Yet Another Study Confirms Lockdowns Did More Harm Than Good

We already know that lockdowns were the worst public health policy failure since, well, ever.  Or at least in the past couple of centuries or so.  The pro-lockdown narrative has been completely laid waste long ago, and can never be even remotely rehabilitated by even the most intellectually dishonest cranks and intellectual poseurs in the future.  History will NOT be kind to the lockdown zealots at all!

And just when you thought we have already seen the most unflattering studies of all, a new one comes along that makes lockdowns look even worse still.  This new study looked at differences in all-cause death rates among various pairs of neighboring US states in which one state imposed a mandatory stay-at-home order in the spring of 2020 and the other did not.  (For completeness, the authors also looked at lockdown states that did not share a border with non-lockdown states as well.)  In using all-cause mortality data, they sidestep the biggest possible source of bias, namely differences in how Covid deaths are counted, and also capture at least some of the collateral damage of lockdowns as well.  There were in fact a total of ten non-lockdown states, so that gives us plenty of comparisons for how lockdowns or lack thereof worked in practice in an American context.

After adjusting for a host of potential health and demographic confounders, the results were more likely to favor the non-lockdown states.  That is, on average, the lockdown states actually had higher death rates than the ten non-lockdown states.  Thus, one can firmly conclude that the lockdowns did more harm than good, effectively killing more people than they saved.  Read that again, let it sink in, and remember that deaths are just the tip of a very large iceberg of collateral damage.

Oh, and by the way, the authors found that this was true regardless of whether they restricted their analysis to 1) the first Covid wave only, 2) the lockdown period only, or 3) the entire period from March 2020 up to and including January 2022.

As William Farr (of Farr's Law fame) famously said, "the death rate is a fact, anything beyond this is an inference".  And the inferences we can draw from this study about these worse-than-useless policies are quite damning indeed.  The lockdown zealots really have blood on their hands, it seems, likely to the tune of 110,000 excess deaths according to this study.

And that's just for the lockdowns proper.  How about masks?  Well, there's that pesky Foegen Effect, impaired gas exchange, microplastic fibers, bacteria and mold growth, and of course the killing of our oceans when billions of them are disposed of.  Plus, they don't really work.  School closures?  Also more harm than good, at least in the long run.  Forced business closures?  Self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good (and also subsumed under lockdowns as well).  Forced restrictions of healthcare?  Again, also self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good.  "Flattening the curve" is literally nothing more than prolonging the worst of the pandemic, any way you slice it.  

And the jabs?  Well, those on balance also seem to be worse than useless as well for most people, and especially for kids.  Locking down and otherwise imposing restrictions while we waited for them to arrive was clearly NOT worth it at all.  And while we may never know exactly how many excess deaths were due to exactly which cause, be it the virus, the lockdowns and NPIs, or adverse reactions to the jabs, the latter are highly unlikely to be trivial either.

On that fateful day in March 2020, the hard-won wisdom of the ages, based on over a century of research, was summarily thrown out the window like so much garbage by people who really should have known better.  The official pandemic playbooks of several countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, among other countries, and even the WHO as recently as 2019, not only did NOT promote the use of mass quarantines, let alone full lockdowns, but actually advised against doing so.  And while such time-tested advice was mainly geared toward influenza pandemics, at least some of the national playbooks (especially for the UK) explicitly applied this same reasoning to a potential "SARS-like coronavirus" pandemic as well.  Thus, this can be considered a classic example of a Chesterton's Fence:  before you remove a fence, be sure you know why it was put up in the first place.  Second-order thinking was clearly NOT being done here at all, it seems.

And even that is being charitable, assuming that the lockdown zealots were simply good people who made bad decisions because they panicked, when clearly some if not most of them had less-than-lofty ulterior motives that later became readily apparent once the initial "fog of war" had largely lifted.

The biggest question now is, will future generations ever forgive us?  Because that will be a pretty tall order for them indeed, as the regrettable consequences of the past two and a half years will continue to reverberate for decades to come.  And those who pushed for these worse-than-useless policies, doubling down and refusing to listen to reason, have an indelible stain on their honor.

UPDATE:  See the latest analysis from the ever-insightful Joel Smalley here as well.  It seems that the jabs are also responsible for a good chunk of both Covid and non-Covid excess deaths as well, particularly among younger folks.  After all, jab deaths and virus deaths are not mutually exclusive, as negative efficacy and host compromising can represent a collision of both factors together.

