I just received a note from a friend in San Francisco. This is how it ends:
In the midst of this phase of the pandemic, I’m off to Paris for a 6 week travel spree culminating in the wedding of my stepdaughter in New Hampshire. Planes, trains, buses and automobiles. Will stay as safe as I possibly can!
Hugs to you – be well, living in your fascist state
Who elected Daniel Andrews as our jailer in chief?
I don’t know what I would do without Paul Krugman and his unerring ability to get things wrong, but bless him, there he is again.
Krugman doesn’t get quite understand any of this, but he does come close. The issue between the classics and the Keynesians over why recessions occur was over whether they were due to structural imbalances or demand deficiency. We live in a world where lack of demand is now the accepted truth which Krugman does go on about, although of all things, by first noting the structural imbalances that now exist.
The pandemic really did produce an Austrian-style reallocation shock, with demand for some things surging while demand for other things slumped. You can see this even at a macro level: There was a huge increase in purchases of durable goods even as services struggled….
We’re finally having the kind of economic crisis that people like Hayek and Schumpeter wrongly believed we were having in the 1930s.
Of course, the reason we are in recession right now is because our governments have shut much of the private sector down as an act of policy. Entirely insane, and we will pay for this and in no uncertain terms, which Krugman even kind of notes in his very last line which is really the central point of this post.
And in case you’re wondering, the Fed, by accepting transitory inflation, is getting it right.
You’ve been warned. Inflation is on its way. What to do about it I have no idea. Our governments will eventually be coming after us for all the money they can put their hands on. Transitory of course means that this inflationary period will end, eventually, but when that might be is anyone’s guess. Saving us from the Chinese flu will not have come cheap.
First do no harm.
That’s the principle behind medical practice, with the other half, presumably, do some good. So what are we to make of this: The Vaccines don’t work – Israel records highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the World despite 78% of population being fully vaccinated.
The issue is not whether one should get vaxxinated. The question is one of costs and benefits. If someone is vaxxinated, what good will it do? But also, what harm will it do? Vaccinations in the past had almost no known downsides, at least not by the time they reached the public. In this case, however, the upside appears to be non-existent.
Despite compounding vaccination, the nation still suffers, with the world’s worst seven-day rolling average number of covid cases per capita. Israel is on track to pass 11,000 daily covid cases — an infection rate that is magnitudes higher than a year before, when everyone in the country was unvaccinated.
Using a non-neutralizing vaccine against a novel, endemic virus only perpetuates the transmissibility of the virus among people. When the spike protein of that virus is forcibly replicated throughout the population, entirely new health problems occur.
By placing selective pressure on an amino acid sequence of the virus, and scaling up that attack across the population, these vaccine programs only cause mutations in the viral sequence, leading to new outbreaks and vaccine failure.
Virtually no one is dying from Covid any more, at least not amongst almost the entire population. Certainly more used to die during flu season. What follows in the years to come we will only know in the years to come. Meanwhile, why take a vaxxine with a massive and known failure rate with the possibility of massive but still unknown harm that we will only know at some time in the future.
And even if there is no harm, which we will not know for some time, why take a vaxxine that does no good?
My thanks to Gold v Fiat in a previous comment for putting me onto this posting
The map is from Ivermectin Safety Profile by David Archibald. Here’s what the different colours mean.
In the graphic above, the blue area shows the countries of Africa that distribute ivermectin once or twice a year for the control of parasites. The brown area is the countries that don’t. The brown line is the daily deaths from Covid per one hundred thousand people in those countries. The blue line is the same for the blue area — which is enjoying a far, far lower Covid death rate. A lot of the poor and backward countries of South America, Africa and Asia have now approved ivermectin for Covid.
So the question is why haven’t the rest of us done the same? When we finally work it out, I suspect there won’t be enough lampposts to go around.
Here’s the actual title, Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Treating, but it really is a study in cynicism and the modern world. Here is the passage that first caught my eye, just in case you were wondering why there are so many covid cases in the US.
American hospitals are actually paid 20 percent more for a coronavirus diagnosis and therefore ‘you can rest assured they are telling people to ‘put it on the DRG‘ which he explained is some code for getting the highest reimbursement from the government. The reimbursement didn’t make that much sense to me as I well understood the U.S. was not all on one shared government programme but he further explained that since Covid, there were nearly no private hospitals anymore; and that everyone had become dependent on the government dollar. He also explained it was the same for anyone getting a Covid test, and although I’d already interacted with a dozen or so hospital employees—they would indeed test me for Covid before I left.
