The excellent 

has this on the subject. (Look up and sign on. )

Democrats Called Out for Creating the Energy Crisis

From the story: As Democrats — who have been waging a war on the oil and gas industry — continue to blame Putin, Americans and some in the media aren’t buying it. In fact, the anti-fracking records of congressional climate activists are being scrutinized. Ahead of the midterm elections, Democrats have backed themselves into a corner (Townhall). Matt Whitlock: Oh man — these Democrats are walking into a buzzsaw of their own making. Just a year ago they were screaming at energy execs to reduce oil production – today they’re going to theatrically accuse them of price gouging (Twitter). Spencer Brown: Oil and gas CEOs aren’t the ones who killed pipeline projects, revoked drilling leases, or promised to “get rid of fossil fuels” (Twitter). Fox News reports: Republicans have been beating the drum that Biden’s policies — including canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and freezing new oil and gas leases on federal lands – started driving up the gas prices prior to the war on Ukraine (Fox News).

Never before had goverments resorted to this method.

From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, Covid represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations.

While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics.

These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining the sick to deploying those with natural immunity, who had recovered from illness, to care for them.

Lockdowns?

. . . were never part of conventional public health measures. In 1968 1-4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic; businesses and schools never closed, and large events were not cancelled. One thing we never did . . . was lock down entire populations. . . . In 2020 we had no empirical evidence that [a
lockdown] would work, only flawed mathematical models whose [predictions] were . . . wildly off by several orders of magnitude.

There followed “devastating economic consequences” and “major societal shifts.”

Our ruling class saw in Covid an opportunity to radically revolutionize society: recall how the phrase “the new normal” emerged almost immediately in the first weeks of the pandemic. In the first month Anthony Fauci made the absurd suggestion that perhaps never again would we go back to shaking hands. Never again?

The idea has a history:

Changes ushered in during lockdowns were signs of a broader social and political experiment “in which a new paradigm of governance over people and things is at play,” as described by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Its “basic features were already sketched” in 2013 . . .

. . . in a book by Patrick Zilberman, professor of the history of health in Paris, Microbial Storms . . . [the book] was remarkably predictive of what emerged during the first year of the pandemic. He showed that biomedical security,. . . previously a marginal part of political life and international relations, had assumed a central place in political strategies and calculations in recent years.

Already in 2005, for example, the WHO grossly over-predicted that the bird flu . . . would kill 2 to 50 million people. To prevent this impending disaster, WHO made recommendations that no nation [was] prepared to accept at the time—including population-wide lockdowns. . . . Zylberman predicted that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.

more more more to come on this grim development . . .

They got nothin’ to tell her. It’s in her written responses to questions from senate committee members.

Her statement that she has no position on whether individuals possess natural rights is on 79th page (in answer to question 16 from Senator Cruz).

Whoosh, there goes the rights business.

I am no baker, though I am quite the man at the microwave and counter-top oven, but I am bowled over by the picture of these muffins and impressed by the narrative. You too, maybe.

. . . gimme a . . . t-i-o-n. Wha’ do you got? You got INFLATION.

It looks like the analytical geniuses over at the San Francisco Fed have finally figured out something that Larry Summers anticipated nearly a year ago: When you pump trillions of dollars of stimulus spending into the economy, it causes inflation to overheat to the highest level in a generation.

Of course, Summers was aggressively poo-poo’d by policy nabobs at Treasury . . . when he first projected that inflation would likely exceed 5% by the end of 2021 thanks to the federal government’s decision to hand out trillions of dollars in stimmies, benefits and PPP loans (combined with the Fed’s ’emergency’ policy posture that involved backstopping corporate debt and slamming interest rates back down to the zero-bound).

Biden did it, or stood by while his people did.

While he has since been vindicated, at the time, Summers was nearly excommunicated by his fellow Democrats for having the audacity to suggest that the federal government shouldn’t have ridden to the rescue of ordinary people during a once-in-a-century pandemic (or, at the very least, it maybe should have considered a more measured approach).

