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Sunday, January 17, 2021

Briefly Noted: The Cruelest Hoax Of All

Which hoax? We live in an age of hoaxes,  so there's a lot of competition for the honor of being the cruelest hoax of all. My vote still goes to the Covid hoax. I base that on the sheer unprecedented amount of damage done by this hoax: business failures, unemployment, hockdowns, depression and its attendant ills, education stoppages that hurt the poorest students most, mass fear bordering on--and not infrequently exceeding--hysteria, widespread paranoia and the breakdown of social solidarity. And last but not least--perversely mistaken withholding of effective treatments (the HCQ regime and Ivermectin) in favor of dangerous and often fatal "treatments", such as mechanical ventilation, leading to far too many unnecessary deaths. Most of this damage was inflicted in knowing violation of all scientific and medical norms regarding viruses in general and coronaviruses in particular. Now we're witnessing the rush to lift many of the absurd measures that were taken--simply because Trump has been ousted by our ruling oligarchy. Which leads to the very reasonable supposition that this was an essentially political hoax that took advantage of unscientific hysteria that was propagated with a purpose.

This morning my wife, listening to her usual CBS news radio, heard a preview of a story to come later. It seems "many doctors are "puzzled" because they haven't seen a single case of flu this whole flu season. I think we've all glanced at these stories about the mysterious disappearance of the flu. What's going on? 

I found an article that goes into the matter in quite a bit of detail, without offering a definitive answer: Why Has the Flu Disappeared?

There appears to be a lot of overlap among diseases with "flu-like symptoms"--a well known and standard statistical categoy. All you have to do is search on "flu-like symptoms" to get the idea. One guess might be that Professor Ioannides out at Stanford may be right--that the Covid coronavirus is extremely widespread, but that most persons who come in contact with it (most of us?) don't even know it. But that could mean that the coronavirus prevents the flu virus from taking hold:


Another theory centers on viral interference, which is the phenomenon in which a cell infected by a virus becomes resistant to other viruses; basically, cells are rarely infected with more than one virus, so COVID-19 could be winning out over influenza.


But there are problems with this theory, as well. In any event, read the article. It simply reinforces what we know, namely, that there has been an appalling lack of transparency throughout this whole hoax, which has facilitated its political weaponization. You can also watch the video that accompanies the article. It features statistician William M. Briggs, who notes:


“CDC, up until about July 2020, counted flu and pneumonia deaths separately, been doing this forever, then just mysteriously stopped … It’s become very difficult to tell the difference between these,” referring to the combined tracking of deaths from “PIC” [Pneumonia, Influenza, Covid].


Here's the video featuring Briggs:




Coincidentally--or, most likely, not--Briggs wrote an interesting article a few days ago regarding another major contender for cruelest hoax of all: the 2020 Election Hoax. Naturally, as a statistician, he has a lot to say about election fraud. Or not, as the case may be. It's an amusingly cynical article, in a rather dark way. Here's how he begins:


In the sense that matters, Joe Biden won the election. Sure, Donald Trump may have won more votes in more states, and he was surely cheated out of votes in several others. But he lost. And Biden won.

We know Biden won because it will be he that is sworn in next week and not Trump. It’s tough to swallow, but that’s what’s happening.

If a party cheats, and is in charge of investigating accusations of cheating, and if the media calls the cheating a conspiracy theory, and if the rulers move to expel those who question the cheating, as has already happened, then that party will win by virtue of its power.

This is the way power works.


Which seems pretty inarguable. Briggs goes on to note that election cheating has always been a part of the American Way--call it American Exceptionalism as applied to electoral democracy. However, 2020 was beyond the norm, due--in his opinion--to the bipartisan collusion, which is what gave the election its hoax character. Or its 'farcical' character--you can argue with Briggs as to the mot juste:


... the Republicans who were supposed to be watching out for their candidate’s interest should have seen what happened coming, and prepared against it.

Instead, the election night turned into a grade D French farce — Trump well ahead in crucial states at sundown, his lead collapsing when the lights went off. This suggests that the party professing support for Trump was not exactly in earnest.


The thing about cheating is that, while in the aftermath it can be papered over, while it's actually occurring it's almost impossible to hide--as Dan Gelernter notes this morning (Are Big Tech and Big Government Overplaying Their Hand?):


The principle behind this analysis is simple and even elegant: It is easy enough to cheat—to falsify data, say, by feeding in a bunch of extra ballots for your preferred candidate. But to do so in a natural-looking way is hard, because tampering with just one part of a whole system makes that part stand out. It may not be obvious to the casual observer, but statistical analysis is like a blacklight revealing flaws invisible to the human eye.


And so Briggs writes:

There is much evidence of election cheating. I took part in marshaling some of it (herehere are the biggest), along with a slew of others you’ve heard about, and some you might not have.

