THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: Facebook Removes ‘Convoy to D.C. 2022’ Group, Claiming It Violated ‘Policies Around QAnon’.
For any endeavor of this kind, you must have backups to the backups. Because the “elites” are terrified.
Oh, yeah, also we should all post “Honk” on facebook first thing tomorrow. Just HONK. (Feel free to tag me. I’ll share it. It will be a thing.) We want them to hear it.
OR THIS? Johns Hopkins Study: Lockdowns Are A Failure.
I mean, seriously. Am I the only one who looks at the numbers? My degree is in languages. Surely there are people out there who have more interest in numbers, right?
Yeah, lockdowns are a failure and masks do nothing. Oh, and Fauci isn’t the science. In fact, science is probably drafting a restraining order against Fauci as we speak.
THIS IS NEWS FOR ANYONE AT ALL? Biden Admin Totally Unprepared For Afghanistan Evacuation .
RECLAIM YOUR SOUL: TELL THE TRUTH AND SHAME THE DEVIL.
THEY ARE IN FACT SCARED: The Eppur si muove problem.
The left “consensus” was so absurd and wrong it could only be maintained by total control of information. It is shattering in a million places, from Joe Rogan to the Honk in Ottowa. They can stomp on one of these at a time, but at some level they know they can’t silence all of it. And they don’t know what to do.
It’s going to get ugly and dangerous. Remember Heinlein’s advice: Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
And be not afraid.
WELL, GOOD.
MISERABLE FAILURES: Scoop: Leaked document reveals Biden’s Afghan failures. “I kept being told by people in the [White House] the thing they were most concerned about was the optics of a chaotic evacuation. . . . They treated us like we were Chicken Little. They didn’t believe the sky was falling.”
Well, they got that chaotic evacuation. And it set the tone for Biden’s presidency, probably irrevocably. Especially geven his other miserable failures.
WEIRD HOW LITERALLY EVERYBODY WHO CHALLENGES THE ESTABLISHMENT ALSO TURNS OUT TO BE A WHITE SUPREMACIST, ETC.:
JUSTIN TRUDEAU SAYS THEY’RE “WHITE SUPREMACISTS:” Sikhs, who represent major share of truckers, protest against Canada’s vaccine mandates as Trudeau and his family leave their Ottawa home.
UPDATE: From the comments:
Nobody thinks they are really white supremacists. It is now another liberal codeword for “our enemy”, like “The Jews” and “The Southerners”.
Yep.
CHANGE: New Zealand to end quarantine stays and reopen its borders. However, most tourists will need to wait until October before they can enter the country without a quarantine stay.
OPEN THREAD: Destination unknown.
YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION: Whoopi Goldberg ‘livid,’ threatening to quit ‘The View’ over her suspension: source.
Lefties wanted this world. I say make them live in it.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Relativity and SpaceX bid on NASA commercial space station competition.
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CHANGE: “Denver will not extend its indoor mask mandate, which ends Thursday. City and county leaders announced the decision Monday. ‘Beginning Friday, people will no longer be required under the public health order to wear a mask or show proof of vaccination for entry into a business in Denver,’ Mayor Michael Hancock said.”
IT’S A WRETCHED HIVE OF SCUM AND VILLAINY:
UPDATE: A friend comments: “Why not just shutter the whole company? Its ratings are absolutely terrible, the place is a cesspool of lousy behavior, and it’s a party propaganda mill no better than the Soviet organ Pravda circa 1976.”
HMM: 4 in 10 U.S. adults affected by heart issues since pandemic started. I’m not seeing anything like those numbers in my crowd.
FLASHBACK: Hollywood’s Missing Movies. “Never heard of Total Eclipse? It hasn’t been produced or even written. In all likelihood, such a film has never even been contemplated, at least in Hollywood. Indeed, in the decade since the Berlin Wall fell, or even the decade before that, no Hollywood film has addressed the actual history of communism, the agony of the millions whose lives were poisoned by it, and the century of international deceit that obscured communist reality. The simple but startling truth is that the major conflict of our time, democracy versus Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism–what The New York Times recently called ‘the holy war of the 20th century’–is almost entirely missing from American cinema.”
To be fair, that’s because Hollywood has long been a commie colony.
I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE. Johns Hopkins Analysis: ‘Lockdowns Should be Rejected Out of Hand.’
What lessons should be learned (my emphasis)?
The use of lockdowns is a unique feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns have not been used to such a large extent during any of the pandemics of the past century. However, lockdowns during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic have had devastating effects. They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.
To which I would add another: We can never squelch free discourse and debate on public-health issues again.
People who argued against the “scientific consensus” about the lockdowns were stifled, censored by Big Tech, denigrated by the media, and mocked by establishment scientists. That was essentially “anti-science.” The scientific method needs heterodox voices to speak freely if it is to function properly.
This subsequent look-back shows why. To a large degree, those with the officially disfavored views–such as the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration—were correct on this matter.
In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it. We tried to give it some elevation on these pages.
That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?”
These researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, these two voices of science used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate. A week after his email, Dr. Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great Barrington Declaration. “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he said. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed in most precincts.
Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. An article in Wired, a tech-news site, denied there was any scientific divide and argued lockdowns were a straw man—they weren’t coming back. If only it were true. The next month cases rose and restrictions returned.
Dr. Fauci also emailed an article from the Nation, a left-wing magazine, and his staff sent him several more. The emails suggest a feedback loop: The media cited Dr. Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Dr. Fauci got his talking points from the media. Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works.
On CBS last month, Dr. Fauci said Republicans who criticize him are “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” He isn’t “science.” And it’s also dangerous for scientific officials to mobilize to quash dissent, without which it’s easy to make tragic mistakes. A scientific debate over pandemic policy was and still is in the public interest, especially during a once-in-a-century plague.
Focused protection of nursing homes and other high-risk populations remains the policy road not taken during the pandemic. Perhaps this strategy wouldn’t have prevailed if a debate had been allowed. But it isn’t enough to repeat, as Dr. Collins did on Fox News Sunday, that advocates are “fringe epidemiologists who really did not have the credentials,” and that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.”
More than 800,000 Americans have died as much of the country followed the strategy of Drs. Collins and Fauci, and that’s not counting the other costs in lost livelihoods, shuttered businesses, untreated illnesses, mental illness from isolation, and the incalculable anguish of seeing loved ones die alone without the chance for a family to say good-bye.
They’ll always have MSNBC, though: ‘I’m a Fauci groupie,’ MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace declares.
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Lightning flash measuring 768 kilometres is the longest ever recorded. “Two record-breaking lightning flashes occurred in 2020: one with a length of 768 kilometres is the longest ever recorded, while another with a duration of 17 seconds is the longest-lasting flash ever detected.”
TODAY IN BRANDON’S ATTEMPT AT STRAY VOLTAGE:
Shot: Unexpectedly: U.S. Lost 301,000 Jobs in January vs. Predicted 200,000 Gained.
—Steve at the PJM Mothership today.
Chaser: Biden relaunches cancer-fighting ‘moonshot.’
—The Verge, today.
MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, BUREAUCRATS: Feds Propose More Mandatory Safety Tech, Lower Speed Limits. And no, minding my business isn’t your business.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? Here’s How to Save ‘Wordle’ After its Purchase by New York Times.
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