The irrational COVID regime is driving many Americans to a healthy noncompliance

 

Some on the left are calling those who resist the regime names like “domestic terrorists,” but that doesn’t carry much weight anymore. With the left having spent a decade calling everyone Hitler, “domestic terrorist” barely registers. (And given the Biden administration’s craven surrender to the real terrorists in Afghanistan, some Americans might be forgiven for thinking that if they get called terrorist enough, they will be in line for the basket of goodies Biden is giving the Taliban.)

Quadruply Masked

 

Let's just keep adding them until we get to 100%.

If you wear one mask, you are just a regular caring person indicating your non-granny killer status. If you wear TWO masks, you are Double Plus Super Awesome and get a special little Covid Virtue Badge to wear on your collar. If you wear three masks, two sets of surgical gloves and a hat that says "STAY HOME SAVE LIVES" you get a deluxe notebook with "I AM THE MOST CARING PERSON IN THE WORLD" embossed in gold on the front.

If you wear four masks, and wrap your children in plastic wrap with tin foil on their shoes, wear the STAY HOME SAVE LIVES hat and a t-shirt that says "JUST WEAR THE DAMNED MASK" then you get all of the other totally awesome Covid Psychosis Virtue Signalling Swag plus a set of Ginsu knives (bonus: made in China) and a free smartphone with an app that automatically scans all your contacts, gives you an ideological questionnaire about each and every single one of them, and sends it directly to Facebook, Google and Twitter and Xi Jinping! The best part is that you get frequent flier miles for every person you report, and upgrades to first class for life for turning in your parents, children, grandparents or other first-degree relatives to the Wokestapo.

A National Milgram Experiment

 

A National Milgram Experiment

Have you heard about the rules for eating in public places in California?  You are supposed to wear a mask even after sitting at the table, removing it enough to take a bite and then putting it back on.  Who would have thought that anyone would propose such a ridiculous idea, or that people would follow these orders? 

The media feasts on the fear they spread like a disease.  The result is a cowed nation following orders that make little or no sense.  Healthy people shut themselves in their homes for months and avoid meeting with family and friends.  In Virginia, most of the people I see in stores and offices are wearing masks.  A fair number of people alone in their cars are wearing are masks, and a few people walking or jogging for exercise are wearing masks.  In California, forget about dining out anywhere until January 4^th, 2021.

What’s interesting is that isolation and mask-wearing don’t seem to be helping.  According to the CDC, during the last 7 days California (the purple line) is off-the-charts for new Covid-19 cases compared to all other states.

Note that states like Florida (the green line) is open for businesses.  This brings into question whether the restrictions that have been placed on people in various states are either reasonable or scientifically valid. 

I suggest that any public official that issues unreasonably restrictive or medically questionable orders should be ridiculed and defied.

The rules we are living under resemble Communist societies.  State legislators have not passed these rules that we live under.  We are ruled by decree.  Legal penalties including fines and jail time are being imposed for non-compliance.  Pressures via social media are incredible.  People not wearing masks are literally accused of murder.  This is totalitarian.

 It reminds me of the Milgram experiment.  Here is a brief synopsis.

Why is it so many people obey when they feel coerced? Social psychologist Stanley Milgram researched the effect of authority on obedience. He concluded people obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative--even when acting against their own better judgment and desires. Milgram’s classic yet controversial experiment illustrates people's reluctance to confront those who abuse power.

Milgram recruited subjects for his experiments from various walks of life. Respondents were told the experiment would study the effects of punishment on learning ability. Respondents thought they had an equal chance of playing the role of a student or of a teacher, but the process was rigged so all respondents ended up playing the teacher. The "learner" was an actor Milgram hired.

"Teachers" were asked to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to the "learner" when questions were answered incorrectly. Shock levels were labeled from mild, to painful, to deadly.

The "learner" (the actor) appeared to react to shocks depending on the supposed severity.  The experimenter would pressure the “teachers” to give increasing levels of shock for each wrong answer.   The actor would pretend to show increasing levels of pain, to the point of screaming.

Milgram was shocked to find those who questioned authority were in the minority. Sixty-five percent (65%) of the teachers were willing to progress to the maximum voltage level, which could have killed the “learner.” 

Milgram showed that many of us are willing to literally torture people when told to by an authority.   

Recall that at the Nuremberg trials the common excuse for Nazi atrocities was that “I was only following orders.”   

