Preliminary autopsy for George Floyd

The London Daily Mail reports:

The preliminary results of the county’s autopsy instead concluded Floyd, 46, died from a combination of heart disease and 'potential intoxicants in his system' that were exacerbated by the restraint placed on him by police officers. ....

The criminal complaint filed against Chauvin, 44, cited that preliminary findings from a Tuesday autopsy conducted by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner saw 'no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxiation or strangulation'.

'Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease,' said the complaint from the Hennepin County Attorney.

'The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death.'

Floyd was pronounced dead about an hour after the ambulance picked him up.

People are rioting because they think the video shows traumatic asphyxiation. I do not think that it does.

The video shows a gas station selling 99 cent diesel gasoline. Can that be right? It cost a lot more elsewhere.

This definition was posted last year:

A Karen is a kind of person who is unhappy when little things don’t go their way. They are a, “Can I speak to your manager?” kind of gal. The bitchy soccer mom of her friend group that nobody likes. ...

karens are usually extremely self entitled, the think that they can do what ever they want to anyone, this is why karens are a nightmare retail workers and really just anyone that has to encounter one. usually what happens is that she randomly will get mad at an other customer for whatever reason and for and ask a retail worker for free stuff and when the worker eventually says no, she will say the dreaded phrase "cAn i sPeAk TO YOur MAnageR" so the worker will call his manager and when they evenually say no she will have a complete meltdown that will result in the karen will be estorted your of the store but not without screeming I WILL SUE YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOU.

It doesn't say that the Karen has to be white, but I think that is implied.

More race-baiting from NY Times

The NY Times is going nuts again with stories about supposed black persecution. There is Arbery who died while resisting arrest. He tried to take a shotgun. There is a Minnesota black man who also died while resisting arrest. I watched the video, and it appears that he lost consciousness while waiting for the ambulance. The cause of death is unknown, and perhaps we will learn from an autopsy. If the autopsy shows that the man died of a neck injury, then the cop is probably at fault, but I doubt it.

There was also a minor dispute between a dog-lover and a bird-lover in NY Central Park. Both exhibited some rude and threatening behavior. No one was hurt, except that the white woman was fired.

While I could second-guess some of these characters, it is not clear that any of these incidents have anything to do with race. The black birder guy did use a derogatory word for a white woman, and the dog woman got fired for being racist, so there is some relation to race. But it is not clear that anyone got mistreated because of racial identification.

So why does a Jewish newspaper invent racial conflict wherever it can?

It is the same strategy used by Russian Communists. When they put out anti-American propaganda, they consistently to stir up racial animosity or other conflicts that would turn Americans against other Americans.

When the NY Times published its list of 100,000 "incalculable" COVID-19 deaths on its front page, one of the very first victims was a black man who the newspapers reported as having died of gunshot wound. Why did it say this guy died of COVID-19? Why did it say 100,000 is incalculable? These are not mistakes. The newspaper is propaganda.

The NY Times has been pushing Commie propaganda for a century. The Jews who run the paper hate black people, and want nothing to do with them. They would be slavemasters today, if slavery were legal. Their interest in blacks is just a device for attacking White America.

Meanwhile, CNN reports:

In new guidance for mathematical modelers and public health officials, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is estimating that about a third of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic. The CDC also says its "best estimate" is that 0.4% of people who show symptoms and have Covid-19 will die, ...

Still, the "current best estimate" number of 0.4% is significantly lower than the 3.4% mortality rate the World Health Organization warned in early March.

The lockdowns were based on that 3.4% estimate.

The CDC says that only 30-50% of infections show symptoms, so the death rate is more like 0.2% of infections. And if you look at healthy people under age 50, the death rate is a whole lot lower than that.

Update: A lot of people are saying that the Minnesota cops are guilty of murder. I am in the minority on this one.

One argument is that the cop choked the man to death, by blocking his trachea and stopping him from breathing. I doubt this, as the cop's knee is at the back of the neck, and nowhere near the trachea. Also, the man was talking for the first couple of minutes, so air was passing thru his trachea just fine.

