of tremendously useful ideas about the way we shape ourselves to the prevailing discourse to avoid the feeling of isolation.)

So Tracy Beth Høeg graduated from medical school in 2006, and later completed a PhD in epidemiology, then a medical residency. She does medical research and treats patients; you can go to her clinic and get medical help. Another person who went to medical school but then decided not to complete a residency or treat patients or publish peer-reviewed research casually dismisses her as “this Hoeg hag”.

In the dominion of the ready-made phrase, the many prevailing and easily grasped terms of social disapprobation provide comfort. The well-known denunciatory words and phrases give credentialed but unaccomplished people who live with social panic and status anxiety a way to elevate themselves by standing on someone else. That fucking hag, that anti-vaxxer bitch! Something something Koch Brothers something something! This ritual use of social denunciation as a status signal is precisely the dynamic Milan Kundera described in a series of novels about the social practices of late communist societies. The grab bag of social ruin trigger terms is easy for mediocre minds, which are empowered by the ability to shit on people for status without having to do much work.

It’s a psychological wall: white nationalism Fox News anti-vaxxers Koch brothers! You can be important and powerful without doing anything, by performing the degradation of someone who has — using the useful shortcut of the ready-made phrases. You don’t have to do or be; you can signal and display. Status is a performance of familiar words directed at the usual and useful targets. It’s lazy, it’s mindless, and it gets a good number of people through their days. Imagine being the 34,567th public intellectual to slam a Covid vaccine critic on Twitter. So fresh! So brave!

November 18, 2022

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

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

Parenting babies and toddlers, as Jen Gerson can tell you in disturbingly graphic detail, requires a totally revamped view of what an acceptable level of hygiene and cleanliness might be compared to those blissful days pre-parenthood … and that was before Canada’s public healthcare system began sinking under the weight of the pandemic:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Ask any parent of a small child right now and you’ll get much the same tale of woe. We’re in the trenches, man. The illnesses have been utterly relentless since school began. We’ve seen nothing like it before; it’s as if three years of sicknesses are being crammed into three months.

So while we’re stressed out, grumpy, and annoyed, we’re not surprised that the shelves are bare of basic children’ medications, and the hospitals are overwhelmed. This was all entirely predictable — and was, in fact, predicted.

That’s why Moore’s advice, to mask up in the Stage 4 biohazard that is my own home, was responded to with an instant eye roll. It was the type of well-intentioned advice that I completely discounted as out of touch and impractical — which is how we used to regard quite a lot of public health advice in the Before Times. “This is a very fine sentiment, but has no relationship to the world in which people actually live.”

Sorry, my little girl just coughed into my mouth.

Moore’s announcement felt like a trial balloon for the return of mask mandates in Ontario in the hope of offsetting the effects on pediatric ICUs, which are currently being overrun by sick children. (The government has thus far not imposed a mandate or even hinted that it may, but you know Ford and his sudden reversals.) Federal public-health officer Theresa Tam has already suggested we mask indoors — but has also stopped short of mandates.

I admit, seeing this from afar, I was struck by two entirely contradictory emotions, neither of them positive.

The first, as better articulated by one of my good friends and fellow mom-in-arms was: “Jesus, we shut down the entire world for two years to save the lives of the elderly, and now that the kids are getting sick, it’s like pulling teeth to get anyone to accept even the most moderate, least intrusive measure — masking.”

The other emotion, equally intense and angry, is the exact opposite of this sentiment: My daughter needs to build an immune system. She needs to be exposed to germs, bacteria, bugs and illnesses. That can’t be avoided. It can only be further delayed.

If the current wave of extraordinary pediatric illnesses is the entirely predictable result of three years of social isolation, lockdowns, school cancellations and, yes, masking, then how will more of any of this help matters in the long run? All we’ll be doing is spreading out the pain over a longer period of time. Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions are sometimes necessary, but truer words were never spoken than these: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

Both of these sentiments are rooted in the same, bone-deep mommy anger. This pandemic, and our response to it, has revealed a profound intergenerational inequity that demands redress. Once again, our kids are paying the bills, literally, figuratively, and physically.

November 4, 2022

Amnesty “literally means a pardon, i.e. the absence of punishment … for a crime committed in the past“

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

Sarah Reynolds considers the implications of what Emily Oster wrote in her Atlantic article suggesting a Covid-19 amnesty:

Now “amnesty” is a very specific word. It doesn’t mean forgiveness, it literally means a pardon, i.e. the absence of punishment … for a crime committed in the past.

It is a stark and loaded word indeed when used to refer to anything Covid-related because it establishes two parties: victims and perpetrators. Group 1: Those who committed crimes and could be in the legal sense pardoned of the criminal behavior they engaged in; and Group 2: those who will consequently not get justice.

The implication of such a dichotomy (if one were to appear) is horrifying.

The author alludes to the appeal and inevitability of forgiveness; I posit in contrast that forgiveness is a spiritual concept, one that may be inextricably linked to a religious belief for some, so she’s jumping the gun here because Forgiveness would be the stage after Justice, and only for those whose religion, faith, or spiritual practice also inspires or compels it.

Use of the word amnesty is terribly concerning to me because it insinuates that grave injustice has been committed. And if some horrible truth is coming out soon, her piece in the Atlantic serves as a way to beta test our/society’s future reaction to it — acting as the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

In other words, if we’re this outraged now knowing only what we know so far, how outraged will we be then, after this (speculated by me) coming newsflash triggers national indignation from coast to coast?

The most revealing part of the Professor’s piece in the Atlantic is this statement:

    The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, vacuums are complicated. All those attachments.

Tyranny is quite straight-forward, in contrast.

