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“More people will die from the measures than from the virus”

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An interview with Yoram Lass, “the former director of Israel’s Health Ministry, on the hysteria around Covid-19”: ‘Nothing can justify this destruction of people’s lives’ at Spiked. Read it all, but this is how it opens – I have left out the questions that these are the answers to:

Yoram Lass: It is the first epidemic in history which is accompanied by another epidemic – the virus of the social networks. These new media have brainwashed entire populations. What you get is fear and anxiety, and an inability to look at real data. And therefore you have all the ingredients for monstrous hysteria.

It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind. If I were making the decisions, I would try to give people the real numbers. And I would never destroy my country.

Mortality due to coronavirus is a fake number. Most people are not dying from coronavirus. Those recording deaths simply change the label. If patients died from leukaemia, from metastatic cancer, from cardiovascular disease or from dementia, they put coronavirus. Also, the number of infected people is fake, because it depends on the number of tests. The more tests you do the more infected people you get.

The only real number is the total number of deaths – all causes of death, not just coronavirus. If you look at those numbers, you will see that every winter we get what is called an excess death rate. That is, during the winter more people die compared to the average, due to regular, seasonal flu epidemics, which nobody cares about. If you look at the coronavirus wave on a graph, you will see that it looks like a spike. Coronavirus comes very fast, but it also goes away very fast. The influenza wave is shallow as it takes three months to pass, but coronavirus takes one month. If you count the number of people who die in terms of excess mortality – which is the area under the curve – you will see that during the coronavirus season, we have had an excess mortality which is about 15 per cent larger than the epidemic of regular flu in 2017.

Compared to that rise, the draconian measures are of biblical proportions. Hundreds of millions of people are suffering. In developing countries many will die from starvation. In developed countries many will die from unemployment. Unemployment is mortality. More people will die from the measures than from the virus. And the people who die from the measures are the breadwinners. They are younger. Among the people who die from coronavirus, the median age is often higher than the life expectancy of the population. What has been done is not proportionate. But people are afraid. People are brainwashed. They do not listen to the data. And that includes governments.

Much more at the link. And speaking of outcomes of Biblical proportions, there is also this to think about.

Two weeks ago, when looking at the recent flurry of chapter 11 filings and a striking correlation between the unemployment rate and loan delinquencies, we said that a “biblical” wave of bankruptcies is about to flood the US economy.

It now appears that the wave is starting to coming because according to Fitch, the monthly tally of defaults in the U.S. leveraged loan market has hit a six-year high, as companies are either missing payments or filing for bankruptcy because of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking biblically again, there is no doubt that governments around the world have sown the wind. You know what comes next.

There is a lot more going on than we so far know

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Two consecutive stories at Instapundit.

AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS SEE VIRUS DESIGN MANIPULATION: “A forthcoming Australian scientific study concludes that the coronavirus causing the global pandemic contains unique properties suggesting it was manipulated in a Chinese laboratory and was not the result of a natural occurrence.“

129Posted at 10:15 am by Ed Driscoll 
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GRANDMA-KILLER CUOMO: AP count: Over 4,300 virus patients sent to NY nursing homes. “More than 4,300 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York’s already vulnerable nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid criticisms it was accelerating the nation’s deadliest outbreaks, according to a count by The Associated Press. AP compiled its own tally to find out how many COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes under the March 25 directive after New York’s Health Department declined to release its internal survey conducted two weeks ago.”“That’s right — people who were still contagious with a disease that is especially deadly to the old and sick were placed in facilities that were full of the old and sick.”

54Posted at 10:12 am by Glenn Reynolds 

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The price of ignorance

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The History of Economic Thought is far and away the most interesting part of economics. Unlike the history of other disciplines, the history of chemistry for example, it can only be studied by someone with an economics background, but is also a very good medium through which to learn economics itself. And with modern economics courses drenched in junk science, HET is perhaps the only way to learn about how an economy works. A couple of days ago, the moderator at the Societies for the History of Economics (the SHOE list) put up a brief note:

Here is a second review of Zachary Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, in The New York Times from Jennifer Szalai [the first one was from the WSJ]. This reviewer says it is “outstanding” and “brilliantly incisive.”

