When I compare the "free-range" childhood of my generation with today's helicopter parenting, I see adults who are unable to control their fears about their children, and who therefore impose their neuroses not only on their own children, but on everyone else's children.
We lost our oldest daughter in infancy to severe heart and liver defects. So I am painfully aware of what it feels like to lose a child. But I knew it would be psychologically unhealthy for my other children if I protected them from *everything* for fear of losing them. I had to use self-control--a quality that seems to have gone by the wayside--to reject the temptation to shelter my kids too carefully.
The reality is that no matter how careful we are, we cannot prevent all dangers. A look at freak accidents will show that. There is a very real risk, though, of making ourselves and our children mentally sick by refusing to live in the effort to protect our lives.
Obviously, masking the healthy is ineffective in terms of reducing transmission: it’s basically just theater. But masking the sick is another matter entirely. Masking sick people (especially those who are coughing), obviously reduces transmission. Masks are a physical barrier that stop a significant portion of droplets being expelled into the air. It doesn’t stop all the virus being expelled into the air, but it certainly reduces the amount.
We’ve all sat next to someone in a restaurant or next to someone on a plane who is coughing their head off, coughing in our face or coughing all over our food, and thought, “I’m probably going to get sick.” And you’re not wrong to think that. You probably are going to get sick. Coughing spreads disease. And masking a cough is a way to reduce transmission. It’s not perfect but it’s a reduction. Not only that, it’s polite.
So, if you’re sick, put on a mask. If you’re healthy, don’t wear one.
Here is the thing: a good argument can be made that masks INCREASE the risk of disease transmission precisely because they create the illusion of protection. The sick person, rather than staying home, chooses to go out because they are wearing a mask.
What actually seems to transmit airborne viral infections, from what I read, is not typically the droplets expelled in a sneeze or cough, unless you sneeze or cough directly into someone's face, which has been a no-no since something like thousands of years ago. It is the act of breathing, which transmits airborne virus particles that linger a long time, travel 30 or more feet, and which are easily inhaled whether there is a mask present or not.
The most recent survey from Europe actually found a slight POSITIVE correlation between mask wearing and overall mortality. The more masks were worn, the more people died. The effect was small--as is any claimed positive effect--and both are within the margin of error.
The whole thing is ridiculous and risible, but it stops being funny when we consider how problems in reading and speaking have skyrocketed among young children born into the pandemic responses. Many of these kids, strictly because of these idiotic measures, will spend their lives socially as functionally autistic or "on the spectrum" in terms of their lack of ability to process social cues and interact in normal human ways.
I have concluded that what the WHO/CDC/WEF are doing is NOT ridiculous, it is far worse. It appears very deliberate. I do not think our masters at these entities are that stupid. A far better theory is that they want to weaken the Western World. They appear to have some sort of symbiotic relationship with the CCP, in that both are driving towards a bilateral world consisting of two totalitarian entities that somehow are mutually beneficial. (Of course only one, the CCP, will end up with a competent military. So perhaps the Western totalitarians are betting on some kind of deal with their more powerful partner.) The most serious resistance to WEF comes from the non-woke Westerners, so they must be weakened. WEF does not criticize the CCP, nor the woke ideology in any of its manifestations - they promote it. This is simply my best guess as to better connect the dots of what is happening to our world.
What's interesting about that, though, is that China is destroying itself in the quest to get rid of COVID, which I don't think many people think is possible.
It's funny that some ideas which are basically intended as inside jokes--like Keynesian economics, which is a back door path to fascistic control of the economy by the government--are taken SERIOUSLY by the very people who were supposed to use them to weaken opponents.
The simple fact, as I see it, is that you cannot be a sincere Leftist and not on some level be a de facto imbecile. They are both tactically and strategically brilliant at times, but the souls behind these minds are empty.
Keynes was not entirely wrong either. Sometimes you really do need to prime the pump, and prime it good. Money (aka liquidity) is the lifeblood of any modern economy, like the oil in an engine (try running a car without enough of it, and disaster results). Supply does NOT automatically create it's own demand, nor does wealth and prosperity automatically trickle down from the ultra-rich and mega-corporations either.
However, it is also obvious that consumption does not automatically create wealth either (even though it stimulates and motivates such creation), it by definition consumes it, and certainly war doesn't create wealth, it destroys it. And inflation and recession are not mutually exclusive.
You know it's not possible for people to just stay home if they have to get to work. People living alone also may have no other way to leave home and get necessities including medicines. There's nothing wrong with people who are sick to consider masking up to be considerate to others if they they have need to leave the house. That said, it should not be a government mandate. If people generally do this because it's a collective cultural desire, like people in Asia have been doing for years since SARs 2000 before Covid, there's nothing wrong with it. It's not forced, and there was no social pressure by Woke authoritarians. As long as it's people's voluntary choice, and I emphasize voluntary, who cares?
And I agree forced mandates for people, sick or not, to wear masks is asinine and ridiculous except in hospitals.
This has been discussed endlessly. Those that do not want to hear just do not hear. There is nothing wrong about masking up if that is your fantasy -- the problem is believing, implying, or promoting that it is "considerate to others". Literally hundreds of studies show that masking for respiratory viruses makes no difference. An equivalent statement would be "There is nothing wrong with people who are sick to consider carrying a rabbit's foot to be considerate to others...".
I have lived in China and Japan where people have warn these entirely symbolic masks at volume for decades. I have been in Israel where many wear Yarmulkes. They are equally effective at warding off respiratory viruses, but perhaps the Yarmulke will get you a disease pass from God?
If you've lived in China and Japan then you know there is more nuances to what you're saying about masks not being effective to protect others either. The real issue here is people all applying a one size fits all recommendations to the entire country or entire world. This has been the most problematic approach in the very first place. The pandemic should've been handled regionally and locally from the get go.
In Japanese and other super crowded and populated Asian cities,where masses of people use public transportations 10 hours a day and people are on top of each other everywhere, people are indeed breathing very close to each other. Will the masks prevent the virus from spreading full stop if people are masked in these places? No. But it is not entirely symbolic for them to try to avoid spreading illnesses to others that way in case they sneeze or cough. OTOH, it is absurdly ridiculous to say this same practice is necessary in Wyoming where one can't even see another living soul driving 60 miles. This is why I was so disgusted with all the politically posturing by both Democratic Republican governors of totally different states. Would you not agree the media sparring by posturing between the likes of Cuomo and Noem were moronic? It makes absolutely not sense for a governor who has to deal with a major metropolitan city and another governor who deals with a state made up of mostly vast land to tell each other which way is right and what to do. And in Cuomo's case, it also makes no sense for what is recommended in NYC subways to be recommended for people living in Buffalo. If there had been more of a common sense approach from those in leadership positions from the get go, instead of political one-upsmanship, people wouldn't have been all politicized like we are today.
Another nuance you leave out is you really don't know if someone masking up is immuno compromised in some ways. Just as it's wrong to judge people who don't wear mask, it's not right to jump to conclusion and judge those who do unless we know their story. Sure if someone is just a virtue signally paranoid, they're idiots. But how would I know if someone in the supermarket is just recovering from cancer and maybe want to wear mask to minimize risks of getting ill?
There had always been sensible ways of making recommendations for public health. With guidance and reasoned explanations, enforcements in places where needed like hospitals and super crowded areas like public transit where people literally squeeze up against each other's bodies, better sanitation practices by building managements, etc. And then letting people decide what is best for them. I don't think it's helpful to take a one size fits all approach.
But yes I do agree with you that those who do not want to hear just do not want to hear. Those people are lost causes.
To my knowledge, there is no study that definitively answers the question, does a mask reduce the amount of airborne virus if worn by a contagious person, a person infected with an airborne, respiratory virus.
I agree. These mask mandates have done a tremendous amount of harm: to our children, to our civil liberties, to our trust in institutions that matter. Government mandates are a very dangerous animal…
If you're sick and wearing a mask you'll likely be sicker than if you went without. You're rebreathing the viruses thereby increasing your viral load. Just stay home.
I was talking with a nurse a few months ago who has had multiple sinus infections this year after decades of having none. The variable? Forced mask wearing. All these medical personnel know better. Somehow, though, the high ups--most of whom likely don't have to comply with their own mandates--have been coopted or paid to push this ridiculous nonsense.
The only sane reasoning I have heard is that they are afraid of being sued by patients who get sick after visiting, and that may have some validity, but that just points back to the need for tort reform in the direction of allowing people to make sane and justified decisions in a world where perfect safety and perfect freedom from fear are not only not possible, but largely undesirable.
If we cover up every hard edge on the planet, how will that not act directly to breed ridiculous, fearful, stupid and needy people everywhere?
It's the opposite: if you are not sick, but still wearing a mask, bacteria accumulate on the wet surfaces of the mask, which you then rebreathe. Most of these lung infections in my view relate to all this. And this effect obviously is multiplied considerably by people wearing the same masks daily for weeks and months, which no health expert anywhere can justify, and which all health experts should have spoken out against strongly.
But they didn't. This is just one more line of evidence that the System has been captured by cowards, crooks and imbeciles.
And, again, all this is well established science. Nothing ground breaking is happening when people wonder why the hell healthy people are being asked to pretend they are sick, and everyone around them is suffering some sort of immune disorder.
Not true. If you were first infected with, say, 100 virus particles, each of those would theoretically infect 100 respiratory cells, take over the cellular machinery to make 10 more of themselves. Now you exhale 1000 virus particles and then REBREATHE them because they're trapped in your well-fitting mask. Not exactly, maybe you breathe 700 but you are still rebreathing and reinfecting yourself.
I work in pediatrics, and have pulled many snot-laden masked off of little faces to peer into their throats. To think those masks can stay on a sick person for hours and NOT cause you to be more sick is just foolish.
Thanks for your reply. Respectfully though, I have to say that you are incorrect. However, if you have access to some study, that shows evidence to the contrary, I would be pleased to read it.
By the time they are showing symptoms, sick people have untold trillions upon trillions of infected cells. And their immune system has already mounted a response to the virus. So, even though they’re spreading the virus like mad, they themselves are actually on the mend. They are not increasing their viral load by re-breathing their exhaled air, once they are symptomatic. Viral load really matters at the beginning – it determines the severity of the infection.
Anyway, all of this discussion about viral loads is not to say that masking sick folks is 100% good for them. It’s not. If they wear it too long, if they wear someone else’s mask, if they let a mask get filthy (or snotty), etc. it’s not great for them. But masking sick people who are Out In Public, is 100% good for other people Because it reduces transmission. Reducing transmission is good public health policy. And it’s good manners.
I'll never forget a flight to Ireland about six years ago. "Bucket list" vacation. Took preemptive Vitamin C and antioxidants for weeks to bolster my immune system because I'm notorious for catching things on overseas trips. Got stuck sitting next to a lady yakking her head off and breathing and coughing all over me. She was one of those "chatty" seatmates. Yup, sure enough 72 hours later I started coming down with one of the worst colds I'd had in years which threw a serious wrench into my experience in that beautiful country and necessitated at least one visit to a sweet old doctor in Killarney.
I thought the whole mask mandate thing was generally ridiculous and went on for way too long, especially on planes. But that woman could and should have worn a mask. Or at least kept her particle-spewing trap shut throughout the flight knowing she was sick. The problem is you can't force sick people who ought to wear one to wear one. On a plane you're trapped and can't very well get up and go sit someplace else when you're seated next to Typhoid Mary. Hopefully with the new air filtration systems all the airlines installed in response to Covid, it might help.
Thanks for your reply. One of the key things that has been missing, since the beginning of Covid, has been any kind of nuance in the conversation. But any conversation or study regarding masking needs to  distinguish between: universal masking, masking the healthy, and masking the sick.
So, with respect to the study you mention (that shows mortality increases with mask wearing) I would have to ask: what kind of masking does this refer to? Masking the sick? Masking the healthy? Both?
I agree that masking healthy people likely produces a multitude of negative consequences, possibly even increased mortality. But masking sick people is different. It is a reasonable and effective means of reducing disease transmission. Especially in areas with high density populations. And while I agree, if you’re sick or coughing you should stay home, I understand that sick people can’t always stay home. Ditto for coughing people. So, if they go out, these people should wear a mask if they’re going to be around other people. It decreases transmission.
I'm not going to take the time to look up the study, which in any event is likely buried in the Search engines, since that is how things work lately, but it was looking at mandated universal masking, on one end of the continuum, versus Sweden and other countries like it. The countries where they were arresting people and denying them access to being in public for not wearing masks compared to, again, countries like Sweden, where I read they actually BANNED MASKS in some towns.
You can look at all this, and not find any pattern in regards to overall mortality, probably in either direction, and certainly not a robust result in the direction of lower mortality.
We have relied on common sense and common decency for many decades. By all means if people had to work who were sick they should have worn masks. But nobody who was not sick, and categorically not children.
What is worth remembering is that 1) this disease is less dangerous than the flu for healthy adults under the age of 65 or so; and 2) the nature of pandemics is that sooner or later at least 70-80% of people have to be exposed and either die or develop relative immunity in order for the spread to diminish. There will be a new variant every year indefinitely, but having had any of them clearly conveys some immunity to all of them, much like the cold and flu.
Thanks for your reply. I agree with your comment. But I would also like to reiterate that nuance is important. I think that people who are sick with Covid should wear a mask because it reduces transmission - so fewer people are likely to get sick. That probably doesn’t translate into much of a decrease in mortality because  the overall mortality for Covid ( for under 65 years old, and no pre-existing conditions) is low to begin with.