Wha’? And lose all that good will from stimmie recipients?

Now, months after Summers inflationary fears were vindicated, the Fed has finally summoned the courage to acknowledge that maybe the government’s balls-to-the-wall COVID stimulus was responsible for stoking the voracious inflationary spiral that – contrary to Jerome Powell’s assurances – has been anything but “transitory”.

Oh, when will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?

Here:

Rigidity, a favorite word of his. Follow the commandments, and you don’t get it. You’re rigid. Phew.

Watch out.

This should strike fear in all of the faithful Catholics in the United States: Cardinal Cupich and club just had an invitation-only event featuring the sixty bishops who voted against discussing Eucharistic Coherence, the liberals from Rome steering the “synodal process”, and the liberal Catholic media.

They had to fess up because JD Flynn and The Pillar caught wind of it, but clearly, Cardinal “We should all get together as brother bishops and discuss” Cupich has now become Cardinal “It hasn’t been going too well so we need to spin the narrative” Cupich.

Feisty female commentator lays it out.

Translation? “We need to make it look like we are the loyal bishops and paint everyone else like they are disobedient schismatics. We need to work the synodal process like Germany.”

She quotes Natl Catholic Reporter:

Through a series of keynote presentations and panel discussions centered on tracing the roots of Francis’ papacy to the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, invited participants also considered the opposition the pope continues to face from some quarters of the U.S. church, more than nine years after his March 2013 election.

And explains feistily:

Some quarters? Uh, let’s see. I believe that is the 75% of bishops and cardinals who don’t agree with the positions of Cardinal Cupich, James Martin, SJ, Cardinal Tobin, and the rest of their ilk on sodomy, same-sex marriage and abortion.

They absolutely do not want those percentages known because then the faithful who don’t pay attention to the elitist politics of Cardinal Cupich’s people might just come to think, “Huh, maybe this isn’t exactly a schismatic group when the vast majority of our bishops and cardinals feel this way.”

more more more . . .

He was warming up for the big one, trying it out a decade and a half before it.

In 2005, George W. Bush gave a press conference on the need to mobilize all national resources for a war on the Avian bird flu, which many people including Anthony Fauci predicted would carry a 50% mortality rate. Not just among the infected: “50 percent of the population could die,” the world’s leading authority on the pathogen told a gullible media always hungry for headlines and clicks.

They ran for the phones with that one. It’s what they do.

False letter to editor or not, government went to work on it.

On June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit covid. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the covid pandemic, clarified that people who have covid without any symptoms “very rarely” transmit the disease to others. WHO then backtracked on their original alarmist statement one day later.

Weeks later, Kerkhove was pressured by the public health establishment, including Harvard’s Global Health Institute, to backtrack on her statement that asymptomatic spread was very rare, claiming that the jury was still out. Her original claim that asymptomatic spread was not a driver of the pandemic was correct, as is now clear. Given that no respiratory virus in history was known to spread asymptomatically, this should not have surprised anyone.

Backtrack the backtrack and do it again, until you get it right. Dizzying, eh?

However:

. . . the damage was already done. The media (God bless ’em) ran with the asymptomatic threat story. The specter of people with no symptoms being potentially dangerous—which never had any scientific basis—turned every fellow citizen into a possible threat to one’s existence.

We should notice the complete reversal that this effected in our thinking about health and illness. In the past, a person was assumed to be healthy until proven sick. If one missed work for a prolonged period, one needed a note from a doctor establishing an illness. During covid, the criteria was reversed: we began to assume that people were sick until proven healthy. One needed a negative covid test to return to work.

Madness.

Grim conclusion:

It would be hard to devise a better method than the widespread myth of asymptomatic spread combined with quarantining the healthy to destroy the fabric of society and to divide us. People who are afraid of everyone, who are locked down, who are isolated for months behind screens, are easier to control.

A society grounded on “social distancing” is a contradiction—it’s a kind of anti-society. Consider what happened to us, consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, burying the dead.

Enough to make people sceptical. Not to mention madder’n hell and becoming unwilling to put up with it.