Ever seen a commercial for “West Coast Psychics?” For a buck a minute on the phone, they will tell you whether that new cute guy in Accounting likes you (spoiler alert: he does, but he might have issues so watch out), whether your 87-year-old auntie will die soon (sorry, she will), and whether you might get a surprise check in the mail in a month (thanks, Nancy Pelosi---like, who knew?) Nobody ever gets told they will lead a dreary life, their plants will die, the cute guy will never notice them, and they will still have to slog off to work every day. Accuracy, in such a business, pays no dividends. Neither does understatement.
The
business of computer modeling for COVID is much the same. We need results!! We need something we can run with!! If the fatalities are overestimated by a
factor of ten, we can work with that.
We’ll find you the bodies. But
don’t tell us this will be just another flu.
That’s not what we’re paying you for.
Bureaucrats
of all sorts operate on the same principle.
If the worst winter of the last thirty years used 3000 tons of road
salt, a bureaucrat will order 6000 tons this year. The only danger such a functionary faces is
from under-estimating the extent of a problem.
“Why didn’t you buy more salt?” he will be asked, but never, “Why did
you buy twice as much as we need?” More
importantly, prestige comes only from the expansion
of one’s mission, and budget, and staff.
There are no incentives for accuracy or efficiency or a hard-nosed
assessment of risks and rewards.
The
biases are built in by the nature of systems that are not market-based, and
thus carry few penalties for being wrong.
The famous Neil Ferguson, the UK’s Imperial College modeler, is a
perfect example. In 2005, he predicted
150 million deaths from the bird flu. In
fact, between 2003 and 2009, 282 people worldwide died from it.
Nevertheless,
when COVID came along, Ferguson’s prediction of 500,000 deaths in the UK and
two million in the U.S. was instantly believed by PM Boris Johnson, who
subjected the Brits to an unprecedented, horribly destructive, and pointless
lockdown regime.
Here in
America, the really smart guys who govern us accepted the same apocalyptic
forecasts without question. It’s not that
Dr. Anthony Fauci is a dope, or an evil man, but he’s not really a scientist
either, or at least he doesn’t think like one.
He has been a government bureaucrat for 52 years; he has never actually
practiced medicine or had a private-sector job.
It was absolutely predictable that Dr. Fauci would believe the most dire
projections from computer models and make government policy based on those
projections. Subjecting children to a
nightmare of isolation and sadness, driving tens of thousands of businesses
into bankruptcy, and throwing tens of millions of people out of work---these
are horrors that could never enter his calculus because of who he is, and who
the bureaucrats at the CDC are.
But it
is hard for me to blame Fauci, or those like him, for the dark curtain of
hygiene fascism that has descended upon most of America and many countries
around the world. We know who Fauci is,
and the WHO is, and the CDC, and Neil Ferguson, and we have a pretty good idea
what they will say and why.
The
true villains are those who allowed these public health bureaucrats to take
over the world. It was Trump’s job, and
Boris Johnson’s job, and Angela Merkel’s job to listen politely, as they would
listen politely to any and all howling special-interest groups, and then make
rational policy decisions that take all aspects of the situation into
consideration. Their failure to do so
brought us to the current state of affairs where masks continue to dehumanize
us and lockdowns continue to destroy our society, yet no one dares to halt the
madness.
*
One
aspect of the COVID mania that has continually amazed me has been the sheer persistence
of the sense of terror. Time after time
I have expected people around the world to rise up, throw off their masks, open
up their gyms and restaurants and schools, and demand their freedom. In some places this has happened, or at least
there have been attempts to throw off the yoke through street demonstrations
and other signs of defiance, but it has been rare, and usually unsuccessful.
The
terror has been supported and reinforced in several ways. First, the visual cues have been
essential. When you venture out of the
house, you see people wearing masks.
They are everywhere, and it’s unnerving.
We have all gotten accustomed to it, but it will never seem normal (I
hope). Much like the required veiling of
women in Muslim countries, the effect is to dehumanize the people whose faces
are hidden. In public, we are our faces. That is our social identity; it is who we are
and how others can know us. And when it
is taken away, so is our individual nature.
We become anonymous. As social
beings, we thrive on the sense of community with others, but the anonymity
makes us impotent and afraid.
The
masking requirements change frequently, and they differ from state to state and
city to city, so it is always necessary to be
aware of what the latest rules are.