Which is not to say the only thing we should be concerned about is mortality. Personally, I don’t like getting sick. So, I wish that the person with a cough would mask up. (As you say: Better yet, they should stay at home).
Masking sick people is a good idea because  it reduces transmission. And it’s courteous.
"I think that people who are sick with Covid should wear a mask because it reduces transmission"
how could that be? The virus is TINY compared to the gaps in masks. Thinking a mask will prevent the spread of the virus is like expecting a chain-link fence to shield you from a bullet. It's physically impossible!
"not only on their own children, but on everyone else's children"
Exactly. We are supposed to "respect" the fears of the most terrified. As soon as one mom drives her child 100 yards to the school bus stop (in a safe neighborhood with sidewalks) and sits in the car with him, with the engine running, until the bus comes, every other mom has to wonder if she's a bad parent for "only" walking with her child to the stop and waiting, and a mom who lets her child walk to the stop and wait by himself might as well be shouting, "I hate my child and want him to die!" at least in Facebook-land.
Great comment. We got up on our own, fed ourselves, and walked alone to the bus stop in -10F weather. After our mom's went to work. We are stronger for it.
When I was 9 years old I walked to the end of the block to wait for a school bus. Later, as a teenager, I walked a mile to school every day. Children can endure.
I walked alone at 5 and wore a key, tied to a shoelace, around my neck so I could let myself into an empty house when I got home. My mother was off getting her masters degree and my father was at work in Manhattan. Today, they’d be arrested for child neglect.
It might be different in rural areas but .. in cities, it's no laughing matter. if you have a young girl in NYC, how could you let her take the subway alone?
answer -- you shouldn't. it's not helicopter parenting, it's reality.
In some places, it's not safe for children to walk/bicycle to school because of dangerous street crossings and a lack of sidewalks. However, this is something of a chicken-or-egg issue. The plans for school location and street design are premised on everyone's being in a car. And since children are all indoors or in vehicles, drivers feel like they can drive like maniacs.
Between 5 and 10 I walked to school. We had street guards to stop traffic on the busier roads. After that we moved out of the city so I rode the bus. Short driveway but there wasn't any of this Mom sitting in the car keeping me warm in the winter.
The mom who only drives their child to the bus stop is still a "bad mom". In order to really be a "good mom" you have to drive your kids to school daily.
In our community, the entrances to all of our public schools are jammed with good moms who "have to" drive their kids to school every day. It's gridlock at a couple of the schools, and they have to station crossing guards, police, and administrators to manage the traffic.
The reasons for doing so are comical - including "it's safer", "my kids won't be exposed to other, potentially sick kids", and best of all "when I drive my kids, they can sleep in for an extra 15 minutes".
"No Cell Phone Area" signs for all the "good" parents driving and dropping kids off to school. Parents are driving distracted, involved in conversations so intense that children climb out of car without a goodbye or wave. A special shout out to the good parents that double park and drop off their young children to run between the SUVs of other "good" parents.
I'd love to have my kids on the bus again. Perhaps many parents are like me, and lost our bus route for two years due to COVID and we now have a shortage of bus drivers. Once we fought the district to get our bus stop back it now takes 1.5 hours to drive 3 miles, on an overcrowded bus that frequently breaks down stranding the kids on the highway until another bus picks them up. I'm not about to let my kids, especially my 1st grader walk three miles on the highway through high crime areas. Fortunately I have a carpool set up, but most people I know would love to have their kids on the bus. It's not as practical as it used to be.
You always have to keep in mind that they could call in a Child Neglect accusation or call the cops if you let your child walk up the sidewalk in your own neighborhood in the daytime. We may not have to actually respect their fear, but we have to respect their power to harass us.
This is the weakest link: "every other mom has to wonder if she's a bad parent for "only" walking with her child to the stop and waiting"
She is also who touted her support for obama and disgust of trump. She is the easily manipulated, fearful, need-for-consensus woman who has been led astray by her peers. She is the majority, now, of upper-middle-class white women. They lack everything except conformity to the norm espoused by their media thought-leaders.
They are far from GGrrrrrllllll and much nearer Baaaaa-baaaaaa.
We need to remember that respecting the fears of others does not require that we either accept them or react to them in the way that others may demand.
Perfectly said. I am happy to let others mitigate their fears however they wish within their own families. But their fears are not my problem, and I am not part of their solution. That's on them, not me.
Yes but what would happen if you systematically trained a particular group to believe that the cops are hunting them and everyone they meet is secretly bigoted against them? Would that result in poor outcomes?
KD, generational stupidity, trying is capitulation, children are taught to drop out, not to overcome but to wallow in victimhood and bemoan the unfairness of it all. It is easy to see.
This would be a semi-valid critique if you hadn’t pledged your life, fortune, and sacred honor to the collectivist scumbags who inject race into literally everything.
"And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm." - KevinDurant?, 2023
So, the black people are cheating/stealing elections, KevinDurant?
"And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm." - KevinDurant?, 2023
"So you are pretending to not know that we have tons of data on how various demographic groups vote?"
- Nah. Just a set-up to see what you'd do. Turns out you doubled-down and walked right into it.
"And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm." - KevinDurant?, 2023
So, the black people are cheating, KevinDurant?
Looks like you're judging people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. Sad. I'll be discussing this with Fetterman.
Oh I understand you are *trying* to talk about me. That’s why I pointed out that you are being a total hypocrite and fraud and as such your views on this matter have no credibility or legitimacy whatsoever.
It’s like if OJ criticized someone for not holding the door for his wife and upon receiving pushback OJ said
Once again my idea that we could eliminate graffiti by punishing it with the death penalty proves to be correct. You don’t need a massive anti-graffiti surveillance system. You just need to publicly execute a few guys and everyone else will fall in line.
Leftists are using this tactic in almost every facet of life.
My view on the matter is that I don't claim people are cheating in elections dues to the color of their skin.
"And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm." - KevinDurant?, 2023
So, the black people are cheating, KevinDurant?
Looks like you're judging people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. Sad. I'll be discussing this with Fetterman.
Accidentally released by a lab that designed this particular virus specifically to gain the function of being able to infect humans, partly funded by Fauci, may not be a conspiracy but it's pretty goddamned stupid if you ask me.
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
(boilerplate response to idiotic trolls with paranoid conspiratard narratives)
You just proved my point, again: you are deeply disturbed, you have a profoundly flawed understanding of reality and you are PROJECTING your own tendency to make up stupid shit when you can't make sense of things.
Highly recommend this discussion between Jordan Peterson & Matt Ripley on the origins of covid. So easy for a cummings wannabe with a tiny first letter complex to dismiss everything he doesn't want to know as conspiratorial. Careful with that period after the e! Definitely the workings of the patriarchy & probably racist.
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
(boilerplate response to idiotic trolls with paranoid conspiratard narratives)
You just proved my point, again: you are deeply disturbed, you have a profoundly flawed understanding of reality and you are PROJECTING your own tendency to make up stupid shit when you can't make sense of things.
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
Once again my idea that we could eliminate graffiti by punishing it with the death penalty proves to be correct. You don’t need a massive anti-graffiti surveillance system. You just need to publicly execute a few guys and everyone else will fall in line.
Leftists are using this tactic in almost every facet of life.
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
Once again my idea that we could eliminate graffiti by punishing it with the death penalty proves to be correct. You don’t need a massive anti-graffiti surveillance system. You just need to publicly execute a few guys and everyone else will fall in line.
Leftists are using this tactic in almost every facet of life.
We’ve created a division amongst our youth in the form of a mask. It is now strictly used to feel “safer” and has nothing to do with reality in mostly cases. Breaks my heart to see kids masked, knowing that their parents, teachers, and other leaders still aren’t aware that it is interfering with building their immune system..and interfering with building relationships.
After almost losing two of our children my heart goes out in a major way. Your response here should be gospel. None of the last three years needed to happen. Viruses cannot be stopped. Will you please have a good day?
I think part of the issue is that previous generations were less afraid. Same hardwiring in every generation but the software changes and even if someone read the news for ten minutes once a week (I aim for less) and only saw cable news in airport waiting areas, it would be enough to terrify them into thinking the world was a dystopian hellscape. I try to, as the cool kids say, touch grass and live in the body as a rule but I don’t envy modern parents who are more connected and plugged in than any other generation before them.
Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter and Tik Tok just to name a few. Then we have cable the biggest disease of all, sprouting lie after lie, the planet has become a very dangerous place to live in.
No, but it does give rise to the aggressively (and aggressive) "intellectual" wannabe types, some who get thousands, millions of likes; others, (like you) not so much. So transparent, to call someone a troll who has just called you on your bullshit. I bet you do that a lot in the 3D world.
Perhaps one difference is that families today are smaller and so each child is more "precious" than each of a large family. I had seven siblings, and so the family could afford to lose one (not really but you get the point). Families with only one or two children tend to guard them more than families with many children. Losing an only child would be totally devastating.
True, but Europeans tend to have even smaller families than Americans, and yet they are still far less helicoptering than Americans are these days. Or so I have heard.
"adults who are unable to control their fears about their children, and who therefore impose their neuroses not only on their own children, but on everyone else's children."
Can you imagine Greta’s household! It must be bizarre to be living in it or to have grown up in it, and then to top it all the UN to buy into all this bullshit crazy stuff.
I don't buy that. Her ego has gotten the better of her just like most people who get broadcast exposure and people fawning over them. It's easy to convince a person that she is a savior. Not so easy to remain humble in such a spotlight.
Celia - Unfortunately, re your last point, that horse is already out of the barn for most families, especially in blue cities and states where people are less likely to get information countering official, fear-inducing diktats.
Succinctly, if you protect your child from every risk, there is a 100% chance the child will grow up messed up, and if you don't protect your child from every risk, there is a small chance your child will be permanently harmed by something you could have protected against. Not gambling is not a choice in this matter.
As an example, I had a friend who was watching her only child, a son, play little league. He was at bat and hit in the chest by a pitched ball. The blow stopped his heart and he died. This was before CPR.
Was little league banned because of this? No....
When you step out of your front door, you enter a dangerous environment. The most dangerous thing you do every day, is get in your car and driving away. Since the invention of the automobile tens of millions of people have been killed. It doesn't stop us from driving.
It's very sad, but the reality is that you can't prevent all possible harm, no matter what you do. But you can drive yourself (and others) crazy by playing the "I've defended against THAT danger; what danger might happen NOW?" game. And children who take no risks at all never manage to gain true self-confidence.
Now that a generation of helicoptered (or worse, snowplowed) kids have reached putative adulthood, we can see the disastrous effects. These young adults have never been allowed to solve their own problems, which leaves them incapable of opening a bank account, renting an apartment, dealing with a speeding ticket, or even going to a job interview without mom there to hold their hand.
Worse yet, kids who are never allowed to test themselves physically fail to develop basic necessary physical traits like a proper sense of balance. They are also more likely to be injured because they don't know what their body is and isn't capable of.
Too many parents forget that they are raising future adults. That is something that my husband and I worked hard to remember at each step of parenting. We now have three adult children who are capable of solving their own problems (although they, like us at the same age) have discovered that parents still have a lot of wisdom to impart).
Life in a zoo is very safe. The animals are well fed and cared for. Unless they get out of the cage. Then they don't have a clue where to go or what to do. They will either be captured or euthanized.
Life in the wild is risky. You may be killed. You may have a hard time finding food. But you are more alive than any zoo animal can ever hope to be. Unless you get put in a cage and sent to the zoo.
Sorry for your loss Celia but love your healthy attitude to life. It makes such a difference to a family if the Mum is in a good space. Wish you all the best for 2023!
I’m sorry for the loss of your eldest daughter, Celia.
At the height of the pandemic, the “esteemed” New York Times ran a piece claiming that Covid was a leading cause of death for children. Instinctively I knew that could not be accurate so I started to research and learned that drowning was actually far deadlier for children (around 4,000 fatalities annually) than Covid ever was or will be. Yet we take risks with baths, showers, pools and other bodies of water every day. The hysteria around Covid and children (IFR < 0.0003%) was absolutely maddening! (And working in a school I was exposed to this madness daily.)
Celia - Your comments are always thought provoking and worth reading.... In this case you have really given me something to think about that is very close to my heart. I have a great deal of anxiety around anticipating/ avoiding loss. Dealing with this is really about self control and acceptance as you point out... I am truly sorry for your loss and I admire your approach....
Excellent article, but data and science have never been as influential as emotion. Fear is effective and viral. Critical thinking is not.
Ever since I saw that surgical masks were being promoted widely rather than the airtight N95 masks that actually stop viruses, it was clear the masking was not about science. Surgical masks are for surgery, not disease control.
So why did the health administrators all unanimously change their guidance on masking with no basis in evidence?
Masks are dehumanizing. They distinguish the subservient from the uncompliant. They train the children to follow orders regardless of any scientific rationale. The message is, "be afraid of ghosts, treat your fear by covering your face, and judge those who do not."
I remember seeing videos of China in a respiratory viral scare from the early 2000s and thinking it was comical that they thought surgical masks protected them. I never imagined it would happen here, but as the USA evolves towards "socialism with Chinese characteristics" itself, it's critical to condition the spirits of the people, especially the children, to achieve that model of governance. This is why none of our leaders feel the need to mask themselves, only you and your children.