It’s a fascinating article on so many levels. This bit is from close to the end.
‘I’m really not happy about a conversation I just had about the business model of a hospital, and I thought I was getting better care in the U.S., than from the National Health.’
‘You probably are.’ Daddy said, ‘But it is a business, and not a very successful one either. Most hospitals are losing money, so there’s an incentive to lie about the diagnosis. Even a positive coronavirus test while treating your eye injury will mean they can bill for 20 percent more so if you want to do them a favour why don’t you tell them you have symptoms of flu.’
‘I’m serious, Daddy.’
‘As am I.
It’s the way of the world.
I wonder what she was doing that deserved all that.
Just how stupid are these people terrorised by Covid. This stupid!
Since the info above is clear and visible to me but not necessarily on the blog, here is a summary of what it says.
Australian Flu Cases in 2019: 302,092
Australian Covid Cases 2020-21 46,726
Australian Flu Deaths in 2019: 950
Australian Covid Deaths 2020-21 985
If these numbers are even remotely correct it’s a shameful madness.
Might match these figures up with another set from Instapundit.
Might add a few comments from the Instapundit post just for emphasis.
I don’t care any more, and I didn’t care much all those eons ago that this madness started. The odds of dying of this seem to me SMALL unless you are already seriously compromised and hanging by one or more threads anyway. Isn’t that right ? BUT the odds that things like passports and State coercion set the stage for a more tyrannical society filled with panicked ,fearful, non-reasoning , obiedient, and judgemental humans seem very large indeed. I’ll take Covid any day over ANY of this ‘helping’ lunacy. And I can because ‘they’ have but little hold on me. But they have a large hold on YOU, if you need to work or learn or just be social with others.
At this point there are no numbers to justify not going back to normal. We are where we are because a loud minority wants to continue the panic and the totalitarians are happy to make use of the useful idiots to grab power. Our rights are being infringed for the sake of someone else feeling safe and I’m sick to death of these ninnies who are still so invested in being afraid of something almost 2 years later. There is no logic, no reason, no facts to back anything from saying “Carry on with your lives. This is as good as it gets.” except that people are invested in feeling anxious and wrapping themselves up in it like a blanket. They hate everyone who isn’t willing to act as cowardly as they are.
CDC– underreporting breakthroughs. Just like that, being asymptomatic – or having only minor symptoms – will no longer count as a “Covid case” but only if you’ve been vaccinated:
‘As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance. Previous case counts, which were last updated on April 26, 2021, are available for reference only and will not be updated moving forward.’
This is from Tony Thomas on Quadrant Online: Sooking and Snivelling for Climate Justice. That’s his title. Mine is the one you see above this post. He describes the views of a group of university students to the supposed planetary disruption that is caused by climate change. If these people are accurately reporting what they have experienced themselves, then they are unfit to lead adult lives.
I’ve been crying myself to sleep a lot lately. And crying at random times too. It’s not as though I watch a video about climate change, and I cry during it. I mean sometimes that happens. It’s more like, something little happens, like my toast burns, and I have an existential breakdown because I think it’s a metaphor for how the world is burning because we aren’t paying attention.
# I am constantly butting heads with sceptics and non-believers (particularly my father-in-law) regarding climate change. It is so frustrating that fellow inhabitants don’t understand the magnitude of the situation, and worse still, they don’t care to learn more about it.
Against these morbid undertows, others of Verlie’s students were uplifted.
No student expresses the least scepticism about the horrow-show material: ‘I remember a unanimous feeling of frustration shared by the whole class.’ The groupthink sadly reflects today’s “monoversity” culture. The class also needed a renewables-powered spa retreat after class. Verlie writes:
As students and I discuss the systems that expose society’s most marginalised to lethal heat stress, our bodily reactions such as sweaty armpits, flushed cheeks and croaky voices belie the ‘thermal monotony’ of our air-conditioned comfort.
Outside the universities, climate derangement has been spreading like COVID Delta, as Verlie’s examples suggest:
Do these people never read what those with different views believe? My disgust at such fools knows no limit.
Law of Markets 