March 22, 2020
THIS POST WILL STAY AT THE TOP FOR A WHILE.)
Due to a ridiculous amount of spam from people I do not want I have had to initiate the registered user's protocol. Only registered users will be allowed to post comments here henceforth.
Bill, I'll check and if you haven't posted anything in a day or two I'll change the settings. My e-mails are down, sadly; I guess my older equipment and service is catching up with me. Do be patient and come back if you can't get in.
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March 29, 2020
"Point of absurdity." Well, Cuomo is certainly an expert on such things, I would say. He's been proving it for years.New York Gov.Andrew Cuomo is threatening to sue Rhode Island over its new coronavirus policy that calls for police to stop cars with New York license plates and has seen National Guard members go door-to-door to ask if anyone has arrived from the Empire State.
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo -- like Cuomo, a Democrat -- announced the drastic new policies last week to limit the spread of the coronavirus. New York is the epicenter of the outbreak in the U.S., confirming more than 52,000 cases of COVID-19 and recording more than 700 deaths.
"I understand the goal ... but there’s a point of absurdity, and I think what Rhode Island did is at that point of absurdity," said Cuomo. "We have to keep the ideas and the policies we implement positive rather than reactionary and emotional.”
No word about what happens if the traveling New Yorkers decide they want to stay. Enough people are leaving New York -- and taking their tax dollars with them -- as it is.He added that he believes the two governors could "work it out."
Raimondo said the policies were intended to make sure people from New York would self-quarantine for 14 days upon arrival in Rhode Island.
"I want to be crystal clear about this: If you're coming to Rhode Island from New York you are ordered into quarantine," she said. "The reason for that is because more than half of the cases of coronavirus in America are in New York."
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Sound familiar?
[...]
Aristotle
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Ilhan Omar - the bitch that keeps on giving!
"All private hospitals should be made public for the duration of the virus,” the Minnesota Democrat wrote on Twitter.
She despises America. Why doesn't she return to her homeland? Oh, wait; they don't even HAVE hospitals in Moghadishu, just mats on the street corners.
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Never let a good crisis go to waste. Kentucky's Democratic Governor Andy Beshear has gone on a rampage, signing all manner of laws under cover of Corona.
From the article:
They include the laundry list of goodies the Governor has put Kentucky on the hook for funding.
If this is the emergency we have been told it is, why are Democrats across the country sneaking all sorts of new laws onto the books? Shouldn't they be concentrating on protecting the public?
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Here is an article at Zerohedge from January that claims the Wuhan Coronavirus is a Chinese import by way of a Canadian lab. It was an act of Chinese espionage.
From the article:
In March 2019, in mysterious event a shipment of exceptionally virulent viruses from Canada’s NML ended up in China. The event caused a major scandal with Bio-warfare experts questioning why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China. Scientists from NML said the highly lethal viruses were a potential bio-weapon.
Following investigation, the incident was traced to Chinese agents working at NML. Four months later in July 2019, a group of Chinese virologists were forcibly dispatched from the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory(NML). The NML is Canada’s only level-4 facility and one of only a few in North America equipped to handle the world’s deadliest diseases, including Ebola, SARS, Coronavirus, etc.
Coronavirus arrived at Canada’s NML Winnipeg facility on May 4, 2013 from the Dutch lab. The Canadian lab grew up stocks of the virus and used it to assess diagnostic tests being used in Canada. Winnipeg scientists worked to see which animal species can be infected with the new virus.
Research was done in conjunction with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s national lab, the National Centre for Foreign Animal Diseases which is housed in the same complex as the National Microbiology Laboratory.
Read the rest at Zerohedge. It is food for thought.
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Here is an essay that argues we have hopelessly failed to use actual knowledge and reason in this Coronavirus pandemic.
We Were Wrong; So Sorry We Ruined Your Life
Definitely worth your time.
As he points out:
He said the following:
"If you rethought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say quarantine everyone. I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people was probably not the best public health strategy because the younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection. "
Further:
"What we did was we closed everything down. That was our public health strategy. Just close everything, all businesses, old workers, young people, old people, short people, tall people. Every school closed, everything.”
