THERE has not been a single case, globally, of a school-aged child, shedding COVID-19 onto another student, or a teacher, resulting in a single death. So, why are schools not open in the USA, or Victoria, Australia?
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SURELY, ‘Get Trump’ politics is not to blame?
CHECK for yourself, then…
SEE from 6:06 (re; education), or alternatively watch Ingraham’s entire episode :
PS// Please excuse new formatting, or errors. Worpdress has a new ridiculous “block technology” that I’m yet to fully become accustomed with, if ever. Strange tech. Thx, JWS.
“California was the experiment, and now it is the proof: environmentalism is worse for ‘social justice’ than any degree of climate change is.
Environmentalism is the indulgent fantasy of remote political elites and their self-serving business backers. If California doesn’t prove this, what would?”
The heatwaves and the fires are natural – the electricity blackouts are not.
Events leading up to today’s power cuts follow a bizarre history. The fact that advanced economies need a continuous supply of power is well understood. Yet for three decades, the political agenda, dominated by self-proclaimed ‘progressives’, has put lofty green idealism before security of supply and before the consumer’s interest in reasonable prices. Even if the heatwaves experienced by California were caused by climate change, are their direct effects worse than the loss of electricity supply?
California’s green and tech billionaires, and its business and political elites, certainly seem to think so. But they are largely protected from reality by vast wealth, private security, gated estates, and battery banks. The high cost of…
“For Dr Tedros, and Bill Gates, Pandemic and climate change share a very different connection. Both are useful pretexts for mass social control. Both are essentially, unsolvable crisis’ they can harness to bypass Democracy and force powerless populations to obey their commands.” – Tucker Carlson
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IF you watch anything today, watch this.
Tucker Carlson, ties in the obvious. COVID-19 is nothing more than another excuse to control you and your family. A condensed version of the Climate Change scam, that apparently failed to control you destroy your life, fast enough.
“The more afraid you are, the more you will accept.”
“How is it we allowed the left to control our media,
tech companies, education systems,
entertainment and every aspect of thought control available?”
– Damo Pelham
“The best way to escape this trap is to recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. I do not say this to disparage anyone. I say this because it is true. And because recognizing this truth will help us understand what we are facing.” – Yoram Hazony
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SINCE reading this incredible essay, have been incessantly thinking about, and searching for an intro that would give justice.
Finally found it from, of all places, Twitter. But, not from any verified, or a ‘democratically’ elected representative. Rather, from a genuine bastion of free-speech and equality, whom I heartily follow on Twitter. “Damo Pelham” is his avatar name, common sense, logic and reason, his game. As simple as that. Such simplicity, a sorely missed attribute in today’s hyper-polarised and, deliberately-confusing to you, political discourse.
Damo tweets:
“How is it we allowed the left to control our media, tech companies, education systems, entertainment and every aspect of thought control available?”
A very good question. One that perhaps requires some serious thought and detail, in order to unpack.
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A long read. Break it up, if time is pressing. But, do see it through. It is a highly enlightening read, in a time when ‘Enlightenment’ (reason) is being literally and figuratively torched within months, not years or decades.
Furloughing political intrigue, the following is a masterful piece of writing that will, like it did with me, take you on a really nice journey of how writing to think, and thinking to affect, is done. Perhaps …
For a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most Americans and Europeans regarded Marxism as an enemy that had been defeated once and for all. But they were wrong. A mere 30 years later, Marxism is back, and making an astonishingly successful bid to seize control of the most important American media companies, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the courts, the government bureaucracy, and some churches. As American cities succumb to rioting, arson, and looting, it appears as though the liberal custodians of many of these institutions—from the New York Times to Princeton University—have despaired of regaining control of them, and are instead adopting a policy of accommodation. That is, they are attempting to appease their Marxist employees by giving in to some of their demands in the hope of not being swept away entirely.
We don’t know what will happen for certain. But based on the experience of recent years, we can venture a pretty good guess. Institutional liberalism lacks the resources to contend with this threat. Liberalism is being expelled from its former strongholds, and the hegemony of liberal ideas, as we have known it since the 1960s, will end. Anti-Marxist liberals are about to find themselves in much the same situation that has characterized conservatives, nationalists, and Christians for some time now: They are about to find themselves in the opposition.
This means that some brave liberals will soon be waging war on the very institutions they so recently controlled. They will try to build up alternative educational and media platforms in the shadow of the prestigious, wealthy, powerful institutions they have lost. Meanwhile, others will continue to work in the mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracy, learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists—just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals.
This is the new reality that is emerging. There is blood in the water and the new Marxists will not rest content with their recent victories. In America, they will press their advantage and try to seize the Democratic Party. They will seek to reduce the Republican Party to a weak imitation of their own new ideology, or to ban it outright as a racist organization. And in other democratic countries, they will attempt to imitate their successes in America. No free nation will be spared this trial. So let us not avert our eyes and tell ourselves that this curse isn’t coming for us. Because it is coming for us.
In this essay, I would like to offer some initial remarks about the new Marxist victories in America—about what has happened and what’s likely to happen next.
II. The Marxist framework
Anti-Marxist liberals have labored under numerous disadvantages in the recent struggles to maintain control of liberal organizations. One is that they are often not confident they can use the term “Marxist” in good faith to describe those seeking to overthrow them. This is because their tormentors do not follow the precedent of the Communist Party, the Nazis, and various other political movements that branded themselves using a particular party name and issued an explicit manifesto to define it. Instead, they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more. When liberals try to use these terms they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them.
The best way to escape this trap is to recognize the movement presently seeking to overthrow liberalism for what it is: an updated version of Marxism. I do not say this to disparage anyone. I say this because it is true. And because recognizing this truth will help us understand what we are facing.
The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists. They don’t talk about the bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle, alienation of labor, commodity fetishism, and the rest, and in fact they have developed their own jargon tailored to present circumstances in America, Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism (what Marx calls the “ideology of the bourgeoisie”) and overthrowing it. We can describe Marx’s political framework as follows:
1. Oppressor and oppressed Marx argues that, as an empirical matter, people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another to the extent they are able. A liberal political order is no different in this from any other, and it tends toward two classes, one of which owns and controls pretty much everything (the oppressor); while the other is exploited, and the fruit of its labor appropriated, so that it does not advance and, in fact, remains forever enslaved (the oppressed). In addition, Marx sees the state itself, its laws and its mechanisms of enforcement, as a tool that the oppressor class uses to keep the regime of oppression in place and to assist in carrying out this work.
2. False consciousness
Marx recognizes that the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors, and that what they think of as progress has only established new conditions of oppression. Indeed, even the working class may not know that they are exploited and oppressed. This is because they all think in terms of liberal categories (e.g., the individual’s right to freely sell his labor) which obscure the systematic oppression that is taking place. This ignorance of the fact that one is an oppressor or oppressed is called the ruling ideology (Engels later coined the phrase false consciousness to describe it), and it is only overcome when one is awakened to what is happening and learns to recognize reality using true categories.
3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society Marx suggests that, historically, oppressed classes have materially improved their conditions only through a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large—that is, through the destruction of the oppressor class, and of the social norms and ideas that hold the regime of systematic oppression in place. He even specifies that liberals will supply the oppressed with the tools needed to overthrow them. There is a period of “more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution” and the “violent overthrow” of the liberal oppressors. At this point, the oppressed seize control of the state.
4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms
Marx promises that after the oppressed underclass takes control of the state, the exploitation of individuals by other individuals will be “put to an end” and the antagonism between classes of individuals will totally disappear. How this is to be done is not specified.
Marxist political theories have undergone much development and elaboration over nearly two centuries. The story of how “neo-Marxism” emerged after the First World War in the writings of the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci has been frequently told, and academics will have their hands full for many years to come arguing over how much influence was exerted on various successor movements by Michel Foucault, post-modernism, and more. But for present purposes, this level of detail is not necessary, and I will use the term “Marxist” in a broad sense to refer to any political or intellectual movement that is built upon Marx’s general framework as I’ve just described it. This includes the “Progressive” or “Anti-Racism” movement now advancing toward the conquest of liberalism in America and Britain. This movement uses racialist categories such as whites and people of color to describe the oppressors and the oppressed in our day. But it relies entirely on Marx’s general framework for its critique of liberalism and for its plan of action against the liberal political order. It is simply an updated Marxism.
III. The attraction and power of Marxism
Although many liberals and conservatives say that Marxism is “nothing but a great lie,” this isn’t quite right. Liberal societies have repeatedly proved themselves vulnerable to Marxism, and now we are seeing with our own eyes how the greatest liberal institutions in the world are being handed over to Marxists and their allies. If Marxism is nothing but a great lie, why are liberal societies so vulnerable to it? We must understand the enduring attraction and strength of Marxism. And we will never understand it unless we recognize that Marxism captures certain aspects of the truth that are missing from Enlightenment liberalism.
Which aspects of the truth?
Marx’s principal insight is the recognition that the categories liberals use to construct their theory of political reality (liberty, equality, rights, and consent) are insufficient for understanding the political domain. They are insufficient because the liberal picture of the political world leaves out two phenomena that are, according to Marx, absolutely central to human political experience: The fact that people invariably form cohesive classes or groups; and the fact that these classes or groups invariably oppress or exploit one another, with the state itself functioning as an instrument of the oppressor class.
My liberal friends tend to believe that oppression and exploitation exist only in traditional or authoritarian societies, whereas liberal society is free (or almost free) from all that. But this isn’t true. Marx is right to see that every society consists of cohesive classes or groups, and that political life everywhere is primarily about the power relations among different groups. He is also right that at any given time, one group (or a coalition of groups) dominates the state, and that the laws and policies of the state tend to reflect the interests and ideals of this dominant group. Moreover, Marx is right when he says that the dominant group tends to see its own preferred laws and policies as reflecting “reason” or “nature,” and works to disseminate its way of looking at things throughout society, so that various kinds of injustice and oppression tend to be obscured from view.
For example, despite decades of experimentation with vouchers and charter schools, the dominant form of American liberalism remains strongly committed to the public school system. In most places, this is a monopolistic system that requires children of all backgrounds to receive what is, in effect, an atheistic education stripped clean of references to God or the Bible. Although liberals sincerely believe that this policy is justified by the theory of “separation of church and state,” or by the argument that society needs schools that are “for everyone,” the fact is that these theories justify what really is a system aimed at inculcating their own Enlightenment liberalism. Seen from a conservative perspective, this amounts to a quiet persecution of religious families. Similarly, the pornography industry is nothing but a horrific instrument for exploiting poor women, although it is justified by liberal elites on grounds of “free speech” and other freedoms reserved to “consenting adults.” And in the same way, indiscriminate offshoring of manufacturing capacity is considered to be an expression of property rights by liberal elites, who benefit from cheap Chinese labor at the expense of their own working-class neighbors.
No, Marxist political theory is not simply a great lie. By analyzing society in terms of power relations among classes or groups, we can bring to light important political phenomena to which Enlightenment liberal theories—theories that tend to reduce politics to the individual and his or her private liberties—are systematically blind.
This is the principal reason that Marxist ideas are so attractive. In every society, there will always be plenty of people who have reason to feel they’ve been oppressed or exploited. Some of these claims will be worthy of remedy and some less so. But virtually all of them are susceptible to a Marxist interpretation, which shows how they result from systematic oppression by the dominant classes, and justifies responding with outrage and violence. And those who are troubled by such apparent oppression will frequently find themselves at home among the Marxists.
Of course, liberals have not remained unmoved in the face of criticism based on the reality of group power relations. Measures such as the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly outlawed discriminatory practices against a variety of classes or groups; and subsequent “Affirmative Action” programs sought to strengthen underprivileged classes through quotas, hiring goals, and other methods. But these efforts have not come close to creating a society free from power relations among classes or groups. If anything, the sense that “the system is rigged” in favor of certain classes or groups at the expense of others has only grown more pronounced.
Despite having had more than 150 years to work on it, liberalism still hasn’t found a way to persuasively address the challenge posed by Marx’s thought.
IV. The flaws that make Marxism fatal
We’ve looked at what Marxist political theory gets right and why it’s such a powerful doctrine. But there are also plenty of problems with the Marxist framework, a number of them fatal.
The first of these is that while Marxism proposes an empirical investigation of the power relations among classes or groups, it simply assumes that wherever one discovers a relationship between a more powerful group and a weaker one, that relation will be one of oppressor and oppressed. This makes it seem as if every hierarchical relationship is just another version of the horrific exploitation of black slaves by Virginia plantation owners before the Civil War. But in most cases, hierarchical relationships are not enslavement. Thus, while it is true that kings have normally been more powerful than their subjects, employers more powerful than their employees, and parents more powerful than their children, these have not necessarily been straightforward relations of oppressor and oppressed. Much more common are mixed relationships, in which both the stronger and the weaker receive certain benefits, and in which both can also point to hardships that must be endured in order to maintain it.
The fact that the Marxist framework presupposes a relationship of oppressor and oppressed leads to the second great difficulty, which is the assumption that every society is so exploitative that it must be heading toward the overthrow of the dominant class or group. But if it is possible for weaker groups to benefit from their position, and not just to be oppressed by it, then we have arrived at the possibility of a conservative society: One in which there is a dominant class or loyalty group (or coalition of groups), which seeks to balance the benefits and the burdens of the existing order so as to avoid actual oppression. In such a case, the overthrow and destruction of the dominant group may not be necessary. Indeed, when considering the likely consequences of a revolutionary reconstitution of society—often including not only civil war, but foreign invasion as the political order collapses—most groups in a conservative society may well prefer to preserve the existing order, or to largely preserve it, rather than to endure Marx’s alternative.
This brings us to the third failing of the Marxist framework. This is the notorious absence of a clear view as to what the underclass, having overthrown its oppressors and seized the state, is supposed to do with its newfound power. Marx is emphatic that once they have control of the state, the oppressed classes will be able to end oppression. But these claims appear to be unfounded. After all, we’ve said that the strength of the Marxist framework lies in its willingness to recognize that power relations do exist among classes and groups in every society, and that these can be oppressive and exploitative in every society. And if this is an empirical fact—as indeed it seems to be—then how will the Marxists who have overthrown liberalism be able use the state to obtain the total abolition of class antagonisms? At this point, Marx’s empiricist posture evaporates, and his framework becomes completely utopian.
When liberals and conservatives talk about Marxism being “nothing but a big lie,” this is what they mean. The Marxist goal of seizing the state and using it to eliminate all oppression is an empty promise. Marx did not know how the state could actually bring this about, and neither have any of his followers. In fact, we now have many historical cases in which Marxists have seized the state: In Russia and Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, and Cambodia, Cuba and Venezuela. But nowhere has the Marxists’ attempt at a “revolutionary reconstitution of society” by the state been anything other than a parade of horrors. In every case, the Marxists themselves form a new class or group, using the power of the state to exploit and oppress other classes in the most extreme ways—up to and including repeated recourse to murdering millions of their own people. Yet for all this, utopia never comes and oppression never ends.
Marxist society, like all other societies, consists of classes and groups arranged in a hierarchical order. But the aim of reconstituting society and the assertion that the state is responsible for achieving this feat makes the Marxist state much more aggressive, and more willing to resort to coercion and bloodshed, than the liberal regime it seeks to replace.
V. The dance of liberalism and Marxism
It is often said that liberalism and Marxism are “opposites,” with liberalism committed to freeing the individual from coercion by the state and Marxism endorsing unlimited coercion in pursuit of a reconstituted society. But what if it turned out that liberalism has a tendency to give way and transfer power to Marxists within a few decades? Far from being the opposite of Marxism, liberalism would merely be a gateway to Marxism.
A compelling analysis of the structural similarities between Enlightenment liberalism and Marxism has been published by the Polish political theorist Ryszard Legutko under the title The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (2016). A subsequent book by Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement (2020), has similarly documented the manner in which the American constitutional revolution of the 1960s, whose purpose was to establish the rule of liberalism, has in fact brought about a swift transition to a “Progressive” politics that is, as I’ve said, a version of Marxism. With these accounts in mind, I’d like to propose a way of understanding the core relationship that binds liberalism and Marxism to one another and makes them something other than “opposites.”
