Covid reflections -- and it's not pretty

June 15. 2021. About fifteen months into this mania I wanted to take some time to reflect on the mistakes and the potential lessons, the villains and the heroes, the losses and the opportunities presented to the world by this tiny but powerful virus.

The first lesson we failed to learn was that the political cure was much worse than the virus. Much of this has to do with the progressive mantra of "never letting a catastrophe go to waste," where socialist/Marxist/fascist/Democrat politicians exploit fear and their extra-constitutional powers to impose tyrannical rule over the general public, with impunity, and as part of extension of their desire to control people and force them to conform to their will.

Dr. Fauci is first and foremost among these lifetime political bureaucrats, a 'scientist' who has not treated any Covid patients, who has presided over 70 million global deaths from AIDS during his lengthy time in his role, who defers to communist China and the WHO, who weaponized the CDC, who declines to condemn (or at least chastise) political protests that violate his own edicts, and who demands kid glove treatment from the media while he ignores the pointed questions placed before him by skeptical congressional leaders. He is the 'brand' for 'follow the science,' rhetoric while all the time failing to recognize the science that does exist, replacing the scientific method with political posturing.

While we know that the Covid virus is quite contagious, it has a relatively low IFR (Infection Fatality Rate) and is not quite as contagious as mask and lockdown practice would suggest. Worse, epidemiologists and politicians who hide behind a position of "not one life to be lost" to the virus have seen the death of millions of people worldwide as the result less of the physical impact of the virus than to the many indirect effects of "Covid policy." Tens of millions more may die over the next ten years as the economic wave reverberates through the global economy, with food shortages, supply-chain problems, unemployment, mental health issues, suicides, and other pernicious effects that remain unrecognized by liberal politicians who while claiming to be protecting the public are actually doing great, great harm.

So masks and lockdowns are generally useless, other than for a poor form of virtue signaling, a clear sign of sheepish deferral to Orwellian authority, and a very minor inhibition of the spear of the virus. Even were masks to be a critical defense few people practice mask protocol effectively, just as condoms, while effective in combatting AIDS, were very often not used effectively, consistently, or properly, diminishing if not eliminating their effectiveness.

And the use of the anti-Trump vitriol made things worse by ignoring good public health practices, by rejecting and gaslighting helpful legacy medicines, and by placing politics and personal smears above the science.

So much of this echoes the nonsense of the climate alarmists among the so-called 'climate scientists,' and hypocritical celebrities and politicians whose level of climate alarmism has no basis in the full facts and science of what is happening in out atmosphere, while they also ignore the fact that half of the world's population -- in China, India and Indonesia -- care not one wit for the proselytizing by progressives as these three countries build hundreds of coal-powered power plants and laugh at the foolishness of the West.

The greatest shame belongs to higher education, who surrendered both their academic mission and their belief in the scientific method to pursue expensive social experiments in "social justice," "anti-racism," "sustainability studies," and "diversity, inclusion and equity," while buying college graduates in hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, filling their minds with wrong-headed and/or useless "liberal arts education," substituting feelings for facts, and giving up critical thinking to political correctness, cancel culture and gaslighting, paying themselves outrageous salaries, creating counterproductive administrative positions, and taking giant leaps backwards in preparing the current and recent generations of college students for the world of reality.

There are some small yet growing and occasionally very pointed rebuttals to this nonsense yet my greatest hope is for a resurgence of a silent majority of people who believe in the family, in capitalism, in common American values, in faith, and in prosperity over political correctness. The media, higher education and 'progressive' politicians have worked tirelessly to divide the country with diversity, to replace out common traits with tribalism, to promise more benefits to the 'takers' and more punishment for the 'makers,' to the point where it is easy to imagine this Orwellian 1984 scenario being coated by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Or, better yet, we may arrive at the point in "Network," when Peter Finch urged people to cry out, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more," and good people stand up to disingenuous politicians and make a last stand for America and western civilization.