Managing the Risk of Being Free
The most important skill we learn as a free people is how to assess and manage the risk brought about as a consequence of that freedom
One of the greatest casualties of our contemporary times is that there exists a large percentage of people who have lived lives during such periods of prosperity - or have benefitted from such a degree of parental or governmental subsidization - they no longer understand risk - much less know how to assess and manage it.
And yet, perhaps the most important skill we learn as a free people is how to assess and manage the risk brought about as a consequence of that freedom.
I don’t know how we got to where we are, maybe it is the arrested development of the adult baby culture, maybe was the prosperity and subsidization, but somehow, a conventional wisdom has taken hold that we should be protected from all risk, and that we should turn to government to protect us from all of life’s vicissitudes.
As my Granddaddy once told me, “Son, Jesus is your Savior, the revenuers (his word for government) ain’t.”
Government lies. It always has and always will. It is not necessarily mendacious by design, but as in any organization, when status within the organization is determined by longevity and status-seeking, self-preservation, buck-passing, covering your ass practices, and bureaucratic insulation from consequences become standard characteristics of the culture, you don’t always get the whole truth.
Often, like those little packets you get with microwavable Ramen noodles, you only get the flavor of the truth.
It doesn’t help that Americans are historically ignorant where statistics are concerned. Maybe it is that people are not interested in math or just simply can't reason, but numbers scare a lot of people. It seems many are willing to uncritically accept numbers they don't really understand from “authorities” who are just as ignorant as they are, or from “experts” with an agenda, or they just want the comfort that stems from having their biases confirmed (or any combination of the aforementioned).
With regards to the use of Covid-19 statistics, I believe as a nation we have had the wool pulled over our eyes.
Let us consider this rhetorical question - if I have cancer and I enter into a treatment that destroys my immune system in an effort to kill the cancer and I contract a simple infection that is common, yet the infection kills me, did the cancer, the treatment, or the infection kill me?
The CDC would say it was the cancer. It considers the treatment and the infection contributing factors, but the end result of my death will be logged as whatever form of cancer I have.
Right now, the gross data for the C-19 pandemic indicates that death rates are about 1 per 1000 population - but are all those deaths truly attributable solely to the virus?
The data seems to indicate it isn't. If you adjust for the comorbidities, the rate drops to around 1 death per 16,667 population, roughly equivalent to the number of people who die from falling each year (around 20,000 per year according to the NIH).
There is no doubt that the virus can kill, especially those people who have underlying respiratory conditions like COPD or some sort of immunodeficiency. For the record, COPD kills 1 out of every 2067 people (per the CDC, about 160,000 per year). It is also important to note that malpractice kills an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people per year, so you are about as likely to know someone who was killed by a doctor's bad decision as you are who died of complications due to Covid-19.
The pandemic hysterics will claim that my questioning make me a “Covid Denier” or an “Anti-Vaxxer” - but that isn't true. I am neither.
My point is not to say that Covid-19 isn't dangerous, it isn't a problem or that it doesn't exist. It is, it is and it does - but it is a risk that can be defined and managed successfully without destroying people and their standard of living and now, the screeching hysterics have realized that they can use case rates of children to keep the panic train on the tracks.
It is a tried and true tactic - when you really want to scare people or stir things up, threaten their children. Nothing scares a parent more than a threat to their children - and the manipulators in politics are never ashamed to use that tactic.
All of this has contributed to the creation of a radical class of Kovid Karens, the virtue signaling, science denying, vaccine and mask shaming moral scolds.
But in all fairness, people need to know the real risk before they can assess it.
If we had a real free press rather than a PR arm for a particular ideology, the chances the public would get better data would be significantly increased - but alas, we don't. The resignation of two top scientists at the FDA should be big news, but it isn’t. The media is engaged in increasing chaos and panic because they understand chaos and panic benefits their benefactors.
Every day, we accept some risks, some we reject, some we accept and find ways to mitigate or avoid. We climb into our cars knowing their are changing road conditions and idiots on the road with us - but we also know that our own skills and the safety equipment in our vehicles are prophylactic measures against Nature and Nature's Idiots.
We don't car surf, cliff dive or do dumb crap on the top of a ladder without knowing that the risk is a fall with injury or even death. Medical professionals in cancer wards and cancer patients know the risk of infection and manage it. We know the danger of medical malpractice and manage it.
The fact is people manage risk every time they take a breath - because living life consists of the assumption and mitigation of risk. We need to know that if we are otherwise healthy, have no underlying conditions and are not over the age of 65, the risk of contracting the virus is small and dying from C-19 alone is infinitesimally small - and that the same holds true for our kids.
None of the aforementioned stops us from living our lives the way our ruling class is demanding we do with this "pandemic".
We need better data points than just Saint Anthony of Fauci saying "Wear the mask and get the jab or you will die, you ignorant peasant." We need those in possession of the data to give it to us completely, even if it tends to contradict their positions and models. I reported on the most recent CDC study that said there was no statistically significant support for kids to be masked in schools, and yet - shocker - only those of us in conservative media know or are even talking about it.
We need better leadership than our authorities dictating that we need to cower behind our couches surrounded by a fog of Lysol spray, be tracked like an animal (as they are doing in Australia), or simply being imprisoned in our homes, forbidden from talking to anyone.
You have to ask yourself why we have reacted to this pandemic differently than we have other recent flu pandemics - because the various strains of the flu also exacerbate the danger from comorbidities. If you extend the pseudo-logic used in this pandemic to the annual flu, to protect every person, we would be in a permanent state of lockdown.
That must change.
I can relate to this. My husband had cancer and had to have his voice box and thyroid removed 6 years ago..product from making a choice to smoke for many years. Serval years prior to that his brother had lung cancer. He was having 1 lung removed in surgery and died on the operating table from the surgeon cutting an artery. We all face risks each day and make choices that steer us towards risks and there outcomes.