Follow the Science? How COVID Authoritarians Get It Wrong

[Muda69]

1 minute ago, Alduflux said:

No and no.

Laws restricting peaceful assemble are another matter.

Why and why?

And do you believe Mr. Myers actions were just him exercising his (and others) right to peacefully assemble?

 

[Alduflux]

On 9/29/2020 at 1:27 PM, Muda69 said:

Anybody else have a problem with the sentencing of someone to a year in prison without a jury trial,

Absent more information I would expect the defendant waived a jury trial to have a bench trial.  One should not be entitled to a lesser sentence for choosing to avoid a jury trial.

 

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 as well as prison time for misdemeanors in general?

One year is generally the typical threshold for misdemeanor vs felony.  Had the misdemeanor sentence been greater then one year I would have answered "yes".

Edited October 1, 2020 by Alduflux

[Muda69]

10 hours ago, Alduflux said:

One year is generally the typical threshold for misdemeanor vs felony.  Had the misdemeanor sentence been greater then one year I would have answered "yes".

IMHO restricting an individual's personal liberty via any jail time for a minor wrongdoing (the commonly accepted definition for the word misdemeanor) is wrong.  Flat out.

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/13/misdemeanor-justice-system-alexandra-natapoff/

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...

Gail Atwater and her two young children were driving home from soccer practice in March 1997 when they realized that a rubber bat that was usually affixed to the window of their pickup truck was missing. It was a favorite toy of Atwater’s 3-year-old, Mac, so the trio turned around, retracing their route to see if they could find it.

Atwater slowed to a speed of roughly 15 miles per hour as she cruised through Lago Vista, the lakeside bedroom community just northwest of Austin, Texas. And although state law required passengers in the front seat of a truck to wear a seatbelt, Atwater told her kids they could unbuckle themselves so they could look outside for the toy. There was no one else on the road, and she was driving very slowly.

Then, she saw the police car. She knew she was likely to be pulled over, which she found reasonable, she later told the New York Times. Under state law, driving without a seatbelt was punishable by ticket and carried a $50 fine.

But when Lago Vista police officer Barton Turek got to her driver side window, he jabbed his finger at her and began yelling. She asked him to lower his voice because he was scaring her children. He told her that she was going to jail.

He cuffed her and put her in the back of his squad car. (A neighbor who had heard about the disturbance out on the street came and took the children home before Atwater was carted off.) Atwater was booked into jail and then later released on $310 bond. She ultimately pleaded no contest to the seatbelt violation and was fined $50. And she paid an additional $110 to get back her truck, which had been towed.

Atwater was incensed by the arrest. Under state law, the seatbelt violation was a fine-only misdemeanor offense, meaning it was not punishable by jail time. Yet she’d been taken to jail for the violation. Atwater sued the city, claiming Turek had violated her constitutional protection against unlawful seizure. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 2001, Atwater lost.

The ruling was astonishing to many, in part because it demonstrated a serious misunderstanding of the nation’s misdemeanor criminal justice system. Justice David Souter wrote that, during oral argument, Atwater’s attorney was asked whether he had any other examples of “comparably foolish, warrantless misdemeanor arrests,” and that he offered “only one.” Souter wrote that while there were certainly additional examples out there, “just as surely the country is not confronting anything like an epidemic of unnecessary minor-offense arrests.”

What Souter wrote was wrong then and remains so today. The misdemeanor criminal justice system makes up the vast majority of the nation’s criminal court dockets; it is wide-ranging, encompassing not only violent crimes like domestic violence, but also myriad offenses where there is little, if any, meaningful criminal activity — things like jaywalking and loitering. It has criminalized millions of people and jailed countless, even when the ultimate punishment for the crime carries no threat of jail time, a practice which the Supreme Court’s ruling endorsed.

The consequences of even the most minor encounter with the misdemeanor system are serious — they can lead to lost jobs and benefits, including food stamps, housing, or educational support — and yet in many respects, the system has avoided much scrutiny. At least until now. In her groundbreaking new book “Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal,” Alexandra Natapoff, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, brings the misdemeanor system into clear focus. In an interview with The Intercept, she explained why the system has escaped widespread scrutiny and challenged us to rethink the ways in which we criminalize conduct.

....

The misdemeanor system represents 80 percent of the state criminal dockets in this country, so of course it’s enormous and ranges from what we might think of as serious misdemeanors — like domestic assault, driving under the influence, crimes that we have come to a consensus that pose real harms, real threats, and that represent conduct that can fairly be called wrongful. At the other end of the spectrum, we see crimes or offenses that don’t seem culpable or blameworthy or harmful at all. We sometimes refer to them as “order-maintenance” crimes or “quality of life” crimes; sometimes they fall into the rubric of “broken windows.” Offenses like loitering or trespassing or disorderly conduct. They can include jaywalking, spitting, littering, all kinds of minor, so-called order offenses that are not about whether anybody did anything wrong or bad or harmful. These crimes are about something else.

We need a misdemeanor system that is capable of punishing low-level crime in a way that’s proportionate and fair, but our misdemeanor system has ballooned to encompass all kinds of other things: to create tools for police to engage in order-maintenance regulation of high crime and/or poor neighborhoods of color; to enforce gentrification boundaries; to collect information; to meet performance metrics in their own department. The misdemeanor system has always exceeded its core purpose of crime control and always reached into the outer corners of social control and social regulation.

....

 

[Muda69]

Lockdowns Intended To Preserve Our Health Are Making Us Poorer and Angrier

https://reason.com/2020/09/30/lockdowns-covid-19-coronavirus-economic-pain-unemployment/

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The U.S. economy may be slowly pulling itself out of the doldrums inflicted by social distancing and government lockdown orders promoted as efforts to stem the spread of COVID-19, but many Americans continue to suffer.