We must remain the land of the free and the home of the brave. The world needs our example.
In March 2020 I did a thorough literature search on masking for respiratory viral illness  so I could best advise my patients. As Dr. Prasad stated here the evidence clearly pointed toward universal masking as ineffective. Additionally, personal masking (non-N95) did not appear to provide protection either.  
My recommendation to my patients included handwashing and staying home if they were sick. If they were high risk, I encourage them to hunker down for the time being.
I encouraged them to please continue to come see me when they were ill and I reassured my clinic staff that we were well equipped and experienced at handling infectious respiratory illness. I told them to stay home if they were ill, as we had always done. After all, we had been doing this for decades. 
By the way, staying away from others when we are sick is physical distancing, not social distancing. I wondered at this seemingly totalitarian term even back then.  Driving to work every morning on completely empty streets felt dystopian and out of balance.
 Looking back, I now realize that Dr. Fauci’s first recommendation on “masking as unnecessary” was based on the scientific evidence, and even what the CDC recommended on its website.  Then his narrative changed without new scientific evidence. That was the first time my lizard brain felt like something was off. The rest is history as you all know.
I have a zip file of hundreds of studies that I have collected on COVID-19 over the past three years.  I have a contextual timeline in my mind as well.  I am a thorough physician. I often found myself at odds with the public health narrative. I incorporated natural immunity into my recommendations for my individual patients, based on common sense and what we already know about immunology. The public health narrative never addressed it and current CDC recommendations on COVID-19 vaccination do not incorporate it. This is strange scientifically but consistent with their public health playbook.
The COVID-19 public health narrative actually interfered with my ability to care for my patients in the exam room, and it has done significant damage to our patient’s trust in the system and in us.  And yes, these policies damaged our children. 
I assume you aren’t in California where the new law signed by Newsom would prohibit your questioning the science… and spreading “disinformation”. It’s ridiculous. Thank you for your good work, Dr.
Honestly, if people gave handwashing the level of attention they give to masking, it would be amazing in terms of reducing disease burden. I used to live in a country where diarrheal diseases still killed a lot of children, so I’m fanatical about it, but it’s something we actually know works! And yet, we’re still stuck on mask theater.
Thank you all! I have not done anything that should be considered extraordinary. We take an oath as physicians as old as the profession itself. First, do no harm. This requires a thorough evaluation of the risks and benefits of any medical intervention on the individual patient. Public Health should return to making recommendations only and stay away from mandates. If they have good data we can use, please share it with us transparently. There is not enough space in my exam room for anyone else but me and my patient. Thankfully I practice in a red state.
One really has to ask what's going on when respected physicians teaching at major institutions such as Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins who issued the Great Barrington Declaration, and myriad practicing doctors such as yourself, are hectored and bullied to swoon to a political doctrine that is the antithesis of science and good practice. [edited only to show that both med school professors and those in practice objected to the dogma]
Thank you for your honesty in telling your patients (and us) the truth. Thank you for your integrity in doing the level of research most of us could not. And thank you for your bravery, frankly, in speaking the truth. We are all well aware of the risks you could be taking by doing any of those things (you must not live in Cali or Canada, but there is similar totalitarian pressure in plenty of other places.). Your patients are extremely lucky to have you in their corner.
I ended up buying a breathable mask that was the color of my skin. No protection and only to be able to go into restaurants etc... It was my little joke😊 People need to live a healthy life style and get back to living🙄
That's funny. I bought a bedazzled breathable mesh mask to wear when it was absolutely required. Life is full of risks, always has been and always will be, but the powers-that-be would seemingly like us to forget that as long as we give them the authority to protect us. No thanks. I'll take my chances going it alone.
let's all try to be at least a little braver... I know it's hard but if we don't push back on ghoulish clothes being forced on our children's faces, we will end up having to wear all sorts of mandatory things, and quick
I bought a bunch of colorful, lightweight gauze masks to meet the requirement. Quite breathable, especially on warm days. And totally useless, of course.
I just keep thinking back to 2014-2016, when my then-elementary schooler had cancer and was immunocompromised. No one - not even her team of world-renowned oncologists - suggested we “mask up” outside the hospital.
As someone who wore an N95 on many occasions and never cared if anyone else wore a mask, this is the exact argument I made 3 months into the pandemic. Dozens of instances of visiting nursing homes during flu season and relatives with cancer and never once heard about masks.
The Democrats I was arguing with just insisted I was wrong even though everyone knew I was right and they were just gaslighting me.
You really have to stop to think what a scumbag you have to be to do that. To just lie to someone’s face when you are proven wrong. Not arguing around it. Just straight up lying. I’m not a particularly good person and I would never do that. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
I had a very similar experience in 2015 with my daughter with cancer. When she went back to school, while still in treatment and with a weakened immune system, no one told her to wear a mask, and no one asked her classmates to wear one to « protect » her; a nurse just came into class to explain the situation and the other children’s parents were asked to inform me in case their child had the flu or another contagious disease so I could keep my daughter home then. My daughter’s condition and protection wasn’t her classmates or other’s responsability, but ours, and it made perfet sense. I can’t understand why, 5 years later, everything is done backwards, people are asked to mask or get jabbed « to protect others », children’s are asked to protect their grandparents or accused of killing them… This is insane.
Yes! That’s how my girl’s school handled it, too. Not a mask in sight, either. There were unvaccinated kids at my girl’s school in 2014-2016, and not only were they not required to be vaccinated, but we weren’t even allowed to know who they were! I hope your girl is OK - mine had ETP ALL and is almost 7 years OT.
My daughter is fine too, she had APL, her treatment worked very well and she’s been in remission for 7 years. I’m sure the way things were handled, with the opportunity she was given to resume normal careless child life as soon as possible amongst family and friends (instead of being surrounded by fear, like what was offered to people these past 3 years) played a big role in her recovery…
💯 We went to Disney World for her Make A Wish - no masks, of course. She discovered a love for roller coasters and met every princess. She’s a very social kid - has been a extrovert from Minute 1. The kind of cancer she had is very aggressive, and it’s hard to get into and stay in remission. She did it, but if she had to stay isolated and everyone was “masked up”? I don’t think the outcome would have been as good.
“If pediatric beds are what’s in short supply, federal reimbursement should pay for pediatric beds. This would entice hospitals to expand capacity where it is needed.”
--------------------------------------
KID: “I have a respiratory virus.”
GOVERNMENT FUNDED HOSPITAL: “I’m sorry, did you say you want a sex change? Right this way.”
Think about this for a second: there are doctors quoted as saying that if you don’t mask, children will get sick and die. Before the Great Panic-demic of 2020, that would have been shocking news. Now, at least half the country doesn’t pay a lick of attention (including myself).
Out of all the consequences of 2020, I think the erosion of trust in the medical institutions may be one of the most deleterious, if not the saddest.
Also (and slightly unrelated to this article), labeling every statistical disparity as “racist” seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in the medical field. If you tell all the black/brown people that healthcare is “institutionally racist”, then they’re probably less likely to come in for mammograms or colonoscopies.
Exactly. What’s sad is that these institutions have probably been untrustworthy for quite a long time, and the past three years has pulled back the curtain on that.
It is incredibly sad. The medical institutions are politicized now by radical ideologues. In addition to their disastrous handling of Covid, they also support gender affirming care”, a practice that supports the drugging and mutilation of kids who are likely to grow out of gender dysphoria without any intervention. I doubt it is a coincidence that they support practices that undermine our society and culture.
Quite right Sue. It is all rather depressing how malevolent things have become and the ignorance of people who go along with it thinking they are being "inclusive and kind".
"I think the erosion of trust in the medical institutions may be one of the most deleterious, if not the saddest."
whereas I personally think it is one of the silver linings. medical doctors are just human beings, prone to all the same pitfalls. professional associations of doctors have been entirely captured by the woke, and most certainly should not be trusted. The fact that a lot more americans now know that AMA / CDC / FDA / FBI are not to be trusted... this is a Good Thing in my view.
Many government and social institutions have now used up the public trust that they built up in the half-century after WWII. Recall what David Burge said about what the Left does to respected institutions.
Getting sick is the price of having a functioning society. But the Non Cons (non contributors), Democrats, think we can all just stay home and muse and speculate and emote, because that’s what they do, and they are adolescent narcissistic simpletons so they actually cannot grasp the concept that there are real human beings doing the things that keep us afloat.
They are of the "consulting class" who stayed home and hoarded toilet paper, screeched about safety and not infecting other people, while they didn't give a fig about the people who had to serve them, deliver their food, and generally keep society functioning. My contempt for them knows no bounds.
There are a lot of reasons for that though. I work for a hospital system and just shut down our peds service line because most hospitals that are big enough to have a peds service in the first place also happen to be near enough to a metropolitan area that has a dedicated childrens hospital and parents will drive an extra 30min to take their sick kid to a childrens hospital in lieu of their community hospital. So we had a 6 bed peds inpatient unit with an average daily census of 1. Meaning we staffed a 24/7 pediatric team to care for an average of 1 kid per day. And kids, more than any other demographic, have the highest rates of Medicaid coverage which has reimbursement rates that don’t even costs. So most hospitals with smaller peds units operate those departments at a complete loss. With the average RN right now making $65-70/hr we can’t afford to sustain departments at a loss anymore.
I _do_ understand the economies of scale operating here; it's the same logic that's leading to the closure of OB units in smaller hospital systems.
I guess what I would argue is that certain medical services—peds, obstetrics—should operate as loss leaders.
And that probably every small hospital doesn't need expensive equipment (MRI machines, etc) that they then have to pay to keep maintained and updated, and _overuse_ to justify the cost of the purchase.
Yes and no. I certainly do not oppose fair compensation (profit) for health care providers. But I steadfastly oppose the mockery federal regulation/the Medicare cudgel have made of health-care. Not to mention the dystopia created by state-mandated third party for-profit insurance.
Oh, absolutely. Totally agree. The medical delivery system is screwed up twelve ways from Sunday now (my father's expression - what does that even mean?)
Wait...where are these nurses making $65-70/hr???? I gotta move there!! But I agree. Work for a hospital system that moved all heart surgeries to one location in order to be better rated on sts score (by combining the pt population being counted as one location) and basically increase revenue, and be able to advertise that score. Unfortunately lots of decisions like that are made, similarly to the peds being elimated where you are, I think with the end of the Covid assistance decisions like that will continue to happen.
I am in Idaho and yeah, clinic RNs no less are making $63.94 per hour. Cushy hours, no OT, no nights/weekends. It’s insane. Seattle Children’s Hospital just lost a collective bargaining battle with WSNA and brand new RN fresh out of school are starting at $50/hr with an expected 49% pay increase over the next 3 years. I work as a strategist so am often at the forefront of decisions precisely like that. They’re never easy but ultimately there’s so many factors that go into them and at the end of the day, it’s a balance between long-term financial viability/survival and continuing to provide as many services and as high quality patient care possible.
Holy cow! I work in Ohio (live in ky- we are on the border) and was happy I got a $1 raise last year to push me at $30 hahaha. Yeah, I think all of those decisions are much more complex than they seem on the surface when you factor everything that has to go into them.
Thanks for contributing SC, I think one of the beauties of this comments area is that we have people actually working in many fields. When we see our areas oversimplified/mischaracterized by reporters (God bless them, the world is super-complex, how do we expect them to get it “right” when it’s so complex and there are so many views)? It’s kind of like peer review for scientific papers, except better because it’s open and involves practitioners. Thanks again!
I was fortunate enough to be able to isolate for quite some time and I wore N95s to the store for longer than I would care to admit. I never got anything. Then when I thought the coast was clear I went to a bar to watch football and immediately got COVID which is identical to the flu except easier to catch.
If you really want to isolate and avoid COVID it is super easy. Closing society is the plan a 9-year-old would come up with. Actually, scratch that, most 9-year-olds aren’t scumbags. It’s the plan a dickhead with the intellect of a 9-year-old would come up with.
And let's not forget the "plan" that Cuomo, Murphy and Lamont came up with to murder the elderly in nursing homes. At the very least, criminally negligent homicide and, yet, not one of them was ever charged. In fact, the worst malefactor - China, which launched a bio weapon at the world - has gotten away with the crime of the century. While lesser criminals such as Fauci, Collins, Daszak, skate free. Amnesty for these criminals? Never. A sane society would demand justice. We are no longer that.
"China, which launched a bio weapon at the world" - I remember watching early news coverage of Wuhan, and the reports said that regional travel within China was locked down. However, international outgoing travel was still permitted. Hmmm... I always thought that was an interesting choice for containing a novel virus
My favorite is when they say that state laws are bad because Republican partisans will be counting the votes now and this can change the outcome which is a clear statement that they know you can totally cheat.
And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm.
Nice to have a place to go where common sense and reality exists.
Thanks
As an aside I am a grandparent and my grandkids had to wear mask at school. Rarely do they wear them correctly and at one point my grandson came home wearing someone else’s mask. So this is helping how?
I so often wish there was a 😂 button for some of these funny comments… our grandson was at a Catholic school which never shut down, but he did wear masks that were rarely on correctly… all patterns, too…dinosaurs, footballs, pizza slices, etc. It became kinda funny to see what mask he wore daily. Meanwhile, the poor public school kids stayed home trying to “learn” with their computers on while they played with their dogs, argued with siblings etc.
