RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/how-do-we-save-people-tyranny-lockdown-katie-hopkins/

Prager U is looking at the impact of lockdown on our mental health and asking, “Was it worth it?”

In the last 30 days, around 40% of people have reported mental or behavioral health issues, 30% anxiety or depression, 26% trauma and stress and 10.7% have considered suicide.

You need to say it twice to stop yourself reading it like a shopping list. During lockdowns, one in ten people have considered suicide in the last 30 days. Look around you. One in ten.

We also know that statistically these figures will be an under-representation. People do not willingly share this kind of information about their darkest thoughts in hopeless moments. Suicide is a private thing, perhaps the most solitary act of all. Right up until what remains of you is found.

4 in 5 U.S. workers live paycheck-to-paycheck. What do you say to a father who no longer has an income to pay the rent? Or a mother made redundant in March with no money to buy food? For many of us work is about much more than satisfying bills, or a providing a home. There is dignity in work, and indignity in the losing of it. This is not unique to lower income homes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/california-apocalypto/#slide-1

Power outages, fires, water shortages, rising taxes, crumbling and congested highways, dismal schools, lawlessness … I t is now August in California.

So we can expect the following from our postmodern state government. There are the now-normal raging wildfires in the coastal and Sierra foothills. And they will be greeted as if they are not characteristic threats of 500 years of settled history, but leveraged as proof of global warming as well as the state’s abject inability to put them out.

When the inept state can’t extinguish them as it has in the past, it suggests that it’s more “natural” to let them burn. Jerry Brown’s team told us that the drought’s toll — millions of dead trees and tens of millions of acres of parched grass and calcified shrubs on hillsides — provided a natural source of food and shelter for bugs and birds and thus need not be grazed or thinned or harvested. And so the wages of drought could be in a sense good for an “ecosystem” that otherwise proved to be green napalm for the people of foothill communities.

We can expect power outages, because we don’t believe in releasing clean heat to make energy. Note that we do not mind people heating up in their 108-degree apartments without power. The planet is always more important than the non-privileged people who inhabit it.

For some reason, solar panels don’t create much power when the state is engulfed in dust, haze, and smoke.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/26/four-covid-19-charts-democrats-cant-let-you-know-about/

If the Democratic National Convention made anything clear, it is that Democrats are entirely invested in making the coronavirus pandemic look worse than it is in the United States.

Almost every speaker decried the response and blamed President Donald Trump for the scale of the disease in the country.

In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said “Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” Later he said, “We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths.”

Fact checkers somehow missed Biden’s flagrant abuse of statistics. NPR’s “fact check” of Biden’s speech said only that, if anything, Biden undercounted the number of COVID-19 deaths.

But the number of infections and deaths is meaningless out of context. What matters is how many have died per capita, how many who’ve been infected have succumbed to the disease and where the trends are right now.

When you do that, the picture looks far less bleak.

The U.S. is far from the worst in the world in terms of the death rate per million population. The U.S. ranks 10th for per capita deaths worldwide, and notably better than the United Kingdom with its socialist health care scheme, and Sweden, which adopted a much more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic than the U.S.

On confirmed cases per million, the U.S. ranks 9th, but this is in part due to the extensive testing we’ve done. In fact, despite what Biden and Co. will have you believe, we are in the top of the pack when it comes to COVID-19 tests per capita. (Note also that only four of the other 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations do better than the U.S. on tests per capita.)

When it comes to the case fatality rate – the share of confirmed cases who have died – there is no comparison. Not only does the U.S. outperform most countries – as well as the world overall – the case fatality rate in the U.S. has been steadily declining.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdowns-economy-pandemic-recession-business-shutdown-sweden-coronavirus-11598281419?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h

Blanket business shutdowns—which the U.S. never tried before this pandemic—led to a deep recession. Economists and health experts say there may be a better way.

In response to the novel and deadly coronavirus, many governments deployed draconian tactics never used in modern times: severe and broad restrictions on daily activity that helped send the world into its deepest peacetime slump since the Great Depression.

The equivalent of 400 million jobs have been lost world-wide, 13 million in the U.S. alone. Global output is on track to fall 5% this year, far worse than during the financial crisis, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Despite this steep price, few policy makers felt they had a choice, seeing the economic crisis as a side effect of the health crisis. They ordered nonessential businesses closed and told people to stay home, all without the extensive analysis of benefits and risks that usually precedes a new medical treatment.

There wasn’t time to gather that sort of evidence: Faced with a poorly understood and rapidly spreading pathogen, they prioritized saving lives.

Five months later, the evidence suggests lockdowns were an overly blunt and economically costly tool.