Degrowth Is A Nonstarter And Won't Work. Here's What Will Instead

From ecological overshoot to all of its attendant crises, including climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and mass extinction, along with the current global energy crisis, the idea of "degrowth" (i.e. a deliberate and planned shrinking of the economy) may seem like an appealing alternative in some circles.  However, not only is it a political nonstarter, but the level of central planning and austerity required would ultimately do more harm than good, get us permanently stuck in a bad place, and we would still end up destroying the Earth in the end (albeit a bit more slowly, compared to business as usual).  It would "flatten the curve", of course, but really just drag it out and prolong the pain without solving the problem.  In other words, it would basically be like Covid lockdown, only permanently, though hopefully minus all of the antisocial distancing and ocean-killing masks.  And we saw what a disaster that was, with the Global South faring the very worst in terms of collateral damage.

And that's before we get into the sort of extremely high and confiscatory tax rates (on both income and wealth) that would be required on not only the rich, but also on the middle class and working class, and even the working poor of the Global North.  Which the oligarchs would so artfully dodge with ease of course, leaving the rest of us holding the bag.  Though to be fair, not all degrowthers necessarily agree with that idea, and many prefer Pigouvian taxes on pollution and resource depletion (most notably carbon taxes), and perhaps also taxing advertising revenue as well, instead of income and wealth.

Some excellent articles casting doubt on degrowth can be found here and here, truly food for thought indeed.

Of course, we clearly need to end our inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell (as Edward Abbey famously said) which ultimately kills its host.  We need an economy that is no longer dependent on growth and can still provide prosperity for all with or without growth.  We need to stop obsessing over the fundamentally flawed metric of GDP, which really ultimately stands for God Damn Profits nowadays.  Rent-seeking, usury, artificial scarcity, cronyism, speculation, and other forms of parasitism and economic manipulation from the top down are the ultimate reasons why our current economic system is so hooked on growth for the sake of growth.

As the futurist Walter Ignatius Baltzley noted back in 2015, the only way to end this system of cannibalism (sorry, "capitalism") is to give it the ONE thing that it absolutely cannot survive:  ABUNDANCE.  That's right, capitalism needs scarcity to function, which is why it has to create so much artificial scarcity nowadays to prop itself up.  Capitalism will thus fatally overdose on capital, in other words.  Abundance is of course the polar opposite of the sort of eco-austerity of degrowth.  With enough abundance, we can humanely euthanize this dreadfully toxic system for good, and easily transition to post-capitalism, and ultimately a post-growth and post-carbon economy. 

For example, Baltzley in another article applies this idea directly to Big Oil.  How do you win a tug-of-war against a much stronger opponent?  By simply letting go of the rope, and letting them fall on their butt.  Thus, as crazy as it sounds, get out of the way and simply give the fossil fuel fat cats what they say they want so much.  Yes, you read that right.  Let 'em "drill, baby, drill", and "frack, baby, frack"!  The government can even buy their oil (and natural gas) at a premium and then turn around and re-sell it at a loss.  The resulting massive surplus of cheap energy would flood the market, bringing down the cost of living in general, and by doing so....will also bring down the cost of renewable energy alternatives like wind and solar that will ultimately replace fossil fuels, while oil and natural gas become less profitable over time.  In the very short run, it would be quite a boon for Big Oil, but in the long run it would be giving them the very rope with which to hang themselves.  (Fortunately for us, Big Oil is extremely shortsighted.)

Yes, it's quite the Hail Mary pass indeed.  But when both Plan A and Plan B have been ruled out as impractical and/or politically impossible, and time is running out, that ultimately leaves us with Plan C.

So what are we waiting for?  Prime that pump, and prime it good!  Let Big Oil and the oligarchs enjoy their utterly foolish pride before the fall.  Remember, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Oh, by the way, wanna hear a joke?  Peak Oil.  That's the joke.  Yes, oil production will inevitably peak at some point.  Duh!  And hopefully demand will peak before supply does.  But we still have more than enough to deep-fry the planet many times over.

Quite frankly, the biggest supply constraint of all right now is NOT geology, but rather geopolitics, as Europe is currently learning the hard way with Russia weaponizing its natural gas against them. And the aforementioned plan would solve that as well.  Canada alone could supply more than enough (liquefied) natural gas to Europe to be free from Russian energy dominance, but they won't, because they never developed the export facilities to do so in time.  That leaves the USA to fill in the gap, of course.

UPDATE:  So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a steady-state economy of course.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, ten percent APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the financialization of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  Let's make it history.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.

FINAL THOUGHT:  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, our ultimate goals at least seems to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth as well.

See here as well.

The Ultimate Death Blow To The Already Collapsed Narrative

The "vaccine" narrative, along with the rest of the official Covid narrative, has collapsed faster than formerly healthy young athletes on the field after being jabbed with novel experimental gene therapies misnamed "vaccines".  But like a zombie, it just won't seem to fully die already...until this new study of the unjabbed, that is.  The effective control group for this massive experiment are the unjabbed, and this new international cohort study's results are finally in:

• Over 70% of the unjabbed cohort relied on natural remedies (largely vitamins and minerals, like C, D, zinc, and a bit of quercetin here and there) and/or off-label generic drugs (largely HCQ and IVM) against the virus.
• Only about 0.4% of them were ever hospitalized for Covid at all, either as inpatients OR outpatients.  So much for a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" gumming up hospitals, right?
• Most had faced some level of discrimination in society, and many were fired from their jobs, due to their unjabbed status, which was of course harmful to their mental health.
• Otherwise, they seemed to be healthy overall.
• There was practically no confounding from flu vaccines or any other vaccines, as only a tiny sliver of the cohort expressed any intent to receive any at the time of the study, especially for flu vaccines specifically.
• And the real kicker:  people who said that they never wore masks had the lowest incidence of suspected or confirmed Covid of all of the subgroups in the study.  Reread that again and let that sink in for a moment.

Thus, not only does the "vaccine" narrative get thoroughly laid waste by this study, the mask narrative does as well, a fortiori.  Two zombie lies were thus killed with one stone.

The Alliance for Natural Health put out an excellent commentary about this study as well.

No wonder the powers that be wanted to get rid of the control group before the truth finally came out.  The perceived benefits of the jabs are shrinking, while evidence of the risks keeps on mounting every day.

Oh, and as for the other major component of the official narrative, namely lockdowns, well, that has also been thoroughly laid waste as well.  The delusional beliefs of the lockdown zealots have been revealed time and again to be, well, delusional.

Dear FERAL Reserve: Stop Hiking Interest Rates!

We at the TSAP have of course been advocating raising interest rates a while ago.  But now the FERAL Reserve seems to be overdoing it, to the point of further scaring already-jittery investors, and they need to tone it down a notch or ten, or they will risk creating a very nasty recession (or worse, stagflation or even a depression).  Inflation is still high but cooling off now, and keeping interest rates too high to for too long will ultimately do more harm than good.  Interest rates are a razor-sharp, double-edged sword, and to fight inflation any hikes need to be short, sharp, and early to be effective.  But they delayed it too long, didn't do it enough when it was needed, and now that the economy is in a technical recession, they want to keep hiking rates even more, in addition to quantitative tightening as well.

As Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes, raising interest rates to cure inflation is often times the wrong medicine for the job.  Case in point, right now in fact.  Inflations are ultimately caused by shortages, and governments need to address the shortages to get to the root of the problem.  Neither taxes nor spending cuts nor interest rate hikes will do the trick.  Ironically, as Mitchell notes, solving shortages can often require MORE federal government spending to specifically incentivize more production of the things in short supply (oil, natural gas, energy in general, foodstuffs, computer chips, labor, etc.).  The government can purchase those things at a premium, and then sell or give those things away at a loss.  Two birds, one stone.  Problem solved.  Next.

Meanwhile, the Fed really needs to stop hiking interest rates, stop threatening to do so, taper off their quantitative tightening, and actually be ready to start cutting interest rates soon as well.

So what are we waiting for?

(NOTE:  Endorsement of some of Rodger Malcolm Mitchell's ideas, or the ideas of any third party for that matter, does not automatically imply endorsement of all of his ideas.)

Dear Elon Musk: Stop Denying Overpopulation!

Elon Musk is a real man of genius, a real-life Tony Stark in fact.  He is also, at least in theory, environmentally conscious as well.  He knows that climate change is a real and urgent problem, while fossil fuels need to be phased out in favor of renewable energy.  And he has long opposed lockdowns before it was cool to do so, and also supports freedom of speech as well.  So far, so good.  

But like many geniuses, he does unfortunately have a massive and glaring blind spot as well.  Not only does he deny the fact that world overpopulation (of humans) is a problem at all, but he literally thinks the biggest problem the world will face is...too FEW people.  Or at least, too few people to realize his ultimate dream of...wait for it...colonizing Mars.  Yes, he actually went on the record saying that.  

This idea is egregiously wrong on SO many levels:

• The Earth is FINITE, and only a fool or an economist (same difference) would believe that infinite growth on a finite world is possible or desirable.
• Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, as Edward Abbey famously said.  Which eventually kills its host, by the way.
• We are already LONG past any reasonable measure of sustainability, and in severe overshoot in terms of carrying capacity and ecological footprint. 
• If everyone in the world lived like the average European, we would need 2 to 3 Earths worth of resources in the long term.  If everyone lived like the average American, we would need a whopping 6 or 7 Earths.  And if everyone lived like Elon Musk, with his five six kids, 120 hour workweeks, and centibillionaire lifestyle, we would probably need at least a thousand Earths!
• Even if everyone lived in an ecovillage, we would still need at least 1.5 Earths, if not more.
• Even with the very best technological breakthroughs that one could ever possibly imagine, that is still not a free lunch in terms of resources and material throughput.  Sooner or later, something's gotta give.
• Thus, if we want everyone on Earth to have anything even remotely close to a decent standard of living (since, you know, condemning billions of people to extreme poverty, suffering, and premature death would be cruel and inhumane), we need to SHRINK the population, or else Mother Nature will brutally shrink it for us.  Not just stop growing, but actually SHRINK down to no more than 2 to 3 billion people (and 150-200 million Americans).  
• Rightsizing the world population is the most truly pro-life thing one could do.
• And last but not least, before we even THINK about colonizing other planets, let's stop messing up the one we currently have!  There really is no "Planet B" for the foreseeable future, if ever.

Fortunately, we can shrink the population ethically and voluntarily using the two most effective methods: 1) female empowerment, and 2) poverty reduction.  Those goals are good for their own sake as well.  And make birth control freely and readily available as well.  No coercion needed.  Problem solved.

But first, we need to completely dispense with the histrionic fears of population decline and the utterly specious, outmoded, and outdated notion that "everybody must procreate".  It is truly maladaptive and insane to maintain this idea any longer.  Honestly, overpopulation deniers are worse than the climate change deniers, and innumeracy is worse than illiteracy.  Denying at least one of the root causes of a problem (along with many other problems too) is by definition worse than denying the consequences.

Jared A. Brock wrote an excellent article about this topic, and you can read it here.

Let the planetary healing begin!

P.S.  If Musk or any other billionaires are still worried that the peasants aren't procreating to their liking, maybe they should literally put their money where their mouth is.  These days, it now costs a whopping $300,000 (up from $250,000 just a couple years ago) to raise even just ONE child from birth to age 18, and that sizeable sum doesn't even begin to include college costs or anything beyond that either.  If they still insist, millions of Millennial and Generation Z current and prospective parents would be glad to send them the bill for that.  Noblesse oblige, right?

About That Lancet Study

The latest Lancet study that supposedly found a modestly increased risk of dementia, psychosis, and other neurological and psychiatric disorders up to two years after a Covid diagnosis is all over the news now.  But as with most mainstream Covid studies, there is much less than meets the eye here yet again.

For starters, the study only compared people who had Covid listed in their medical record with those who had other respiratory infections instead, which would inherently exclude the vast majority of infections that were either asymptomatic or too mild to even see a doctor about.  Especially for Omicron and its subvariants, as another study found that most people who were infected with Omicron (i.e. confirmed by antibody testing later) weren't even aware that they had it at all.  Which honestly is not even the least bit surprising for a variant that typically does not exceed the "I have a cold" threshold in terms of symptoms.  And if anything, the antibody testing is underinclusive, not overinclusive.

Additionally, most of the effect sizes found in the Lancet study for most of the neuropsychiatric sequelae studied were either transient and/or not radically different than for other respiratory infections, especially for children but also for adults as well.  And confidence intervals were fairly wide for many of the endpoints studied as well.

Finally, as much as the mainstream media likes to claim it does, it does NOT really exonerate the gene therapy injections misnamed "vaccines" either.  At best, not nearly enough time has gone by to do so.  Meanwhile, evidence the risks and lack of durable benefits of the jabs continues to mount as we speak.

See also here, here, and here as well for further evidence that Long Covid is typically not radically worse than Long Flu, and why Long Lockdown and Long Jab Injury are far worse things to fear.  And as we noted previously, the masks probably don't help matters much either, and likely make things worse.

Thus, there is literally no valid scientific reason to treat Covid any differently than the flu now, if there ever really was.  It is endemic now, and for practical purposes it really is no worse now. Case closed.

China's On The Dark Side Of The Moon, And Not In A Good Way

The People's Republic of China, aka Communist China or simply China, is skating on extremely thin ice now, and numerous cracks and fissures are forming all over the place.  From the Covid pandemic that they had unleashed on the world, to their failed but never-ending Zero Covid strategy and its rolling lockdowns, to their (not coincidentally) ultra-low and still plummeting birthrates, to their utterly tarnished world image now, to their massive Evergrande debt crisis, housing bubble crisis, and thus incipient financial crisis that would make 2008 look like a walk in the park, their once-buoyant but now sclerotic and increasingly moribund economy (if not society too) now stands on the precipice of truly epic collapse.  The ruling CCP is quickly losing clout each day, and civil unrest is only growing.  Meanwhile, their biggest ally, Russia, is now a pariah state bogged down in the quagmire of their own making in Ukraine, and North Korea is, well, North Korea.  If they did decide to foolishly invade Taiwan, that would of course only accelerate their collapse.  But even if they don't, they are still bound to collapse soon.  First gradually, then suddenly, as Ernest Hemingway would say. 

See you on the dark side of the moon....

Of course, being the second largest economy in the world, when China sneezes, the rest of the world catches much more than a cold.  Thus, a global financial crisis looks likely.  Hopefully the contagion will only be metaphorical this time around.