“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

-Voltaire

77 NFL players and staff tested positive on Saturday, negative on Sunday.

It’s long past time to scrap testing, scrap lockdowns, and just scrap every COVID policy response and mitigation effort, aside from protecting the ones who are actually at risk. It’s time to treat COVID the same way we treat every other unavoidable, negligible risk and move on with our lives.

An industry is being built around the hysteria, and will require a persistent state of fear in order to turn a profit. This has happened with the military/industrial complex and as brought endless tragic outcomes. It can’t be allowed to happen with our healthcare industry.

This is insane. BLM rioters armed with semi-auto rifles have shut down the street in #Kenosha and ordered a Sheriff’s vehicle to stop. Video by @livesmattershow. #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/cDhmOBG1p9

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 24, 2020

We’ll rarely ever see something like this again. Rioting thugs surrounding a police vehicle with rifles, forcing it to stop. During the night they burned an entire car lot, and rampaged through Kenosha.

Taleb has a heart of gold, he did endorse Ron Paul for President a decade ago, but unfortunately also a vanity that extends beyond the solar system. He’s committing the same intellectual sin he constantly attributes to his opponents: building a strawman caricature of his opponent, and then dismissing them entirely. Sad that he included Ioannidis, an intellectual superior to him in every way, in the graph.

Here is the hall of “experts”:
3-4 down out of 12 (includ. civilized debate w/Ioannidis), but others would be scraping the bottom of the pot.

These “experts” are being used for backup by the politicized no-mask-virus-is-a-hoax mob (see from @BallouxFrancois‘s feed). pic.twitter.com/u7MjSPx5rQ

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) August 24, 2020

I rarely come across anyone that believes “the virus is a hoax”. I do, however, encounter greater numbers of people realizing that COVID-19 isn’t aerosolized Ebola, that it’s far less dangerous to children than the flu, that it doesn’t kill randomly but targets a very specific group of people with very specific symptoms, that masks, unemployment, and school closings pose a clear and present danger to children, and that allowing COVID to spread among the non-vulnerable population (which makes up over 99%) of everyone will protect the vulnerable far more than cowering in hypochondriac terror for the remainder of their lives. Do the elderly really want to spend their remaining years mired in this fear, hidden behind several masks and an eye shield?

Taleb’s ego is apparently preventing him from admitting he’s been on the wrong side for months. Does he ever mention lockdowns as a cause of apocalyptic devastation of the very most vulnerable in society?

But I was told everyone should enjoy the lockdowns… https://t.co/YLC5pnnUuE

— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) August 24, 2020

Sanity begins creeping in.

Next will be the public aknowledgement of vast and devastating human rights violations. Countries and US states currently doubling down on police state tactics should be considered as engaging in a form of genocide against the most vulnerable among their population, and the leaders who made the decision that led to this outcome must be held accountable.

Did a coordinated effort by China to promote fear of COVID-19 and totalitarian lockdowns as the only possible policy response result in the lockdowns that they sought? Fascinating/disturbing info in this Twitter thread. Click through to read the entire eye-opening thread.

https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/1270925788389486593

This is 1984-level, “friendly Big Brother” totalitarianism right here. Orwellian doesn’t even begin to describe it. This is like being gaslit by an evil stepmother who never breaks her friendly demeanor as she sucks out your soul. “It’s for your own good my dear!”

Dictatorships always need an external threat, whether real or imagined. In this case, the “threat” has perfect  characteristics: invisible, silent, existing everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

Great casting on this one. People love being told about health from someone who is very overweight.

And, to be fair, if our pal wasn’t SO overweight, she’d have to worry about the virus a considerably less. 👀pic.twitter.com/JSDOGIVhNn

— Sydney Watson (@SydneyLWatson) August 22, 2020

“I would shut it down, I would listen to the scientists.”

This would mean another 50 million unemployed, food and home insecurity during the dead of winter, effectively inflicting a mortal wound to the US economy, and causing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. The professional class applauds this insanity, a policy that would usher in a true apocalypse for millions of the most vulnerable. How is it possible that anyone thinks this is something other than national suicide?

More often than not, they are the most deranged people in the room, as this person appears to be. These people should not be allowed anywhere near power or public policy decision-making. We are staring into a black future due precisely to the fact that people like this have been taken seriously over the past 6 months.

This is suicide-pact logic. This is the raving of a person who believes government should and could be safely transformed into some kind of leviathan Santa Claus, with no ill consequences whatsoever. It’s the raving of someone who has, her entire life, backpedaled into a belief that government should be God. It’s the pre-historic, tribal view of government and power. It has no place in our world.