It’s true that anyone following the unfolding fiasco and the
gradually emerging data behind it knows that Cuomo is right. The
response has not been modern and scientific. It has been medieval and
mystical. The theory behind the policy has been nothing but a panicked
cry of run and hide before the noxious gas gets you. Lacking reliable
data – which is the fault of the CDC and FDA – we replaced knowledge
with power.
In the end, this fiasco is an epistemic crisis. As Ed Yong has written in a beautifully detailed articlefor The Atlantic, "The testing fiasco was the original sin of America’s
pandemic failure, the single flaw that undermined every other
countermeasure.” Even the wide acceptance of social distancing as a
norm, however much it helps curb the spread, presumes this absence of
knowledge. Stay away from everyone as much as possible: a slogan that
reveals how little we know.
And yet lacking that knowledge, the politicians, cheered on by the
media, acted in ways that have fundamentally wrecked life as we knew
it, all in the course of a couple of weeks.
While I do quibble with a few points I have to say this guy pretty much nails it. Do read it all.
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This is disgraceful.
China and U.S. are Biggest Investors in Water Entitlements
Apparently the U.S. and China have been buying up water rights in Australia.
How can you say a nation has sovereignty when it doesn't own it's own water?
There is an old theory called the Hydraulic Empire or Water Monopoly Empire. It says that a state that owns all the water is absolute and can strangle any opposition. Egypt was one such. Another was....China. The Chinese understand the importance of controlling the water supply.
So if they are investing in water there is a reason. And in Australia water is life itself for the people there. The Chinese have no major agricultural interests in Australia, so why buy up all the water?
Seems to me they seek control.
During the First World War the Germans had to pay Britain royalties on every machine guy and every case of ammunition they used; the patent was held by the British and the Germans had to PAY for the privilege of owning weapons to kill Limeys. One wonders if that isn't the reason they lost the war. At any rate, when your enemies own something that valuable they can bleed you.
Clearly China is doing this to the Australians. We are too, apparently, but for different reasons. (Most likely for agricultural purposes.)
From the article:
"At the moment, there's a small percentage of water owned by foreign interests and much of that is by one property — Cubbie Station," Mr Littleproud said.
However, the Conservative Party's South Australian Senate candidate Rikki Lambert said it was a major concern to see China as one of the major investors in Australian water entitlements.
"Chinese foreign ownership is different to other forms [like British foreign ownership] because it is state-based," Mr Lambert said.
"The Chinese Government has effective control of any [Chinese] company that operates around the world."
"It's strategic because these countries are wanting to shore up their own food security and growing food in another country so they're not using their own water resources at home."
The Chinese aren't doing this for "food security"; they aren't growing food in Australia. It's for power and control.Which is likely the reason we are doing this too.
If you own the water rights you can shut off the tap.
A nation that allows itself to be owned and controlled by a foreign power cannot be said to be sovereign. That doesn't mean aliens can't be allowed to own some property, but something as fundamental as water rights should never be sold to foreigners, unless they have a specific purpose for those rights and there is a sunset clause.
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My latest blog post, on the notable downturn in virus-related mortality in Europe this flu season.
COVID 19 Deaths in Europe: Excess Mortality is - Down
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March 28, 2020
Good article. For the rest, go here: https://www.foxnews.com/world/who-chief-tedros-questionable-past-coronavirusThe head of the World Health Organization, in charge of making life or death decisions on a grand scale, has been accused of covering up cholera epidemics, supporting a terrorist organization and inflating his resume to claim he conquered malaria and HIV.
Tedros Adhanom Ghegreyesus' campaign to rewrite his questionable past has some wondering whether he is the right fit to lead the global agency through the coronavirus pandemic.
"Tedros is the second-to-last person who should be heading the world World Health Organization at this time," foreign affairs expert Gordon Chang told Fox News. "The last person is (Chinese President) Xi Jinping."
The Ethiopian official, who was elected to lead the WHO in 2017, has been accused of cozying up to countries like China that have pledged millions of dollars to the agency.
Last week, Tedros applauded Xi for his efforts to contain and control the novel coronavirus that is widely thought to have originated in a Wuhan, China seafood market.
"For the first time, #China has reported no domestic #COVID19 cases yesterday. This is an amazing achievement, which gives us all reassurance that the #coronavirus can be beaten," Tedros tweeted.
Beijing has been accused of multiple cover-ups related to COVID-19 and health experts have said China's decision to suppress information about the virus has endangered the lives of millions around the world.
"Tedros permitted Xi Jinping to make public health decisions for the World Health Organization, and that slowed down the global response to the coronavirus outbreak at crucial moments," Chang said. "Moreover, Tedros, by making comments supporting the totalitarian form of rule over democracy, made himself a part of Xi's campaign to bring despotism to the planet. Democracies should defund WHO if Tedros stays."
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Massive deliveries of urns in Wuhan have raised fresh skepticism of China’s coronavirus reporting.
As families in the central Chinese city began picking up the cremated ashes of those who have died from the virus this week, photos began circulating on social media and local media outlets showing vast numbers of urns at Wuhan funeral homes.
China has reported 3,299 coronavirus-related deaths, with most taking place in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global pandemic. But one funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days, according to the Chinese media outlet Caixin.
It’s not clear how many of the urns were filled.
Workers at several funeral parlors declined to provide any details to Bloomberg as to how many urns were waiting to be collected, saying they either did not know or were not authorized to share the number.
The photos surfaced after both the United States and Italy have reported significantly more cases and than China. Italy has reported just shy of three times the fatalities.
But see below Tim's article about the dodgy way Italy counts the deaths! the MSM does not acknowledge that because (sigh) it doesn't fit their agenda, which is more of a "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! Women and minorities hit hardest. Trump to blame. Details at 11:00." kind of thing.
The article is here: https://www.foxnews.com/world/urn-deliveries-wuhan-china-coronavirus-death-toll
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Here are the latest graphs from Willis Eschenbach:
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San Francisco's "no arrest" plague policy is leading to looting.
Thugs in San Fran Loot Cosmetics Store After "No Arrest" Policy
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"Green energy" was always a con to force people into having and using less. That's why it always has needed subsidies.
Never Competitive: Britain's Wind Industry Begs for Even More Massive Subsidies
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Great piece from a week ago. Some of it may be wishful thinking, but if the American people are paying attention, COVID-19 will trigger the end of many of the Left’s most destructive campaigns
When Wuhan Virus Departs World Will be Changed
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"It’s no
secret that the press’s reputation has taken a credibility hit
in this crisis. Nor is it any secret why: Instead of a
presentation
P.S. Torture statistics long enough and they become sadistic.
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I previously predicted we might actually see a reduction in virus-related deaths due to more people being careful about spreading germs, thus reducing the number of seasonal flu deaths. It turns out, in COVID-19 hard-hit Europe, there has been (as of yet) no increase in total mortality. Their explanation that it is related to high total population in the denominator makes zero sense... that division is done every year... if mortality increases, the statistics will show an increase averaged over ANY population group. (H/T Bryan Lambeth)
https://www.euromomo.eu/index.html?fbclid=IwAR2EJXTj1t_YBFt-eTIoU8VS7ZygDAy-GFHyxmhclRUcsfG8QJojoVeVV0s
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I had an argument with a member of Extinction Rebellion. Here is how it went:
Ian Too said:
i. Humanity, along with other life, is the point.
ii. Wanting the climate crisis treated with the seriousness it deserves is not a form of fascism.
iii. Very few of us receive money from Charles Koch, so we're able to maintain a sense of proportion.
iv. Is there any evidence at all that this sticker is genuine?
I replied:
He shot back:
Seriously, you have to have holed yourself up in some sort of feedback hell to consider that a reasonable proposition. Anything but listen to the other side, eh?
Then, sans evidence, you slander NASA, NOAA, the Hadley Centre, Michael Mann and then hilariously, 'scientists'.
This Timothy, is when you need to go into the bathroom, gaze long into the mirror and ask yourself: 'Am I a conspiracy nut?'
I'm not just pissing with you here, I'm serious. When you've got to the point where you've basically lumped all climate scientists into a conspiracy, what you're doing is righting off the critical faculties of literally thousands of people smarter by orders of magnitude than you and me combined. People unlike us, who are speaking within their field of expertise. If that isn't setting off alarms in your head, then you need to call an engineer.