Half of Americans who lost their job because of the pandemic are still out of work, and the resulting damage to finances falls hardest—as you might expect—on lower-income people who have little cushion against hard times. That's something to keep in mind as politicians contemplate renewed restrictions, especially given the potential for economic pain to worsen already-simmering social tensions.

"Overall, 25 percent of U.S. adults say they or someone in their household was laid off or lost their job because of the coronavirus outbreak, with 15 percent saying this happened to them personally," Pew Research reported last week. "Of those who say they personally lost a job, half say they are still unemployed, a third have returned to their old job and 15 percent are in a different job than before."

What makes the situation even worse is that the burden falls hardest on those who can least afford it. "Lower-income adults who were laid off due to the coronavirus are less likely to be working now than middle- and upper-income adults who lost their jobs (43 percent vs. 58 percent)," Pew adds.

Among those who have continued working or are back to work, many are making do with reduced hours and pay cuts. About a third of adults report they or their households have suffered such trimmed income opportunities. That means less money in-hand and greater difficulty in making ends meet.

"A quarter of U.S. adults say they have had trouble paying their bills since the coronavirus outbreak began," the Pew report notes. "Among adults with lower incomes, 46 percent say they have had trouble paying their bills, and about a third (32 percent) have had problems paying their rent or mortgage since February—significantly higher than the share of middle- and upper-income adults who have faced these struggles."

Fortunately, the economy shows signs of recovery, though not full health by any means. An economic index created by Moody's Analytics and CNN shows unemployment declining from its pandemic peak and both hiring and hours worked at small business on the rise. But overall economic activity is only at 81 percent of where it was when lockdowns began back in early March. While not everybody is affected to the same extent, we're living in a poorer country than we did just months ago.

And the effects are expected to linger.

"The ongoing public health crisis will continue to weigh on economic activity, employment, and inflation in the near term, and poses considerable risks to the economic outlook over the medium term," the Federal Reserve cautioned on September 16.

Likewise, the Congressional Budget Office expects the vast sums of money spent by the federal government in an attempt to keep people fed and housed while the economy was in a holding pattern "to raise borrowing costs, lower economic output, and reduce national income in the longer term."

Obviously, this is a big deal in terms of people's ability to pay for necessities, save for the future, and create prosperity for themselves and their children. But continuing joblessness and economic distress also have important implications for the stability of the society in which we live.

Recent months have been marked by protests, riots, and political violence in cities across the country. Yes, we were in for a rough ride, anyway. We entered this contentious election year with Congress and the president locked in an impeachment struggle, amidst high social tensions and a polarized population divided into mutually loathing political and cultural factions.

But, as I warned in March, drawing on historical examples and research by social scientists, unemployment and economic distress have proven time and again to fuel social unrest.

"Results from the empirical analysis indicate that economic growth and the unemployment rate are the two most important determinants of social unrest," noted a 2013 report (PDF) from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a United Nations agency that maintains a Social Unrest Index in an attempt to predict civil disorder based, in part, on economic trends. "For example, a one standard deviation increase in unemployment raises social unrest by 0.39 standard deviations, while a one standard deviation increase in GDP growth reduces social unrest by 0.19 standard deviations."

As the pandemic lockdowns started to affect people's lives in March, David L. Katz, former director of Yale University's Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, wrote in The New York Times that he was "deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life—schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned—will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself."

Six months later it appears that Katz's fears have been fulfilled. We've had months of social unrest with no end in sight. Millions of Americans remain un- or underemployed and, as Pew points out, "many Americans continue to face deep financial hardship" and are struggling to pay their bills. The economic damage inflicted by the lockdowns looks destined to extend into the foreseeable future.

And now politicians are contemplating or already imposing new restrictions as the pandemic continues and the numbers of cases rise in some places. Israel is under a renewed lockdown. Spain and the U.K. are sliding in the same direction piecemeal. Some U.S. jurisdictions are tightening the screws as public health professionals call for putting the whole country back in suspended animation.

Given what we know now after months of unpleasant experience, it should be obvious that restrictions intended to preserve our health are making us poorer and angrier. Further disrupting people's social connections and economic activity would be worse than pouring salt on open wounds. It would amount to throwing a lit match on a pile of oil-soaked rags.

Agreed.  If the strong arm of government bring the restriction hammer down again there could be an armed revolt in some parts of the country.

 

[Muda69]

Michigan Supreme Court Strikes Down Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's COVID-19 Executive Orders: https://reason.com/2020/10/05/michigan-supreme-court-strikes-down-gov-gretchen-whitmers-covid-19-executive-orders/

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The Michigan Supreme Court ruled Friday that a series of executive orders put in place by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to combat COVID-19 were unconstitutional and are now invalid under Michigan law.

The Democratic governor's directives were an "unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution," wrote Justice Stephen J. Markman.

Over the course of the pandemic, Whitmer sparked a great deal of debate over how much power a state's executive branch should have in addressing a public health crisis. The governor's April stay-at-home order prohibited "all public and private gatherings of any number of people occurring among persons not part of a single household." It banned the in-store sale of paint, outdoor goods, and other allegedly nonessential items at big-box retail stores, so those establishments were forced to block off certain aisles to customers. In most cases, it disallowed travel between Michigan residences, including to vacation homes in the northern area of the state. It shuttered lawn care services, despite research suggesting that the virus is much harder to transmit outdoors. It made it illegal to use motorboats, though residents could use boats without motors.

Lottery sales, however, were deemed essential, likely because the proceeds help fund the state's public schools.

Whitmer rolled back those restrictions at the end of April, not long after four Michigan sheriffs issued a public letter saying they wouldn't be enforcing several of her regulations. But the governor continued to issue orders as she saw fit. At one point she issued an executive order requiring stricter enforcement of her executive orders, which includes a provision that allows the government to weaponize licensing power against businesses.

