Flaming hypocrisy: “It’s good to be the king” of Netherlands or Prime Minister of England edition.

Demonstrated attitude of large portion of our political leaders here in the United States and around the world. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Today’s illustration of leaders blowing off Covid restrictions include the British Prime Minister and the Dutch Royal family.

That reminds me of a line from one of Mel Brooks’ movies, which I quoted above. More on that in a moment.

Mirror – 12/16/21 – Boris Johnson “joined No 10 staff for a Downing Street party during first lockdown” – Allegations have been raised Boris Johnson attended a pizza and wine party on May 15, 2020, yes a couple months into the pandemic. Reports claim 20 staff were present at the party with some of them staying until late at night. Get together took place after a press conference.

Mild denials suggest the P.M. only dropped by for a bit and left early.

My guess? This will be blown off as a staff meeting.

No biggie.

The Guardian, sourced to Agence France-Presse – 12/15/21 – Dutch Royals sorry for Princess Amalia birthday party that broke Covid rules – Royal family of Netherlands held a birthday bash to celebrate Princess Amalia’s 18th birthday. Reports claim at least 21 people were present.

At the time rules in the country prohibited having more than four guests in your home who were over 13 years old.

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Still more flaming hypocrites get caught, this time including Prime Ministers of England and Finland.

The Department of Hypocrisy is well staff in the U.S., England, and Finland.
Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The roster is continually growing of flaming hypocrites who routinely ignore they rules they demand we follow. Just a few of the most recent illustrations of our ruling overlords exempting themselves from their dictats:

  • Prime Minister of Finland kinda’ sorta’ blew off instructions to isolate because of covid-exposure and instead partied the night away. She is part of the ‘new generation’ and therefore she can do whatever she feels like. She is doubly exempt from any rules because she is Prime Minister and she is also 37 years old which means she can do as she wishes.
  • Prime Minister of England held a Christmas party last year when such gatherings were explicitly banned and his spokesperson laughed as she explained the party would be categorized as a “business meeting.”
  • Dr. Fauci parties at a book signing; is quoted as saying he takes his mask off whenever he feels like it.
  • Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer parties at a DC bar without a mask when mask was required except when eating or drinking. Staff at the bar say she was neither eating nor drinking while maskless.

Do our ruling overlords actually believe there is danger?

The only conclusion we can draw from this nonstop stream of in-your-face hypocrisy is our alleged political leaders don’t really believe Covid is dangerous. By their behavior they show the rules they require or endorse or enforce are not really necessary.

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Here we go again…

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Our ruling overlords in California have decided to dictate another statewide mask requirement . Los Angeles county and several counties in the San Francisco Bay area have already mandated masks at any indoor location.

The mask diktat now covers all indoor locations in California.

Articles for your consideration:

  • California imposes statewide mask mandate.
  • New York imposes statewide mask mandate.
  • New York will not enforce statewide mandate.
  • Reminder that the coronavirus bug is smaller than the holes in a surgical mask.

Wall Street Journal – 12/13/21 – California to Reinstate Indoor Mask Mandate – Secretary of California Health and Human Service Agency royally declared that starting Wednesday, December 15, 2021, all Californian citizens subjects will be required to wear a mask at any indoor event.

Royal decree will run until January 15, 2021. 

Any guesses on whether this will be allowed to expire in January?

This follows the state of New York imposing a statewide mask mandate…

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Who should we listen to? Who should we ignore?

Who should we listen to? Who, amongst our supposed leaders, has any idea what they are talking about? Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

At a time when the media is telling us this Covid pandemic will continue forever and there are frequent variants that will kill us all dead, who should we actually be paying attention to?

The possibilities:

  • people who know how to spell epidemiology, or
  • actual epidemiologists, or
  • people who are so convinced that Covid is deadly that they don’t bother to protect themselves; these are the people who also routinely ignore the rules they dictate we must follow.

People who know how to spell epidemiology and actually know someone they went to school with who is an epidemiologist:

Tweet by Martin Kulldorff

“The vocal pro-lockdown “public health scientists”, with their limited knowledge of infectious disease epidemiology, will be the last to recognize the public health disaster they created.”

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More indications the supply chain crisis will not be going away anytime soon.

Illustration of supply chain. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

There are lots of reports out with tidbits of information which combine to paint a picture that the tangled supply chain is not going to untangle anytime soon. For your consideration:

  • New system to allow cargo ships to register a scheduled arrival time will make it look like the number of ships waiting to unload has decreased.
  • Big increase in the number of people who started their own business since start of the pandemic, becoming self-employed.
  • Your favorite restaurant may stop taking delivery orders during crunch time.
  • Pay and working conditions for truckers are horrible – no wonder there aren’t enough of them.

FreightWaves – 12/1/21 – Ships in California logjam now stuck off Mexico, Taiwan and Japan – You may have heard the number of ships parked off the coast of ports in Southern California has dropped recently.

Good news, right?

Well, not so fast.

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More reports on health damage caused by government action during Covid pandemic.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

So many reports are pointing to the damage caused by government actions during the pandemic.  I can’t possible discuss all the news. Here are a few articles for your consideration

  • Lack of prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of malaria in sub-Sahara Africa has caused the death of 47,000 more people than would have died otherwise. Government actions are killing people.
  • Governor of New York orders elective surgeries be halted because hospitals may become overloaded. This will kill people from lack of treatment.
  • A medical doctor indicates we will deal with increasing Covid infection rates by repeating the steps that didn’t work before.

Foundation for Economic Education – 12/6/21 – 47,000 More People Died of This Disease in 2020 Due to Lockdowns, World Health Organization Reports The concept of “excess deaths” is something we all need to become familiar with. This is the idea of some event or circumstance killing more people than would otherwise have died without that circumstance having taken place.

It will take five or 10 years to identify all of the excess deaths which were directly or indirectly caused by government actions to shut down the economy in 2020.

The current data point is 47,000 people dying because of malaria who would have otherwise lived apart from the government lockdowns across the world.

47,000.

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What the government induced disruption of the employment market looks like from a consumer’s perspective – #2.

This sign is becoming more common during business hours. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

My wife and I are seeing firsthand the impact of turmoil in the employment market to include restaurants that have to close for the day because no staff showed up to work. One restaurant is making up stories about masks being government-required.

Previous post on this topic was back on 6/4/21:  What does the economy wide staffing shortage look like to a customer?

This discussion will highlight disruptions I have seen in our local community in the last month. We will discuss separately the wide range of government actions which have caused this turmoil.

In the meantime…

Daily Bulletin – 11/25/21 – “Sorry!” Customers with prepaid Thanksgiving meal orders find doors shut at Boston Market in Rancho Cucamonga – The only employee showing up at the Boston Market stored in my hometown put a note on the door saying

“No employee showing up today… We are unable to fulfill the orders! We are sorry!”

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One of the reasons why we are seeing record setting high inflation: staggering, astronomical level of federal spending.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The amount of money Congress has pumped into the economy in an attempt to fight the Covid pandemic is staggering. Don’t quite have enough adjectives to describe the amount of money that is forced into the economy without any corresponding increase in production.

The amount spent directly on the pandemic is more than four times the annual budget at the federal level.

This is one of the primary reasons we are seeing inflation rates running at a thirty year high.

A close cousin on the list of inflation causes is the Fed flooding the economy with liquidity.  See previous discussion: Just how much money has the Federal Reserve created out of thin air and injected into the economy?

I’ve pulled together the amount of money appropriated by Congress in 2020 and 2021 which are focused on fighting the pandemic and stimulating the economy. Here is my tally, with amount of funding in billions of dollars, date Congress passed the legislation, and name of the program:

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Flaming hypocrisy from the ruling caste – private jet edition.

Typical private jet during four hours in the air will emit about as much CO2 as an average person will generate during an entire year. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The demand for private jets is soaring. Those jets generate massively more CO2 emissions that any commercial flight.

The ruling caste, who think they rule over us, have no hesitation to use heavily polluting private jets to scoot around on their planet hopping fun times.

The pandemic has been generous to the super rich.

CNBC – 11/25/21 – The rich are getting richer – and they’re fueling a private jet boom – Demand for private jets is soaring. Even used jets are getting hard to find.

The super-rich are taking their private jets to go around the Covid restrictions on commercial flights.

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Educational institutions continue to shrink two years into the pandemic.

College classroom. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The double whammy of Covid pandemic and government policies in reaction to the pandemic continue to hammer the educational sector. Unsettling thing is to consider these articles only discuss the current impact and not the long-term destruction of education for all students from pre-K to grad school.

Articles for you to consider:

  • Columbia University settles for a refund of fees their class-action lawsuit claiming refund of fees and tuition.
  • Freshman enrollment in colleges and universities continued to decline in fall 2021. The anticipated return of students who skipped matriculation in fall 2020 has not happened.
  • As an indicator of what is likely happening in all primary and secondary schools across the country, Washington state public schools estimate enrollment for the next two years will be down another 4.5% from their February 2021 estimate.

TaxProf – 11/27/21 – Columbia Settles Covid-19 Class Action Tuition Refund Suit For $12.5 Million – Looks like Columbia University got off easy. Students there established a class and were suing for refund of tuition and fees because they were prohibited from in-person classes and instead attended an Ivy League school on their monitor.

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Evaporating freedom, Australia edition. A good, but not yet final, solution.

Australia has a special camp for forced quarantines. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

A year ago you would have been considered crazy, cuckoo, one of those tin foil-hat-wearing-nut-jobs if you had been so irresponsible as to suggest what is described in the next two articles could ever, ever happen.

A year after such predictions would have been laughed at, the Australian government is sending out the military to forcibly relocate people into a “quarantine camp” with fences and barbed wire.

The untried, unconvicted, and unsentenced crime? Testing positive for Covid.

The military is also forcibly relocating anyone who is in “close contact” with someone who tested positive for Covid.

Yeah, that is really happening.

Quarantine camps. Forcible relocation.

(Side note – I should have posted this yesterday, before the we’re-all-gonna’-die Omicron variant generated closing of borders and shutting of air travel. Had best post it before Monday morning because by then we might learn the loss of freedom in Australia is old news.)

Zero hedge – 11/23/21 – Australian Army Begins Transferring Covid-Positive Cases, Contacts to Quarantine Camps – The Army has started forcibly transporting people from the Northern Territories to a quarantine camp which the government has built in Darwin.

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More bad news on the health front.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The bad news just keeps rolling in regarding the Covid pandemic, or perhaps we should now refer to it as endemic. It’s beginning to look like there’s not a whole lot we can do to stop or even slow the pandemic. We continue to see reports showing horrible side effects of the economic and social shutdown.

For your consideration:

  • There have now been more deaths coded to a Covid cause in 2021 than in 2020. Keep in mind this is with widespread vaccinations.
  • An actual scientist with experience developing vaccines points out that it is almost expected that we will see situations like in Gibraltar there there is an extraordinarily high vaccination rate and simultaneously an extraordinarily high infection rate.
  • The number of deaths from drug overdoses has skyrocketed since early 2020. Hmm.  What could have caused that? Is there something that happened in, oh, say March 2020 that might have led increasing number of people to abuse drugs?

There have now been more Covid deaths in 2021 with widespread vaccination than in 2020 without any vaccinations. 

On 11/22/22 the John Hopkins database reports 771,118 deaths from coronavirus.

On 11/22/21 the CDC reports the following death tally of “all deaths involving Covid-19.” This category is defined as “Deaths with confirmed or presumed Covid 19, coded to ICD-10 code U07.1.” Their account:

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More flaming hypocrisy from our ruling caste. More protests around the world.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The list of high visibility public officials who do not feel the need to lower themselves to follow the rules mandatory for you and me just keeps growing.

For yet another weekend, protests were taking place around the world against mandatory vaccinations, useless lockdowns, and the Bitte Deine Papier (your papers please) vaccination passports.

News reports for today:

  • President of American Federation of Teachers blows off mask requirement during panel discussion. Oh, Sen. Schumer boogies the night away sans mask even though legal diktat requires it.
  • Two reports on protests across Europe.

The Epoch Times – 11/7/21 – Teacher’s Union Head Apologizes for Note Wearing Mask Indoors, Says People Has a “Hard Time Hearing” – The president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten spoke at a conference in Puerto Rico without a mask. Other speakers were are also maskless.

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Supply chain disruptions not getting better anytime soon.

Cargo container on chassis pulled by big rig truck. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

String of articles are pointing at disruptions in the supply chain continuing well into 2022 or possibly 2023.

A few of said articles discussed below:

  • Tally of ships off the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports rises to record of 111.
  • Experienced truck driver describes how every step of the trucking part of the supply chain is tangled up, from extra wait getting into the port all the way to several hours waiting to drop cargo at warehouses.
  • Disruption of chip supply expected to last until sometime in 2023.

Do please keep in mind this is due to the hubris of government officials thinking an economy can be turned off and on light a light switch and also flooding the economy with several trillion dollars without any corresponding increase in output.

Washington Free Beacon – 11/10/21 – Record Number of Ships Stranded Outside California Ports – Article sites Business Insider as saying there are 111 ships waiting to unload at Los Angeles and Long Beach ports as of 11/9/21. This backlog is new high from previous record of 108 ships on 10/21/21.

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More reports on the devastation caused by the social and economic shutdown.

Illustration of what happened to average earnings of working poor because of the economic lockdowns. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

Reports keep rolling in on the destruction caused by governmental orders to shut down the economy, our educational system, and large portions of society.

My prediction is we will continue to these reports for the next five or 10 years,

Merely two of recent articles:

  • Excess deaths are identifiable for people who had mental health struggles.
  • Harvard study shows lockdowns seriously hurt earnings of poor folk while rich folk were earning more money.

Lockdowns killed people with mental health struggles.

Medical Express – 10/8/21 – Excess deaths in people with mental health conditions increased during the Covid-19 pandemic– The lockdowns and other actions taken during the pandemic killed a significant number of people with mental health trouble.

Let me say it again – The shutdowns killed people who were already struggling with mental health problems.

A concept we all need to learn about is something called “excess deaths.”

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