Masks: Net Negative

Source: City Journal, May 2023

Mask-wearers breathe in greater amounts of air that should have been expelled from their bodies and released out into the open.

“[A] significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven in many studies,” write the German authors. “Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2,” they observe, while chronic exposure at CO2 levels of 0.3 percent is “toxic.”

How much CO2 do mask-wearers breathe in? The authors write that “masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.”

In other words, while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels.

circumstantial evidence that popular mask use may be related to current observations of a significant rise of 28% to 33% in stillbirths worldwide and a reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance of two full standard deviations in scores in children born during the pandemic.”

They cite recent data from Australia, which “shows that lockdown restrictions and other measures (including masks that have been mandatory in Australia), in the absence of high rates of COVID-19 disease, were associated with a significant increase in stillborn births.” Meantime, “no increased risk of stillbirths was observed in Sweden,” which famously defied the public-health cabal and went its own way in setting Covid policies.

As for countries where mask-wearing has long been common, the authors write, “Even before the pandemic, in Asia the stillbirth rates have been significantly higher” than in Eurasia, Oceania, or North Africa.

Selecting Talent – Emergent Ventures

Source: Kulesa/Substack, Sep 2021

Tyler’s success at discovering and enabling the most talented people before anyone else notices them boils down to four components:

1. Distribution:
   Tyler promotes the opportunity in such a way that the talent level of the application pool is extraordinarily high and the people who apply are uniquely earnest.
2. Application:
   Emergent Ventures’ application is laser focused on the quality of the applicant’s ideas, and boils out the noise of credentials, references, and test scores.
3. Selection:
   Tyler has relentlessly trained his taste for decades, the way a world class athlete trains for the olympics.
4. Inspiration:
   Tyler personally encourages winners to be bolder, creating an ambition flywheel as they in turn inspire future applicants.

The distribution strategy selects for an earnest, high quality applicant pool

Once Tyler discovers a social circle enriched for talent, he expands and many members are quickly funded. The goal seems to be to hook an initial person, and then generate referrals. One can imagine Tyler’s search strategy as fishing in a well-chosen set of pools, not yet overfished from the mainstream. And when he hooks one fish, sometimes he also discovers a whole school.

The program does not award large amounts of capital, in fact many grants are “travel grants” of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. Nor is there any promise of connections to a network of elite status people, at least as overtly advertised.

Thus, Emergent Ventures appears to be designed against anyone looking for credentials, large amounts of cash, or status/attention. Instead, the program selects and rewards earnestness. Maybe because few other things in life reward this, earnest people are so delighted to be recognized that they can’t help but refer friends.

The application only values the quality of ideas

The application is designed to efficiently assess only one thing: the clarity and quality of the applicant’s ideas. Examining it shows a striking departure from almost any job or college application. There is no resume/CV, no test scores, and most strikingly, no reference letters. It is only a <1500 word essay.

The second need – consistency – is eliminated because Tyler is the only reviewer. He does not need to create a pretense of having a clean, objective, or consistent way of evaluating applications for the sake of accountability or consistency. Tyler can afford to truly only care about the quality of the applicants’ ideas.

The result is that the essay, i.e. the quality of the applicant’s ideas and their ability to communicate them, is the only thing that matters.

“I would stress how much the writing in the proposal matters to me. How good the proposal is is really very important.

So when I interview someone for the first time, most of the time I don’t track them down using google and try to read their medium essays or their tweets…[I don’t] track down the past stuff, don’t ask for CV, don’t ask for letters of reference, [and I’m] trying to give everyone a fresh start in a way.” [Tyler Cowen: Production Function. David Perrell, North Star Podcast.]

Tyler’s practice in “cracking cultural codes” enables him to evaluate ideas in diverse fields

Maybe the most important piece of the puzzle is selection. Tyler has compounded his skills in selecting talent over decades of deliberate practice in “cracking cultural codes.”

in Tyler’s view, Peter Thiel possesses the “deepest understanding of the humanities that is out there now,” and “is the best selector of talent… maybe ever”

You want experience at solving a broad diversity of problems, to heighten your aesthetic sense, to learn some real history, and to understand how some of the art world works, surround yourself with beauty.

And you should buy it for the love of the art, and try to find that which other people have not really found or appreciated yet.

It’s just like the world of ideas right? It is the world of ideas. It just costs more to play in it in terms of upfront dollar commitments.” [Tyler Cowen: Production Function. David Perrell, North Star Podcast.]

