M/V Columbus

In the summer of 2018 I sailed on the M/V Columbus, of the British line Cruise and Maritime Voyages (CMV).  It was a beautiful ship, here are some pictures of her in those happier days:

As I said, a beautiful ship in her prime.  It was an enjoyable cruise from Amsterdam to Gibraltar to the Canaries to Madeira to Lisbon to London.  Two weeks, as I recall.

Well, she's not so beautiful these days.  Here's what she's looked like more recently, after being sent to a scrap yard in India after CMV went under because of the 'rona:

 Ship and aircraft boneyards seem like such a waste to me.

Who Should See Dept of Education Data?

They wouldn't have such gag clauses, and wouldn't sue people for violating such gag clauses, if they weren't trying to hide something:

The California Department of Education has threatened to sue two prominent Stanford University education professors to prevent them from testifying in a lawsuit against the department -- actions the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California calls an attempt to muzzle them.

The ACLU, in turn, is threatening a lawsuit of its own -- against CDE for infringing their and other researchers' First Amendment rights.

Observers say the dispute has the potential to limit who conducts education research in California and what they are able to study because CDE controls the sharing of data that is not available to the public.

At issue is a restriction that CDE requires researchers to sign as a condition for their gaining access to nonpublic K-12 data. The clause, which CDE is interpreting broadly, prohibits the researcher from participating in any litigation against the department, even in cases unrelated to the research they were doing through CDE.

"It keeps education researchers from weighing in on the side of parties who are adverse to the California Department of Education. So it's really skewing the information and expertise that can come into courts," said Alyssa Morones, an ACLU attorney involved with the case. "Individuals and students seeking to vindicate their rights no longer will have access to these education experts, and the court can no longer hear what they have to say"...

"What are state officials afraid of?" (Attorney) Jacobs said. "That their performance in running the school system during the pandemic in fact aggravated the achievement gap? That notwithstanding their protestations, they haven't done enough to address that problem?"

CDE declined to comment on the need for the litigation ban in data contracts or its threats and actions against Dee or Reardon. Researchers told EdSource they were unaware of similar prohibitions in other states, but EdSource could not verify that.

I have to believe that such a lawsuit against the CDE would be a slam dunk; at least, it would be in probably any other state.

What Side Would You Be On?

They Lie, And Pat Themselves On The Back For Their Creativity

Do lefties "exaggerate", or do they just lie through their teeth?

Remember the old children’s story about Chicken Little? An acorn falls on Chicken Little’s head, and she surmises that “the sky is falling” and the world is coming to an end. As a result, Chicken Little creates mass hysteria among the barnyard animals.

Chicken Little whipped the other animals into a frenzy with her histrionics, which makes her the perfect metaphor for today’s leftists...

Democrats act as if every Republican proposal is an existential threat to life in one way or another. Fossil fuels will destroy the planet. Efforts to secure elections will prevent minorities from voting. Measures to keep young children from irreversibly damaging their bodies amount to erasing transgender people. You get the picture.

The Biden administration has turned progressive melodrama into an art form. We’re talking about the people who compare anyone who didn’t vote for Joe Biden to violent extremists and who promised a “winter of severe illness and death” to anyone who didn’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.

A Wall Street Journal editorial by Barton Swaim demonstrates how bad the left has gotten when it comes to histrionics.

“President Biden’s re-election announcement video warned that ‘MAGA extremists are lining up’ to repeal ‘bedrock freedoms,'” Swaim begins. “Uh oh—what freedoms? The extremists plan on ‘dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love, all by making it more difficult for you to be able to vote' "...

“The other threats on Mr. Biden’s list—’banning’ books, ‘telling people who they can love’ and voter suppression—are literally nonexistent,” Swaim points out. “Mr. Biden isn’t engaged in the time-honored political craft of exaggeration. He’s seeing things that aren’t there.”

I'm going with "lying to sway the low-information voter", of which there are unfortunately too many.  Remember the blatant lie Harry Reid told about Mitt Romney?  "Romney didn't win, did he" was Reid's reply when called out, so the ends justified the means.  It always does for lefties.