This effort to push precautionary measures to this degree appears to come from an irrational belief that humans can control nature if they just try hard enough, if we just all work together. What is forgotten is that no matter how much we separate ourselves from natural events, there will always be a limit to our control. We can’t stop earthquakes, we can’t stop tsunamis, we can’t stop contagions. Although we are the “pinnacle species” on the planet, we will always be subject to Natural Selection in some way.
Through our technology we have been so successful in staving off medical problems with medications and surgery that we have become delusional about how much power we really have over biology. We are victims of our own success.
"This effort to push precautionary measures to this degree appears to come from an irrational belief that humans can control nature[and that man is perfectible]"
“ an irrational belief that humans can control nature if they just try hard enough”
I think this is one of the beliefs that’s making our world so awful to live in. If we work in concert with nature, not against it, not trying to control it, we might find beauty, peace, and enlightenment.
This weird belief that humans are IT and that we can and should do whatever we want (trying to turn a boy into a girl for example or control the weather) is killing our spirits IMO.
Medical problem this society actually creates and then financially benefits from "solving". Our bodies are trying to adapt to the enviromental insults, but we are past the tipping point. Only those fixes that generate money are used and the rest of the people are left to suffer. Those who have preventative answers, at best, can't make any money, and at worst are cancelled.
Has anyone collected data on RSV in school systems that were shutdown more than systems that stayed open? Or is the level of RSV and its severity roughly the same as it would have been before the pandemic.
BTW - it may get tiresome to hear this - But Thank you to the Free Press for reporting on important, useful subjects.
It’s probably hard to know because testing for RSV in school-age kids was fairly uncommon in the past. RSV tends to hospitalize the littlest ones - infants and toddlers so that’s where testing efforts are focused. Many parents don’t take their older kids in to be tested with every head cold which is how RSV usually presents in normal, healthy school aged kids. This year was a little different than last years in that our regional hospitals had more older kids hospitalized with RSV than we’ve seen in years past.
Thanks for the reply - so any data is lost in the noise.
My family has begun to wonder if it is VERY important to insure that children are exposed as much as possible. We know that the immune system has to be "trained" i.e. kids need to get into the dirt - perhaps it needs to be challenged constantly - or the result is a weakened immune system?
3 years ago I would have said you were wrong. Now I say, trust but verify. No unquestioned trust to the CDC, NIH or FDA. They may never recover my trust - which doesn't mean much - but my impression is that a lot of people feel the same way.
I’m in the don’t trust but verify place myself. I feel that way about the media too. There have been too many lies and / or mistakes …. But dismissing everything outright would be foolish
Your comment reminded me that I’ve read that in the 20th century polio struck harder in middle and upper class communities precisely because they had better sanitation. In the lower class neighborhoods, kids were exposed at early ages--precisely because polio was present and excreted. Gross but fascinating. Prior to improved sanitation, if I recall correctly, there were no epidemics of polio.
Thanks for your reply - I hadn't run across this before.
You are correct. The internet says there are two stages of infection - if you got polio when you were a baby (and had maternal-immunity) it was mild - and you developed long-term immunity. But when better sanitation prevented that early infection - then if you got polio later in childhood - it could be much worse.
First, "tripledemic" is an entirely made up term that did not exist before the Fall of 2022. It was coined primarily by the media and has been adopted by those pushing the orthodoxy. It is irresponsible of the media and health institutions to use the term, even informally. Though, obviously, it's used to try scare people into behaving a certain way.
Second, I live adjacent to a self-described "progressive" city. Most of the people I see wearing masks are people I reckon to be in their 20s-30s. Granted, some may very well be compromised in some way, but I suspect most are just doing what they're being told. It would be easy to ridicule them, but I won't. What I am angry about, though, are the institutions that are continuing to frighten people and push interventions, such as mask-wearing, that are not effective. It makes me worry about what the response will be to the next health crisis.
At the beginning of 2020 I tried to find info on mask efficacy and the best was that they were “20-80 percent effective”. Well, nearly anything is 20-80percent, and that’s even if the masks are worn even close to properly. Anyone who has to wear even the surgical (I call it a dust mask) will quickly have it almost uselessly on their face. But that’s OK with the clueless sheep pushing this. As long as there’s anything on your face, they feel they’ve driven compliance.
I just grimace when I see young people outdoors in masks. SO sad. What the mask CAN do is interfere with the flow of the CO2 you exhale and cause the wearer to breathe harder to try to get oxygen. It just puts the CO2 back into the inhalation. One super sad event I read was the girls track star who passed out from running a distance event in a mask -of course, outdoors. Tragic.
I never realized the efficacy of shame in a culture. Shame for skin color: bad. Shame for walking around in a full-body safety suit: good. One or our top military brass reviewing troops in a get-up like Darth Vader because of a relatively mild virus: a disgrace to a nation. We have broken the glass ceiling on being fools and abominations and it seems that when Pandora's box is open all manner of ills spill out.
Unfortunately we have a media driven by clicks and dwindling subscriptions that found COVID fear to be just the antidote to drive up numbers. That is now receding and they are hoping to find different ways to return to 2020. Fortunately, most of us are just going back to normal and not soon enough. Thanks Vinay.
That’s why we had the pandemic and the response to it. And now we have to bear the consequence of a man and a woman who have absolutely no right to be in the WH. God help us all
The time is long past for consenting adults to agree to be governed by the authoritarian whims of pseudo-science practitioners. What strikes me in particular is that we have such cognitive dissonance in, and conflict between, so many government policies and dicta. We must be “safe” at the cost of personal choice and liberty; we must be protected from every potential harm; yet we must also be free to kill the most vulnerable in the womb. And there is a growing--and dangerous--advocacy lobby for the right to end one’s own life for vague reasons. And let’s be clear: it isn’t Republicans pushing the authoritarian safety police: it;s “liberal” Democrats. One of the most recent examples of Democrat-driven governmental insanity is the proposal to ban gas stoves because of potential health hazards. It used to be a joke that Democrats want us to freeze to death in the dark. Now it seems to be their mantra.
Haha my county in just banned gas stoves and heating systems! I never heard about an effort to do so before they passed the law. Then it was like oh it for your safety plus the environment. No more explanation. Fools.
When I compare the "free-range" childhood of my generation with today's helicopter parenting, I see adults who are unable to control their fears about their children, and who therefore impose their neuroses not only on their own children, but on everyone else's children.
We lost our oldest daughter in infancy to severe heart and liver defects. So I am painfully aware of what it feels like to lose a child. But I knew it would be psychologically unhealthy for my other children if I protected them from *everything* for fear of losing them. I had to use self-control--a quality that seems to have gone by the wayside--to reject the temptation to shelter my kids too carefully.
The reality is that no matter how careful we are, we cannot prevent all dangers. A look at freak accidents will show that. There is a very real risk, though, of making ourselves and our children mentally sick by refusing to live in the effort to protect our lives.
You can't bring more life into your childrens lives by terrifying them. We all die, but living in fear is dying early and dying often.
Obviously, masking the healthy is ineffective in terms of reducing transmission: it’s basically just theater. But masking the sick is another matter entirely. Masking sick people (especially those who are coughing), obviously reduces transmission. Masks are a physical barrier that stop a significant portion of droplets being expelled into the air. It doesn’t stop all the virus being expelled into the air, but it certainly reduces the amount.
We’ve all sat next to someone in a restaurant or next to someone on a plane who is coughing their head off, coughing in our face or coughing all over our food, and thought, “I’m probably going to get sick.” And you’re not wrong to think that. You probably are going to get sick. Coughing spreads disease. And masking a cough is a way to reduce transmission. It’s not perfect but it’s a reduction. Not only that, it’s polite.
So, if you’re sick, put on a mask. If you’re healthy, don’t wear one.
If you are coughing, stay home. Period.
Here is the thing: a good argument can be made that masks INCREASE the risk of disease transmission precisely because they create the illusion of protection. The sick person, rather than staying home, chooses to go out because they are wearing a mask.
What actually seems to transmit airborne viral infections, from what I read, is not typically the droplets expelled in a sneeze or cough, unless you sneeze or cough directly into someone's face, which has been a no-no since something like thousands of years ago. It is the act of breathing, which transmits airborne virus particles that linger a long time, travel 30 or more feet, and which are easily inhaled whether there is a mask present or not.
The most recent survey from Europe actually found a slight POSITIVE correlation between mask wearing and overall mortality. The more masks were worn, the more people died. The effect was small--as is any claimed positive effect--and both are within the margin of error.
The whole thing is ridiculous and risible, but it stops being funny when we consider how problems in reading and speaking have skyrocketed among young children born into the pandemic responses. Many of these kids, strictly because of these idiotic measures, will spend their lives socially as functionally autistic or "on the spectrum" in terms of their lack of ability to process social cues and interact in normal human ways.
I have concluded that what the WHO/CDC/WEF are doing is NOT ridiculous, it is far worse. It appears very deliberate. I do not think our masters at these entities are that stupid. A far better theory is that they want to weaken the Western World. They appear to have some sort of symbiotic relationship with the CCP, in that both are driving towards a bilateral world consisting of two totalitarian entities that somehow are mutually beneficial. (Of course only one, the CCP, will end up with a competent military. So perhaps the Western totalitarians are betting on some kind of deal with their more powerful partner.) The most serious resistance to WEF comes from the non-woke Westerners, so they must be weakened. WEF does not criticize the CCP, nor the woke ideology in any of its manifestations - they promote it. This is simply my best guess as to better connect the dots of what is happening to our world.
What's interesting about that, though, is that China is destroying itself in the quest to get rid of COVID, which I don't think many people think is possible.
It's funny that some ideas which are basically intended as inside jokes--like Keynesian economics, which is a back door path to fascistic control of the economy by the government--are taken SERIOUSLY by the very people who were supposed to use them to weaken opponents.
The simple fact, as I see it, is that you cannot be a sincere Leftist and not on some level be a de facto imbecile. They are both tactically and strategically brilliant at times, but the souls behind these minds are empty.
Keynes was not entirely wrong either. Sometimes you really do need to prime the pump, and prime it good. Money (aka liquidity) is the lifeblood of any modern economy, like the oil in an engine (try running a car without enough of it, and disaster results). Supply does NOT automatically create it's own demand, nor does wealth and prosperity automatically trickle down from the ultra-rich and mega-corporations either.
However, it is also obvious that consumption does not automatically create wealth either (even though it stimulates and motivates such creation), it by definition consumes it, and certainly war doesn't create wealth, it destroys it. And inflation and recession are not mutually exclusive.
Indeed, the oligarchs of the shadow government notoriously play both sides of any conflict between the best frenemies that are their constituents.
You know it's not possible for people to just stay home if they have to get to work. People living alone also may have no other way to leave home and get necessities including medicines. There's nothing wrong with people who are sick to consider masking up to be considerate to others if they they have need to leave the house. That said, it should not be a government mandate. If people generally do this because it's a collective cultural desire, like people in Asia have been doing for years since SARs 2000 before Covid, there's nothing wrong with it. It's not forced, and there was no social pressure by Woke authoritarians. As long as it's people's voluntary choice, and I emphasize voluntary, who cares?
And I agree forced mandates for people, sick or not, to wear masks is asinine and ridiculous except in hospitals.
This has been discussed endlessly. Those that do not want to hear just do not hear. There is nothing wrong about masking up if that is your fantasy -- the problem is believing, implying, or promoting that it is "considerate to others". Literally hundreds of studies show that masking for respiratory viruses makes no difference. An equivalent statement would be "There is nothing wrong with people who are sick to consider carrying a rabbit's foot to be considerate to others...".
I have lived in China and Japan where people have warn these entirely symbolic masks at volume for decades. I have been in Israel where many wear Yarmulkes. They are equally effective at warding off respiratory viruses, but perhaps the Yarmulke will get you a disease pass from God?
My daughter and grandkids wear masks in Korea not for viruses but for the airborne pollutants carried by seasonal weather patterns from China.
The pollution issue is a huge deal there and the masks are a legitimate strategy when the concentrations are high.
Whenever someone brings up masks in Asia that’s my first thought.
If you've lived in China and Japan then you know there is more nuances to what you're saying about masks not being effective to protect others either. The real issue here is people all applying a one size fits all recommendations to the entire country or entire world. This has been the most problematic approach in the very first place. The pandemic should've been handled regionally and locally from the get go.
In Japanese and other super crowded and populated Asian cities,where masses of people use public transportations 10 hours a day and people are on top of each other everywhere, people are indeed breathing very close to each other. Will the masks prevent the virus from spreading full stop if people are masked in these places? No. But it is not entirely symbolic for them to try to avoid spreading illnesses to others that way in case they sneeze or cough. OTOH, it is absurdly ridiculous to say this same practice is necessary in Wyoming where one can't even see another living soul driving 60 miles. This is why I was so disgusted with all the politically posturing by both Democratic Republican governors of totally different states. Would you not agree the media sparring by posturing between the likes of Cuomo and Noem were moronic? It makes absolutely not sense for a governor who has to deal with a major metropolitan city and another governor who deals with a state made up of mostly vast land to tell each other which way is right and what to do. And in Cuomo's case, it also makes no sense for what is recommended in NYC subways to be recommended for people living in Buffalo. If there had been more of a common sense approach from those in leadership positions from the get go, instead of political one-upsmanship, people wouldn't have been all politicized like we are today.
Another nuance you leave out is you really don't know if someone masking up is immuno compromised in some ways. Just as it's wrong to judge people who don't wear mask, it's not right to jump to conclusion and judge those who do unless we know their story. Sure if someone is just a virtue signally paranoid, they're idiots. But how would I know if someone in the supermarket is just recovering from cancer and maybe want to wear mask to minimize risks of getting ill?
There had always been sensible ways of making recommendations for public health. With guidance and reasoned explanations, enforcements in places where needed like hospitals and super crowded areas like public transit where people literally squeeze up against each other's bodies, better sanitation practices by building managements, etc. And then letting people decide what is best for them. I don't think it's helpful to take a one size fits all approach.
But yes I do agree with you that those who do not want to hear just do not want to hear. Those people are lost causes.
To my knowledge, there is no study that definitively answers the question, does a mask reduce the amount of airborne virus if worn by a contagious person, a person infected with an airborne, respiratory virus.
I agree. These mask mandates have done a tremendous amount of harm: to our children, to our civil liberties, to our trust in institutions that matter. Government mandates are a very dangerous animal…
Indeed, masks are useless against aerosols, and in fact worse than useless per the Foegen Effect.
If you're sick and wearing a mask you'll likely be sicker than if you went without. You're rebreathing the viruses thereby increasing your viral load. Just stay home.
I was talking with a nurse a few months ago who has had multiple sinus infections this year after decades of having none. The variable? Forced mask wearing. All these medical personnel know better. Somehow, though, the high ups--most of whom likely don't have to comply with their own mandates--have been coopted or paid to push this ridiculous nonsense.
The only sane reasoning I have heard is that they are afraid of being sued by patients who get sick after visiting, and that may have some validity, but that just points back to the need for tort reform in the direction of allowing people to make sane and justified decisions in a world where perfect safety and perfect freedom from fear are not only not possible, but largely undesirable.
If we cover up every hard edge on the planet, how will that not act directly to breed ridiculous, fearful, stupid and needy people everywhere?
BINGO
Indeed, it's known as the Foegen Effect.
Just looked that up, and found this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35363218/
Indeed. And this study was further confirmed by another study of Europe during the second wave.
If you are already sick, you’re not increasing your viral load by breathing your own exhaled air.  That’s not how it works.
It's the opposite: if you are not sick, but still wearing a mask, bacteria accumulate on the wet surfaces of the mask, which you then rebreathe. Most of these lung infections in my view relate to all this. And this effect obviously is multiplied considerably by people wearing the same masks daily for weeks and months, which no health expert anywhere can justify, and which all health experts should have spoken out against strongly.
But they didn't. This is just one more line of evidence that the System has been captured by cowards, crooks and imbeciles.
And, again, all this is well established science. Nothing ground breaking is happening when people wonder why the hell healthy people are being asked to pretend they are sick, and everyone around them is suffering some sort of immune disorder.
Agreed. If you’re not sick, stop wearing a mask. 
Not true. If you were first infected with, say, 100 virus particles, each of those would theoretically infect 100 respiratory cells, take over the cellular machinery to make 10 more of themselves. Now you exhale 1000 virus particles and then REBREATHE them because they're trapped in your well-fitting mask. Not exactly, maybe you breathe 700 but you are still rebreathing and reinfecting yourself.
I work in pediatrics, and have pulled many snot-laden masked off of little faces to peer into their throats. To think those masks can stay on a sick person for hours and NOT cause you to be more sick is just foolish.
Thanks for your reply. Respectfully though, I have to say that you are incorrect. However, if you have access to some study, that shows evidence to the contrary, I would be pleased to read it.
By the time they are showing symptoms, sick people have untold trillions upon trillions of infected cells. And their immune system has already mounted a response to the virus. So, even though they’re spreading the virus like mad, they themselves are actually on the mend. They are not increasing their viral load by re-breathing their exhaled air, once they are symptomatic. Viral load really matters at the beginning – it determines the severity of the infection.
Anyway, all of this discussion about viral loads is not to say that masking sick folks is 100% good for them. It’s not. If they wear it too long, if they wear someone else’s mask, if they let a mask get filthy (or snotty), etc. it’s not great for them. But masking sick people who are Out In Public, is 100% good for other people Because it reduces transmission. Reducing transmission is good public health policy. And it’s good manners.
There is alot of debate on this topic. I like that it is respectful in tone (from the comments I have read). This is refreshing.
So what can we all - pretty much all - agree on?
If we are sick, stay home until symptoms are gone. Feeling well? Go enjoy life! Pretty simple.
I'll never forget a flight to Ireland about six years ago. "Bucket list" vacation. Took preemptive Vitamin C and antioxidants for weeks to bolster my immune system because I'm notorious for catching things on overseas trips. Got stuck sitting next to a lady yakking her head off and breathing and coughing all over me. She was one of those "chatty" seatmates. Yup, sure enough 72 hours later I started coming down with one of the worst colds I'd had in years which threw a serious wrench into my experience in that beautiful country and necessitated at least one visit to a sweet old doctor in Killarney.
I thought the whole mask mandate thing was generally ridiculous and went on for way too long, especially on planes. But that woman could and should have worn a mask. Or at least kept her particle-spewing trap shut throughout the flight knowing she was sick. The problem is you can't force sick people who ought to wear one to wear one. On a plane you're trapped and can't very well get up and go sit someplace else when you're seated next to Typhoid Mary. Hopefully with the new air filtration systems all the airlines installed in response to Covid, it might help.
Thanks for your reply. One of the key things that has been missing, since the beginning of Covid, has been any kind of nuance in the conversation. But any conversation or study regarding masking needs to  distinguish between: universal masking, masking the healthy, and masking the sick.
So, with respect to the study you mention (that shows mortality increases with mask wearing) I would have to ask: what kind of masking does this refer to? Masking the sick? Masking the healthy? Both?
I agree that masking healthy people likely produces a multitude of negative consequences, possibly even increased mortality. But masking sick people is different. It is a reasonable and effective means of reducing disease transmission. Especially in areas with high density populations. And while I agree, if you’re sick or coughing you should stay home, I understand that sick people can’t always stay home. Ditto for coughing people. So, if they go out, these people should wear a mask if they’re going to be around other people. It decreases transmission.
I'm not going to take the time to look up the study, which in any event is likely buried in the Search engines, since that is how things work lately, but it was looking at mandated universal masking, on one end of the continuum, versus Sweden and other countries like it. The countries where they were arresting people and denying them access to being in public for not wearing masks compared to, again, countries like Sweden, where I read they actually BANNED MASKS in some towns.
You can look at all this, and not find any pattern in regards to overall mortality, probably in either direction, and certainly not a robust result in the direction of lower mortality.
We have relied on common sense and common decency for many decades. By all means if people had to work who were sick they should have worn masks. But nobody who was not sick, and categorically not children.
What is worth remembering is that 1) this disease is less dangerous than the flu for healthy adults under the age of 65 or so; and 2) the nature of pandemics is that sooner or later at least 70-80% of people have to be exposed and either die or develop relative immunity in order for the spread to diminish. There will be a new variant every year indefinitely, but having had any of them clearly conveys some immunity to all of them, much like the cold and flu.
Thanks for your reply. I agree with your comment. But I would also like to reiterate that nuance is important. I think that people who are sick with Covid should wear a mask because it reduces transmission - so fewer people are likely to get sick. That probably doesn’t translate into much of a decrease in mortality because  the overall mortality for Covid ( for under 65 years old, and no pre-existing conditions) is low to begin with.
Which is not to say the only thing we should be concerned about is mortality. Personally, I don’t like getting sick. So, I wish that the person with a cough would mask up. (As you say: Better yet, they should stay at home).
Masking sick people is a good idea because  it reduces transmission. And it’s courteous.
"I think that people who are sick with Covid should wear a mask because it reduces transmission"
how could that be? The virus is TINY compared to the gaps in masks. Thinking a mask will prevent the spread of the virus is like expecting a chain-link fence to shield you from a bullet. It's physically impossible!
Indeed, a coward dies a thousand deaths.
Last line is spot on.
"not only on their own children, but on everyone else's children"
Exactly. We are supposed to "respect" the fears of the most terrified. As soon as one mom drives her child 100 yards to the school bus stop (in a safe neighborhood with sidewalks) and sits in the car with him, with the engine running, until the bus comes, every other mom has to wonder if she's a bad parent for "only" walking with her child to the stop and waiting, and a mom who lets her child walk to the stop and wait by himself might as well be shouting, "I hate my child and want him to die!" at least in Facebook-land.
Great comment. We got up on our own, fed ourselves, and walked alone to the bus stop in -10F weather. After our mom's went to work. We are stronger for it.
When I was 9 years old I walked to the end of the block to wait for a school bus. Later, as a teenager, I walked a mile to school every day. Children can endure.
Walked alone at 6. Walked 2 miles each way to HS. Oh, no!
I walked alone at 5 and wore a key, tied to a shoelace, around my neck so I could let myself into an empty house when I got home. My mother was off getting her masters degree and my father was at work in Manhattan. Today, they’d be arrested for child neglect.
🤣🤣🤣yip they would be.
But, but, but the lions! And tigers! And bears! Oh my!😉
It might be different in rural areas but .. in cities, it's no laughing matter. if you have a young girl in NYC, how could you let her take the subway alone?
answer -- you shouldn't. it's not helicopter parenting, it's reality.
You forgot about the closet monster.
Plus the walk was good exercise.
In some places, it's not safe for children to walk/bicycle to school because of dangerous street crossings and a lack of sidewalks. However, this is something of a chicken-or-egg issue. The plans for school location and street design are premised on everyone's being in a car. And since children are all indoors or in vehicles, drivers feel like they can drive like maniacs.
Between 5 and 10 I walked to school. We had street guards to stop traffic on the busier roads. After that we moved out of the city so I rode the bus. Short driveway but there wasn't any of this Mom sitting in the car keeping me warm in the winter.
We walked to school. Whole groups of us.
The mom who only drives their child to the bus stop is still a "bad mom". In order to really be a "good mom" you have to drive your kids to school daily.
In our community, the entrances to all of our public schools are jammed with good moms who "have to" drive their kids to school every day. It's gridlock at a couple of the schools, and they have to station crossing guards, police, and administrators to manage the traffic.
The reasons for doing so are comical - including "it's safer", "my kids won't be exposed to other, potentially sick kids", and best of all "when I drive my kids, they can sleep in for an extra 15 minutes".
"No Cell Phone Area" signs for all the "good" parents driving and dropping kids off to school. Parents are driving distracted, involved in conversations so intense that children climb out of car without a goodbye or wave. A special shout out to the good parents that double park and drop off their young children to run between the SUVs of other "good" parents.
Crazy stuff!
It's the same here. Children are most at risk in a vehicle, of course, so it's weird.
I'd love to have my kids on the bus again. Perhaps many parents are like me, and lost our bus route for two years due to COVID and we now have a shortage of bus drivers. Once we fought the district to get our bus stop back it now takes 1.5 hours to drive 3 miles, on an overcrowded bus that frequently breaks down stranding the kids on the highway until another bus picks them up. I'm not about to let my kids, especially my 1st grader walk three miles on the highway through high crime areas. Fortunately I have a carpool set up, but most people I know would love to have their kids on the bus. It's not as practical as it used to be.
Our school is the same! It drives me crazy. My kids are on the bus. And they walk themselves to the bus stop.
Bad mom Jennifer! (I’m joking of course but they way everybody is interpreting tweets, posts etc I felt I had to clarify)
Yes, this is absolutely ridiculous.
That’s why we stuffed up today in America JD!
Funny how we are supposed to respect their fear, but they don't have to respect our lack of same.
You always have to keep in mind that they could call in a Child Neglect accusation or call the cops if you let your child walk up the sidewalk in your own neighborhood in the daytime. We may not have to actually respect their fear, but we have to respect their power to harass us.
Exactly. I was attacked constantly for not being a covidian and I enjoyed it immensely.
Because ‘they’ are always ‘right’
🫰🫰🫰
This is the weakest link: "every other mom has to wonder if she's a bad parent for "only" walking with her child to the stop and waiting"
She is also who touted her support for obama and disgust of trump. She is the easily manipulated, fearful, need-for-consensus woman who has been led astray by her peers. She is the majority, now, of upper-middle-class white women. They lack everything except conformity to the norm espoused by their media thought-leaders.
They are far from GGrrrrrllllll and much nearer Baaaaa-baaaaaa.
We need to remember that respecting the fears of others does not require that we either accept them or react to them in the way that others may demand.
Perfectly said. I am happy to let others mitigate their fears however they wish within their own families. But their fears are not my problem, and I am not part of their solution. That's on them, not me.
🫰🫰
Yes but what would happen if you systematically trained a particular group to believe that the cops are hunting them and everyone they meet is secretly bigoted against them? Would that result in poor outcomes?
KD, generational stupidity, trying is capitulation, children are taught to drop out, not to overcome but to wallow in victimhood and bemoan the unfairness of it all. It is easy to see.
Thought the conversation was about Covid.
Just can't help yourself, can you?
This would be a semi-valid critique if you hadn’t pledged your life, fortune, and sacred honor to the collectivist scumbags who inject race into literally everything.
Don’t engage Kevin
LOL but it’s fun!!
😂😂
Good. Let's have more fun!!
"And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm." - KevinDurant?, 2023
So, the black people are cheating/stealing elections, KevinDurant?
Answer. Yes or No?
"And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm." - KevinDurant?, 2023
So, the black people are cheating, KevinDurant?