Tyler pushes winners to be more ambitious, and creates an ambition flywheel

Emergent Ventures is not really about grantmaking.

An Emergent Ventures grant is a push to be more ambitious. It’s a push to drop the status quo, to make a change in one’s life and open the door to a new career.

Some general principles

First, cultivate pools of talent that are very high in quality, even if very low in quantity.

Recognize that people have already self-selected on media channels like Twitter, blogs, and podcasts, on discord/slack, or even in group houses. Design incentives to attract the applicants seeking the right things, for example by using an evaluation strategy that is much harder for credentialists to game (e.g. Emergent Ventures’ 1500 word essay).

Second, zero in the talent signals you care about, and develop one’s skill at evaluation by practicing “cracking cultural codes.”

Find practical application of the humanities with fast feedback loops. Perhaps learning to make strong art investments is not as different from selecting talent in a specific field as it might at first appear.

Last, raise the ambitions of one’s “winners” (i.e. grantees, employees, investments, students, etc) more than they imagined possible,

and work hard to help them succeed. Promote their work such that they inspire new talent.

The Real “Lord of the Flies”: Boys Shipwrecked for 15 months

Source: The Guardian, May 2020

The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku‘alofa. “I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. “Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”

In the months that followed I tried to reconstruct as precisely as possible what had happened on ‘Ata. Peter’s memory turned out to be excellent. Even at the age of 90, everything he recounted was consistent with my foremost other source, Mano, 15 years old at the time and now pushing 70, who lived just a few hours’ drive from him.

The real Lord of the Flies, Mano told us, began in June 1965. The protagonists were six boys – Sione, Stephen, Kolo, David, Luke and Mano – all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa. The oldest was 16, the youngest 13, and they had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand.

The mood when the boys returned to their families in Tonga was jubilant. Almost the entire island of Haʻafeva – population 900 – had turned out to welcome them home. Peter was proclaimed a national hero. Soon he received a message from King Taufa‘ahau Tupou IV himself, inviting the captain for an audience. “Thank you for rescuing six of my subjects,” His Royal Highness said.

“Now, is there anything I can do for you?” The captain didn’t have to think long. “Yes! I would like to trap lobster in these waters and start a business here.” The king consented. Peter returned to Sydney, resigned from his father’s company and commissioned a new ship. Then he had the six boys brought over and granted them the thing that had started it all: an opportunity to see the world beyond Tonga. He hired them as the crew of his new fishing boat.

The real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.

After my wife took Peter’s picture, he turned to a cabinet and rummaged around for a bit, then drew out a heavy stack of papers that he laid in my hands. His memoirs, he explained, written for his children and grandchildren. I looked down at the first page. “Life has taught me a great deal,” it began, “including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”

Thatcher: “Get Up George, You’re Embarassing Me”

Source: Quora, date indeterminate

the late Margaret Thatcher was asked to take part some time in the 80’s while visiting an SAS regiment.

While other VIPs and dignitaries visiting the SAS have only begrudgingly accepted this offer, the Iron Lady apparently jumped at the chance and insisted on being the hostage. Her bodyguard George advised against this, prompting an annoyed Thatcher to suggest that if he was so worried about her safety around the most elite fighting force the country she ran had at its disposal, he should accompany her.

So a few minutes later Thatcher and her sheepish bodyguard were huddled into a room, sat at a table flanked by cardboard targets and were then left there in total darkness.

A few minutes later an SAS operative kicked down the door, hurled a flashbang grenade through the hole, fired two rounds into every target and then hit the lights. When the smoke cleared the SAS operatives gathered were stunned to see Thatcher sat at total ease absentmindedly resting her hands on the table beside her purse. George on the other hand had responded to the hail of bullets by leaping under the table and cowering in fear. Prompting an irate Thatcher to, according to the SAS, say “Get up George, you’re embarrassing me.”

Three Body Problem/Dark Forest – China

Source: Belfer Center, Jul 2020

Those who hope to revive engagement, or at least establish frenmity with Beijing, underestimate the influence of Wang Huning, a member since 2017 of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the most powerful body in China, and Xi’s most influential adviser.

Back in August 1988, Wang spent six months in the U.S. as a visiting scholar, traveling to more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities. His account of that trip, “America against America,” (published in 1991) is a critique — in places scathing — of American democracy, capitalism and culture (racial division features prominently in the third chapter).

Yet the book that has done the most to educate me about how China views America and the world today is, as I said, not a political text, but a work of science fiction. “The Dark Forest” was Liu Cixin’s 2008 sequel to the hugely successful “Three-Body Problem.”