Enlightenment liberalism is a rationalist system built on the premise that human beings are, by nature, free and equal. It is further asserted that this truth is “self-evident,” meaning that all of us can recognize it through the exercise of reason alone, without reference to the particular national or religious traditions of our time and place.
But there are difficulties with this system. One of these is that, as it turns out, highly abstract terms such as freedom, equality, and justice cannot be given stable content by means of reason alone. To see this, consider the following problems:
1. If all men are free and equal, how is it that not everyone who wishes to do so may enter the United States and take up residence there?
By reason alone, it can be argued that since all men are free and equal, they should be equally free to take up residence in the United States. This appears straightforward, and any argument to the contrary will have to depend on traditional concepts such as nation, state, territory, border, citizenship, and so on—none of which are self-evident or accessible to reason alone.
2. If all men are free and equal, how is it that not everyone who wants to may register for courses at Princeton University?
By reason alone, it can be argued that if all are free and equal, they should be equally free to register for courses at Princeton on a first come, first served basis. This, too, appears straightforward. Any argument to the contrary will have to depend on traditional concepts such as private property, corporation, freedom of association, education, course of study, merit, and so on. And, again, none of this is self-evident.
3. If all men are free and equal, how can you justify preventing a man who feels he is a woman from competing in a women’s track and field competition in a public school?
By reason alone, it can be said that since all are free and equal, a man who feels he is a woman should be equally free to compete in a women’s track and field competition. Any argument to the contrary will have to depend on traditional concepts of such as man, woman, women’s rights, athletic competition, competition class, fairness, and so on, none of which is accessible to reason alone.
Such examples can be multiplied without end. The truth is that reason alone gets us almost nowhere in settling arguments over what is meant by freedom and equality. So where does the meaning of these terms come from?
I’ve said that every society consists of classes or groups. These stand in various power relations to one another, which find expression in the political, legal, religious, and moral traditions that are handed down by the strongest classes or groups. It is only within the context of these traditions that we come to believe that words like freedom and equality mean one thing and not another, and to develop a “common sense” of how different interests and concerns are to be balanced against one another in actual cases.
But what happens if you dispense with those traditions? This, after all, is what Enlightenment liberalism seeks to do. Enlightenment liberals observe that inherited traditions are always flawed or unjust in certain ways, and for this reason they feel justified in setting inherited tradition aside and appealing directly to abstract principles such as freedom and equality. The trouble is, there is no such thing as a society in which everyone is free and equal in all ways. Even in a liberal society, there will always be countless ways in which a given class or group may be unfree or unequal with respect to the others. And since this is so, Marxists will always be able to say that some or all of these instances of unfreedom and inequality are instances of oppression.
Thus the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism, which goes like this:
1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights.
2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights.
3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights.
4. Return to #1 above and repeat.
Of course, not all liberals give in to the Marxists’ demands—and certainly not on every occasion. Nevertheless, the dance is real. As a generalized view of what happens over time, this picture is accurate, as we’ve seen throughout the democratic world over the last 70 years. Liberals progressively adopt the critical theories of the Marxists over time, whether the subject is God and religion, man and woman, honor and duty, family, nation, or anything else.
A few observations, then, concerning this dance of liberalism and Marxism:
First, notice that the dance is a byproduct of liberalism. It exists because Enlightenment liberalism sets freedom and equality as the standard by which government is to be judged, and describes the individual’s power of reason alone, independent of tradition, as the instrument by which this judgment is to be obtained. In so doing, liberalism creates Marxists. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, it constantly calls into being individuals who exercise reason, identify instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, and conclude from this that they (or others) are oppressed and that a revolutionary reconstitution of society is necessary to eliminate the oppression. It is telling that this dynamic is already visible during the French Revolution and in the radical regimes in Pennsylvania and other states during the American Revolution. A proto-Marxism was generated by Enlightenment liberalism even before Marx proposed a formal structure for describing it a few decades later.
Second, the dance only moves in one direction. In a liberal society, Marxist criticism brings many liberals to progressively abandon the conceptions of freedom and equality with which they set out, and to adopt new conceptions proposed by Marxists. But the reverse movement—of Marxists toward liberalism—seems terribly weak in comparison. How can this be? If Enlightenment liberalism is true, and its premises are indeed “self-evident” or a “product of reason,” it should be the case that under conditions of freedom, individuals will exercise reason and reach liberal conclusions. Why, then, do liberal societies produce a rapid movement toward Marxist ideas, and not an ever-greater belief in liberalism?
The key to understanding this dynamic is this: Although liberals believe their views are “self-evident” or the “product of reason,” most of the time they are actually relying on inherited conceptions of what freedom and equality are, and inherited norms of how to apply these concepts to real-world cases. In other words, the conflict between liberalism and its Marxist critics is one between a dominant class or group wishing to conserve its traditions (liberals), and a revolutionary group (Marxists) combining criticial reasoning with a willingness to jettison all inherited constraints to overthrow these traditions. But while Marxists know very well that their aim is to destroy the intellectual and cultural traditions that are holding liberalism in place, their liberal opponents for the most part refuse to engage in the kind of conservatism that would be needed to defend their traditions and strengthen them. Indeed, liberals frequently disparage tradition, telling their children and students that all they need is to reason freely and “draw your own conclusions.”
The result is a radical imbalance between Marxists, who consciously work to bring about a conceptual revolution, and liberals whose insistence on “freedom from inherited tradition” provides little or no defense—and indeed, opens the door for precisely the kinds of arguments and tactics that Marxists use against them. This imbalance means that the dance moves only in one direction, and that liberal ideas tend to collapse before Marxist criticism in a matter of decades.
VI. The Marxist endgame and democracy’s end
Not very long ago, most of us living in free societies knew that Marxism was not compatible with democracy. But with liberal institutions overrun by “Progressives” and “Anti-Racists,” much of what was once obvious about Marxism, and much of what was once obvious about democracy, has been forgotten. It is time to revisit some of these once-obvious truths.
Under democratic government, violent warfare among competing classes and groups is brought to an end and replaced by non-violent rivalry among political parties. This doesn’t mean that power relations among loyalty groups come to an end. It doesn’t mean that injustice and oppression come to an end. It only means that instead of resolving their disagreements through bloodshed, the various groups that make up a given society form themselves into political parties devoted to trying to unseat one another in periodic elections. Under such a system, one party rules for a fixed term, but its rivals know they will get to rule in turn if they can win the next election. It is the possibility of being able to take power and rule the country without widespread killing and destruction that entices all sides to lay down their weapons and take up electoral politics instead.
The most basic thing one needs to know about a democratic regime, then, is this: You need to have at least twolegitimate political parties for democracy to work. By a legitimate political party, I mean one that is recognized by its rivals as having a right to rule if it wins an election. For example, a liberal party may grant legitimacy to a conservative party (even though they don’t like them much), and in return this conservative party may grant legitimacy to a liberal party (even though they don’t like them much). Indeed, this is the way most modern democratic nations have been governed.
But legitimacy is one of those traditional political concepts that Marxist criticism is now on the verge of destroying. From the Marxist point of view, our inherited concept of legitimacy is nothing more than an instrument the ruling classes use to perpetuate injustice and oppression. The word legitimacy takes on its true meaning only with reference to the oppressed classes or groups that the Marxist sees as the sole legitimate rulers of the nation. In other words, Marxist political theory confers legitimacy on only one political party—the party of the oppressed, whose aim is the revolutionary reconstitution of society. And this means that the Marxist political framework cannot co-exist with democratic government. Indeed, the entire purpose of democratic government, with its plurality of legitimate parties, is to avoid the violent reconstitution of society that Marxist political theory regards as the only reasonable aim of politics.
Simply put, the Marxist framework and democratic political theory are opposed to one another in principle. A Marxist cannot grant legitimacy to liberal or conservative points of view without giving up the heart of Marxist theory, which is that these points of view are inextricably bound up with systematic injustice and must be overthrown, by violence if necessary. This is why the very idea that a dissenting opinion—one that is not “Progressive” or “Anti-Racist”—could be considered legitimate has disappeared from liberal institutions as Marxists have gained power. At first, liberals capitulated to their Marxist colleagues’ demand that conservative viewpoints be considered illegitimate (because conservatives are “authoritarian” or “fascist”). This was the dynamic that brought about the elimination of conservatives from most of the leading universities and media outlets in America.
But by the summer of 2020, this arrangement had run its course. In the United States, Marxists were now strong enough to demand that liberals fall into line on virtually any issue they considered pressing. In what were recently liberal institutions, a liberal point of view has likewise ceased to be legitimate. This is the meaning of the expulsion of liberal journalists from the New York Times and other news organisations. It is the reason that Woodrow Wilson’s name was removed from buildings at Princeton University, and for similar acts at other universities and schools. These expulsions and renamings are the equivalent of raising a Marxist flag over each university, newspaper, and corporation in turn, as the legitimacy of the old liberalism is revoked.
Until 2016, America sill had two legitimate political parties. But when Donald Trump was elected president, the talk of his being “authoritarian” or “fascist” was used to discredit the traditional liberal point of view, according to which a duly elected president, the candidate chosen by half the public through constitutional procedures, should be accorded legitimacy. Instead a “resistance” was declared, whose purpose was to delegitimize the president, those who worked with him, and those who voted for him.
I know that many liberals believe that this rejection of Trump’s legitimacy was directed only at him, personally. They believe, as a liberal friend wrote to me recently, that when this particular president is removed from office, America will be able to return to normal.
But nothing of the sort is going to happen. The Marxists who have seized control of the means of producing and disseminating ideas in America cannot, without betraying their cause, confer legitimacy on any conservative government. And they cannot grant legitimacy to any form of liberalism that is not supine before them. This means that whatever President Trump’s electoral fortunes, the “resistance” is not going to end. It is just beginning.
With the Marxist conquest of liberal institutions, we have entered a new phase in American history (and, consequently, in the history of all democratic nations). We have entered the phase in which Marxists, having conquered the universities, the media, and major corporations, will seek to apply this model to the conquest of the political arena as a whole.
How will they do this? As in the universities and the media, they will use their presence within liberal institutions to force liberals to break the bonds of mutual legitimacy that bind them to conservatives—and therefore to two-party democracy. They will not demand the delegitimization of just President Trump, but of all conservatives. We’ve already seen this in the efforts to delegitimize the views of Senators Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Tim Scott, as well as the media personality Tucker Carlson and others. Then they will move on to delegitimizing liberals who treat conservative views as legitimate, such as James Bennet, Bari Weiss, and Andrew Sullivan. As was the case in the universities and media, many liberals will accommodate these Marxist tactics in the belief that by delegitimizing conservatives they can appease the Marxists and turn them into strategic allies.
But the Marxists will not be appeased because what they’re after is the conquest of liberalism itself—already happening as they persuade liberals to abandon their traditional two-party conception of political legitimacy, and with it their commitment to a democratic regime. The collapse of the bonds of mutual legitimacy that have tied liberals to conservatives in a democratic system of government will not make the liberals in question Marxists quite yet. But it will make them the supine lackeys of these Marxists, without the power to resist anything that “Progressives” and “Anti-Racists” designate as being important. And it will get them accustomed to the coming one-party regime, in which liberals will have a splendid role to play—if they are willing to give up their liberalism.
I know that many liberals are confused, and that they still suppose there are various alternatives before them. But it isn’t true. At this point, most of the alternatives that existed a few years ago are gone. Liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to the Marxists, and help them bring democracy in America to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices.
Yoram Hazony, President of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, is chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @yhazony.
Sweden’s Success is Kryptonite for Lockdown and Mask Advocates Their long term strategy is working | The Mass Illusion
“The impact of Covid on the people below 50 is smaller than that of flu and the impact on really young people is zero for all practical purposes. Focus on urinating in the correct room which is a task adequate for your intelligence.”
– Luboš Motl (Former Harvard Professor)
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis
***
AS the indolent, Western mainstream media continues to regurgitate its Big government slogan – “we’re all in this together” – in a pathetic and patronising attempt to soften the blow against forced unemployment, stay-at-home Lockdown and mandatory mask-wearing, Sweden has come out the other end with its economy intact and its citizens as free as they were before, global Fauciism.
THE most important takeout of the Swedish ‘experiment’ is one of freedom. The Swedish government put trust, not in Big-government policies, but rather in her people, her voters. The Swedish government refused to muzzle and subjugate its citizenry. Actual, democracy-in-action.
SUCH freedoms allowed to its people highlight a critical moment of distinction for the neo-Marxist, political fashionistas who cite Sweden as a “great example of socialism”. No. Sweden employs ‘socialism’ through various economic levers and social principles. It does-not-forgo the most basic and inalienable right of its citizenry – freedom to be.
THE stark difference between actual democratic freedom and AOC-fashionable-socialism-faux-freedom, cast in brilliant light by the very stance that Sweden has taken in response to the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’.
BELOW are two fantastic reads on Sweden’s commendable and measured response to CV19. The first from a front-line Swedish Doctor. The second, from Swedish blogger, Jordan Schachtel.
This is a reblog of the post at Sebastian Rushworth M.D. Health and medical information grounded in science. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Ok, I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, Sweden, and of living as a citizen in Sweden. As many people know, Sweden is perhaps the country that has taken the most relaxed attitude of any towards the covid pandemic. Unlike other countries, Sweden never went in to complete lockdown. Non-essential businesses have remained open, people have continued to go to cafés and restaurants, children have remained in school, and very few people have bothered with face masks in public.
Covid hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the usual things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was covid.Practically everyone who was tested had covid, regardless of what the presenting symptom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had covid. They came in with stomach pain and they had covid.
Then, after a few months, all the covid patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single covid patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five peopledying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more. If we assume around 0.5 percent of those infected die (which I think is very generous, more on that later), then that means that three weeks back 1,000 people were getting infected per day in the whole country, which works out to a daily risk per person of getting infected of 1 in 10,000, which is miniscule. And remember, the risk of dying is at the very most 1 in 200 if you actually do get infected. And that was three weeks ago.
Basically, covid is in all practical senses over and done with in Sweden. After four months.
In total covid has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million. A country with an annual death rate of around 100,000 people. Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway.That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.
That is why it is nonsensical to compare covid to other major pandemics, like the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people. Covid will never even come close to those numbers. And yet many countries have shut down their entire economies, stopped children going to school, and made large portions of their population unemployed in order to deal with this disease.
The media have been proclaiming that only a small percentage of the population have antibodies, and therefore it is impossible that herd immunity has developed. Well, if herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people? Why has the rate of infection dropped so precipitously? Considering that most people in Sweden are leading their lives normally now, not socially distancing, not wearing masks, there should still be high rates of infection.
The reason we test for antibodies is because it is easy and cheap. Antibodies are in fact not the body’s main defence against virus infections. T-cells are. But T-cells are harder to measure than antibodies, so we don’t really do it clinically. It is quite possible to have T-cells that are specific for covid and thereby make you immune to the disease, without having any antibodies. Personally, I think this is what has happened. Everybody who works in the emergency room where I work has had the antibody test. Very few actually have antibodies. This is in spite of being exposed to huge numbers of infected people, including at the beginning of the pandemic, before we realized how widespread covid was, when no-one was wearing protective equipment.
I am not denying that covid is awful for the people who do get really sick or for the families of the people who die, just as it is awful for the families of people who die of cancer, or influenza, or an opioid overdose.
But the size of the response in most of the world (not including Sweden) has been totally disproportionate to the size of the threat.
Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with in a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly. At present that means Sweden has one of the highest total death rates in the world. But covid is over in Sweden. People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected any more. I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway. Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long.
Covid has at present killed less than 6000 in Sweden. It is very unlikely that the number of dead will go above 7,000. An average influenza year in Sweden, 700 people die of influenza. Does that mean covid is ten times worse than influenza? No, because influenza has been around for centuries while covid is completely new. In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated. So it is quite possible, in fact likely, that the case fatality rate for covid is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population at the start of this pandemic.
This conclusion makes sense of the Swedish fatality numbers – if we’ve reached a point where there is hardly any active infection going on any more in Sweden in spite of the fact that there is barely any social distancing happening then that means at least 50% of the population has been infected already and have developed immunity, which is five million people. This number is perfectly reasonable if we assume a reproductive number for the virus of two: If each person infects two new, with a five day period between being infected and infecting others, and you start out with just one infected person in the country, then you will reach a point where several million are infected in just four months.