You see, what's happening is that 'scientists', especially those within the field, have reached a consensus and rather than accept that, cognitive dissonance has driven you into the wilds of conspiracy theory echo-chambers where they have the gall to call themselves sceptics.
I have to declare skin in this game now: I have been a member of the Skeptic's (Note the spelling) movement since the mid nineties, when I discovered The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Since then I've done what I can against 'psychics' who use Cold Reading to bilk grieving people out of money and stood against quacks, who sell people bleach to drink to cure their ills and by such actions we have given the word skeptic its standing. I was describing myself as a skeptic long before it became fashionable and I'm not very happy that people who deny the climate crisis are co-opting it. And this is where I bring this back on point:
When you're dealing with a conspiracy, you have to be able to answer another pesky little question: What do they stand to gain?
The person who sells diluted bleach as medicine does it for money. The ghoulish medium uses a parlour trick for money. These individuals bring no real benefit to anyone but themselves. If only they were harmless.
Charles Koch and his late brother did and do what they do for money. Koch is an oil billionaire, he stands to lose massively if people stop burning oil. It's in his interests to cast doubt on the science and he may be clever, but he's not picky about how he does it. He doesn't shy away from calling people's competence or integrity into doubt by inflating the slightest sliver of doubt into a whole ship of conspiracy foolishness. Look what they did to Phil Jones. Despicable.
Finally, you compare people like George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and Bill Gates with Koch. I'm not in the business of defending billionaires, but I ask: What do these people stand to gain from their stance? Make your case.
In the case of Bill Gates, we're talking about someone who, with his wife Melinda, is actually giving away a lot of their fortune to among other things, eradicate polio. Are you sure you want to slander them?
This is where I stop. You've got an appointment with a mirror.
My reply:
That's it for now.
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March 27, 2020
Check this out; an Obama holdover at the State Department was responsible for bringing people with COVID-19 into the U.S. - after President Trump ordered that nobody be allowed in with the infection.
Daniel Greenfield Dishes:
According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, "Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made."
Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.
According to a State Department briefing, the missions were carried out by the Directorate of Operational Medicine within the Bureau of Medical Services. You might think that sounds like it would be part of HHS or NIH, but the Bureau of Medical Services is actually an arm of the State Department.
The Directorate of Operational Medicine is a part of the Bureau assigned to deal with crisis response with a $250 million portfolio and a lot of employees that almost no one outside D.C. ever heard of. At least unless you remember an eventat which Barack Obama honored Dr. William Walters, the head of the Directorate, for evacuating Ebola patients to the United States.
"Now, remember, the decision to move Kent back to the United States was controversial. Some worried about bringing the disease to our shores. But what folks like William knew was that we had to make the decisions based not on fear, but on science," Obama said.
By "some”, Obama meant, among others, Trump, who had been a strong critic of the move.
Despite Obama’s end-zone dance, the State Department had badly botched the Ebola evacuations.
Under Bush, the CDC had prepped an evacuation aircraft for flying out contagious Americans. The Obama administration shelved the gear because of the cost, and then failed to make use of it. The evacuation process led to the same infighting between the State Department and the CDC as now.
Dr. William Walters is still on duty. In 2017, Walters was boasting of prepping more Ebola evacuations even over President Trump’s opposition to the practice. And he was once again at the wheel now.
"The question was simply this: Are these evacuees?” Walters explained the decision to evacuate coronavirus patients to the United States. "And do we follow our protocol? And the answer to that was yes on both accounts.”
Consulting President Trump was not part of the protocol even on a major national security issue.
In a Congressional briefing, Walters boasted that, "the Department executed the largest non-military evacuation of U.S. citizens in its history. The safe and efficient evacuation of 1,174 people from Wuhan, China and people onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan is a testament to the agility, proficiency, and dedication of our workforce to accomplishing our core mission – advancing the interests of the American people.”
So this guy just made an end-run around his boss. But that's the way it works these days:Walters got his job in 2011. He’s a relic of the Obama era. That doesn’t mean that his politics are those of his former boss. But this is not about him. It’s about the reality that the White House doesn’t make many of the most vital decisions and doesn’t even know that they’re being made until it’s too late.
