The death toll from lockdowns

Posted: August 2, 2022 by chrisharper in covid
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By Christopher Harper

The death toll from lockdowns increased deaths from heart attacks to cancer to alcohol and drug overdoses to murders.

As of January, the CDC registered roughly 875,000 Covid fatalities [now just over one million], with an alarming number of Americans 65 and up accounting for more than 70 percent of the deaths, according to the CDC and The Wall Street Journal. The federal government counted more than 145,000 Covid deaths among nursing-home residents, most in the pandemic’s first year. At least 2,250 nursing-home staffers also died from Covid-19.

According to a study published in the JAMA Network Open, heart disease and stroke mortality rates rose 4.3% and 6.4%, respectively, in 2020.

Stephen Sidney, the lead author of the study, reported that the 696,962 recorded deaths from heart disease in 2020 was the highest yearly number, adding that preliminary CDC data for 2021 are similar. Stroke deaths rose 1.2% to 162,140, he said.

Much of the increase can be attributed to the inability to get standard medical care because of lockdowns and hospitals being overwhelmed with Covid cases.

For example, four of my close friends died over the past year because they couldn’t get adequate health care for cancer, and I know only one person who died from Covid. 

According to preliminary data from the CDC, drug-overdose deaths jumped to a record of more than 107,000 in 2021 due to the lockdowns and mental health issues.

Gun murders increased nearly 35% to 6.1 homicides per 100,000 residents from 2019 to 2020 to the highest level since 1994, according to a CDC report. Agency officials cited economic stress, disruption of services, and social isolation during the pandemic as potential factors. The firearm-suicide rate also increased slightly, and that trend continued in 2021.

According to the report, the rate hit 6.1 homicides per 100,000 residents, rising 34.6 % during the first year of the pandemic compared with a year earlier. 

Several cities set new highs for murders in the past two years. Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon., Louisville, Kentucky., and Albuquerque, New Mexico, had their deadliest years on record in 2021, according to data compiled by The Wall Street Journal. 

The number of deaths involving alcohol increased between 2019 and 2020 from 78,927 to 99,017, an increase of 25.5%.

Health experts say it will likely take years to understand the lockdowns’ toll fully. The consequences of people delaying care for chronic illnesses, like diabetes, or delaying cancer screenings that could catch harmful malignancies early have yet to be fully realized, Gerald Harmon, the president of the American Medical Association, told The Wall Street Journal.

In 2020, screening prevalence for breast cancer and cervical cancer decreased by 6% and 11%, respectively, compared with 2018, according to data from the American Cancer Society published in JAMA Network Open. Colonoscopies for men and women dropped 16%.

Add these issues to the impact on the economy, personal wealth, and educational preparation, particularly for kindergarten through high school, and we can indeed say that lockdowns had a lot of unintended consequences that the “experts” failed to consider adequately.

Report from Louisiana: Back to School Wish Lists

Posted: August 1, 2022 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

SHREVEPORT – This will be my second fall NOT to return to the classroom as a teacher! I retired a year and a half ago and let me tell you, I have zero regrets. Ze.Ro.

I loved my students, I loved my school, I loved my classroom, I loved my principal.

I did NOT love scripted curriculums. I hated dumbed-down curriculums. I hated the politics of it on all levels. The pure, unbridled vitriol from the public whenever the school board asked them for a raise. It was ugly.

So many things about public education are wrong. And so many good teachers have left the classroom because of this.

The pay is abysmal. And I have heard it all before: “You knew the pay was low when you signed up for this job.” Or, “You do it for the children, not the money.” Even, “But you have three months off in the summer and all those holidays!” 

In response: Yes, I knew the pay was low but I thought it would at least be a living wage without having to get a side hustle. Yes, I love the children, but I have bills to pay. And No, I do NOT get three months off in the summer. I was paid for nine months of work which was divided by twelve months so that I got a check every month. I never got paid for not working.

Now that my friends are returning after their summer break (which included professional development and workshops, all on their own time), they are posting pictures on social media showing off their classrooms “ready to go!”. And I am so glad I don’t have to do that.

They are also sharing their Amazon Wish Lists. This is one of the things wrong with public education. I was the beneficiary of many a gift through Amazon; I published my own Wish Lists and man people are generous! And when I decided to create a classroom library, and published a book wish list, people came through in spades. It was AMAZING!

But why oh why does an American public school educator have to do this? Most of these wish lists include items like looseleaf paper, pencils, pens, spiral notebooks, chalk, dry erase markers, tissue, hand sanitizer. It just seems to me that parents and schools should supply these very basic materials. And while I realize there are parents in need, and times are tough, we have “Stuff the Bus” campaigns all over town. And churches collecting supplies. And businesses collecting supplies.

I true “Wish List” should not have to include the minimal basics to educate a child. A “wish list” should include things like pretty room décor, a new teacher desk chair, a fancy keyboard, that sort of thing. Non-necessary things. My classroom library was a luxury – a Wish. It was great to have and my students benefitted greatly from it, but it wasn’t a basic necessity like paper and pencil.

It is sad to me that teachers have to beg for these supplies. It makes me wonder where is all the public education money really going? Over-inflated salaries? Sports programs? It’s certainly not being spent on the cafeteria lunches!

I picked a couple of teachers from my old school and sent a few things from their wish lists. I want to help where I can and I know how hard their job is.

And I’m really really glad it’s not MY job anymore!

The Left in General and the Transgender Groomer Left in one Image (and some advice)

Posted: August 1, 2022 by datechguy in Uncategorized

Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov: I have never been talked to like that in my life!

President Harry S Truman: Carry out your agreements and you won’t get to be talked to like that,

Exchange on Poland April 23rd 1945

If there is a better illustration of what the left has become over the last twenty years I’m not aware of it:

Yes that’s 4 transgender flags arranged in a circle and the person who posted it was arrested for: “Causing anxiety” I kid you not.

I have a suggestion for the left in general and the Transgender groomer left and their supporters in particular who are disturbed and are “caused anxiety” by people suggesting they are a bunch of Fascists’ and Nazis:

The best way to stop people from considering you a bunch of Nazi Fascists’ is to stop acting and reacting like a bunch of Nazi Fascists whenever anyone disagrees with you on anything!

One you stop acting like Nazis who want to crush dissent, destroy people and brainwash youth to your ends you’ll be surprised at how fast people will not seeing you as such.

No charge

Fact-checkers are gaslighting Americans over definition of a recession

Posted: July 31, 2022 by John Ruberry in business, economy, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

“The fliparoo theory of PolitiFact is now confirmed,” Dan Bongino said early in his July 28 podcast, “The fliparoo theory is this: If a fact-checker, airquotes, PolitiFact, says something is true it is probably false. If PolitiFact says something is false it’s probably true.”

Which means, of course, that we are now in a recession. PolitiFact, in a piece written by propagandist Louis Jacobson entitled, “No, the White House didn’t change the definition of ‘recession,'” he fact-checked a claim that originally came from an Instagram post. In seemingly 10,000 words, meant to overwhelm low-information voters, Jacobson ruled that statement false.

Jacobson is wrong, he’s gaslighting us. We are in a recession.

And Jacobson is not alone.

The Biden White House, led by the embarrassment of a press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, has been redefining “recession” for at least a week. For decades, the generally accepted definition of a recession has been two successive months of negative GDP growth. In the first quarter of 2022, the American economy shrank by 1.4 percent, and it contracted by 0.9 percent in the second quarter. These are facts. 

“However, the two-quarter threshold cited in the Instagram post has never been official,” Jacobson said in his so-called fact-check. “It’s more like a rough guide,” he continued, “one piece of a complicated puzzle.” Translation: the wise and oh-so-brilliant Jacobson is right, and you are a semi-literate yokel for accepting the commonly agreed upon description of a recession. 

In another overly long fact-check, Newsweek’s Tom Norton, another hack apologist, also ruled “false” the claim that the Biden White House is redefining what a recession is. “Furthermore, the White House website doesn’t have a dictionary or catalog of all political terminology and jargon it uses (that is the case for other governments, such as those of the UK and Canada, too),” Norton offered. 

Wow. I’m convinced. Not.

In Norton’s Newsweak–or is it Newspeak?— fact-check, Norton quotes Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen, who, by the way, was wrong about inflation being “transitory,” that it is really up to a secretive private organization to determine a recession. Who knew? “There is an organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks at a broad range of data in deciding whether or not there is a recession,” she revealed.

Another fact-check fabulist, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, appears to be on vacation so he hasn’t weighed in on the leftist-induced recession debate. Three years ago, while fact-checking Donald Trump, Kessler wrote, “A recession is two quarters of negative economic growth.” But Joe Biden wasn’t president then.

Another prominent (along the lines of someone having an ugly prominent nose) fact-checker, USA Today, also hasn’t recently given its opinion on what a recession really is. Oh, what’s this? In a 2020 fact-check USA Today informed us, “A recession is generally defined as two consecutive quarters of declining GDP, or gross domestic product, a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced during a specific time period.”

But on the other hand, Snopes is bowing to the Democrat Party mantra about recessions. Referring to a couple of social media messages, “The tweets quoted above may give readers the misleading impression that the Biden administration literally tried to revise the criteria economists use to determine when a recession has occurred. But that was not the case,” Bethania Palma chimes in for Snopes.

It is the case. Snopes is lying.

Here are some media talking heads talking not too long ago, based on who I see here and the chyrons, using the classical definition of a recession, in a montage compiled by the Media Research Center. You know the, you know the thing, as Biden likes to say, two consecutive quarters of declining GDP growth. C’mon man!

But, assuming briefly we are not in a recession when will we be in one? The Biden administration won’t say. Is it a recession when we have three successive quarters of declining growth? Four? Five-and-a-half?

Or will it be a recession only when there is a Republican president?

Dan Bongino is right. The fliparoo theory of “fact-checkers” is now confirmed. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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