If only 6000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 percent, roughly the same as regular old influenza, which no-one is the least bit frightened of, and for which we don’t shut down our societies.
Here in the United States, we have become inundated with tales of COVID-19 doom and gloom. In America, the mainstream narrative is rife with hopelessness. We are told that there is simply no way to stop this virus without repetitive lockdowns, healthy quarantine, even of asymptomatic individuals, and universal mask mandates. And even with all of those extreme policy measures put in place, the politicians and public health officials tell us that we will have to wait for a vaccine for the country to even think about our “new normal” following the COVID-19 pandemic.
There’s one country that they don’t seem to want to talk about – Sweden. And for good reason. Sweden debunks the hysteria. Sweden shows how unnecessary all of the interventions to “fight” the virus are. Sweden shows us that a rational, evidence-based approach to the pandemic is now thriving.
In Sweden, there’s no masks, no lockdown, no vaccine, and most importantly, no problem.
Life has largely returned to normal in Sweden, and it all happened without the economy-destroying non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) demanded by the “public health expert” class, who guaranteed that chaos would come to every country that disobeyed their commands to hit the self-destruct button for their nations.
The Swedish government has provided its advanced metrics on the COVID-19 pandemic to the public, and the data includes the ever-important statistics on actual day of death, and other useful information. I ran the numbers month by month so you can get a very clear picture of Sweden’s downward trend.
In August, Sweden has registered just one death (!) with/from the coronavirus. Yes, you read that correctly. One death so far.
For the month of July, Sweden reported 226 deaths. They’ve accounted for 805 June deaths, 1646 in May, and 2572 in April. The deaths attributed to COVID-19 went from about a 50% reduction to falling off of a cliff.
The story is the same in the hospitals. COVID-19 is hardly registering as a blip on the radar. Sweden has reported just 4 new COVID-19 patients in their ICUs in August. The month of July saw only 52 COVID-19 patients in ICUs.
It doesn’t take a math whiz to come to the conclusion that the epidemic appears to have been wrapped up in Sweden for months. It’s unclear whether this is a result of having achieved the herd immunity threshold, or if the seasonality of the virus is providing indefinite relief. But it’s become absolutely clear that Sweden’s long term pandemic strategy is working.
Sweden did not do everything perfectly. Stockholm, like much of the West, failed to protect its nursing home population. The majority of the COVID-19 deaths in Sweden have come from the senior care population, with the average age of death (82) being the same as the average lifespan in the country. But remember, people in nursing homes are not mobile. They live in their own ecosystems and are not particularly impacted by COVID-19 policies. It was Sweden’s general population that was supposed to be plagued by their open society model to respond to the virus. We were told that the hospitals would be overrun, and that bodies of all ages would be dropping in the streets. This dystopian pandemia projection never came to fruition. Even during the worst months of the pandemic, Sweden’s general population never pressed their healthcare system. The same is true in the United States, but for whatever reason, many U.S. officials and “public health experts” have pushed the idea that everyone is equally impacted, which could not be further from the truth.
For this pandemic, the global public health expert class threw the pandemic playbook out the window, disregarding hundreds of years of proven science on herd immunity, in order to attempt to assert human control over a submicroscopic infectious particle. It hasn’t worked, to say the least. There is no evidence anywhere in the world that lockdowns or masks have *stopped* the spread of the virus. Sweden was one of the few places where cooler heads prevailed, and the scientists realized that attempts to stop the virus would be worse than the disease itself, in the form of economic and social ruin.
This is Sweden in the hight of the pandemic. They don’t have wall to wall media scaring the life out of citizens to justify their path! Relaxed & life as normal! pic.twitter.com/KhuRj0O2N6
Sweden’s experts settled on a strategy that was realistic, sustainable and science-based. The intention was never to “fight” the virus but to protect the old and vulnerable.
They have NO second wave and herd immunity. This is how Sweden is tracking for deaths per year 🧐 pic.twitter.com/vqnYJPC1GW
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken
***
MUST READ analysis, by a concerned citizen (aka voter), of what’s really going on in the Orwellian world of COVID-19 and the politics of statistics.
Positive Case to Test Conducted Percentage – 0.70%
COVID Deaths – 123
Positive COVID Case Death rate – 1.06%
COVID deaths to tests conducted – 0.0075% (read that again…)
COVID deaths to total Victorian population: 0.0019% (read that again…)
Median Age of COVID deaths: 82
Australia’s life expectancy at 2017: 82.50
There is a highly unusual occurrence in the 2020 influenza data. Based on the included charts , you will see there was a steadily increasing number of influenza cases at the start of 2020 that was almost in lockstep with the 2019 (record-breaking) influenza season. This was until March – at week 11 (when lockdown started), the influenza numbers across the country suddenly dropped off to almost zero at the same time as COVID numbers increased. The flu has remained at almost zero since (nearly 20 weeks later). Now, of course with lockdowns, increased sanitisation and social distancing, this would always reduce the spread of the flu in roughly equal proportion to the spread of COVID.
However (and here is where it gets mysterious), if the trigger for a large number of tests being conducted is people with “flu-like symptoms”, and 1.6 million COVID tests have been conducted with only 11.5k (0.7%) positive COVID cases, then by extension a reasonable portion of the 1.6 million tests should actually be the flu. Right?
Even if we took a rather conservative estimate of only 10% of tests conducted being the actual flu, this would still equate to a bit over 160,000 flu cases (or roughly half of last year’s national flu cases) – that is a lot. It is almost as if the existence of COVID and the flu are mutually exclusive. How is this possible?
Why is it that lab-confirmed influenza reporting has virtually stopped (not entirely but as close to stopped as you can get)?
Influenza has been an increasingly growing concern for the government and health departments over the past 3 or so years (with a record ~300,000 lab-confirmed influenza cases last year – nationally). It killed 902 people around the country, it appears to hit the vulnerable communities in just the same way COVID does.
So questions to be asked that the flu and COVID data raises
How did influenza numbers almost immediately stop at lockdown and have virtually remain flatlined since – even mid-way into peak season and even during a COVID second wave?
Why does it look as though COVID numbers have directly replaced flu numbers, yet the positive case to test ratio is still so low (0.70%)
If COVID remained contagious despite the implemented controls, why has the flu’s contagion rate almost completely fallen to zero?
Of all the people who showed “flu-like” symptoms but tested negative, why do they not show up on the flu data? If they had flu-like symptoms but not COVID, then what did they have?
Why has flu reporting stopped, and what are the implications of not having continuity in flu reporting, [for] long term healthcare planning and management?
Who stands to gain by not reporting the flu during COVID?
What agendas are playing out on the absence of flu data as a reasonable and reliable baseline?
If COVID cases are still occurring (second wave), should there not be an equal/corresponding spike in regular flu cases (in line with the symptomatic but negative COVID tests) from people moving around?
If the flu has almost completely disappeared and has for the most part been replaced by COVID, will we ever be free of COVID? And further, if this is now the case, what is the acceptable target of COVID cases in circulation before we can get “back to normal”?
If contact tracing and tracking the spread of a new virus that symptomatically looks like the flu is important, why would the flu not be tested at the same time as covid to map how the flu is transmitting and behaving alongside COVID?
Is testing for flu not equally as important and responsible so people who test negative to covid but positive to the flu still operate safely in public?
This post is prompted by a recent exchange with those reasserting the “consensus” view attributing all additional atmospheric CO2 to humans burning fossil fuels.
The IPCC doctrine which has long been promoted goes as follows. We have a number over here for monthly fossil fuel CO2 emissions, and a number over there for monthly atmospheric CO2. We don’t have good numbers for the rest of it-oceans, soils, biosphere–though rough estimates are orders of magnitude higher, dwarfing human CO2. So we ignore nature and assume it is always a sink, explaining the difference between the two numbers we do have. Easy peasy, science settled.
What about the fact that nature continues to absorb about half of human emissions, even while FF CO2 increased by 60% over the last 2 decades? What about the fact that so far in 2020 FF CO2 has declined significantly with no discernable impact on rising atmospheric…
Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia Natural climate variability similar to what we see today has been going on for thousands, if not millions of years, whether ‘greenhouse gas’ theorists moaning about modern human activities like it or not.
– – –
The Roman Empire coincided with warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the Med, says The GWPF.
The Mediterranean Sea was 3.6°F (2°C) hotter during the Roman Empire than other average temperatures at the time, a new study claims.
The Empire coincided with a 500-year period, from AD 1 to AD 500, that was the warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the almost completely land-locked sea.
“All great nations, including China and India, view energy as a domain of power. The west already has their power, but no longer knows how to use it the way it did during the Cold War. Global warming, abortion, gay marriage, and renewables versus fossil fuels have overtaken realism in all facets of government, military strategy, economics and countering the global threats from China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.” – China And India Will Watch The West Destroy Itself – OpEd | Climatism
WHILE the impotent and spoiled West concerns itself with knocking down monuments and promoting meaningless climate thresholds as its ’emissions’ obsessed leaders stumble around looking for non-existent net-zero pathways to their imaginary climate heaven, China continues its impressive growth strategy, strengthening its geopolitical and global advantage at frightening pace.
AND the greatest irony of all – China is doing all this on the back of an abundance of cheap, reliable thermal energy, namely coal-fired power. At the same time ratifying the Paris Climate Accord while accusing the USA of being “selfish” for wanting to burn coal! But, why wouldn’t they? The indolent Western mainstream media offers zero China pushback, ever.
HOW’s your Mandarin? Might be time to seriously consider enrolling the kids in lessons.
*
BY Jim Jordan (No link to original source available. Received via email)
“In some countries ’emissions’ obsessed leaders stumble around looking for non-existent net-zero pathways to their imaginary climate heaven. But India’s recent approach towards fossil utilization can be summed up in three words: ‘No Holds Barred’, says the author.”
INDIA also understands the meaning of four other words pertinent to wind/solar utilisation: “Go woke, go broke.”
Credit: Coal India Limited In some countries ’emissions’ obsessed leaders stumble around looking for non-existent net-zero pathways to their imaginary climate heaven. But India’s recent approach towards fossil utilization can be summed up in three words: “No Holds Barred”, says the author.
– – –
India is on the way to becoming a fossil fuel-based energy powerhouse of the 21st century, says Vijay Jayaraj @ The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).
India’s developmental goals for the future are quite ambitious. They ought to be: From tackling the surging poverty rates to providing affordable utilities, the country faces a steep challenge.
The key to achieving any of its developmental goals is a strong energy sector.
India is the third largest energy consuming nation and is following the fossil fuel pathway (like the West did during the 20th century) to achieve energy independence in the near future.
Like I have pointed out before, the environmentalist movement is not only a wing of the political Left but is also part of the Marxist tradition. As Tucker Carlson implied in his Fox News show opening monologue last night, the Left’s hiding Joe Biden is indicative of what is behind their mask. It is the…
— Read on greenjihad.com/2020/07/09/tucker-carlson-unmasks-the-left/
“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever levelled in modern times. One sure to stick in the craw of the Soviet propaganda machine with increasing discomfort until it has done its work.” — George F. Kennan (American diplomat and scholar)
“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” — David Remnick, New Yorker
“Best Nonfiction Book of the Twentieth Century” — Time magazine
***
JORDAN PETERSON’s forward to the abridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic The Gulag Archipelago is a literary masterpiece. Lucid, instructive and powerful. Who, having enjoyed the experience of reading it, would doubt Peterson’s claim that “If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917… there is absolutely and finally no excuse now.” For history is littered with diabolical examples of national leaders implementing grotesque, murderous means to justify the end, an impossible utopian Marxist mirage.
POSTING this on Climatism, today, as a reminder that the same Marxist, collectivist ideology that enabled a third of Stalin’s Soviet population to be slain, is the same poisonous ideology driving Democrat states and cities across America, to ruin.
NYPD leave their positions at City Hall in NYC, leaving it to Antifa and Black Lives Matter at the new CHAZ. pic.twitter.com/LN1lS7xwr9
THIS is not happening by chance. Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece about the murderous Soviet forced labor camp system, acclaimed as the defining document that “led to the end of Euro-communism and the end of pro-Soviet left-wing parties across Europe,” is required reading for all Russian students.
The Gulag Archipelago, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature is suppressed in the West because of the Marxist sympathies of Western academics.
“And today, despite everything, and under their sway — almost three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent collapse of communism — we are doing everything we can to forget what Solzhenitsyn so clearly demonstrated, to our great and richly deserved peril. Why don’t all our children read The Gulag Archipelago in our high schools, as they now do in Russia?”
*
THIS remarkable essay should be compulsory reading in every Australian university and high school. The fact that it isn’t/won’t, speaks volumes about why we are witnessing so much mob violence and anarchy across nearly every major Western ‘democratic’ city, today.
The Gulag Archipelago confirmed the horrors of the Soviet Union
JORDAN PETERSON
NOVEMBER 16, 2018
Nobel prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern front in the criminally ill-prepared Soviet Red Army. Then you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of “anti-Soviet propaganda”, and dragged off to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then you’re sentenced, in absentia, to eight years of hard labour (but you got away easy; it wasn’t so long afterwards that people in your position were awarded a “tenner” — and then a quarter of a century!). And fate isn’t finished with you yet — not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death.
Despite all this, you hold your head high. You refuse to turn against man or God, although you have every reason to do so. You write, instead, secretly, at night, documenting your terrible experiences. You craft a personal memoir — a single day in the labour camps — and, miracle of miracles! The clouds part! The sun shines through! Your book is published, and in your own country! It meets with unparalleled acclaim, nationally and internationally. But the sky darkens, once again, and the sun disappears. The repression returns. You become (once again) a “non-person”. The secret police — the dread KGB — seize the manuscript of your next book. It sees the light of day, nonetheless; but only in the West. There your reputation grows beyond the wildest of imaginings. The Nobel committee itself bestows upon you its highest literary honour.
The Soviet authorities, stripped of their camouflage, are enraged. They order the secret police to poison you. You pass (once again) near death. But you continue to write: driven, solitary, intolerably inspired. Your The Gulag Archipelago documents the absolute and utter corruption of the dogmas and doctrines of your state, your empire, your leaders — and yourself. And then: that is printed, too! Not in your own country but in the West — once again — from copies oh-so-dangerously hidden and smuggled across the borders. And your great book bursts with unparalleled and dreadful force into the still naive and unexpecting literary and intellectual world. You are expelled from the Soviet Union, stripped of your citizenship, forced to take residency in a society both strange to you and resistant, in its own way, to your prophetic words. But the power of your stories and the strength of your morals demolish any remaining claims to ethical and philosophical credibility still made by the defenders of the collectivist system that gave rise to all that you witnessed.
Years pass (but not so many, from the perspective of history). Then? Another miracle! The Soviet Union collapses! You return home. Your citizenship is restored. You write and speak in your reclaimed homeland until death claims you, in 2008. A year later The Gulag Archipelago is deemed mandatory reading by those responsible for establishing the national school curriculum of your home country. Your impossible victory is complete.
The three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago — one continuous, extended scream of outrage — are, paradoxically, brilliant, bitter, disbelieving and infused with awe: awe at the strength characterising the best among us, in the worst of all situations. In that monumental text, published in 1973, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn conducted “an experiment in literary investigation” — a hybrid of journalism, history and biography, unlike anything written before or since. In 1985 the author bestowed his approval upon Edward E. Ericson Jr’s single-volume abridgement — republished here on the 50th anniversary of the completion of the full three-volume edition and centenary of the author’s birth — and sold 30 million copies in 35 languages. Between the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s book — apart from the documentation of the horrors of the legions of the dead, counted and uncounted, and the masses whose lives were torn asunder — are the innumerable soul-chilling personal stories, carefully preserved, making the tragedy of mass betrayal, torture and death not the mere statistic Stalin so disdainfully described but individual, real and terrible.
