Trust Not In Self Serving Bureaucracy

 https://healthy-skeptic.com/2021/07/11/the-axis-of-evil-strikes-again/

Since the dawn of civilization, bureaucracy has been the enemy of the people. It's primary purpose is to increase its own power, followed closely by ensuring its isolation from feedback that would expose its malfeasance and incompetence. 

The biggest lesson of the epidemic, which fortunately many Americans seem to have taken to heart, is that you can’t trust experts or politicians, and you can’t believe anything they tell you about the data or science. YOU NEED TO TRUST YOUR OWN ABILITY TO GET THE FACTS AND REASON OUT THE TRUTH.

Our supposed public health experts, most of whom are lifetime government bureaucrats who couldn’t get or keep a job in private industry (yes, this means you Dr. Fauci) have repeatedly promoted suppression measures which anyone who looked at the research and who was thoughtful would reject. Build and be guided by models that aren’t close to representing reality. Close schools, when there is no risk to children and they are minor transmitters. Recommend massive testing programs that don’t slow spread but do generate false and low positives that force people to wrongly quarantine. Use PCR testing results that are essentially worthless in determining who is actually infectious. Over-attribute hospitalizations and deaths to CV-19 and terrorize the population about how scary this virus is. Close businesses and cause enormous and disruptive unemployment. Push social distancing that makes no difference, endorse plastic barriers that make no difference, and most of all, turn masking into a religion when the only actual research shows masks make no difference to community spread. And on and on, with one stupid, incredibly destructive recommendation after another.

Business relies on results in competition in the market and the feedback of profits, or most frequently lack thereof. Only 30% of new businesses last 30 years,  I could not find a statistic on how long government agencies last, am not so surprised to know that we don't even have an agreed list of how many government agencies we currently have. I will give you a link to the "wide horse and burro" program, just in case you are worried that not enough of your tax dollars are going to that critical funcion! 

The point is that bureaucracy endures, and it is dedicated to survival and expanding, because it has no competitors, nor actual oversight. It is the 4th and most powerful branch of our broken insolvent government. 

NEVER trust in "experts"! In order to be an expert on something, you must know more and more about less and less, until you know everything about nothing. That is the price of being a limited human in a universe where the details about even an electron are infinite. 

Given that limitation along with the prime objective of making certain you get credit for anything you can present as a "success",  no matter the cost to others, as well as being a true "expert" on dodging any responsibility for failure. 

Covid did a great job of exposing the total failure of our "experts", though given the efforts of the general media cheerleading, and social media cancelling, most will succumb to the narrative of bureaucratic and "expert" success. 

Fauxi E-Mails

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/about-those-fauci-emails.php

One never gets a clear answer out of a bureaucracy -- obfuscation is a prime function of bureaucracy, right after increasing their power in priority. 

The following from the link: 

 ... conservatives have found confirmation of their suspicions of the life-long bureaucrat, who went to work for the NIH during the Nixon administration and has been rising through the bureaucracy, as opposed to treating patients, ever since.

The liberals view him as a saint, but of course bureaucracy is one of most important tools in their agenda of ever increasing centralized government control. The following from Wikipedia: 

After completing his medical residency in 1968, Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases's (NIAID) Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI).[14] He became head of the LCI's Clinical Physiology Section in 1974, and in 1980 was appointed chief of the NIAID's Laboratory of Immunoregulation. In 1984, he became director of the NIAID, a position he still holds.[6] Fauci has been offered the position of director of the NIH several times, but has declined each time.[15]

You decide if he looks like a career bureaucrat, up to and including avoiding the big chair, where he is more likely to be held accountable. CYA is a bureaucratic mandate. 

A little further evidence that COVID19 was created in a lab ... this time, a technical one. 

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/why-the-science-points-to-a-lab-leak.php

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

I'm sure that scientists can be found which will dispute everything about this ... super, science like any other human endeavor is prone to bias. 

What skeptical people need to keep in mind as we dive deeper into the modern era of Lysenkoism "truth" is whatever the state says it is. 