In many states, jobs and businesses are destroyed by Governors and mayors issuing fatuous, ill-considered orders with no concern for the damage caused to the people affected.  It is a disgrace.  We are being ruled by petty political hacks acting like medieval Barons ruling by decree.  They are using the Wuhan flu as an excuse to rule as dictators. 

There is a movement in California to recall Governor Gavin Newsome, evidence that there are a fair number of people there who are appalled enough to sign a petition, if not rise up and take to the streets.  Elon Musk is moving his entire organization from California to Texas, and others are doing the same.  

 Governor Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio are struggling to see which one can do more to drive the people out of New York faster.

The original Milgram experiment ended when Milgram explained to his subjects that they were being hoaxed.   The end of this experiment will end when we, the subjects, see through the hoax, refuse to take part and rebel.

The Great Reset - Paul Joseph Watson

New York: Oppression imposed because of almost no COVID-19 deaths

 In the last few weeks the Democratic Party governments that control the state and city of New York imposed new and incredibly oppressive new rules, clamping down hard on the freedoms of their citizens, as well as the ability of visitors and tourists to come there.

• Travelers to New York must quarantine for three days, then get coronavirus test
• NYC schools close through Thanksgiving as city reaches 3% COVID-19 positivity rate
• Cuomo limits private gatherings to 10 people due to COVID spike
• New York imposes curfew, including shuttering of bars & gyms at 10 pm to slow spike

The justification used by Democrats Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio for these new edicts against freedom? Both claimed that an increase to 3% of what they called “the positivity rate” required more restrictions. This increase comes from increased detection of COVID-19 due to increased tests, but it does not mean there has been a significant rise in actual illness.

We Have Had Enough Lockdown

 

“Almost a half a year ago, Americans were asked to suspend their personal freedoms, business pursuits, and schooling for 15 days to ‘flatten the curve’ of rising cases of the novel coronavirus. Americans, fearful of the unknown and willing to do what they imagined was the right thing to protect themselves and their family, acquiesced. That was 172 days ago. What has happened since will be studied and debated for decades with one likely conclusion: Global lockdowns, particularly in the United States, were one of the costliest man-made disasters of all time. . . . Students and teachers are back to school in Wuhan, the source of the plague, while our kids prepare to remain secluded and chained to laptops for the rest of the calendar year. Meanwhile, grown adults argue over a stupid freaking visit to a hair salon.”

How a Free Society Deals with Pandemics, According to Legendary Epidemiologist and Smallpox Eradicator Donald Henderson

 And yet here we are living in times when the state is controlling our movements, shuttering businesses, defining who and what is essential, dangerously disrupting supply chains, forcibly closing schools and churches, and restricting travel. A shelter-in-place order is something of a liberal nightmare, the worst-possible use of coercive power against individual rights, and the results have been catastrophic.

It’s my view that we have been ill-prepared to deal with this onslaught. We have a very thin record of writings that make the case that freedom, market forces, and private governance are better than government quarantines and closures in dealing with pandemics. So where do we turn for better arguments and a better case?

Part of the problem is that as economists, historians, and political philosophers people are telling us to stay in our lane and not comment on medical matters. In general that is good advice. But there is a problem. The computer scientists and theoretical physicists who dreamed up this lock down haven’t really had serious medical training either and they sure haven’t stayed in their lane. They certainly have cared very little for the economic implications of their plans.

Where do we turn for competent commentary on the medical aspects of quarantine and lockdowns? Where is our credentialled and experienced expert who can provide weighty evidence that this is the wrong course?

Let me introduce you to Donald A. Henderson (1928-2016). He was the twentieth-century’s most acclaimed disease eradicator. 

Clay County judge Michael McHaney is a hero

Via Mark Steyn:

James Mainer of HCL Deluxe Tan in Clay City sued Governor Pritzker's lockdown regime - and won. Giving his decision from the bench, Clay County judge Michael McHaney gave a pithy summation of the new Law of Experts as one could wish. It deserves to be savored:

Before I rule, I'm advising everybody in this room, no public outbursts or displays. The court is still in session until you are told otherwise.

Since the inception of this insanity, the following regulations, rules or consequences have occurred: I won't get COVID if I get an abortion but I will get COVID if I get a colonoscopy. Selling pot is essential but selling goods and services at a family-owned business is not. Pot wasn't even legal and pot dispensaries didn't even exist in this state until five months ago and, in that five months, they have become essential but a family-owned business in existence for five generations is not.