It is a matter of pure historical fact that The Gulag Archipelago played a primary role in bringing the Soviet Empire to its knees. Although economically unsustainable, ruled in the most corrupt manner imaginable, and reliant on the slavery and enforced deceit of its citizens, the Soviet system managed to stumble forward through far too many decades before being cut to the quick. The courageous leaders of the labour unions in Poland, the great Pope John Paul II and the American president Ronald Reagan, with his blunt
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the day of his release in 1953 after eight years in prison.
insistence that the West faced an evil empire, all played their role in its defeat and collapse. It was Solzhenitsyn, however, whose revelations made it positively shameful to defend not just the Soviet state but the very system of thought that made that state what it was. It was Solzhenitsyn who most crucially made the case that the terrible excesses of communism could not be conveniently blamed on the corruption of the Soviet leadership, the “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin or the failure to put the otherwise stellar and admirable utopian principles of Marxism into proper practice. It was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions and the devastation of many more were, instead, a direct causal consequence of the philosophy (worse, perhaps: the theology) driving the communist system. The hypothetically egalitarian, universalist doctrines of Karl Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual culpability and responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested in the world.
For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic class, a group — that, and little more — and history nothing but the battleground of classes, of groups. His admirers regarded (continue to regard) Marx’s doctrine as one of compassion — moral by definition, virtuous by fiat: “consider the working classes, in all their oppression, and work forthrightly to free them”. But hate may well be a stronger and more compelling motivator than love. In consequence, it took no time, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, for solidarity with the common man and the apparently laudable demand for universal equality to manifest its unarticulated and ever-darkening shadow. First came the most brutal indictment of the “class enemy”. Then came the ever-expanding definition of that enemy, until every single person in the entirety of the state found him or herself at risk of encapsulation within that insatiable and devouring net. The verdict, delivered to those deemed at fault, by those who elevated themselves to the simultaneously held positions of judge, jury and executioner? The necessity to eradicate the victimisers, the oppressors, in toto, without any consideration whatsoever for reactionary niceties — such as individual innocence.
What can be concluded in the deepest, most permanent sense, from Solzhenitsyn’s anguished Gulag narrative? First, we learn what is indisputable — what we all should have learned by now (what we have nonetheless failed to learn): that the Left, like the Right, can go too far; that the Left has, in the past, gone much too far. Second, we learn what is far more subtle and difficult — how and why that going too far occurs. We learn, as Solzhenitsyn so profoundly insists, that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And we learn as well that we all are, each of us, simultaneously oppressor and oppressed. Thus, we come to realise that the twin categories of “guilty oppressor” and “justice-seeking victim” can be made endlessly inclusive. This is not least because we all benefit unfairly (and are equally victimised) by our thrownness, our arbitrary placement in the flow of time. We all accrue undeserved and somewhat random privilege from the vagaries of our place of birth, our inequitably distributed talents, our ethnicity, race, culture and sex. We all belong to a group — some group — that has been elevated in comparative status, through no effort of our own. This is true in some manner, along some dimension of group category, for every solitary individual, except for the single most lowly of all. At some time and in some manner we all may in consequence be justly targeted as oppressors, and may all, equally, seek justice — or revenge — as victims. Even if the initiators of the revolution had, therefore, in their most pure moments, been driven by a holy desire to lift up the downtrodden, was it not guaranteed that they would be overtaken by those motivated primarily by envy, hate and the desire to destroy as the revolution progressed?
Thus the doctrine of group identity inevitably ends with everyone identified as a class enemy, an oppressor; with everyone uncleansibly contaminated by bourgeois privilege, unfairly enjoying the benefits bequeathed by the vagaries of history; with everyone prosecuted, without respite, for that corruption and injustice. “No mercy for the oppressor!” And no punishment too severe for the crime of exploitation! Expiation becomes impossible because there is no individual guilt, no individual responsibility, and therefore no manner in which the crime of arbitrary birth can be individually accounted for. And all the misery that can be generated as a consequence of such an accusation is the true reason for the accusation. When everyone is guilty, all that serves justice is the punishment of everyone; when the guilt extends to the existence of the world’s misery itself, only the fatal punishment will suffice.
It is much more preferable instead — and much more likely to preserve us all from metastasising hells — to state forthrightly: “I am indeed thrown arbitrarily into history. I therefore choose to voluntarily shoulder the responsibility of my advantages and the burden of my disadvantages — like every other individual. I am morally bound to pay for my advantages with my responsibility. I am morally bound to accept my disadvantages as the price I pay for being. I will therefore strive not to descend into bitterness and then seek vengeance because I have less to my credit and a greater burden to stumble forward with than others.”
Is this not a, or even the, essential point of difference between the West, for all its faults, and the brutal, terrible “egalitarian” systems generated by the pathological communist doctrine? The great and good framers of the American republic were, for example, anything but utopian. They took full stock and full measure of ineradicable human imperfection. They held modest goals, derived not least from the profoundly cautious common-law tradition of England. They endeavoured to establish a system the corrupt and ignorant fools we all are could not damage too fatally. That’s humility. That’s clear-headed knowledge of the limitations of human machination and good intention.
But the communists, the revolutionaries? They aimed, grandly and admirably, at least in theory, at a much more heavenly vision — and they began their pursuit with the hypothetically straightforward and oh-so-morally-justifiable enforcement of economic equality.
Wealth, however, was not so easily generated. The poor could not so simply become rich. But the riches of those who had anything more than the greatest pauper (no matter how pitiful that “more” was)? That could be “redistributed” — or, at least, destroyed. That’s equality, too. That’s sacrifice, in the name of heaven on earth. And redistribution was not enough — with all its theft, betrayal and death. Mere economic engineering was insufficient. What emerged as well was the overarching and truly totalitarian desire to remake man and woman, as such — the longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image of the communist preconceptions. Attributing to themselves this divine ability, this transcendent wisdom — and with unshakeable belief in the glowing but ever-receding future — the newly minted Soviets tortured, thieved, imprisoned, lied and betrayed, all the while masking their great evil with virtue. It was Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago that tore off the mask, and exposed the feral cowardice, envy, deceit, resentment and hatred for the individual and for existence itself that pulsed beneath.
Others had made the attempt. Malcolm Muggeridge reported on the horrors of “dekulakization” — the forced collectivisation of the all-too-recently successful peasantry of the Ukraine and elsewhere that preceded the horrifying famines of the 1930s. In the same decade, and in the following years, George Orwell risked his ideological commitments and his reputation to tell us all what was truly occurring in the Soviet Union in the name of egalitarianism and brotherhood. But it was Solzhenitsyn who truly shamed the radical leftists, forcing them underground (where they have festered and plotted for the last 40 years, failing unforgivably to have learned what all reasonable people should have learned from the cataclysm of the 20th century and its egalitarian utopianism). And today, despite everything, and under their sway — almost three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent collapse of communism — we are doing everything we can to forget what Solzhenitsyn so clearly demonstrated, to our great and richly deserved peril. Why don’t all our children read The Gulag Archipelago in our high schools, as they now do in Russia? Why don’t our teachers feel compelled to read the book aloud? Did we not win the Cold War? Were the bodies not piled high enough? (How high, then, would be enough?)
Why, for example, is it still acceptable — and in polite company — to profess the philosophy of a communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s killing fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance (albeit of the most inexcusable kind) that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance — to present it as compassion and care? Or is it, instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth?
Perhaps we simply lack sophistication. Perhaps we just can’t understand. Perhaps our tendency towards compassion is so powerfully necessary in the intimacy of our families and friendships that we cannot contemplate its limitations, its inability to scale and its propensity to mutate into hatred of the oppressor, rather than allegiance with the oppressed. Perhaps we cannot comprehend the limitations and dangers of the utopian vision given our definite need to contemplate and to strive for a better tomorrow. We certainly don’t seem to imagine, for example, that the hypothesis of some state of future perfection — for example, the truly egalitarian and permanent brotherhood of man — can be used to justify any and all sacrifices whatsoever (the pristine and heavenly end making all conceivable means not only acceptable but morally required). There is simply no price too great to pay in pursuit of the ultimate utopia. (This is particularly true if it is someone else who foots the bill.) And it is clearly the case that we require a future towards which to orient ourselves — to provide meaning in our life, psychologically speaking. It is for that reason we see the same need expressed collectively, on a much larger scale, in the Judeo-Christian vision of the Promised Land, and the kingdom of heaven on earth. And it is also clearly the case that sacrifice is necessary to bring that desired end state into being. That’s the discovery of the future itself: the necessity to forgo instantaneous gratification in the present, to delay, to bargain with fate so that the future can be better; twinned with the necessity to let go, to burn off, to separate wheat from chaff, and to sacrifice what is presently unworthy, so that tomorrow can be better than today. But limits need to be placed around who or what is deemed dispensable.
Here’s some thoughts — no, some facts. Every social system produces inequality, at present, and every social system has done so, since the beginning of time. The poor have been with us — and will be with us — always. Analysis of the content of individual Paleolithic gravesites provides evidence for the existence of substantive variance in the distribution of ability, privilege and wealth, even in our distant past. The more illustrious of our ancestors were buried with great possessions, hoards of precious metals, weaponry, jewellery and costuming. The majority, however, struggled through their lives and were buried with nothing. Inequality is the iron rule, even among animals, with their intense competition for quality living space and reproductive opportunity — even among plants, and cities — even among the stellar lights that dot the cosmos themselves, where a minority of privileged and oppressive heavenly bodies contain the mass of thousands, millions or even billions of average, dispossessed planets. In equality is the deepest of problems, built into the structure of reality itself, and will not be solved by the presumptuous, ideology-inspired retooling of the rare free, stable and productive democracies of the world. The only systems that have produced some modicum of wealth, along with the inevitable inequality and its attendant suffering, are those that evolved in the West, with their roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition; precisely those systems that emphasise above all the essential dignity, divinity and ultimate responsibility of the individual. In consequence, any attempt to attribute the existence of inequality to the functioning of the productive institutions we have managed to create and protect so recently in what is still accurately regarded as the free world will hurt those who are weakest and most vulnerable first. The radicals who conflate the activities of the West with the oppression of the downtrodden therefore do nothing to aid those whom they purport to prize and plenty to harm them. The claims they make to act under the inspiration of pure compassion must therefore come to be regarded with the deepest suspicion — not least by those who dare to make such claims themselves.
The dangers of the utopian vision have been laid bare, even if the reasons those dangers exist have not yet been fully and acceptably articulated. If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917 (and both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche prophesied well before then that there would be hell to pay for that doctrine) there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. And we know that mostly because of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Thank heaven for that great author’s outrage, courage and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth. It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter wilful blindness and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror and destruction. Perhaps we could come to remember and to learn from the intolerable trials endured by all those who passed through the fiery chambers of the Marxist collectivist ideology. Perhaps we could derive from that remembering and learning the wisdom necessary to take personal responsibility for the suffering and malevolence that still so terribly and unforgivably characterises the world. We have been provided with the means to transform ourselves in due humility by the literary and moral genius of this great Russian author. We should all pray most devoutly to whatever deity guides us implicitly or explicitly for the desire and the will to learn from what we have been offered. May God himself eternally fail to forgive us if in the painstakingly revealed aftermath of such bloodshed, torture and anguish we remain stiff-necked, incautious, and unchanged.
Jordan Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of the bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. This is an edited extract from the foreword to the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, published by Vintage Classics.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis
IF Obama and not Trump were in power, would a shutdown of the entire global economy even have been uttered? Let alone the coordinated press-driven panic over a virus with a 99% recovery rate. A virus that was known early on to pose the greatest threat to the elderly and infirm.
OBAMA’S PANDEMIC
According to the CDC, Obama’s 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu, that killed “151,700-575,400 people worldwide during first year” (COVID19 507,188 to date), didn’t only target the elderly and infirm:
“2009 flu pandemic primarily affected children and young and middle-aged adults…
CDC estimated that 151,700-575,400 people worldwide died from (H1N1)pdm09 virus infection during the first year the virus circulated.** Globally, 80 percent of (H1N1)pdm09 virus-related deaths were estimated to have occurred in people younger than 65 years of age.”
WHOSE virus, therefore, posed a greater threat to the entire population in order to justify and initiate a global lockdown? Obama’s or Trump’s?
KEEP in mind that the WHO told us, very early on, two crucial points about COVID–19:
INFLUENZA CAN SPREAD FASTER THAN COVID-19 (Mar 6, 2020) : “The serial interval for COVID-19 virus is estimated to be 5-6 days, while for influenza virus, the serial interval is 3 days. This means that influenza can spread faster than COVID- 19.”
NO CLEAR EVIDENCE OF HUMAN-TO-HUMAN TRANSMISSION (Jan 14, 2020) : “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China”
Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China🇨🇳. pic.twitter.com/Fnl5P877VG
A positive test result shows you may have antibodies from an infection with the virus that causes COVID-19. However, there is a chance a positive result means that you have antibodies from an infection with a virus from the same family of viruses (called coronaviruses), such as the one that causes the common cold.
The CDC is combining antibody and current infection tests, so that anyone who has ever had the virus counts as a positive. Using this methodology they will be able to maintain panic indefinitely, even if very few people are currently infected. https://realclimatescience.com/2020/07/cdc-sabotaging-the-economy/
“REMEMBER when we paved the world with electronic waste
that chopped eagles and condors and made bats extinct because we thought wind was natural and uranium evil? – man that was a dark age!” – Michael Shellenberger
“MUCH that passes as idealism is disguised
hatred or disguised love of power.”
– Bertrand Russell
•••
TIME Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and U.N. IPCC expert reviewer Michael Shellenberger drops another inconvenient truth-bomb in the fight against the dangerous and costly politicisation of science.
“But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.”
REGARDLESS of your position on the magnitude of anthropogenic carbon dioxide as the supposed “climate control knob“, this is a timely and important read. Especially in the dangerous new age of postmodernism that we currently inhabit where truth, reason, honesty and integrity within government, academia and the sciences is in such short supply.
Ergo, props to Michael Shellenberger. Questioning dogma objectively, in the quest to restore scientific integrity, is risky business, these days.
On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.
I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.
But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.
Here are some facts few people know:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declinedby an area nearly as large as Alaska
The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, notclimate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California
Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations including Britain, Germany and France since the mid-seventies
Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor
We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter
Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change
Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels
Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture
I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.
In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.
Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.
I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”
But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.
I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.
But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”
The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”
Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.
As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.
Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.
I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.
It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.
Some highlights from the book:
Factories and modern farming are the keys to human liberation and environmental progress
The most important thing for saving the environment is producing more food, particularly meat, on less land
The most important thing for reducing air pollution and carbon emissions is moving from wood to coal to petroleum to natural gas to uranium
100% renewables would require increasing the land used for energy from today’s 0.5% to 50%
We should want cities, farms, and power plants to have higher, not lower, power densities
Vegetarianism reduces one’s emissions by less than 4%
Greenpeace didn’t save the whales, switching from whale oil to petroleum and palm oil did
“Free-range” beef would require 20 times more land and produce 300% more emissions
Greenpeace dogmatism worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon
The colonialist approach to gorilla conservation in the Congo produced a backlash that may have resulted in the killing of 250 elephants
Why were we all so misled?
In the final three chapters of Apocalypse Never I expose the financial, political, and ideological motivations. Environmental groups have accepted hundreds of millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests. Groups motivated by anti-humanist beliefs forced the World Bank to stop trying to end poverty and instead make poverty “sustainable.” And status anxiety, depression, and hostility to modern civilization are behind much of the alarmism
Once you realize just how badly misinformed we have been, often by people with plainly unsavory or unhealthy motivations, it is hard not to feel duped.
Will Apocalypse Never make any difference? There are certainly reasons to doubt it.
The news media have been making apocalyptic pronouncements about climate change since the late 1980s, and do not seem disposed to stop.
The ideology behind environmental alarmsim — Malthusianism — has been repeatedly debunked for 200 years and yet is more powerful than ever.
But there are also reasons to believe that environmental alarmism will, if not come to an end, have diminishing cultural power.
The coronavirus pandemic is an actual crisis that puts the climate “crisis” into perspective. Even if you think we have overreacted, Covid-19 has killed nearly 500,000 people and shattered economies around the globe.
Scientific institutions including WHO and IPCC have undermined their credibility through the repeated politicization of science. Their future existence and relevance depends on new leadership and serious reform.
Facts still matter, and social media is allowing for a wider range of new and independent voices to outcompete alarmist environmental journalists at legacy publications.
Nations are reorienting toward the national interest and away from Malthusianism and neoliberalism, which is good for nuclear and bad for renewables.