Years ago, I read a book that taught the reader that people are often confessing and how to detect it. If you look at and listen to their word choices, you can sometimes find what it is they did in the past, what they fear will happen in the future, and clues about whether or not they are capable of remorse. Many of you who have watched my youtube or read my blog before I got on substack know how I like to do a communication analysis, and delineate a) what’s literally being said, b) what the person really meant, and c) the third and most important/revealing part, what’s being left unsaid. And I rarely hear people say, “it’s complicated”, unless they are feeling profound regret, fear of the consequences of those “complicated choices”, and plenty of denial of the emotional origin of that particular word choice. They don’t even know why they were compelled unconsciously to use that word … but we do. The stark truth would likely be anything but complicated and possibly horrifying. (For example, what if Oster got on twitter tomorrow and tweeted out, “I don’t think I feel regret or remorse like other people. Intellectually, I get it: the Pandemic response caused human beings unbearable pain and society irrevocable damage but it doesn’t really bother me per se and sometimes I even feel gratified by it, especially when I witness overt force (mandates) replace emotional manipulation (shame).” Now I’m sure Oster is a wonderful person with a fully intact moral compass who’s 100% able to empathetically relate to others!! But … IF … on the off chance it were a true statement so she did declare it on twitter, it might seem complicated to her, but to us it would be the simplest most logical explanation for her actions. We’d go, oh! She’s a sociopath! Oh my God, now it all makes perfect sense! Hahahahaha I get it now hahahahaha because we live in hell!!)

H/T to Chris Bray for the link.

November 3, 2022

Amnesty? How about “no”.

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

Tom Knighton on the recent trial balloons being sent up by certain media folks to test the willingness of us proles to “forgive and forget” their authoritarian cheerleading over the last two+ years:

Recently, a story over at The Atlantic proposed an amnesty over what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea was that we just let bygones be bygones and no one holds anyone else accountable for what happened.

Lives were ruined, people died alone and miserable — and in some cases, because they were alone and miserable — but we’re supposed to ignore all of that.

At Spiked, Lauren Smith says that the nasty authoritarian tendencies of those in power during the pandemic should absolutely not be forgotten:

As the Covid-19 pandemic fades from view, some may be tempted to forget those miserable two years of lockdowns, social distancing and other restrictions on our liberties. This is certainly the view of a widely shared article in the Atlantic, which calls for a “pandemic amnesty”. American economist Emily Oster asks us to “forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about Covid”. It quickly becomes clear why Oster would prefer us to move on.

During 2020 and 2021, Oster was very much on the side of lockdown. And she supported vaccine mandates in universities and for workers. In fairness to Oster, she did not support every Covid measure. She did, for instance, criticise how long it took for schools to re-open in the US back in the summer of 2020. Yet ultimately, she belonged to the side that was happy to criminalise meeting a friend for coffee or to separate people from their dying loved ones.

Now, with hindsight, Oster regrets some of her positions. The crux of her argument is that the people baying for more lockdowns, harsher restrictions and vaccine mandates couldn’t possibly have known any different at the time. She says that they couldn’t have known that outdoor transmission of Covid was rare, that schoolchildren were always a low-risk group and that cloth masks were virtually useless in preventing viral spread.

Many, however, did know these facts, including back in the spring of 2020. But those who said them out loud were quickly turned into pariahs.

Although Oster admits that those on the anti-lockdown side got many things right, she says this was merely a question of “luck”. But it should not have taken any great foresight to see the danger of lockdowns. They were responsible for the most significant loss of liberty in the history of the democratic world. Their impact on economic output was as profound as that of any war. Not since the days before universal education had so many kids been shut out of school. Worse still, those who did warn of these inevitable and dangerous consequences were met with derision and censorship.

This is a pretty representative viewpoint of the lockdown mindset:

September 11, 2022

“Learning is something we humans do, while schooling is something done to us”

Filed under: Education, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kerry McDonald refutes the “learning loss” narrative we’ve been inundated with:

“Abandoned Schoolhouse and Wheat Field 3443 B” by jim.choate59 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There are mounting concerns over profound learning loss due to prolonged school closures and remote learning. New data released last week by the US Department of Education reveal that fourth-grade reading and math scores dropped sharply over the past two years.

Fingers are waving regarding who is to blame, but the alleged “learning loss” now being exposed is more reflective of the nature of forced schooling rather than how children actually learn.

The current hullabaloo over pandemic learning loss mirrors the well-worn narrative regarding “summer slide”, in which children allegedly lose knowledge over summer vacation. In 2017, I wrote an article for Boston NPR stating that there’s no such thing as the summer slide.

Students may memorize and regurgitate information for a test or a teacher, but if it has no meaning for them, they quickly forget it. Come high school graduation, most of us forget most of what we supposedly learned in school.

In his New York Times opinion article this week, economist Bryan Caplan makes a related point: “I figure that most of the learning students lost in Zoom school is learning they would have lost by early adulthood even if schools had remained open. My claim is not that in the long run remote learning is almost as good as in-person learning. My claim is that in the long run in-person learning is almost as bad as remote learning.”

Learning and schooling are completely different. Learning is something we humans do, while schooling is something done to us. We need more learning and less schooling.

Yet, the solutions being proposed to deal with the identified learning loss over the past two years promise the opposite. Billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds are being funneled into more schooling and school-like activities, including intensive tutoring, extended-day learning programs, longer school years, and more summer school. These efforts could raise test scores, as has been seen in Texas where students receive 30 hours of tutoring in each subject area in which they have failed a test, but do they really reflect true learning?

As we know from research on unschoolers and others who learn in self-directed education settings, non-coercive, interest-driven learning tends to be deep and authentic. When learning is individually-initiated and unforced, it is not a chore. It is absorbed and retained with enthusiasm because it is tied to personal passions and goals.

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