Another argument is that the cop blocked one the main two neck arteries, causing death. Again, I doubt it. It takes a lot of force to block the artery, and the cop does not appear to be using force at all.

Another argument is that the cop should have checked the man's pulse, and gotten medical attention. But he had called an ambulance that got there a few minutes later. It is unlikely that the cops could have done better than that.

The autopsy may determine that the man died of COVID-19.

Update: Now rioters are looting a Target story. Because black lives matter, I guess.

Founders said people were sheep

Ferdinand Bardamu writes:

America began life not as a democracy, but as an “aristocratic” republic. Under this model of elite governance, also known as federalism, civic participation was restricted to propertied White males. The basis for this particular exclusion was traditional English jurisprudence, which maintained autonomous agency was not possible without ownership of property. John Adams, a prominent Federalist, spoke for the majority of American Founding Fathers when he wrote:

“Such is the frailty of the human heart that very few men who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest …. [They are] to all intents and purposes as much dependent upon others, who will please to feed, clothe, and employ them, as women are upon their husbands, or children on their parents.”[i]

I did not know that the Founders had such a dim view of the agency of ordinary citizens.

I am not sure it is much different today. Most people are sheep. Politicians don't say this, except maybe Joe Biden implying that black voters do as they are told.

We must look to human biology to understand why diversity always fails. The separate evolutionary histories of each human race, which inhabited different ecological niches for thousands of years, entails average differences in intelligence and temperament between populations. This makes conflict inevitable when racial groups must live together under a single roof. As far as human relations are concerned, the greater the diversity, the greater the severity of the ensuing conflict. If group differences are too wide, the prospect for internal stability is diminished considerably.

In America, immigration policy has increased the potential for race conflict.

Even if all the races had the same intelligence and temperament, we would still see big conflicts between ethnic groups. That is what we see in all parts of the world.

The Dilbert filters

I like the Scott Adams Dilbert podcast for his filter on current events. In particular,

No mindreading. If some commentator is basing his analysis on telling you the intents, feelings, or thinking of someone else, then he should be disregarded by humans do not have such psychic abilities. Either he is a stage magician, or he is bluffing, or he is self-deluded. Regardless, his mindreading attempts will not yeild any useful info.

No wordplay gotchas. If somebody says something that sounds offensive, but a simple rewording of it is reasonable, then it is silly to get offended. A recent example is Joe Biden saying something stupid about blacks.

Consider the biases. If you are getting a news story from NY Times, NPR radio, or PBS TV about Donald Trump, you should remember that they have never done a fair story about him. So it is reasonable to assume that the facts have been twisted to support their ideology.

Persuasion. People are influenced by images, anecdotes, memes, and other non-rational communications. It is a mistake to pretend that people make rational decisions.

Another filter I like, but which Dilbert does not use, is the 3-year-old filter. Having talked to 3-year-olds a lot, I find the conversations very similar to adult conversations. The adults just use bigger words, and refer to a wider range of experiences.

Is the Alt-Right dead?

Hunter Wallace writes:

The Alt-Right doesn’t really exist anymore.

There were some people who were drawn to the Alt-Right from conservatism and libertarianism. They have returned to conservatism and libertarianism. There were some people who came from the conspiracy theory/truther world. They have returned to their conspiracies and truths. Finally, there were people who joined the Alt-Right who were moderates. They have gone back to being moderates.

Okay, but Donald Trump is still President, and the Republican Party has reluctantly aligned with him.

Alt Right used to mean the alternative part of the right wing that was supporting Trump. Now the Republican Party is. It is not "alternative" anymore.

A lot of the old political issues have been replaced by COVID-19. It is a whole new game now. Trump will be judged on how he handles the crisis. Nobody is even talking about the other issues.

The lockdowns postponed some deaths

Here is the top NY Times story:

If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers.

And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.

Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May.

Sounds impressive, right? Not really.

When it says deaths "would have been avoided", it only means that according to the model, those deaths would not have occurred before May 3. All they really show is that earlier social distancing would have postponed 1000s of deaths until after May 3.

Nobody thought that the social distancing would stop the Wuhan virus. It was only going to slow the spread, and postpone the deaths.

