{"id":3870,"date":"2020-04-24T12:35:06","date_gmt":"2020-04-24T16:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=3870"},"modified":"2020-04-24T12:36:11","modified_gmt":"2020-04-24T16:36:11","slug":"sacrificing-billions-to-save-thousands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/?p=3870","title":{"rendered":"Sacrificing Billions to Save Thousands?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Throne, Altar, Liberty\n<\/a>\n<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
The Canadian Red Ensign<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
$\"The$ <\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Friday, April 24, 2020<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\nSacrificing Billions to Save Thousands?\n<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
\nBy robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
\nBut, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
\nAnd the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”<\/strong><\/em> \u2013 Rudyard Kipling

\nThe way the World Health Organization, our power-hungry politicians, the\n technocratic boobs with tunnel vision who are our health apparatchiks, \nand the cheap harlots of the mainstream media talk about it, one would \nthink that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a real life equivalent of the \nartificially engineered, antibody resistant, superflu which wipes out \nmost of the world\u2019s population in Stephen King\u2019s 1978 novel The Stand<\/em>\n and the various adaptations thereof. It is not. Although it is \npossible that like the weaponized flu strain in the novel, it escaped \nfrom a laboratory, that of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it is not \nremotely comparable in terms of lethality. It is basically a normal \nstrain of bat influenza that has jumped species to humans, that has been\n spreading rapidly due to it being new to the species and thus our \nhaving no built up immunity to it yet, but most people are not at risk \nof anything worse than the ordinary flu from it. Those who are most \nsusceptible to developing the severe and potentially lethal form of \npneumonia that it can produce are the same people susceptible to \ncatching pneumonia and dying from H1N1 and the other, ordinary, seasonal\n strains of the flu.

\nFrom the beginning of this pandemic it has been apparent that the WHO\u2019s \nclaims with regards to the lethality of this virus have been greatly \nexaggerated. Although the press in its daily reports has used \n\u201cstaggering\u201d and similar scare words to describe the rising death tolls,\n the numbers themselves have not supported the use of such adjectives. \n Not when taken in context at any rate. COVID-19 has not become the \nleading cause of death, it is nowhere close to it. The overall number \nof deaths from all causes for the period of this pandemic has not risen \nastronomically in comparison with the number for the same period in \nother years. Indeed, in some areas that have been particularly hard \nhit by COVID-19 this number has been down from recent years.

\nIn most countries, the epidemiologists\u2019 original projections of expected\n deaths from this disease have been radically revised downward. At \nsome point the mortality rate will have to undergo a similar radical \nadjustment. Contrary to the lies of the health authorities and the \nmedia, the official death count for COVID-19 is not too low but too \nhigh. Even though the vast majority of people who have caught this \nvirus and died have had multiple other conditions that also contributed \nto their demise these have all been classified as deaths from COVID-19. \n If deaths from regular influenza were counted the same way the \nmortality rate for the flu would be much higher than it is. Similarly,\n the other number that goes into the mortality rate calculation is much \ntoo low. Since a large number \u2013 as many as fifty percent some \nestimates put it \u2013 of those who contract the virus are completely \nasymptomatic, the total number known to have been infected is obviously \nmuch, much, lower than the true number of infected. Indeed, when we \nconsider that international travel in and out of Hubei province was \nallowed long after the initial outbreak began there \u2013 and long after Red\n China shut down travel from that province to the rest of their own \ncountry \u2013 during a period in which Western countries, sick with a \nliberalism far more lethal than this virus, resisted imposing travel \nrestrictions on China, it is almost certain that the virus had made it \ninto all of our countries long before we noticed that it had arrived.

\nSince the potential lethality of this virus has been hugely exaggerated,\n the extent to which the repugnant, totalitarian, Communistic measures \nbeing taken almost everywhere are \u201csaving lives\u201d is also exaggerated. \nIn pointing this out I do not wish merely to throw water on those \ncurrently engaged in a nauseating orgy of self-congratulatory, \nbackslapping, tripe over their efforts to save lives by sacrificing our \nfreedoms, but to contrast the low number of lives saved with the \npotentially much higher number of lives endangered by the same measures.

