Friedman famously claimed that world "free trade", which he fully knew would begin with Chinese and Mexicans earning 1/20th or less of their American counterparts, would almost-immediately begin to normalize wages over there. That is, having "tasted freedom" the workers would essentially force companies to pay competitive world wages and their standard of living would wildly improve. This would turn them into consumers of the very same products they produced and thus greatly expand the economy as a whole. While he acknowledged this distribution would not be even the premise was that the great improvement generally would outweigh any modest declines in established markets.
He was wrong. NAFTA was passed and what Ross Perot said would be the case turned out to be true; wages in Mexico did not normalize with America. We offshored labor to Bangladesh and Vietnam for textiles and nearly everything to China and wages did not normalize with the western world over there.
Likewise in many American cities in the 50s and 60s we built "projects" for low-income housing. Cabrini Green was one of the most-notorious of course but hardly the only one. Some of these were constructed to house displaced people during the Eisenhower Expressway system construction through major cities, but hardly all had that as their excuse. These places turned into hotbeds of crime, drugs and squalor, and we were told it was the concentration that was the problem; dispersing said people with Section 8 vouchers all over the urban and suburban landscape would cause them to experience good culture instead of bad and thus adopt the good elements, at least in part.
That's not what happened. Instead the "bad culture" expanded wildly into the urban and suburban school districts, destroying the quality of education for everyone. The drugs, thuggery and similar nonsense expanded there too, along with the criminal element that inevitably comes with all of it.
Joe Biden nominated Kato Crews for a federal district judgeship. Crews, who is currently a magistrate judge, was asked during his confirmation hearing how he'd evaluate a Brady motion. He did not know what it is yet it forms one of the pillars of due process of law and any graduate of law school or person who passed the bar would know this. Therefore it is fact that irrespective of any alleged credential he may have that allegedly "qualifies" him to be a lawyer -- or judge -- he never actually learned any of that material and thus did not actually earn the credential; how did he manage to get that seat?
Obviously Kato Crews' cultural values do not include actually mastering material before being given a credential, a rather basic precept in any honest society.
That people who fail this basic test are not and will not be immediately removed from any position of power and authority, no matter who they are, points directly toward an impending collapse in our nation's capacity to deliver all manner of things that are utterly-reliant on basic competence. To refuse to demand ALL said persons' removal and back up that demand with whatever is necessary is a choice our society has made and it has consequences you are not going to like.
South Africa infamously had an "apartheid" government structure for 43 years; black people were formally and legally disadvantaged, unable to be treated as equals despite being in the majority of the population, from 1948 to 1994. The nation, despite formal and legal segregation had a functional economy and government structure. In the 25 years since that system was formally ended the nation has essentially devolved into gang violence, thuggery and is teetering on the collapse of basic goods and services such as production of basic foodstuffs (farming), electricity and water supply. Please explain how, if there was no cultural or other significant difference whether in capacity or culture between the two groups this occurred and for extra credit please explain why anyone should consider assistance of any sort to this nation when the majority of the people there, who demanded equality and got it, are in fact fully and completely responsible for this breakdown in the basics of any civilized society and economy.
MASHELE: You've got a political crisis, which started in 1997, where the then-CEO of Eskom alerted government and told them that, if we do not get additional capacity in, we are going to start load shedding from 2007, which is exactly what happened.
Post-apartheid the electrical system operator warned the government that if they did not act to incentivize infrastructure and investment this would happen. The newly-empowered majority government did nothing of the sort -- with fully ten years of fair warning -- and thus collapse it is.
Lest you think I'm bagging on people because of their race -- nope. I'm bagging on people because of their culture and unwillingness to accept that which is when it comes to physical fact and deal with it. Biden and his family anyone? A wife in the family who gets a "payment" for no service of note? A son who likes to smoke meth and, it appears, shower with underage girls in the family, never mind all manner of apparently-corrupt business dealings in multiple nations, being paid huge sums of money when he has zero relevant business or operational experience in the fields at hand. This man winds up President, which tells me everything I need to know about the culture of this nation, particularly when his opponent in the other major political party just got done paying hospitals bonuses in the amount of tens of thousands of dollars per-person for procedures we knew did not work against a novel viral threat -- even when the patient died.
That is functionally equivalent to the Palestinians sending family members $10,000 when one of their sons wears a suicide vest and blows up a bunch of Israelis. If that is an unacceptable act worthy of United States and international sanction tell me why the man who paid hospitals bonuses when they used known worthless treatments on your Grandmother and she died just had a huge crowd show up to cheer him on for a second Presidential run instead of running that rat bastard out of town?
When both major political parties post up candidates such as this and the people through their representative processes allow, enable and cause that to happen the cultural problem resides in us.
The instant rhetoric whenever someone engages in a school shooting is "ban guns." How about banning thugs, virtually all of whom self-identify before the final incident? We just had that happen in Denver, did we not? I don't care how old you are or aren't or what race, sex or other "tribe" you belong to; if you're violent and disruptive you have no right to destroy the rights of others under some rubric of "equity."
You know, this thing called "The Rule of Law" which says when you demonstrate you're unfit to be in polite society through your actions we put you somewhere where you can't harm peaceful citizens.
I think they're called "prisons", but I could be mistaken.
There have always been thugs among humanity who, given the opportunity, will take advantage of others. This is not new. There have also always been narcissists among humanity who are absolutely certain they are the most-important person in the universe.
Positions of power attract these people just like crap attracts flies.
The entire reason we have an alleged "Rule of Law" and no "Divine Right Of Kings" in this nation, and such was ensconced in the Constitution of the United States is that history has shown repeatedly over more than two thousand years that as soon as you allow any group to be exempt from said laws the thugs are attracted there and you wind up with abused and dead people by the score.
