By Andrew Gilbertson, AMERICAN THINKER
Conservatives? Anti-science? No way! Science created fuel-burning engines, harnessed electricity, and ushered in an industrial revolution that transformed the world. Science found cures for malaria, tuberculosis, and polio; expanded the world’s food supply many times over; significantly lengthened life expectancy; and put men on the moon. And then, just when it seemed nothing more was even possible, science — specifically computer technology — transformed the world yet again. Cyber-wonders emerge on an almost daily basis, enhancing our lives in ways we could only have imagined a generation ago.
No, folks, we have no quarrel with science. But we have a serious problem with something masquerading as science: the manipulation of facts and data to create fearful predictive models. These “scientific” statistical models often tend to cast the freedom we enjoy in a negative light, and they almost always end up being wrong. Let us amble down the Memory Lane of five decades and revisit some of the terrifying events the learned practitioners of this branch of science once assured us would occur. No doubt, you will recall many of them:
By 1980, city-dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.
By 1985, air pollution will block 50% of the sunlight reaching Earth, causing global cooling.
By 1989, the population explosion and resulting food shortages will result in mass starvation (“The Great Die-Off”), in which 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, will perish.
By 1990, all lead, zinc, tin, silver, and gold reserves will be gone.
By 2000, global crude oil reserves will be gone.
By 2000, global temperatures will be 11 degrees cooler, and we will be in a new Ice Age.
On January 1, 2000 (“Y2K“), computers will go haywire and plunge the civilized world into chaos.
As the 21st century progresses, stronger Katrina-like hurricanes will occur more frequently.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote by double digits and defeat Donald Trump in an Electoral College landslide.
By 2050, consistent with rapidly rising global temperatures shown in a hockey stick graph, 15 U.S. cities will be under water.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic will possibly result in as many as 2.2 million U.S. deaths.
Admittedly, the jury is still out on COVID-19, but given that the current U.S. death toll — depending on which CDC website you visit — is either about 47,000 or 78,000, it is highly unlikely fatalities will reach 2.2 million. Indeed, they may not even surpass the 100,000 Americans who died of seasonal flu in 1968 or the 116,000 who died in 1957. (Note: The U.S. economy did not shut down in either of those years, and we survived.)
It is important to emphasize that these ill fated prognostications were not made by carnival hucksters or Times Square loons in sandwich boards; they were the work of highly respected scientists and statisticians, widely publicized in the national media. All were taken seriously at the time.
Thanks to today’s “scientists” and their “scientific” COVID-19 models, daily life in 2020 has turned into a dystopian nightmare of home confinement, latex gloves, hand sanitizer–hoarding, and toilet paper shortages. The once routine trip to the supermarket is now an empty-shelved, grotesque costume party in which our former neighbors have all donned face masks and morphed into Hannibal Lecter and Lord Humungus, Warrior of the Wasteland. Are the face masks really keeping us safe, or will we one day look back and laugh, the way we laugh at that “duck and cover” atom bomb movie from the 1950s? Time will tell.
But what is happening to the US economy is surely no laughing matter. In just weeks, massive business closures have left tens of millions of Americans jobless and terrified they may not be able to afford food and shelter for themselves and their families. The businesses closed not because of poor economic conditions — they were ordered closed by panicked government officials who relied on “scientific” health warnings so dire that economic considerations mattered not at all. Heaven forbid that our desperate, unemployed American brothers and sisters dare peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The government, media, and even some of their fellow citizens (most of whom, you may notice, are employed or at least financially secure) will mock them and vilify them as reckless fools, ignorant haters, racists, and fascists. The protesters and their families are starving? Let them eat gourmet ice cream.
What will happen if, after the COVID-19 frenzy has passed, we finally accept that our esteemed scientists’ projections were out of proportion all along and that the government’s devastating overreaction was unnecessary? (2.2 million U.S. deaths…really?) Who will be there to apologize and take responsibility for killing 33 million citizens’ livelihoods and leaving our prosperous economy — and the U.S. Constitution — in shambles? Augustus Caesar is famously said to have wailed in anguish, “Varus, give me back my legions!” after his general allowed three Roman legions to be led into the Teutoburg Forest, where Germanic warriors ambushed and massacred them. When we wail, “Dr. Fauci, give us back our prosperity!,” will it be too late? Perhaps we will hear a reprise of Otter’s lame response to Flounder in Animal House after Flounder’s brother’s car was wrecked: “You f—– up…you trusted us!”
A great many scientists are brilliant, learned, and accomplished. But here’s the thing — even the best scientists are sometimes wrong! Science is a never-ending process of learning through questioning and testing, trial and error — or at least it was until recently. Nowadays, “science” seems instead to be about reaching consensus and then silencing any further discussion. Remember those campus radicals back in the 1980s with their “Question Authority” t-shirts? What became of them? Could it be they are now the ones in power? Because these days, it sure seems that when science, government, and the media proclaim a predictive model to be the undisputed truth, questioning authority is no longer cool. We Deplorables are expected to question nothing, shut up, knuckle under, and go with the flow. Anyone who challenges “settled science” will be branded a “science denier” and shunned. (Good thing Copernicus, Einstein and so many others managed to challenge “settled science” before these rules went into effect. Otherwise we might all still be taught the Earth is probably flat and the center of the universe.)
We need to respect science, but we must stop blindly accepting scientists’ unproven doomsday predictions. Medical scientists all over are coming up with promising treatments for COVID-19, and without a doubt, there will soon be an effective vaccine. It will be effective not because of a dazzling theoretical model, but because it has been tested and works. Now, that’s the kind of science we can, and should, all celebrate.