It would be hard to overstate Liu’s influence in contemporary China: He is revered by the Shenzhen and Hangzhou tech companies, and was officially endorsed as one of the faces of 21st-century Chinese creativity by none other than … Wang Huning.

“The Dark Forest,” which continues the story of the invasion of Earth by the ruthless and technologically superior Trisolarans, introduces Liu’s three axioms of “cosmic sociology.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, “Survival is the primary need of civilization.”

Second, “Civilization continuously grows and expands, but the total matter in the universe remains constant.”

Third, “chains of suspicion” and the risk of a “technological explosion” in another civilization mean that in space there can only be the law of the jungle.

In the words of the book’s hero, Luo Ji:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost … trying to tread without sound …

The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them.

In this forest, hell is other people … any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.

Related Resource: Belfer Center, Oct 2019

As one of the aliens points out to their leader, because of their world’s utter unpredictability, “Everything is devoted to survival. To permit the survival of the civilization as a whole, there is almost no respect for the individual. Someone who can no longer work is put to death. Trisolarian society exists under a state of extreme authoritarianism.”

Life for the individual consists of “monotony and desiccation.” That sounds a lot like Mao’s China.

the deeper meaning of the book is surely that Trisolaris is China.

The three bodies in contention are not suns but classes: rulers, intellectuals, masses. Right now, China is in one of its stable phases. But, as the contending forces shift, chaos will sooner or later return. Perhaps it already has, in Hong Kong.

Is the Pandemic Over?

Source: American Thinker, Sep 2020

A curious but fortunate characteristic of virus epidemics is their limited life spans.  No one knows why, but guesses include herd immunity and mutations of the virus.

Virus epidemics, however, have relatively short time profiles, like what we’re seeing with COVID-19.  There’s nothing unusual about the fact that the coronavirus death count is dying a natural death.  That should have been anticipated, and it should now be widely publicized.  Why are we pretending not to know this good news?  These facts are easy to find.  We ought to be celebrating as we did when WWII ended.

This COVID-19 death profile is extremely significant yet is almost totally ignored by the media.  Their focus is on cases, not deaths.  The number of cases has not decreased as rapidly as the number of deaths.  Only a small percentage of cases now end in death, and the death count is vastly more important than the case count.  The case count may linger, but that problem is becoming increasingly manageable.

Lockdowns Don’t Work

Source: Mises, Sep 2020

lockdowns have never been shown to be particularly effective. And this lack of success in containment must also be weighed with the very real costs of forced isolation. This was explained in a 2006 paper in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism called “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza” by Thomas V. Inglesby, Jennifer B. Nuzzo, Tara O’Toole, and D.A. Henderson. The authors conclude:

There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza. A World Health Organization (WHO) Writing Group, after reviewing the literature and considering contemporary international experience, concluded that “forced isolation and quarantine are ineffective and impractical.” Despite this recommendation by experts, mandatory large-scale quarantine continues to be considered as an option by some authorities and government officials.

It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.

Donald Luskin noted in the Wall Street Journal:

Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.

Basically, Luskin searched for a clear correlation between lockdowns and better health outcomes in relation to covid-19. He found none. He continues:

It could be that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks. But the surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads. And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health or temperature. The only factor that seems to make a demonstrable difference is the intensity of mass-transit use.

A July study published by The Lancet concluded: “The authors identified a negative association between the number of days to any lockdown and the total reported cases per million, where a longer time prior to implementation of any lockdown was associated with a lower number of detected cases per million.”

In April, T.J. Rogers looked at “a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown” and found that “The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)”

In May, Elaine He at Bloomberg showed “there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities.”

In an August 1 study, also published by The Lancet, the authors concluded, “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.”

A June study published in Advance by Stefan Homburg and Christof Kuhbandner found that the data “strongly suggests” that

the UK lockdown was both superfluous (it did not prevent an otherwise explosive behavior of the spread of the coronavirus) and ineffective (it did not slow down the death growth rate visibly).

Is the Prolockdown Data Good Enough to Justify Massive Human Rights Violations?

Extraordinary measures require extraordinary evidence. And the burden of proof is on those who seek to use the coercive power of the state to force people into their homes, cripple the economy, and abolish countless basic freedoms for the duration. Have the advocates for lockdowns made their case?