CCP Virus Breakthroughs, Stop Counting

Epoch Column

I'm happy that the CDC and media are treating virus breakthroughs of fully vaccinated people as "not a concern", because that is how reasonable people operate. If only they would have treated the tiny number of serious  cases in children and even healthy adults under "50" in the same reasonable manner. 

What does concern me a bit more is: 

Of the cases, more than six in 10 occurred in females, with the median patient age being 58, according to a new report from the CDC, which stopped counting breakthrough infections as of May 1, except for those that cause hospitalization or death.

 Is there a pattern here?  The Obama administration stopped counting H1N1 cases in 2009 because "they already knew it was an epidemic". I've often said that if you don't like what someone tweets,  quit following them -- my general attitude to lots of supposed "sources" these days. 

However, when it is your job to count, ceasing to count when you don't like what you see tends to make your "counting" more political than scientific. It makes the sham of trusting the bureaucracy a bit too clear -- the actual mission of any bureaucracy is to increase its power,  not to actually do some supposed "critical mission".

As I've often observed, the real meaning of "believe the science" is "believe the narrative". 

And Just Like That, Covid Is Over

https://spectator.us/topic/wait-pandemic-over-cdc-masks/ 

One of my very early questions on Covid lockdowns/masks, etc was "What is the end game on this?"

Silly me. In the age of credulity for media, bureaucracy and big business, it is "whenever they say so". As we have seen with Russiagate, two farcical "impeachments" and the election by the dead, thou shalt believe and parrot the narrative of the day. 

The Covid narrative has had more twists and turns than a cheap garden hose, and I'm fairly certain there will be more. The narrative was just too good for the power hungry, big box store companies, inflation beneficiaries, etc to not go on ... likely in a more "lethal" mode. Perhaps the next time it will kill more babies than a month of abortions. 

Just like that? Nothing about this pandemic, or the science behind it, or the vaccines that have stopped it, tells us that something changed suddenly and magically for vaccinated people yesterday. But today we can finally lose our masks, as President Biden’s CDC finally announced a full loosening of mask restrictions other than crowded indoor spaces and public transportation. Joe Biden wants you to believe that this day arrived by the good graces of science and his administration’s tireless work, but that would be incorrect. The public has been getting vaccinated since early January and we are now five months into 2021. It’s the same vaccine, yet we are supposed to buy the idea that today, May 13, 2021, will go down in history as the day the pandemic suddenly ended.

It's gotta be true! Even MN governor "tear down this Walz" lifted his mask mandate -- although he did retain his "emergency powers".  

The idea that if you had it, or were fully vaccinated, you STILL needed to wear a mask was even more unbelievable than the idea that a mask protected anyone. Either the vaccinations work or they don't.  If they do, the odds of you getting it and thus being a spreader are very low. If they don't work, why bother? 

Since the masks were "80% +" about virtue signalling, there are going to be a lot of people unwilling to give up their "virtue". 

The Symbolism Of Masks

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-mask-is-an-outward-sign-of-inward-things/ 

The masks are a wonderful symbolic statement of being a pious follower of Scientism, so don't expect them to exit quickly. Expect other symbols of being part of the "illuminati" to follow in their wake.

 Secularists have been lacking in iconography for their faith, and as humans, that is important -- no matter how pointy your head may be. The Darwin Fish tended to indicate an evolution focus rather than general materialist/scientist faith. The rainbow is too gay, Che Guevara tees can just confuse people, and body piercings, tats, etc don't really invoke "science", but rather paganism. 

The KKK liked hoods, but while a rainbow hood might catch on and be even more materially effective than masks (especially if it had a respirator included), it would be unwieldy, and as the linked column points out, it was never about "effectiveness". 

The use of masks as a social signifier is hardly new to the COVID-19 era. Face-coverings and head-coverings have featured in the social and religious life of Muslims (hijabs and kufis), Christians (mantillas, wimples, zuchettos), Jews (tichels, kippahs), Hindus (ghoonghats), and many others for centuries. The head-covering and face-covering impulse is partly rooted in modesty (both sexual modesty and modesty before God), but it also has a community-building aspect. When the Sikh spiritual master Guru Gobind Singh ordered his male followers to forgo cutting their hair and to wear turbans, he did so in order that, as he put it, his “disciples will be recognized among millions.” Outward signs of community and solidarity inevitably take on, to some degree, a depersonalizing role, as with the military uniform, which makes soldiers exactly what the adjective promises.

The Covid mask primarily screamed "I'm a follower". 

While the media worked overtime to claim that MAGA hats indicated the person was a brainless sheep, they were uncommon enough in most quarters to take some level of backbone to put one on. Like a Trump sticker on your bumper, there was a not insignificant chance wearing one could get your car keyed, or even physically attacked. Nobody keys a car for a Darwin or rainbow bumper sticker -- primarily for the same reason you see very few demonstrations by the "deplorables" (they are working). In the nearly unique case of the Capitol "riot" -- which was not a "riot" since the only person killed was an unarmed white woman veteran, nobody got a free tv, and nothing was burned, Democrats had to label the demonstration as an "insurrection". 

A worthy and thought provoking column. Do I need to start wearing a cross? 

This column also does a good (and simpler) job of explaining mask "virtue". 

But masking while fully vaccinated entails a baffling contradiction. We’re simultaneously to believe: 1) everyone must get vaccinated; 2) vaccines don’t work. Wrap your head round that. Because if your vaccination overwhelmingly prevents both transmission and disease (meaning it works), even unvaccinated people present no danger to you. So you don’t socially distance. You go to restaurants. You see your friends. And you don’t wear a mask. Yet, bizarrely, in surveys vaccinated Americans express far less willingness than the unvaccinated to resume once-normal activities like hopping on a bus, often by a factor of two. Calling that ‘cognitive dissonance’ may be too generous. Let’s go for ‘state-induced mass hysteria’ instead.

It is a delusional age on so many fronts that sanity is abnormal. From wind and solar are going to replace fossil fuels, printing trillions won't cause inflation, voter id suppresses voting, the Russian hoax, to Jeffrey Epstein himself, it is truly a mad mad world. 

Cuomo, Covid, One Party Rule

Article

Why can't you trust Covid "death tolls"? A quote from the linked: 

"DeRosa admitted that ‘basically, we froze’ out of fear of a US Justice Department investigation into how thousands of nursing home patients had died. A ProPublica investigation had found that Cuomo’s March 25 mandate that state nursing homes admit coronavirus patients was akin to ‘introducing fire to dry grass’. An investigation by the state’s Democratic attorney general found that the real numbers boosted the official nursing-home death toll by more than 50 percent, to what is now a total of 13,432. New York State only has some 100,000 patients in nursing homes."

There is no "trust in government" for sane people, especially when there is one party rule as there is in New York. Sadly, as we saw clearly under Trump, the vast federal and state bureaucracies are where the real power is. Thankfully there are still a few who will stand up as this courageous attorney general did, but it is now quite late, and we will likely never know at what cost. The Cuomo family is powerful -- our nation is massively corrupt at all levels, the New York AG had best be very cautious. 

If a state is significantly in Democrat control, you can't put much stock in any number coming out of it -- more government power is the only goal of the Democrat party, and since they support the killing of babies, we know they have no limit to what they will do to maintain and increase that power. Manipulating any sort of number -- especially vote counts, is standard operating procedure. 

Are Republicans not the same? Certainly there are some that are the same, however the overall goal of the Republican party is LESS government, not more. In general, Republicans at least claim to care for the unborn and recently born. Naturally, as humans, they are FAR from "perfect", however there is a reason that over 90% of media, academia,  legal, and government employees vote Democrat. 

POWER! 

You can trust government to nearly always do whatever it takes to expand their power. As in the case of this brave AG, it is the rare exception that really proves the rule! 

How many people died OF Covid vs WITH Covid? We have no idea -- nor do we have any idea about any government number reported, except they are all (including vote counts) reported with a heavy pro government bias! 

Do Lockdowns Encourage Greater Virus Lethality?

Interesting article about a possibility why Covid evolved may be more lethal. 

The 1918 lethal flu started out mild like typical flu. The common flu (and colds) spread easily and don't kill their hosts ... or often don't even make them ill enough to stay home. All the better to let their hosts get out and spread better. The strains that are LESS lethal are naturally selected. 

In 1918 europe however, the sick soldier was often sicker (cold, nasty trenches, etc) and was therefore transported to hospitals by healthcare workers. The sicker you were, the more likely you were to get transported and spread the flu. The MORE severe (and thus more likely to be lethal) strains were naturally selected. 

Ridley (the author of the column) is smart and quite humble (I've read books and other articles by him) -- he admits to making mistakes, unlike our "experts" and mass media. 

There is some evidence that the response to Covid may be causing selection of more severe (and thus more likely to be lethal) strains with the health system as a vector. 

**IF** this is a factor, encouraging people to go and get tested (not a problem if you believe masks are very effective), and making them afraid enough that they are driven to seek hospitals for treatment. 

If we allowed the general population to get out, the less severe strains would win the selection race. 

As Ridley points out, we don't KNOW that ... it is a possibility. 

If we were a free society with lots people thinking and discussing their thoughts,  very little censorship (either overt or through shaming) of possibly "crazy" ideas, past experience would suggest that better ideas being "naturally selected" would win out. 

In our current culture, the expression of thoughts like this article is likely to get you labeled as a "dangerous crank" and possibly "cancelled", or at least shamed. 

Respect for actual free speech and diviersity of thought/discussion as a prime cultural value once "naturally selected" the old territory between Mexico and Canada as "exceptional". 

What is cancel culture and shaming selecting? 

I Hope Your Cancer Doesn't Come Back

As a Covid "survivor" (for my wife and I it was the mild side of the flu), I observe something that I find interesting. Especially when I inform people that have been taking Covid especially seriously that we have "been there, done that", the response I commonly get is "I really hope that you don't suffer any of the long term effects that can come with Covid". 

Yes, we were not that worried about Covid, due at least mostly to both of us having survived serious life challenges in the past few years (spinal cord injury causing initial neck down paralysis, brain infection requiring brain surgery, resulting in a period of not being able to recall my name). The biggest thing those challenges showed us is that we are NOT in charge. Our next breath (if it happens) is a gift from God if he so chooses. Gratefulness for Grace is our response -- we have been blessed to better realize how dependent we are on God. 

When we recovered from our challenges, the near universal response when others were informed were along the lines of "wow, you must be really happy to have come out of that like you did". 

I can't recall a single instance of "I hope you don't suffer any future bad effects because of what you went through", although I'm nearly certain that was pretty much a universal sentiment. Unstated because it was obvious -- like I hope the sun comes up tomorrow. 

When a cancer survivor informs me that they have been cancer free for five years, so they have "made it", I have ZERO desire to say "well, I hope that is the case, but it CAN return, and of course there MAY be many negative long term effects from having survived cancer even if it doesn't return". 

Why would it even cross my mind to say something like that, and why does it cross the minds of so many of those seeing Covid as a "defining issue"? 

I have no pat answer, just some thoughts:

• If you have mostly bought into the Covid narrative,  any sort of real world counterexample is a threat to your accepted narrative, and that is bigger than common civility. The apparent fact of a real world "survivor" who experienced it as "mild flu" is just not acceptable in that world view.  It MUST be challenged to maintain your virtue. 
  
  
• You have invested a lot in "being with it" on Covid ... lots of isolation, lots of masking, maybe even some mask shaming of others and some mask virtue signalling. You are smart, superior, and confident! Those who cast doubt on your virtue are to be pitied -- and it is your responsibility to inform them that they are NEVER to be free of worry about Covid. (well at least until the "science" shows that the vaccine is "100% effective").
  
  
• As with everything in our divided "all is political" world, it is imperative to show that you are on the "right (left) side". ALL depends on that distinction. There are some so crazy on the "Covid denier" (well, they really don't deny there is a virus, but you know what I mean)  side that they go to church, apparently literally wanting to kill others! One must take all measures you can to insure that there is no confusion as to which side you are on -- you are a Pharisee!  JUST under the law of wokeness. You are thankful to science and wokeness that you are in no way in sympathy with those who have left the true way of Covid wokeness!  They will be judged eventually -- even if it takes years. The after effects of allowing Covid to contaminate them will show the error of their ways! Perhaps they will be consigned to eternal damnation?
  