Many argued that delaying the spread would ultimately reduce deaths because the hospital ventilators would not be overwhelmed, but no such reduction happened.

It is an open question whether the social distancing has done any good at all.

Another NY Times article notes:

“We now know that geography played a large role. 54 percent of all U.S. deaths were in the 100 counties in or within 100 miles of NYC.”

Covid-19 deaths — more than 90,000 so far — are “concentrated among the elderly,” Horowitz continues, and the “virus lopsidedly targets people with particular underlying conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes.”

The death rate, Horowitz claims, “doesn’t even climb above .1% until you reach over 70, with a steep and dangerous growth of risk over 75 and 80.”

While the death toll is more than I expected, the disease impact on most of the population is far less that what anyone was predicting.

The article goes on to wonder why there might be a correlation between skepticism about policies against climate change, and against COVID-19.

I don't think it is so hard to understand. Some people, such as redpillers, accept that there are forces of nature that may be impossible or impractical to change. Climate and coronavirus disease may be among them. Sure, a cure would be great, and everyone is in favor of that, but most of the policies are ineffective and expensive, and should be treated with skepticism.

Critic thinks women are excluded

An LA Times culture critic and dedicated feminist writes:

“Mrs. America” is quite possibly the bravest show in the history of television. ...

No, the real courage of “Mrs. America” is baked into its pitch: To chronicle in nine episodes (the last of which runs Wednesday night) Phyllis Schlafly’s successful campaign to prevent ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, hook the legs out from under the women’s movement and aid the rise of religious-driven conservatism in our political arena.

In other words, let’s all watch a nine-hour television show in which the heroes lose. ...

The end is what the end is. The ERA dies, the women’s movement is shoved increasingly to the sidelines and Schlafly helps usher in neo-conservative politics. Which will bring us, among other things, the evangelical movement, the tea party and the election of Donald Trump.

It is difficult to watch “Mrs. America,” especially at a time when many of us, in pandemic isolation, are already feeling powerless, and when the systematic exclusion of women from our highest offices has never been more obvious.

This is delusional.

A woman was almost elected President in 2016. Many other candidates have been greatly helped by campaigning as a woman. Joe Biden has promised to pick a woman for VP.

Male candidates get systematically eliminated by MeToo attacks. Trump and Biden are constantly attacked for being men. Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris are being touted as possible VPs, but only because they are women of color. Nobody thinks that these women would ever be chosen for anything on the merits.

I suspect that some viewers of the TV show will wonder what the fuss was all about. The anti-ERA arguments are clear enough. But for those favoring the ERA, it is never clear what their goal is. Did they have some broader Jewish or Black leftist political agenda? Did they think that they were going to get improved abortion rights or lesbian rights? Presumably it was some combination.

The final episode is to be released today.

Taking the Red Pill

The NY Times reports:

Elon Musk, the bombastic head of Tesla and SpaceX, exhorted his 34 million Twitter followers on Sunday to “take the red pill.” ...

In “The Matrix,” the movie’s hero, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, is given the option to take a pill that lets him see the truth.

The world he thinks is real turns out to be an entertaining lie; his body is actually trapped in a farm where people are being used as human batteries. Taking the blue pill would let him return to living in the ignorant but blissful lie, while taking the red pill would launch him into an arduous journey through a brutal but fulfilling reality.

The idea of taking the red pill later grew to mean waking up to society’s grand lies. ...

To be red-pilled can now mean being broadly skeptical of experts, to be distrustful of the mainstream press or to see hypocrisy in social liberalism. ...

Asked to explain his thinking, Mr. Musk pasted an image of the Urban Dictionary definition of red pill in an email. It read:

“‘Red pill’ has become a popular phrase among cyberculture and signifies a free-thinking attitude, and a waking up from a ‘normal’ life of sloth and ignorance. Red pills prefer the truth, no matter how gritty and painful it may be.”

Here is a current example of Red Pill thinking, from Steve Pinker:

The motive seems to be the slipshod politicizing I exposed 18 years ago in The Blank Slate: if we’re blank slates, there can’t be differences between races, which would make racism impossible; therefore to combat racism we must believe that humans are blank slates.

The essence of the Red Pill is to accept the facts and science of human nature, wherever that leads.