Republicans sued in May. As I wrote then:

At the core of the conflict are differing interpretations of Michigan's two laws pertaining to emergency executive authority: the Emergency Powers of Governor Act [EPGA] of 1945 and the Emergency Management Act [EMA] of 1976. The former does not require that a sitting governor ask for permission from the legislature to extend a state of emergency, but the latter mandates that he or she do so after 28 days, a mark that Whitmer has hit. That deadline is complicated by a clause in the 1976 legislation, which states that the law "shall not be construed to…limit, modify or abridge the authority of the governor to proclaim a state of emergency" as laid out under the 1945 act.

"This lawsuit is just another partisan game that won't distract the governor," Tiffany Brown, Whitmer's press secretary, declared at the time.

But the state's highest court disagreed. It said the governor overstepped the bounds of her authority when she declared a state of emergency after that first 28-day mark. But even if that weren't the case, it wouldn't have mattered, because court also ruled the 1945 emergency powers statute unconstitutional.

"We conclude that the Governor lacked the authority to declare a 'state of emergency' or a 'state of disaster' under the EMA after April 30, 2020, on the basis of the COVID-19 pandemic," the court said. "Furthermore, we conclude that the EPGA is in violation of the Constitution of our state because it purports to delegate to the executive branch the legislative powers of state government—including its plenary police powers—and to allow the exercise of such powers indefinitely. As a consequence, the EPGA cannot continue to provide a basis for the Governor to exercise emergency powers."

Freedom.

 

[Muda69]

The Quarantine Queen Versus Representative Democracy: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-quarantine-queen-versus-representative-democracy/

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Does representative democracy matter during a pandemic? Or do we dispense with it in favor of unchecked rule by executives and health departments?

Those questions recently came to a head in Michigan, when the state supreme court struck down emergency powers that had been wielded by an imperious governor. Gretchen Whitmer, who seems to think she’s some kind of Upper Midwest Holy Roman Emperor, had been granted sweeping authority back in March to fight the coronavirus under an emergency management law passed in 1976. But that statute also held that after 28 days she needed the approval of the Michigan legislature, which eventually declined to renew the state of emergency. So she simply ignored them, citing a different 1945 law that allowed her to take “reasonable” action “to protect life and property or to bring the emergency situation within the affected area under control.” Under its auspices, she issued more than 180 executive orders in the name of public health.

By far the most audacious of these decrees came back in April, when with the stroke of a pen, Whitmer made it illegal to visit friends, relatives, even vacation homes. All private and public gatherings of any size were prohibited. Sales of carpeting, paint, and gardening supplies at large stores were all banned, though Michiganders could still purchase state-sold lottery tickets. They couldn’t go golfing, motorboating, or hire lawn mowing services, though they could apparently attend Black Lives Matter protests, as Whitmer herself did in June. There was no logical consistency to any of it, because there rarely is logical consistency in an autocracy. The only standard was the whim of Her Excellency the Governor, who believed it within her sole purview to decide whether other people could sell trowels.

The backlash was swift. Retailers and farmers complained that they couldn’t make sense of the byzantine rules and received little help from the governor’s office. Police departments refused to enforce the executive orders, viewing them as unconstitutional. Whitmer later rescinded some of the measures, though she also continued to issue restrictions, creating more confusion. The peasants began filing lawsuits, and after one initiated by several medical centers landed in a district court, the judge requested that the state supreme court clarify what the governor could and couldn’t do. The supreme court hearings did not go well for Whitmer. One of the justices accused her of making “probably the largest claim of executive power that any governor has ever made in the history of Michigan.” Another, a Democratic appointee, warned that “once rights are forfeited or once rights are taken, they’re difficult if not impossible for people to reclaim them or get them back.”

The ruling came down last weekend and Whitmer’s scepter was predictably confiscated. It’s been widely claimed, including by the governor herself, that the court ruled on partisan lines, four to three, with only Republican-appointed justices going against her. But that’s misleading. On the main question—whether under the 1976 law Whitmer needed the consent of the legislature to extend her state of emergency beyond 28 days—the court was unanimous, deciding against her seven to zero. The narrower ruling was over whether the entire 1945 emergency law should be struck down, which it was. It was a clear rebuke, yet there was the Countess of Kalamazoo herself on Saturday, insisting that she didn’t have to relinquish power for another three weeks. This was contradicted by her own Democratic attorney general, who said the next morning that she would no longer enforce the executive orders.

All of this has proven a mess for Michigan, not a state known for its volatile politics (George Romney was once governor there). And in fairness to Michiganders, the question was never whether the pandemic was a threat. It also wasn’t whether the state needed a quarantine regulatory framework—it obviously did and does. It was whether all that authority should be vested in one person. Whitmer, almost from the start, behaved with complete impunity. She ignored the concerns of the legislature (which initially supported her state of emergency). She undermined her own public health rationale when she marched socially undistanced with BLM. She stretched the government’s powers deep into the grooves of everyday life without any kind of accountability or democratic consultation. She shrugged away anger from protesters and business owners, bragging about her “thick skin.”

If Whitmer would now like to govern, then she can do what the rest of the known free world does: work with other lawmakers and competing interests to achieve consensus within the confines of the law. Does representative democracy matter during a pandemic? Cheers to Michigan’s supreme court for affirming that it does. Other states whose governors have been acting too singularly should take notice.

Yet there’s a broader issue in play here too, one that’s at the heart of that four-to-three decision. The Michigan court struck down the 1945 emergency law under what’s known as the nondelegation doctrine. This holds that one branch of government can’t transfer its assigned powers to another branch. The question was whether the statute, which allowed the governor unilateral authority during a disaster, was an improper delegation of the powers of the legislature to the executive. The court ultimately said yes, citing a unanimously decided U.S. Supreme Court case, Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, which created a test: “whether a delegation is unconstitutional depends on two factors—the amount of discretion and the scope of authority.” Since the law allowed Whitmer to claim an immense scope of power (over an entire economy, indefinitely), it couldn’t stand.

Another Michigan justice, in a dissenting opinion, pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court had only invalidated statutes under the nondelegation doctrine twice in its history. He noted that there were other avenues to rein Whitmer in: the legislature itself might have repealed the 1945 law. That’s a good point (though Whitmer would have vetoed any attempt to check her own power). Nevertheless the problem of legislatures delegating their powers to executive agencies is very real, and exists at the national level too. The federal administrative state now passes more rules than the president signs laws, government by unelected functionary. In which case, maybe we should consider whether the Michigan justices have a point. Maybe it’s time for the courts to start wielding the nondelegation doctrine less sparingly, to take Gretchen Whitmer’s royal waving as a cautionary tale.

Of course, the ideal solution would be for legislatures to reclaim their own authority, to stop the partisan squabbling and stand up for their greater institutions. But if you think that’s going to happen, I have some Michigan lawn fertilizer to sell you.

 

[Muda69]

[Muda69]

Pandemic Follies: Tyranny Won’t Keep Us Safe

https://mises.org/wire/pandemic-follies-tyranny-wont-keep-us-safe

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Politicians have destroyed more than 13 million jobs this year in a deluge of edicts aimed to fight the covid-19 pandemic. More than two hundred thousand Americans still died from the coronavirus, but the anticovid government crackdowns probably did far more damage than the virus. The covid crisis has also shown how easy it is for politicians to fan fears to seize nearly absolute power.

In March, Donald Trump proclaimed that “we are at war with an invisible enemy.” He also declared, “I’m a wartime president….This is a different kind of war than we’ve ever had.” Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, asserted that “every Marylander can be a hero, just by staying home” after he dictated a “shelter-at-home” order threatening a $5,000 fine and a year in prison for any Marylander who went outside in violation of his edict.

Almost 40 percent of households earning less than $40,000 per year have someone who lost his job in recent months, according to the Federal Reserve. The Disaster Distress Helpline, a federal crisis hotline, received almost 900 percent more phone calls in March compared with a year ago. A recent JAMA Psychiatry analysis warned that stay-at-home orders and rising unemployment are a “perfect storm” for higher suicide rates. A California health organization recently estimated that seventy-five thousand Americans could die from “despair” as a result of the pandemic, unemployment, and government restrictions.

In the name of saving lives, politicians have entitled themselves to destroy an unlimited number of livelihoods. Politicians in many states responded to covid-19 by dropping the equivalent of a reverse neutron bomb—something which destroys the economy while supposedly leaving human beings unharmed. But the only way to assume people were uninjured is to believe their existence is totally detached from their jobs, bank accounts, and mortgage and rent payments.

Covid policymakers have written themselves the letter that Cardinal Richelieu gave to one of his agents in the novel The Three Musketeers: “The bearer of this letter has acted under my orders and for the good of the state.” This carte blanche was sufficient to place murders and other crimes above the law and beyond reproach in France. In contemporary America, the same exoneration is achieved by invoking “science” and “data.”

Gubernatorial Tyranny

Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, banned residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions, and also banned all recreational travel. Six Oregon counties have only one confirmed covid case, and most of the state has minimal infections. But schools, businesses, and other activities were slammed shut by government command.

Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed some of the most severe restrictions, prohibiting anyone from leaving his home to visit family or friends. Whitmer also severely restricted what stores could sell; she prohibited purchasing seeds for spring planting after she decreed that a “nonessential” activity. (Purchasing state lottery tickets was still an “essential” activity, though.) Covid infections were concentrated in the Detroit metropolitan area, but Whitmer shut down the entire state—including northern counties with near-zero infections and zero fatalities, boosting unemployment to 24 percent statewide. Her repression provoked fierce protests, and Whitmer responded by claiming that her dictates saved thirty-five hundred lives. She exonerated herself with a statistical formula that was painfully ethereal compared with the stark physical devastation in Michigan.

The shutdown order of Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, resulted in the highest rate of unemployment in the nation—33 percent. But according to Senator Rand Paul, covid’s impact in Kentucky “has not been worse than an average flu season.” But that did not stop Beshear from forbidding people to attend church services and sending Kentucky State Police to attach notices to car windshields ordering church attendees to self-quarantine for fourteen days and reporting them to local health departments.

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo imposed a state lockdown and justified his edict: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” So the governor is entitled to freeze the lives and movement of 20 million people, subverting their efforts to provide for themselves and their families to save one person? Most counties in New York State had five people or fewer who tested positive for coronavirus at the time of his decree, and most of the state has avoided the stratospheric casualty rate of the New York City area. Cuomo’s ludicrous formula exemplifies how politicians reap media applause for dramatic actions that have little or nothing to do with public safety.

Maryland politicians have destroyed more than four hundred thousand jobs in dictatorial responses claiming to thwart the coronavirus pandemic. “Nearly one in five Maryland workers have filed for unemployment” compensation, the Baltimore Sun reported. The situation is so bad that even the Washington Post recognized that Maryland’s covid “restrictions have crippled the economy and paralyzed daily life since mid-March.” But the shutdowns failed to prevent covid cases from increasing by fiftyfold or the death rate from rising a hundredfold. That dictate never made any sense for much of the state. Garrett County, for instance, has had only ten covid cases and no fatalities, but its schools and businesses were shuttered at the command of Annapolis.

Killing the Elderly

Secrecy and hypocrisy have permeated covid policies across the nation. Maryland is busy hiring a thousand “contact tracers” to track down anyone who might have interacted with anyone who tested positive for covid. Privacy will be no excuse for failing to disclose personal contacts. However, at the same time, the Maryland Department of Health ordered local county health departments to cease disclosing which nursing homes have been ravaged by covid outbreaks, claiming that such information “‘serves no public health purpose’ and violates privacy laws,” as WJLA-TV reported. Most covid fatalities statewide have occurred in nursing homes. One might think that children would have a legitimate interest in knowing where their parents faced the greatest risk of dying, but no such luck in the Free State.

Why the secrecy? Reopen Maryland requested and was denied “information on whether…the state forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19 positive patients discharged from hospitals, as suggested by the Governor’s April 5 executive order and corresponding directives from the Maryland Department of Health.”

Similar policies in other states helped send the covid death rate into the stratosphere. Governor Cuomo, who callously compelled nursing homes to accept covid patients, will have no legal culpability for a policy that contributed to more than five thousand nursing home deaths in his state. Pennsylvania’s health czar, Rachel Levine, issued a similar order, contributing to thousands of nursing home deaths, and then removed her own 95-year-old mother from a nursing home to keep her safe.

The pandemic also revealed the lust by some politicians to perpetuate their power as long as possible on any shabby pretext. On May 15, Governor Hogan rescinded Maryland’s statewide stay-at-home order but permitted counties to extend it with their own decrees. Hogan’s announcement ending the state shutdown sparked a political pity party by Democratic officials in the Washington suburbs and Baltimore area. “All of us were taken aback by his announcement. We were hung out to dry,” whined Montgomery County executive Marc Elrich, who faced the burden of justifying perpetuating the lockdown for the million residents of his county. Elrich lamented that Hogan’s decision “makes it sound like it’s an arbitrary decision….[Hogan] kind of ignited this rebellion against what we were doing.”

The Washington Post summarized Elrich’s response: “Montgomery County rushed to create its own data dashboard last week, so elected leaders could justify to constituents why they remain stuck in a coronavirus shutdown.” But county officials are apparently being slippery, relying on arbitrary selection and manipulation of data to justify perpetuating arbitrary power. Maryland daily covid fatalities had fallen by more than 50 percent, but politicians did not want to loosen their grip. Anne Arundel County struck bureaucratic gold when it declared that its pandemic emergency would continue until “health equity” was achieved—whatever that means.

Federal Diktats

While much of the media has responded to the pandemic by painting prolockdown politicians as saviors, covid carnage was multiplied by incompetent federal agencies. Incompetent scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contaminated key samples for creating a test in February.

Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the Food and Drug Administration continued blocking innovative private testing. The FDA forced the nation’s most innovative firms to submit to its command-and-control approach regardless of the feds’ having little or nothing to offer. FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn shrugged off his agency’s disastrous policies: “There are always opportunities to learn from situations like this one.” Trump made bushels of false or inaccurate statements on the availability of testing early on that contributed to confusion and fear during the pandemic. Instead of speedy access to life-saving medical results, Americans were obliged to settle for Trump’s ludicrous assertion that “anybody that needs a test gets a test.” While Trump condemned people who purchased more food and supplies than they needed short-term, administration officials also floated a proposal for a presidential diktat to cancel all flights nationwide and lock everyone at home for two weeks or longer.

While that bizarre proposal was rejected, the pandemic spurred other “trial balloons” to see how much additional power government could seize. In March, media reports indicated that Trump’s Justice Department was considering asking Congress to approve suspending habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic—which some experts say could last eighteen months. But Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, warned, the proposed policy “says ‘affecting pre-arrest.’ So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over.” The same type of pre-arrest power could be exercised to detain anyone suspected of being infected or failing to obey lockdown orders. Republican Utah senator Mike Lee, one of the most principled members of the Senate, tweeted in response to the news of the power grab, “OVER MY DEAD BODY.”

Because politicians have no liability for the economic damage they inflict, they have no incentive to minimize the disruptions they decree. Trillions of dollars of new deficit spending will be vexing American workers for many years. As Reason’s Matt Welch noted, “The estimated $3 trillion price tag on the first four batches of covid-19 stimulus, divided by 330 million increasingly underemployed US residents, equals $9,000 per capita, which has ended up where government payouts usually go: to entities with better connections than you.”

Permitting governments to seize boundless power on the basis of shaky extrapolations of infection rates will destroy our nation. Trump’s boast of being a “wartime president” should recoil on him after the government launched a preemptive attack on American prosperity. It will be years until we know how much permanent damage was inflicted by politicians’ panicky responses to the pandemic.

Agreed.  The uni-party politicians are slowly destroying this country.

[DE]

On 9/23/2020 at 10:30 AM, Muda69 said:

It's all about control.   If covid-19 and pneumonia had switched places in the timeline of communicable diseases we all be having pneumonia lockdowns right now.  

The illuminati saw their chance and they took it. Seems to be a pretty good success so far.

 

Thanq

[Muda69]

WHO Joins Top Epidemiologists in Emphasizing Harm Caused by Lockdowns

https://reason.com/2020/10/14/who-joins-top-epidemiologists-in-emphasizing-harm-caused-by-lockdowns/

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"We've got to follow the science," we're repeatedly told during the COVID-19 pandemic, usually by people arguing for the strict measures included in the broad category of "lockdowns." But what happens when scientists disagree with one another and don't adhere to one true faith in their recommendations for battling viral infection?

While there has been disagreement among scientists since COVID-19 appeared on the scene, opponents of the most restrictive measures have largely been sidelined. But now, insisting that "science" speaks with one voice is much harder, with a World Health Organization (WHO) official and the Great Barrington Declaration objecting to the pain inflicted by lockdowns and calling for less-draconian public health policies.

"We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus," David Nabarro, WHO special envoy for Covid-19, told Britain's Spectator magazine last week. "The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we'd rather not do it."

He pointed to the devastating worldwide elevation in rates of poverty and hunger as a result of restrictions imposed to fight the pandemic, saying that "lockdowns just have one consequence that we must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer."