Which led me to this reply:

I am grateful again to the moderator for putting up another review of The Price of Peace, subtitled, “Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. The review was from The New York Times. Its title, “John Maynard Keynes Died in 1946. An Outstanding New Biography Shows Him Relevant Still”. More of the usual mythology.

“The General Theory” aside, the rough outline of the Keynes story is that nobody with any power listened to his visionary proposals before the crisis of the Depression hit; after that, almost everyone did. Keynes’s ideas were radical, Carter writes, but he was staunchly anti-revolutionary: Having been traumatized by World War I, Keynes was at pains to persuade some of his Marxist students at Cambridge that a more just and equitable society didn’t have to come at the point of a gun. An activist government and deficit spending could alleviate suffering and spur growth, he reasoned, and the world eventually obliged. As much as Franklin Roosevelt didn’t like running a deficit, his New Deal offered one version of how Keynesianism worked; World War II offered another.

Of course, Harry Truman offered a third version on how things should be done. At the end of World War II, Truman immediately “sacked” all of the millions who had been in the armed forces while virtually the entire armaments industry was closing, thus creating perhaps the largest potential increase in mass unemployment in history. At the same time, and immediately the war was over, Truman balanced the budget, eliminating the largest deficit as a proportion of GDP in American history. And the result, as we all know, was the largest and most sustained period of growth in history with full employment continuing almost year after year through until the 1970s.

I might contrast The Price of Peace and its review with this: The Politics of Fear, whose sub-title is, “For economist Robert Higgs, Covid-19 is just the latest emergency justifying expanded government power”. Lots there to ponder, but will merely quote this:

“I foresee the worst depression since the Great Depression right around the corner. That alone would be enough to bring forth a host of bad government policies with long-lasting consequences. Many such policies have already been adopted. But much more awaits us along these lines.”

There have been so many breakages in the way our economies knit together in the past few months there is nothing that might not yet happen, and there is no telling how bad it might get. We are so far beyond anything that Keynes ever wrote about or dealt with that calling up his name is more than just a total irrelevance, it is an astonishing distraction. Yet the reviewer writes, in her very first paragraph, that this new biography of Keynes “offers a resonant guide to our current moment, even if he finished writing it in the time before Covid-19”.

Does it no longer occur to most economists to leave things to the market to sort themselves out? With Keynesian economics we are not only fighting the last war, we are fighting a war that had ceased in 1933 when the Great Depression ended (everywhere, it might be noted but in FDR’s USA), using classical economic theory to bring the Depression to an end. How inappropriate would Keynesian theory be in trying to deal with problems associated with our present government-engineered downturn that cannot in any sense be attributed to a deficiency of aggregate demand and an excess of saving.

The moderator has now added this:

To avoid any potential confusion, I just want to say that I posted these two reviews to point out that this bio of Keynes is getting a great deal of mainstream attention. It’s nice to see the history of economic thought in the WSJ and NYT. I have not read it and I do not have an opinion on it.

I thank Steve for his view and if any of our many other SHOE experts on Keynes has a reaction to the book, I hope they will share it with us.

There are 1200 who link into the SHOE list. Will let you know if anyone does.

People on the left never disagree with each other

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As near as I can tell, people on the left never disagree with each other. They certainly disagree with people on the right, but other than in relation to to all the things they all agree about amongst themselves, where are the internal debates so that you can find examples of one person on the left saying something that another person, still on the left, disagrees with, and yet both remain on the same side of politics.

On the left there is a single acceptable position and after that, no deviation is permitted. That they believe themselves to be critical thinkers is only because they all collectively disagree with people who disagree with any element of the common set of beliefs.

One does not have to be on the left to believe that climate change is a problem. Or that gay marriage should be legal. Or that many aspects of the market economy are unacceptable. Or that Donald Trump is not a nice person. On the right, all these are open for debate. On the left, they are fixed positions, in no sense open for discussion.

This is a depiction of conservatism as I see it, written by Irving Kristol. Titled The right stuff, it explains the difference between the conservative perspective in the US and in the UK. Being from the New World myself, and Australians fit into this pattern as well, I find myself siding here with Kristol.