Whenever you leave the house, you must think about where you are
going. Do I have a mask in my
pocket? Is there one in the car? In addition, despite the end of the pandemic
and the increasing difficulty in believing masks provide any protection, the
requirements grow more
stringent. Ten months ago, I didn’t have
to wear a mask at my job in a big-box store.
Now Pennsylvania wants me to wear one when walking through the park by
myself.
We have
been in this lockdown/masking phase for nine months, though the pandemic ended
in July for most of America. Yet more people wear masks now than at the
beginning, though evidence continues to accumulate that masking does no good,
just as all the studies from the last twenty-five years told us.
There
are other visual cues, like signs on the doors of businesses, and
social-distance stickers on the floor so you will know how far away to stand
when waiting in line. There is no escape
from the constant reminders of the peril we all face. In addition, the warnings over the PA system
never end. “Because of local
regulations, you are required to wear a face-covering in this store.” This message is repeated in my store every
ten minutes. At this point, is there
really anyone who is not aware there are regulations? The purpose of these constant announcements
is not to educate, it is to keep the virus perpetually in the forefront of our
consciousness.
Then
there is the hygiene theater, as it is now called. In my store, there is an employee whose job
it is to (ostentatiously) spray and “disinfect” each shopping cart before
presenting it to a customer. We have
known for months that people get COVID through the air and not by touching
infected surfaces or water fountains or doorknobs, yet the charade of wiping
down and spraying the presumed sources of disease grows ever more elaborate and
silly. For me, the most distressing
spectacle occurs when the store is busy, and rather than just grabbing an
untreated cart, a customer will wait for
the employee with the spray bottle to wipe one down for him.
Then
there is the relentless drumbeat of the “positive” cases, and the numbers of
those in hospitals, and on ventilators, and the fatalities. It is constant, on TV and on the radio, and
in newspapers. Today, all day, I heard
about the grim milestone we have just passed---500,000 COVID deaths in America. Based on CDC statistics, I believe the actual
number is probably about 30,000, but we can have that argument another
day. The point is that nobody really
knows how many there have been, and we won’t know for at least another eighteen
months when we can see what the excess deaths for this period have been as
compared to earlier periods. That,
however, does not stop the apparent celebration of death and fear by the news
media and by the politicians and bureaucrats who have orchestrated this reign
of terror, day by day.
And
perhaps the most insidious tactic is the constant shifting of the rules and
edicts and guidelines that are imposed on us.
Can local restaurants admit 10% of capacity for indoor dining, or is it
now 25%? And what are the HVAC standards
the restaurant must meet in order to seat you at all? Can I invite 10 people to my house for a
backyard barbecue, or is it 15? And what
about your daughter’s lacrosse team? Is
she allowed to play? Are you allowed to
watch? And why should the rules be
different in Pennsylvania than they are in New Jersey? Is the “science” different over there? It becomes almost impossible to keep track of
all the state and municipal rules, and the effect can be paralyzing. Only a year ago, it was easy to go to a
restaurant, go to a ballgame, go to the library---all you had to do was show
up. Now, well, it often just seems like
too much trouble. And the ensuing
isolation, and separation from our friends and neighbors, only reinforces the
fear that now is supposed to guide our every movement, and every decision.
*
It is a
testament to the corruption and secularization of religious organizations, from
the Catholic Church to our various forms of Judaism, to the innumerable
Christian churches and sects, that there has been almost no pushback against
the irreligious (and frequently atheist), government forces that have wanted to
shut them down and have now found a means, in the “pandemic,” to do so.
The
First Amendment to the Constitution states: “Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof….” Nowhere does it say, “unless there’s a pandemic.”
Churches
should be open. There is no legal
authority to restrict them or close them, and if priests and preachers and rabbis were willing
to insist upon our right to assemble for religious purposes and be dragged from
their pulpits and thrown in jail, I and tens of millions of Americans would be
pleased to go with them. But they are
not. They are cowards, and this is one
of many reasons why the churches and synagogues of America are increasingly
empty.
And
this is not just occurring in America.
The Pope himself bent his knee to the government hygiene fascists by altering
traditional Ash Wednesday services.
Instead of impressing ashes on the foreheads of the faithful, he
sprinkled ashes over their heads, maintaining social distance the entire time. And this was done despite the fact that he
and almost everyone else at the Vatican has already been vaccinated!
Copyright2021MichaelKubacki
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