Is there anything Joe Public won’t tolerate?
There follows a fulsome selection of invidiously pernicious behaviour by the banking, political, news media, academic, bureaucratic, Leftliberal, social media and police communities in the Anglosphere.
A direct quote – whose content is undisputed – from the respected site Wall St on Parade:
‘The November 2019 Federal Reserve report on the condition of the biggest banks in the U.S. shows that almost half were rated unsatisfactory. There have not been any further editions since that November report, until the latest one from the Fed which was released last week and dated May 2020. The new report carries this headline: “The banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy financial position.” This is part of the Fed’s strategy to lay its abysmal failure to supervise the mega Wall Street banks at the door of the coronavirus pandemic.’ Where is the Congressional or media outcry about that?
Let’s stay with the US, and return to the inflammatory idiocy of Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model as applied to the virus in the States during 2020. Their intitial estimate of total deaths was 2.2 million….but with total lockdown and social distancing, (they said) this could be reduced to 1.1 million…..um, exactly half of the ‘with no action’ number. Does that smack of a lot of rounded numbers and big assumptions? It does. Here is William Luther writing yesterday at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER):
‘[2.2m]…. is the study’s ‘worst-case scenario’, where everyone just goes on as if there were no virus….Perhaps the authors should have written “incredibly unlikely”….the authors of the Imperial College study estimate that we will reduce deaths from 2.2 million to 1.1 million. That is still a lot of deaths, to be sure. It is roughly 32 times as many deaths as resulted from the flu last year…..I cannot overemphasize how implausible the headline estimate is….As a liberal, I strongly believe in the presumption of liberty. That does not mean it is never acceptable to coerce others. Rather, it means that it is only acceptable to coerce others when there is a very good reason for doing so.’
Mr Luther is liberal in the quaint traditional sense of preferring citizen sanity to government panic alongside a media pack with a sensationalist agenda. The data, however, support him, not Imperial College: with C19 deaths now slowing noticeably in the US, as of last night the death toll was 85,533. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), projects a death total from COVID-19 at roughly 138,000 by the beginning of August.
This means that, although only a mild version of Imperial’s lockdown programme has been applied in America, Ferguson’s projection of 1.1m dead is miles out….and his ‘worst case’ is a fantasy.
Ferguson had to stand down for breaking his own lockdown….not for being totally wrong on a major national threat for the fourth time in a row. Where is the Whitehall accountability in all this?
In fact, the two medics in California whose experience at the sharp end arrived at precisely the same conclusion as The Slog – a 0.03% chance of dying from C19 – were absolutely right….and their reward for this was to be banned from telling the Truth on YouTube. If that isn’t unregulated and unconstitutional censorship of information vital to the public debate, then what is?
Today came the news that the US cop who expressed his doubts about the Constitutional validity of lockdown in the face of Covid19 was fired because he refused to take down the vid he put up on YouTube. This is free speech in the Land of the Free?
So much for unexplained censorship in the US. Let’s now take a further look at ‘news’ and ‘social’ media in the UK. On both Twitter and Facebook – and in the Times with its shiny new bonkers ‘model’ – figures ranging from 40-61,000 for the ‘real’ British viral death toll continue to be bandied around…but the figure at the generally trusted Worldometer site is just under 33,700. Where is the condemnation of this criminal overstatement of UK Covid19 deaths?
As I posted earlier this week, Fleet Street is rife with rumours that Whitehall is building a fire under our elected Government with these persistent leaks, and that they’re being released with the Blind Eye approval of Britain’s most powerful unelected official, Sir Mark Sedwill. Yesterday, it emerged that he tested positive in April for C19 but this had been kept from the media. Today it is alleged that he’s appointed himself to head two further Cabinet Committees. Where is the objection to this from Parliament?
There has to be a line in the sand somewhere. I’m just damned if I can see where Western electorates are going to draw it, and mean it.
The Slog 