Conservatism in the US today is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Although most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win their votes. The movement is issue-oriented. It will happily combine with the Republicans if the party is “right” on the issues. If not, it will walk away. This troubled relationship between the conservative movement and the Republicans is a key to the understanding of American politics today. The conservative movement is a powerful force within the party, but it does not dominate. And there is no possibility of the party ever dominating the movement.

American conservatism after the second world war begins to take shape with the American publication of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1943 and the founding in 1955 of William F Buckley’s National Review. Previously, there had been a small circle who were admirers of the Jeffersonian, quasi-anarchist, teaching of the likes of Albert Jay Nock, but no one paid much attention to them. Hayek’s polemic against socialism did strike a chord, however, especially among members of the business community. There may have been people converted from statism to anti-statism by that book, but my impression is that most admirers of the book were already pro-free market. What Hayek did was to mobilise them intellectually, and to make their views more respectable.

I will take you to the final para which seems more relevant today than when it was first written in 1996.

The US today shares all of the evils, all of the problems, to be found among the western democracies, sometimes in an exaggerated form. But it is also the only western democracy that is witnessing a serious conservative revival that is an active response to these evils and problems. The fact that it is a populist conservatism dismays the conservative elites of Britain and western Europe, who prefer a more orderly and dignified kind of conservatism. It is true that populism can be a danger to our democratic orders. But it is also true that populism can be a corrective to the defects of democratic order, defects often arising from the intellectual influence and the entrepreneurial politics, of our democratic elites. Classical political thought was wary of democracy because it saw the people as fickle, envious and inherently turbulent. They had no knowledge of democracies where the people were conservative and the educated elites that governed them were ideological, always busy provoking disorder and discontent in the name of some utopian goal. Populist conservatism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, and conservative thinking has not yet caught up with it. That is why the “exceptional” kind of conservative politics we are now witnessing in the US is so important. It could turn out to represent the “last, best hope” of contemporary conservatism.

Whether it is the best hope or not is uncertain, but that it may be the last hope is looking all to possible all the time.

But why should we steer the economy away from carbon?

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From The Economist just now. We live in the midst of such idiocy in almost every direction that it will be a miracle if we get through this without a major collapse, going well beyond a mere depression. You really have much to fear when it’s Daniel Andrews leading the way. Plus this:

cover-image
Our cover this week calls for a global effort to tackle climate change. Covid-19 creates a unique chance to steer the economy away from carbon at a much lower financial, social and political cost than before. Rock-bottom energy prices make it easier to cut subsidies for fossil fuels and to introduce a tax on carbon. The revenues from that tax can help repair battered government finances. The businesses at the heart of the fossil-fuel economy—oil and gas firms, steel producers, carmakers—are already going through the agony of shrinking their long-term capacity and employment. Getting economies back on their feet calls for investment in climate-friendly infrastructure that boosts growth and creates new jobs. Low interest rates make the bill smaller than ever. The world should seize the moment.

“I foresee the worst depression since the Great Depression right around the corner”

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I am grateful again for the moderator at the Societies for the History of Economics discussion thread for putting up another review of The Price of Peace, the book subtitled, “Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. This review is from The New York Times. More of the usual mythology.

Carter’s explications of macroeconomic theory are so seamlessly woven into his narrative that they’re almost imperceptible; you only notice how substantive they are once you get to his chapter on Keynes’s notoriously dense 1936 book, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” and realize that you’re riveted by a passage on fluctuations in liquidity preference because you somehow know exactly what it is that Carter is talking about.

“The General Theory” aside, the rough outline of the Keynes story is that nobody with any power listened to his visionary proposals before the crisis of the Depression hit; after that, almost everyone did. Keynes’s ideas were radical, Carter writes, but he was staunchly anti-revolutionary: Having been traumatized by World War I, Keynes was at pains to persuade some of his Marxist students at Cambridge that a more just and equitable society didn’t have to come at the point of a gun. An activist government and deficit spending could alleviate suffering and spur growth, he reasoned, and the world eventually obliged. As much as Franklin Roosevelt didn’t like running a deficit, his New Deal offered one version of how Keynesianism worked; World War II offered another.