The evidence is overwhelming that our high-energy civilization is better for people and nature than the low-energy civilization that climate alarmists would return us to.
And the invitations I received from IPCC and Congress late last year, after I published a series of criticisms of climate alarmism, are signs of a growing openness to new thinking about climate change and the environment.
Another sign is the response to my book from climate scientists, conservationists, and environmental scholars. “Apocalypse Never is an extremely important book,” writes Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. “This may be the most important book on the environment ever written,” says one of the fathers of modern climate science Tom Wigley.
“We environmentalists condemn those with antithetical views of being ignorant of science and susceptible to confirmation bias,” wrote the former head of The Nature Conservancy, Steve McCormick. “But too often we are guilty of the same. Shellenberger offers ‘tough love:’ a challenge to entrenched orthodoxies and rigid, self-defeating mindsets. Apocalypse Never serves up occasionally stinging, but always well-crafted, evidence-based points of view that will help develop the ‘mental muscle’ we need to envision and design not only a hopeful, but an attainable, future.”
That is all I that I had hoped for in writing it. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll agree that it’s perhaps not as strange as it seems that a lifelong environmentalist, progressive, and climate activist felt the need to speak out against the alarmism.
I further hope that you’ll accept my apology.
Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.
Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award Winner, and author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper Collins, June 30, 2020). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and other publications. His TED talks have been viewed over five million times.
THE book-burners have been busy again. This time it’s a TIME Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and U.N. IPCC expert reviewer, Michael Shellenberger.
HIS crime, apologising “for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.”
Here are some facts few people know:
Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”
The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”
Climate change is not making natural disasters worse
Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003
THE use of hard facts to back up his apology didn’t please the deep-green authoritarians at Forbes, keen to protect their “climate crisis” narrative, at all costs.
— Mike Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) June 29, 2020
*
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
“THE urge to save humanity is almost always a
false-front for the urge to rule it.”
– H.L. Mencken
***
IF you want see what the situation is really like in Democrat-run states and cities across America, then watch this epic tragedy on Seattle released March, 2019 by ‘ABC’ news affiliate KOMO News.
A heartbreaking hour of truth, delivering a stunning assortment of hard data and facts that expose the brutal dangers of implementing Socialism as policy. The ‘compassionate’ quest for woketopia, a guaranteed deathblow to the soul of a city and its people.
“People come here because it’s called Free-attle and they believe if they come here they will get food, free medical treatment, free mental health treatment, a free tent, free clothes and will be free of prosecution for just about everything; and they’re right.
It didn’t used to be that way. Law enforcement officers used to be able to enforce laws.” – Seattle Police Officer
With the new dystopian ‘colony’ of ‘CHAZ’ or ‘CHOP’ recently declared in downtown Seattle, surely this special report, released a year ago, was not a wakeup call as to the inevitability of the current status of total anarchy, mayhem and madness in CHOP?
Seems no one cares, except for affected residents, small business owners and the “powerless” Police of Seattle.
The complete lack of interest and even ‘denial’ of reality in Democrat-run cities like Seattle represents yet another momentous victory for the mainstream media and bedfellows, the Democrat party – successfully hiding from their ‘progressive’ viewers and voters the ugly truth about the ruinous and generational effects of Democrat, socialist, ‘progressive’ policies.
“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, that the only thing I can equate it to is, we’re running a concentration camp without barbed wire, up to and including the medical experiment of poisoning these people with drugs.
I don’t know how else to put it, and it’s infuriating.” – Todd Wiebke, former Seattle Police Officer
“Yes, I am frustrated because I’m a law enforcement officer that is told NOT to enforce the law.” – Seattle Police Officer
And this prophetic 2016 warning from a Seattle PD Officer on the dangers of a ‘compassionate’ approach to homelessness, drugs and crime:
“In a misguided attempt to help this population, the city has allowed the streets to be essentially taken over . The city is falling apart and becoming more unsafe due to politics surrounding low level criminal activity and homelessness. We don’t want to screw over the homeless population, we just want the ability to police them.” – Seattle Police Officer
WHAT is really going on here?
It’s as simple as the current ruling-class, Leftist-elite not interested in the people who they work for and are bound to represent, rather, they are only interested in one thing, it’s name is p-o-w-e-r.
WATCH it all …
KOMO’s Eric Johnson explores the impact the drug and homelessness problem is having on our city and possible solutions in “Seattle is Dying.” Read more or watch at KOMONews.com: KOMO News Special: Seattle is Dying | KOMO
Seattle Is Dying. It’s a harsh title. Someone on social media even called it a “hopeless” title. I’ll admit to you that I wrestled with the name for some time. Too dramatic, I wondered? Too dark? In the end I went with it because I believe it to be true. I believe that Seattle is dying. Rotting from within.
This show, that we’ve been working on for several months now, is really the third in a kind of trilogy.
he second was called, “Demon at the Door.” It was about the hellish existence of heroin addiction.
This one is about everyone else.It’s about citizens who don’t feel safe taking their families into downtown Seattle. It’s about parents who won’t take their children into the public parks they pay for. It’s about filth and degradation all around us. And theft and crime. It’s about people who don’t feel protected anymore, who don’t feel like their voices are being heard.
This program is not about demonizing those who are struggling with addiction and homelessness and mental illness. On the contrary. Instead, it asks the question, “Why aren’t we doing more? Why don’t we have the courage to intervene in lives that are, in the face of a grave sickness, reeling out of control?”
It’s called, Seattle is Dying, and I believe the title to be true. But it’s not a hopeless program. There are ideas and concepts in the show that could start conversations about change.
I hope.
Mostly, I want it to be a reminder that this is not normal. This is not the way it has to be. This is not right.
Seattle’s hard-Left secessionist movement has claimed its first territory: six blocks in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
For the past week, Black Lives Matter and Antifa-affiliated activists have engaged in a pitched battle with Seattle police officers and National Guard soldiers in the neighborhood, with the heaviest conflict occurring at the intersection of 11th and Pike, where law enforcement had constructed a barricade to defend the Seattle Police East Precinct building. Hoping to break through the barricade, protesters attacked officers with bricks, bottles, rocks, and improvised explosive devices, sending some officers to the hospital. At the same time, activists circulated videos of the conflict and accused the police of brutality, demanding that the city cease using teargas and other anti-riot techniques.
Then, in a stunning turn of events, the City of Seattle made the decision to abandon the East Precinct and surrender the neighborhood to the protesters. “This is an exercise in trust and de-escalation,” explained Chief Carmen Best. Officers and National Guardsmen emptied out the facility, boarded it up, and retreated. Immediately afterward, Black Lives Matter protesters, Antifa black shirts, and armed members of the hard-Left John Brown Gun Club seized control of the neighborhood, moved the barricades into a defensive position, and declared it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone—even putting up a cardboard sign at the barricades declaring “you are now leaving the USA.”
On the new rebel state’s first night, the atmosphere was festive and triumphant. Hooded men spray-painted the police station with slogans and anarchist symbols, renaming it the “Seattle People’s Department East Precinct.” Raz Simone, a local rapper with an AK-47 slung from his shoulder and a pistol attached to his hip, screamed, “This is war!” into a white-and-red megaphone and instructed armed paramilitaries to guard the barricades in shifts. Later in the night, Simone was filmed allegedly assaulting multiple protestors who disobeyed his orders, informing them that he was the “police” now, sparking fears that he was becoming the de facto warlord of the autonomous zone. A homeless man with a baseball bat wandered along the borderline and two unofficial medics in medieval-style chain mail stood ready for action.
Nikkita Oliver, a radical activist and former mayoral candidate, emerged as a critical voice of the protest movement and assumed a leadership role in the newly declared autonomous zone. After night fell and a light rain began falling, she spoke to the crowd and outlined the ideological commitments behind the occupation. “[We need to] align ourselves with the global struggle that acknowledges [that] the United States plays a role in racialized capitalism,” she told protestors. “Racialized capitalism is built upon patriarchy, white supremacy, and classism.”
The following day, a coalition of black activists associated with the autonomous zone released a more specific list of demands, including the total abolition of the Seattle Police Department, the retrial of all racial minorities serving prison time for violent crimes, and the replacement of the police with autonomous “restorative/transformative accountability programs.” Activists pledged to maintain control of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone until their demands are met—setting the stage for a long-term occupation and the establishment of a parallel political authority.
The city government has not developed a strategic response to the takeover of Capitol Hill. According to one Seattle police officer with knowledge of internal deliberations, the city’s “leadership is in chaos” and “the mayor has made the decision to let a mob of 1,000 people dictate public safety policy for a city of 750,000.” The officer said that Chief Best had dispatched high-ranking police officials to the autonomous zone to establish a line of communication, but the officials were immediately sent away by armed paramilitaries at the barricades. “The tide of public opinion is on the side of the activists and they’re pushing the envelope as far as they can,” said the officer. “It’s not hyperbolic to say the endgame is anarchy.”
Politically, the Seattle City Council has already begun to champion the protesters’ demands. Socialist Alternative councilwoman Kshama Sawant declared the takeover a “victory” against “the militarized police force of the political establishment and the capitalist state.” Three councilmembers have signaled support for a 50 percent reduction in the police budget, with additional councilmembers likely to support a similar policy in the coming weeks. Sawant also opened Seattle’s City Hall—which had been closed by the mayor—to protesters, who immediately occupied the building.
The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone has set a dangerous precedent: armed left-wing activists have asserted their dominance of the streets and established an alternative political authority over a large section of a neighborhood. They have claimed de facto police power over thousands of residents and dozens of businesses—completely outside of the democratic process. In a matter of days, Antifa-affiliated paramilitaries have created a hardened border, established a rudimentary form of government based on principles of intersectional representation, and forcibly removed unfriendly media from the territory.
The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is an occupation and taking of hostages: none of the neighborhood’s residents voted for Antifa as their representative government. Rather than enforce the law, Seattle’s progressive political class capitulated to the mob and will likely make massive concessions over the next few months. This will embolden the Antifa coalition—and further undermine the rule of law in American cities.
Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. He’s directed four documentaries for PBS, including his new film, America Lost, which tells the story of three “forgotten American cities.” Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations
on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
– Prof. Chris Folland,
Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
“Themodels are convenient fictions
that provide something very useful.”
– Dr David Frame,
Climate modeller, Oxford University
97 Percent of scientists believe in catastrophic human caused climate change? Of course not! But far too many believe this ridiculous statement that defies basic logic and observation. (Can you think of any highly-political issue where you could get even 65% agreement?) The 97% Myth has succeeded in fooling many people because the phony number is repeated over and over again by those who have a financial and/or ideological stake in the outcome. By the way, what any scientist “believes’ doesn’t matter anyway. Science is what happens during rigorous and repeated experimentation.
SALIENT reminders about “consensus” from science legend, Michael Crichton :
“There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
― Michael Crichton
“I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”
― Michael Crichton
“Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.”
― Michael Crichton
CLIMATE models from the 1970’s have consistently predicted that theorised CO2-induced climate change should be causing a significant decline in total snow cover. However, Global snow cover has actually increased since at least the start of the record (Connolly et al, 2019), leading to some scepticism within the scientific community about the validity of the climate models.
ANOTHER ‘snow rich’ Nordic winter isn’t helping the climate model cause, one bit …
NB// Accompanying image is “intended as a joke.” (Tallbloke’s Talkshop)
Was it like this? This story may not make headline news, so let’s give it an airing here. Nordic countries are well used to winter snow, so when they talk of a ‘snow-rich’ winter they mean exactly that.
– – –
Electricity prices in the Nordic countries are likely to be unusually low this summer amid high inflows to hydropower plants, caused by a combination of a very snow-rich winter and late snowmelt, says Phys.org.
Electricity prices in the Nordic countries are likely to be unusually low this summer amid high inflows to hydropower plants, caused by a combination of a very snow-rich winter and late snowmelt.
“May was cooler than normal in Scandinavia and June has also started on the cool side. This has led to snowpack melting a bit later than it usually does,” Nathalie Schaller, a senior researcher at CICERO Center for International Climate Research, said…
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken
RON CLUTZ, of the excellent site Science Matters, examines the historical use of fear employed by our ruling-class-elite as a tool to maintain control and solicit power.
CLUTZ finds that the modern use of fear has been weaponised under a far more sinister premise than in more ‘noble’ times gone by. Whereas in the past, power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people, today’s “societies are now warped by the use of fear for political gain.”
Ironically, the most hated leader is Donald Trump, who broke from the doom and nightmare script, instead offering a promise to “Make America Great Again.” Elected on that hope, Trump was riding high on the theme “The power of Promises Kept.” And then came the pandemic filling the media and stoking public fears.
A salient read that dutifully explains the planned chaotic times we currently inhabit…
In 2004 BBC aired a 3-part documentary The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. The episodes start with this narration (in italics with my bolds):
In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority.
Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand.
And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media. This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits.
At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world, and both had a very similar explanation of what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age.
And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.
*
I was impressed at the time by the writing, imagery and presentation of the premise: Our societies are now warped by the use of fear for political gain. A lot has happened in the last 16 years, including the demise of Osama Bin Laden, disruption of Al-Queda, the rise and fall of ISIS. With terrorism increasingly on the back burner, politicians turned to climate fears, emphasized at the 2009 Copenhagen COP, ramped up to the Paris Accord in 2015, and further amped to SR1.5 in 2019 to claim a “climate emergency”, leading to schoolchildren protesting rather than learning, and violence from groups like the “valve turners” and Extinction Rebellion.
The Power of Nightmares explained the symbiosis between radical revolutionaries and elected officials. Public fear of damage and destruction cedes power and authority to governing politicians.They invited Greta to speak at Davos for the very same reason: she empowers them. At first the menace was Islamist Terrorists, who did achieve much killing and suffering in places they were able to occupy, or in attacks such as the Twin Towers. Then the media turned to extreme weather events, extinctions, sea level rise, arctic amplification, acid oceans, and fear of everything from Acne to Zika virus. The latter was a prelude to our current obsession with the coronavirus.
In all cases, the fear has been seized upon for outlays of public monies in massive spending, unheard of in normal times. And from the Patriot Act, NSA surveillance, and FISA courts, on to environmental regulations and obstacles, and now to lockdowns and distancing orders, civil liberties are quashed to gain safety from an invisible enemy.
Ironically, the most hated leader is Donald Trump, who broke from the doom and nightmare script, instead offering a promise to “Make America Great Again.” Elected on that hope, Trump was riding high on the theme “The power of Promises Kept.” And then came the pandemic filling the media and stoking public fears. Most recently, the fear mongers are promoting racism as a reason to undo law and order in favor of passion and violence. They are literally playing with fire threatening the roots of civil society in their pursuit of power.
“In the face of civil unrest,
strong leaders emerge to lead people away from lawlessness.”
–– Laura Ingraham
“Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap; An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit.”
–– Rudyard Kipling (Tommy)
***
FOX News’ Laura Ingraham asking the big questions that go a long way to providing answers as to the enormous scope and volatility of the U.S. riots. Questions that our ruling-class-elite and sycophant mainstream media will hide from you at all costs.
BBC busy spreading climate change fear and panic to the vulnerable. Paul Homewood corrects the MIAMI sea-level rise record straight with actual “science” and data …
Just down the coast from Donald Trump’s weekend retreat, the residents and businesses of south Florida are experiencing regular episodes of water in the streets. In the battle against rising seas, the region – which has more to lose than almost anywhere else in the world – is becoming ground zero.
The first time my father’s basement flooded, it was shortly after he moved in. The building was an ocean-front high-rise in a small city north of Miami called Sunny Isles Beach. The marble lobby had a waterfall that never stopped running; crisp-shirted valets parked your car for you. For the residents who lived in the more lavish flats, these cars were often BMWs and Mercedes. But no matter their value, the cars all wound up in the same place: the basement.
When I called, I’d ask my dad how the building was doing…
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
–– Top Google engineers
“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.
–– Warren Buffett
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
– James Hansen (The Godfather of AGW alarmism / former NASA climate chief)
***
JUST as socialist central-planning failed miserably before it was replaced by free market economies, green central-planning will have to be discarded before Australia and other Western nations will see a return to energy security, competitive pricing and business prosperity.
GOOD to see Mexico heading in the smart direction. Led by an apparent reasoned and rational government who understands that “the only things ‘inevitable’ about the ‘transition’ to wind and solar are skyrocketing electricity prices and unstable power grids.”