There are many aspects of human nature where society regularly perpetrates lies. These include male-female difference, and blank slate ideas.

I think that there are also lies we are being told about the Wuhan coronavirus also. Perhaps this is what Musk meant.

Libertarians require open borders

The Libertarian magazine Reason reports:

The Libertarian Party (L.P.) has always stuck up for mobility rights unencumbered by political barriers—in other words, for open borders. ... "A truly free market requires the free movement of people, not just products and ideas," the party platform's immigration plank declares.

So one key question for the five-term Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a former Republican who recently joined the L.P., is whether he will advance this commitment or dilute it if he succeeds in getting the party's presidential nomination. ...

This was evident during Saturday's L.P. presidential debate in Kentucky, when Jacob Hornberger, the founder of the libertarian think tank Future of Freedom Foundation, raved about the party's 1990 platform that unambiguously called for the "elimination of all restrictions on immigration [and] the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol." He castigated Amash, ... Meanwhile, Jo Jorgensen, the 1996 L.P. nominee for vice president, promised to "immediately stop construction on President Trump's border wall boondoggle, and work to eliminate quotas on immigration so that anyone who wishes to come to America could do so legally." She asked Amash point blank if he would do the same. He refused to answer — just as he did repeated requests from Reason for an interview for this piece.

Amash has flunked the ideological purity test, and has dropped out of the Presidential race. He cannot get the support of the Libertarian Party unless he endorses open borders.

The same is true of Joe Biden and the Democrat Party.

This is all very short-sighted, because open borders is national suicide.

Immigrants would be more likely to ban the Libertarian Party, than to become Libertarians. If you value American freedom, then open borders are the last thing you want.

NY Times partially exposes Ronan Farrow

I thought that I was the only one attacking Ronan Farrow's reporting. The NY Times shared a Pulitzer Prize with him, but now publishes a long article trashing his reckless reporting. He relies on unverified gossip, and distorts the facts.

Because if you scratch at Mr. Farrow’s reporting in The New Yorker and in his 2019 best seller, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” you start to see some shakiness at its foundation. He delivers narratives that are irresistibly cinematic — with unmistakable heroes and villains — and often omits the complicating facts and inconvenient details that may make them less dramatic. At times, he does not always follow the typical journalistic imperatives of corroboration and rigorous disclosure, or he suggests conspiracies that are tantalizing but he cannot prove.

Yes, I know Harvey Weinstein was convicted by a jury, but I think that he was innocent, and didn't get a fair trial.

The article portrays him as an over-eager young reporter who hasn't yet learned the difference between being a journalist and a novelist.

It does not touch the deeper issues.

Farrow passes judgment on various celebrity sex lives, but has little to say about his own bizarre sex life, except that he is engaged to another man.

His father is Woody Allen, who named him Satchel. He has bizarre daddy issues, as he blames his famous father for things that don't make any sense.

His bizarre Jewish attitudes. His father is famously Jewish, and many of his targets are Jewish. Is he trying to destroy famous Jews as a`way of getting revenge on his father? Revenge for what?

Everything about Ronan Farrow, aka Satchel Allen, is creepy and weird. I am glad to see the NY Times finally call him on some of his crap.

Update: See also Quillette essay.

Zip codes do not determine futures

The NY Times has a big article on Do children’s ZIP codes at birth determine their futures?. No, I didn't read it, as it is behind a paywall, and it is just too idiotic.

Is this some kind of Jewish form of astrology? The newspaper is published by smart people, and surely they are smart enough to understand that zip codes do not determine children's futures.

My guess is that this is some sort of Jewish way to announce their superiority over other people. Those in the wrong zip codes are doomed to subservience to their Jewish masters. The zip code is just a code for something else.

Professors call out NY Times for censorship

Pamela Paresky, Jonathan Haidt, Nadine Strossen, and Steven Pinker write in Politico:

a recent course of action by the New York Times is cause for alarm.

On December 27, 2019, the Times published a column by their opinion journalist Bret Stephens, “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” and the ensuing controversy led to an extraordinary response by the editors.

Stephens took up the question of why Ashkenazi Jews are statistically overrepresented in intellectual and creative fields. This disparity has been documented for many years, such as in the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene by the eminent sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab. In his Times column, Stephens cited statistics from a more recent peer-reviewed academic paper, coauthored by an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. Though the authors of that paper advanced a genetic hypothesis for the overrepresentation, arguing that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group because of inherited traits, Stephens did not take up that argument. In fact, his essay quickly set it aside and argued that the real roots of Jewish achievement are culturally and historically engendered habits of mind.

Nonetheless, the column incited a furious and ad hominem response. Detractors discovered that one of the authors of the paper Stephens had cited went on to express racist views, and falsely claimed that Stephens himself had advanced ideas that were “genetic” (he did not), “racist” (he made no remarks about any race) and “eugenicist” (alluding to the discredited political movement to improve the human species by selective breeding, which was not remotely related to anything Stephens wrote). ...

The Times’ handling of this column sets three pernicious precedents for American journalism.

I mentioned the original column last year, as well as the subsequent editorial redaction.

I am not sure if all of these authors and publications are Jewish. It appears that most of them are.

While I agree that the NY Times retraction is deplorable, and that its explanation was dishonest, the criticism is still a little strange.

The critics are also eager to dismiss a legitimate scholar as being racist, and to show off liberal credentials. It says:

First, while we cannot know what drove the editors’ decision, the outward appearance is that they surrendered to an outrage mob, in the process giving an imprimatur of legitimacy to the false and ad hominem attacks against Stephens.

No, that is not the problem.

The NY Times prints lies about Pres. Trump everyday. The outrage mob does not induce the paper to tell the truth about Trump. These critics are giving giving an imprimatur of legitimacy to the false and ad hominem attacks against Henry Harpending.

I think this whole story is about how to best reinforce certain Jewish ideologies. Stephens accidentally revealed some truths about Jewish beliefs, and his employer and others must rush to obscure the truth and help him out.

Calhoun Mouse Experiments

A new paper argues:

With ideal technology, human carrying capacity runs into the tens of trillions, while with currently demonstrated technology Earth could support more than 200 billion humans. These numbers reflect neither a desirable nor a natural equilibrium population level, but represent a rough estimate of the maximum number of humans Earth could sustain.

This is lunacy. We would be much better off if we scaled world population down to about 100 million.

Here is Wikipedia's account of the John B. Calhoun NIMH mouse experiments:

In July 1968, four pairs of mice were introduced into the habitat. The habitat was a 9-foot (2.7 m) square metal pen with 4.5-foot-high (1.4 m) sides. Each side had four groups of four vertical, wire mesh "tunnels." The "tunnels" gave access to nesting boxes, food hoppers, and water dispensers. There was no shortage of food or water or nesting material. There were no predators. The only adversity was the limit on space.

Initially, the population grew rapidly, doubling every 55 days. The population reached 620 by day 315, after which the population growth dropped markedly, doubling only every 145 days. The last surviving birth was on day 600, bringing the total population to a mere 2200 mice, even though the experiment setup allowed for as many as 3840 mice in terms of nesting space. This period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against.[2]

After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting and only engaging in tasks that were essential to their health. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones." Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed.

The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.

Calhoun saw the fate of the population of mice as a metaphor for the potential fate of man. He characterized the social breakdown as a "second death," with reference to the "second death" mentioned in the Biblical book of Revelation 2:11.[1] His study has been cited by writers such as Bill Perkins as a warning of the dangers of living in an "increasingly crowded and impersonal world."[3]

We need to limit population long before we get to physical limits.

Sweden's new hospital is empty

The UN WHO and other severe criticized Sweden for not ordering the lockdowns that many other European countries did. They did scare Sweden into building a new hospital and expanded intensive care units. But now cases are declining, and those units are empty:

The newly constructed field hospital in Stockholm, with room for hundreds of patients, has still not received any patients. It will probably never have to open.

In most places, hospitals are operating at below normal levels, as a lot of medical treatments got canceled, and the big COVID-19 rush never materialized.

It may be time to start talking about the COVID-19 hoax. The lockdowns have probably caused more deaths than they have prevented, and we are still within the range of a bad flu season.