Of course, Harry Truman offered a third version. At the end of World War II, Truman immediately sacked all of the millions who had been in the armed forces and closed virtually the entire armaments industry, thus creating the largest mass of unemployed people in history. At the same time, and immediately the war was over, he balanced the budget, eliminating the largest deficit as a proportion of GDP in history. And the result: the largest and most sustained period of growth in history. I might contrast The Price of Peace and its review with this: The Politics of Fear, whose sub-title is, “For economist Robert Higgs, Covid-19 is just the latest emergency justifying expanded government power”. Lots there to ponder, and it should all be read, but will merely quote this:

“I foresee the worst depression since the Great Depression right around the corner. That alone would be enough to bring forth a host of bad government policies with long-lasting consequences. Many such policies have already been adopted. But much more awaits us along these lines.”

And there is no doubt that the reviewer sees “The Price of Peace” as relevant to bringing our economies out of the present lockdown. This is from her opening para:

Zachary D. Carter’s outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes, offers a resonant guide to our current moment, even if he finished writing it in the time before Covid-19.

There have been so many breakages in our structure of production in the past few months there is nothing that might not yet happen, and there is no telling how bad it might get. We are so far beyond anything that Keynes ever wrote about or dealt with that calling up his name is a total irrelevance. Does it no longer ever occur to most economists to leave things to the market to sort themselves out?

This is beyond spooky

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It’s the very template of what we have seen for ourselves in real life. The only difference is that the motives behind the virus created is to benefit the news networks. Not this time. Much more sinister. It’s about the election in November.

I picked up the video from Steve Hayward at Powerline Loose ends 109. Pretty straightforward, right? Wrong!

Googled “the simpsons apocalipse meow” which suggested “did you mean apocalypse meow” and went straight to its suggested set of words. There was everything about a Simpsons episode from 1993 but nothing about the one posted at Powerline. So went back to this.

Showing results for the simpsons apocalypse meow
Search instead for the simpsons apocalipse meow

I chose the “search instead” option and ended up with a page entirely in Spanish with this the first entry:

41 melhores imagens de Simpsons | Os simpsons, Bart, lisa e …br.pinterest.com › anakelbh2 › simpsons
16 de out de 2018 – Explore a pasta “Simpsons” de anakelbh2 no Pinterest. Veja mais ideias sobre Os simpsons, Bart and lisa e Desenho dos simpsons. … Zombie. onde comprar. ZumbiBonecasDesenhosBart SimpsonOs SimpsonsToy ArtApocalipse ZumbiFaça Você Mesmo DescoladoArte Urbana … Right Meow! =^.

And beyond that, the images under “Images for the simpsons apocalipse meow” were also all in Spanish as well.

Verificamos: É falso que Os Simpsons previram a chegada do novo ...

And even the first frame would refer you to the wrong episode of the Simpsons, as did the heading over the images:

Did you mean: the simpsons apocalypse meow

The one that mattered was, in fact, Season 22 Episode 6. And when was it aired? From Wikipedia:

The Simpsons’ twenty-second season began airing on Fox on September 26, 2010 and ended on May 22, 2011.

This, by the way, is the edited version of the episode found on Google:

Incredible and terrifying.

Politics as unusual

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Roger Kimball writing on John Brennan and the Plot to Subvert an American Election. The sub-head reads, “Tyranny is always more palatable when swaddled in the conviction of its own virtue.”

Let’s talk about John Brennan a bit. You remember John Brennan. He was Barack Obama’s director of the CIA. Once upon a time, he was an enthusiast for Gus Hall, the Communist candidate for president, for whom he voted in 1976. I can’t think of any better background for the head of the country’s premier intelligence service under Obama. In 2014, having put childish things behind him as St. Paul advised, Brennan spied on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He denied it indignantly. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that. That’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we’d do.”

But that was before irrefutable evidence of the CIA’s spying transpired. Then Brennan apologized, sort of. Senators were outraged. They shook their little fists. “What did he know? When did he know it? What did he order?” asked one of the Lilliputians.

