2020: The year of living stupidly

December 20, 2020. While one 'expert' claims that masks have almost eliminated cold and flu...

....the CDC's own research claims that masks are not effective... "did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.

Stupid politicians piled upon stupid 'experts and what do you get? 2020!

While I am not a fan of Trump the person, I can't even begin to abide the politics of the left. It is important that people separate the two -- personality and politics. Or simply, what a person (or a party) does is more important than what they say.

Here are some examples from the above-linked post:

Donald Trump’s wrongness, as usual, got the most attention: “We have it totally under control. . . . It’s going to be just fine,” he said on Jan. 21. Trump had lots of company in being wrong: “Get on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus,” Mayor Bill de Blasio urged New Yorkers on March 2, the day after the first confirmed case hit town.
“In this situation, the facts defeat fear because the reality is reassuring,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, also on March 2. “We should relax because that’s what is dictated by the reality of the situation.” Cuomo added this was “not our first rodeo.”

To be fair, Trump spoke very early in the 'crisis' when, in fact, there was no crisis. DiBlasio and Cumo, who eventually produced world record death rates from their actions, spoke later, knew better and did much worse. Trump tried to close the border; Pelosi told the San Francisco to pack the restaurants. While Trump spoke with his own ego, his actions did not produce the super-spreader events and the nursing home mortalities that the progressive politicians of the far left produced. And while Trump was chastised, Cuomo has been lionized. He even won and Emmy. It should have been for 'most avoidable deaths in the shortest period.'

It is also important to understand the difference between the 'pandemic' itself, and the policies it produced, and the subsequent effects. People need to stop saying that the pandemic caused all of our economic problems -- pr at least those that were not caused by capitalism -- and recognize that it has been the politicians and public health officials' policies and mandates that are the real cause. At its worst, Covid has been a co-morbidity in the death of many businesses; politics has been the real cause of death.

More alarming is how clear the motives of the rich, elite in this attack on economic freedom. Those with wealth got a to richer while those with low incomes became much poorer and what little wealth they may have had has turned into debt, deficits, and deferred payments. All this while the elite politicians, public health officials, business leaders and media mavens offered virtue signaling about their distaste for wealth and income inequality, while their very actions made the inequality markedly worse.

Citing capitalism as the cause of our problems is another irrational, non-fact-based claim. We only have what we do have to combat and live through the pandemic because of capitalism. We only have the huge amounts of wealth too argue over distributing because of capitalism. As Thomas Piketty stumbled upon the finding that people can earn money from money, not just labor, and, in many cases, more from managing their finances then in managing their work careers. Marx was completely wrong in simplifying wealth as either land or labor, and that fundamental error destroys his entire theory before one even gets to the next step.

I learned in my logic class fifty years ago that if one starts with a false premise, any subsequent truths will not produce a logical conclusion. If you start with the premise that your destination is five hundred miles to the north and the reality is that it is five hundred miles to the south, all the rational efforts to speed up the journey will be for naught. In fact, they will be counterproductive. As the adage goes, "We're lost, but we are making great time!"