Tell me again how Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted and imprisoned for sexually trafficking minors, managed to be convicted for that crime when not one person to whom she trafficked said minors to has been indicted, tried or imprisoned? Its rather difficult to traffic minors for sex without someone consuming that service and in each and every case doing so is a serious felony. If you believe the only person she "trafficked" them to was Epstein you're a few cans short of a sixpack; the flight logs from his aircraft make quite clear an awful lot of people were flying around on that plane, nearly all of them men and underage girls, and in addition no plausible legal explanation for where he got all of his money from has surfaced. So where are the other prosecutions, convictions and imprisonments? You see we still have "The Divine Right of Kings" don't we, and we, as Americans, have not sacked our government for continuing that practice despite it being the very reason this nation exists and why we shot all those British soldiers, ejecting them from America!
I'm supposed to be mad enough to ban guns over the shooting in Nashville despite the fact that a gun in the hands of a non-thug at that instant in time ended the slaughter? At the same time 107 people, as of 3/20/2023 were shot and killed this year in Chicago, all but two of whom were apparently killed by thugs (the other two were, it appears, legitimate police stops of a thug-in-process.
The shooter in Nashville was apparently a 28 year old woman and the "early reports" were that she was apparently "in her teens." Oh really? Why isn't her name all over the place if she was known to be 28 years old and since when is a 28 year old apparently "in her teens"?
Then we find out -- the shooter, according to the Nashville cops, identified as a man and so gee, was biologically a woman. A copy of a social media profile with pronouns has been found. Gee, no culture problem there right? I get it, you didn't like being born with a slot between your legs instead of a hose. I didn't like being born a dude who wasn't really all that good at hand-eye coordination sports because my right eye isn't as good as my left and thus, for example, I will never be any good at hitting a pitched baseball, but there's no "bionic" replacement so there's also nothing I can do about it as I was born this way.
I didn't go shoot up a school because I sucked at baseball when I was a kid nor did I demand people coddle me because I couldn't process an incoming baseball fast enough to accurately swing a bat at it. Not do I have a right to play in the Major Leagues even though, no matter how much effort I put into training, I will never be capable of hitting a fastball. Ever.
We all have something we'd rather be different. The cultural difference between "well, that's how the cookie crumbles; I have to figure out how to deal with it" and "this is reason to scream, shout, demand accommodations and then go kill a bunch of people" is, well, rather profound.
WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE, AMERICA?
Rational response (this is who I am, like it or not, so I have to deal with it and figure out how to be ok with it) or kowtowing to the screaming demands of those who, when they don't get what they wish they were and can never be or have, turn rabid?
THIS IS THE CHOICE.
Biden's administration immediately tried to frame this as yet more "gun control" nonsense which is a nice attempt from deflection from the fact that he and his administration have funded the slaughter of tens of thousands of people in and around Ukraine which incidentally shielded wild-eyed corruption over there, was a direct beneficiary of our corruption of their political process and then "demanded" literal tanks in the streets -- and got them, from us.
Oh, never mind the LIE that there is no objective reality with it comes to things you cannot change and are fixed at the moment of conception too.
Why do I bring this up specifically?
Because its really all part of the same issue. Prior to 1968 you could literally buy a gun out of the Sears Catalog by mail order and have it delivered to your door by the post office. There was an entire section in the "wish catalog" that came out every fall before Christmas; I remember that catalog as a boy since the back part of it was Christmas toys.
Yet there was no such problem. Indeed it was common for boys to have a shotgun in the rack of the back of their truck in rural areas because they went hunting after school with it.
Why was there no such problem?
Because if you were a thug or decided that your specific issues meant someone else had to kowtow to you our culture was that you were not allowed to get away with that crap -- you sucked it up or not, but you could not impose your insanity on others. Oh sure, there were exceptions -- the mob in some cities and similar -- but not in the general case. You hit a teacher or threw a chair at her you got expelled and your parents had to deal with finding a way to get you an education at their own expense. You got neither an IEP or a "cry room" if you were incapable of being in the same space with others and not disrupting their learning. If they didn't or couldn't act as parents you wound up having to fend for yourself. If that ended with you in prison for life tough crap. If you attacked someone else you got jailed. If you did it again you got jailed for a lot longer and you got to break rocks or make license plates as your highest and best life achievement. If you believed you were a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice-versa, you were told to suck it up buckwheat -- your chromosomes were set at conception and there's nothing you can do about it. If you wanted to be wild-eyed crazy that was your prerogative until and unless you committed a criminal act against someone else -- and then off to jail you went. If you were a man but liked to dress as a woman that was fine, but we still called you "Joe" and there was nothing you could do about it and no, you could not be on the woman's track or swim team. We did not allow a parade of people to break the law coming into the United States and if you tried that you were summarily ejected, we did not allow a river of fentanyl to flow in via said illegal border crossings and we did not coddle people who committed violent offenses against others no matter their age.
Whatever gifts and abilities, for better or worse, you were born with that's what you had. Our culture instilled the viewpoint that you should make the best use of your unique abilities to the best of your capacity, and if you choose not to for whatever reason that was fine -- but the cost of that decision was on you and nobody else. If you tried to make it someone else's problem you'd be told "NO!" in a firm but compassionate manner -- and if you refused to accept that answer it would be enforced if necessary.
With this culture we advanced in this nation as no other country ever has over a similar period of time. We conquered atomic energy for peaceful purpose, we put men on the moon multiple times, we built reusable spacecraft that could fly to orbit and return and we created and distributed all manner of apparently-miraculous things, including electric lights, electricity on demand, automobiles capable of being bought by the average person's salary, calculators you could hold in your hand, computers in an office, then on your desk and finally in your pocket and more.
But then over the last several decades we decided we could instead create and nurtured a culture where flat-out false claims and demands for "equality" when in fact that is impossible are tolerated and even rewarded, such as the insane "reparations" nonsense out in San Francisco, claims that a man is in fact a woman., that one is entitled to a law or other degree or diploma if one hasn't learned the material and repeatedly releasing violent accused felons on trivial or even no bail whatsoever. Friends of mine vacationing in Nashville a few months ago were held up at gunpoint overnight in their rental by armed thugs. To the best of my knowledge the assailants have not been caught. Anyone care to guess whether they had priors and if so why weren't they in prison?
