I will share this, but will add a Metacomment: The people who created this website software are psychopaths. More properly, most people in the Tech business somewhere along the line lost the ability for basic human empathy, society, and integrity, if they ever had these features of being human. On a moment’s reflection, I don’t think most of them ever sprouted into normal human beings, and never will. That is the beauty of Left wing politics: no understanding is needed. No compassion, no empathy: they are all simply STIPULATED. If you show up–if you toe the party line–then you get credit for all of them. You could be torturing cats for fun, but you still get to virtue signal.
There is no obvious, easy way to change the font. That is about as basic a feature as any sane person could hope for. It seems likely that many people like me will stumble on the obstacles THEY CREATED in the hope that I will pay them for development.
Call me old school, but if you charge me for a product, give me the fucking basics, then charge more for add ons which should not be an obvious default standard. There is nothing easy and obvious I am missing. There is of course an answer, but it is one hidden behind a series of clicks they have made challenging by design.
I decided, after some effort, just to leave the banner as it is. I was considering using this company to move my other website, but fuck these people. Not a penny, and I will move this too at some point.
This email is sent by an intelligent, frustrated person, in the hope of finding thoughtful, intelligent, genuinely kind and well meaning people who are willing to entertain what I believe are good questions about our COVID-19 response.
In this email I would like to discuss the Hippocratic Oath and Science, writ large.
The oath Dr. Fauci swore stipulated “Above all, do no harm.” Two corollaries of this are that the minimum dose of anything that will accomplish the end should be used, and that the cure cannot be worse than the disease.
Our public policy response to this disease is more or less like treating Society—all of us—as a sick patient, to be “cured” by the government, or health care workers working as de facto agents of the government.
This is a paradigm, a word made most famous by a philosopher of science named Thomas Kuhn. It might also be termed the Dominant Assumption.
Here is my first question: if this paradigm were wrong—if it were not true that this pandemic cannot be ended except by the measures of lockdowns, school closings, the banning of most public events, masks and mass vaccination–how would we know?
To offer a specific example there is a short position paper called the Great Barrington Declaration that you can easily look up and read, written by qualified experts from Stanford, Harvard and Cambridge. It was released last October and called for immediate reopening of everything normally, with the qualifying exception of those most at risk. This would mean, among other things, live music with full attendance, live theater, sporting events, cinemas and restaurants and bars operating at full capacity and normal hours and all with no masks.
Second question: Can anyone say with certainly adopting the Great Barrington Declaration would not have been the best policy when it was released, or that it is not even now the best approach, regardless of vaccine status (which is more useful for the elderly in any event)?
The word “science”, as a reminder, is being thrown around, and this is a formally scientific question. We are told by our media that to deny the specific policies chosen by specific people is to “deny science”. This is silly: it is deny the opinion of one expert or group of experts in favor of another.
They are telling us we must believe and obey the only people they allow us to hear, but even if we want to recognize and plead our own individual ignorance, we remain free to choose from among qualified opinions, both those favored by the media, and those buried by the media. Professors with relevant degrees from the best universities in the world certainly qualify as experts.
It is a FACT that all historical pandemics have ended. They may recur, but they were described 180 years ago by British Dr. William Farr as coming, nearly always, in Bell Curves. There are varying opinions on all this, no doubt, but I think most experts would agree that when the disease disappears, after showing up, peaking, then diminishing in a symmetrical way, that we have achieved that much discussed condition “Herd Immunity”. The disease simply runs out of people it can infect, and–without hosts–withers. This will happen regardless of what is, or is not, done.
And there is every reason to believe that if the government had done NOTHING, that the disease would be gone by now; or at least come in two waves, as it did in Sweden (whose death rate is significantly lower than that of the United States, and whose second wave appears to be over. If you look up the mortality graph that should appear if you search “COVID Dashboard WHO Sweden”, you will see two clean Bell Curves. India also has a very nice, year long one, which I will discuss in a future email.)
But, we were told, the death count would have been astronomical if we had sought Herd Immunity.
A second important philosopher of science is Karl Popper, who coined the word “falsifiability”. By this is meant that a properly formulated scientific hypothesis will stipulate the conditions of its own demise. An honest scientist will say “if I am wrong, then X will happen, and that will mean we need to revise the hypothesis.” A dishonest scientist, in contrast, will make no predictions at all, and merely point to all outcomes as validating the initial claim. In conditions where skepticism and objection are suppressed this can go on indefinitely, but never in the process become “science.”
Here is my third question: what evidence do we have NOW that these large numbers would have occurred? It has been a year, so can we not now compare SCIENTIFICALLY the results of nations and States which did more severe lockdowns and wore more masks and those who did not? Florida and California, say? New York and South Dakota? Sweden and the UK? Would this not be the SCIENCE that keeps getting mentioned? If we do that, it appears the more severe lockdowns and mask wearing places fare a bit WORSE than those who are more lax, and that in any event it appears to make little difference. No more people die if you leave schools open than if you close them. This is, at a minimum, a strongly tenable empirical claim.
Why is this seeming fact not in the public domain and getting debated? Why is this not front page news and not—as is the case now–speculation relegated by the Dominant Narrative to the fringe?
I will remind you that last February we had the best economy ever. Hopes were high and new businesses were popping up everywhere, and everyone was building and expanding. Now, at least tens of thousands of small businesses have closed permanently, and we have rates of depression in most demographics somewhere around 50%, according to reasonable guesses, which are no doubt worse in the places with the most restrictions. The emotional scars on our children are difficult to measure, but clearly significant. Our economy has not begun to process the worst of all this, according to many experts and common sense, and a full blown Depression is far from out of the question.
So I will ask a fourth question: is it not reasonable to suppose it POSSIBLE, at least, that the dose is vastly excessive, and that the cure is worse than the disease?
These are in my view good, relevant, and reasonable questions. I plan to send more emails, but am trying to keep them short so they get read. You can of course opt out.
Please forward this to anyone you feel may read it. There is a great deal of suffering around the world right now, and all good people owe those less fortunate every possible consideration and diligence of thought and effort.