Tag Archives: Covid-19 lockdowns

The Economic Meltdown Has Roots in Lockdown, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Posted on June 15, 2022 | Leave a comment

You can’t just switch a multi-trillion dollar economy on and off. Who knew? From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:

American’s capacity for denial is truly a thing to behold. For at least 27 months, it should have been obvious that we were headed for a grave crisis. Not only that: the crisis was already here in March 2020.

For weird reasons, some people, many people, imagined that governments could just shut down an economy and turn it back on without consequence. And yet here we are.

Historians of the future, if there are any intelligent ones among them, will surely be aghast at our astounding ignorance. Congress enacted decades of spending in just two years and figured it would be fine. The printing presses at the Fed ran at full tilt. No one cared to do anything about the trade snarls or supply-chain breakages. And here we are.

Our elites had two years to fix this unfolding disaster. They did nothing. Now we face terrible, grim, grueling, exploitative inflation, at the same time we are plunging into recession again, and people sit around wondering what the heck happened.

I will tell you what happened: the ruling class destroyed the world we knew. It happened right before our eyes. And here we are.

Last week, the stock market reeled on the news that the European Central Bank will attempt to do something about the inflation wrecking markets. So of course the financial markets panicked like an addict who can’t find his next hit of heroin. This week already began with more of the same, for fear that the Fed will be forced to rein in its easy-money policy event further. Maybe, maybe not; but recession appears impending regardless.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government

Tagged

Michael Senger’s Snake Oil: A Review, by eugyppius

Posted on April 14, 2022 | Leave a comment

The point of the Chinese response to Covid-19 wasn’t the virus, it was the lockdowns. From eugyppius at eugyppius.com:

Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World (2021). 220pp. ISBN: 978-1957083780. $10.99.

I will never tire of typing that the whole question, of how lockdowns became the default response to Corona, is very hard. Some points are nevertheless clear: There was, without a doubt and in the earliest stages, a kind of lockdown cabal, a small group of people in different countries who worked to bring some simulacrum of the Hubei response first to Italy and then to most of the globe. An insidious, coordinated information campaign accompanied their efforts, and this should warn us against easy assumptions that they had good intentions.

On social media, a swarm of manipulative pro-lockdown accounts promoted containment and attacked any prominent politician who tried to steer a moderate course. Michael Senger was among the first to point out that this campaign was operated, in part, out of China. His crucial September 2020 article on the Chinese promotion of lockdowns on social media for Tablet Magazine won him wide renown. He had over 100,000 followers on Twitter before the platform banned him; he now writes The New Normal on Substack, and you should all subscribe to him.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged ,

The Inflation Disaster Is Collateral Damage from Lockdowns, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Posted on March 26, 2022 | Leave a comment

The lockdowns prompted the mad fiat debt creation of 2020 and 2021. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:

The outrageous prices at the grocery store and gas stations – the highest ever recorded and increasing at rates too fast to calculate with precision – are yet more collateral damage from the initial lockdowns two years ago. The story unfolds over two years but the line of causality is direct.

Apparently it’s going to get much worse. I wonder if at some point, no one will remember how this all began. Maybe everyone has already forgotten.

I asked a friend: do you think people understand the relationship between the March 2020 lockdowns and the wild price increases two years later? The answer came: no way.

That surprises me but I also understand. There has been so much flimflam coming from the media and government spokespeople for so long, so many many attempts to demonize and scapegoat.

In addition, for many people, the past 24 months have seemed like one big blur when everything they thought about the world has been blasted to pieces. It’s extremely disorienting. After a while, one can get used to the chaos and just accept it without attempting to account for it. The lines of causality too become blurry.

The latest mess – and this doesn’t even account for the shocking talk of nuclear war that is now in the air – profoundly affects all states in the US, not just the blue ones that stayed closed much longer than red ones. Red states have felt normal but now they too must deal with incredible price increases in everything plus strange and random goods shortages on the shelves.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Debt, Economy, Governments, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

Tagged ,

Planet Lockdown: A Documentary, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on March 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Lockdowns are completely incompatible with human freedom and they ruined or destroyed millions of live. From Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com (Planet Lockdown documentary embedded in linked post):

Story at-a-glance

  • The film Planet Lockdown explores this unprecedented time in history, speaking with epidemiologists, scientists, doctors and other experts to uncover the real motives behind the increasing totalitarian control taking over the globe
  • Dr. Scott Jensen, a family doctor and former member of the Minnesota Senate, received an email from the Department of Health that coached him to use COVID-19 as a diagnosis incorrectly
  • The notion of asymptomatic spread turns virtually anyone you meet or encounter on the street into the enemy or a threat, furthering fear and control
  • The artificially imposed state of incoherence that’s been enacted during the pandemic is described as a torture tactic, designed to get people to submit to vaccine passports and COVID-19 shots
  • Many of the experts in the film bring up the Nuremberg Code, which is being violated as people are forced to get experimental shots
  • Civil disobedience, boycotting businesses that are requiring vaccine passports, participating in rallies and fighting illegal mandates in court are ways that everyone can get involved in protecting freedom