A couple of years ago violent bands of thugs burned and looted cities all over this nation. How many were imprisoned for a decade for committing arson or commercial looting? Effectively zero. What does that tell you about how our culture has evolved to consider such thuggery nothing more than a nice night out on the town?
It is all the same thing through this article and these examples -- culture. We have enabled and celebrated thuggery in Mexico (drug gangs), China (Uyghurs, Christians, Muslims .et.al.) and right here in the United States (drug gangs, illegal immigrants slaughtering a girl in Iowa, BLM and antifa "mostly-peaceful protestors" and more.)
This has extended into our government with both Trump (paying hospitals a bonus when they kill you) and Biden (mandates that had no basis in law or fact, "defund the police" out of Harris, shielding from prosecution his son for apparent criminal acts and more) never mind our Congress which has enabled repeated scams and schemes (Solyndra and all the various Covid-time period rip-offs anyone) going back decades and accelerating on an unbroken basis over the last 20+ years. Rather than punish the funding source for the 9/11 attacks (Saudi Arabia) we instead waged war on TWO nations that had nothing to do with it (Iran and Iraq) and killed a few million children in one of them; one of the most-outrageous examples of thuggery in human history explicitly endorsed and permitted by the American people.
Spare me the crocodile tears until our culture changes and we decide, as a body politic, that this crap is going to stop -- and mean it.
As many of you have read in these pages Ishmael has contributed several articles on the clown world challenges of the last few years. No, that's not me writing under another name, and yes, it is one contributor.
Let me offer, at this point, a different perspective: We won, they lost.
The outcome was in doubt for quite some time. But now, its not.
Rasmussen ran a poll not long ago and found a very large percentage of people who are convinced that someone they knew was seriously injured or killed by the vexxines. Remember the old mantra -- safe and effective? Its no longer an opinion that holds sway among the American people.
But its not just opinion anymore: Now its fact, as we keep seeing. Report after report, even showing up in the mainstream media, of people taking the Fauci Flop. Allegedly healthy people, even elite level athletes, suddenly collapsing and in many cases dying.
Reality is that everyone dies and death is not uncommon. But unexpected, sudden death among people younger than 60 or so is quite unusual. Especially among athletes and other people of prominence, except from drugs, which of course have always been a scourge and have claimed people all the time. Elvis infamously died on the crapper and upon autopsy they found ten prescription drugs in size and a seriously damaged liver. Not all that long ago my sister died under similar circumstances, and from similar root causes. I've had friends who also succumbed from the same sort of abuse of substances and that sucks.
But many of these are not slow suicides by drug abuse -- or, for that matter, by potato chip and sugared beverages. They're "side effects" of something peddled to the masses and everyone knows it. Those who were conned are scared of meeting God and having to explain their personal insanity to him, thus that fearful look in their eye. Their attacks on you both over the last two years and today are from that exact reason: They're scared they got it wrong and you had it right -- and they may be literally walking while already dead. Those who conned others or worse, who were enforcers either through soft coercion or even literal force, such as politicians, police officers, CEOs and supervisory people are not just scared they might be next but that their particular fiefdom and ambitions are screwed, never mind their personal life and wealth, perhaps terminally so.
Good.
The suck that the so-called "mitigations" caused from destruction of two+ years of children's education and productivity in our economy is nowhere near finished. In fact the worst of it is just starting. A virus that for many including healthy young people was actually less dangerous than the flu has done what essentially every highly mutable respiratory virus does: Entropy is not a suggestion any more than the laws of thermodynamics (which is what gives rise to entropy, by the way) and nothing escapes it. Covid followed the same pattern that OC43 did back in the 1890s when nobody knew a damn thing about the structure of viruses nor were there any shots. Even with our tampering the laws of physics were not to be denied or evaded; man may create God in an image that suits him, but he can't make hydrogen and oxygen turn into gold instead of water.
There is a maxim I didn't much discuss when I was running a business (because I certainly preferred not to educate my competition!) which is that you don't make money selling things -- you make money when you buy them. Its has and always will be true. When you take advantage of someone else's stupidity (which you're not responsible for since you didn't contribute to the stupid act) you acquire an advantage your competitor cannot outrun or outmaneuver whether its in business or your personal life. MCSNet managed several of these, with one of the larger being a deal we found for office space (which of course every business needs) that was at about 20% of the going rate as a result of another firm's stupidity. I was able to capitalize on that because I had stashed back cash, acquire a five-year lease on said office space and the cost of operations advantage over others was immense -- and dropped immediately and durably to the firm's bottom line.
The "suck" is going to tempt you in the next few years to whine and cry. Don't. That's self-destructive, especially if it prompts you to do something stupid like drown yourself in a bottle of gin. Instead, if you're one of the people who said "no" and meant it build reserves, live frugally, shed unnecessary debt and expenses and be patient. The stupidity that has run through not just the United States but worldwide over the last three years has not been local or minor: It has been immense, it has crossed nearly all professions and it has sucked into its maw the majority of Americans, say much less those in other nations. The opportunities this will generate are also going to be immense, particularly when coupled with all the other stupidity of the last 20 years, including so-called "diversity hiring." Just look at one minor piece of this -- the recent NOTAM meltdown in civil aviation. NOTAMs even got "diversity renamed" to Notice to Air Missions when in fact it is Notice to Airmen. It really is a trivial problem from a computing point of view; just a list of notices that deal with a specific route or place to warn pilots of local and abnormal conditions, such as a restriction on flying into a given set of coordinates during a certain time. I could probably code up a system to do this in a weekend and run it in a single rack of equipment for the entire nation, then triplicate that in three strategic locations so there are two always-on spares -- literally. Well, the FAA apparently did not care about making sure this "non-safety critical" (after all, if it fails it doesn't directly crash a plane) system actually worked and was redundant, and it failed. The problem is that without it you can't fly because if you take off without having the NOTAMs for the area you're operating in and go somewhere you can't as a pilot your ticket gets punched, so said failure basically grounded the entire US non-military aviation system, commercial and civilian, for several hours.