A family of six can pile in their car and drive to Carlyle Lake without contracting COVID but, if they all get in the same boat, they will. We are told that kids rarely contract the virus and sunlight kills it, but summer youth programs, sports programs are cancelled. Four people can drive to the golf course and not get COVID but, if they play in a foursome, they will. If I go to Walmart, I won't get COVID but, if I go to church, I will. Murderers are released from custody while small business owners are threatened with arrest if they have the audacity to attempt to feed their families.

These are just a few of examples of rules, regulations and consequences that are arbitrary, capricious, and completely devoid of anything even remotely approaching common sense.

And things that are arbitrary and capricious cannot be laws - because, as I often say, it is tyranny that is always capricious. Judge McHaney continues:

Doctors and experts say different things weekly. The defendant cites models in his opposition. The only thing experts will agree on is that all models are wrong and some are useful. The Centers for Disease Control now says the virus is not easily spread on surfaces.

And then His Honor addresses one of the most repulsive aspects of the regime under which much of the "free world" has lived since March: those who make these new laws are not bound by them. For Governor Pritzker's family, as for Governor Whitmer's and Justin Trudeau's, the rules are different:

The defendant in this case orders you to stay home and pronounces that, if you leave the state, you are putting people in danger, but his family members traveled to Florida and Wisconsin because he deems such travel essential. One initial rationale why the rules don't apply to him is that his family farm had animals that needed fed. Try selling that argument to farmers who have had to slaughter their herds because of disruption in the supply chain.

When laws do not apply to those who make them, people are not being governed, they are being ruled. Make no mistake, these executive orders are not laws. They are royal decrees. Illinois citizens are not being governed, they are being ruled. The last time I checked Illinois citizens are also Americans and Americans don't get ruled. The last time a monarch tried to rule Americans, a shot was fired that was heard around the world. That day led to the birth of a nation consensually governed based upon a document which ensures that on this day in this, any American courtroom tyrannical despotism will always lose and liberty, freedom and the constitution will always win.

The Honorable Michael D McHaney, chief judge

COVID-19 Cytokine Storm Is a Metaphor for How a Society, Fearing the Unknown, Can Destroy Itself

One of the ways the Coronavirus kills is by stimulating an overreaction of a patient’s own immune system. “Diseases such as covid-19 and influenza can be fatal due to an overreaction of the body’s immune system called a cytokine storm.”

This metaphor can also describe how society can harm itself when measures taken to control a disease do more harm than good. Perhaps the most forceful and controversial reaction to the coronavirus epidemic has been the lockdown, which believe it or not, did not exist in the American context as a bureaucratic concept before 2006. As Jeffrey Tucker writes in the American Institute for Economic Research:

No one really knew what the effects of shutting down economic activity would be in early 2020 but neither did anyone know how potentially deadly the disease would be. What really broke the intellectual tie were hair-raising forecasts by epidemiological modelers predicting deaths in millions. Faced with this apocalyptic scenario and perhaps recalling the warnings of Climate Change advocates, the public was admonished to “trust the science.”

But the science, given the lack of data in the early days, was far from certain. When models in which so much trust had been reposed failed to pan out, especially those of the prestigious Imperial College, public confidence was shaken.

It was the crash heard round the world. After it was discovered how amateurish the software code was, trust turned to anger and the Daily Telegraph wrote in disgust that “Neil Ferguson’s model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time.” It was certainly an expensive one.

But even the most skillful software authorship could not have saved the Imperial model from the uncertainty surrounding the pathogen’s environmental behavior, which remain mysterious to this writing. Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian captured his frustration at science’s ability to forecast a socio-medical phenomenon as complex as the weather in a kind of layman’s rant.

There is no correlation between fatalities and lockdown stringency. The most stringent lockdowns – as in China, Italy, Spain, New Zealand and Britain – have yielded both high and low deaths per million. Hi-tech has apparently “worked” in South Korea, but so has no-tech in Sweden. Sweden’s 319 deaths per million is far ahead of locked-down Norway’s 40 and Denmark’s 91, but it’s well behind locked-down UK’s 465 and Spain’s 569. …

The half-Swedish commentator Freddie Sayer has been closely monitoring this debate from the UK. He makes the point that with each passing week the rest of Europe moves steadily closer to imitating Sweden. It is doing so because modern economies – and their peoples – just cannot live with such crushing abnormality as they have seen these past two months.

Some of these crushing abnormalities are actually unintended consequences of government’s response to the virus, of fixes gone wrong. Governments, like New York’s, keen to avoid for the forecast (see ‘models’) inundation of hospitals by patients, responded by offloading infected seniors to nursing homes. Distracted by their efforts to lock down whole societies, they caused a massacre of the elderly in a fit of absentmindedness. As the New York Times notes:

At least 28,100 residents and workers have died from the coronavirus at nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for older adults in the United States, according to a New York Times database. The virus so far has infected more than 153,000 at some 7,700 facilities. …

While just 11 percent of the country’s cases have occurred in long-term care facilities, deaths related to Covid-19 in these facilities account for more than a third of the country’s pandemic fatalities.

If nobody saw it coming maybe it was because government was fascinated with its shiny new superpowers. Only later did officials waken to this bit of friendly fire. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo has finally admitted — tacitly and partially, anyway — the mistake that was state health chief Howard Zucker’s order that nursing homes must admit coronavirus-positive patients.”

One of the reasons the lockdown debate is so psychologically difficult is it involves getting the public to choose between two risks, one with a tight sigma (economic collapse) versus another with a poorly defined sigma, the virus. Many people are hard pressed to select between a familiar, predictable system run-down and “high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare event … beyond the realm of normal expectations,” It has divided the public into those who would rather endure a known, but certain economic doom than take their chances with a less predictable yet psychologically more menacing viral hazard — or vice versa.

Unfortunately we now know there is a third source of risk, arising from the chance that governments may initiate reactions to the pandemic that are catastrophic and unforeseen. Examples include the nursing home massacre and inflicting lasting damage on whole swaths of the economy. Such government reactions, far from having predictable linear effects, can be Black Swans in their own right.

If the lockdown set new standards for the intensity of government response to pandemics it also increased the risk of bureaucratically induced harm. Like the patients done in by a cytokine storm, countries and states may survive the virus only to succumb to their own countermeasures, felled by their own bureaucratic reaction.

When Did Flattening The Curve Turn Into Finding The Cure

Emergency Press Conference - When Did Flattening The Curve Turn Into Finding The Cure pic.twitter.com/ZaSTxL6Tuc

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) May 14, 2020

Dictatorial State Power Wearing a Lab Coat

No group has done more to create havoc in the country than the “scientists” who have been running the world’s policy designed to deal with the Chinese Communist Party’s decision to hide the fact that their virology lab released – probably accidentally - a lab-created virus for which there is no vaccine or cure.   

After first ignoring the virus, leading epidemiologists got press headlines by predicting the virtual second coming of the Black Death.   Political leaders eventually reacted by shutting down the economies of much of Europe and North America, throwing untold millions – 20 million in America alone – out of work and forcing most of the rest of us to hide out at  home.

British scientist Neil Ferguson ignited the world’s drastic response to the novel Wuhan coronavirus when he published the bombshell report predicting 2.2 million Americans and more than half a million Brits would be killed. He now says both that the U.K. should have enough ICU beds and that the coronavirus will probably kill under 20,000 people in the U.K. - more than half of whom would have died by the end of the year in any case because they were so old and sick.

Ferguson, labeled the “gold standard” of disease modeling has quite a history of being wrong.  In 2005 he predicted that up to 200 million people could die from the Bird Flu.  The Bird Flu’s death toll from 2003 to 2020 is 455.

Dr. Ferguson was equally off with his death projections for mad cow disease. He made big headlines in the United Kingdom by predicting that mad cow disease could kill between 50 and 50,000.  Millions of cows were slaughtered. But to be fair, his scientific ‘model’ was right. The death toll is 178 to date.

A world that has lost its faith in God has replaced that faith with another, and it is known as “Science.”  If you question the High Priests of Science you are denounced as a sister-marrying, racist, bigoted, Flat-earth, knuckle dragging troglodyte.  You probably do not believe in global warming, use plastic straws, are not saving the planet by using re-usable grocery bags and drive your own car instead of using the disease petri dish known as mass-transit. 

But after several two-week extensions of our government induced and scientifically promoted self-imprisonment, people are beginning to notice.  The Scientific Gods were wrong. 

The hallowed Dr. Fauci was wrong about the Wuhan flu any number of times.  He said it was “not a major threat for the people of the United States” on January 31^st.  On February 21^st he told the American people that the threat of coronavirus as “miniscule;”  that the annual flu was more a threat.   As March ended, Dr. Fauci did a U-turn and was recommending a nationally federally mandated shut-down, even in parts of the country with no evidence of coronavirus. 

People are beginning to question whether the polices that governments have enacted are based on faulty computer models.  The models predicted hospitalizations that were vastly larger than the actual numbers. 

