Mask-Wearing Represents Fear and Blind Obedience, Not Science
Dennis Prager
When I see people walking outside, often alone with no one anywhere near them, wearing a mask, my primary reactions are disappointment and sadness.
I am disappointed because I expected better from my fellow Americans. I never thought most Americans would be governed by irrational fears and unquestioning obedience to authority. I have come to realize that I had a somewhat romanticized view of my countrymen.
Had you told me a year ago that nearly every American in nearly every metropolitan area would cover their faces for over a year because one man, one political party and the media told them to, I would have responded that you underestimate the strength of the American character.
But here we are, over a year later, and where I live (the Los Angeles area), I am usually the only person on the street not wearing a mask. (For the record, I wear a mask in stores and when entering the building in which I work, out of courtesy to those who think a person not wearing a mask poses a lethal threat.)
On the rare occasions I pass people not wearing a mask, I thank and praise them. They are invariably enthused by my reaction.
You do not need medical or scientific expertise to understand the foolishness of outdoor mask-wearing. Common sense, that great unused guide to life, suffices.
If you wear a mask, you do so in the belief that you are protecting yourself (and others) from COVID-19. So, then, why do you care if I don't wear a mask? Doesn't your mask protect you? If it does, my not wearing a mask may irritate you because you resent my assertion of freedom, my obvious lack of respect for government and medical authorities, and my alleged selfishness, but there would be no rational medical -- that is, "science-based" -- reason for your objecting to my not wearing a mask.
And if masks protect us and others, why have people been refused the right to visit a loved one as he or she lay dying alone? Why couldn't a person -- wearing the same mask a doctor, nurse or any health care worker wears when entering your parent's room -- enter that room? There are two possible answers: One is it's a tacit admission that masks are essentially useless. You were prevented from visiting your dying father because the hospital believes your loved one or others in the hospital might contract the virus from you, even though you were wearing a mask. Which means those running the hospital don't believe masks actually work. The other is that the medical establishment and lay authorities have abandoned elementary human decency in the name of AOC, or "Abundance of Caution." Forcing hundreds of thousands of people to die alone will go down as one of the cruelest policies ever adopted by American medical and political authorities.
The problem is most Americans who went to college learned to unquestioningly obey "experts." This is why common sense, logic and reason mean little to the well-educated -- and, increasingly, to everyone else, because everyone is taught by the well-educated. All we need to know is what the "experts" say. That plus a fanatical adherence to the rule of AOC have crushed logic and reason.
The irony, however, is that "the science" doesn't justify the fanatical commitment to mask-wearing. There are plenty of experts with evidence-based views to the contrary. Here are but a few examples:
Dr. Anthony Fauci himself told the truth about the uselessness of mask-wearing on "60 Minutes" on March 8, 2020: "Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks. ... There's no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences: People keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face."
Dr. Ramin Oskoui, a cardiologist in Washington at a Senate hearing in December 2020, testified under oath: "Masks do not work." (The New York Times, Dec. 8, 2020.)
The Wall Street Journal reported on Nov. 11, 2020: "The projected number of lives saved, and the implied case for a mask mandate, are based on a faulty statistic."
Dr. Paul E. Alexander, a Canadian epidemiologist, wrote: "Surgical and cloth masks, used as they currently are, have absolutely no impact on controlling the transmission of Covid-19 virus, and current evidence implies that face masks can be actually harmful." (American Institute for Economic Research, Feb. 11, 2021.)
Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Riverside, wrote: "A 'mask,' and that term usually refers to either a SURGICAL mask or N95 mask, has no benefit in the general population and is only useful in controlled clinical settings. Further, it has been considered a greater transmission risk than a benefit in the general population. ... In the open environment, no one should be wearing face coverings." (American Institute for Economic Research, Oct. 16, 2020.)
Finally, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 21, 2020, concluded: "We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic."
Contrary to mainstream media misinformation, the doctors who wrote that report did not later retract anything they wrote.