This occurred because the stupid has run rampant throughout or civil and government systems where competence is no longer the gating factor to employment and supervisory positions but rather has been replaced with blind obedience to whatever the flavor of the day happens to be whether its hiring someone due to their skin color or their pronouns and then, in the last couple of years, whether they damaged their bodies stupidly because of a bunch of money-grubbing jackasses along with their enablers in the media and government.
All this will unwind and those who did the stupid things will be the ones who pay for it. Yes, you'll have to live through the suck and we're all going to have to deal with that. If you're younger you have never lived through a real suck. That must be nice. I'm almost 60 and I did -- both little sucks (e.g. early 1990s) and one pretty nasty one in the late 70s and early 80s which was caused by stupidity and arrogance, just like this one. That latter one went on for about five years before it turned and started to improve but if you were prepared and took advantage you did damn well. I was both too young and personally stupid at the time but I learned from that and in the 1990s pounced on its little brother. That smaller one came at a great time for me professionally and was a big part of MCSNet being successful. Some people levered up and won but most who did that lost with many literally losing everything. The prepared who didn't lever up did quite well without the risk of a zero; winning less is ok unless you're a pig, in which case go ahead and grab for that Ring of Power -- just don't whine if you fall off the cliff into the lava instead of getting it.
Those of you who said NO -- the most-powerful single word in the English language -- are already winning. You don't wake up every morning wondering if tonight you will go to bed and never wake up from a clot you throw in your sleep. You might have been persecuted, fired and ostracized but you have your health and are not wondering if there's a ticking time bomb in your chest.
You should contemplate putting your unvexxed status everywhere -- including especially on resumes.
Wear it proudly -- you were RIGHT and its a perfectly-valid marketing point to use both personally and professionally.
Those who cheated (e.g. bribing the doc $50 to squirt it in the trash) are arguably in the worst situation of all. You branded your own chart by doing that and in today's world with EMR (electronic medical records) you can never undo it. If you ever used that fake credential you committed an offense against the person who you gave it to and might have committed a crime but even if it wasn't a crime if and when you get caught (and yes, it is possible for it to be proved you never got the actual shots) or try to walk it back you risk being blackballed in your industry or worse, particularly if your profession has ethics clauses -- and many professions do. Even if you can't be blackballed you marked yourself as untrustworthy, and that cannot be reversed.
The consequences from all of this stupidity are going to have to go through the system and this is not going to be "over and done" as if nothing happened next week -- or next year. But those consequences are going to create tremendous opportunities. All-cause mortality is currently running in the high single-digits to around 12% all over the world, it is not coming back down materially and that is not a small figure.
Then there's disability, which is doing its best impression of a skyrocket just after launch:
Note the dip in "disabled" as we went into 2020; that was disabled people dying from the virus. They were medically fragile and succumbed; we know this virus was especially ugly in those who were already seriously medically compromised, and that shouldn't have surprised anyone. But what happened afterward and why, even though Omicron has been the dominant virus form for the last year and it kills almost nobody, has that trend in disability gone vertical? Those newly-minted medically-fragile are the new screwed -- and they did it to themselves. Perhaps this will level off in the next year or two and stop but if it doesn't, and the evidence thus far is that it is not slowing down, asset prices are going to collapse in many areas and those who are healthy and didn't screw themselves will be writing their own ticket, which will go a hell of a lot further when it comes to standard of living than it did five or ten years ago.
Take a million and a half extra people out of the workforce every year just from disability and perhaps 1/5th of that again in deaths on top of the normal everyday rate and guess what: That's almost exactly the 3% rate of "seriously screwed" I predicted and what this data appears to show was a pretty darn good educated guess.
The rage over the last couple of years was surcharging people's health insurance for refusing the jab as a punitive, coercive act. On a forward basis those who took it may find themselves uninsurable at any price, never mind life insurance and those who refused have every right and should demand all of those surcharges back in cash, with interest at today's higher rates. This is where you'll get caught if you try to lie too, because both the damage and residuals from taking the vexxine is almost-certainly going to be detectable and will be looked for. Elevated troponins or even worse LGE on a cardiac MRI are impossible to hide. Yeah, Obamacare will be there but for the healthy this means subsidy levels for decent insurance will go way up and that's good if you don't need it because it means you can have reasonable coverage for little or no cost. In private business when this worm turns the screwed may find themselves unemployable at anything other than part-time, no-health-insurance jobs as the prognosis for those with LGE is both very poor and hideously expensive. Then there are all the younger people still in or before their childbearing/siring years -- you have to be out of your damned mind as a young man or woman to date with the intent to marry and try to create children with a vexxed partner when you have the choice of a someone who didn't take it -- and you do. Three percent doesn't sound all that bad but it is: Do you like adding a one in thirty risk that your husband or wife-to-be is mortally wounded and going to stick you with both the psychic and economic costs of their prior decision two, five or ten years down the road, never mind the possibility of being unknowingly unable to have children? How about the recent study that found evidence of cardiac damage in nearly one in five young people?
How do you like those odds if you're a young man or woman?
Choose wisely -- which means unvexxed. Let the vexxed have each other and whatever misery comes to them. They bought the ticket; don't take their ride for them.