Answer. Yes or No?
"So you are pretending to not know that we have tons of data on how various demographic groups vote?"
- Nah. Just a set-up to see what you'd do. Turns out you doubled-down and walked right into it.
"And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm." - KevinDurant?, 2023
So, the black people are cheating, KevinDurant?
Looks like you're judging people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. Sad. I'll be discussing this with Fetterman.
Oh, he most definitely shouldn't.
Nah. We're talking about YOU.
So....please explain what your comment had to do with Covid.
With you, KevinDurant?, no one ever has to worry about "secretly."
Oh I understand you are *trying* to talk about me. That’s why I pointed out that you are being a total hypocrite and fraud and as such your views on this matter have no credibility or legitimacy whatsoever.
It’s like if OJ criticized someone for not holding the door for his wife and upon receiving pushback OJ said
“But we are talking about YOU.”
3:37 PM 1/8/2023
-----------------
death threat, archived:
-----
[ https://www.thefp.com/p/will-jordan-peterson-lose-his-license/comment/11735893 ]
[ https://substack.com/profile/4285841-kevin-durant ]
Kevin Durant?
Writes The $79.99/mo Newsletter
7 hr ago
You reported this comment.
Once again my idea that we could eliminate graffiti by punishing it with the death penalty proves to be correct. You don’t need a massive anti-graffiti surveillance system. You just need to publicly execute a few guys and everyone else will fall in line.
Leftists are using this tactic in almost every facet of life.
Answer KevinDurant.
Yes or No?
Pathetic.....you're not even a man.
Answer the question, Kevin Durant.
Yes or No?
My view on the matter is that I don't claim people are cheating in elections dues to the color of their skin.
"And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm." - KevinDurant?, 2023
So, the black people are cheating, KevinDurant?
Looks like you're judging people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. Sad. I'll be discussing this with Fetterman.
Covid the disease manufactured by Fauci and implemented into the world by the CCP who took cover from Fauci
Accidentally released by a lab that designed this particular virus specifically to gain the function of being able to infect humans, partly funded by Fauci, may not be a conspiracy but it's pretty goddamned stupid if you ask me.
Even as an accident, what brilliant scientist decided this was safe to do in the middle of a crowded city? Maybe Antarctica...or the moon.
Paranoid conspiratard narrative from the $billion Alex Jones troll farm.
Keep wearing your mask while driving alone if that makes you feel better
note: my email notifications about your bizarre mental diahhrea in this thread are muted.
RIGHT WING AS THE CIA'S CONTROLLED OPPOSITION
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
(boilerplate response to idiotic trolls with paranoid conspiratard narratives)
You just proved my point, again: you are deeply disturbed, you have a profoundly flawed understanding of reality and you are PROJECTING your own tendency to make up stupid shit when you can't make sense of things.
Highly recommend this discussion between Jordan Peterson & Matt Ripley on the origins of covid. So easy for a cummings wannabe with a tiny first letter complex to dismiss everything he doesn't want to know as conspiratorial. Careful with that period after the e! Definitely the workings of the patriarchy & probably racist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEh5JyZC218 Better get another booster before watching; you never know.
note: my email notifications about your bizarre mental diahhrea in this thread are muted, bot.
RIGHT WING AS THE CIA'S CONTROLLED OPPOSITION
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
(boilerplate response to idiotic trolls with paranoid conspiratard narratives)
You just proved my point, again: you are deeply disturbed, you have a profoundly flawed understanding of reality and you are PROJECTING your own tendency to make up stupid shit when you can't make sense of things.
https://www.thefp.com/p/we-have-a-tripledemic-not-of-disease/comment/11790709
Exactly. Wokies.
note: my email notifications for this thread are muted.
RIGHT WING AS THE CIA'S CONTROLLED OPPOSITION
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
Bazz hole troll
Your face shield is fogging up again.
note: my email notifications for this thread are muted.
RIGHT WING AS THE CIA'S CONTROLLED OPPOSITION
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
3:37 PM 1/8/2023
-----------------
death threat, archived:
-----
[ https://www.thefp.com/p/will-jordan-peterson-lose-his-license/comment/11735893 ]
[ https://substack.com/profile/4285841-kevin-durant ]
Kevin Durant?
Writes The $79.99/mo Newsletter
7 hr ago
You reported this comment.
Once again my idea that we could eliminate graffiti by punishing it with the death penalty proves to be correct. You don’t need a massive anti-graffiti surveillance system. You just need to publicly execute a few guys and everyone else will fall in line.
Leftists are using this tactic in almost every facet of life.
b0t, ZERO IQ
Your paranoid conspiratard troll scripts are clogging up your mental feces.
b0t, ZERO IQ
You mental feces is clogging up every facial orifice. Psychotic troll.
I feel like these comments are not helping your argument that I am the one who is psychotic.
😂😂😂
This whole thread is lowering the level of discourse that can be found in this forum. I wish you both would please stop.
note: my email notifications for this thread are muted.
RIGHT WING AS THE CIA'S CONTROLLED OPPOSITION
https://readersupportednews.org/pm-section/78-78/45197-im-convinced-that-the-whole-national-review-is-a-cia-operation-murray-rothbard
“I’m Convinced That The Whole National Review Is A CIA Operation” — Murray Rothbard
Print
Written by Charles Burris
Saturday, 12 August 2017 11:35
This powerful Rothbard quote, cited by journalist John Judis in his article, "William F. Buckley, Jr., The Consummate Conservative," in the September 1981 edition of The Progressive, reveals one of the biggest secrets of the past 70 years -- how after WWII and the birth of the National Security State in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency created, fostered, and molded the synthetic ideological movement known as "Conservatism." This subject is briefly outlined in my articles, "How the CIA Bamboozled the Public For 70 Years," and The Phony Legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the former also dealt with the CIA's covert interaction with the non-Communist Left and Cold War Liberalism.
From the crucial time before the American government's formal entrance into World War II, establishment elites have fostered an ongoing series of elaborate intelligence operations based on psychological warfare and propaganda aimed at manipulating public opinion and attitudes in regards to the projection of American state power and interventionism. These operations, both covert and overt, have been one of the central props of the National Security State. It was out of these CIA-funded disinformation campaigns which emerged the key ideological voices of the mainstream media and its adjuncts in academia, whether marching under the unfurled banners of social democracy, liberalism, conservatism, or neoconservatism. For the past 70 years, "responsible public policy debate" has been confined to the narrow perimeters set by these establishment-sanctioned gatekeepers and mouthpieces.
It was "former" deep cover CIA agent Buckley and intelligence community veterans of the OSS and CIA (James Burnham, Wilmoore Kendall, Priscilla Buckley, and William Casey) who launched National Review, which became the premier publication of this phony "conservative movement." Buckley called Burnham, who had been a leading Trotskyist communist, WWII consultant for the Office of Strategic Services, and later head of the Political and Psychological Warfare division of the Office of Policy Coordination of the Central Intelligence Agency, “the number one intellectual influence on National Review since the day of its founding.” Buckley and NR shaped and set the stentorian dogmatic tone for such "conservatives" for decades, purging and declaring any alternative voices on the Right anathema. Author John T. McManus, in his critical biography of Buckley, described him as the "Pied Piper for the Establishment."
In the 1930s and 1940s there was the non-interventionist Old Right of libertarians and nationalists opposed to the welfare-warfare State's domestic and foreign policies of FDR's New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal. They believed in a constitutionally limited and decentralized federal republic, peace and diplomacy not war and empire. The populist grassroots masses of the Old Right were opposed in several presidential elections (1936-1952) by the anglophile northeastern seaboard establishment forces within the nexus of the Morgan and Rockefeller Wall Street financial blocs. The National Security State believed this Old Right must be marginalized and destroyed. This process, as I alluded to above, began during World War II, and accelerated with the virulent covert action insurgency against Old Right figurehead Senator Robert Taft by the elite establishment Eisenhower forces led by the ardent internationalist patrician, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, at the 1952 GOP presidential convention, and continued unabated up to the foundation of National Review.
Here are four exceptional sources which detail this fascinating but little-known story.
The first is an article from the October 1998 edition of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (the predecessor of LewRockwell.com). It is entitled, "Neoconservatism and the CIA," by Greg Pavlik.
In this telling except from his semi-autobiographical memoir, The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard, delved into the central question raised by the title of this blog: "In the light of hindsight, we should now ask whether or not a major objective of National Review from its inception was to transform the right wing from an isolationist to global warmongering anti-Communist movement; and, particularly, whether or not the entire effort was in essence a CIA operation." Rothbard goes on to show how the CIA's public intellectuals at NR maliciously waged war upon the remnants of the Old Right.
The third item is a 1992 speech delivered by Rothbard to the John Randolph Club entitled, "A Strategy For The Right, which further developed his searing analysis of how the Buckleyites transformed the non-interventionist, anti-statist sentiments of a large segment of American public opinion in the brutal totalitarian direction sought by the National Security State.
And lastly there is "Swine Before Perle -- The 'National Review' Attack on LRC," by Richard Cummings, which brings this sordid story up to the time of the Iraq War.
from the substack death threat archive:
3:37 PM 1/8/2023
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death threat, archived:
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[ https://www.thefp.com/p/will-jordan-peterson-lose-his-license/comment/11735893 ]
[ https://substack.com/profile/4285841-kevin-durant ]
Kevin Durant?
Writes The $79.99/mo Newsletter
7 hr ago
You reported this comment.
Once again my idea that we could eliminate graffiti by punishing it with the death penalty proves to be correct. You don’t need a massive anti-graffiti surveillance system. You just need to publicly execute a few guys and everyone else will fall in line.
Leftists are using this tactic in almost every facet of life.
What you “feel” is psychosis. Troll
We’ve created a division amongst our youth in the form of a mask. It is now strictly used to feel “safer” and has nothing to do with reality in mostly cases. Breaks my heart to see kids masked, knowing that their parents, teachers, and other leaders still aren’t aware that it is interfering with building their immune system..and interfering with building relationships.
After almost losing two of our children my heart goes out in a major way. Your response here should be gospel. None of the last three years needed to happen. Viruses cannot be stopped. Will you please have a good day?
I think part of the issue is that previous generations were less afraid. Same hardwiring in every generation but the software changes and even if someone read the news for ten minutes once a week (I aim for less) and only saw cable news in airport waiting areas, it would be enough to terrify them into thinking the world was a dystopian hellscape. I try to, as the cool kids say, touch grass and live in the body as a rule but I don’t envy modern parents who are more connected and plugged in than any other generation before them.
Yeah in this case the problematic software is ‘self-esteem’ where we openly train people to love themselves.
And then omg how did we get all of these pathological narcissists??
Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter and Tik Tok just to name a few. Then we have cable the biggest disease of all, sprouting lie after lie, the planet has become a very dangerous place to live in.
Studies have been done on how narcissism is rewarded on social media.
Which explains why trolls like you are here.
No, but it does give rise to the aggressively (and aggressive) "intellectual" wannabe types, some who get thousands, millions of likes; others, (like you) not so much. So transparent, to call someone a troll who has just called you on your bullshit. I bet you do that a lot in the 3D world.
SEEK PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT, ASAP.
stupid, vapid blather. troll
https://www.thefp.com/p/we-have-a-tripledemic-not-of-disease/comment/11920176
Exactly. Not only do they get a participation award, they get a hero award for the slightest good deed.
No kidding. I was away from home for hours at a time and as long as I was home for dinner my mother really didn't care.
Perhaps one difference is that families today are smaller and so each child is more "precious" than each of a large family. I had seven siblings, and so the family could afford to lose one (not really but you get the point). Families with only one or two children tend to guard them more than families with many children. Losing an only child would be totally devastating.
True, but Europeans tend to have even smaller families than Americans, and yet they are still far less helicoptering than Americans are these days. Or so I have heard.
"adults who are unable to control their fears about their children, and who therefore impose their neuroses not only on their own children, but on everyone else's children."
Sounds like Mr. & Mrs. Thunberg.
🤣🤣🤣 exactly like the Thunbergs. “How dare you” Snarling!
I've wondered if the parents also talk like that. What a household.
Can you imagine Greta’s household! It must be bizarre to be living in it or to have grown up in it, and then to top it all the UN to buy into all this bullshit crazy stuff.
This was pretty interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IetovUoOmRo&ab_channel=JordanBPeterson
Excellent thanks for sharing!
I don't buy that. Her ego has gotten the better of her just like most people who get broadcast exposure and people fawning over them. It's easy to convince a person that she is a savior. Not so easy to remain humble in such a spotlight.
Celia - Unfortunately, re your last point, that horse is already out of the barn for most families, especially in blue cities and states where people are less likely to get information countering official, fear-inducing diktats.
Succinctly, if you protect your child from every risk, there is a 100% chance the child will grow up messed up, and if you don't protect your child from every risk, there is a small chance your child will be permanently harmed by something you could have protected against. Not gambling is not a choice in this matter.
Amen to that!
Exactly!
As an example, I had a friend who was watching her only child, a son, play little league. He was at bat and hit in the chest by a pitched ball. The blow stopped his heart and he died. This was before CPR.
Was little league banned because of this? No....
When you step out of your front door, you enter a dangerous environment. The most dangerous thing you do every day, is get in your car and driving away. Since the invention of the automobile tens of millions of people have been killed. It doesn't stop us from driving.