Covid Mortality Mitigation

When even the Brits are saying this...:

Abstract

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to determine the effect of lockdowns, also referred to as ‘Covid restrictions’, ‘social distancing measures’ etc., on COVID-19 mortality based on available empirical evidence. We define lockdowns as the imposition of at least one compulsory, non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI). We employ a systematic search and screening procedure in which 19,646 studies are identified that could potentially address the purpose of our study. After three levels of screening, 32 studies qualified. Of those, estimates from 22 studies could be converted to standardised measures for inclusion in the metaanalysis.

They are separated into three groups: lockdown stringency index studies, shelter-in-place-order (SIPO) studies, and specific NPI studies. Stringency index studies find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States in the spring of 2020 only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 3.2 per cent. This translates into approximately 6,000 avoided deaths in Europe and 4,000 in the United States. SIPOs were also relatively ineffective in the spring of 2020, only reducing COVID-19 mortality by 2.0 per cent. This translates into approximately 4,000 avoided deaths in Europe and 3,000 in the United States. Based on specific NPIs, we estimate that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States in the spring of 2020 reduced COVID-19 mortality by 10.7 per cent. This translates into approximately 23,000 avoided deaths in Europe and 16,000 in the United States. In comparison, there are approximately 72,000 flu deaths in Europe and 38,000 flu deaths in the United States each year. When checked for potential biases, our results are robust. Our results are also supported by the natural experiments we have been able to identify. The results of our meta-analysis support the conclusion that lockdowns in the spring of 2020 had a negligible effect on COVID-19 mortality. This result is consistent with the view that voluntary changes in behaviour, such as social distancing, did play an important role in mitigating the pandemic.

Summary

• The Herby-Jonung-Hanke meta-analysis found that lockdowns, as reported in studies based on stringency indices in the spring of 2020, reduced mortality by 3.2 per cent when compared to less strict lockdown policies adopted by the likes of Sweden


• This means lockdowns prevented 1,700 deaths in England and Wales, 6,000 deaths across Europe, and 4,000 deaths in the United States.


• Lockdowns prevented relatively few deaths compared to a typical flu season – in England and Wales, 18,500–24,800 flu deaths occur, in Europe 72,000 flu deaths occur, and in the United States 38,000 flu deaths occur in a typical flu season


• These results pale in comparison to the Imperial College of London’s modelling exercises (March 2020), which predicted that lockdowns would save over 400,000 lives in the United Kingdom and over 2 million lives in the United States


• Herby, Jonung, and Hanke conclude that voluntary changes in behaviour, such as social distancing, played a significant role in mitigating the pandemic – but harsher restrictions, like stay-at-home rules and school closures, generated very high costs but produced only negligible health benefits


• COVID-19 lockdowns were “a global policy failure of gigantic proportions,” according to this peer-reviewed new academic study. The draconian policy failed to significantly reduce deaths while imposing substantial social, cultural, and economic costs.


• The comprehensive 220-page book, began with a systematic review of 19,646 potentially relevant studies....

Substantial costs.  Typical British understatement.

The Left Has Mastered Hypocrisy

link

There Should Be A Reckoning

Even if it's nothing more than a South Africa-type "Truth and Reconciliation Commission", the purpose of which was to expose the injustices of apartheid for all to see, we deserve more than we're likely to get:

A global consensus has emerged that governmental responses to covid-19, which mainly involved shutdowns, limitations on mobility and other aspects of freedom, mask mandates, and vaccination requirements, did an enormous amount of harm. The issue is sometimes posed in terms of whether governments’ responses did more damage than the epidemic did. But that isn’t actually the right question. The epidemic happened. The question is whether the epidemic + government restrictions on freedom was better or worse than the epidemic alone would have been. And the answer is, worse. The net effect of government responses was catastrophically bad...

The analysis synthesizes 600 publications with a focus on meta-analyses, systematic reviews, global reports and multi-country studies. This cumulative academic research shows that the collateral damage of the pandemic response was substantial, wide-ranging and will leave behind a legacy of harm for hundreds of millions of people in the years ahead. Many original predictions are broadly supported by the research data including: a rise in non-Covid excess mortality, mental health deterioration, child abuse and domestic violence, widening global inequality, food insecurity, lost educational opportunities, unhealthy lifestyle behaviours, social polarization, soaring debt, democratic backsliding and declining human rights. Young people, individuals and countries with lower socioeconomic status, women and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities were hit hardest.