Here's my take: Those who thought for themselves, read the available information and then stuck up the middle finger at the people attempting to convince them to take the vexxines not only will win they have already and will keep winning. Be smart now and into the future, build reserves, live frugally so you're prepared and be patient; you're not just winning now, today and here you're going to continue winning and those who made the other decision are going to continue losing both now and well into the future. Not everyone who did a dumb thing will lose but in terms of economic impact that does not matter; all that matters is that many, far more than usual in our society, did a stupid thing and you will be able to take advantage when they are awarded their stupid prize. If you do that and keep your powder dry five years from now you're odds-on to have a big fat grin on your face.
When all is said and done I expect mRNA to be consigned to the dustbin of history, the worst of a bad set of medical experiments run on entire populations without cause -- and those firms involved in it are going to be severely damaged if not (as in the case of one-trick-ponies) utterly destroyed. Biotech firms blowing up is nothing new; they do it all the time and most of them fail. The only difference here is the size of the detonations as a result of the stupidity of attempting to use unproved medical technology on a mass basis.
Do not expect the economic and sociological impact will be over or "back to normal" in a year. If we're lucky in five years we'll be coming out of it; if not it might be a decade or even longer. But those who made smart decisions will be the winners on a statistical basis and already are winning.
Hold your head high if "screw you!" was your answer to this garbage.
You were right and it is rapidly becoming consensus whether the media and so-called "bigwigs" like it or not.
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
Oh, but you claimed to know. You didn't claim opinion and neither did anyone else on your side. Like, for example, the claim that people should celebrate those who refused the jabs and then died.
Well how about those who took the jabs and then got screwed, either by side effects or worse, the new data that shows that within 60 days you're more-likely to wind up in the hospital or dead if you were jabbed than not?
Further, this is not a matter of luck, as Emily suggests and Clott Adams has claimed in his puerile attempt to evade responsibility for leading people to their doom. Do stupid things, win stupid prizes may well apply to him from what I've heard reported of late (he long ago blocked me on social media for calling him out on jabby advocacy.)
Luck was not a factor on many people's parts, mine included. Many of our positions were in fact the outcome of deductive reasoning, having put in hundreds of hours reading literal hundreds of scientific and medical papers that stretched back decades. I gave up a hell of a lot of sleep over those two years attempting to analyze what was in front of me and provide useful commentary to the public going all the way back to Diamond Princess.
For example I concluded very early on that masks would be pointless. Was this "speculation" or "luck"? No; it was scientific fact that had been repeatedly confirmed over more than forty years, dating back to a study by Neil Orr published in 1981. That study provided conclusive evidence that in a sterile field (an operating room) with every person present being a trained medical professional adherence to the use of medical-grade masks to interdict transmission of disease failed and in fact potentiated disease transmission.
Obviously nobody in the general public will do better than trained medical professionals and you cannot do better in terms of environment than a sterile operating room. It was therefore impossible for masks to work -- this was known forty years ago.
How about ventilators? We knew they were worthless in March of 2020 because in more than 9 out of 10 people with Covid they were used on in Wuhan the person died. That was published very early and thus it was known they were valueless. Yet everyone screamed for more things that killed people. Here is the data table on that from the time -- March of 2020.
32 people were intubated and one survived. Three got ECMO and that didn't work either; zero of those attempts were successful.
Ventilators and ECMO, in Covid patients, are worthless and this was known in March of 2020. Yet CMS to this day pays hospitals a bonus if they intubate Covid patients despite knowing all the way back to March of 2020 that it was pointless and if it did anything at all it actually killed them.
We also knew in March of 2020 that if your kidneys got hosed you were screwed too; that is also in that table in that renal replacement did not save one patient (since there were 10, that means its less than 10% effective and perhaps zero.)
Yet CMS did and still does pay hospitals to stuff you full of Remdesivir which has a known side effect profile that includes destroying your kidneys as this risk was known when it was tried against Ebola years earlier and more people died when given the drug than if they got nothing.
We will never know how many people who went into the hospital and were given that drug were killed by the virus and how many were killed by the drug. If the deceased was given Remdesivir and developed kidney failure it is a reasonable presumption the hospital killed them, not the virus. Disentangling that is impossible; isn't that convenient when you pay the hospitals to give people a known-dangerous drug rather than paying said bonus only if the person walks out alive under their own power? I don't need to prove who got killed by one or the other; I need merely to observe that anything you pay for you will get more of -- every time. This is basic human nature so why didn't we pay bonuses to hospitals only for success?
My position on these things did not come from wild speculation -- it came from detailed and documented study which I dutifully linked in my commentary on a daily basis, expecting nobody to take my opinion at face value without the sources to back up my point of view. Yet that position earned me the ire of many, including that of Google, Twitter and others who sought to force me to shut up about that which had been true forty years prior and still was at the time -- and remains so today.
Where is the apology and restitution to those of us who got this right not by random chance but by deductive reasoning that came from detailed and laborious study? What about those who got sick, went to the hospital, were stuffed full of Remdesivir, suffered kidney failure and are now dead, including one of my friends?
At the root of Emily's sin is that she had no evidence for benefit in any of what she backed or the fear she instilled in her family and others, including her demands for policy but the harms of going down the road she advocated for were known. Specifically, closing schools was known to be harmful in every case, with the only dispute over the degree of harm. Masking children, especially young children, was known harmful too, because language development in children is largely through facial expression. This isn't speculation; it has been known to be scientifically true for decades. Thus we had on the one side known and serious harms and on the other no evidence whatsoever, just fear-driven belief.
This was and remains no different than someone who believes in "witchcraft" and then uses that belief as an argument for burning the alleged witch at the stake. That harm will take place if you burn the witch is obvious but you have no evidence that the "spells", even if they were actually cast, did or would do anything at all.
Then there's the 40-odd years of economic and social study on pandemics spanning multiple academic works which made clear the correct action when it came to mitigations was to do nothing. That is, you couldn't stop the virus so there was no benefit to mitigating factors but there was harm that each of those factors would, with certainty, cause. Therefore from an analytical point of view the best and only defensible measure was to maintain normalcy through the economy and social environment to the maximum possible extent.