It’s hard to see how they have. For one, advocates for lockdowns need to present obvious and overwhelming evidence that lockdowns bring big benefits far in excess of the no-lockdown approach. They have not done so. Moreover, they have not shown that a lack of lockdowns is anywhere near as dangerous as they have claimed in the name of pushing lockdowns to begin with. We can already see what the no-lockdown scenario looks like. It looks like Sweden, and that’s a better outcome than many prolockdown regimes can claim.

Ant Financial Goes Public

Source: Bloomberg, Aug 2020

Alipay: A $17 Trillion Machine

The world’s largest digital payment platform was created in 2004 as an escrow service for Alibaba to secure transactions on the e-commerce site. For consumer wary about online payments, the service was a hit and quickly spread to other platforms.

The mobile version, launched in 2009, once held 75% of the market, but has seen its share slide to about 55% in competition with Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat Pay.

Alipay has 711 million active users, mostly in China, who tap it to buy everything from a quick coffee to even property, generating $17 trillion in payments in the 12 months through June. But it’s also becoming less and less important to Ant and contributed 36% of its revenue in the first half of this year, down from more than 50% just two years ago.

Huabei and Jiebei: A Loan Feast

For those that don’t have ready cash to spend via Alipay, Ant operates services that dole out small unsecured loans: Huabei (Just Spend) and Jiebei (Just Lend). The former focuses on quick consumer loans for purchases of iPhones and fridges, while the latter finances anything from travel to education.

Ant uses some of its capital for these loans, but the bulk of the money comes from banks, with the firm acting as gateway. The platforms made loans to about 500 million people in the 12 months through June, charging annualized rates on its smaller loans of about 15%. Their lending could swell to almost 2 trillion yuan by 2021, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The firm’s CreditTech business, which includes Huabei and Jiebei, is its single biggest revenue maker, contributing 39% of the total in the first six months of the year.

Yu’ebao: The Great Stash

With hundreds of millions flocking to Alipay, Ant in 2013 created a money market fund that allowed people to earn interest from cash they parked in the app, investing as little as 1 yuan. Tianhong Yu’e Bao Money Market Fund is one of the world’s largest of its kind with about $173 billion in assets. But it has shrunk from its heyday after regulators stepped in to limit how much each investor could put in the fund.

In 2018, Ant opened the platform to third parties. Now it offers fund options from more than 20 asset managers. It has partnered with companies including Invesco Ltd., which has seen one fund grow 300- to 400-fold in size as of March. This year, Ant teamed up with Vanguard Group to offer a robo adviser to allow the U.S. giant make headway in China.

The unit that Yu’ebao is part of at Ant accounted for 15% of revenue this year, which is about unchanged over the past three years.

Credit Scoring

Leveraging the vast amount of data it gleans on spending and lending patterns, Ant started a credit scoring service in 2015 called Zhima Credit. If users opt-in to the service, Ant runs checks on transaction histories and also uses data from third-party providers to check credit worthiness. Ant charges companies that tap into the service a fee and if customers score high enough, they can avoid paying deposits on everything from renting a bike or booking a room at hotels like Marriott.

Xianghubao: Insurance for Pennies

A lot of ants make a mighty colony. The company in 2019 entered the insurance market, creating a health care product called Xianghubao that allows people to pay a small monthly fee that is pooled to help cover treatment costs for members stricken by diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and even Ebola.

Ant’s Insuretech unit also sells insurance premiums from third party companies, and it takes a cut. The unit’s revenue rose 47% to 6 billion yuan in the first half, accounting for 8% of total sales.

Controversies: Yahoo!

Jack Ma spun off Alipay from Alibaba into a company he controlled in 2011, citing the risks of having foreign ownership in the highly sensitive payment system business due to its impact on financial stability and data collection. Yahoo! Inc. and SoftBank Corp. held a majority of Alibaba at the time. Yahoo disputed the move and prior to Alibaba’s record $25 billion IPO in 2014 the companies struck a deal that entitled Alibaba to a share of Ant’s earnings.

That deal was terminated when Alibaba bought a 33% stake in Ant in 2018. Ant now has other foreign investors, including Warburg Pincus LLC, Carlyle Group Inc. and Silver Lake Management LLC.

Ant shuttered its Zhao Cai Bao platform after Cosun Group, a Chinese telecom company in the Guangdong province, defaulted on bonds sold via the platform. When Zhao Cai Bao was first created, the vision was to create a platform that allowed small businesses and individuals to borrow directly from investors.

Who Owns Ant?

The IPO is set to make a lot of people very rich and Jack Ma even richer. He holds 50.52% voting rights in Ant, via his control over shares held by Hangzhou Junhan and Hangzhou Junao. Ma has said that he intends to reduce his economic interest in Ant to no more than 8.8% in the future and is also donating 611 million shares to charity.

Others who stand to make a bundle, include Ant Chairman Eric Jing and another 17 current and former Alibaba and Ant executives will join the ranks of billionaires.

But the full scope of those that stand behind Ant is unclear, since Junhan and Junao don’t disclose inclusive lists of people who receive economic interest either via direct shares or proxy contracts.

When there are no shared global values, there’s no global community

Source: JNS, Aug 2020

Globalism is a Western idea that non-Western nations never bought into.

The laws of war and the refugee system, once the moral underpinnings of internationalism, were brutally exploited by Islamic states to wage terrorist campaigns and funnel colonists into Western nations. Erdoğan’s Turkey has been the first state to openly weaponize migrants, demanding money and concessions in exchange for not sending migrants into Europe.

The global club was built for Western countries. When non-Western nations were admitted, the club, whether it was trade, travel, diplomacy, or anything else, was inevitably trashed.

Globalism is a bad idea. But what made it even worse than the loss of sovereignty and individual freedoms of the nation-state were the widespread abuses of its infrastructure.

China’s model of large-scale intellectual property theft was innovated by the USSR.

The Soviet Union’s espionage was not only directed at political and military targets, but at economic ones. Communist agents routinely stole and copied Western technology and designs. The Chinese habit of exploring a business deal with a Western company only to gain access to its trade secrets was the default tactic for industries in Warsaw Pact nations.

Where the Soviet Union failed, Communist China succeeded, not only because of a superior work ethic and skill set, but because globalist institutions welcomed it in and the internet allowed it to overwhelm domestic manufacturers in other countries, while hacking their trade secrets.

Shared Worldview

Globalism’s fatal flaw was the messianic assumption that other peoples shared its worldview. There was no reason for Beijing, Tokyo, Tehran, or Islamabad to share a particular strain of thought whose origins are distinctly European in philosophy, law and secularized religion.

They’re happy to join the club, exploit it for all it’s worth and then shrug their shoulders at any moral responsibility to what we would see as a hippie handing out free lunches to everyone.

Now the hippie experiment is drawing to a close because it doesn’t serve anyone’s interest.

Except the people taking the free lunches.

Globalism is being torn apart by the same demographic forces that are destroying the nation-state. The social contracts that govern a country or the international order depend on the willingness of all the participants to believe in the larger community. At the most basic level, that’s represented by the balance of giving and taking through the social contract.

Altruists give more than they take, deadbeats take more than they give, and abusers take everything and give nothing except where it directly serves their short-term interests.

Domestic demographic changes are destroying the social contracts of the welfare state, and internationally the social contract and its infrastructure have been hijacked by non-Western nations with no regard for the Western obsession with maintaining an international community.

Globalism was fueled by the myth of a global community that could never exist.

Communist China and the Islamists have spent the last 30 years demonstrating that it can’t and won’t. Communities are built around shared values.

When there are no shared values, there’s no community. That’s as true globally as it is in the streets of London and New York City.

Globalists have struggled with the failure of the social contract by blaming those who abide by it, middle-class native homeowners locally, and America and its allies globally. But internalizing the blame doesn’t make a community work. As we’ve seen in major American cities this year, permissively accepting abuses of the social contract out of guilt destroys communities.

A community must have a way of dealing with those who violate the social contract. If it can’t rein in nations and individuals who violate the social contract, then violations become the norm, and people and nations abandon the failed community because it doesn’t protect their interests.

When there are few shared values, then communities have to spend more time and force policing the social contract. That can mean militarized police, surveillance cameras and DNA databanks in major cities, and a constant state of war and endless military deployments abroad.

The lack of a shared social contract turns life, locally or globally, into a perpetual struggle.

Leftist political philosophies have tried to dodge this crisis by defending the perpetrators and blaming the victims. But no matter who they blame, their system is still falling apart.

Globalism is dying. The greatest enemies of the Western world are saving it from itself.

The Covid Coup

Source: American Mind, Jul 2020

Bad judgments and usurpations—the scam, not the germs—define this disaster’s dimensions.

What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.

The U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were based. Its model also predicted COVID deaths for un-locked-down Sweden. On May 3 it wrote that, as of May 14, Sweden would suffer up to 2800 daily deaths. The actual number was below 40. Whether magnifying this falsehood was reckless or willful, it amounted to shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater. What justifies listening to, and paying, people who do that kind of science?