No it doesn’t but this is such a sad post🥲🥲
Yes it is.
It's very sad, but the reality is that you can't prevent all possible harm, no matter what you do. But you can drive yourself (and others) crazy by playing the "I've defended against THAT danger; what danger might happen NOW?" game. And children who take no risks at all never manage to gain true self-confidence.
Now that a generation of helicoptered (or worse, snowplowed) kids have reached putative adulthood, we can see the disastrous effects. These young adults have never been allowed to solve their own problems, which leaves them incapable of opening a bank account, renting an apartment, dealing with a speeding ticket, or even going to a job interview without mom there to hold their hand.
Worse yet, kids who are never allowed to test themselves physically fail to develop basic necessary physical traits like a proper sense of balance. They are also more likely to be injured because they don't know what their body is and isn't capable of.
Too many parents forget that they are raising future adults. That is something that my husband and I worked hard to remember at each step of parenting. We now have three adult children who are capable of solving their own problems (although they, like us at the same age) have discovered that parents still have a lot of wisdom to impart).
So true.
Life in a zoo is very safe. The animals are well fed and cared for. Unless they get out of the cage. Then they don't have a clue where to go or what to do. They will either be captured or euthanized.
Life in the wild is risky. You may be killed. You may have a hard time finding food. But you are more alive than any zoo animal can ever hope to be. Unless you get put in a cage and sent to the zoo.
While I understand the point of your story, CPR has been a thing for many decades now. How long ago are you talking about?
1950s
Wow! That is just crazy.
Sorry for your loss Celia but love your healthy attitude to life. It makes such a difference to a family if the Mum is in a good space. Wish you all the best for 2023!
I’m sorry for the loss of your eldest daughter, Celia.
At the height of the pandemic, the “esteemed” New York Times ran a piece claiming that Covid was a leading cause of death for children. Instinctively I knew that could not be accurate so I started to research and learned that drowning was actually far deadlier for children (around 4,000 fatalities annually) than Covid ever was or will be. Yet we take risks with baths, showers, pools and other bodies of water every day. The hysteria around Covid and children (IFR < 0.0003%) was absolutely maddening! (And working in a school I was exposed to this madness daily.)
The Left wages war on the normal.
Agree 💯
Celia - Your comments are always thought provoking and worth reading.... In this case you have really given me something to think about that is very close to my heart. I have a great deal of anxiety around anticipating/ avoiding loss. Dealing with this is really about self control and acceptance as you point out... I am truly sorry for your loss and I admire your approach....
As a cartoon fish once said: "Well, you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo."
Excellent article, but data and science have never been as influential as emotion. Fear is effective and viral. Critical thinking is not.
Ever since I saw that surgical masks were being promoted widely rather than the airtight N95 masks that actually stop viruses, it was clear the masking was not about science. Surgical masks are for surgery, not disease control.
So why did the health administrators all unanimously change their guidance on masking with no basis in evidence?
Masks are dehumanizing. They distinguish the subservient from the uncompliant. They train the children to follow orders regardless of any scientific rationale. The message is, "be afraid of ghosts, treat your fear by covering your face, and judge those who do not."
I remember seeing videos of China in a respiratory viral scare from the early 2000s and thinking it was comical that they thought surgical masks protected them. I never imagined it would happen here, but as the USA evolves towards "socialism with Chinese characteristics" itself, it's critical to condition the spirits of the people, especially the children, to achieve that model of governance. This is why none of our leaders feel the need to mask themselves, only you and your children.
We must remain the land of the free and the home of the brave. The world needs our example.
In March 2020 I did a thorough literature search on masking for respiratory viral illness  so I could best advise my patients. As Dr. Prasad stated here the evidence clearly pointed toward universal masking as ineffective. Additionally, personal masking (non-N95) did not appear to provide protection either.  
My recommendation to my patients included handwashing and staying home if they were sick. If they were high risk, I encourage them to hunker down for the time being.
I encouraged them to please continue to come see me when they were ill and I reassured my clinic staff that we were well equipped and experienced at handling infectious respiratory illness. I told them to stay home if they were ill, as we had always done. After all, we had been doing this for decades. 
By the way, staying away from others when we are sick is physical distancing, not social distancing. I wondered at this seemingly totalitarian term even back then.  Driving to work every morning on completely empty streets felt dystopian and out of balance.
 Looking back, I now realize that Dr. Fauci’s first recommendation on “masking as unnecessary” was based on the scientific evidence, and even what the CDC recommended on its website.  Then his narrative changed without new scientific evidence. That was the first time my lizard brain felt like something was off. The rest is history as you all know.
I have a zip file of hundreds of studies that I have collected on COVID-19 over the past three years.  I have a contextual timeline in my mind as well.  I am a thorough physician. I often found myself at odds with the public health narrative. I incorporated natural immunity into my recommendations for my individual patients, based on common sense and what we already know about immunology. The public health narrative never addressed it and current CDC recommendations on COVID-19 vaccination do not incorporate it. This is strange scientifically but consistent with their public health playbook.
The COVID-19 public health narrative actually interfered with my ability to care for my patients in the exam room, and it has done significant damage to our patient’s trust in the system and in us.  And yes, these policies damaged our children. 
Thank you for your work and your integrity, I'm encouraged by hearing about people like you.
I assume you aren’t in California where the new law signed by Newsom would prohibit your questioning the science… and spreading “disinformation”. It’s ridiculous. Thank you for your good work, Dr.
Honestly, if people gave handwashing the level of attention they give to masking, it would be amazing in terms of reducing disease burden. I used to live in a country where diarrheal diseases still killed a lot of children, so I’m fanatical about it, but it’s something we actually know works! And yet, we’re still stuck on mask theater.
Thank you all! I have not done anything that should be considered extraordinary. We take an oath as physicians as old as the profession itself. First, do no harm. This requires a thorough evaluation of the risks and benefits of any medical intervention on the individual patient. Public Health should return to making recommendations only and stay away from mandates. If they have good data we can use, please share it with us transparently. There is not enough space in my exam room for anyone else but me and my patient. Thankfully I practice in a red state.
One really has to ask what's going on when respected physicians teaching at major institutions such as Yale, Stanford and Johns Hopkins who issued the Great Barrington Declaration, and myriad practicing doctors such as yourself, are hectored and bullied to swoon to a political doctrine that is the antithesis of science and good practice. [edited only to show that both med school professors and those in practice objected to the dogma]
Thank you for your honesty in telling your patients (and us) the truth. Thank you for your integrity in doing the level of research most of us could not. And thank you for your bravery, frankly, in speaking the truth. We are all well aware of the risks you could be taking by doing any of those things (you must not live in Cali or Canada, but there is similar totalitarian pressure in plenty of other places.). Your patients are extremely lucky to have you in their corner.
I would trust you as my doc. I assume you still have a goid bedside manner. I also wonder is The Science purchased mask-maker stock.
Thank you for this post.
I ended up buying a breathable mask that was the color of my skin. No protection and only to be able to go into restaurants etc... It was my little joke😊 People need to live a healthy life style and get back to living🙄
That's funny. I bought a bedazzled breathable mesh mask to wear when it was absolutely required. Life is full of risks, always has been and always will be, but the powers-that-be would seemingly like us to forget that as long as we give them the authority to protect us. No thanks. I'll take my chances going it alone.
I really wanted to embroider "AMULET" across my required cloth masks. But alas, I do need to earn a living and wasn't brave enough to actually do it
It is the thought that counts in such scenarios. Said seriously, not sarcastically.
let's all try to be at least a little braver... I know it's hard but if we don't push back on ghoulish clothes being forced on our children's faces, we will end up having to wear all sorts of mandatory things, and quick
I bought a bunch of colorful, lightweight gauze masks to meet the requirement. Quite breathable, especially on warm days. And totally useless, of course.
So I'm not the only paranoid here.
It's the cowardly cult of safetyism, which seeks to have our children live for 150 years without enjoying a single day.
I just keep thinking back to 2014-2016, when my then-elementary schooler had cancer and was immunocompromised. No one - not even her team of world-renowned oncologists - suggested we “mask up” outside the hospital.
I hope she’s doing much better.
She is - thank you. She’s now 14 and an absolute gem.
I am sure she is a gem. Two of my kids have been on their death beds and are much tougher than their peers.
I’m sure that’s right! My girl has perspective that her friends simply don’t have.
Perspective is a better word. My son and daughter just laugh while other young adults navigate social situations.
As someone who wore an N95 on many occasions and never cared if anyone else wore a mask, this is the exact argument I made 3 months into the pandemic. Dozens of instances of visiting nursing homes during flu season and relatives with cancer and never once heard about masks.
The Democrats I was arguing with just insisted I was wrong even though everyone knew I was right and they were just gaslighting me.
You really have to stop to think what a scumbag you have to be to do that. To just lie to someone’s face when you are proven wrong. Not arguing around it. Just straight up lying. I’m not a particularly good person and I would never do that. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
These people are a different species.
I had a very similar experience in 2015 with my daughter with cancer. When she went back to school, while still in treatment and with a weakened immune system, no one told her to wear a mask, and no one asked her classmates to wear one to « protect » her; a nurse just came into class to explain the situation and the other children’s parents were asked to inform me in case their child had the flu or another contagious disease so I could keep my daughter home then. My daughter’s condition and protection wasn’t her classmates or other’s responsability, but ours, and it made perfet sense. I can’t understand why, 5 years later, everything is done backwards, people are asked to mask or get jabbed « to protect others », children’s are asked to protect their grandparents or accused of killing them… This is insane.
Yes! That’s how my girl’s school handled it, too. Not a mask in sight, either. There were unvaccinated kids at my girl’s school in 2014-2016, and not only were they not required to be vaccinated, but we weren’t even allowed to know who they were! I hope your girl is OK - mine had ETP ALL and is almost 7 years OT.
My daughter is fine too, she had APL, her treatment worked very well and she’s been in remission for 7 years. I’m sure the way things were handled, with the opportunity she was given to resume normal careless child life as soon as possible amongst family and friends (instead of being surrounded by fear, like what was offered to people these past 3 years) played a big role in her recovery…
💯 We went to Disney World for her Make A Wish - no masks, of course. She discovered a love for roller coasters and met every princess. She’s a very social kid - has been a extrovert from Minute 1. The kind of cancer she had is very aggressive, and it’s hard to get into and stay in remission. She did it, but if she had to stay isolated and everyone was “masked up”? I don’t think the outcome would have been as good.
Total insanity but then I think America has gone over the edge
“If pediatric beds are what’s in short supply, federal reimbursement should pay for pediatric beds. This would entice hospitals to expand capacity where it is needed.”
--------------------------------------
KID: “I have a respiratory virus.”
GOVERNMENT FUNDED HOSPITAL: “I’m sorry, did you say you want a sex change? Right this way.”
I heard sex changes only increase trans-mission rates though.
Literally laughed out loud
Lol!
CANADIAN HOSPITAL: “Too expensive. How about some nice quick euthanasia?”
No kidding. Crazy stuff
Think about this for a second: there are doctors quoted as saying that if you don’t mask, children will get sick and die. Before the Great Panic-demic of 2020, that would have been shocking news. Now, at least half the country doesn’t pay a lick of attention (including myself).
Out of all the consequences of 2020, I think the erosion of trust in the medical institutions may be one of the most deleterious, if not the saddest.
Also (and slightly unrelated to this article), labeling every statistical disparity as “racist” seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in the medical field. If you tell all the black/brown people that healthcare is “institutionally racist”, then they’re probably less likely to come in for mammograms or colonoscopies.
It’s just sad, really.
The problem is not the erosion of trust, the problem is that those medical institutions are not trustworthy.
Exactly. What’s sad is that these institutions have probably been untrustworthy for quite a long time, and the past three years has pulled back the curtain on that.
It is incredibly sad. The medical institutions are politicized now by radical ideologues. In addition to their disastrous handling of Covid, they also support gender affirming care”, a practice that supports the drugging and mutilation of kids who are likely to grow out of gender dysphoria without any intervention. I doubt it is a coincidence that they support practices that undermine our society and culture.
Quite right Sue. It is all rather depressing how malevolent things have become and the ignorance of people who go along with it thinking they are being "inclusive and kind".
Sad but true 🫰🫰🫰
🔥🔥🔥❤️
"I think the erosion of trust in the medical institutions may be one of the most deleterious, if not the saddest."
whereas I personally think it is one of the silver linings. medical doctors are just human beings, prone to all the same pitfalls. professional associations of doctors have been entirely captured by the woke, and most certainly should not be trusted. The fact that a lot more americans now know that AMA / CDC / FDA / FBI are not to be trusted... this is a Good Thing in my view.
🔥🔥❤️❤️
Many government and social institutions have now used up the public trust that they built up in the half-century after WWII. Recall what David Burge said about what the Left does to respected institutions.
Getting sick is the price of having a functioning society. But the Non Cons (non contributors), Democrats, think we can all just stay home and muse and speculate and emote, because that’s what they do, and they are adolescent narcissistic simpletons so they actually cannot grasp the concept that there are real human beings doing the things that keep us afloat.
They are of the "consulting class" who stayed home and hoarded toilet paper, screeched about safety and not infecting other people, while they didn't give a fig about the people who had to serve them, deliver their food, and generally keep society functioning. My contempt for them knows no bounds.
You mentioned the toilet paper thing so I have to do my Wipe Supremacy joke again.
