Where's the scientific evidence that lockdowns work?

Big Doug was advising us today that we shouldn't make plans for Easter weekend. The national propaganda network was simultaneously advising us that the pandemic in Ontario is "completely out of control."

So you know what's coming. 

The world has been playing the lock-down game for a year now, and the more you look at the comparative stats, the less certain you will be about the efficacy of lockdowns. 

That's due mainly to the entire pandemic event having become a highly politicized cultural touchstone. For example, compare the pandemic stats among the four most populous states. Two of them are Republican, two or them are Democrat. True to every cliched expectation, the Republican states are open for business, while the Dem states are masked up and locked down.

There is absolutely nothing in the numbers that can definitively tell you lockdowns work, but there is plenty that suggests they don't make any difference whatsoever.

Which makes sense to me.

Why would the virus care if you're a Dem or a Republican?

And why would the virus care if you wear a mask or not? You're still breathing the same air!

Anyway, Big Doug is gonna push whatever small businesses are still afloat under the water again. 

When the story starts with "suspected Russian hackers" you know you're reading bullsh!t

I clicked on a CBC headline that told me Russian hackers had infiltrated the email system at the US Department of Homeland Security.

The first word in the story is "suspected."

Oh. So they don't actually know this to be true. But they're floating this story anyway, because, Putin.

You know, Putin's aggression and all that. Look how he persecutes those punk rock icons, Pussy Riot. Look at how he persecutes freedom and corruption fighters Bill Browder and Alexei Navalny. Look at how he grabbed that Crimean naval base right out from under the noses of the Americans.

Clearly, Putin must be stopped.

Therefore, even if we have absolutely nothing to definitively connect Russia to the SolarWinds hack, here's a bit of official speculation to get you headed in the right direction.

Perhaps by next week Bellingcat will have come up with the proof!

China: goofy, klutzy, clumsy, dumb, and dumber

Those are a few of the descriptors Globe and Mail journo Campbell Clark tosses into today's two minutes of China hate. 

Those silly fools! They are the "Keystone Kops of propaganda," don't you know! Look how we rattled them with our sanctions! They sanctioned a few Canadians right back, and now the whole world is rallying to Canada's side, or if not the whole world, at least Joe and Boris. Har-de-har har, those dumbass Chinese!

Having surrendered our sovereignty for the sake of America's illegal and immoral sanctions on Iran by nabbing Meng Wanzhou, we plucky Canucks now look to Boris and Joe to bail us out. I'm sure freedom for the two Michaels is so close they can almost taste it...

Do the people publishing this nonsense really believe that the daily trashing of China in the pages of the Globe and Mail is in any way conducive to improving relations between our countries?

Just hold 'em down and give those brown folks the jab!

The Toronto Star has presented many articles spelling out the sordid facts around our front line heroes on the frontmost of front lines, the PSWs in long term care homes. Thanks to the diligent reportage by Star journalists, we know those workers are mostly racialized recent immigrants working multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet.

These are the folks who are gonna be wiping your ass and washing your balls when you can't take care of yourself anymore. They typically make a wage that leaves them well below the poverty line. We should be very very kind to them.

We also know that vaccine hesitation is more pronounced in communities of colour, and the Toronto Star has provided us with extensive coverage of this topic. BIPOC communities have long suffered from systemic racism, and therefore don't trust the health care system.

Today, the Toronto Star published this letter, titled by an editor, or an unpaid intern standing in for an editor, "Care workers refusing vaccine should be unemployed."

Shouldn't my expectation to be cared for by a fully vaccinated health team supersede their baseless fear of vaccination? I believe their choice of whether to vaccinate or not ought to be replaced with the choice of whether to keep their jobs or not.

The author's name would suggest they are not a recent immigrant, and I strongly suspect they've not worked anywhere near the front lines.

There's quite a few strands you could pull together in analysing why the Star would publish a letter that suggests we fire racialized recent immigrants in essential health-care positions because they are vaccine hesitant.

I don't want to stir up a conspiracy theory, but do you think this could be a first glimpse of the new owners of the Toronto Star flexing their muscles?

Researchers discover negative bias in pandemic reporting

Who knew?

I've been commenting on the over-the-top fear-mongering of pandemic reportage for over a year now. It is ubiquitous, relentless, and continues to this day. Check out the home page of CBC News anytime you like, and most of what you'll read is alarming speculation about what some experts think might yet be unleashed by variants, variants of concern, mutations, double mutations, and so forth. The fact that there are other experts thinking other thoughts is never hinted at.

Here is but one very minor example of media malfeasance. Every news platform in the land features the daily case count front and centre. Do any of those platforms tell you the daily test counts? No!

Why not? The government publishes this number every day, on the same government website that gives us the case numbers. Why does the media give us one of those stats with religious zeal, while totally ignoring the other one? Isn't it perfectly reasonable to expect that you'll find twice as much covid if you do twice as much testing?

Ontario first hit 35,000 tests per day early last September. By January we were averaging over 70,000 per day. During that period we saw new cases go from about 1000 per day to over 3000 per day. That was the dreaded "second wave."

Yes, Ontario had a second wave, but at least half the increase was due to nothing other than doubling the number of daily tests. Cut the second wave in half and it looks more like a ripple than a wave. But that's certainly not something the media pointed out, is it?

So yes, there's been an obvious fear-mongering spin to covid coverage overall, but it can't be real until some experts figure it out.

Here it is. Researchers at a couple of serious schools (ie not Fairfax University!) took a look at some 20,000 pandemic related news stories, and found over 90% had a negative spin. Even last summer, as case numbers were declining, negative stories were five times more frequent than positive ones. 

Unfortunately for legions of conspiracy theorists, this skewing of the pandemic narrative is not the result of secret machinations behind the curtain. It's driven by reader demand. People click on negative stories more often, and therefore the click-driven media platforms give the readers more of what they want.

Trump v Biden; Who's the empty suit?

No matter how much you may have been a Trump fan, by the end of his four year run in the White House it was beyond obvious that the "president" didn't actually wield any supposed presidential powers. As entertaining as the man was, and he was certainly a ratings bonanza for corporate news, he was essentially an empty suit. Actual power was exercised by others.

No matter how much you may have been a Joe Biden fan, and he allegedly has more fans than any president in history, after watching his first presser, a mere 65 days into his tenure, it is impossible to imagine that this man is calling the shots in Washington. Joe is just an empty suit.

Which raises an interesting question that cuts to the core of America's claim to be the leader of the free and democratic world. If the president elected by the people, in the most expensive and ostentatious display of "democratic process" seen anywhere on earth, doesn't actually exercise power, isn't the entire spectacle a sham?

Does that fact not call into question the very foundation of America's civilizing mission to the world, the relentless and ruthless export of a dystopian governance model that long ago ceased to be a functioning democracy?

The super-awesome & miraculous intelligence scoops from Bellingcat

In the summer of 2014, things were pretty hot in the eastern reaches of Ukraine. The democratically elected Yanukovych government had been overthrown in a US engineered coup. Russia had subsequently absorbed Crimea, and there were fears of a wider conflict. This was the context of the shooting down of MH 17, a civilian Malaysian airliner.

The Americans realized they had a potential propaganda bonanza on their hands, if only they had something they could pass off as proof to pin the blame on the Russians. Alas, in spite of an army of thousands of analysts and data scientists, in spite of an array of spy satellites monitoring every square inch of Ukraine 24/7 in real time, in spite of vast networks of on-the-ground informants, and in spite of a budget in the many billions of dollars, they had nothing.

Enter Eliot Higgins, a thirty-something unemployed loafer in England. Eliot was able to prove what the US intelligence apparatus couldn't. Sure enough, the Ruskies had sneaked one of their missile systems across the border, shot down MH 17, and then skedaddled back over to Russia!

Hmm...

The nature of Higgins' "proofs" tends to leave more than a little bit desired, like any actual solid proof in the conventional sense of the word. Nevertheless, that was good enough to get him on the grant list at the National Endowment for Democracy, that US government-funded "non-government organization" specializing in distributing seed money to whatever fifth columns might further US interests in target nations.

Eliot was a guest on The Current this morning. Needless to say, host Matt Galloway didn't ask any  awkward questions about that US financing, or about anything else for that matter. Instead, we were treated to what was essentially twenty minutes of anti-Russian propaganda by a guy who collects money from the American government.

The CBC; using Canadian tax dollars to spread US propaganda.