As Mexico is poised to plunge into its worst recession in recent-memory the leftist president is making cuts and pulling the plug on subsidy dependent intermittent power from wind and solar that has been driving up the cost of electricity for its financially challenged population.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the 2018 election by a landslide. His approach to government spending — even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout — might best be compared to that of conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Recognizing that industrial wind and solar electricity bring little to no value to electrical grids, Mexico is moving to avoid the higher electrical prices experienced by Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, South Australia, California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other governments that have heavily subsidized their supply of intermittent electricity.
The only things ‘inevitable’ about the ‘transition’ to wind and solar are rocketing electricity prices and unstable power grids. As to the latter, the Mexican government has taken a stand that has sent renewable energy rent seekers into a tailspin.
The Mexican government’s concept, not without merit, is that if you are looking for a reliable electricity supply, then it does not make much sense to rely on the ‘unreliables’. Mexico needs reliable and affordable power, more than ever.
The stage is now set for yet another legal dispute between Mexico’s government and the intermittent electricity sector, with the Mexican government acting to freeze project connections in a supposed bid to underpin system stability in the COVID-19 era.
While the wind and solar industries seem eager to deliver their peculiar brand of a ‘healthy environment’ for Mexicans, their government appears more inclined to ensure the delivery of affordable electricity as and when Mexicans need it.
Whether you’re a South Australian business owner trying to keep your head above water, a farmer’s wife in Ontario trying to keep your head on your pillow and sleep despite incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound or an Eagle just trying to keep its head, you’ve probably formed a pretty strong opinion about the ‘merits’ of subsidized wind electricity.
Oaxaca is a state in southern Mexico that is home to almost two-thirds of Mexico’s wind-power capacity, including the Tehuantepec turbines. Many people in towns with wind parks seem to still favor them, but over time, people have seen less benefits than originally promised. Job opportunities, for example, have fallen short of expectations, locals say. And the touted improvements to roads or schools also have not materialized, overall.
After the trillions spent on industrial wind turbines and solar panels that do not deliver as advertised, the worldwide ecological destruction from the mining of precious minerals leave lands uninhabitable and worthless for plants and trees. Renewable taxpayer handouts have stripped landscapes. Left in the wake of intermittent electricity farms and subsidized biomass-fueled power plants is cynical at best, and mercenary in their ability to destroy nature’s ability to alleviate the coronavirus via cleaner air.
During this global pandemic, dependence on China for rare earth minerals, which solar panels and wind turbines are useless without, makes clean energy a costly proposition.
The environmental destruction that wind turbines create is extraordinary – “building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.”
Wind and solar also bring little to no value to electrical grids. When the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow at set speeds it destroys a grid spinning reserve mode, peaking mode, and backup mode. Similarly, in Great Britain Prime Minister Boris Johnson catches coronavirus, and his country struggles with an unstable grid over widespread adoption of renewables for electricity. In the age of COVID-19 there are life and death matters if electricity is hampered for any length of time.
Renewables then make no sense when the entire world is sick. Only using Warren Buffet’s logic does chaotic wind power bring financial wealth when Mr. Buffett said: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That is the only reasons to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”
What makes the entire notion of relying on chaotically intermittent renewables dangerous is a seminal work by energy expert Robert Bryce titled, “Question of Power: Electricity and Wealth of Nations,” which highlights this startling fact:
“Roughly 3.3 billion people – about 45 percent of all the people on the planet – live in places where per-capita electricity consumption is less than 1,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or less than the amount used by a refrigerator.”
Uncertainty is the one constant the coronavirus has shown. Long-term planning is no longer in vogue – now it is understanding cratering oil prices and a possible Great Depression. If the World does not get back to work soon, trillion-dollar deficits as the new norm, and prosperity taking a backseat to police-state-like shut-ins.
More than 6,000 products come from the derivatives of crude oil, including every part in solar panels and wind turbines. Additionally, renewables cannot produce the critical medical equipment like ultrasound systems, ventilators, CT systems, and X-ray, medicines, masks, gloves, soap and hand sanitizers for hospitals, and protective gear for doctors and nurses. All those products begin from crude oil, or as the Wall Street Journal states – “Big Oil to the Coronavirus Rescue.”
More damning for renewables than endless subsidies or the billions of people needing reliable electricity, is the fact that without the products from petroleum derivatives the coronavirus would rage unchecked.
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis
***
A powerful piece, written only as a New Yorker could. Sentiments no doubt echoed across the globe as like-minded authoritarian technocrats governments, seemingly drunk-on-power, continue their draconian COVID19 ‘lockdown’ edicts even as “the curve” has well and truly “flattened”.
Sometimes, a good rant is all a writer can offer. Bear with me.
Last Friday morning, some 3,500 New Yorkers lined up at a Catholic church in Queens to receive free food hours before it even opened, according to the New York Police Department. Catholic Charities has reported a 200 percent increase in demand over the past month and a half.
By prolonging the coronavirus shutdown long after its core mission was accomplished, Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio have plunged tens of thousands of New Yorkers into poverty.
It needs to end. Now.
In mid-March, we were told we have to endure a lockdown to ensure that hospitals didn’t get overrun. We did. The hospitals were not overwhelmed. We turned the Javits Center into a hospital. We didn’t need it. We brought in a giant Navy ship to treat New Yorkers. We didn’t need it.
We were told we were moments away from running out of ventilators. We weren’t, and now the United States has built so many, we are giving them away to other countries.
Meanwhile, the Big Apple is dying. Its streets are empty. The bars and jazz clubs, restaurants and coffeehouses sit barren. Beloved haunts, storied rooms, perfect-slice joints are shuttered, many for good. The sweat equity of countless small-business owners is evaporating. Instead of getting people back to work providing for their families, our mayor talks about a fantasyland New Deal for the post-coronavirus era.
Open the city. All of it. Right now. Broadway shows, beaches, Yankees games, the schools, the top of the freakin’ Empire State building. Everything. New Yorkers have already learned to socially distance. Businesses can adjust. The elderly and infirm can continue to be isolated.
People social distancing at Domino Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Paul Martinka
For two months, we have waited for Cuomo and de Blasio to tell us how this ends. Where is ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg with his alleged army of tracers that the governor told us was the key to reopening? And why did he hand that responsibility over to Bloomberg, whom nobody elected anyway?
What the hell is going on? Is anybody in charge of this situation? Or are we just left with the governor and his talking-head brother arguing on CNN about which of the two Ma loves best? (Who cares?)
In late April, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp defied experts by opening his state. The Atlantic magazine, once a serious publication that should now come with a stick of stale bubblegum, accused him of engaging in “human sacrifice.”
You want to guess what happened? Guess, come on, take a guess. Instead of the predicted spike in deaths, the number of cases of coronavirus and associated deaths declined.
We should always consider that we are led by idiots, as one of my friends likes to remind me. Cuomo and de Blasio have no plan. There is not a single question about when New York can get back to normal to which they have a straight answer. Not one. They cash their taxpayer paychecks while immiserating the rest of us.
If our elected leaders won’t save the world’s greatest city from a slow death by economic strangulation, then the people of New York must do it themselves. Barbers, tailors, nail salons, sporting-goods stores, movie theaters and others should open their doors — while maintaining social distancing, of course — and dare the state to shut them down.
Our politicians serve by our consent; we don’t run our businesses or live our lives by their consent. The suggestion to the contrary is an affront to Americanism.
It has been a long time since this country, let alone this city, really had to deal with the prospect of mass starvation. This isn’t about the stock market — it’s about parents putting their kids to bed hungry and hoping tomorrow there will be something for them to eat if they get up at 4:30 a.m. and get in line at the food bank.
We did what we were asked. We flattened the freakin’ curve. There is no longer any reasonable justification for the government to deprive us of our livelihoods. And our rights aren’t the government’s to grant or take away. They belong to us — the free grant of nature and the God of nature. We’re Americans. More than that: New Yorkers, goddammit.
David Marcus is The Federalist’s New York correspondent. Twitter: @BlueBoxDave
PLANDEMIC (Pt. 1) is a must watch. It exposes the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system.
ABOUT THE FILM : Humanity is imprisoned by a killer pandemic. People are being arrested for surfing in the ocean and meditating in nature. Nations are collapsing. Hungry citizens are rioting for food. The media has generated so much confusion and fear that people are begging for salvation in a syringe. Billionaire patent owners are pushing for globally mandated vaccines. Anyone who refuses to be injected with experimental poisons will be prohibited from travel, education and work. No, this is not a synopsis for a new horror movie. This is our current reality.
Plandemic video has been taken down by YouTube and their little robotic censors. I am so done with YouTube! I hope people leave that platform in droves but the fact that they removed it gives the video even more credibility, of which YouTube is devoid. I’ll find it somewhere else and post the link everywhere!
*
MEANWHILE, you can see the original version from the PlandemicMovie website in Vimeo format. Click image to take you there…
In an effort to bypass the gatekeepers of free speech, we invite you to download this interview by simply clicking the button below, then uploading directly to all of your favorite platforms.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” ― George Orwell, 1984
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
– George Orwell, 1984
***
NEVER in American history have politicians been more powerful than they are now. Tucker Carlson reveals how many of our elected representatives have become “drunk with power”, feeding on draconian CV19 lockdown measures while completely ignoring the Bill of Rights.
The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t just resulted in panic, but also new found power grabs by politicians and an acceptance by many to cede their liberties to political authority. This isn’t just about unchecked power, but also what happens when humans are viewed as the primary cause of a catastrophe in which leaders tend not to even abide by rules they impose on others. For example, the police officers featured in the below video aren’t wearing face masks, few politicians wear themdespite the risks and the practice being required in some states, and former president Obama was recently caught golfing in Virginia despite the state’s lockdown order.
When I speak of a hoax and The Virus, I don’t mean there isn’t in our population a pathogen identified loosely as COVID-19 or, as the “unwoke” might say, the Wuhan Flu. As with past respiratory diseases, it’s also dangerous to the vulnerable. But as data increasingly show — and as I and some others have been saying all along — this current situation is very different from past pandemics in one significant and deadly way: It’s not being treated as only a medical/health issue.
It’s being treated as a political issue.
And as the Soviet Union’s Lysenkoism demonstrated, politics kills science.
I recently dubbed the Wuhan Flu the “Wizard of Oz Virus” because its reputation greatly exceeds its power. This was evident long ago, too. We only had to look at the early data coming out on Italy and a certain quarantined cruise ship, after all.
While the following might have changed a bit over time, we heard early on that 99-plus percent of the Italian victims had comorbidities and that their average age was 79.5. Italy is also a graying nation, with 23 percent of the population in its most affected area (the north) more than 65 years old.
Additionally, Italy has a wanting health care system, and stories emerged about askew triage-oriented priorities causing certain elderly to be denied care. Italy’s economic ties with Beijing also meant there were direct flights from Wuhan and 100,000 Chinese working in its factories.
There are other differences, too. One I pointed out is that Italy has an “un-social-distancing” culture, with acquaintances engaging in a lot of touching, and personal space between them only two to three feet (vs. four in North America).
Then there was the cruise ship Diamond Princess, which was quarantined off Japan’s coast in February and at one time had more than half the Wuhan virus cases outside of China. Of the 3,711 people on board, 712 (19.2 percent) contracted the disease and 13 (1.8 percent) died.
Yet note that this ship was called a disease incubator; the average age of those aboard was 58, with 33 percent over 70; and medical care was sub-par. Note, too, to illustrate the latter group’s (the elderly’s) vulnerability, that they were dying during a four-week stretch in 2018 at “a rate of 169 people a day [in the U.S.], or seven people per hour” of the common flu, reported the AARP.
In other words, there was never a reason to believe the Wuhan virus would transform America into Black Plague-ravaged medieval Europe. The Enemedia pretended to know this at one time, too.
Right after President Trump wisely announced his China travel ban (Jan. 31), the Enemedia, busy calling him “racist” for doing so, ran headlines such as this Feb. 1 Washington Post gem: “Get a grippe, America. The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now.”
It was also around this time that Nancy “Let ‘em Eat Ice Cream” Pelosi, Bolshevik Bill (de Blasio) and other leftist pols were encouraging New Yorkers and San Franciscans to visit their Chinatowns, as they played the race card. Now they criticize Trump for not doing more when they counseled doing less.
(Know, too, that Dr. Anthony Fauci said on TV Jan. 29 that Americans didn’t need to change their behavior to combat the virus.)
But the Enemedia weren’t all wrong back then. Consider the following past flu pandemics, with the number of Americans dead accompanied by what that translates into today adjusted for population.
The Spanish Flu pandemic (1918-19) killed 675,000 Americans. Today: equates to a bit more than two million dead.
The “Asian Flu” pandemic of 1957 killed 116,000 Americans. Today: equates to approximately 223,000.
The “Hong Kong Flu” pandemic of 1968 killed at least 100,000 Americans. Today: equates to 164,915.
Thus far, the Wuhan virus has claimed approximately 63,000 Americans — if you can believe the allegedly exaggerated numbers our governments produce.
Moreover, each year the flu claims tens of thousands more U.S. victims, including 61,000 during the 2017-18 winter season and 358 children during 2009-10. (In contrast, there are three “unconfirmed” Wuhan virus pediatric deaths.) But we didn’t run around back then like a jack-booted Chicken Little trampling civil rights and economic fortunes, shutting down schools and complaining about naming the disease after its place of origin.
But, again, in those times disease wasn’t a political issue.
Now, of course, data are showing what cooler heads have long theorized: The Wuhan flu mortality rate may end up being similar to the flu’s; the doom-and-gloom computer-model projections were way off; lockdowns are deadlier than what they supposedly combat; perhaps 80-plus percent of the afflicted are asymptomatic or only mildly affected; the infection rate is far higher than most “experts” suspected; and as with the flu, going outside, living relatively normally and establishing herd immunity (while protecting the vulnerable) is the best way to eliminate the disease.
Yet the Enemedia and leftist politicians, far from correcting their mistakes, are doubling down on destructive policies. Given this, it’s time to examine how the Wuhan Flu was turned into the Wizard of Oz Virus.
Anatomy of a National Hysteria
How we got to where we are now is complex, as man’s events usually are, but here’s a summary:
Back when the Democrats and their Enemedia were focused on impeachment, video was emerging from China of government thugs in hazmat suits forcibly extracting people from their homes and spraying down wide areas with disinfectant. (This reaction lends credence to the increasingly accepted thesis that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab, mind you.)
With the impeachment effort’s collapse, the Enemedia turned its attention to the pandemic. After first downplaying it and calling Trump xenophobic, they then began exaggerating it and calling him criminally negligent. They simultaneously commenced showing that alarming Chinese footage, along with reporting massive death in Italy (which also might have been exaggerated) and continually showing videos of coffins, from Italy and later N.Y.C.
Hearing only the Enemedia horror stories and apocalyptic projections, Americans became terrified and panicked — and panicked people don’t make wise decisions. They are easy to control, though.
The Enemedia’s malpractice was devastating. With polls showing up to 80 percent support for lockdowns because of it, it became politically impossible for officials to implement rational policy. Trump and the governors were likely terrified that they’d be blamed for every death if they didn’t “take action.”
The pseudo-elites had and have incentive to keep the hoax going. The Enemedia know that if it bleeds, it leads, but they and the Democrats also wanted to damage Trump. Note that his strong economy has been crashed, and his popular rallies — central to his campaign effort — have been cancelled. Moreover, leftists have used the manufactured crisis to remove rights and advance their agenda, with some actually confessing this Machiavellian goal. Why, some rank-and-file leftists even admitted they’d prefer millions of Wuhan Flu deaths to Trump being re-elected.
It doesn’t help that Trump is a known germaphobe counseled by apparently incompetent and/or corrupt officials such as Fauci and Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx.
And now those officials have formulated a standard for opening the economy that has been called “rigged” and that may be impossible to satisfy. This is despite the Wizard of Oz Virus narrative’s collapse, with a study showing lockdowns don’t work and it becoming clearer, by the day, that they’ll actually lead to more disease and death.
