Face Masks Are A Religion Now. All Hail The Almighty Mask!
Most religions, including Christianity, must by definition give the Almighty the benefit of any doubt when things don’t work out the way we mere humans would like. He is, after all, the creator of the universe. Who are we to question, right? A prayed-for sick loved one dies. God is good. An election doesn’t go our way? God is still good. A tsunami wipes out half a country? Well, you get the picture.
Real religions as an attempt to explain mankind’s greatest and oldest questions are one thing. However, turning an unproven scientific hypothesis into a de facto religion as a way to tarnish detractors as heretics and stifle debate is quite another, and anyone who doubts the fact that face masks have become just such a de facto religion should consider how they too ALWAYS get the benefit of any doubt. When COVID-19 spikes sharply in an area that’s already at ~100 percent mask compliance, the solution is always, always, always to “MASK HARRRDDDDERRRRR!” And when that inevitably doesn’t work, they call for lockdown measures, all the while never daring to question the efficacy of the sacred mask.
Masks can’t possibly have ANY negative side effects on health or society, we are told, even as social media giants censor legitimate medical professionals who conduct studies that suggest otherwise. In their zeal to worship the Almighty Face Mask, zealots even insist that high school athletes cover their faces with what soon becomes a wet washcloth while competing outdoors in the rain, their omnipotent power and glory being such that no negative health ramifications will ever occur. Masks are the “best tool” we have to “stop the spread of COVID-19,” our overlords constantly tell a population that is ALREADY well above the 80 percent mask compliance so-called "experts" once promised in May it would take to make cases “plummet.”
But cases aren’t "plummeting," now are they? Quite the contrary, they are exploding all over Europe and the U.S., despite the fact that Joe Biden once insisted that if only the Trump administration would have been more like Europe we would have stopped this virus in its tracks, or something. Now, media "geniuses" marvel at how European countries that supposedly "did EVERYTHING right (!!)" are nevertheless slammed with COVID-19 cases, yet not one of them will admit that perhaps "everything right" could just be … WRONG. They aren’t capable of questioning their previous assumptions and beliefs, in no small part because, again, those beliefs have become a religion.
Consider the puzzlement contained in this Daily Beast article about Italy’s recent spike: “What's particularly troubling about the return of COVID in Italy is that the country has done everything experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci have been advising,” writes Barbie Latza Nadeau. “Face masks in public places have been compulsory for months, social distancing is strongly enforced, nightclubs have never reopened, and sporting arenas are at less than a third of capacity. Children who are back at school are regularly tested and strictly social-distanced, and yet, the second wave seems completely unstoppable.”
The Daily Beast is shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that human measures touted for months have been almost entirely futile. Despite instituting an outdoor, 1,000 euro fine-enforced mask mandate, the virus nevertheless stubbornly insists on virusing. Italy had 37,237 cases Friday (the equivalent to 204,803 in U.S. numbers) and 699 deaths. If that played out in the U.S., it would mean 3,844 dead in one day alone, a number never reached even in the spring. It's almost like it doesn't really matter what humans do, short of draconian, destructive lockdowns that harm millions and delay the inevitable.
Democratic Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, like most of these power-hungry wanna-be dictators, was in the “it’s all your fault” camp for months. Chastising Nevadans for COVID-19 spikes like an angry parent threatening consequences for bad behavior, Sisolak, presumably while firmly wagging his finger, scolded, "I'm not going to come back in two weeks and say I'm going to give you another chance." His tone was a bit more humble, however, once news broke that he managed to catch the ‘Rona himself: “You can take all the precautions that are possible and you can still contract the virus. I don’t know how I got it."
Go figure. Viruses keep virusing, and humans keep twisting themselves and their societies into pretzels to little or no avail. A brazen, ridiculous CNN headline last week summarizes the absolute insanity of it all. “Their states are in crisis after they resisted masks and Covid-19 rules,” CNN wrote, referring to Republican governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem who have “largely taken a hands-off approach” to the virus. “It hasn’t worked out well,” they smugly write, conveniently leaving out the fact that the virus is spreading significantly in countless places that, like Italy, are supposedly doing “everything right.”
It’s journalistic malpractice, of course. Obviously, the virus was going to spread in the Dakotas, especially since they didn’t really have much of a spike before. It may even be a bit worse per capita for a while because of that, but as Noem has aptly pointed out, hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and they are handling things just fine. Meanwhile, Michigan broke the 10,000 case mark Friday for the first time, and cases are exploding in states like Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which have doubled-down on forced masking as a way to control spread.
Except, it isn’t controlling the spread at all, and the spikes in countries that don’t implement forced masking, like Sweden and Norway, aren’t any worse and are often better than their masked counterparts.
Meanwhile, CNN continues to pee on our legs and tell us it’s raining by citing “research” before the November surge that basically cherry-picks a few rural areas in Kansas where 10 cases would equal a “50 percent spike!!!!” to contend that “mask-mandates work to slow the spread of Covid-19.” All the while conveniently ignoring all the masked areas where cases are exploding.