\nWhile I am no fan of Karl Marx \u2013 Groucho is much more my style \u2013 and am \nof the firm opinion that he was wrong about almost everything, there are\n a few rare exceptions to this. One such exception was the sentence \nwith which he opened his letter to Louis Kugelmann on July 11, 1868. \nHe wrote \u201cEvery child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not \nsay for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish.\u201d With this \nsentence he introduces an argument that is neither interesting nor \nrelevant to the subject at hand, but the sentence itself states an \nobvious truth, one very similar to that which is found in the verses by \nRudyard Kipling quoted at the beginning of this essay.

\nThe Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus continues to be remembered to this \nday for his theory about population size and the food supply. Human \nbeings, Malthus argued, can increase our food supply through improved \nmeans of production, but if we do so the natural human response will be \nan increase in reproduction. The increase in reproduction will be \nfaster and larger than the increase in food production so that the \ngrowth in population size will exceed the increase to the food supply \nand as a result there will be famine, poverty, starvation, disease and \ndeath. His essay on the Principle of Population<\/em> was first \npublished in 1798. He expanded and revised it in 1803, and published \nseveral further editions with minor revisions before his death in 1834. \n From that day to this, it has inspired several prophecies of doom, the\n most famous of recent times being the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb<\/em>\n by Stanford University\u2019s Paul Ehrlich which predicted that hundreds of \nmillions of people would die in the 1970s from starvation due to \noverpopulation. That, of course, did not happen.

\nThere is obviously a flaw somewhere in Malthus\u2019 theory. The question \nis where. According to the popular Demographic Transition Model, first\n developed by Warren Thomson in 1929, the problem is with his \nunderstanding of human nature. According to this theory, as societies \nprogress towards industrialization they pass through stages and, after \nthey have achieved a certain level of industrial development, fertility \nrates drop drastically and population size stabilizes. While the \ndemographic history of Western countries and other developed countries \nsuch as Japan in the twentieth century would seem to bear this \ninterpretation out, explaining its having passed into conventional \nwisdom, it has not gone without challenge. Dr. Virginia Deane \nAbernethy of Vanderbilt University, for example, in her book Population Politics<\/em>\n (Transaction Books, 2000) gave several examples of empirical evidence \nthat goes against the theory, making the case that popular late \ntwentieth century progressive efforts to combat Third World \noverpopulation and poverty with policies based upon the assumption of \nthe DTM, such as foreign relief and liberal immigration to the West as a\n population safety valve, have not worked as the model would have \npredicted but have, if anything, made the problem worse. The sharp \ndecline in fertility that developed countries have experienced since the\n end of the post-World War II Baby Boom is better explained by other \naspects of the transition to modernity, such as a severe weakening of \nthe traditional idea that producing posterity is a duty we owe to our \nancestors, than by industrial prosperity itself.

\nThe other leading explanation of the flaw in Malthus\u2019 theory is that he \nvastly underestimated our capacity to improve and increase the food \nsupply. This explanation is also borne out by the history of the \ntwentieth century and much more consistently than that of the DTM.

\nNow, if this explanation of what went wrong with the predictions based \nupon Malthus\u2019 theory is the correct one, and I believe it is, then what \ncould potentially happen when we have a global population of 7.8 billion\n people and we shut down the economy all over the world, jeopardizing \nout ability to produce food at this improved and increased capacity?

\nWhy, lo and behold, we have just discovered where the potential for a \ndeath rate as a high as the one in Stephen King\u2019s book is to be found.

\nYes, shutting down the economies of practically every country in the \nworld, is indeed a move that will put the food supply in jeopardy. \nWhen those who produce and sell food are almost the only ones allowed to\n be open they are essentially being asked or told to work for nothing, \nfor nobody else is producing anything with which to pay them. Yes, \ngovernments are printing and handing out fiat money by the gazillions, \nbut money has no intrinsic value. Its role in the marketplace is to be\n a convenient stand-in for real goods. The X number of dollars that \nyou pay someone for Y amount of magic beans, represents the cow that you\n would have traded in a barter exchange. Perhaps that is a bad \nexample, because both beans and cattle are sources of food, but I think \nit still gets the point across. If only category of producers are \nallowed to actually produce anything for sale in the market, the \ncurrency that is exchanged in that market will rapidly become worthless,\n and those producers will become overburdened and start to fail. It \nis estimated that nine million people in the world die from hunger every\n year. It is responsible for half of the deaths of children under the \nage of five. This is over three times the number of people known to \nhave been infected with COVID-19. It is about fifty times more than \nthe number who have died after contracting the virus. As of this \nwriting, the number who have died from hunger in 2020 so far is almost \nthree million. That\u2019s about fifteen times the number who have died \nafter contracting COVID-19, whether the virus was the primary killer or \nnot. The measures being taken to combat COVID-19 will drive the number\n who die from hunger up and by considerably more than they can bring the\n number who die from COVID-19 down.

\nThere are those who would say that this is the intentional and \ndeliberate true purpose of the global lockdown. I would not go that \nfar. The problem with the interpretation of events as being the \nintended outcome of a very powerful and malevolent cabal is that it \nrequires assuming that politicians, bureaucrats, technocrats, and the \nlike possess an almost superhuman level of competence. In reality, \nthese are people who think they are Sherlock Holmes, when they are \nactually Jacques Clouseau \u2013 the Jacques Clouseau portrayed by Peter \nSellers in Blake Edwards\u2019 Pink Panther films, not the version of the \ncharacter more recently portrayed by Steve Martin. Unlike the latter, \nwho is able to scrape together enough deductive reasoning to actually \nsolve the case by the end of his movies, Sellers\u2019 classic \ninterpretation of this character was of a bumbling, clumsy, nincompoop \nwhose incompetence is matched only by his vanity and arrogance, and who \nsucceeds only through an extraordinary degree of sheer accidental luck. \n

\nThat having been said, large scale global depopulation has been one of \nthe chief goals of the environmentalist wing of the United Nations and \nits ultrawealthy backers like Bill Gates, George Soros, and the late \nMaurice Strong since at least the 1992 \u201cEarth Summit\u201d at Rio de Janeiro \nthat produced the famous \u2013 or, depending upon your perspective, infamous\n \u2013 action plan \u201cAgenda 21.\u201d These people represent the most extreme \nversion of one of the two distortions of Malthus that have been around \nsince his own day. While his detractors, like Victorian novelist \nCharles Dickens, unjustly accused him of heartlessly wishing upon people\n the famine, poverty, and death his theory predicted, his supporters, \nespecially those of more recent times, have advocated measures to combat\n overpopulation that he himself would have found morally repugnant, such\n as abortion, infanticide, and totalitarian state control of \nreproduction. Those who want the world\u2019s population reduced by as much\n as eighty to ninety-five percent are the worst example of this sort. \nThe overlap between the institutions such as the United Nations and \nindividuals such as Bill Gates who advocate this radical agenda and \nthose behind the global lockdown is certainly worth taking note of.

\nWhether intentional or merely the result of the kind of stupidity that \nis the unique property of technocratic experts \u2013 \u201cI had no idea my \nsolution to Problem X would create the much worse Problem Y because that\n is not my field of expertise\u201d \u2013 the potential lethality of the measures\n being taken to combat COVID-19, far exceeds that of the disease itself.
\n\n\n\n\n\nPosted by\n\n\n\nGerry T. Neal\n<\/a>\n\n\n\nat\n\n 6:14 AM<\/abbr><\/a>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLabels:\n Agenda 21<\/a>,\n Bill Gates<\/a>,\n Blake Edwards<\/a>,\n COVID-19<\/a>,\n George Soros<\/a>,\n Groucho Marx<\/a>,\n Karl Marx<\/a>,\n Maurice Strong<\/a>,\n Paul Ehrlich<\/a>,\n Peter Sellers<\/a>,\n Rudyard Kipling<\/a>,\n Stephen King<\/a>,\n Thomas Robert Malthus<\/a>,\n Virginia Deane Abernethy<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Throne, Altar, Liberty The Canadian Red Ensign Friday, April 24, 2020 Sacrificing Billions to Save Thousands? In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2164,2160,2165,2136,1136,2168,2166,2169,2167,2170,2171,2172,2173],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3870"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3871,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870\/revisions\/3871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cafe.nfshost.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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