Personal fear does not trump 40 years of academic study, but for Emily it not only did so it drove her public pronouncements. Hiding under the bed is a personal decision. Demanding others do so, particularly when you start waving around credentials, is another matter.
Emily demanded, and got, the exact opposite of what decades of formal study concluded should be done differing only in degree from one place to another and we deliberately undertook courses of treatment despite having plenty of evidence they were worthless or even were responsible, in whole or part, for the death of the person in question.
Emily wishes for absolution after engaging in this enterprise and being a proponent of it.
Not only should she not get it she, her family and her employer should be utterly destroyed for not only pushing it on others but now trying to profit from it in "teaching" about it, when every bit of what was done in that regard was either due to laziness, fear-mongering, possible political animus (e.g. Trump) or all of the above. In other words at best it displayed idiocy and at worst malice and nobody who claims the title of "Professor" should be allowed to use the excuse of idiocy.
You don't give someone who is malicious and unrepentant ""amnesty" in a just, lawful society -- you give them a trial and, upon conviction, a date with the hangman.
Unfortunately what Emily wanted didn't end with the stupidity surrounding masks.
Oh no, Emily was and is a shill for this too:
Another example: When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.
Oh, that's all it was Emily? It would appear you're lying by omission:
The Internet is forever; unless this particular excerpt as was posted on Twitter is forged you personally advocated for and supported the deprivation of human rights on the basis of your fear, without evidence, and you were wrong. For that, above all else, you deserve punishment BEFORE due process exactly as you demanded happen to others.
You weren't alone; here's just one of hundreds of examples calling for people to be shot if they refused the jabs. I saw more demands of that sort over 2021 than I can count. You were one of those people varying only in degree so if you think you're getting away with running that crap as it if never happened you've got another think coming.
We further now know your pipe dream was pure horseshit, was predicated on lies and has produced real harm. Let's go down the list.
Fact: There is no evidence that any vector-based medication, whether viral-vector (e.g. J&J) or mRNA (Pfizer/Moderna/etc.) is safe. Neither has ever been used on a widespread basis, despite more than a decade of trying. All previous attempts ended in failure either on efficacy, safety or both. This is simply due to the mechanism by which they function; rather than introduce an antagonist to the body directly as with every other vaccine they reprogram the cellular machinery in cells that take up the material to produce the antagonist. This in turn means the immune system will consider those cells which are reprogrammed but are part of the person to be a foreign invader and attack them. Any injected medication will inevitably result in some of the material winding up in the circulation and thus some of the cells that will take that up are in the circulatory system and the immune system will attack them. This will in every case result in some amount of damage to the person injected. That's not speculation, it is fact, it is basic physiology and it cannot be evaded as the very design of the technology uses this exact mechanism to work; the only question to be answered is how bad the damage will be and how that balances against any benefit you might receive. If you wish to falsify this fact with the claim of "new discovery" it will take decades of formal study to do so. Until that is demonstrated there is absolutely no place in the medical world for these forms of therapy on a mass-administration basis. Period.
Fact: There has never been a successful coronavirus vaccine developed and we now know that's true for these jabs too. This is not due to not trying; we have tried for decades in both man and beast. All previous trails have failed at the animal testing stage due to adverse events, whether by direct adverse events or causing ADE, potentiation of the actual infection. The reason for the latter is partly due to the rapid mutational pattern that all coronaviruses exhibit. We knew immediately, before the shots were deployed, that Covid also mutated rapidly and thus was extremely likely to exhibit evasion or enhancement whether immediately or down the road. To deploy shots without conclusive proof that this decades-long unbroken record of failure in fact had changed was so wildly-irresponsible that anyone promoting it deserves prosecution and, upon conviction, the death penalty for depraved indifference to the very real possibility of mass-slaughter and morbidity either by disease propagation or direct injury. It is not possible to obtain this evidence in three months time, say much less two or three years, and thus there was no ethical, moral or legal path to use these shots on a mass-basis given the known state of science at the time.
Fact: A vaccine must produce sterile immunity or it is not a vaccine. You can take a prophylaxis against a disease but there is never a "public health" argument for a compulsion to do something that impacts nobody but you. Changing the definition of "vaccine" post-hoc does not change facts but it does prove intent to maliciously deceive. The original trials were never designed to demonstrate sterile immunity and this was public knowledge as the trial design was published at or around their initiation in the summer of 2020. Deborah Birx has admitted that she knew this before the first shot went into the first arm. Anyone "ordinarily skilled" in public health matters or epidemiology knew this too, as did anyone who read the study designs, such as myself. To represent otherwise was to spread deliberate false information and Fauci, Joe Biden, Birx and thousands of so-called "medical professionals" did exactly that. Emily says we should take steps to deal with those who spread deliberately false information. When are the trials scheduled for Biden, Birx, Fauci, the VUNT who came after me here locally in public, every single Governor (including DeSantis, by the way) who pushed and still does push this crap, all the CEOs and more? Yes, that list includes Trump.
Fact: There is now in those nations where we have the data publicly available and they used these technologies a wildly statistically significant and persistent increase in all-cause mortality that is not, in any plausible way, Covid related and what's much worse is that it is not falling back off to national baselines. We've all seen the anecdotal reports of people dying of the "suddenlies" and "unexpectedlies" in age groups that statistically do not have that happen, such as cheerleaders, soccer players and the like. The data shows that this pattern began to emerge a few months after the jabbing started and despite the poor uptake of boosters it has not gone away, implying that the damage done was permanent and these outcomes will be with us for a decade or more if we stop giving these shots now. In other words the potential risks outlined above now appear to be realized risks.