Importantly, Nabarro made his comments immediately after endorsing concerns, raised by Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, about the economic disruptions caused by lockdowns. Gupta is co-author—with Harvard University epidemiologist Martin Kulldorffm, Stanford University epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, and 32 others—of the Great Barrington Declaration. The declaration advocates refocusing protection efforts on high-risk individuals, while encouraging others to get back to their lives.

"Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health," the declaration argues. "Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed."

The authors and co-signers of the declaration suggest a more-focused approach. "Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19," they argue. "Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold."

The declaration and its authors have come under intense fire from some who disagree with its policy proposals on scientific grounds.

"This is wishful thinking. It is not possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, and it is not possible to fully isolate them," argues Rupert Beale of the Francis Crick Institute. "Furthermore, we know that immunity to coronaviruses wanes over time, and re-infection is possible—so lasting protection of vulnerable individuals by establishing 'herd immunity' is very unlikely to be achieved in the absence of a vaccine."

But the declaration also faces ad hominem attacks from people who object to its sponsorship by the market-oriented American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).

"I'm in my mid-50s. I have HIV. I saw my friends die in droves in the 80s, 90s. I have no more fucks left to give," tweeted Yale School of Public Health epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves in response to the declaration. "Except those peddling pseudoscience, bankrolled by right-wing, libertarian assholes can kiss my queer ass. I know your kind. We beat you once. Will will again."

As criticism goes, that's a tad over the top. But at least it recognizes that there's a debate to be had. And, as Nabarro's comments indicate, the signers of the Great Barrington aren't alone in their concerns.

Sixty-six high-profile British physicians made headlines earlier this month when they urged the government "to consider non-Covid harms and deaths with equal standing as the reported deaths from Covid" and said that lockdown-related "harms to long term health and wellbeing begin to outweigh the benefits."

"Closedown, lockdown, closing borders—nothing has a historical scientific basis, in my view," observed Agners Tegnell, one of the architects of Sweden's less-restrictive pandemic response.

Back in March, David L. Katz, former director of Yale University's Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, wrote: "I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life—schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned—will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself."

But these objections have largely been ignored as the views of a few fringe heretics to the supposedly science-dictated dogma of restrictive policies that close whole societies.

Such sidelining gets harder as more high-profile scientists join together to muscle their way into the public view.

As if to emphasize the end of a monolithic public-health stance on COVID-19 response, this week the WHO joined with other international organizations to warn that "border closures, trade restrictions and confinement measures have been preventing farmers from accessing markets, including for buying inputs and selling their produce, and agricultural workers from harvesting crops, thus disrupting domestic and international food supply chains and reducing access to healthy, safe and diverse diets."

The statement also calls for "universal health coverage and income support," making it a difficult target for accusations that it was crafted by "right-wing, libertarian assholes."

The pretense that "science" automatically dictates the suspension of normal life without regard for other concerns including liberty, prosperity, and psychological health is over. At long last, months into the pandemic, the debates over the proper response to COVID-19 have begun.

As one of the comment states:

 

https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1316381998345146369

Scott Atlas: Prolonged lockdowns a complete disaster:

* Working class & low income people destroyed
* 46% of cancers not diagnosed
* 50% chemo appts missed
* 50% missed immunizations
* 200K missed cases of abuse
* 25% of young people considering suicide

 

[swordfish]

Maybe President Trump was right after all - "Don't let the cure be worse than the disease"......

[Muda69]

Rapid Home COVID-19 Tests Are the Best Path to a New Normal. They're Illegal.

https://reason.com/2020/10/20/rapid-home-covid-19-tests-are-the-best-path-to-a-new-normal-theyre-illegal/#comments

Quote

COVID-19 diagnostic testing has been greatly scaled up from a few thousand tests per week back in early March to 2 million tests per week in early August. But the summer upsurge in COVID-19 diagnoses, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. highlights the fact that we still don't have enough testing to provide individual Americans and health care professionals with the information needed to squelch the pandemic.

A huge part of the problem is that most asymptomatic, presymptomatic, and mildly afflicted people don't know they're infected, even as they spread the virus to others while working, shopping, and gathering in enclosed spaces such as bars and restaurants. Making cheap, fast tests available for use at workplaces, schools, and homes could solve this information deficit problem. "The way forward is not a perfect test," Harvard medical professor Ashish Jha argued in Time, "but one offering rapid results."

The good news is that a number of companies, including biotech startup E25Bio, diagnostics maker OraSure, and the 3M Co., are working on and could quickly deploy rapid at-home COVID-19 diagnostic tests. These antigen tests work by detecting, within minutes, the presence of coronavirus proteins using specific antibodies embedded on a paper test strip coated with nasal swab samples or saliva. Somewhat like at-home pregnancy tests, the antigen tests change color or reveal lines if COVID-19 proteins are recognized.

But there is one major problem. "Everyone says, 'Why aren't you doing this already?' My answer is, 'It is illegal to do this right now,'" Harvard epidemiologist Michael Mina told The Harvard Gazette in August. "Until the regulatory landscape changes, those companies have no reason to bring a product to market."

It took Food and Drug Administration regulators until July to finally issue the agency's template for approving tests that "can be performed entirely at home or in other settings besides a lab" and without a prescription.

It would cost around $20 billion to provide 330 million Americans with rapid at-home test kits costing $1 each for weekly use. Given that the federal government has already borrowed $3 trillion in response to the pandemic and appears interested in borrowing trillions more, that would be a real bargain. Such a testing regime "will stop the vast majority of transmission and it will cause these outbreaks to disappear in a matter of weeks," Mina said. "This is something we can actually do at warp speed."

Yep.  Government regulation mucking up the works, as it always does.  

[swordfish]

OK - So 1 year ago - I get sick, I stay home until I mostly feel better, then get back to the office.  Nobody else had any concern except to say get better - see ya soon (hopefully tomorrow) Today - I cough because I swallowed my own saliva (which can happen to anyone BTW not just me), everyone around me thinks "Coronavirus - dead in 2 weeks" - you better go get tested, we need to send anyone with any contact to him home to quarantine for 10 days..........WTF people....