For another opinion, see this SciAm article which predicts that the death will increase by a factor of 10 or more in the next couple of months. All of these alarmist predictions have been wrong so far, but decide for yourself.

Update: CNN will give us a Swedish view:

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg has been invited by CNN to be an "expert panelist" on a Thursday night event about the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you are a bit confused by this choice, that's fair. Thunberg not really an expert in the field for which she is most well known, and that field is not virology or epidemiology or economics.

Fauci has no expertise underlying most of his opinions either, so this seems fair to me.

Biden opinions are predictably partisan

This essay trashes Tara Reade:

The social media world has spent the last month obsessed with the Tara Reade sexual assault allegation. ...

Tara Reade first gained prominence in April 2019, when she was one of several women to accuse Joe Biden of inappropriate touching. ... After she spoke up in April 2019 about feeling objectified in Biden’s office, she was attacked on social media and called a “Russian asset.” She felt like Biden was behind the attacks.

Okay, but these same criticisms apply to various other MeToo accusers, and Biden is on the record as saying that they should be believed.

Also:

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer says that Joe Biden’s denial of Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation is “sufficient.”

Schumer, who just happened to be a fierce defender of the #MeToo Movement during the confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh, commented on the allegation during a press conference on Tuesday.

Reade claims that Biden penetrated her with his fingers while she was working in his senate office in 1993.

“I’ve heard Joe Biden’s explanation. I think it’s sufficient. I think he will be a great candidate. I think he will be a great President and I think he’ll help us take back the Senate,” Schumer told reporters.

So this is all just partisan politics. Everyone knew that Anita Hill was lying, that Christina Ford was lying, and that Ronan Farrow (whose real name is Satchel Allen) is lying. Nobody thinks women can reliably tell these stories.

Biden is a creep, and a senile old fool who is not competent to be President. That is why Barack Obama picked him for VP in 2008, and he is worse now. This Tara Reade stuff is just an excuse to take him out.

Fauci is our top charlatan

The NY Times reports for its top story:

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a central figure in the government’s response to the coronavirus, intends to warn the Senate on Tuesday that Americans would experience “needless suffering and death” if the country opens up too quickly.

Dr. Fauci, who has emerged as the perhaps nation’s most respected voice during the coronavirus crisis, is one of four top government doctors scheduled to testify remotely at a high-profile hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Got that? He is both the top expert and the most respected voice.

This is so idiotic. It is like saying, "our top expert says that you will risk injury if you drive your car too fast". It tells you nothing about how fast to drive.

One way to tell an expert is really a charlatan is when most of his opinions are outside his expertise. If he were really such a top infectious disease expert, he would advise us on how different policies would affect the spread of the disease, and the ultimate death count, and leave it to others to decide whether the cost is worth it. But he has given policymakers extremely little useful info, and much of that has been incorrect.

Fauci is just more proof that the world has gone mad. No one should take that clown seriously.

Update: Here is a list of 15 Fauci mistakes.

The latest hate crime hoax

Jared Taylor writes:

Get ready for another massive national convulsion over race. It will be just like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray. This time, the dead black man is Ahmaud Arbery, age 25. The whites who shot him are Gregory McMichael, age 64, and his son, Travis McMichael, 34. ...

So, what happened? Unlike previous celebrated “modern lynchings,” at least some of the police findings are public. Their lives may be ruined, but there is good reason to think that what Gregory and Travis McMichael did was perfectly legal.

The father, Gregory McMichael, is a former police officer and investigator for the district attorney. He lived close to a new building under construction where there had been break-ins and trespassing. Mr. McMichael had reportedly seen surveillance video of a black man trespassing. He says that on February 23, he saw a black man — who turned out to be Arbery — “hauling ass” down the street, and thought he looked like the man in the video. He and his son armed themselves and followed in a pickup truck, hoping to hold him until the police came. A friend named Bryan William followed in a second vehicle and took cellphone video. The McMichaels drove ahead of Arbery and stopped in the street.