Not every theory of cheating put forward as conclusive was as strong as was touted, but that was to be expected given the nature of the effort.


Check it out. Then decide which hoax did more damage. Perhaps its apples and oranges, or corona and flu: distinct yet intertwined.


18 comments:

  1. "Intertwined" for $500.00, Alex.

    CoVid is a bio-weapon. CCP needed only a couple dozen friends in the USG to turn it into a CRISISEMERGENCYSTAYHOME OR DIE......and CCP's other allies, the Democrats, took over.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Remember the videos of people dying the streets of Wuhan? I do. Remember the huge orders of urns for the dead? I do. Remember stories of people being locked into their apartments to die? I do.

      After the US went into lockdown those videos disappeared and haven't re-appeared.

      As far as I am concerned the US should bill China for lost economic output and take payment in cancelled US Treasuries. To hell with financial market disruption. Use the diverted funds to pay for companies to write off their China assets and build in the US. Also send it to the states. Think California, New York and Illinois wouldn't get behind that plan?

      Spartacus

      Delete
    2. Don't worry we'll be getting plenty of Chinese money, but it won't be going in our pockets. Dems are salivating as they line up America on the discount table for the biggest garage sale ever. AND they don't give a F#*# about your concerns.

      Delete
  2. It's all a bit too much. My elderly mother died in August after five months of physical isolation from her family. We all know that she just gave up. Still, her passing at long last allows us to feel free to abandon CA. We bought a new home in AZ (a still salvageable state) and we're going, going, gone before Tax Day.

    Had Trump (officially) won we might well have stayed. The only way to vote anymore is with your feet. There was a small earthquake last night reminding us that there are many facets to the state's dangerous instability.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Enjoy reading your blog for very insightful essays and comments. Re: the flu disappearing. Sars-CoV-2 is much more infectious than influenza. Takes about 350 virions to get inoculated with Covid, compared to approx 1350 to contract the flu. Even the most minimal protections against the coronavirus provide maximum protection against flu. No time to find the citations but this info can be found in the scholarly literature. So, no surprise to see so little flu.

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    Replies
    1. As recently as Oct CDC was saying we don't actually know that.

      Delete
  4. Like I keep saying, either covid cured the incurable influenza or influenza is being logged as covid, but both can not be true.

    Pesky science'ncy stuff...

    What better boogie man could you have besides on you can only see with a electron microscope? Its way better than the mythical Russian!

    Though... I think the greater hoax is the pile of poor SCOTUS decisions that allowed our government to perpetrate these types of hoaxes to begin with.

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  5. Almost every sentence you've written would get you banned on Twitter, just sayin'.

    ReplyDelete
  6. In Burning Platform, the most read blog of 2020 concisely lays out the Trump voter frustrations. There is language in the rant.

    The Zero Hedge article starts with this paragraph.

    It's secession or war...

    Four days after the election, a woman calling herself OHMama posted “I Am Done” on The Burning Platform website. It was the site’s most read article of 2020. SLL and many other websites reposted it. It was raw, explosive anger and a profoundly moving lament; OHMama was clearly at the end of her rope. The closing paragraph packed a wallop.

    https://www.theburningplatform.com/2020/11/07/i-am-done/#more-227723

    Every leader should read this.

    Spartacus

    ReplyDelete
  7. Cruelest Hoax?

    That we follow the constitution.

    ReplyDelete
  8. 2 min video from Trump - "we can't let that go on"

    Seems to be a declaration.

    Will probably be deleted soon.

    https://youtu.be/gGO3uxsbJck

    Frank

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. How do you mean? Deep fake?

      Frank

      Delete
    2. I simply mean that it wasn't posted by Trump nor are these remarks made in the current context. These are excerpts of remarks he made quite some time ago that have been taken from their full context and posted by Derrick Grayson. IOW, it's NOT a two minute video by Trump. It is, as a commenter notes:

      "from the Prayer breakfast after the Senate denied the First impeachment. Nancy was sitting next to him during this."

      Delete
    3. It also seems that something was done to the audio to make it sound more sinister. Not at all Trump’s typical pitch and cadence.

      Delete
    4. I see. Hopes dashed again...

      Frank

      Delete
  9. News brief from Epoch Times: (part of a larger column of CCP blurbs, scroll down)

    California Calls for Pause in Use of Huge Batch of Moderna Vaccines

    California officials late Sunday directed COVID-19 vaccine providers to not administer any doses from a batch of over 330,000 that was circulated across the state.

    The reason was a “higher-than-usual number of possible allergic reactions,” California State Epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said in a statement. The doses were produced by Moderna.


    https://www.theepochtimes.com/ccp-virus-updates-slovakia-to-test-nearly-all-citizens-in-9-days_3660913.html

    ReplyDelete