People say they "follow the science." They rarely do. They follow the scientists the media tell them to follow.
https://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2021/04/06/maskwearing-represents-fear-and-blind-obedience-not-science-n2587447
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The ‘Party Of Science’ Can’t Seem To Bring Itself To Endorse Vaccines
Fundamentally, science is a process — a means of explaining the world through observation, questioning, formulating assumptions and testing through experimentation and further observation. To quote Sagan, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
What is not science? Blind and unquestioning adherence to the opinions of anointed “experts.”
Yet, during the past year, obedience to politicians, their cherry-picked experts and government bureaucrats has been demanded of Americans as a patriotic duty — all in the name of science. From no corner have these calls been louder, more frequent and expressed with greater opprobrium, than from members of the Democratic Party – the self-proclaimed “Party of Science.”
Americans have been insulted, censored, shouted down and physically attacked for requesting empirical evidence before agreeing to imprison themselves in their homes, abandon interpersonal contact, shutter their businesses, sacrifice their children’s education and walk around with condensation-laden glasses – all imposed with the imprimatur of “science.” This, despite the knowledge that absent effective vaccines, there was little we could do to alter the epidemic’s ultimate course.
Alas, the data is in. States that took a balanced approach to the epidemic fared as well or better than those that imposed prolonged, stringent, economy-crushing and unemployment-inducing lockdowns.
Florida, with its large elderly population, took a targeted but liberal path and is 27th among states in its COVID-19 population death rate. Florida’s 1605 deaths per million people is much lower than that of New York (2668 deaths/million), New Jersey (2,833 deaths/million) and Michigan (1802 deaths/million), and only modestly higher than that of much younger California (1545/million). These latter 4 states employed prolonged, draconian lockdowns. Florida’s unemployment rate sits at an impressive 4.7 percent, compared with California’s 8.3%, Michigan’s 6.8%, New Jersey’s 7.7% and New York’s whopping 8.5%.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed confounded the experts, bringing spectacularly effective vaccines in less than a year. Over 80% of Americans 65 years and older, and more than 50 percent of adults, have received at least one shot. Deaths and hospitalizations have plummeted.
Vaccination of the elderly and vulnerable is ending the crisis. Instead of riding out the epidemic, acquiring natural immunity through infection while our at-risk relatives suffered through serious and deadly infections, we gained control. Science won.
We would expect jubilance at the supremacy of science from a science-infused party. Instead, many Democrats seem gloomy, unwilling to embrace the shining light at the end of the tunnel. Have Democrats become vaccine doubters?
Joe Biden could not bring himself to celebrate our success, largely the result of his predecessor’s policies. Biden on March 29 said, “Our work is far from over. The war against COVID-19 is far from won. This is deadly serious. … I’m reiterating my call for every governor, mayor, and local leader to maintain and reinstate the mask mandate.” The same day, a CDC study reported that vaccinated individuals are at low risk for infection, do not carry the virus in significant numbers and by extension are not an important source of spread.
Despite the over 200 million administered vaccine doses and the millions of people who gained immunity through infection, Americans are told it is too dangerous to go on with their lives. Why? Some people continue to get infected. New variants have been identified. Even if most of those infected are young and healthy and variants pose no immediate threat, the vaccinated must hunker down.
https://dailycaller.com/2021/04/21/klein-the-party-of-science-cant-seem-to-bring-itself-to-endorse-vaccines/
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The Dirty ‘Great Reset’ Secret Behind Big Corporations’ New War Against Conservatives
In recent months, hundreds of large corporations and financial institutions have rallied around liberal causes and even put policies into place directly targeting conservatives or their views.
For example, on April 14, hundreds of the largest corporations and financial institutions in the world, including Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Starbucks, signed a statement opposing “discriminatory legislation” that aims to make elections more secure—an apparent reference to commonsense reforms like the ones recently passed in Georgia, which include a requirement that voters provide a driver’s license or free state identification card to prove their identity prior to casting a ballot.