Prior to 2020, if you heard the term “lockdown” you might think of something that happens in a prison — not in a free society. This mechanism of control has since become commonplace — not among prisoners but among the free — with repercussions that are only beginning to be understood.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Law, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

Tagged

Fauci’s War on Science: The Smoking Gun, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on December 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

Fauci orchestrated attacks on the Great Barrington Declaration, which sought to spark a debate on the medical efficacy of lockdowns. A debate, you know, science. From Jeffrey Tucker at brownstone.org:

Those weeks following the release of the Great Barrington Declaration did feel odd.

On the good side, medical doctors, scientists, public health workers, and citizens all over the world were thrilled that three top scholars in fields of public health and epidemiology had spoken out against lockdowns and for a reasoned approach to Covid. They eagerly signed the document.

Yes, there were some attempts to sabotage it too, with fake names and so on, which should have been a clue about what was coming. The fakes were deleted in days and new methods of confirming signatures were deployed.

The document, on the one hand, said nothing controversial. The right way to deal with this pandemic, it said, was to focus on those who could face severe outcomes from disease – a very plain point and nothing new. There was nothing to be gained by locking down the whole of society because of a pathogen with such a huge differential in its demographic impact.

The virus would have to become endemic in any case (including the realization of “herd immunity,” which is not a “strategy” but a descriptive term widely accepted in epidemiology) and certainly would not be stopped by destroying peoples’ lives and liberties.

The hope of the Declaration was simply that journalists would pay attention to a different point of view and a debate would begin on the unprecedented experiment in lockdowns. Perhaps science could prevail, even in this climate.

On the bad side, and at the very same time, following the release, the attacks began pouring in, and they were brutal, structured to destroy. The three main signers – Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) – made the statement as a matter of principle. It was also born of frustration with the prevailing narrative.

Mostly this declaration was intended as an educational effort. But the authors were being called vicious names and treated like heretics that should be burned. There certainly was no civil debate; quite the contrary.

It was all quite shocking given that the Declaration was a statement concerning what almost everyone in these professional circles believed earlier in the year. They were merely stating the consensus based on science and experience. Nothing more. Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. It was sponsored by Yale University. Today it reads nearly like a first draft of the Great Barrington Declaration. Indeed on that same day, Fauci wrote to a Washington Post reporter: “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Law, Media, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science

Tagged , ,

An Inside Look at Lockdown Orders From 2020, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on July 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

From two primary perspectives—medical and liberty—the lockdowns were massive failures. From Jeffrey Tucker at realclearmarkets.org:

An Inside Look at Lockdown Orders From 2020

(AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Life in the United States and in many parts of the world was transformed in mid-March 2020. That was when the great experiment began. It was a test. How much power does government have to rule nearly the whole of life? To what extent can all the power of the state be mobilized to take away rights that people had previously supposed were protected by law? How many restrictions on freedom would people put up with without a revolt?

It was also a test of executive and bureaucratic power: can these dramatic decisions be made by just a handful of people, independent of all our slogans about representative democracy?

We are far from coming to terms with any of these questions. They are hardly being discussed. The one takeaway from the storm that swept through our country and the world in those days is that anything is possible. Unless something dramatic is done, like some firm limits on what governments can do, they will try again, under the pretext of public health or something else.

There is so much to unpack from those early days, every day filled with drama and meaning.

There were two critical turning points, so far as the public knows. The first was on March 12, when Trump gave an evening speech that ended in announcing a travel ban from Europe. Fauci had previously said that it would not happen.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Economy, Governments, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged

New Harvard Data (Accidentally) Reveal How Lockdowns Crushed the Working Class While Leaving Elites Unscathed, by Brad Polumbo

Posted on June 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

Harvard researchers certainly weren’t goal seeking the conclusions that came from their own study. From Brad Polumbo at fee.org:

Founding father and the second president of the United States John Adams once said that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” What he meant was that objective, raw numbers don’t lie—and this remains true hundreds of years later.

We just got yet another example. A new data analysis from Harvard University, Brown University, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation calculates how different employment levels have been impacted during the pandemic to date. The findings reveal that government lockdown orders devastated workers at the bottom of the financial food chain but left the upper-tier actually better off.

The analysis examined employment levels in January 2020, before the coronavirus spread widely and before lockdown orders and other restrictions on the economy were implemented. It compared them to employment figures from March 31, 2021.

The picture painted by this comparison is one of working-class destruction.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Debt, demographics, Economics, Economy, Governments, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged , ,

Professor: Historians Will Look Back On Lockdowns As ‘Most Catastrophic Event Of All Human History’, by Steve Watson

Posted on June 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

For the high and the mighty, because much of the damage has been to the poor and powerless, it doesn’t count. From Steve Watson at summit.news:

“Every single poor person on the face of the earth has faced some harm, sometimes catastrophic harm, from this lockdown policy.”

Stanford University professor of medicine Jay Bhattacharya says that in years to come lockdowns will be looked back upon as the most catastrophically harmful policy in “all of history”.

Speaking on The London Telegraph podcast ‘Planet Normal’, Bhattacharya noted that government scientific advisors “remain attached” to the policy of lockdown in spite of the total “failure of this strategy”.

“I do think that future historians will look back on this and say this was the single biggest public health mistake, possibly of all history, in terms of the scope of the harm that it’s caused,” said Bhattacharya.

The epidemiologist added “Every single poor person on the face of the earth has faced some harm, sometimes catastrophic harm, from this lockdown policy.”

“Almost from the very beginning, lockdown was going to have enormous collateral consequences, things that are sometimes hard to see but are nevertheless real,” Bhattacharya added.

He further noted that serious mental and physical illnesses have been basically ignored and “we closed our eyes to them because we were so scared about the virus and so enamoured with this idea that the lockdown could stop the virus.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Economy, Governments, Labor, Law, Media, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged ,

German Study Finds Lockdown ‘Had No Effect’ on Stopping Spread of Coronavirus, by Paul Joseph Watson

Posted on June 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

Nothing we don’t already know, but even the mainstream is waking up to the fact that most everything that was done to stop or slow the spread of the coronavirus had no effect. From Paul Joseph Watson at summit.news:

Infection rates already falling before restrictions put in place.

A major new study by German scientists at Munich University has found that lockdowns had no effect on reducing the country’s coronavirus infection rate.

Oh.

“Statisticians at Munich University found “no direct connection” between the German lockdown and falling infection rates in the country,” reports the Telegraph.

The study found that, on all three occasions before Germany imposed its lockdowns in November, December and April, infection rates had already begun to fall.

The R rate – the number that indicates how many other people an infected person passes the virus to – was already under 1 before the lockdown restrictions came into force.

As we highlighted last year, a leaked study from inside the German Ministry of the Interior revealed that the impact of the country’s lockdown could end up killing more people than the coronavirus due to victims of other serious illnesses not receiving treatment.

This is by no means the only study to have concluded that lockdowns are completely useless and don’t work.

A peer reviewed study published in January by Stanford researchers found that mandatory lockdowns do not provide more benefits to stopping the spread of COVID-19 than voluntary measures such as social distancing.

Back in March, Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya told Newsweek that COVID-19 lockdowns are “the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Government, Medicine, Science

Tagged

2020 Exploded the Myth About Left Wing Love of the Poor, by Jeffrey Tucker

Posted on June 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

Leftists love the poor so much they destroy their livelihoods. From Jeffrey Tucker at realclearmarkets.com:

2020 Exploded the Myth About Left Wing Love of the Poor

(Jason Connolly/Summit Daily News via AP)

An axiom everyone picks up in college – and in nearly the whole of media culture too – is that people who favor a market economy disregard everyone but the privileged rich (itself a euphemism). It’s a great rhetorical trick because the presumption keeps backers of freedom on the hot seat, permanently.

You know the ropes. Trickle down is a myth, so why are we shilling for the rich? What’s this fetish for big business? Why do we disregard the poor, the workers, the marginalized, the vulnerable? Why is our thinking so solipsistically exclusionary of people unlike ourselves?

If the experience of 2020 doesn’t change this fake narrative, nothing will. The reality is that with few exceptions, the people who identify as “left of center” became the champions of lockdowns, as if this were a normal policy any civilized country would deploy in the event of a new pathogen.

I never would have believed it, and some of my friends on the left are shocked by it all. They are in the minority among their tribe. Still there it was, a clear ideological bias for lockdowns that strongly tilted left.

Let us begin with the great slogan of Spring 2020: “Stay home and stay safe.” Twitter even invented a little house icon that appeared when you typed it. It became a kind of mantra that the way to control this disease is not to leave your house. Have your meals delivered. Watch your church services on your computer. Meet with friends only through Zoom. Get out on the roads only if you have to, and do not travel no matter what.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Law, Medicine, Politics

Tagged ,