Some have called for Fauci and others to be criminally prosecuted, but I am not aware of any basis for such action. I do think, however, that we need a political accounting. Those who used covid as an excuse to exercise essentially fascistic powers, like Newsom, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, and Minnesota’s Tim Walz, should be humiliated and driven from office. But so far, that isn’t happening.

Update, 5/29/23:  Yes, a Truth and Reconciliation-type commission is certainly called for:

The petty tyrants and their lies have been so thoroughly exposed that they are now in full consequence avoidance mode. The first thing that leftists like to do when ducking responsibility is to rewrite history and pretend that none of it happened. Tyrannical garden gnome and alleged physician Anthony Fauci repeatedly insists that he didn’t want anything shut down. Randi Weingarten — the most evil woman in America — swears that she and the cauldron-stirring teachers’ union she runs never tried to keep schools closed.

Update, 5/31/23:  More:

So all of that unpleasantness is simply disappearing from medical journals and research archives. And the media would like us all to pretend that it never happened. But it did happen. And if we don’t learn anything from all of this, it will happen again when the next pandemic inevitably comes along. The need for speed must be moderated by adhering to proven practices from the past. And if you’re trusting the government to deal with you honestly and fairly based on the best available science rather than “The Science,” I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in purchasing.

Cell Phones and Kids

Too many parents were (and some still are) willing to mask their kids for years for a minimal threat but completely ignore the science telling them about the threat from cell phones:

“The younger the age of getting the first smartphone, the worse the mental health the young adult reports today,” writes Jon Haidt, citing a survey of 28,000 young adults around the world. 

Reingold talked to Nicholas Kardaras, who authored a book on tech addiction. He treats young adults with screen addictions at the Omega Recovery center in Austin, Texas. Often "influencers" have persuaded them they have Tourette syndrome, borderline personality disorder or gender dysphoria. When they go offline, escaping the “social contagion,” their symptoms disappear.

 Update:  More here.

I Can't Imagine How Anyone Thought Any Differently

Yet they did.  You can think some pretty stupid things when your thinking is tribal, and the 'rona nazis were the most tribal of them all:

Evidence continues to mount that mask mandates were perhaps the worst public-health intervention in modern American history. While concluding that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” in preventing the spread of viruses, a recent Cochrane review also emphasized that “more attention should be paid to describing and quantifying the harms” that may come from wearing masks. A new study from Germany does just that, and it suggests that the excess carbon dioxide breathed in by mask-wearers may have substantial ill-effects on their health—and, in the case of pregnant women, their unborn children’s.

Mask-wearers breathe in greater amounts of air that should have been expelled from their bodies and released out into the open. “[A] significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven in many studies,” write the German authors. “Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2,” they observe, while chronic exposure at CO2 levels of 0.3 percent is “toxic.” How much CO2 do mask-wearers breathe in? The authors write that “masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.”

In other words, while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels.

Yeah, and they said I was the one who wanted to kill grandma.

'Rona-related Isolation Did No Good

This from no less than the BBC, mouthpiece organ of a government that loved its lockdowns:

There is no evidence that shielding benefited vulnerable people during the Covid pandemic, according to a study.

Swansea University compared 117,000 people shielding in Wales with the rest of the population of three million.

The study found deaths and healthcare usage were higher among shielding people than the general population.

The Welsh government said shielding was introduced on medical and scientific advice and it will continue to review evidence from the pandemic.

The study also found the Covid rate was higher among those shielding - 5.9% compared to 5.7%.

The researchers said the data raised questions about whether the policy worked.

They concluded that a "lack of clear impact on infection rates raises questions about the success of shielding, and indicates that further research is required to fully evaluate this national policy intervention"...

Speaking to BBC Radio Wales, Prof Helen Snooks, who led the research, said: "If shielding was going to be effective in reducing deaths and serious illness from Covid, then it really needed to reduce the infection rate, but unfortunately we didn't find evidence of that in the study."