It would be nice to think that the malicious Machiavellians in media and politics will be held accountable for visiting one of American history’s greatest blunders upon us. But that appears just a dream. It’s lamentable, surely, and can make one understand why G.K. Chesterton once remarked, “It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”
IMAGINE Our Covid-19 Response Running On Windmills And Mirrors | Climatism
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
–– Top Google engineers
“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.
–– Warren Buffett
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
– James Hansen (The Godfather of AGW alarmism / former NASA climate chief)
***
ISN’T it a little strange that a century ago electrification and its fossil fuel source was revered and now so many despise the source but think they can just keep the electricity. No one told them you can not have your cake and eat it too, or that there are no free lunches.
Imagine Our Covid-19 Response Running On Wind And Solar Power
By Dr. Jay Lehr~
UNTIL the Pandemic struck the world, the desire of the progressive political movement in the United States and much of the world was focused on ridding the planet of fossil fuels, said to be negatively altering the planet’s climate. These folks are fully convinced that the world, at its present state of technological advance, could be run entirely on renewable refuels lead by solar and wind power. They have always ignored the intermittency of these sources when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. While they know we have no economic method to store such energy, they assume one will come along.
It has been futile yet interesting to continue such a debate in the face of a calm period where conjecture was but an intellectual exercise. Then reality hit us all in the face with a disaster never seen in our life times. Where would the two million Covid-19 afflicted people be who depended on ventilators run by electricity from coal and natural gas be today, if they only had power from the wind and the sun. The obvious answer is that many more would be dead.
While not much good will come from this world wide tragedy, perhaps more of the people deluded by the climate change fear mongering will come to their senses. Eliminating fossil fuels to produce electricity or power automobiles would not support life as we know it today but only life as we knew it a century and a half ago. It may also be time to rename the electric cars, beloved by many, to what they really are, coal, natural gas or nuclear powered cars.
It is a mystery that virtually all the electric car owners believe their power comes magically out of a wall socket at home or a charging station on the road. The power really comes from a nearby power plant all of which burn coal, natural gas or obtain heat from nuclear fuel. Even if the plant gets some energy from local wind turbines or solar photovoltaic cells this amount is minimal. If we really want a huge increase in the number of electric automobiles on the road we must build more fossil fuel burning power plants, not more wind or solar farms.
Perhaps a little history of the electrification of our nation is in order. It was the development of our fossil fuels that made possible the greatest contribution to health and prosperity which was to make electricity affordable everywhere. In 2000 the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced “the 20 engineering achievements that have had the greatest impact on the quality of life in the 20th century”. The achievements were nominated by 29 professional engineering societies and ranked by a distinguished panel of the nation’s top engineers. They ranked electrification as the number one achievement.
It powered almost every pursuit and enterprise in modern society. Aside from lighting the world, it impacted countless areas of daily life including food production and processing, air conditioning, heating, refrigeration, entertainment, transportation, communication, health care and eventually computers.
In the NAE announcement regarding electrification it stated : “One hundred years ago life was a constant struggle against disease, pollution, deforestation, treacherous working conditions and enormous cultural divides ……. By the end of the 20th century, the world had become a healthier, safer and more productive place, primarily because of this engineering achievement”.
Fossil fuels brought electricity to the homes and workplaces of billions of people around the world. Wind and solar power in anyone’s wildest dreams can never support what electricity provided us in these past 148 years since Thomas Edison built the world’s first coal fired generating plant on Pearl Street in New York City in 1882.
Part of our collective problem as to energy and electricity is that technology has past us by. We all once understood how an automobile engine worked, how a home was wired, what a fuse was. When computers and GPS and smart phones came along most of us gave up trying to understand. Many believe there really is a cloud up there keeping our data safe. So why not think electric cars reap the magic from the wall socket and the wind and sun can keep us doing all that we do. And that scientists have high tech crystal balls to tell us the climate decades from now. It should become clear as technology advanced beyond the average persons ability to comprehend, we have actually become dumber. Perhaps being rationally ignorant of things we do not need to know is okay. Unfortunately people in leadership positions are then able to lead us astray. The elimination of fossil fuels is a poor path to follow.
Isn’t it a little strange that a century ago electrification and its fossil fuel source was revered and now so many despise the source but think they can just keep the electricity. No one told them you can not have your cake and eat it too, or that there are no free lunches.
Note: Portions of this article were excerpted from Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels (CCRII: Fossil Fuels), produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) published by The Heartland Institute, with permission of the editors Joseph Bast and Diane Bast. The authors strongly recommend the book for a complete exposé of the fallacies behind the climate delusion.
Dr Jay Lehr contributes posts at the CFACT site. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition, and he is the author of more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books.
A 240 year old doll that can write, a clockwork creation by Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a Swiss watchmaker. The doll is able to write any custom text up to 40 letters long, and it uses a goose feather to write, which he inks from time to time, including a shake of the wrist to prevent ink from spilling. His eyes follow the text being written, and the head moves when he takes some ink. You can view this doll in person at the Muse d’Art et d’Histoire of Neuchtel, in Switzerland.
“We wear a mask in an acute setting to protect us. We’re (now) not wearing masks. Why is that? Because we understand microbiology. We understand immunology, and we want strong immune systems. I don’t want to hide in my home, develop a weak immune system and then come out and get disease.
We have both been in the E.R. through swine flu, through bird flu …. DID we shutdown for those?
AS predicted, the YouTube ‘Ministry of Truth’ has pulled the Dr Erickson and Dr. Artin Massih videos.
APPARENTLY, using data from Stanford University and the CDC while noting that COVID19 is “no more deadly than the flu” is illegal speech. Welcome back to 1984 . Orwell would be blushing.
FREEDOM of speech is dead.
ANDY Dale sums up the current situation of Leftist, big-tech censorship poetically…
“The gradual erosion of freedom of speech and thought as groupthink takes over is frightening.” – @AndyDal02045409
*
THERE are a few independent sites still showing the content…
“The documentary does a good job at proving that conservatives were right to say that green energy is a scam“
“This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate.”
***
A must watch.
IT gets going at around the 13 minute mark, and then, kaboom…
***
UPDATE 26 May
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
– George Orwell, 1984
THE Ministry Of Truth has now removed Michael Moore’s original #YouTube release of #PlanetOfTheHumans. It was tracking some 10 million views when shut-down/censored due to a “copyright claim”.
THE complainant, Toby Smith, explains why he is not filled with the obligatory totalitarian streak of the muzzle-ready Leftist …
“I went directly to YouTube rather than approaching the filmmakers because I wasn’t interested in negotiation. I don’t support the documentary, I don’t agree with its message and I don’t like the misleading use of facts in its narrative.”
YOUTUBE boss, @SusanWojcicki agreed and pulled the Moore/Flint docco that thoroughly destroys the “renewable energy” myth.
SUSAN does not trust your judgment or you ability to think for yourself.
Paul Homewood comments, “Regardless of the so-called copyright issues, this is clearly a politically motivated attempt to censor the film, as Toby Smith himself admits.”
THE post title is obviously a parody. However, it happens to be a factual one, albeit politically incorrect.
OUR very ‘warm’ friends at National Geographic have inadvertently proven the Medieval Warm Period that existed a mere ~1000 years ago. An inconvenient period known as a “climate optimum” that ClimateChange™️ and National Geographic have spent so much currency, propaganda and magazine paper, ‘denying’.
*Nat Geo has deleted the “continue reading this myth” link. So, you will have to imagine what they would have gone on to say. Not hard to imagine the content.
IT would have, no doubt, referenced Michael E. Mann’s “hockey stick” fraud that disappeared the Medieval Warm Period just prior to the UN IPCC’s 2001 third assessment report (TAR)…
*
BY the 2001 IPCC report, the Medieval Warm period disappeared and became much cooler than the late 20th century:
BY pure coincidence, in the year 1995 the IPCC made a decision to make the Medieval Warm Period disappear:
YOUTUBE clip of Dr David Deming’s US Senate testimony on the “disappearance” of the Medieval Warm Period (see 01m:50s) :
Video of Dr David Deming’s statement to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works on December 6, 2006. Dr Deming reveals that in 1995 a leading scientist emailed him saying “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. A few years later, Michael Mann and the IPCC did just that by publishing the now throughly discredited hockey stick graph.
“As he peered into the gloom, Pilø soon realized he was looking at a field of objects that hadn’t seen the light of day for hundreds of years. Broken sleds, tools, and other traces of daily life going back nearly 2,000 years lay strewn across the surface of the Lendbreen ice patch, which was melting rapidly due to global warming.“
QUESTION to NatGeo:
WHAT caused the now-exposed highway to be just as exposed ~1,000 years ago? Freyja’s chariot?
Reporting from New York — An estimated 80,000 Americans died of flu and its complications last winter — the disease’s highest death toll in at least four decades.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, revealed the total in an interview Tuesday night with the Associated Press.
Flu experts knew it was a very bad season, but at least one found the size of the estimate surprising.
“That’s huge,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert. The tally was nearly twice as much as what health officials previously considered a bad year, he said.
In recent years, flu-related deaths have ranged from about 12,000 to 56,000, according to the CDC.
Last fall and winter, the U.S. went through one of the most severe flu seasons in recent memory. It was driven by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, particularly among young children and the elderly.
The season peaked in early February and was mostly over by the end of March.
Making a bad year worse, the flu vaccine didn’t work very well. Experts nevertheless say vaccination is still worth it because it makes illnesses less severe and saves lives.
“I’d like to see more people get vaccinated,” Redfield said. “We lost 80,000 people last year to the flu.”
CDC officials do not have exact counts of how many people die from flu each year. Flu is so common that not all flu cases are reported, and flu is not always listed on death certificates. So the CDC uses statistical models, which are periodically revised, to make estimates.
Fatal complications from the flu can include pneumonia, stroke and heart attack.
CDC officials called the 80,000 figure preliminary, and said it may still be revised. But they said it is not expected to go down.
The figure eclipses the estimates for every flu season going back to the winter of 1976-77. Estimates for many earlier seasons were not readily available.
Last winter was not the worst flu season on record. The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted nearly two years, killed more than 500,000 Americans, historians estimate.
It’s not easy to compare flu seasons through history, partly because the nation’s population is changing. There are more Americans — and more elderly Americans — today than in decades past, noted Dr. Daniel Jernigan, a CDC flu expert.
U.S. health officials on Thursday are scheduled to hold a media event in Washington to stress the importance of vaccinations to protect against whatever flu circulates this winter.
And how bad is it going to be? So far, the flu that’s been detected is a milder strain, and early signs are that the vaccine is shaping up to be a good match, Jernigan said.
The makeup of the vaccine has been changed this year to try to better protect against expected strains.
MEANWHILE, the weather back in the NH winter season of 2017/18 …
*
IT certainly was a brutal 2017/18 winter in the U.S. and globally:
COLDEST US TEMPS ON RECORD
NEW YORK, NY – DECEMBER 27: Two women take a selfie photo in front of a frozen fountain in Bryant Park on a frigid day in Manhattan on December 27, 2017 in New York City. Dangerously low temperatures and wind chills the central and eastern United States are making outdoor activity difficult for many Americans. Little relief from the below normal temperatures is expected the first week of the New Year. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Temperatures plummet to -37C as US is hit by record Arctic freeze
Temperatures have plummeted to -37C as the US Midwest and Northeast is hit by a record Arctic blast.
Cold weather records were set from Arkansas to Maine on Thursday and the freezing air is expected to last through the weekend and reach as far south as Texas and the Florida Panhandle.
In New Hampshire, the cold set a record for the day of -37C on Mount Washington.
An investigation has been launched by the humane society after a dog was found “frozen solid” on the porch of a home in Toledo, Ohio.
It’s so cold in the US that sharks are freezing to death
In Massachusetts, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy found three thresher sharks washed up in Cape Cod, “stranded due to cold shock,” which can cause cardiac arrest in animals.
The conservancy collected tissue samples from the sharks that will be examined “once they thaw.”
“We hauled the shark off the beach and it is currently thawing at NOAA Fisheries Service to be dissected later,” the group wrote on Facebook about the latest shark discovery. “A true sharkcicle!”
Visitors take photographs at the brink of the Horseshoe Falls in Niagara Falls, Ontario, as cold weather continues through much of the province on Friday, Dec. 29, 2017. (Aaron Lynett/The Canadian Press via AP)
A couple looks out over the partially frozen American side of the Niagara Falls during sub-freezing temperatures in Niagara Falls, Ontario March 3, 2014. REUTERS/Mark Blinch (CANADA – Tags: ENVIRONMENT TRAVEL SOCIETY) ORG XMIT: MDB14
IN case you hadn’t noticed, the COVID19 crisis has been highly successful in drowning out the mainstream media’s go-to-weapon of mass fear and panic – ClimateChange™️.
PERHAPS the timing is fortunate as recent and prominent climate data hasn’t really held up as ammunition-worthy material in support of their “climate emergency” nightly narrative, or whatever the latest GretaThunberg™️ meme of the day requires.
TWO of the favoured metrics used by CC activists and sycophant mainstream media, in order to push their memes, are conditions applicable to the Arctic and Antarctica. Namely, sea-ice levels.
UNFORTUNATELY for climate ambulance chasers, sea-ice levels for the Arctic and Antarctica are tapping and well within the long-term average respectively. Completely at odds with ‘expert’ and mainstream media predictions and U.N. climate model forecasts.
*
ANTARCTIC SEA-ICE
ACCORDING to NOAA, Antarctic sea-ice coverage in March came in “near the 1981–2010 avg & ended a 41-month period of below-avg monthly values.”
THIS rebound time (41 months) matches nicely the time from the date when a significant portion of Antarctic sea-ice was blasted away by a “perfect storm of tropical, polar conditions not due to climate change” – Malte F. Stuecker et al
ANTARCTICA has always been a thorn in the side of ClimateChange™️. It is very much the ‘inconvenient’ pole, the naughty child, that has been gaining ice mass and cooling for decades, despite a 20 per cent increase in atmospheric CO2, and model predictions to the contrary.
THE Arctic, however, has been the veritable whipping-boy for the climate activist movement, as it has seen clear declines in sea-ice levels since the century-maximum of 1979.
BUT, hardly the declines that the mainstream media and ‘experts’ made us believe to be true, according to their dire and hyper-alarmist predictions.
HERE is a taste of what the fake news media and ‘expert’s’ told you about Arctic sea-ice having “disappeared” years ago …
“Arctic summers ice-free by 2013” (BBC 2007)
“Could all Arctic ice be gone by 2012?” (AP 2007)
“Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?”(National Geographic 2007)
“Imagine yourself in a world five years from now, where there is no more ice over the Arctic” – Tim Flannery (2008)
“North Pole could be ice-free in 2008” – Mark Serreze (New Scientist 2008)
“Gore: Polar ice cap may disappear by summer 2014” (USA Today 2009)
“Arctic expert predicts final collapse of sea ice within 4 years” (Guardian 2012)
“Say Goodbye to Arctic Summer Ice” (Live Science 2013)
“Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist” (The Guardian 2013)
“Why Arctic sea ice will vanish in 2013” (Sierra Club 2013)
“Next year or the year after, the Arctic will be free of ice’” – Peter Wadhams (The Guardian 2016)
“Action must be powerful and wide-ranging. After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will. Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.”
–– GretaThunberg™️
***
CLIMATE scientist and friend Vijay Jayaraj sent me a link to a tweet that resonates to a level beyond disturbing.
WITHOUT asking the United Nations to ‘zip-it’ while billions are going through COVID19 hell, let alone tens of millions of Indian children who cannot even touch or feel an iPad, I’ll leave this with you…
A School Strike when the Entire World is Shutdown? This is what happens when you refuse to be educated! Btw I know 100s of individuals in India who wished they had schooling in their life. Stop Undermining School. Stop spreading lies. @ClimateRealists@ClimateDepot@JWSpryhttps://t.co/pNoOqtNjp7
THESE charts certainly help to put things in context. Perspectives that are needed when hysteria — healthy or otherwise — threatens to eviscerate the global economy, causing far more damage than COVID ever could.
*Immediate disclaimer: saying something is a panic is not denying, minimising, or ignoring it. (Jamie)
*Immediate disclaimer: saying something is a panic is not denying, minimising, or ignoring it. (Jamie)
MARCH 21, 2020
AS Australia enforces a further increase to its “social distancing” rules from one metre yesterday to 4 square metres today, and as the Australian Football League (AFL) kicks off its second game of the ‘go-ahead’ season, to an empty stadium, the stark reality of our new draconian way of Corona-life sets in.