[Muda69]

A Plague of Pandemic Restrictions Builds Herd Immunity to Arbitrary Rules 

https://reason.com/2020/10/21/a-plague-of-pandemic-restrictions-builds-herd-immunity-to-arbitrary-rules/

Quote

Perhaps the only thing worse than being subjected to seemingly arbitrary and intrusive rules imposed to fight a pandemic is when those same rules fail to accomplish their goals. Instead of effective infectious disease control, you get fatigue with commands issued by officials who seem to have no idea what they're doing, as we're seeing during the COVID-19 crisis. Given the resulting pushback against ineffective, nonsensical rules, expect widespread cynicism toward official dictates to linger after the virus is history.

Consider New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who, early in the crisis, ordered his state's nursing homes—over their protests—to take in people who had tested positive for COVID-19. "In the weeks that followed the March 25 order," ProPublica reported, the disease "tore through New York state's nursing facilities, killing more than 6,000 people."

While that fatal error did not lead Cuomo to grapple publicly with his own poor judgment, it did diminish his credibility. He later decreed which drinking establishments were allowed to open based not on health criteria but on their sale of snacks. "Establishments must only serve alcohol to people who are also ordering food," he announced.

Perhaps doubtful about the antiviral powers of munchies, some bar owners complied by making menus featuring things like $1 "Cuomo chips" and penny lollipops. "More than just hors d'oeuvres, chicken wings, you had to have some substantive food," the visibly annoyed governor huffed in response. "The lowest level of substantive food were sandwiches." He was soon reduced to issuing repeated complaints about the multitude of bars engaged in "egregious violations of pandemic-related Executive Orders."

Not that New York was alone. In Texas, where forced business closures and stay-at-home orders hobbled social relations and economic activity without preventing a summer surge of COVID-19 cases, over 800 bars joined together to open in defiance of state rules.

"Recently we have spoken with business owners who tell us they don't intend to follow the orders," A. Bentley Nettles, executive director of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, said in a press release. Officialdom was not happy about being ignored, but bar owners lost patience with rules that proved more effective at killing bars than eliminating viruses.

The revolt among establishments serving alcoholic beverages is relatively easy to track, because they're closely monitored. But you see the same rule fatigue among barbershops, car washes, furniture stores, gyms, smoke shops, and even houses of worship. "After California Gov. Gavin Newsom shut down indoor religious services for the majority of the state, some churches chose to defy the order," The Sacramento Bee reported in late July.

Newsom had already blinked once on the issue, softening restrictions after hundreds of churches vowed to reopen at the end of May despite being deemed "nonessential" and thus subject to closure orders. "The current governmental orders are not narrowly tailored here because innumerable secular enterprises and places where people gather are deemed essential, including those that pose even greater risks of COVID-19 than religious assemblies," pastors protested in an open letter.

Inconsistency about whether mask wearing was virtuous or antisocial also bred defiance of mask requirements, turning the pieces of fabric into "a flash point in the virus culture wars," as The New York Times put it. Blame for the controversy can be laid, at least in part, on confusion sown by government officials themselves.

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!" U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams tweeted on February 29, in an effort to maximize masks available to health care workers. "They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus."

By June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had changed its messaging and was urging general use of masks. But that guidance was contradicted by the World Health Organization, which said that "the widespread use of masks everywhere is not supported by high-quality scientific evidence."

Even as calls for voluntary behavior were botched and muddled, mask mandates spread like wildfire, enforced by fines and even police stings in some jurisdictions. Inevitably, mask-wearing rules resulted in refusal and even violence by people bristling at conflicting claims and commands from supposedly responsible authorities.

Beyond the human cost of COVID-19, government credibility is a victim of this pandemic. It's unlikely to recover anytime soon, no matter how the health crisis itself is resolved.

 

[DE]

On 10/16/2020 at 9:14 AM, swordfish said:

Maybe President Trump was right after all - "Don't let the cure be worse than the disease"......

Not maybe, he was.

[Muda69]

Holcomb to send National Guard into nursing homes to help facilities care for residents

https://www.jconline.com/story/news/health/2020/10/21/indiana-nursing-homes-receive-help-national-guard/3716948001/

Quote

Gov. Eric Holcomb announced on Wednesday that he would send members of the Indiana National Guard into nursing homes to help an "exhausted" staff care for residents.

The announcement comes as long-term care facilities are experiencing a surge of cases and deaths. To date, 2,205 residents of nursing homes or assisted living facilities in Indiana have died of COVID-19, about 58% of coronavirus deaths statewide.

Beginning on November 1, the National Guard will help with tasks such as staff screenings, data entry and testing to allow long-term care staff more time to directly care for residents. Facilities currently experiencing outbreaks will be the first to receive the aid.

Staff, residents and families are "simply, like so many, overwhelmed by the scale and pace that this virus can take on," Holcomb said during the state's weekly coronavirus press conference. "There is fatigue there. You're seeing that; we're hearing that when you're on the ground."

But that fatigue should not necessarily come as a surprise. The pandemic exacerbated what was already a chronic problem revealed in an IndyStar investigation, published back in March.

Even before the pandemic, Indiana's nursing home facilities were significantly understaffed, on average ranking 48th in the nation according to an analysis of federal data by IndyStar. Poor staffing at the state's homes is one of the reasons AARP rates Indiana's elder care system dead last in the country. The IndyStar investigation found several instances where poor staffing was cited as contributing to injury or death at Indiana facilities.

The use of the National Guard is one of several steps the state announced to prevent the spread of the disease in long-term care facilities and to maintain hospital capacity, one of the state's four guiding principles for reopening. The state has twice as many Hoosiers hospitalized with COVID-19 today compared to late June and early July, said Dr. Lindsay Weaver, chief medical officer of the state health department.