Andrew Gilbertson is the Editor of BeigePage.
It would be interesting to compare the nb of deaths in 2020 for a particular period (March to September), and compare it to the average for the same period for the past five or ten years.
A planetary gulag, concentration camps or reeducation center?
The ultimate goal: planetary elito-klepto-socialism!
The US nb of deaths would require to know the correct medical h/o of EACH patient (comorbidities), flu status and cov-19 status! Autopsies?
Patients positive for either flu or cov-19 may not necessarily die from these viruses.
Would be interesting to take for the same period, the average number of deaths for the past five or ten years and substract from the number for 2020.
It will be more complicated to find out the real number of deaths attributed strictly to cov-19, than people think and the media will take advantage of this to continue with their fake info.
A rerun of climate change?
At least cc did not kill anyone yet!
I get it: The scientists missed the target, so put the amateurs in charge. Brilliant!
I don’t think there are many liberals posting here lately (Felix seems to be offline for the duration); so it’s been interesting seeing so many presumed “conservatives” and “Trumpites” behaving like Democrats — nit-picking our president’s every move, criticizing his administration and blaming it for all our woes.
I thank God for the leaders He has given us, be they our Republican President, Senate and Supreme Court, or our Democrat House and (in my case) Governor and State Legislature. We are HAPPY in our circumstances; despite the false social guilt making its rounds here, saying we should for some reason be miserable.
A saying used to make the rounds, attributed to mothers, seemingly everywhere, that we needed to eat our oatmeal because “people are starving in China”. I now have a daughter and grandchildren in China — and not just the China of our grandparents, but COMMUNIST! China, the land of “Great Leaps Forward (off the cliff), famines and “cultural revolutions”. They live in the land that produced the pandemic (which some claim is a hoax and a fantasy); and they went through their quarantine six weeks before we went through ours. They aren’t starving, so decisions over whether I should or shouldn’t eat my oatmeal do not depend on them. Neither should my disposition be altered by the latest predictions and decisions by experts “so-called” or actual.
We will get by, somehow, and that’s good enough for me. As I said elsewhere, “This isn’t our first rodeo”. My wife and I have gone through changes and difficulties throughout our lives; and so have our parents and grandparents. If the world should end today, we look forward to seeing our Redeemer; and if it doesn’t, we will continue to thank God for our many blessings, which we have enjoyed throughout the generations.
“Doomsday” will come when it will, to those for whom it has been appointed; and no predictions nor policies can hasten nor forestall the day.
“Top Gates adviser’s anti-nation agenda: ‘New World Order and International Health’
By World Tribune on May 3, 2020
Special to WorldTribune.com
Corporate WATCH
By Joe Schaeffer” This article reveals that one of the governments most influential advisors in managing the coronavirus is openly an advocate of a “transnational”world government as a necessary step to improve world health and eliminate social and economic equality. He believes that the nation-state is obsolete. He directs a foundation funded by Bill Gates.
“1.4 Million People to Die From Untreated TB Due to Coronavirus Lockdown
Saving lives or costing them?
Paul Joseph Watson8 May, 2020
Around 1.4 million people are expected to die from untreated TB infections due to the coronavirus lockdown, according to research published by Imperial College London and Johns Hopkins University.
“Up to 6.3 million more people are predicted to develop TB between now and 2025 and 1.4 million more people are expected to die as cases go undiagnosed and untreated during lockdown,” reports the Guardian.
The figures are based on the premise of a 3 month lockdown and a 10-month period of restoring services after lockdown is lifted.
Lucica Ditiu, head of a global partnership to end tuberculosis, said she was “sickened” by the revelation and that the situation would set back global efforts to end TB by eight years.
“The fact that we’ve rolled back to 2013 figures and we have so many people dying, this for me is sickening,” said Ditiu. “I am outraged that just by not being able to control what we do … and forgetting about programmes that exist we lose so much, starting with the loss of the lives of people.”
Concentrating on finding a vaccine for COVID-19 will also delay efforts to find an adult vaccine for TB, which kills 1.5 million people a year, more than any other infectious disease. Coronavirus has claimed the lives of 275,000 people globally so far.
As we previously highlighted, a data analyst consortium in South Africa found that the economic consequences of the country’s lockdown will lead to 29 times more people dying than the coronavirus itself.
Professor Richard Sullivan also warned that there will be more excess cancer deaths in the UK than total coronavirus deaths due to people’s access to screenings and treatment being restricted as a result of the lockdown.
His comments were echoed by Peter Nilsson, a professor of internal medicine and epidemiology at Lund University, who said, “It’s so important to understand that the deaths of COVID-19 will be far less than the deaths caused by societal lockdown when the economy is ruined.” ” From the Summit.news web site.
Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit has a new article in today’s edition that shows, based on his reprint of CDC’s statistics from Jan. 1 to the end of March, the total number of deaths recorded for this period is “only” 24,000 more than the same period last year. And it is actually less than the number of deaths in 2017 (remember, there was a very bad flu season that year) for the same four=month period. This year’s four-month toll is about 21,000 more than the average for th past five years. This years deaths are about 0.2 % higher than average for these years. (2015-2019).
This suggests to me that the CDC’s “low-end estimate of 47,000 is closer to the truth than its “high end” estimate of 78,000. Perhaps the true number of coronavirus deaths could be as as low as 25,000. In any case , the figures do not justify locking down the entire country.