Sunday in the park with children. Intellectual honesty and the right to dissent
2021 08 22
Oksana, Eddie and Marianna spent last week at an Orff seminar in Lutsk. It is the capital city of Volyn Oblast in the northwest corner of the country, bordering Poland and Belarus. Eddie took care of Marianna as Oksana attended the sessions. He walked her through the huge, incredibly green city park. They had a wonderful time and Eddie got some money out of it.
Meanwhile, Zoriana was in full time daycare and spent her evenings with me. She was as close to an angel as one can imagine. Of course, I spoiled her a little bit, with the excuse that the rest of the family was on vacation. The bus schedule being a little bit chaotic, we would buy some ice cream as we started off on the 20 minute walk home. Somehow that walk took an hour every time, as we stopped to watch things, talk, and play along the way.
I had a lot to catch up on while Oksana was out of town. First was to mow the lawn and get the house in order. Then came pharmaceuticals – ordering rhymes with I were 'spectin in anticipation of problems when the forecast (how do they know these things?) wave of coronavirus hits us this fall. Then came my pension distribution. The biggest jump in the United States tax bracket is from 12% to 22%, as has been the case for the past decade. I figure out how to take as much out at 12% as I can. It's all the more important this year as my government's money printing is accelerating at an absurd rate and inflation seems ever more imminent.
Though I have not looked for comparables, real estate prices have supposedly continued to rise here in Ukraine. Reported inflation is 10%, while the exchange rate with the dollar has actually strengthened bit. I'm happy with my decision to have bought land in January.
This morning I took the kids out to Park Perimogi – Victory Park – at 8:30. On our way we went through the Sunday farmers market looking to buy carp for Oksana. They didn't have any, but we got some beautiful corn on the cob for 17¢ an ear.
Although Zoriana was pushing hard to get a pedalo boat, we rented a rowboat for an hour. I think she found that even more fun. She stationed herself in the center of the boat and operated the left-hand oar, as I sat on the rear thwart and manage the other one. Eddie set up front making observations about the wildlife. Along the way Oksana called to say she was in the park, and she heard us singing Row Row Row Your Boat in rounds as we went down the lake.
Some of you have written that you disagree with me about Covid 19. There are many possible levels of disagreement.
1. You can disagree on my course of action. You can think I am mistaken not to get vaccinated. You may think that ivermectin is dangerous.
2. You can disagree about my right not to get vaccinated. That's a different question.
3. You can disagree on my right to express my opinion on Covid 19. You can endorse the actions of the tech giants Google, Twitter, Facebook and the like censoring my posts as "medical misinformation." That's yet a different question.
So, when you think I'm being stupid, I can accept that opinion with equanimity. If you disagree with my right to be stupid in caring for my own body, then you severely disappoint me. Aren't you the ones who were recently crying "My body, my choice" when it came to abortion? And when you deny my right to even express my stupid ideas you are 180 degrees out of phase with traditional ACLU liberalism – the Free Speech Movement and so on of my youth. And the sacred First Amendment to the US Constitution.
Aristotle said that there are three modes of persuasion – ethos, pathos and logos. Arguments from authority, passion and logic. When you hammer me with arguments from authority, citing what you get from Anthony Fauci or Joe Biden, you disappoint me again. When you refuse to refute the arguments from logos presented by Robert Malone, the guy who invented mRNA, or Michael Yeadon, who spent a lifetime developing vaccines with Pfizer, you disappoint me. Governments will lie to you. Even CNN says as much, at least with respect to the events leading up to today's debacle in Afghanistan.
If you want to persuade me of the wisdom of lockdowns, social distancing, the efficacy of the face diaper, the efficacy of the vaccines and so on, please offer your own statistical analyses. Preferably double-blind, with a large sample size, as you demand of others. But nobody offers this – you simply endorse what the authorities say. Do you blame me if I don't buy it?
Changing the subject a bit, in the realm of being wrong, nobody has written to disagree with my recent YouTube video entitled "The Sixth Great Extinction – Not!" I said that numbers just do not support the claim.
At the same time I note that this year I have not seen certain species of birds. Topping the list is the cuckoo. We always hear the cuckoo starting in late May. There have never been many – I usually hear them I half a dozen times in a given year. This year I was listening and I never heard a single one. I do not notice swifts and swallows chasing bugs in the air this year. I have not seen a hoopoe for a couple of years, although I have to say that it was not until three years ago, when Eddie pointed one out, that I recognized what they were. I think that woodpeckers are more scarce.
There could be lots of reasons, starting simply with me being inobservant. It could have a lot to do with vanishing habitat due to the roads and apartments being constructed not terribly far away. It could be some disruption in their food chain, perhaps caused by some modern DDT such as glyphosate. At any rate, my eyes are open, and my mind is open for explanations. Even global warming, although this has been a generally cool summer following a downright cold winter and spring.
With regard to global warming, I recently mentioned in another online exchange that Tony Heller suggests increased nighttime temperatures may be attributable to higher relative humidity, and that in turn may be a results of irrigated agriculture. The point in question was the record high nighttime temperatures in Death Valley, which lies about 100 miles to the east, albeit over a mountain range, from the highly irrigated California Central Valley. The catcalls about Tony Heller in that email thread were scalding.
Tony is an interesting character. He has a most incredibly mild-mannered approach. Moreover, he seems wedded to facts. He is fond of pointing out that graphics supporting scares about increasing temperatures and wildfires are almost always constructed for dramatic effect by choosing an optimal starting date. Go back further in history and one finds much greater conflagrations or heat waves in Australia, California, Washington State or wherever.
I remarked tongue-in-cheek that Heller's favorite source is the New York Times. While some may accuse the Times of having published lies ever since its inception, nobody accuses it of being prescient or clairvoyant. They could not have anticipated the climate debate of the third decade of the 21st century. Therefore, their weather reportage of a century back is probably accurate. Heller is not on shaky ground quoting them.
I simply got no reply. No rebuttal to Heller's videos beyond the ad hominem attack. Once again with the climate argument, it seems clear that the objective is moral preening, chest thumping, virtue signaling and pushing a narrative rather than seeking the truth.
A correspondent warned me last year about measles, sending a link to a joint WHO and CDC joint report of 207,500 measles deaths last year. A scary number!
Worldatlas.com backed up their claim that the four leading countries for measles deaths are Madagascar, Ukraine, Philippines and India. Their article claimed 1,200 deaths for Madagascar but no numbers for the others.
There is a contradiction right there. WHO has 156 member nations. 207,500 ÷ 156 = 1330. For the total to be right, every member nation would have to have more than the 1,200 deaths for the one with the highest reported figure. Something was wrong!
The ministries of health in Ukraine, Philippines and India report 16, 203 and 38 measles deaths, respectively. The four leading nations thus account for only 1,457 deaths. The WHO number has to be off by a factor of about 100. That's an incredible lie!
This has implications for my kids. Very few people die of measles. The VAERS database reveals that people die of the MMR vaccine every year, but nobody has died from measles itself since 2015. The safest decision is not to vaccinate them. I might be persuaded to do it to promote herd immunity, but not when they lie so egregiously.
I wrote to my correspondent about this. Intellectual integrity would seem to require that he investigate the discrepancy and concede that the WHO and CDC were wrong, viz, lying, or convince me I was wrong. Nope. Crickets.
It seems like everybody nowadays feel obliged to support a narrative. Global warming will kill us! Trump is a tool of the Russians! Nobody is concerned with facts, even in defense of his or her reputation.
I am increasingly fearful of even pointing the sort of thing out. It is probably better to fall back to the wisdom of my former Soviet neighbors and simply keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. Though there is something in the human soul that yearns to warn others when they see an imminent catastrophe, the wisdom of this age may be more cynical. As the French say, sauve qui peut. I should not be concerned for those who refused to see what is coming.
And that's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong (and silent if they know what's good for them), the women are good looking as ever, and we can only hope that the children will learn the appropriate lessons from our words and example.