MEANWHILE, as the Australian Prime Minister holds daily pressers, pulling every fiscal lever available to stimulate the economy in an effort to avoid the R word, it seems impossible that there will not be devastating and permanent damage done to the economy and society as tens of thousands of businesses become insolvent, raising welfare queues exponentially.
A grim reality that seems inevitable as large employers, including the hospitality sector and the 45 billion-dollar tourism industry literally grind to a halt.
ON Thursday, Australia’s national carrier Qantas laid off two-thirds of its entire workforce, totalling some 20,000 employees, as the airline grounded its entire international fleet and 60 per cent of its domestic fleet as a result of the unprecedented lack of demand for travel, tied with government-imposed travel restrictions.
UNEMPLOYMENT levels peaked at 25 per cent during the 1930’s Great Depression. It took 3 years from 1929 to reach that level.
IN the era of COVID19, the hospitality and tourism sectors, alone, makeup approximately 15 per cent (1,500,000 positions) of Australia’s total workforce. A great percentage of those jobs have quite possibly been eviscerated not within years, but within days.
IT seems untenable that even the most potent suite of economic stimulus measures can possibly prevent the current and future carnage of a solvency crisis unleashed by the enforced six-month, four square metre “social distancing” policy.
THE ultimate lever of a COVID vaccine would matter little, following months of trials and regulatory approvals.
WHILE we are bombarded hourly by the predictable mainstream media on how many new cases of COVID there are, how many deaths, and who is to blame, we are rarely exposed to the math or reality of the long-term economic damage that draconian policies will do to society, business and indeed the health system.
WHY is that? Does it detract from the COVID19 narrative of fear and panic, as real as it may be? Or, is it too risky or distressing to explore and be honest to the public about the consequences of such heavily weighted, health-based policy prescriptions? Are politicians afraid that doing too little will invite mainstream media contempt, or god forbid, social-media scorn?
A few brave scientists are publicly warning of the dangers of such draconian measures in relation to how little we know about COVID19, based on a total lack of reliable data.
THEY argue:
“How have we found out that the virus is dangerous?”
“In some people who die from viral respiratory pathogens, more than one virus is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.” – John P.A. IoannidisProfessor of medicine, epidemiology (Stanford University)
JOHN P.A. IOANNIDIS is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.
HE warns in this impassioned and must read op-ed that current COVID data indicates that we are severely overreacting to Coronavirus.
A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data
ByJOHN P.A. IOANNIDIS / MARCH 17, 2020
A nurse holds swabs and a test tube to test people for Covid-19 at a drive-through station set up in the parking lot of the Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich.PAUL SANCYA/AP
The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco.
At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.
Draconian countermeasures have been adopted in many countries. If the pandemic dissipates — either on its own or because of these measures — short-term extreme social distancing and lockdowns may be bearable. How long, though, should measures like these be continued if the pandemic churns across the globe unabated? How can policymakers tell if they are doing more good than harm?
Vaccines or affordable treatments take many months (or even years) to develop and test properly. Given such timelines, the consequences of long-term lockdowns are entirely unknown.
The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed. We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300. Three months after the outbreak emerged, most countries, including the U.S., lack the ability to test a large number of people and no countries have reliable data on the prevalence of the virus in a representative random sample of the general population.
This evidence fiasco creates tremendous uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19. Reported case fatality rates, like the official 3.4% rate from the World Health Organization, cause horror — and are meaningless. Patients who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2 are disproportionately those with severe symptoms and bad outcomes. As most health systems have limited testing capacity, selection bias may even worsen in the near future.
The one situation where an entire, closed population was tested was the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. The case fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was a largely elderly population, in which the death rate from Covid-19 is much higher.
Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.
That huge range markedly affects how severe the pandemic is and what should be done. A population-wide case fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. If that is the true rate, locking down the world with potentially tremendous social and financial consequences may be totally irrational. It’s like an elephant being attacked by a house cat. Frustrated and trying to avoid the cat, the elephant accidentally jumps off a cliff and dies.
Could the Covid-19 case fatality rate be that low? No, some say, pointing to the high rate in elderly people. However, even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes. In fact, such “mild” coronaviruses infect tens of millions of people every year, and account for 3% to 11% of those hospitalized in the U.S. with lower respiratory infections each winter.
These “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of deaths every year worldwide, though the vast majority of them are not documented with precise testing. Instead, they are lost as noise among 60 million deaths from various causes every year.
Although successful surveillance systems have long existed for influenza, the disease is confirmed by a laboratory in a tiny minority of cases. In the U.S., for example, so far this season 1,073,976 specimens have been tested and 222,552 (20.7%) have tested positive for influenza. In the same period, the estimated number of influenza-like illnesses is between 36,000,000 and 51,000,000, with an estimated 22,000 to 55,000 flu deaths.
Note the uncertainty about influenza-like illness deaths: a 2.5-fold range, corresponding to tens of thousands of deaths. Every year, some of these deaths are due to influenza and some to other viruses, like common-cold coronaviruses.
In an autopsy series that tested for respiratory viruses in specimens from 57 elderly persons who died during the 2016 to 2017 influenza season, influenza viruses were detected in 18% of the specimens, while any kind of respiratory virus was found in 47%. In some people who die from viral respiratory pathogens, more than one virus is found upon autopsy and bacteria are often superimposed. A positive test for coronavirus does not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.
WODARG’s thesis contends that SARS-CoV-2 is only one of many similar viruses which usually go undetected as part of an ordinary seasonal period of respiratory infections (casually called flu or cold), and that the worldwide activities to stop the pandemic are only a “hype” caused basically by selective perception of researchers.
DÉJÀ VU?
A segment of the video, which I transcribed, explains how Corona-panic has escalated by an unholy interaction between government and virologists.
THE formula is eerily similar to how ClimateChange™️ panic has successfully metastasised into its own global pandemic, care of the exact same vectors — politicians, science ‘experts’ and the mainstream media — working in unison.
DR Wodarg:
And all this was so significant that it lead to international consequences, politicians had to deal with it, had to take a stand.
Then the virologists came into play again.
The governments asked their own virologists and they confirmed that this virus is a thing to worry about and proposed to develop tests to help measure the virus – like China.
Something was woven around this. A network of information and opinions has been developed in certain expert groups. And politicians turned to these expert groups, who initially started all this. And they really absorbed this network, moved within it.
This lead to politicians who now are just resting on these arguments, while using these arguments to evaluate who has to be helped, to determine safety measures or what has to be permitted.
All these decisions have just been derived from these arguments. Which means that it’s now going to be very hard for critics to say “Stop. There is nothing going on.”
And this reminds me of this fairytale about the king without clothes on. And just a small child was able to say “Hey, he is naked!”. All the others in the courtyard – surrounding the government and asking the government advice, because they can’t know themselves – they all played along and joined the hype.
And like this, politicians are being courted by many scientists. Scientists who want to be important in politics because they need money for their institutions….
And what is missing at the moment is a rational way of looking at things. We should ask questions like
“How have you found out that the virus is dangerous?”
“How was it before?”
“Didn’t we have the same thing last year?”
“Is it even something new?”
That’s missing. And the king is naked.
*
CONCLUSION
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
IS COVID19 merely another Coronavirus, one of many that mutates every year in order that we get sick, like every other virus including the flu does?
COVID19, the latest Corona variant is unfortunately with us now and here to stay. The genie is out of the bottle. We will all come into contact with it eventually and become immune by vaccine or by exposure.
VIRUSES are clever and will always be with us. They adapt and so should we, only smartly, not foolishly.
•••
UPDATE
FOR the many, including the mainstream media, who continue to cite Italy as the bell-weather of the Coronavirus “Crisis”, please note the following scientific study regarding flu-death incidents studied in a 3-season 4-season period from 2013/14 to 2016/17.
HOPEFULLY this death rate does not rise to the yearly average, based on the above ScienceDirect study, of 23,000 deaths. 17,000 Italian flu deaths per year.
***
UPDATE
CORRECTION:
STUDY is over a four-year period. Not over a 3-year period as I noted. My mistake. Apologies (Jamie)
FROM the study…
We estimated excess deaths of 7,027, 20,259, 15,801 and 24,981 attributable to influenza epidemics in the 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17, respectively, using the Goldstein index. The average annual mortality excess rate per 100,000 ranged from 11.6 to 41.2 with most of the influenza-associated deaths per year registered among the elderly. However children less than 5 years old also reported a relevant influenza attributable excess death rate in the 2014/15 and 2016/17 seasons (1.05/100,000 and 1.54/100,000 respectively). Investigating the impact of influenza on excess mortality in all ages in Italy during recent seasons (2013/14–2016/17 seasons) – ScienceDirect
***
UPDATE – Mainstream media not helping
The Media is just loving this #coronavirus pandemic. Watch them play crisis dress up with one reporter in a makeshift Halloween hazmat costume while their entire film crew does their Hollywood scene filming in normal attire. This propaganda is disgusting. pic.twitter.com/kAkdcIR00q
INTERESTING analysis and explanation by Prof Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to #Italy’s minister of health, as to the above average Case Fatality Rate (CFR) in Italy:
But Prof Ricciardi added that Italy’s death rate may also appear high because of how doctors record fatalities.
“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.
“On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,” he says.
Massive Centrelink (Welfare) queues stretching for blocks, with no “4 square metre” “social distancing” zone.
Chaos.
A NATION IN SHUTDOWN
***
UPDATE – Mon 23/3/20 (11:46 AU)
Hundreds THOUSANDS queue outside Centrelink offices as coronavirus unemployment surges
The MyGov website has crashed as Australians try to access government services like Centrelink online. Photos showed queues outside some Centrelink offices stretching around the block this morning.
“The problem of SARS-CoV-2 is probably overestimated, as 2.6 million people die of respiratory infections each year compared with less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing.”
A just published peer-reviewed paper in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents confirms the concerns I've expressed earlier today: The risk from Coranavirus (a.k.a. SARS-CoV-2) is likely overestimated:https://t.co/XgxifBewsT Hence, the economic shutdown is UNWARRANTED pic.twitter.com/zrBYlA2cOs
Prof. Dr. med. Sucharit Bhakdi. Infectious disease specialist. One of the most highly cited medical research scientists in Germany.
THE good Dr is not the best orator, but what he has to say about existing Corona viruses within the population, that lead to the normal death rate of respiratory victims, is highly informative.
“The life expectancy of millions is being shortened. The horrifying impact on world economy threatens the existence of countless people.”
This year’s coronavirus outbreak is clearly unprecedented in amount of attention received. Media have capitalized on curiosity, uncertainty and horror. A Google search with “coronavirus” yielded 3,550,000,000 results on March 3 and 9,440,000,000 results on March 14. Conversely, “influenza” attracted 30- to 60-fold less attention although this season it has caused so far about 100-fold more deaths globally than coronavirus.
Different coronaviruses actually infect millions of people every year, and they are common especially in the elderly and in hospitalized patients with respiratory illness in the winter.
*This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/eci.13222
IN striking resemblance to ClimateChange™️, it seems that experts who question the official narratives of the Mainstream media are not to be heard, by the herd …
“Below is our list of twelve medical experts whose opinions on the Coronavirus outbreak contradict the official narratives of the MSM, and the memes so prevalent on social media.” – Off-Guardian
”I want you to remember these people died WITH the #coronavirus and not FROM the coronavirus”
– (President Italian Civil Protection Service)
THIS would make the news in a functioning mainstream media, whose job is to report the ‘news’ in an unbiased way. Not, at all, to minimise or to ‘deny’ the seriousness of COVID19, rather to maintain cool heads when so much rides on clear and precise information that is essential to quell hysteria which inevitably leads policy makers to prescribe possibly even more deadly cures than the disease itself.
“The president of the Italian Civil Protection Service actually went out of his way to remind people of the nature of Italy’s fatality figures in a morning briefing on 20/03“
REPORT shows up to 88% of Italy’s alleged Covid19 deaths could be misattributed.
That messy back-and-forth has been on vivid display this week with the publication of a startling new report on the virus from a team at Imperial College in London. The report, which warned that an uncontrolled spread of the disease could cause as many as 510,000 deaths in Britain, triggered a sudden shift in the government’s comparatively relaxed response to the virus.
American officials said the report, which projected up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States from such a spread, also influenced the White House to strengthen its measures to isolate members of the public.
A remarkable turn from @neil_fergusonwho led the @imperialcollegeauthors who warned of 500,000 UK deaths – and who has now himself tested positive for COVID19.
HOW listening to one ‘expert’ from @imperialcollege coupled with mainstream media fear-mongering and fact-free hysteria, has paralysed the entire global economy, destroying billions of people’s lives and their livelihoods!
Big thread. The man who panicked the world is now running from his doomsday projections. Shut up and quarantine crowd MIA. No need to apologize to those of us who told you not to blindly trust 1 projection. Scrutinize a little more next time before you surrender your freedoms. https://t.co/EopJL2BhNB
IT turns out that Imperial College advises the U.K bureaucracy on ClimateChange™️ models and ‘science’ as well as advice for UK’s ClimateChange™️ and energy strategies and policies.
NO guessing which way their ‘advice’ leans!
@JordanSchachtel@thegwpfcom Exactly the same as for "Climate Change". UK govt and bureaucracy fund, consult & depend heavily on Imperial College/Grantham Institute for "science" and advice for UK's climate change & energy strategies & policies. https://t.co/eaz3W4rHjs
In one of the biggest shocks to the retail sector in a week where tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, the nation’s biggest department store has decided to close its stores.
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UPDATE – Fri 27/3/20 (22:35 AU)
Boris Johnson tests positive for coronavirus
ANOTHER timely indicator which reinforces the fact that we are all going to ‘get’ COVID19 at some point, either from direct exposure or by vaccine.
FROM my earlier “CONCLUSION”:
COVID19, the latest Corona variant is unfortunately with us now and here to stay. The genie is out of the bottle. We will all come into contact with it eventually and become immune by vaccine or by exposure.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken
***
WHEN the COVID-19 panic eventually clears, many important questions will be asked. One of them ought to be, “was the cure worse than the disease?”
THE ever-hysterical mainstream media will require tough scrutiny as well. Is there no upper limit anymore to their money-making mantra “if it bleeds, it leads” ?
COMPARE the coverage of Swine Flu (H1N1) (150,000–575,000 fatalities) to COVID-19.
IN April of 2009, H1N1 became a pandemic. It wasn’t until six months later, October, that then-President Obama declared a public health emergency on what was already a pandemic. By that time, the disease had infected millions of Americans and more than 1,000 people had died in the U.S.
WILL leave you to judge the reaction of the globalist mainstream media toward Obama’s global pandemic versus Trump’s one, resulting in the literal shut down of the entire global economy.
Ahem, cough, splutter.
*
TONY Heller of Real Climate Science pulls no punches when it comes to lifting the lid on the ClimateChange™️ farce. Here are his grim thoughts on the prognosis and prescription for the Wuhan flu …
Compare this to the 12,000 to 30,000 flu deaths which had already occurred in the US by February 1.
Flu season is hitting its stride right now in the US. So far, the CDC has estimated (based on weekly influenza surveillance data) that at least 12,000 p
California’s green and tech billionaires, and its business and political elites, certainly seem to think so. But they are largely protected from reality by vast wealth, private security, gated estates, and battery banks. The high cost of…
Well, if herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people? Why has the rate of infection dropped so precipitously? Considering that most people in Sweden are leading their lives normally now, not socially distancing, not wearing masks, there should still be high rates of infection.
People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected any more. I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway. Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long.
In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated. So it is quite possible, in fact likely, that the case fatality rate for covid is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population at the start of this pandemic.
means at least 50% of the population has been infected already and have developed immunity, which is five million people. This number is perfectly reasonable if we assume a reproductive number for the virus of two: If each person infects two new, with a five day period between being infected and infecting others, and you start out with just one infected person in the country, then you will reach a point where several million are infected in just four months.
This post is prompted by a recent exchange with those reasserting the “consensus” view attributing all additional atmospheric CO2 to humans burning fossil fuels.
Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia
Credit: Coal India Limited
In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions
Was it like this?