In May the Centers for Disease Control, by then discredited professionally (though not, alas, in the mass media), was forced to conclude that the lethality rate, far from being circa 5% was 0.26%. Double a typical flu. The CDC was able to keep the estimate that high only by factoring in an unrealistically low figure for asymptomatic infections—never mind inflated figures for deaths. But the U.S. government, instead of amending its recommendations in the face of reality, tried to hide reality by playing a shell game with the definition and number of COVID “cases.”

they toyed with reporting deaths by attributing to COVID any that “involved” or looked as if they might have involved it. They then included pneumonia, influenza, and COVID into the category PIC. That is how the death figure came to exceed 100,000. But if the CDC had used the same criterion that it did with the SARS virus, namely “severe acute respiratory distress syndrome,” the figure by the end of June would have been some 16,000.

By the July 1, even using the CDC’s inflated figures for COVID-responsible deaths, COVID-19’s Infection Fatality Rate for people under 70 was 0.04%.

The Imperial College, London’s tally for Great Britain, broken down by age of death, shows that the chances of dying from COVID-19 infection roughly track the chances of death from all causes at any given age, except for the very young. For men, the chances of death co-incident with the virus don’t exceed 1%, or the average death rate, until age 70. For women, they don’t exceed the average death rate until close to age 90. In Spain, the death rate for infected persons over 90 years old was 10%.

The measure of “excess deaths” tells a similar story. During the six-week peak of the COVID event in 2020, deaths in the U.S. exceeded deaths during the same period in the previous year by 82,000. Considering that, concurrently, the 2020 flu season was one of the worst on record (typically the flu is responsible for some 50,000 deaths during the season) and given the CDC-mandated conflation of COVID numbers with others, the COVID-19 pandemic in and of itself did not amount to much—except in New York City, for reasons only partly known. By the week of June 20, 2020 the CDC was reporting ZERO excess deaths—meaning that the figure for weekly deaths was within the long-term normal curve for that time of the year.

In short, COVID-19 is not America’s plague. It did not shake America. The ruling class shook it. They have not done it ignorantly or by mistake. They have done it to extort the general public’s compliance with their agendas. Their claim to speak on behalf of “science” is an attempt to avoid being held accountable for the enormous harm they are doing. They continue doing it because they want to hang on to the power the panic has brought them.

By contrast, COVID-19’s effect on ordinary healthy persons is considerably milder than those of ordinary respiratory diseases. What sense, then, could general isolation ever have made in the context of COVID-19?

The U.S. authorities, the “experts,” the ruling class, chose to do precisely the opposite. They “locked down” a general population that is at virtually no risk, thereby delaying the virus’s spread to people it could not harm and whose infection would build herd immunity. Keeping millions of people indoors also worsened their health. Keeping people from interacting and working normally wrecked economic and social life.

Power

All of the above served the ruling class’s overarching interest in its own power. Are there any categories of people who benefited from the shutdowns? Government gained. We know of no employee of federal, state or local government who was furloughed or had his or her pay reduced. On the contrary, all got additional power. The federal government created trillions of dollars, the distribution of which is enriching the usual suspects involved in administration. The teachers’ unions gained the power to extort concessions as a price for reopening schools. Among them, restrictions on or elimination of charter schools.

The ruling class’s gains of power and money have been at the country class’s expense, and have depended on suppressing truth.

An egregious example of forcible official lying is the ruling class’s political campaign against the drug Hydroxychloroquine. President Trump had pointed to the truth that this standard treatment for malaria for more than a half century is effective against the early and mid-stages of the COVID disease. This fact had been discovered accidentally and confirmed by studies and practices in France, Spain, India, and South Korea. In April, U.S. doctors started prescribing it widely, reported good results, and took it themselves prophylactically. The ruling class found this intolerable because it contradicted its narrative that nothing could prevent the sky from falling, but above all because its success might cast a favorable light on Trump. Hence it set about canceling truth about drugs from public consciousness and substituting its own narrative.

Perspective

It should be clear that the COVID event in America is only tangentially about health. It is essentially a political campaign based on the pretense of health. Mere perusal of news from abroad is enough to see that this is true as well throughout the Western world. Throughout, the campaign by governments and associated elites has essentially smothered social and economic activity. Not least—and by no means incidentally—it has smothered the overt political opposition which had increasingly beleaguered said governments and elites throughout the Western world.