Guess what happened to John Brennan for spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee?

If you said “Nothing,” go to the head of the class and collect your gold star.

Nothing happened to Brennan for spying on U.S. senators.

If he could get away with that, what else could he get away with?

How about starting the bogus investigation into fictional “collusion” or “coordination” between the Russians and the campaign, and then the administration, of Donald Trump? How about that?

In Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy offers a meticulously researched overview of the origins and character of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible links between Trump and the Russians. That began in May 2017, shortly after Trump fired James Comey from his post as Director of the FBI. McCarthy also looks carefully at the background to that investigation, operation “Crossfire Hurricane” and several tributary investigations into possible Russian collusion with various U.S. persons and entities. Crossfire Hurricane began on July 31, 2016, about three months before the presidential election.

Was that the beginning of the Obama Administration’s inquiry into Donald Trump’s possible connections with “the Russians”? No, the inquiries begin even earlier. You may remember the excited article in the New York Times, “How the Russia Inquiry Began,” from December 20, 2017. According to this story, it all started in London in May 2016. It was a dark-and-stormy night—or at least a night of “heavy drinking”—when “George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to [Alexander Downer] Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.” (In fact, the “heavy drinking” consisted of “a couple of gins and tonic,” but, hey this is the New York Times. Details are for the little people.)

What amazes me most is how little anyone seems to care.

What if this was just a practice run?

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This is taken from Instapundit.

HUBRIS AND MISCALCULATIONS ARE A GIVEN WITH THE LEFT. BUT EVEN I DIDN’T REALIZE THEY’D BE SO STUPID AND EVIL AS TO WANT TO DESTROY ALL OF ECONOMY AND STARVE PEOPLE JUST TO GET ORANGE MAN BAD:  Hubris and miscalculation: The left’s bid to exploit the virus to defeat Trump.

11Posted at 5:30 am by Sarah Hoyt 

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This is from the article cited:

Freedom is what we rightfully take for granted. There are too many on the left who want to see the Bill of Rights abrogated in the name of social justice or identity politics or whatever. They eschew the freedom to which we are all entitled and they cannot prevail. They’ve made inroads, but now is the time to fight back against the revealed despots who have attained high offices. The oft-quoted sentence of Ben Franklin is vital to remember at this moment in time:

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Humankind will never be free of viruses; they are a natural part of all life. The left cannot be allowed to oppress us, to restrict our freedoms, because of COVID-19. Vote them all out, every last one of them. They do not mean well.

We should truly be worried about the future, but not because of this virus which was a pushover. It’s the politics we have been exposed to that should truly worry us. Daniel Andrews is a sensational incompetent who has bankrupted Victoria, but he still believes he has been our saviour and knows what’s best. If our political leaders are not prepared, even now, to call off their viral dogs when there is now nothing at all to save us from, what defence really is there against the politics of the lockdown any time some political leader wants to call one on?

Donald Trump writes to the WHO

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The final paras of Donald Trump’s letter to the WHO.It’s from a time long ago when personal responsibility mattered:

Perhaps worse than all these failings is that we know that the World Health Organization could have done so much better. Just a few years ago, under the direction of a different Director-General, the World Health Organization showed the world how much it has to offer. In 2003, in response to the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China, Director-General Harlem Brundtland boldly declared the World Health Organization’s first emergency travel advisory in 55 years, recommending against travel to and from the disease epicenter in southern China. She also did not hesitate to criticize China for endangering global health by attempting to cover up the outbreak through its usual playbook of arresting whistle blowers and censoring media. Many lives could have been saved had you followed Dr. Brundtland’s example.

It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world. The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China. My Administration has already started discussions with you on how to reform the organization. But action is needed quickly. We do not have time to waste. That is why it is my duty, as President of the United States, to inform you that, if the World Health Organization does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization. I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests.

It’s not serving anyone’s interests, not even China’s, not in the long run. I can only hope that China learns a lesson from this, although so long as they are what they are, it remains very unlikely. Just as unlikely will the left internationally learn anything as well.