What happened next is on this short video, and is consistent with what the McMichaels told police. They shouted at Arbery to stop because they wanted to talk to him. They say Arbery ran around the pickup and attacked Travis, the younger McMichael, who was holding a shotgun. There were three shotgun blasts as Travis and Arbery struggled for the weapon, and Arbery died at the scene.

I don't know, but I am beginning to see a pattern here. When the mainstream media all jump to the conclusion that there was a hate crime, it usually turns out to be the opposite.

You would think that the leftist race-baiters would be able to find some legitimate example of a black American being mistreated somehow. And yet when Barack Obama and many others make racial complaints, it is nearly always about some hoax case like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, where most of those who examine the evidence agree that the black perp deserved to die.

I don't know about this latest case. I cannot tell from the video whether Arbery attempted to grab or fire the shotgun. But it is hard to believe that the McMichaels set out to lynch a black jogger.

The Crisis is the Official Panic

The big national crises in recent memory are the 2001 9-11 attacks, the 2008 mortgage derivative crash, and the 2020 Wuhan virus. What do these have in common?

In each case, about 99% of the damage was caused by govt do-gooders who overreacted to some relatively minor adverse news.

The 2001 attack was the most audacious terrorist attack anyone had ever seen, but it only killed about 3k people, and did a couple of billion dollars in property damage. Had we just cleaned up the rubble and done nothing else, we would have been a lot better off. There was no big wave of terrorist attacks or anything else to worry about.

Instead we spent many trillions on foolish wars, created the TSA to hassle everyone at airports, and imported millions of Moslems. These were far more damaging.

The 2008 crash bankrupted some investment bankers who made bad investments in mortgage securities, but did not have a direct negative effect on anyone else. Those who owned homes saw some fluctuations in appraised values, but longterm owners saw no adverse effects. Some people speculated on houses with no money down and dishonestly exaggerating their income. Some of them lost their houses in foreclosures, but it was the banks who closed their eyes to the obvious fraud who absorbed the loss. The govt spent 100s of billions bailing out the firms who made foolish investments. We would have been better off if those firms were bankrupted.

Now the 2020 pandemic has a death toll that is comparable to a bad flu season. It is the lockdowns, not the deaths, that are causing many trillions of dollars in losses. The lockdowns are probably not even saving any lives.

In each of these crises, we were subjected to supposed experts giving silly opinions on CNN and in the NY Times. It should have been obvious that these experts did not know what they were talking about. Their policy proposals did not even have any serious analysis showing benefits would exceed the costs.

Another pitch for importing Chinese censorship

Breitbart reports:

Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule suggests using the Chinese virus pandemic as an excuse to establish a new interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, implementing policies that do away with concepts such as “free speech ideology” and “property rights.”

Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, recently wrote a piece for the Atlantic in which he argues that traditional interpretations of the U.S. constitution have “now outlived its utility,” and that it is now time for the government to take a more centralized role in people’s lives.

Vermeule argues that “circumstances have now changed” due to the Chinese virus pandemic, and that it is now possible to imagine “moral” constitutionalism, which he says is not “enslaved to the original meaning of the Constitution,” and is also “liberated” from the narrative of “relentless expansion of individualistic autonomy.”

The professor is advocating for a new interpretation of the U.S. constitution, which he refers to as “common-good constitutionalism.”

“Such an approach,” wrote Vermeule, “should be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.”

This is the direction we are headed. Today, the chief censors outside of China are Jews, and the censorship is promoted by Jewish publications.

When they say "common good", just what do they mean? They are not talking about White Christians. They appears to be inspired by Chinese or Soviet Communinists.

Greta Thunberg was right

Philip Greenspun writes

“You come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” a visibly angry Thunberg told the high-level audience gathered for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York.

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing,” thundered the 16-year-old Swedish girl, who has galvanized youth across the world to mobilize against climate change.

This was a debatable point at the time, but just six months later children around the world were cut off from their playgrounds, their friends, and their schools (i.e., most of their “childhood”)! Bizarrely, one of the only countries where this did not happen is Sweden, home of infidels who reject the True Church of Shutdown.