😂😂😂
Hoarding toilet paper while the virus affected the cardio system was always a head scratcher...
Why? Seems to me like they were signaling their top priority.
Lol!
Referring back to your previous comment, the folks you describe use the name of Jesus as a curse word, not a reason to mask and jab everyone.
Unless and until they find it useful to invoke His name; usually in some snarky and underhanded manner.
Which is using it in vain.
d'accord
😘
Excellent article. Thanks.
The money quote: "Caring for children is not a major moneymaker for hospitals, and often earns less than adult hospitalization."
Bingo. At this point, I have exactly zero trust in the medical establishment, and I used to be an ER nurse.
There are a lot of reasons for that though. I work for a hospital system and just shut down our peds service line because most hospitals that are big enough to have a peds service in the first place also happen to be near enough to a metropolitan area that has a dedicated childrens hospital and parents will drive an extra 30min to take their sick kid to a childrens hospital in lieu of their community hospital. So we had a 6 bed peds inpatient unit with an average daily census of 1. Meaning we staffed a 24/7 pediatric team to care for an average of 1 kid per day. And kids, more than any other demographic, have the highest rates of Medicaid coverage which has reimbursement rates that don’t even costs. So most hospitals with smaller peds units operate those departments at a complete loss. With the average RN right now making $65-70/hr we can’t afford to sustain departments at a loss anymore.
Thanks for this explanation. 🙏
I _do_ understand the economies of scale operating here; it's the same logic that's leading to the closure of OB units in smaller hospital systems.
I guess what I would argue is that certain medical services—peds, obstetrics—should operate as loss leaders.
And that probably every small hospital doesn't need expensive equipment (MRI machines, etc) that they then have to pay to keep maintained and updated, and _overuse_ to justify the cost of the purchase.
Except when the lawyers come calling because there was no MRI to diagnosis a pediatric case of Hodgkin’s or whatever.
Don’t underestimate the impact of lawyers in this equation.
What a novel idea - health care separate from the profit motive. Who would have ever thought?
The irony though is without the profit motive the the efficiency deteriorates and progress slows to a snail's pace.
Yes and no. I certainly do not oppose fair compensation (profit) for health care providers. But I steadfastly oppose the mockery federal regulation/the Medicare cudgel have made of health-care. Not to mention the dystopia created by state-mandated third party for-profit insurance.
Oh, absolutely. Totally agree. The medical delivery system is screwed up twelve ways from Sunday now (my father's expression - what does that even mean?)
Wait...where are these nurses making $65-70/hr???? I gotta move there!! But I agree. Work for a hospital system that moved all heart surgeries to one location in order to be better rated on sts score (by combining the pt population being counted as one location) and basically increase revenue, and be able to advertise that score. Unfortunately lots of decisions like that are made, similarly to the peds being elimated where you are, I think with the end of the Covid assistance decisions like that will continue to happen.
I am in Idaho and yeah, clinic RNs no less are making $63.94 per hour. Cushy hours, no OT, no nights/weekends. It’s insane. Seattle Children’s Hospital just lost a collective bargaining battle with WSNA and brand new RN fresh out of school are starting at $50/hr with an expected 49% pay increase over the next 3 years. I work as a strategist so am often at the forefront of decisions precisely like that. They’re never easy but ultimately there’s so many factors that go into them and at the end of the day, it’s a balance between long-term financial viability/survival and continuing to provide as many services and as high quality patient care possible.
Holy cow! I work in Ohio (live in ky- we are on the border) and was happy I got a $1 raise last year to push me at $30 hahaha. Yeah, I think all of those decisions are much more complex than they seem on the surface when you factor everything that has to go into them.
Thanks for contributing SC, I think one of the beauties of this comments area is that we have people actually working in many fields. When we see our areas oversimplified/mischaracterized by reporters (God bless them, the world is super-complex, how do we expect them to get it “right” when it’s so complex and there are so many views)? It’s kind of like peer review for scientific papers, except better because it’s open and involves practitioners. Thanks again!
Yep. Spot on.
I was fortunate enough to be able to isolate for quite some time and I wore N95s to the store for longer than I would care to admit. I never got anything. Then when I thought the coast was clear I went to a bar to watch football and immediately got COVID which is identical to the flu except easier to catch.
If you really want to isolate and avoid COVID it is super easy. Closing society is the plan a 9-year-old would come up with. Actually, scratch that, most 9-year-olds aren’t scumbags. It’s the plan a dickhead with the intellect of a 9-year-old would come up with.
And let's not forget the "plan" that Cuomo, Murphy and Lamont came up with to murder the elderly in nursing homes. At the very least, criminally negligent homicide and, yet, not one of them was ever charged. In fact, the worst malefactor - China, which launched a bio weapon at the world - has gotten away with the crime of the century. While lesser criminals such as Fauci, Collins, Daszak, skate free. Amnesty for these criminals? Never. A sane society would demand justice. We are no longer that.
"China, which launched a bio weapon at the world" - I remember watching early news coverage of Wuhan, and the reports said that regional travel within China was locked down. However, international outgoing travel was still permitted. Hmmm... I always thought that was an interesting choice for containing a novel virus
I noted that too. I am also curious about the recent and current protocols. What do they know that I am prevented from knowing?
Adolf Whitmer was secretly the worst offender.
And yet she was re-elected. Truly our nation has become a ship of fools. Or dupes who have let the election process be hijacked by jackals.
My favorite is when they say that state laws are bad because Republican partisans will be counting the votes now and this can change the outcome which is a clear statement that they know you can totally cheat.
And then you look at a picture of the people handling the ballots currently, in pretty much every single state, and it is always a room full of people who, demographically speaking, vote about 95% Democrat. Hmmmmm.
Elections are local so everybody concerned about impropriety should volunteer.
C'mon....Lynne. You can do better than that!
How can you tell by a picture?
So you are pretending to not know that we have tons of data on how various demographic groups vote? Are you even capable of being honest?
"It’s the plan a dickhead with the intellect of a 9-year-old would come up with."
Oh, you mean government...
Correct.
Nice to have a place to go where common sense and reality exists.
Thanks
As an aside I am a grandparent and my grandkids had to wear mask at school. Rarely do they wear them correctly and at one point my grandson came home wearing someone else’s mask. So this is helping how?
I so often wish there was a 😂 button for some of these funny comments… our grandson was at a Catholic school which never shut down, but he did wear masks that were rarely on correctly… all patterns, too…dinosaurs, footballs, pizza slices, etc. It became kinda funny to see what mask he wore daily. Meanwhile, the poor public school kids stayed home trying to “learn” with their computers on while they played with their dogs, argued with siblings etc.
This effort to push precautionary measures to this degree appears to come from an irrational belief that humans can control nature if they just try hard enough, if we just all work together. What is forgotten is that no matter how much we separate ourselves from natural events, there will always be a limit to our control. We can’t stop earthquakes, we can’t stop tsunamis, we can’t stop contagions. Although we are the “pinnacle species” on the planet, we will always be subject to Natural Selection in some way.
Through our technology we have been so successful in staving off medical problems with medications and surgery that we have become delusional about how much power we really have over biology. We are victims of our own success.
"This effort to push precautionary measures to this degree appears to come from an irrational belief that humans can control nature[and that man is perfectible]"
The definition of the Left and Communism.
“ an irrational belief that humans can control nature if they just try hard enough”
I think this is one of the beliefs that’s making our world so awful to live in. If we work in concert with nature, not against it, not trying to control it, we might find beauty, peace, and enlightenment.
This weird belief that humans are IT and that we can and should do whatever we want (trying to turn a boy into a girl for example or control the weather) is killing our spirits IMO.
Great way to put it.
Medical problem this society actually creates and then financially benefits from "solving". Our bodies are trying to adapt to the enviromental insults, but we are past the tipping point. Only those fixes that generate money are used and the rest of the people are left to suffer. Those who have preventative answers, at best, can't make any money, and at worst are cancelled.
Has anyone collected data on RSV in school systems that were shutdown more than systems that stayed open? Or is the level of RSV and its severity roughly the same as it would have been before the pandemic.
BTW - it may get tiresome to hear this - But Thank you to the Free Press for reporting on important, useful subjects.
It’s probably hard to know because testing for RSV in school-age kids was fairly uncommon in the past. RSV tends to hospitalize the littlest ones - infants and toddlers so that’s where testing efforts are focused. Many parents don’t take their older kids in to be tested with every head cold which is how RSV usually presents in normal, healthy school aged kids. This year was a little different than last years in that our regional hospitals had more older kids hospitalized with RSV than we’ve seen in years past.
Thanks for the reply - so any data is lost in the noise.
My family has begun to wonder if it is VERY important to insure that children are exposed as much as possible. We know that the immune system has to be "trained" i.e. kids need to get into the dirt - perhaps it needs to be challenged constantly - or the result is a weakened immune system?
Maybe a weakened immune system is the point.
Our medical industry is built on sickness. More sick people equals more money
3 years ago I would have said you were wrong. Now I say, trust but verify. No unquestioned trust to the CDC, NIH or FDA. They may never recover my trust - which doesn't mean much - but my impression is that a lot of people feel the same way.
I’m in the don’t trust but verify place myself. I feel that way about the media too. There have been too many lies and / or mistakes …. But dismissing everything outright would be foolish
Your comment reminded me that I’ve read that in the 20th century polio struck harder in middle and upper class communities precisely because they had better sanitation. In the lower class neighborhoods, kids were exposed at early ages--precisely because polio was present and excreted. Gross but fascinating. Prior to improved sanitation, if I recall correctly, there were no epidemics of polio.
Thanks for your reply - I hadn't run across this before.
You are correct. The internet says there are two stages of infection - if you got polio when you were a baby (and had maternal-immunity) it was mild - and you developed long-term immunity. But when better sanitation prevented that early infection - then if you got polio later in childhood - it could be much worse.
FWIW - there were epidemics in 1916 and 1932.
Two comments--
First, "tripledemic" is an entirely made up term that did not exist before the Fall of 2022. It was coined primarily by the media and has been adopted by those pushing the orthodoxy. It is irresponsible of the media and health institutions to use the term, even informally. Though, obviously, it's used to try scare people into behaving a certain way.
Second, I live adjacent to a self-described "progressive" city. Most of the people I see wearing masks are people I reckon to be in their 20s-30s. Granted, some may very well be compromised in some way, but I suspect most are just doing what they're being told. It would be easy to ridicule them, but I won't. What I am angry about, though, are the institutions that are continuing to frighten people and push interventions, such as mask-wearing, that are not effective. It makes me worry about what the response will be to the next health crisis.
At the beginning of 2020 I tried to find info on mask efficacy and the best was that they were “20-80 percent effective”. Well, nearly anything is 20-80percent, and that’s even if the masks are worn even close to properly. Anyone who has to wear even the surgical (I call it a dust mask) will quickly have it almost uselessly on their face. But that’s OK with the clueless sheep pushing this. As long as there’s anything on your face, they feel they’ve driven compliance.
I just grimace when I see young people outdoors in masks. SO sad. What the mask CAN do is interfere with the flow of the CO2 you exhale and cause the wearer to breathe harder to try to get oxygen. It just puts the CO2 back into the inhalation. One super sad event I read was the girls track star who passed out from running a distance event in a mask -of course, outdoors. Tragic.
"One super sad event I read was the girls track star who passed out from running a distance event in a mask -of course, outdoors
It's an old saying, but you can't fix stupid.
I think it’s called virtue signalling
Walking around any college town where the students mingle is horrifying. I swear 50% of them still mask outdoors and alone in their cars.
Peer pressure
I suspect they are wearing masks outdoors and alone in cars, because they fear people will otherwise think they are republicans.
I never realized the efficacy of shame in a culture. Shame for skin color: bad. Shame for walking around in a full-body safety suit: good. One or our top military brass reviewing troops in a get-up like Darth Vader because of a relatively mild virus: a disgrace to a nation. We have broken the glass ceiling on being fools and abominations and it seems that when Pandora's box is open all manner of ills spill out.
Unfortunately we have a media driven by clicks and dwindling subscriptions that found COVID fear to be just the antidote to drive up numbers. That is now receding and they are hoping to find different ways to return to 2020. Fortunately, most of us are just going back to normal and not soon enough. Thanks Vinay.
also TDS
That’s why we had the pandemic and the response to it. And now we have to bear the consequence of a man and a woman who have absolutely no right to be in the WH. God help us all
The time is long past for consenting adults to agree to be governed by the authoritarian whims of pseudo-science practitioners. What strikes me in particular is that we have such cognitive dissonance in, and conflict between, so many government policies and dicta. We must be “safe” at the cost of personal choice and liberty; we must be protected from every potential harm; yet we must also be free to kill the most vulnerable in the womb. And there is a growing--and dangerous--advocacy lobby for the right to end one’s own life for vague reasons. And let’s be clear: it isn’t Republicans pushing the authoritarian safety police: it;s “liberal” Democrats. One of the most recent examples of Democrat-driven governmental insanity is the proposal to ban gas stoves because of potential health hazards. It used to be a joke that Democrats want us to freeze to death in the dark. Now it seems to be their mantra.
Look at NY state - banning gas heat and wood burning stoves in the freaking Adirondacks! Democrat mecca here.
Complete lunacy —the cohort to climate alarmism.
Haha my county in just banned gas stoves and heating systems! I never heard about an effort to do so before they passed the law. Then it was like oh it for your safety plus the environment. No more explanation. Fools.