Fact: We knew, because there were papers published as early as December of 2020, that the risk of severe or even fatal damage if the spike entered the circulation was not theoretical. To deliberately continue on a program to inject people in a way that was physiologically certain to cause that to happen to some degree in each person is the definition of depraved indifference and that is the difference in law between negligence and murder. No less than the Salk Institute flagged this discovery in December of 2020, following up a study from September that had suggested it might be true, and said paper was peer-reviewed and published by spring of 2021, long before most people had been jabbed and before all mandates. That was more than sufficient evidence to put a full and immediate stop to the jabbing program and it was deliberately ignored. Now we have a new study out of Europe that appears to show that one hundred percent of the people inoculated with these jabs suffer some degree of cardiac injury. The medical and government personnel involved in this, never mind the corporate and educational actors must be held criminally accountable for these actions as they went ahead with approval and even mandates while intentionally ignoring evidence published by a highly-credible international medical society before mass-distribution began.
Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
FUCK NO.
"Moving on" requires the three steps that are always required to demonstrate penitence, none of which you or any of the other people involved in this garbage have displayed.
Specifically:
- You must admit you were wrong in all material respects where you were. This extends to masks, schools and shots. You must do so equally publicly to what you advocated and beg forgiveness for your wrong acts, advocacy and the harm that came from that which was imposed on others not by their free choice but rather by coercion or force, forfeiting every privilege and penny you gained therefrom.
- You must make restitution for that imposition of coercion or force to the extent it is possible. There are millions who were materially and even permanently harmed, including being killed as a result of this bullshit. You can't make adequate restitution but you can forfeit everything you have including all credentials, all capacity to earn a living beyond the fast food industry and live out your miserable days bowing before every single person you meet in atonement. You won't, of course, because you haven't even taken the first step -- that is, you still don't admit you did anything wrong and instead are making excuses for your behavior.
- You must act to put into place legal protections such that what you did can NEVER happen again, and if it is attempted any person against whom it is attempted is fully within their rights to use whatever level of force is necessary to stop it, including lethal force. Of course you'll never agree to that either, nor lift a single finger in furtherance of same, if for no other reason than you want to continue to force your view on others. That, standing alone, makes you a monster.
Indeed the truth is you are nothing more than a smug piece of excrement unfit to draw oxygen from the air.
In my opinion you are no longer afraid of a virus but you are very concerned that you may receive exactly the same amount of due process before you are punished by those you fucked, which by the way was none, that you advocated be imposed by force upon others.
I believe THAT, and only that, is why you penned your article and that same fear is why the editors at The Atlantic published it.
To both of you my answer is the same: FUCK OFF.
I will NOT grant amnesty, I will NOT forgive and I WILL rub your bullshit and record in your face at every opportunity, along with reserving the right and option to exact every lawful penalty I can against you and every institution you are associated with, now or in the future, for all eternity.
I remind you that the Biden Administration has yet to drop the "Emergency", it is still trying to mandate jabs and fighting said court cases even after they've lost and neither the Administration, NIH or CDC has issued one apology just as you have not. Indeed the FDA and CDC have both recently acted to further protect the entities making and distributing these shots from any legal responsibility for the harm they may or have caused.
As a direct and sole result of your and others personal actions and choices I do not care if you and every single other person involved in this fiasco over the last two years receives zero due process before punishment is handed out, whether legally or otherwise, as neither you or they gave a wet crap about due process of law when you and they were acting to screw everyone else. That which you refuse to accord to others you have no right to expect for yourself. If that bothers you or keeps you up at night then perhaps you should have acted in accordance with said principles in the first place.
The only way we will stop this crap and prevent future incidents of this sort is if everyone who put their fingers in their ears and deliberately ignored known harms to demand a speculative benefit without a single shred of evidence, or worse ignored decades of evidence that the path they advocated for was dangerous and might have permanent, irreversible harms associated with it, such as these "viral vector" technologies and filling people full of wildly-dangerous experimental drugs in hospitals, is held to full account for their actions and the harms that their demands caused, not by personal choice of those who independently decided to do foolish things but who were coerced or forced, whether it was closure of schools, forced masking or mandates of any other sort including but certainly not limited to the jabs.
There is no money damage award that can provide restitution to the tens of millions of kids who have been irrevocably screwed out of two years of their educations, or those kids who were irrevocably screwed out of language development as the window has closed on that part of their developmental process. Those harms are going to go through our economy and society for the next sixty to eighty years and there is nothing we can do to change that at this point. You, and others like you, particularly Teacher's organizations and Democrat Governors, own every bit of that and deserve the consequences.
The ridiculous economic damage imposed through the wild spending spree and inflationary impact resulting from the numerous fiscal orgies vomited forth by both Trump and Biden in that regard is going to screw people for a generation into the future. How do you propose to compensate the screwed for that harm? You can't, but the harm is real.
Further, those who were lied to about these jabs or even worse, coerced cannot be made whole. New study work out of Europe strongly suggests that every single person who got these shots suffered some degree of cardiac damage. Some more, some less but if the data is correct every single person did take some amount of damage. A separate French study found that nearly 3% of all persons injected with mRNA jabs had clinical (not simply elevated troponin) myocarditis damage and it was more common in women than men. How do you compensate two hundred million Americans for what may well prove to be a decade or more off their life expectancy? What about the kids who are now five or six and lose a parent ten years from now due to heart failure these jabs caused? How about those who have already died due to this harm? The number already screwed is in the hundreds of thousands in America alone and nobody knows if or when it will slow down or stop.
Never mind the CDC's "recommendation" to jab kids with this crap, which is entirely unsupportable on facts or science and thus has only one plausible explanation: It is the only way to get these jabs into the NCVIA liability framework and prevent Pfizer and Moderna from being sued to beyond the orbit of Mars with their "businesses" turned into a smoking hole as soon as the EUAs drop.