Here comes the biggie:

Prof Snooks also emphasised that the shielding group was "a lot sicker than the non-shielding group".

"There were more deaths and there were more hospital admissions. We are, at this point, thinking that perhaps it was impossible to shield people effectively when there was such a high level of healthcare transmission at that time," she said.

"For a particular person, it may have been the best thing to do. What we evaluated was the policy of writing to people and recommending very strongly that they stay at home. It wasn't underpinned at that time by any evidence."

"It wasn't underpinned at that time by any evidence."  Those of us who said that a few years ago were blood-libeled.

"It was sort of made up at the time and implemented."

Given that no one could provide any evidence, of course it was made up.  

It wasn't anti-mask people like me who were anti-science, who made this a totalitarian "with us or against us" issue, who damaged the credibility of public health officials.  It was the the people who "made it up at the time" who did these things.

#### them, including this one.

Update:  Even Nate Silver, now formerly of FiveThirtyEight, says this:

Nate Silver blasted COVID-era closures of churches while other public spaces, such as museums, were permitted to operate with fewer restrictions.

“It’s kind of crazy (and tells you a lot about who was writing the restrictions) that churches in some jurisdictions were subject to more restrictions than museums!” Silver, the data journalist and founder of the FiveThirtyEight statistical analysis news site, tweeted.

“Not even attempting to follow any sort of epidemiological principles.”

Yeah, pretty much.  And Nate Silver is no rightie.

Three Years Ago Today...

...was my last day at school that year.  I really expected decent people, adults, to make good decisions, and I expected to be back at work in 3 weeks.

Temporarily shutting down schools in the early days of the 'rona, when no one knew anything, seemed reasonable.  Keeping them shut for a year was disastrous.

Accountability

From Instapundit:

Remember When Saying This Got You Labeled A Conspiracy Theorist?

It was always the most logical and likely explanation, which is why lefties had to try to gaslight anyone who believed it:

Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says

I Guess It's Good That "Science" Is Catching Up To Reality

Public masking was useless?  I was telling you that almost 3 years ago:

After questioning the value of general mask-wearing early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided the practice was so demonstrably effective that it should be legally mandated even for 2-year-olds. A new review of the evidence suggests the CDC had it right the first time.

That review, published by the Cochrane Library, an authoritative collection of scientific databases, analyzed 18 randomized controlled trials that aimed to measure the impact of surgical masks or N95 respirators on the transmission of respiratory viruses. It found that wearing a mask in public places “probably makes little or no difference” in the number of infections.

These findings go to the heart of the case for mask mandates, a policy that generated much resentment and acrimony during the pandemic. They also show that the CDC, which has repeatedly exaggerated the evidence in favor of masks, cannot be trusted as a source of public health information.

They lied.  Or, to be charitable, maybe it was how it was described in this Newsweek article I quoted a week or so ago:

I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and "they" responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.

They knew they were wrong, at best maybe they thought that doing this wouldn't cause harm.  But it did, and I curse them for that.

So why do some people still wear masks?  Part of it is virtue signaling, part of it might be because they're ugly.

Why Are Some People Still Wearing Masks?

Before the 'rona, the only people in the US who wore masks were trick-or-treaters or doctors.  Now, there's a sizeable minority of people who continue to wear them.  Why?

“Researchers from Seoul National University in South Korea wanted to see if self-perceived attractiveness played a role in people’s mask-wearing intentions,” reports the Daily Mail. The researchers conducted three studies of Americans to determine how perceptions of attractiveness affect mask-wearing...

We’re learning more about the ineffectiveness of masks in terms of preventing the spread of COVID and other similar diseases. Brand-new research from the Cochrane Institute shows that surgical masks decreased the chances of catching COVID or another flu-like disease by only 5%.

Yet we see people continuing to wear masks, although less often than we used to. Perhaps mask-wearing is rooted in issues of attractiveness and self-worth, as this study suggests. Or maybe masks are serving as more of a psychological barrier than a viral one.

We Need More Of This, But From The People Who Made The Mistaken Decisions

Our response to the 'rona was a disaster:

As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters.

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.

We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and "they" responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting.