And what that means, beyond the politics of the moment, is that the people don’t decide.
You can vote one way or another and the real decisions that matter will still be made by the head of a directorate that is a subsection of a bureau that you never heard of, but that has a budget in the hundreds of millions, a small army as its disposal, and will follow whatever the protocol is.
This is how the country is really run. And that’s the problem.
We got lucky then. Not looking so lucky now.
There should not be such a thing as a career bureaucrat.
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It looks like,
hopefully, some pretty good news for a change no matter which way you
want to spin it politically that you can see for yourself with two
articles posted below. The UK scientist who was at the heart of the
panic virus projections that became an economic inferno in the West,
has now scaled back the doomsday numbers way down and then assured
Britain that there will be enough beds for people after all. This, at a
time, when the UK is being hit pretty good with this flu.
They were
unaware that so many people had the virus already, which will bring the
death toll percentages way down the more information is known. Both the
scientist himself and even Prince Charles have it now too, including
Boris Johnson now too. Meaning that, if this flu is as contagious as
the experts say it is, then that must mean that many, many more people
already have this flu than otherwise is/can be known, particularly in
Europe.
By the way, testing on this not easy, requires a lab, and is
not cheap, and so I am not sure how the home testing kit that was being
offered to Americans would work? But regardless, the more that is
known, it looks like the more this virus will be downgraded.
One of the biggest problems all along in this whole mess is that no one was trusting the Chicoms with their numbers.
However, the numbers coming out of South Korea are trustworthy. South Korea was hit pretty good with this flu too a few months ago, but is now well on its way out of this, and did not lockdown the country to do it. From my several visits there in the past, it was obvious they already have some stricter protocols already in place with regard to such health concerns that is part of their daily routine. Regardless, those who are recovering now in South Korea are eating deeply into with those now getting the flu, and so are sliding downhill out of this on their own natural bell curve that is routine with the flu season - and this particular flu is looking to be just a little bit worse than others. This is not to say this virus cannot be a killer in certain targeted people, and is doing this more than usual, sometimes even the young in limited numbers, but we are slowly confirming this is not the Spanish Flu - far from it.
However, all of this also brings up the potential specter that the Spanish Flu pandemic scenario in full panic mode requiring lockdown house arrest measures in order to stop, might be looking more and more like another hoax coming from our elites?
Time will tell, and if so, much more propaganda will be coming out to cover everyone's tracks. The UK scientist already admitted it will take decades to pay for this particular lockdown. Wonderful. Yet common sense strongly suggests that totalitarian solutions never work anyway because they cannot target the problem as they try to take care of everything rather than what specifically needs to be dealt with. This is precisely why socialism never works. It requires a total solution - a secular salvation that is impossible to obtain this side of the grave. As such, totalitarian solutions have a miserable historical record, and actually make the problems far worse than they actually are. Secular idealism in the mind distort the ability to resolve specific problems as they conjure up total solutions which are impossible to execute.
The other article comes from a more liberal 'scientific' persuasion with a liberal spin on it that touts social distancing (lockdown is not being touted) that will spare the overcrowding of the hospitals to level off the spiking of numbers that also helped foster much panic inside the hospitals and clinics themselves - but the message is pretty close to the more conservative one I posted above that this particular flu is in the process of being downgraded the more is known about it. The UK scientist's computer models now are showing that at worst, 20,000 in the UK may die, but the number of deaths will likely be even considerably lower the more information comes in.
Let us
hope and pray this is indeed the case, and again, if so, this also
reveals the great problem with postmodern science these days where
scientists are virtual Chicken Littles who "Cry Wolf" all the time for
any number of different problems and reasons, particularly those of the
environmental persuasion. They claim to be secular empiricists, but
always come up with semi-apocalypti
Scientists are not prophets. Yet they routinely take this
mantle upon themselves, but amazingly never take responsibility when
they are wrong, nor suffer the consequences accordingly. They seem,
however, to be well paid with cush jobs. The scientist in the New Scientist article is now in
self-isolation.
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