So… Greta Thunberg might turn out to be wrong regarding atmospheric physics, just as the academic researchers who’ve gotten grants for climate modeling may turn out to be wrong (Cato article on a paywalled Nature paper). But I think she got the generational dynamics correct! Given the chance to cut their personal risk of contracting Covid-19 by a percentage point or two, older adults had no difficulty deciding to rob children of their childhood.

I think he is right here. This is yet another example of Baby Boomers selfishly protecting their generation, at the expense of everyone else.

School closings did not help

NY Times science writer Gina Kolata writes:

Did Closing Schools Actually Help?
Researchers have a plan to find out.

As different countries and states tentatively start reopening their economies, there seems to be no clear plan, and no clear way to figure out which of the lockdown measures made a difference in slowing the spread of Covid-19.

Was it necessary to shut down schools? Did it matter if state parks and playgrounds in New Jersey were closed? Did an 8 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew make a difference? When can we go back to normal? ...

Now, two Norwegian medical researchers, experienced in evaluating cancer data, suggest a way to get reliable information. ...

But, Dr. Kalager and Dr. Bretthauer said in a Zoom interview, it is not always in politicians’ interest to get data from randomized controlled studies. Those who called for quickly shutting schools down would face blowback if it turned out that the closings had virtually no effect on the spread of the epidemic.

So far, a study like the one they propose is just a thought experiment. No schools in Norway are planning to randomly test reopenings.

This is an amazing admission from the NY Times.

There was no scientific basis for closing the schools. We could easily find out if there were any benefit to the closings, but no one wants to know. There are only two researchers who are even talking about doing an experiment to find out, but they are in Norway and the experiment is unlikely to be done.

This is nuts. Closing the schools was a $100 billion decision. Shouldn't there be some analysis of the necessity?

No school age kids are dying of the disease. None are spreading it to adults. I have no idea why kids would be immune, but this has been known for months.

I keep hearing people say, "we need to listen to the experts, and follow the data." No, the experts are not following the data. This is all political.

Americans advocating Chinese-style censorship

More and more, Jews are advocating Chinese-style censorship.

Essay in The Atlantic:

Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal

In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.

COVID-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. ...

But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.

Google used to say that their mission was to make all the world's information accessible. Now Google openly censors medical facts and opinions that different from official govt policy.

And now David Icke kicked off Facebook. He has spent many years advocating many outlandish theories, such as the world having been taken over by shape-shifting reptiles. But the reason given for booting him is that he disagrees with United Nations coronavirus recommendations.

Need Cost-Benefit Analysis

What was the mistake of the Iraq War? Was it WMD?

No. The statements made by Pres. G.W. Bush and Tony Blair were essentially correct. They said that Iraq had previous WMD programs and had not fully complied with inspections. The war discovered WMDs that were more or less consistent with what had been alleged. This is all well-documented, and you can read about it on Wikipedia.

No, the WMD was just a sideshow. The problem was that there was no cost-benefit analysis justifying the war the war cost us trillions of dollars, and there was never any hope of obtaining commensurate benefits.

I see a similar mistake with the Wuhan virus today. The govt policy is costing trillions of dollars. While it is postponing some deaths, there may be no net saving of lives when it is all over. It is quite possibly the most destructive govt policy since World War II.

Many countries allow joint child custody

The Japan Times reports:

Justice Ministry survey finds many countries allow joint child custody after divorce

Many countries such as Canada and China allow divorced parents to have joint custody of their children, a survey by Japan’s Justice Ministry showed Friday.

Of 24 countries surveyed, only India and Turkey have a sole custody system as Japan does.

Joint custody is also the norm in South Korea, Russia and Indonesia, according to the survey. Italy requires divorced parents to agree on their children’s education and whereabouts.

The sole custody system is criticized for limiting the opportunity for parents who lost custody and their children to interact with each other.

Most of the countries surveyed have measures in place to support interactions between divorced parents and their children, including public monitoring.

The ministry will use the results of the survey to consider law revisions, officials said.

Occasionally I hear people say that countries like Japan and India are pro-family.

No. Systems that routinely disconnect parents from their kids are anti-family.

It sounds as if Japan is going to consider laws to allow public monitoring of parents to visit their kids. No, that is not pro-family either.

Japan has degenerated into a sick society where hardly anyone even has kids anymore.