The difference between Emily's position and mine is that while I set forward my opinion and the data supporting it I did not attempt to force anyone to follow the same path or demand they come to the same conclusions. If you came to a different conclusion and wanted to wear a mask I had no quarrel with that. In fact I repeatedly pointed out that if you truly believed you needed respiratory protection the only sane thing to do was to go buy a P100, available at most home stores for painting and other fume-generating procedures which has an exhaust valve, replaceable cannisters for when their time-in-use expired and because it filters only in one direction it can actually provide a seal around both the nose and mouth. I expected even that to fail, given what we knew early on about transmission, but if you concluded it would work then you were free to have at it. If you, despite the lack of any long-term safety data and deliberately ignoring the fact that spike in the circulation was directly harmful wanted to jab yourself with said dangerous experimental drug anyway, judging that the potential benefits were work the risks, have at it as well. I had no desire to nor did I advocate that anyone be forced to do or not do anything, but I did demand that those on the other side refrain from attempting to force compliance with their views and expectations which all were, in point of fact, predicated on fear rather than analysis and deliberately ignored the balance of harms in each and every case.
That was and is the difference between my position and those on the other side of the alleged "debate" and there is nothing any of us can do to change it now.
Amnesty for Emily and others like her?
Not a prayer in Hell, bitch. Not now, not ever -- not for you or anyone else involved in any of this crap.
You're damn lucky the people of this nation have long ago lost their sack to whatever soy-infested crap they worship these days or everyone involved would have already been sacked -- justly so.
Try this sort of crap again -- ever -- and you might find the word "lawful" is left out of the description of what is justly earned and that suddenly said sack has been found.
So CDC, NIH and others are over-reach and bullshit extraordinaire.
I was asked to speak on this briefly today. And did.
Then the conversation went toward "smart meters" and the overtones of "5g."
Jesus, cut the shit folks.
So-called "smart meters" are nearly all Zigbee-style devices which is a quite-common option for home automation. This is a mesh technology and typically runs in the same bands as your WiFi router does, with less power in terms of ERP (effective radiative power) than your cellphone -- and not by a little either, given the wild difference in distance between the device and you.
The reason the power companies use this is because it can be certificate-based for security and thus is quite secure from interception or tampering, which is a really big deal when you're talking about people's power bill never mind being shut off if you don't pay. While they could have designed their own why re-invent what already exists and is available to anyone who wants to use it when that is perfectly-suitable to the task and quite secure?
Here's an ARRL document on them, which is entirely accurate by the way. 902 Mhz is very close to the Z-wave US frequency (908 Mhz) and I've had that stuff all over my house for over ten years. You probably have too, since it was one of the earlier "cordless phone" frequencies (nowdays most are on 2.4Ghz.)
FCC power requirements limit such a meter to one watt of RF power. For comparison your cellphone is tower-controlled as to power level but, because you walk around with it near and on your body (which attenuates the signal thus can cause the power required to go up) its limited to 600mw, or 0.6w, which is the maximum for a handheld device.
A common ham radio HT or "walkie talkie" has both a 1W and 5W setting. I own two. My ham "base" transceiver has a base power level settable of up to fifty watts but the power I'm allowed to run depends on the band I'm operating on and, depending on the band and the power limits associated with amateur radio use on same I can run a linear amplifier behind that and boost the power to ten or more times that level.
I also used to work on Ku and C band microwave transmitters and in fact did control software for some of them; the C-band klystron units, in particular, had rated power outputs into the kilowatt range, with TWT units typically having rated outputs around 300-600 watts. These were continuous ratings, not "burst" or "pulsed".
All of RF is, as you learn if you ever study it, subject to the inverse-square law. This is why the local FM radio station frequently runs somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 watts of output power yet at your radio the signal level received by the antenna is tiny.
Thus while your meter may emit 1 watt and your cellphone is 6/10ths of that the meter is almost-certainly a hell of a lot further away from you than the phone just as your FM radio or TV is from the transmitter and thus the actual power you are exposed to is a tiny fraction of that from your cellular device, laptop connected via WiFi (which of course is transmitting) and similar.
In addition the meter transmits on a periodic basis because all the others within "listening range" have to not be transmitting at the same time or they will "step on" each other since they're all on the same frequency band. The "mesh" is what makes this work; in short your neighbor "helps" your signal get to one of the utility company's antennas and vice-versa. This is, of course, wildly different than what happens when you use a cellphone, PDA or laptop where your transmission is for you -- and only you.
In short the argument is bullshit unless, of course, you have no electronic devices in your house and do not live anywhere near a transmitting radio or TV station, nor do you have a transformer (which also emits EMF) on the pole or pedestal outside your home. Well, perhaps not if you're Amish. For everyone else? It's crap. Period.
The other argument is "dirty power." Guess what I own? A Tek digital storage oscilloscope, with which I can trivially look at the power quality coming from my AC outlets just as easily as I can use it to design, diagnose and fix electronics. I have. The claim is nonsense.
Why do power companies love smart meters? Because they don't have to send people out to read them, so their costs are lower. In addition nearly all (if not all) have a remote disconnect capability. This cannot be used to shut you off for load management as its not designed to be used on a regular basis (it has a rated connect/disconnect under load life of perhaps a hundred cycles) so in terms of a "rolling blackout" that's not how they'll do it -- if they try they'll be buying a lot of new meters when the contacts fail.
But if you don't pay your bill, well, that's a "once in a while" deal and yeah, they can and do use it that way since now they don't need to send someone out to remove the meter from the socket and potentially meet the deadbeat with a 12ga shotgun who's rather interested in them not removing it and thus shutting their power off.
What I was asked to speak to was CDC overreach and my view that the agency should be destroyed, as their malfeasance and misfeasance, all of it intentional, goes back decades and is well-documented as is that of the FDA and NIH. AIDS was one of the most-egregious examples but hardly the only one prior to Covid, never mind the CDC's refusal to actually act within their authority and seize and destroy contaminated items in interstate supply (such as E-coli contaminated food), which under statute they are empowered to do.
Nonetheless I refuse to have my name associated with bullshit and, while I'm polite enough not to call it out while on the Zoom, it shall not pass without my commentary here, on the record and exempt from roll-off.