Been a long time since I agreed with something I read in Newsweek, but this?  This I can agree with.

The 'Rona Lockdowns

Those shutdowns caused a lot of harm:

In hopes of containing the pandemic, everyone across the country was forced to suffer through lockdown orders, closed schools, and shuttered workplaces in the spring of 2020. In Democratic-controlled areas, many of these restrictions lingered into 2021. Yet they didn’t work. We all got COVID-19 anyway, more than a million Americans nonetheless died of the disease, and in a dark and ironic twist, most COVID-19 spread actually happened at home .

Meanwhile, those restrictions themselves evidently had deadly consequences. A new study from Casey B. Mulligan and Rob Arnett published in the journal Inquiry finds that non-COVID deaths were highly elevated above expected trends in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021. They report that over this period, approximately 97,000 Americans died annually (not including COVID deaths) above the baseline trend, a statistic known as “excess deaths.”

These deaths included 32,000 deaths from heart disease and hypertension, some of which may have been fueled by the disruption to healthcare services and healthy lifestyles from the COVID restrictions. Meanwhile, deaths due to obesity-related illness, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related causes were all 12,000-15,000 above expected trends. All these factors were heavily influenced by the way COVID-19 lockdowns fueled social isolation, sedentary lifestyles, and mental health issues.

The data “point to a historic, yet largely unacknowledged, health emergency,” the study concludes. “COVID-19 is deadly, but so were the draconian steps taken to mitigate it.”

There's no evidence the lockdowns did any good at all, yet I'm convinced that we'll eventually see them again now that they've escaped Pandora's box.

This Man Is Mental

Governor Newsollini, who clearly wants to be president, thinks that the 7 Republicans left in California are the cause of all the state's problems:

With the state suffering under a plague of hundreds of thousands of homeless drug addicts living on the streets, a serious spike in violent crime and theft, highest-in-the-nation taxes and cost of living, failing public schools, a state-created water shortage, and hundreds of thousands of California businesses and residents fleeing to friendlier states, Newsom made his second inaugural speech all about him – and he attacked the toothless GOP in this Democrat one-party state...

Newsom played a victim of the Covid time period, in denial of his decisions to lock down school children and businesses, force vaccines on millions of Californians, and mask the population indoors and outdoors, while he went about his life unmasked, attending events and parties, and while his children attended private school...

Newsom played the game of “I know you are, but what am I?” described by the Urban Dictionary as, “quite simply the most retarded comeback someone makes when they’ve completely lost the argument. This statement signifies that the argument has gone to a completely immature level.”

He continued attacking the right, GOP, and red states...

That last statement is really rich coming from the Governor who still clings to his Covid State of Emergency powers three years after the order, and ruling by fiat, locked down 40 million people during Covid, issued more than 70 executive orders containing 561 provisions, and killed off half of the businesses in the state.

What strange things are in this man's head.

'Rona--Is There Anything It Can't Do?

A Canadian study showed that those unvaccinated against the 'rona were more likely to be involved in car accidents.

To answer my question:  yes.  It can't make lefties make sense.

We're Losing Our Enlightenment Values

What's worse, I never thought we'd lose them so quickly:

[W]hich came first, the corruption of science or the censoring of speech? 

It appears they’ve walked hand-in-hand for quite some time, becoming all the more apparent with the consolidation of social media power and the collective efforts of federal bureaucrats who wish to control not only what you think but especially what you say. During no time in human history was this more obvious than during the COVID-19 crisis where social engineering tactics were used against the American public, not to limit your exposure to a virus, but to limit your exposure to information that did not fit within a government sanctioned narrative. 

Throughout the pandemic, doctors, scientists, patients, and families were censored, shadow-banned, blocked, and punished for having views, opinions, and research findings disfavored by the government and their chosen gatekeepers. Hard fast truths that have become indisputable over time, ranging from the effectiveness of Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine to the potential dangers of Remdesivir and the failures of the vaccine were labeled as "disinformation" and "misinformation."

I remember when believing that the coronavirus had nothing to do with a wet market, that it was a human-manufactured virus that escaped from the lab in Wuhan, got you laughed at and called a conspiracy theorist.  Today that same belief gets you a "well, duh, of course".