As Tucker Carlson so eloquently put it on his show last week: “If masks and lockdowns stopped spikes in coronavirus infections, then we wouldn't be seeing spikes in coronavirus infections.” Indeed, if masks work, why aren’t they WORKING?
It would all be a ridiculous joke if they hadn’t succeeded in making it a de facto religion.
***************************************
It's time to go to bat for market forces
Comment from Australia
It could be the news of not one, but two, COVID-19 vaccines with over 90 per cent effectiveness that could be widely distributed before winter. It could be some economic green shoots, with some forecasters - particularly at the big banks - predicting a far faster recovery than first feared.
It could be just that it's nearly summer time.
Economic optimism is a good thing in more ways than one: it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Optimism breeds consumer and business confidence, which itself generates the desired investment and economic growth to beat the pandemic recession.
Of course, given what 2020 has dished out thus far, it might be wise to exercise some caution amid the optimism - lest we next suffer a plague of locusts or some other biblical black swan.
Yet, while the short-term issues associated with the recovery are crucially important, they're not the only serious economic problem we face.
Although it may seem like the sort of dull thing we used to be concerned about back when we didn't have any real problems (circa 2019), you may recall that wage growth leading into the recession was at near record lows, despite a 28-year run of uninterrupted economic growth.
As the Productivity Commission pointed out in its latest report on productivity, stimulating and maintaining productivity growth are the only things that will boost wages in the long term.
There are two roadblocks to rebooting productivity, one on the left and one on the right. From the right, the concern is the re-emergence of economic nationalism and protectionism. From the left, the issue is the strangling growth of regulation.
It took a long time for Australia to move away from protectionism. There is a serious risk that the border safety concerns of the pandemic will drive Australia, and the rest of the world, back towards the insular, protectionist attitudes that were prominent in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.
As the Productivity Commission explained, the "Fortress Australia" approach of protection all around was deeply flawed: "The walls of Fortress Australia were unable to protect us from the economic turmoil of the 1970s and contributed to Australia sliding down the income ladder."
Scepticism of a free trade-led approach to international relations had been growing for years before the pandemic.
In the United States, both sides of politics have been openly expressing hostility to the merits of free trade deals. President Donald Trump has been a strong proponent of economic nationalism: specifically the idea that America is a loser from trade with the rest of the world.
A big part of Trump's pitch to "make America great again" was bringing manufacturing jobs back to America.
Of course, the unexplained flaw in this argument is that most of the jobs were actually lost to automation not trade. And the ability to manufacture far more than we used to, at a lower price, thanks to automation and productivity gains, is one of the most tangible examples of why we should embrace a pro-market agenda.
A pro-market agenda is not a pro-business agenda: it's a pro-consumer agenda. After all, despite what the politicians say, the gains from trade do not primarily arise from chiselling out access to distant markets for producers.
The biggest benefit comes from the competition that foreign producers bring to domestic markets. Competition drives innovation and cuts margins: that means more products and lower prices for consumers.
Competition forces firms to become more efficient to thrive. Firms protected from that competition grow fat and lazy, taking their customers for granted because they have nowhere else to go.
Regulation is a different type of limitation on competition, one that is equally damaging and even more insidious. Whatever lofty language is used to justify them, regulations are primarily about government control over businesses and markets.
Sometimes that control is exercised effectively, for a good purpose; such as regulations around manufacturing standards for medicines and medical devices.
But more often, regulation - regardless of how well-intentioned government is - creates as many problems as it solves. Regulations may create barriers to entry and flow through into unaffordable price rises.
The best example here is childcare, where the National Quality Framework has driven rapid growth in prices and out of pocket costs, despite increasing government subsidies.
Overzealous regulators can also create perverse outcomes, like ASIC's enforcement of responsible lending laws.
And sometimes regulation exists solely for the purpose of protecting vested interests, to the detriment of consumers - such as restrictions on the placement and ownership of pharmacies.
The number and scope of regulations imposed by government has exploded in the last decade or so. It would be convenient to point to the global financial crisis and its supposed failure of capitalism as the genesis of this trend, but in reality a desire to tamper with market forces to control economic outcomes far predates this downturn.
The left of politics in particular has embraced the regulatory state, both because of a discomfort with markets and because the declining power of unions has weakened their ability to push their social and political agenda on business and society through industrial muscle.
The distrust of market forces and the supposed unfairness of the outcomes from free markets are common to both right-wing protectionists and left-wing regulationists. The COVID-19 pandemic has enabled and encouraged the expansion of these attitudes.
Yet, as the Productivity Commission and the governor of the Reserve Bank have both made clear in recent days, freeing up market forces is the key not only to emerging from the COVID-19 recession but to sustained income growth thereafter.
If the green shoots of recovery are indeed more robust than they seemed a few months ago, it will be because Australia's efforts at deregulation and opening of markets in the 1990s and 2000s made our economy one of the most resilient in the world, in spite of the hostility to those ideas that has been growing since then.
It will not be easy to reignite this agenda. A lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and what's left will require taking on entrenched vested interests (particularly in the public sector, where the productivity gains promise to be the greatest).
But if we want broad-based wage growth, then it's time to go to work.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7020715/its-time-to-go-to-bat-for-market-forces/
*************************************http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment