The Broken Thumb: Heuristics in the Fall of Civilization

Most knowledge comes from a rule of thumb, a heuristic, that because a consensus of authorities portrayed to us by our news media and educational and governmental institutions state something to be true, it must, therefore, be true.

It's not that we observe for ourselves the events reported in the news, history books, Google searches, or the data that constructs what we call science. Instead, we place trust in authorities telling us what is true. Our knowledge is a proxy, a symbol of our trust in these authorities. We assume these authorities almost always, or at least usually, state the truth and that we can rely on that truth to plan our day-to-day lives.

This is the foundation of what we call civilization. You don't have to build most items you use from scratch; you trust an expert to furnish you with that item in exchange for money. You don't have to examine the item you're purchasing and test it yourself or even understand how it works; you can, instead, read reviews from others posted online and trust their opinions to make your purchases.

This rule of thumb allows us to specialize in our individual arts and enterprises while relying on others to supply us with everything else we might need or want. When this reliance is misplaced by another's negligence or malfeasance and harms us, we have court systems to compensate us for our losses. You shouldn't need to understand medicine and make your own drugs or treat your own illness; you assume you can rely on your doctors. You shouldn't need to understand the intricacies of voting systems; you assume your vote will be counted. You shouldn't need to understand the geo-political intricacies of conflict in other countries; you assume your politicians will use a military to appropriately serve your nation's interests.

When you make an agreement with someone, you generally expect that agreement will be lived up to or that you can have a court remedy the mistake or malfeasance if it is not. For the basic necessities, such as food, home supplies, and medicine, this is generally true. The more we can rely on others, the stronger a civilization we have. The less we can rely on others, the more broken a civilization we have.

You may have noticed some critical areas where the thumb is broken. Broken trust in elections and militaries affects some countries more than others. But the whole world suffers from our broken knowledge surrounding the 2020 pandemic that has extended into 2021 and likely far beyond.

Welcome to the Fall
A specific type of corona virus, among countless others, identified (IDed) in 2019 and aptly named COVID-19, has taken the world on a dark political ride of confusing narrative inversions under the guise of what is labeled a "pandemic," grossly restricting people's day-to-day activities such as working, saying goodbye to loved ones at funerals, exercising at public facilities, going to school, and in countless other ways.

A pandemic should justify a public policy restricting activity to protect people that is proportional to (1) how deadly or harmful a pathogen is and (2) how infectious it is. The reliability of this life-or-death information conveyed to us and our trust that it won't be misused for personal gain and/or lust for arbitrary power is an apt test for civilization. This test failed spectacularly.

How are COVID-19 deaths counted? In April 2020, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the U.S. issued a memorandum instructing changes in how deaths for COVID-19 would be reported. No positive test for the virus is needed. Speculation based on "symptoms and exposure to an infected individual" without evidence the infected individual had COVID-19 at the time of contact is appropriate to count the death as COVID-19 for reporting [*1].



And death counts, at least in Illinois and among other states in the U.S., are tallied toward COVID-19 even if the patient died of a "clear alternative cause." The Illinois Department of Public Health Director, Dr. Ngozi Ezeke, explained how Illinois deaths are counted on April 20, 2020 [*2]:
If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means, technically, even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it's still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who's listed as a COVID death doesn't mean that that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of the death.
We've all heard by now the countless reports of people who died of car accidents or gunshot wounds and were also reported as COVID-19 deaths. Are these merely mistakes or one-off reports? How widespread are such conflations of death? I had a client, on an unrelated matter, tell me about how a friend's husband that commit suicide was labeled a COVID-19 death. The family was livid and demanded it be changed, because the despair of lockdowns caused the suicide, not the virus. They were told that because the suicide came from policies related to the pandemic, the pandemic was a cause of the death, so COVID-19 was appropriate for the death certificate.

As a public policy matter, how can we balance the deaths the lockdowns cause (e.g., suicides, missed "elective" surgeries that prevent future death, etc.) against the deaths the virus causes, if our institutions are conflating lockdown-related suicides with virus deaths?

Why might all these death reports be conflated with COVID-19? A monetary incentive was provided to list the poor and elderly as having contracted and/or died of the virus. Medicare, for the elderly, and Medicaid, for the poor, pay healthcare providers $13,000 per COVID-19 patient and $39,000 if they were placed on a ventilator [*3]. If medical professionals have a choice whether to put someone on ventilator or pursue a different option, and either choice would be equally reasonable, would $39,000 at a time hospitals are prohibited from performing elective surgeries influence healthcare decisions? 

Remember when ventilator-shortages were a huge deal and New York needed thousands of them, as war powers were enacted to convert car plants into ventilator factories? What happened to all that ventilator use we saw in March 2020? Use of ventilators can be incredibly dangerous, as hospital waivers are needed to disclaim the risk that the ventilator itself could cause death. Normally the elderly would have family with them at the hospital to help with such a decision and weigh the risks, but visitors were restricted. Did the massive spike in COVID-19 deaths in New York compared to everywhere else come from the virus itself or because greedy hospital administrators wanted $39,000 ventilator payments at a time governments grossly restricted non-COVID-19-related elective surgeries and hospital treatments?

The premise for restricting access to businesses and/or ordering people to stay home that we refer to as "lockdowns" was to prevent too many people from contracting COVID-19 at once in order to ensure enough hospital beds were available (in the U.S., "two weeks to slow the spread"). The concern was that people wouldn't get access to those precious ventilators or other hospital-bed treatments due to a lack of beds. Thus, if the infection rate could be reduced and cases were spread out over a number of months, more of these fixed sets of beds could treat more patients.

This premise spread around the world. Yet, overflow of hospital beds was not the rule. Data from the National Health Service (NHS) in England showed a reduction in hospital-bed use for 2020, staying below the 2017-2019 average, while, curiously, a news piece by the Guardian in 2019 decried a record reduction in beds for 2019 by 17,000 beds from 2010 [*4]. If one country was going to be harmed by this assumed bed-shortage, certainly it would have been England.



Military bases were set up for overflow to account for the projected lack of beds, but went largely unused, a pattern that persisted throughout the world [*5]. The stories of mass ventilator use went away. Certainly, the mission to "slow the spread" was accomplished. But, restrictions on freedoms persisted anyway, as the narrative then focused on increases in cases and how infectious the virus is.

But even the case numbers were grossly inflated, as, over the summer of 2020, Florida cases went from 2,000 to 12,000 per day, at the same time multiple testing sites featured a positivity rate of close to 100%, including Orlando Health, which reported 98% positive tests and had to correct its records down to 9.4% [*6]. Over the summer of 2020, in a study published by the International Journal of Geriatrics and Rehabilitation, the CDC's test kits were found to give inaccurate results 50% of the time, a 30% false positive rate and 20% false negative [*7]. Thus, how can positive test-results close to 100%, as we saw in Florida, be explained by negligence in lieu of malfeasance?

Even as late as January of 2021, errors in testing have been exposed as in need of remedial action. The World Health Organization (WHO) admitted the cycle count for the nasal-swab testing the world had relied on for its infection figures needed to be reduced due to false positives [*8]. This confession came, conveniently, after the installation of Joe Biden as U.S. president.

And is it even possible to know if someone had COVID-19? Antibody tests to see if someone had the virus (and, thus, might be immune) were notoriously inaccurate, producing false positives too, as the CDC warned "[s]erologic test results should not be used to make decisions about grouping persons residing in or being admitted to congregate settings, such as schools, dormitories, or correctional facilities" and "should not be used to make decisions about returning persons to the workplace [*9]." 

Dishonesty plagued the media's reporting as well, as CBS was caught using footage of doctors in Italy when reporting about New York hospitals being overwhelmed [*10]. It's hard to conflate such an error with a mistake instead of as an intentional dramatization in order to fit the narrative that hospital beds were being overwhelmed (and thus lockdowns were needed).

The same media organization was later caught orchestrating false lines of vehicles in order to exaggerate the demand for testing [*11]. Assuming COVID-19 is a legitimate and dangerous pandemic, wouldn't showing such long lines of cars, when there were usually no lines at all, deter people from getting tested and hence put lives in danger? Is the goal to encourage testing or to promote fear?

In the United Kingdom, a government document even suggests using the media to exaggerate the harm from COVID-19 in a blunt fashion: "use media to increase sense of personal threat" using "hard-hitting emotional messaging." The ethics of government using the media is not considered outside utilitarian considerations, conceding such a tactic "could be negative" [*12] if the public catches them exaggerating.





British scientist, Neil Ferguson, produced the model the U.S. relied on for its lockdown policies, stating 2.2 million would die in the U.S. alone and that the number could be brought down to one million in the U.S. with governmental action such as lockdown policies. This wasn't the first time Ferguson was grossly off in his predictions, and he later resigned for violating the very lockdown policies he promoted by leaving his home to cheat on his wife with a married woman [*13].

Purported powers for lockdowns, such as in states like Illinois, were mostly exercised and extended through executive fiat as opposed to through legislative approval. After all, the Illinois Governor wasn't up for reelection, so why should legislators be bothered to take political heat for shutting down the state when they can just presume goldfish memories will prevail during a future gubernatorial election in a few years, to the extent voting in such an election would even matter? The governor in Illinois went far beyond his statutory 30 days to ruin lives and was even legally barred from enforcing his executive lockdown orders beyond that period by a court [*14]. He continued to do so anyway. What army does a judge have to enforce his orders against a governor? The vast majority in the media didn't care.



We call the policy of closing churches and businesses while ordering people to stay at home "lockdown." But the WHO, whose policies are required to be followed in order to receive International Monetary Fund loans, initially conflated these draconian restrictions it recommended with the word "quarantine," a wicked inversion [*15]. According to my Black's Law dictionary (and many others) quarantine meant "isolation of a person or animal afflicted with a communicable disease or the prevention of such a person from coming into a particular area," but WHO pretended it was "restriction of activities or separation of persons who are not ill but who may have been exposed to an infectious agent or disease." Instead of restricting the sick, we restrict the healthy, as the language to do so is inverted in an Orwellian fashion.



The WHO is deemed by information-monopolist Google, via its subsidiary YouTube's CEO Susan Wojcicki, as the measure of all truth pertaining to COVID-19, by which any contra information is banned. "Anything that would go against World Heath Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy," the minister of truth, Ms. Wojcicki decried [*16]. When WHO got the veracity of the nasal-swab test calibrations used through January 2021 wrong and issued a retraction, after Joe Biden was installed, anybody that challenged the tests for that multi-month period was, thus, censored by the world's foremost information monopolist.

Is it a "conspiracy theory" to note a correlation in COVID-19 drama and the 2020 U.S. presidential election? I would suggest no such thing, of course, Ms. Wojcicki. But Los Angeles County Public Health Director, Barbara Ferrer, made a revealing statement in September 2020 [*17]:
We don’t realistically anticipate that we would be moving to either tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, in early November. … When we look at the timing of everything, it seems to us a more realistic approach to this would be to think that we’re going to be where we are now until we are done with the election.
Did policies restricting activities or "separation of persons who are not ill but who may have been exposed" (i.e. everyone) we refer to as "lockdown" make a difference? A Stanford January 2021 retrospective study of the efficacy of lockdown polices, euphemistically referred to as non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), did not find a correlation between more restrictive "NPIs" and relative reduction in case growth [*18].



Alarmingly, the study concluded "sometimes[,] under more restrictive measures, infections may be more frequent in settings where vulnerable populations reside relative to the general population." In other words, draconian "lockdown" policies can increase the infection rate in populations with a higher chance of dying of the virus.



But, certainly face masks have been our savior, if, perhaps, lockdowns were a little extreme. Can you go five minutes with a television on without seeing propaganda on the moral glory of wearing a face mask?

First, we were informed face masks were not necessary. The U.S. Surgeon General implored us not to buy face masks in February 2020 [*19], during the exact time reducing transmission would've theoretically made the greatest impact, considering the peak March 2020 death rate.

The media's darling prophet of COVID-19 is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has garnered a cult-like following, complete with special prayer candles you could buy on Amazon.



What pray tell is the gospel of St. Fauci on masks? Dr. Fauci said in February 2020 [*20]:
If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn’t really do much to protect you. People start saying, "Should I start wearing a mask?" Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.
This wasn't a one-off mistake. Dr. Fauci made multiple statements on multiple network television shows down-playing the danger of the virus and the need for face masks, such as in this March 8, 2020 "60 Minutes" interview [*21].
Dr. Fauci: Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with-with masks.

Interviewer: You're sure of it? Because people are listening really closely to this.

Dr. Fauci: Right now--people should not be--there is no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a-a droplet. But it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.

Interviewer: And can get some shmootz, or some sort of thing inside there?

St. Fauci: Uh. Of course. Of course. When you think mask, you should think healthcare providers who need them, and people who are ill.
You might remember a time in January and February 2020 when those on the left denounced any fear about the virus as not legitimate concern but racism toward those of Asian descent. The New York mayor and a mayor in Italy even encouraged people to meet and mingle in public to show those racists who was boss. On January 21, 2020, even Dr. Fauci downplayed the impending doom of the virus on Greg Kelly's show [*22]. 
Greg Kelly: Bottom line. We don’t have to worry about this one, right?

Dr. Fauci: Obviously, you need to take it seriously, and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing. But, this is not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about. 
Considering the face-mask policies we've suffered with for the past nine months have revealed a complete inversion in course, you'd assume Dr. Fauci could just admit the authorities on face masks were wrong and that the science had since moved toward a consensus that masking is correct and would have been, in retrospect, the wiser course. Instead, in an interview, he implied he had to lie about the efficacy of face masks in order to ensure enough hospital workers would get them [*23]: "We were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply." The inference by his choice of the words "many people were saying this" is that there was a consensus to mislead the public.

Of course, Dr. Fauci has since doubled down on his inverted clarion call for masking it up, as he recently declared on the "Today" show: “If you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective [*24].” 



Curious. The process of inhaling involves exhaling just like the process of eating involves defecating, inferring what is good for our body is consumed and what is not good for our body, or possibly bad for our body, is rejected. Wouldn't masks (and especially double-masking) inhibit the free flow of oxygen? Wouldn't masks necessarily cause your body to rebreathe the rejected elements like carbon dioxide? What are the long-term health risks of prolonged mask use?

And what are the public-health benefits of masking up to weigh against any individual long-term health risks of prolonged use? It's supposedly not about protecting you from contracting COVID-19 but preventing you from exhaling COVID-19 particles in public that another might intake and become infected with. This rests on the theory that you could be an asymptomatic spreader, meaning you are spreading the virus to others without even knowing you're infected, like a walking bioweapon. Has there been a study showing this to be true? A Chinese study on COVID-19 took 455 asymptomatic people living with their families to see if infection could be spread, and, in all 455 cases, no infection occurred [*25].



Of course, we've been told not to trust the Chinese, that COVID-19 originated from China, and the Chinese government tried to cover it up. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe suspicion of Chinese scientists based on their country of origin means one is racist. Maybe the Chinese government played up the fear through its knowledge of our distrust, purposefully, as a means of economic warfare on its competitors. Or maybe placing blame on China and inferring China lies about COVID-19 numbers is a means the intelligence communities of other countries used to get more right-wing mistrusting communities on board with the pandemic fear in order to advance their own agendas.

Intelligence communities, such as the Central Intelligence Agency in the U.S., have blanket authority to engage in covert propaganda campaigns around the world.



And they are on record confessing they manipulate American media, per the 1975 testimony of then-CIA Director William Colby [*26].
U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Otis Pike: Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation or American journal?

CIA Director William Colby: We do have people who submit pieces to American journals.

Pike: Do you have people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?

Colby: This I think gets into the kind of uh, kind of details I’d like to get into at an executive session.

Pike: Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to the national news services, AP and UPI?

Colby: Well again, I think we are getting into the kind of detail, Mr. Chairman, I’d prefer to handle in an executive session.
Does the intelligence community still manipulate the media on issues that matter to them, like expanding theaters of executive-run conflict in countries like Syria or locking down economies to serve some other "national security" purpose? A Harvard study on media coverage for the first 100 days of the Trump administration revealed an 80% negative tone in coverage, with coverage inverting to 80% positive solely on one issue: cruise missile attacks on Syria, while later-released documents cast doubt upon the pretense for the attack [*27].





Curious. Of course, you'll be ensured that all this activity stopped after the 1970s through supposed reforms. How would you know those reforms were lived up to? Could we audit these intelligence agencies and see everything they've been up to? If we could, how would we know we'd been told the truth?

You might recall the widely-reported notion that upwards of 21-million Chinese probably perished from COVID-19 through March 2020 because, allegedly, 21-million Chinese cell phone accounts disappeared [*28]. Considering nowhere near 21-million deaths occurred globally since the start of the pandemic, even using these ridiculously-inflated statistics, such an outlandish report seems suspect. So suspect, in retrospect, chalking the origins of that "21-million" figure up to an honest mistake seems unlikely. More likely, the figure seems like propaganda that was used to scare people.

The masks and lockdowns (or "quarantine" if you prefer) are the stick. Nobody enjoys having oxygen cut off and rebreathing carbon dioxide, while being sporadically prohibited from going to church, funerals, various social events, or school, with arbitrary conditions for return to normalcy, such as waiting, like Barbara Ferrer suggested, until "after the election." What is the carrot? What is the end game we can reach in our communities to take away the stick? And what is required of us to reach that point?

Who knows for sure? Was the installation of Joe Biden as U.S. president sufficient? Unlikely. This has been a world-wide phenomenon. Likely, one of the long-term goals of the COVID-19 pandemic is to implement a system of immunity certificates for public travel. Imagine how many trillions of dollars can be made if we all are made to inject ourselves every year or six months with the latest vaccine in order to participate in public life? How many injections is that over the course of human lifespans? How many trillions of dollars?

The pros and cons of vaccination are beyond my scope here. Maybe vaccination is a wonderful thing, and we should all take the vaccine cocktail du jour annually (or whatever period of time is fashionable). Are the public health benefits so vital that choice should be removed from the equation?

That's the preferred direction of our global insititutions. Note this Irish company that tried to promote the idea of a health passport linked to vaccination records for public travel in order to "protect our society, economy, and jobs." The video marketing their product was subsequently moved to private [*29], thus I always screenshot shocking information.



Will corporations independently require proof of COVID-19 vaccination to enter public venues such as concerts? Will states require vaccination to obtain a driver's license or to engage in public travel? Will airports require such proof to enter their facilities? Public pressure has, so far, stymied outward plans to force this upon people. Note the like-to-dislike ratio in the above screenshot. Note less than half of American registered voters in a November 2020 poll asserted they would willingly get such a vaccine [*30].



Just like the WHO redefined "quarantine," it had also, for about six weeks, redefined "herd immunity," which is the purported end-game where we can return to normal and start saying goodbye to deceased loved ones at funerals or breathe oxygen freely in public again. WHO had defined it, as of an update on June 9, 2020, as "the indirect protection from infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection." This is the common definition found in most dictionaries.

The notion that herd immunity could be achieved through "previous infection," as opposed to solely through vaccination, was removed on November 13, 2020 with a curious update, as captured by the Vision Times on December 28, 2020 [*31].



After this publication, WHO immediately changed the definition back to the original on December 31, 2020 [*32]. When caught improperly changing something, is it best to (1) argue that what you're changing is actually proper or (2) quietly change it back? The former tactic draws attention and argument while the latter is a confession you were up to no good. 

Of course, if a vaccine is successful, only one shot would be needed, and no recurring-market model would need to be imposed. Thus, in the COVID-19 era, even the definition of "vaccination" is called into question. Most had thought a primary purpose of a vaccine was to render oneself unable to spread a pathogen to another human being. The very premise for "herd immunity," vaccinating the population, is called into question with COVID-19 products we presently call "vaccines," as the vaccines were not tested to see if they prevent transmission but only on whether they reduced symptoms [*33].

COVID-19 vaccination is implemented not for the purpose of preventing the dreaded "asymptomatic carrier" from spreading the disease but for reducing the severity of symptoms of those who do catch the virus. Under this model, a schedule for repeated vaccinations will have to be implemented, not to reach "herd immunity" but as a means to safeguard individuals in case they're prone to more visceral symptoms.

In the alternative, it is argued that, because COVID-19 will mutate into new variants, immunity would only be temporary, and a schedule of recurring vaccinations would be needed to account for each mutation. The deputy chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) in the United Kingdom, Anthony Harnden conceded, “We may well be in a situation where we have to have an annual coronavirus vaccine much like we do with the flu vaccine, but the public should be reassured that these technologies are relatively easy to edit and tweak, so once we find strains that are predominant, the vaccines can be altered [*34].”

Twenty-three people died after taking the COVID-19 vaccine in Norway, half of which came from nursing homes, as Sigurd Hortemo, chief physician at the Norwegian Medicines Agency, said reactions to the vaccine, like fever and nausea, “may have contributed to a fatal outcome in some frail patients [*35]." But worry not. You see, just because they took the vaccine and later died doesn't mean these patients died from the vaccine itself. They could have died of, perhaps, a "clear alternate cause." This logic, of course, is an exact inversion from the prior-referenced means COVID-19 deaths are counted in the U.S. 

My point in all this discussion is not to convince you that vaccines are innately harmful or that a cabal of shadow-government officials are using the vaccine as a rouse to reduce the global population by reducing fertility or to install chips that would track us. Vaccination could be the panacea the world needs in a time of crisis. Or, it could be one option among many but is the one that makes trillions of dollars from a client base of the entire global population as opposed to a more paltry sum from conventional medications taken by those contracting the virus.

A special non-jury administrative court system in the U.S., with damage caps and disallowing class-actions, is first-imposed on anyone holding a pharmaceutical company responsible for a mistake in design or production of a vaccine. But vaccines, like and including the COVID-19 ones, are exempt from any legal liability, absent proof of willful conduct in making the vaccine harmful, under the emergency use provision of the law.

Some countries, like the United Kingdom, are outright granting legal immunity for COVID-19 vaccines. Why produce a one-time drug that cures a disease and applies only to the sick, but opens your company up to multi-million-dollar class-action lawsuits, when you can, instead, make a vaccine that has special legal immunity and applies to the global population? The former has a customer base of only those who contract COVID-19. The latter has the whole world to feast upon.

Bill Gates is the current public face in vaccination and is being promoted as a media darling, second only to St. Fauci, pushing for global vaccination through his multi-billion-dollar Gates Foundation and for further legal immunity for any possible side effects from a COVID-19 vaccine. Gates, himself, has seen a multi-billion-dollar boost in his personal wealth during this never-ending pandemic [*36]. This could, of course, be legitimate philanthropy. And Gates' March 2020 patent on a crypto-currency body chip that transmits data via his Microsoft company [*37] could be an independent venture of virtue, entirely unrelated to his global vaccination fetish.



Likewise, the global push organizations like the Alliance Partners make for inserting such a chip that tracks human beings to fulfill the "fundamental and universal human right" of "proving one's identity." may very well be entirely unrelated [*38].



Such discussion infers what some might call "conspiracy theories." After all, there is no direct evidence of malfeasance, such as a confession from Bill Gates himself that he is up to no good. Thus, absent such confessions, we dare not express skepticism of anyone's intent.

Of course, the media engaged in a coordinated propaganda campaign to ensure us Joe Biden was legitimately elected and that there was, first, "no evidence of voter fraud," then "no widespread evidence of voter fraud," and then "no proven claims of voter fraud," despite the first-listed inventor of the Dominion voting machines accused of gross fraud in the 2020 U.S. election, Eric Coomer, being caught in an interview by Joe Oltmann saying, "Don't worry. Trump won't win the election, we fixed that [*39]." But maybe Mr. Oltmann is lying, even though party-opponent statements (switching our opponent to Dominion) are exempt from hearsay rules. But our ever-so-trustworthy media have higher standards than courts, of course. Thus, presumably Mr. Coomer would have to go on CBS and confess live on television in an interview, after being sworn in, for us to accept such a confession as legitimate. 



But even a direct confession of an evil or fraudulent act may not reach our masters in the media's goal post for questioning one's agenda for COVID-19. After all, it is an epistemological possibility for someone to proclaim they have committed an evil or fraudulent act when they actually didn't.

Regardless of one's political views, misgivings on global vaccination, or general belief in the terror of COVID-19, the institutions that were supposed to guide us through the pandemic revealed themselves as fundamentally broken, giving contradictory and questionable directives, and incapable of being honest brokers of information to use in planning our day-to-day lives. Our rule of thumb is broken, and nothing exposed the break more viscerally than the year we've spent sporadically locked down and masking it up for COVID-19.

How Broken Is the Thumb?
My aim here is no longer to convince voters to take any information gleaned here and convert it into political action for change. The 2016 vote in the United Kingdom for "Brexit," revealed voting doesn't matter in, perhaps, the second most powerful democratic country in the world. And the 2020/1 elections in the United States reveal representative democracy in the foremost democratic power in the world is a comical fraud. Nobody honestly believes Joe Biden won 10.5 million votes more than the previous record-holder, Barrack Obama, while winning 45% less counties, most excess votes coming from four cities that shut down counting operations and suddenly found statistically-absurd Biden-only ballot dumps under the circumstances of a thousand affidavits and video evidence witnessing the same ballots being run through machines multiple times while observers were conveniently kicked out [*40].

Voting is but one institution among many that keeps civilization alive. A table can stand without a fourth leg. Although human flourishing is more likely in a nation governed by an honest autocracy than a lying democracy, a successful civilization is not predicated on its health in governance alone. But the COVID-19 fog of information begets foundational rot in civilization extending well beyond faith in government. How can we measure the rot? A survey with over 33,000 respondents in 28 countries, taken October 19 through November 18, 2020 and through December 18, 2020 in the U.S. reveals some answers [*41].

It's clear not just the American public, but the global public, no longer trusts the media to report the truth, as 59% believe "journalists and reporters are purposefully trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations."



Note the decline in trust from last year regarding multiple media institutions. What role do you think our institutions' mismanagement of information pertaining to COVID-19 has played in this dramatic decline?



Less than 13% will automatically believe information reported by their government and only 10% automatically believe information reported by the media, dropping to only 8% when media use anonymous sources.



Note the seven-point decline in trust in the scientific community.



In our post-democratic era, as America leads the world into post-democracy, the media's purpose is no longer to convince voters who to vote or not vote for but to massage public perception [*42]. 

The institutional response to COVID-19 has sired a civilizational rot. It's possible for someone with terminal cancer to have an outwardly healthy and successful lifestyle up until the symptoms manifest in ways that interfere with the host's ability to function. As such, institutions like electrical grids, indoor plumbing, and the like will continue to function despite any diagnosis for some period of time. But the rot will eventually affect those areas as well.

Healing the Thumb: the Trend Toward Nationalism
An old adage: "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

People rightly don't trust our institutions, because institutions have converged toward a global power structure. The game of reliance on those in authority becomes one of telephone. The message changes as experts continuously relying other experts relay the message of "truth" to the public. If an authority believes X, does he believe it because he independently discovered X or because another authority he trusts discovered it? When we see a thousand authorities proclaim X is true, how do we know that they are not all merely relying on one person who got it wrong? When 1,000 experts all proclaim something is true, we are, perhaps, a thousand times more convinced that it is true. But the snowballing effect of all those authorities can merely be originating from only one authority. Thus, a powerful consensus can be illusory.

The desire to build a global civilization through a peaceful empire is as old as recorded history. Empire can even be entirely democratic, as the Athenian one was. In science fiction, we commonly see one Earth government in conflict with other alien civilizations, but rarely do we see multiple Earth governments in conflict with each other in this context. Our stories of the future almost always allude to some global crisis resulting in convergence of global power. Those who want to dismantle or stymie that convergence are portrayed as the ignorant antagonists, and rarely do we see themes explored of a global government itself being inherently evil.

The reason large organizations become corrupt should be obvious. Who can large organizations compete against, as monopolies like Google and Amazon exceed the wealth and influence of many of the world's nation states? One estimate puts control of the media and most scientific journals in America at six corporations owning 90% of them [*43], and I've discussed the rot of the scientific community in a prior post you read here [*44].

Note the incredible financial gains of tech companies and Amazon during this pandemic. Amazon owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post, which coincidentally fear-mongers over COVID-19 in an ever-more histrionic fashion. But perhaps more alarming than that is how Amazon puff pieces echo throughout local news channels. The repeated phrases "millions of Americans staying at home [due to the COVID-19 pandemic] are relying on Amazon," "keeping its employees safe and health," and "has spent $800 million on increased wages and overtime pay" [*45] were parroted by multiple news broadcasters.



One of the benefits to large corporations on lockdowns has been the destruction of competition by small businesses. Ever wonder why there hasn't been a viable competitor to Google-owned YouTube? Google (owned by Alphabet) can afford to run subsidiaries at a loss. This is partly because other areas owned by the corporation can compensate for the loss but also because they have access to loans small business don't. A corporation like Disney, in the current COVID-19 environment shutting down parks and movie theaters, should be in bankruptcy by now. Why isn't it? Because Disney can obtain a seemingly-infinite supply of loans to cover missing cash flow and at tolerable interest rates.

Why can governments always get loans? Governments have near-limitless powers of taxation. If you're a lender, they're as good for the money as you can get. Monopolies have similar powers in that sense, since they dominate such a wide swath of the market, it's only a matter of time until the loan can be made good on. Thus, when organizations reach a certain threshold of power, like a government, they have access to near infinite capital. Without a proper profit motive, large organizations are free to use their resources to nudge populations toward causes its executives feel are just, all without even the façade of representative democracy to give their opinions on what is just a sense of legitimacy.

Meanwhile, as countless small businesses are forced to shut down, large corporations can buy up the assets at cheap prices and consolidate their power. And, since low-interest loans are readily available to large corporations, and they have a dominant share of the market, along with lobbyists in government, they need not be held accountable by customers or often even regulators. They are free to pursue whatever promethean agendas they deem just for humanity.

Leftists enjoy the social justice causes corporations throw themselves behind in the current era, but that will change in the post-democratic era we are entering, as voting decreasingly matters in changing large geo-political offices like the U.S. president and senate or key national decisions like Brexit; hence, politicians will have waning control of them. Large corporations, unaccountable to competition or political will through voters, are free to pursue pet projects like diversity and inclusion, but you won't see them advocating for leftist causes like universal healthcare for their employees or unionization. While Jeff Bezo's newspaper, the Washington Post, spent the majority of its post-election coverage denigrating any notion that mail-in ballots fraudulently altered the 2020 presidential election, Bezos' flagship company, Amazon, just argued against mail-in ballots for voting on whether to unionize in a legal battle with the National Labor Relations Board [*46].

Once these institutions recognize they no longer need support from left-wing activists, such activists will have to turn to other more localized solutions to assemble their vision of what human flourishing entails.

As trust in these global-oriented institutions like the WHO, the general "scientific community," and global media corporations evaporates, new institutions will rise. These institutions will start local. The closer an institution is to your home, the more you can trust it to tell you the truth. As a practicing attorney at a law firm servicing thousands of clients (sorry SJWs, you won't succeed in getting me fired or disbarred, and I strongly suggest you don't try it on a lawyer), clients call me whenever they have concerns or important news to share. Trust is more personal, and people naturally prefer local-oriented institutions with their business. If you dislike what Amazon is doing (like deplatforming Twitter-competitor Parler), can you call Jeff Bezos and complain to him personally like you can to me?

We intrinsically understand the benefit more localized power has and the danger extended centralized power imposes. The prior-referenced poll [*47] suggests that trust in local authorities, at least for now, is far greater than in geo-political ones.



What is important to you? Is it material objects, events, or people in your life?  If it's people in your life, how do you prioritize your love? For most, it starts with family. Then, it expands to your nation. Then, it expands to the globe. Love and trust for the entire world is a hollow kind of love, impersonal. Love is a relative act in our day-to-day lives. We cannot love the entire world, because there is nothing to love it relative to. You love your spouse and children, because they are more important to you relative to anyone else in the world. How would your spouse or children feel if you told them your love of them was equal to an unknown individual on the opposite side of the world?

Whoever controls global institutions, often operating from another part of the world, can exercise arbitrary authority over you, as you are incapable of meaningfully giving input to change the policies of these authorities. Arbitrary power is the most intoxicating kind, as it is ultimate freedom. Those in absolute power can make you do absurd things (e.g., double-masking) for no sound logical reason. Who can stop them?

Healing the thumb, our trust in institutions, involves building local institutions and centering our reliance in our day-to-day lives on them, as opposed to the corrupted global ones that have failed us. The biblical tale of the fall of the tower of Babylon to reach to the heavens is told for a reason. Whenever humanity converges toward global institutions, it inevitably falls prey to its own corruption. Prosperity is found in our nations, not in absolute power converged in conglomerate authorities.

UPDATE: A May 2021 publication by Dr. Joseph Mercola and Randy Cummings, The Truth About COVID-19, adds new details in support of my piece here:

(1) Polymerase chain reaction testing (PCR) is the primary diagnostic tool for COVID-19. The tests involve setting cycle counts. The authors discuss how a cycle count of 17 would be appropriate for ensuring a gross number of false positives aren't also reported, while American PCR tests are set at 35, over double. The WHO recommended setting them at 40, and then, right after Joe Biden was installed, recommending reducing the counts. This and many many more troubling details with COVID-19 testing are discussed at pages 75-81.

(2) I speculated that the spike in New York deaths correlating with the craze in ventilator usage might have contributed to the disproportionate number of New York deaths. Dr. Mercola states his view on pages 58-59:
Ventilators Did Not Help and Only Increased Deaths
The misuse of mechanical ventilation was not limited to Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. As early as June 2020, researchers warned that COVID-19 patients placed on ventilators are at increased risk of death, and leading experts suggested the machines were being overused and that patients would likely do better with less invasive treatments. According to one study, more than 50 percent of mechanically ventilated COVID-19 patients died.

The practice remained widespread, nonetheless. In a case series of 1,300 critically ill patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) in Lombardy, Italy, 88 percent received invasive ventilation, but the mortality rate was still 26 percent. Further, in a JAMA study that included 5,700 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the New York City area between March 1, 2020, and April 4, 2020, mortality rates for those who received mechanical ventilation ranged from 76.4 percent to 97.2 percent, depending on age.

Similarly, in a study of 24 COVID-19 patients admitted to Seattle-area ICUs, 75 percent received mechanical ventilation and, overall, half of the patients died between 1 and 18 days after being admitted.

There are many reasons why those on ventilators have a high risk of mortality, including being more severely ill to begin with. There are risks inherent to mechanical ventilation itself, including lung damage caused by the high pressure used by the machines. In cases of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), the lung’s air sacs may be filled with a yellow fluid that has a “gummy” texture, making oxygen transfer from the lungs to the blood difficult, even with mechanical ventilation. Long-term sedation from the intubation is another significant risk that is difficult for some patients, especially the elderly, to bounce back from.
UPDATE: I add a reference to how the U.S. government exempts the COVID-19 vaccines, which were all approved under "emergency use," from legal liability.
https://www.phe.gov/Preparedness/legal/prepact/Pages/default.aspx
My piece was updated to reflect this. I also changed my piece to remove a number on the damage caps for compensation from vaccine injuries that are subject to the administrative court system I reference, as this number changes and has gone up to a quarter million (in 2021) for pain and suffering per claimant as opposed to $100,000 it once was at.

UPDATE: Regarding U.S. Medicare and Medicaid payments for COVID-19 patients at footnote 3, I typed $9,000. The correct number, per the USA Today "fact check," is $13,000, 44.4% more! I corrected the figure.

---
FOOTNOTES
[*1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
[*2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/05/29/us_covid-19_death_toll_is_inflated.html#!
[*3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/04/24/fact-check-medicare-hospitals-paid-more-covid-19-patients-coronavirus/3000638001/
[*4] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/25/hospital-beds-at-record-low-in-england-as-nhs-struggles-with-demand
[*5] https://apnews.com/article/e593ba57f37206b495521503d7e5e4c5
[*6] https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/fox-35-investigates-florida-department-of-health-says-some-labs-have-not-reported-negative-covid-19-results
[*7] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/half-of-cdc-coronavirus-test-kits-are-inaccurate-study-finds/ar-BB16S6M6
[*8] https://www.who.int/news/item/20-01-2021-who-information-notice-for-ivd-users-2020-05
[*9] https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-says-antibody-test-results-wrong-half-the-time-2020-5
[*10] https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/cbs-admits-to-using-footage-from-italy-in-report-about-nyc/
[*11] https://www.projectveritas.com/news/cbs-news-this-morning-aired-faked-covid-19-drive-through-testing-site-line/
[*12] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/options-for-increasing-adherence-to-social-distancing-measures-22-march-2020
[*13] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/5/neil-ferguson-british-epidemiologist-resigns-after/
[*14] https://illinoisfamily.org/politics/judge-rules-all-of-illinois-free-from-governor-j-b-pritzkers-unlawful-executive-orders/
[*15] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2020/05/persuasive-redefinition-what-does.html
[*16] https://www.foxnews.com/media/youtube-will-remove-content-goes-against-world-health-organization-recommendations-ceo-says
[*17] https://www.dailywire.com/news/audio-los-angeles-county-health-director-says-she-expects-schools-to-reopen-after-the-election
[*18] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/eci.13484
[*19] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/surgeon-general-americans-stop-buying-face-masks.html
[*20] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/02/17/nih-disease-official-anthony-fauci-risk-of-coronavirus-in-u-s-is-minuscule-skip-mask-and-wash-hands/4787209002/
[*21] https://wearechange.org/saint-anthony-fauci-the-hidden-history/
[*22] https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/03/flashback-fauci-coronavirus-us-threat-trump/
[*23] https://www.mediaite.com/news/dr-fauci-admits-feds-initially-misled-about-face-masks-wanted-to-make-sure-health-care-workers-had-enough/
[*24] https://nypost.com/2021/01/25/fauci-wearing-two-masks-is-better-than-one/
[*25] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0954611120301669
[*26] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGxQdc0Kg8
[*27] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-role-of-media-in-post-democratic-era.html
[*28] https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/03/24/21-million-chinese-cellphone-users-disappear-in-three-months-of-pandemic/
[*29] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88ZKJhztiM&t=57s&fbclid=IwAR18FpYSjsAAgor9r43Pr8NuuCLhYMalZrcSyAVtUEjj7xDYrqlmQV77GrI
[*30] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/nzc8dt85gn/econTabReport.pdf
[*31] https://visiontimes.com/2021/01/01/who-redefines-herd-immunity-in-push-for-coronavirus-vacination.html
[*32] https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease-covid-19-serology
[*33] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-transmission-idUSKBN29N1UH
[*34] https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/i-think-used-this-vaccine-19689512
[*35] https://nypost.com/2021/01/15/23-die-in-norway-after-receiving-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine/
[*36] https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/fortunes-of-10-richest-men-rose-by-540bn-since-coronavirus-struck-march-2020
[*37] https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020060606&tab=PCTBIBLIO
[*38] https://id2020.org/manifesto
[*39] https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/11/sidney-powell-releases-the-kraken-in-georgia-and-micigan-federal-lawsuits/
[*40] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/planning-for-post-democratic-divided.html
[*41] https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2021-01/2021-edelman-trust-barometer.pdf
[*42] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-role-of-media-in-post-democratic-era.html
[*43] https://www.gaia.com/article/6-corporations-control-most-scientific-publications
[*44] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2018/05/plato-and-rise-of-scientistry-and.html
[*45] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6U2Un5kEdI
[*46] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/amazon-comes-out-against-mail-in-ballots-for-its-own-unionization-votes
[*47] https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2021-01/2021-edelman-trust-barometer.pdf

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