Similarly, Major League Baseball recently announced it’s moving its annual All-Star Game out of Georgia as a protest against the state’s new election requirements.
In February, Coca-Cola allegedly provided employees with radical diversity training that asked them to “try to be less white,” which, according to leaked slides from the presentation, involves being “less oppressive” and requires a “break with white solidarity.”
In February and March, the six largest banks in the United States announced that they would phase in a net-zero carbon dioxide financing requirement for all of their business operations, effectively making it impossible for fossil-fuel companies—as well as any other business that refuses to “go green”—to secure a loan or benefit from various other financial services at the country’s biggest banks. Many other, smaller banks have also signed on.
Why are so many large corporations and financial institutions embracing left-wing causes, alienating tens of millions of conservative Americans in the process? Although there are likely several important reasons, the biggest is cronyism—but not necessarily the old-fashioned kind of backroom dealing between corporate leaders and politicians that we’re all used to.
In recent years, dramatic shifts in monetary policy, coupled with greater coordination between bankers, investors, government officials, and corporations, have ushered in an entirely new era of cronyism and the centralization of economic and social decision-making, one that poses significant dangers to individual liberty.
At the foundation of the change is the recent rapid increase in money-printing that has been pursued by central banks in the United States and Europe, which have increased the money supply by trillions of dollars in just a few years.
Once government officials realized they are now able to spend nearly any amount of money they want without having to raise taxes, and banks learned that they can get a steady stream of newly printed cash from central banks on-demand, these two powerful groups came to the conclusion that they can effectively manage most economic activity without having to pass a slew of new laws, taxes, and restrictions.
Rather than resist these changes, large corporations and investors know they can benefit immensely from the arrangement. All they have to do is play ball by agreeing to adhere to the whims of central banks, governments in North America and Europe, and their political allies—most of which are left-wing activist groups and labor unions.
I know this might sound like a wild right-wing conspiracy theory, but the evidence is quite overwhelming. In June 2020, the World Economic Forum, working with CEOs and presidents from large corporations, powerful bankers, international institutions, labor union leaders, and activists, launched the “Great Reset,” a plan to overhaul the entire global economy.
“Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed,” wrote Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, in an article about the initiative. “In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”
How, exactly, will this transformation occur? Exactly as we are seeing it play out now. Corporations and banks will impose left-wing social justice policies on society, and they will be rewarded by governments, central banks, and investors, who, in turn, will also earn large profits from new streams of government-printed cash.
We know that this is occurring not only because corporations and banks have already started to align with left-wing goals, even though they know it will frustrate large proportions of their customer base, but also because corporations have widely adopted environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards that systematize social justice goals within their businesses.
According to a report (pdf) by KPMG, thousands of companies worldwide already have ESG or sustainability reporting systems in place, including 98 percent of large companies in the United States.
Further, groups such as Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) have managed to get more than 3,000 investors and investor groups to agree to support businesses that embrace ESG systems. PRI’s signatories control more than $100 trillion in wealth, so you can bet that when they talk, big corporations are listening.
In the past, corporations used to stay out of most political and ideological debates, because alienating huge segments of society generally isn’t a good recipe for success in a market economy. But now that trillions of dollars are flowing into financial institutions and banks, it makes a lot more financial sense for corporations to move to the left than it does to stay neutral.
Tens of millions of conservative customers collectively control a substantial amount of money, to be sure, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the folks who have signed up for the PRI and who spend their winters skiing with George Soros in Davos.
Corporations are moving to the left for a reason, and it’s not because they have suddenly had a come-to-Bernie conversion. The Great Reset, like so many other movements in history, is all about money and power—and these days, there’s plenty of both available for ruling-class elites to get their fill.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-dirty-great-reset-secret-behind-big-corporations-new-war-against-conservatives_3782326.html
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
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)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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