90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Governor Kristi Noem wields flame thrower in latest Instagram pic; what’s not to love?

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has raised eyebrows again, this time after posting a picture to her Instagram account in which she is holding a flame thrower.

Along with the photo, the feisty GOP governor wrote: “Is it too late to add something to my Christmas list?”

Noem’s post drew a cleverly worded response from one user that suggested a more prominent political future for Noem.

“Noem 2024. She’ll torch the competition,” the user wrote.

There is already some buzz in political circles that Noem may make a bid for the presidency in 2024. When asked recently if she was planning a run during Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit last weekend, her response was cagey.

“I’m not going to answer that question,” she said, laughing.

That said, the governor inspired President Donald Trump-supporting conservatives — while rankling many Democrats and left-leaning media talking heads — during the COVID-19 pandemic for steadfastly refusing to lock down her state and shutter businesses in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Governors in six other states — Arkansas, Iowa, North Dakota, Nebraska, Utah, and Wyoming — also never...

What you do choose, now, what do you believe, now

Who are you gonna trust?

All you dreams and fancy schemes

Just crumble into dust

Calm and cool and computerized to calculate and collect

We wait and watch and wonder

Just which puppet they'll select

AIER: Evidence Shows Lockdowns Do Not Control Coronavirus

The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion.

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control.

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes.

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population.

Much of the following list has been put together by data engineer Ivor Cummins, who has waged a year-long educational effort to upend intellectual support for lockdowns. AIER has added its own and the summaries. The upshot is that the virus is going to do as viruses do, same as always in the history of infectious disease. We have extremely limited control over them, and that which we do have is bound up with time and place. Fear, panic, and coercion are not ideal strategies for managing viruses. Intelligence and medical therapeutics fare much better.

(These studies are focused only on lockdown and their relationship to virus control. They do not get into the myriad associated issues that have vexed the world such as mask mandates, PCR-testing issues, death misclassification problem, or any particular issues associated with travel restrictions, restaurant closures, and hundreds of other particulars about which whole libraries will be written in the future.)

1. “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes” by Rabail Chaudhry, George Dranitsaris, Talha Mubashir, Justyna Bartoszko, Sheila Riazi. EClinicalMedicine 25 (2020) 100464. “[F]ull lockdowns and wide-spread COVID-19 testing were not associated with reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.”

2. “Was Germany’s Corona Lockdown Necessary?” by Christof Kuhbandner, Stefan Homburg, Harald Walach, Stefan Hockertz. Advance: Sage Preprint, June 23, 2020. “Official data from Germany’s RKI agency suggest strongly that the spread of the coronavirus in Germany receded autonomously, before any interventions became effective. Several reasons for such an autonomous decline have been suggested. One is that differences in host susceptibility and behavior can result in herd immunity at a relatively low prevalence level. Accounting for individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to the coronavirus yields a...

White House Advisor Peter Navarro released an exclusive update to his “Immaculate Deception” election fraud report describing how in Michigan the number of potentially illegal ballots is over two times greater than Joe Biden’s alleged margin of victory.

Navarro, the Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, details in the memo addressed to “War Room and American Republic” how election fraud tainted nearly 400,000 ballots in the critical swing state of Michigan.

He describes the three forms of election irregularities that interfered with honest election results:

There are over 379,000 potentially illegal ballots in Michigan – more than twice the alleged Biden victory margin. These 379,000 potentially illegal ballots have been called into question by three types of election irregularities – outright fraud in the form of dead voters; a significant process foul in the form of a failure to provide adequate voter identification check; and significant statistical anomalies in the form of inexplicable vote surges.

Irregularities include over 11,000 presumed dead individuals voting, 174,384 absentee ballots out of 566,694 absentee ballots cast in Wayne County being counted despite lacking a voter registration number, and “voting machine irregularities” contributing to “at least 305,000 additional ballots in question.”

READ: