Leading From Fear

Worth dissecting where we are with Covid.  Instead of watching the television, or listening to blowhard politicians, it is best to look at data and statistics.  Unfortunately, most people do not understand stats.  Most of the stats you see in the news are manipulated in some way to drive an opinion.

People use fear to whip and drive people. They use fear to control them. One of the things I learned trading is if I traded from a place of fear, I made bad decisions. As I invested in startups, I saw CEOs wrestle with fear. The ones that handled it did better than the ones that were controlled by it.

Fear is a powerful emotion because of the chemicals that are released into the body. We are genetically ingrained for flight or fight. Animals are too. I see a lot of wild animals up here in Northern Minnesota all summer long and all of them choose flight when you happen upon them. I have seen wolves, bears, moose, deer, fox, and coyotes. All have run rather than face me. Flight is a lot easier than fight.

Same goes for humans. It’s easier to accept all the bullshit that comes down than fight it.

Check this out:

Covid is just not as serious as the politicians are making it out to be. They have another goal. Increase their power. Political entities love power. The Founders recognized that and enshrined people’s rights into the Constitution. It’s worth pointing out the Constitution and Bill of Rights protect people from government, not the other way around.

The statistical distribution for Covid is not a classically formed bell curve statistical distribution.  It’s highly skewed.  In addition, the outcome is heavily dependent on conditional probabilities and isn’t the same for everyone.  Hence, there is a lot of variance in Covid.  One size fits all regulations don’t work.

Covid is more an excuse to push an agenda and exponentially ramp up government spending than anything else.

If you were one of the people who got Covid and survived, you have 13x better immunity compared to people who got the vaccine.  That doesn’t mean don’t get the vaccine.  Get it if you haven’t had Covid.  If you had it, no need.  This is why the blanket policies being pushed by governments and corporations right now are stupid. They don’t recognize data.   Besides, even if you get the vaccine you can still get and spread Covid.

Besides, the Delta variant is 20x less lethal than original Covid. Cases ramp up quickly because it’s more transmissible.  Of course, citing cases is stupid anyway. No one should cite the number of cases when talking about Covid.  The only meaningful stats are who is getting it, what their health condition is when they get it and did they get admitted to a hospital or not.  During the entire Covid event, we have never seen hospital beds overwhelmed in the US anywhere.  Never. Recall the cruise ships, Navy ships, and convention centers that were turned into makeshift hospitals for Covid.  It was a total waste.

My wife had Covid.  It was a mild case.  I didn’t.  I got the vaccine.  We can’t go to a restaurant in NYC together despite the fact she is better protected against getting Covid than I am.

When you look at who dies when they get Covid, it should lessen your fear.  Most people under the age of 70 have other problems. They have hypertension.  They have some other chronic disease.  A large percentage of them are just fat.  Face it, there are a lot of fat Americans.  They know who they are.

Since governments and corporations are in the business of making choices for people based on vaccination status, should they also choose based on obesity?  Obese people are most likely to have trouble with Covid.  Maybe airlines ought to ban obese people from flying until this whole thing blows over.  Illinois has a governor that probably would have some trouble if he got it.

There is a place to draw the line. It’s masks. Democratic governors all over the country are reinstituting mask mandates. They are totally stupid. Not even based on any peer-reviewed or good data at all. All masks are is a way to spread fear, and increase control over you.

You just can’t say “Masks work” and have any credibility at all.

Here are some studies on masks and their effectiveness.  Children don’t need vaccines or masks.

• None of the masks most people use protect you at all.
• A recent study that looked at deaths occurring in children in the U.K. during the first 12 months of the pandemic found 99.995% of children diagnosed with COVID-19 survived
• Between March 2020 and February 2021, only 25 children under the age of 18 died directly as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infection. This gives us an absolute mortality rate for children of 2 per 1 million
• In the U.S., 335 children under 18 have died with a COVID-19 diagnosis on their death certificate. The CDC estimates the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 among children 0 to 17 years old is 20 per 1 million
• The 20-in-1 million mortality rate in the U.S. cited by the CDC is likely a gross overestimate as, unlike the U.K., PCR tests were done with grossly inappropriate cycle threshold levels, and those who had legitimate infections also had existing comorbidities that were the true cause of death, yet it was inappropriately attributed to COVID-19
• Researchers at Johns Hopkins teamed up with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze the health insurance data of approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with COVID-19 between April 2020 and August 2020. None of the children who died were free of preexisting medical conditions such as cancer
• CDC numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related.
• This study shows no meaningful statistical difference between mask wearers and non-mask wearers when it comes to getting infected with a communicable disease.
• Washing your hands is more effective than mask wearing.
• Two other studies found no statistically significant differences between their mask-plus-hands and hands-only groups. A 2011 study in Bangkok by Simmerman, et al. observed very similar results for both groups. A CDC-funded 2009 study in Hong Kong by Cowling, et al. observed that the hands-only group generally did better than the mask-plus-hands group, but not to a statistically significant degree.
• Among 4,899,447 hospitalized adults in PHD-SR, 540,667 (11.0%) were patients with COVID-19, of whom 94.9% had at least 1 underlying medical condition. Essential hypertension (50.4%), disorders of lipid metabolism (49.4%), and obesity (33.0%) were the most common. The strongest risk factors for death were obesity (adjusted risk ratio [aRR] = 1.30; 95% CI, 1.27–1.33), anxiety and fear-related disorders (aRR = 1.28; 95% CI, 1.25–1.31), and diabetes with complication (aRR = 1.26; 95% CI, 1.24–1.28), as well as the total number of conditions, with aRRs of death ranging from 1.53 (95% CI, 1.41–1.67) for patients with 1 condition to 3.82 (95% CI, 3.45–4.23) for patients with more than 10 conditions (compared with patients with no conditions).

The peer-reviewed medical studies overwhelmingly show masks don’t stop infection or spread. Civil disobedience would tell you to just not where them and ignore the stupid regulation.  All laws are not holy and passed down from some prophet off the mountaintop.

If you are fat, your risk of death goes up.  Still not an excuse for lockdowns or anything like that.

When there was a mask mandate in Nevada, I walked through a casino on my way to a restaurant and didn’t wear a mask.  No one said a peep.  If everyone just takes off their masks recognizing they do nothing, no one can stop you.  In Grand Marais here, there is one shop that has a mask mandate. I don’t patronize it.  The guy that runs it is stupid.

I have called for Civil Disobedience for a long time now.  It’s action time.

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