 

The state will also connect facilities with clinical workers through its health care reserve program, which pairs retired or out-of-work health care workers with facilities in need. Weaver said the state had received 11 requests for help from the program from long-term care facilities just this week.

Additional workers will work with the Indiana State Department of Health to visit each long-term care facility at least three times a week, possibly more, to provide additional infection control training, Weaver said.

In addition to staffing help, the state will send 2 million N95 masks to long-term care facilities, the largest distribution of personal protective equipment in Indiana to date.

The efforts come as ISDH closes in on its goal to perform infection control surveys at every facility in the month of October, which Weaver expects to wrap up this week.

Weaver identified staffing as the most common theme where long-term care facilities could use additional support.

The pandemic creates a burden on staffing nursing homes, whose staff must stay out of work to quarantine after exposure or who must take extra time to care for COVID-19 patients.

"I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge our healthcare workforce and acknowledge the fact that they are exhausted. They have been running a marathon at a sprint pace for eight months. And the human body simply isn't designed to sustain such a pace," Weaver said. "These measures are intended to not only protect residents of these facilities, but will provide some relief to the staff who have been working around the clock to help care for them."

Weaver also announced a new program that would allow hospital patients to be discharged straight to home care rather than to nursing homes. The program, which was approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, will be piloted in Marion, Hamilton, St. Joseph, Floyd and the surrounding counties.

"We want to ensure that everyone who qualifies for home services can get them quickly," Weaver said.

I wonder when the state/national guard will leave, or is this just he beginning of a state takeover of private long-term facilities?

 

[swordfish]

So this morning, the Elkhart General Hospital (1 of 2 large hospitals in Elkhart County) has "almost" 40 Covid patients and calls it a "desperate situation".  In a 375 bed hospital.  (IMHO) maybe if they call back some of the staff they (and the other local hospitals) laid off in March/April when it became "illegal" to perform elective procedures, the situation wouldn't be so desperate.......

[swordfish]

[Alduflux]

On 10/22/2020 at 11:07 AM, swordfish said:

#False.  Only cancer and heart disease will kill more people by the end of the year then Covid.  In case you didn't notice cancer and heart disease are not communicable.

[Muda69]

14 hours ago, Alduflux said:

#False.  Only cancer and heart disease will kill more people by the end of the year then Covid.  In case you didn't notice cancer and heart disease are not communicable.

What is your solution then for the state of Indiana, whom the CDC has recently stated "is going in the wrong direction"?  Shut virtually everything down again?

 

[Alduflux]

5 hours ago, Muda69 said:

What is your solution then for the state of Indiana, whom the CDC has recently stated "is going in the wrong direction"?  Shut virtually everything down again?

 

Unrealistically I would remove all mandates and let people do as they wish.  This would result in a health care disaster this winter and most directly harm those that choose to downplay the severity of this pandemic or act like it doesn't exist.  I am fortunate enough to avoid high risk behavior and would benefit from weeding out the stupid.

Realistically I encourage targeted restrictions county by county based on hospital/health care stress.  Restrictions means limitations on crowd size and mask mandates.  As our understanding of COVID transmission improves I would adjust those restrictions accordingly, different rules for indoor vs outdoor etc... Most importantly I would keep politics out of that decision making.  I would also encourage a massive information campaign to target misinformation on social media.

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/10/guide-to-overcoming-coronavirus-misinformation-infodemic/?utm_source=reddit.com#close

Edited October 24, 2020 by Alduflux

[DanteEstonia]

2 hours ago, Alduflux said:

Unrealistically I would remove all mandates and let people do as they wish.  This would result in a health care disaster this winter and most directly harm those that choose to downplay the severity of this pandemic or act like it doesn't exist.  I am fortunate enough to avoid high risk behavior and would benefit from weeding out the stupid.

Darwinism at work.

[Muda69]

20 hours ago, DanteEstonia said:

Darwinism at work.

Millennia of history has shown it to work, has it not?

 

[Muda69]

School Threatens 12-Year-Old With Arrest for Allegedly Missing 90 Minutes of Zoom Class

https://reason.com/2020/10/23/school-zoom-class-arrest-lafayette-mark-mastrov/

Quote

The parents of a seventh-grade boy received a letter from his school in Lafayette, California, warning of possible truancy charges if he missed any more virtual class sessions.

"Out of the blue, we got this letter," Mark Mastrov, the boy's father, told the East Bay Times. "It said my son had missed classes and at the bottom, it referenced a state law which said truants can go to jail for missing 90 minutes of class."

Mastrov assumed the school had been sent in error, so he called the school. He was shocked to learn that the authorities meant business: The law says any kid who misses three full days of school or is tardy for a 30-minute class period on three separate occasions can face jail time.

The policy was obviously intended to cover unexcused absences for in-person education, but the district apparently intends to apply it to virtual education as well.

Mastrov contends that his son didn't miss his classes but simply logged on after his teacher had already taken attendance.

"Who passed this law in their infinite wisdom?" he wonders. "Who in their right mind could do that?"

Virtual learning is a deeply frustrating experience for many families, and schools should be maximally patient with students and their parents. Unfortunately, education officials around the country have been making life unnecessarily difficult for students who don't sign in to their classes on time. Some places have even required teachers to perform virtual wellness checks, and to call the cops on parents if their kids seem checked-out during class. One kid got in trouble because his camera caught a glimpse of a toy gun, as though that's comparable to bringing an actual weapon to a physical school.

This pandemic has caused enough problems on its own. Parents don't need to be threatened with jail time for failing to master a hopelessly frustrating—and temporary—new system.

Government, and that it includes the public school system, will take any opening it can to insert itself into the private lives of citizens.

 

[swordfish]

Unrealistically I would remove all mandates and let people do as they wish.  

 

You mean like Sweden?