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Predicted 135,000 hospital beds just for coronavirus patients, 65,000 in New York alone. For New York, the real number is closer to 13,000. Emergency hospitals were set up, not used, and then dismantled because of a lack of patients.  Other areas – not hot spots like New York – were even father from predictions. 

Remember the ventilator crisis? A shortage meant people would die.  The Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo demanded 30,000 – 40,000 ventilators from the Federal Government based on these predictions.   He got 16,000.   Today, Cuomo is giving ventilators away.  Meanwhile Ford and GM are churning out tens of thousands of ventilators that will go into storage.

Then there are the global organizations like WHO – the World Health Organization.  First, they denied that there was a problem.  They echoed the Chinese government that the virus could not be passed from human to human.  They claimed that it came from the Wuhan wet market.  On April 6^th the WHO said that healthy people don’t need to wear face masks, mere days after the CDC told people to mask up.  That was only a few weeks after the CDC told people not to wear masks, that wearing a face mask was useless … or worse. 

It is now more than likely that the virus was man made and has a label attached to it “Made in China.”  The Chinese Communist Party has denied it and instead claims that it’s a product of the US Military. The WHO has denied it.  The American Press has vigorously denied it.  In fact, the American Press labelled it a debunked conspiracy theory.  The Columbia Journalism Review even says that if the virus originated in the Wuhan virology lab, it is still a “conspiracy theory.”  It is impossible to find a better definition of “Gaslighting” that that. 

Government policy evolved like a tragedy, one domino knocking the other over.  In the beginning: no problem.  Then 11 million residents of Wuhan were shut in their homes.  Neil Ferguson predicts mass deaths.  What public official can resist scientists predicting mass death?  The airwaves were filled with charts and graphs created by eminent scientists with impeccable credentials, the High Priests of Science, proving - with computer models and PowerPoint presentations -  that unless we kill the economy everyone will die. 

So we shut up our shops and threw tens of millions out of work.  Many millions work for small businesses that will never re-open.  Some state and local officials went further.  Governor Whitmer of Michigan decided that buying seeds for your garden, or paint for your home was a threat to the health and safety of Michiganders.  Strictly forbidden!

Church services were cancelled nation-wide.  Tucker Carlson asked the Governor of New Jersey why he thought that he had the Constitutional power to forbid church services.  The Governor replied that it never occurred to him that the freedom to practice your religion was enshrined in the Constitution.  It was, he explained, above his pay grade.  Other officials went further and when a pastor held a service in his parking lot for people who stayed in their cars with windows rolled up, the local police issued $500 tickets to the parishioners.  

As recently as two months ago, this country was filled with officials who swore to uphold the Constitution and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  They lied.  Encouraged by Scientists to rule by decree, they grabbed the opportunity with relish.

And the people, convinced that following orders meant safety, went along. It is amazing to see how quickly sacred ideals are discarded in the face of public pressure.  In American culture, the guy in the lab coat, the Scientist, has proved that they can get politicians, the police, and the people to go along even if it a week later he tells them the exact opposite.

The police especially disillusion me. It has been an article of Conservative faith that the military and the police would never turn on the American people, enforcing dictatorial rule.  If you get cops in Greenville Mississippi to give $500 tickets to people for sitting in their cars in the church parking lot listening to a sermon, what else will they do if given the order?

AMERICAN INCREASING PROTESTS AGAINST IMPRISONMENT

Protest against Pa. business closures planned in Harrisburg https://t.co/s5zMxdLPvZ via @6abc pic.twitter.com/hhqsvocV9C

— Chris (@Chris_1791) April 17, 2020

THE THING THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND IS THAT WE’RE NOT LOCKED IN HERE WITH THEM. THEY’RE LOCKED IN HERE WITH US

Sarah Hoyt:

We’re Americans. Millions for defense, not a cent for tribute. And that includes to enemies domestic. I can sense the time coming and it’s not very far when Americans will have obeyed their last irrational order.

I think I’ve said this before: I’ve lived through lock downs and curfews before. Not once was the reason given the real reason. The real reason was always “fear of the governed.” Now you know. Proceed accordingly.

THE RALEIGH PD IS NON ESSENTIAL

A group of citizens attending a peaceful assembly to protest the economic shutdown in NC was forcibly dispersed, and some arrested, by the Police in Raleigh, North Carolina. Despite being one of the 13 original colonies, they forgot the First amendment!!

Nicely done Raleigh, North Carolina Police Department! You reminded people around the country that the “First Amendment right” to peaceful assembly is at risk. From you. Officers of the law.