  
• We **DO** have control! If we follow the mandated measures to avoid the contamination of Covid  we WILL remain pure! We have faith in true science! We believe!  The unbelievers are trying to tempt us to doubt -- they may not have actually had it. They may be lying, or perhaps their tests were done at an inferior "Red State" facility -- their "experience" is invalid! Our ideas are so good, they need to be mandatory! A mandatory world lockdown would have saved is all! 

Certainly, nearly none of the "I hope you don't suffer in the long run" people have any of the thoughts from my bullets above consciously. They just have "a need" to attempt to get the "denier" to remain afraid at some level. "It is only right". 

We ALL "know not what we do" in this vale of tears. That is why some of us crazies see weekly Holy Preaching and Holy Communion to be far more important than our next breath in this mortal coil. 

Covid Rate Of Transmission (Rt)

 https://rt.live/

The linked will take you to a chart that shows a computation for the rate of Covid transmission by state. In theory, if the Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading. The creators of the model are Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger,  the co-founders of Instagram. Tom Vladeck is a data scientist and owner of Gradient Metrics. 

I find it to be "interesting/useful" ... lots of caveats / discussion below.

The bars for each state are the 80% confidence interval for the model ... meaning there is an 80% chance that the actual number is in that range. So why can't they be more correct? Basically, the map/model is NEVER the "territory" that is what "model" means! 

If you choose to dig into more detail, the Faq gives that ... the basic fact is that like all models, reality may be different from reality. This is true of ALL models! The "proof" of model correctness is in the rear view mirror, but must people reporting on models often don't tell you that. The reaction to Covid was based on models ... "masks are not effective at all", "we are going to be shut down for 2 weeks to flatten the curve", "masks are effective to protect others, not you", "it doesn't spread outside", "masks provide significant protection for you", "it does spread outside", etc Draw your own conclusions on how good the models have been.

Why look at the model? Basically for the same reason you look at the weather forecast -- to give you a general idea of how future weather looks  TODAY ... the prediction  may  (and often is) be different tomorrow. Good models allow you to look back at how accurate they were in the past, and discuss a bit about updates to the model they have made, and some they would like to make. (this one does) 

Although many statisticians don't like to admit this, this is the reason there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics". Statements like "women are better drivers!" based on them having less accidents are ridiculous, but often made. A "better" statistic would  be per mile driven ... just using accident statistics would call a woman who never drives a good driver. 

Getting a good statistic is HARD (election predictions should be a clue here). It gets REALLY complicated, and moves into the area of art rather than science. "Correlation is not causality" is also key. Drowning is strongly correlated (meaning the graph curves look alike) with ice cream sales and high temps. Of course neither of them CAUSE drowning. 

The important factor here is that today statistics are often presented as "science" when they are in fact just mathematical TOOLS. Climate change is often portrayed as "settled science" of which there is no such thing. Science is by definition NEVER settled! If something is "Science", then it MUST be falsifiable -- the next experiment may show the "settled" to be wrong. This is doubly true for statistical models ... especially as they predict the future rather than look at the past.

So why is Rt a useful statistic? It is just "better" than number of cases which is essentially meaningless ... more cases resulting from more testing doesn't mean more people are getting it, it just means we are finding more. cases (this model attempts to account for that). We don't have good data on number of asymptomatic cases because we are not doing randomized testing. Assuming we are tracking asymptomatic cases (which I doubt), we MAY be able to get a better idea of how many people have had it but did not know it.  

Naturally, even THAT doesn't really help us that much, because the "experts" claim that you don't get "much" immunity if you have had it ... therefore you still have to take protective measures -- for a disease that we believe you will be asymptomatic of in at least 50% of cases ... although we of course don't KNOW that either! 

Socrates was the wisest man because he knew that he knew nothing.