Today's Takes: Thursday, July 22

A side effect of global pandemics is not the closure, en masse, of small businesses and the accumulation of capital at the top 1% of the economic pyramid. Only government policy can achieve such admirable ends. The panic train will not stop until the regime reckons with the permanence of COVID. We will always be on the precipice of imminent destruction. Institutions like the CDC and WHO thrive in such environments. They are incentivized to perpetuate the fear. It gives their overweight and undernourished lackeys something to do.

Regardless of vaccination rates and much like the flu, COVID-19 will be with us in one form or another for the foreseeable future. Leaders like Gavin Newsom who insist that, if everyone gets vaccinated, we will never have to worry about the virus again are expressing their desire to inflict political policy and not health advice on their constituents. What gets lost when talking about COVID, "case counts", and the threat of variants are known facts about the virus. Here are some hard facts (if you're a frequent reader, this will be old news):

• The mortality rate of children under the age of 18 is zero (Read)
• The average age of death is 73 (Read)
• Half of all deaths are in people 80 or older (Read)
• In the U.S. 78% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 were overweight or obese. (Read)
• 95% of COVID-19 deaths had an average of four related underlying conditions and the CDC’s death count includes “deaths involving unintentional and intentional injury.” (Read)
• The mortality rate for people under the age of 70 is 0.05% and even lower if you have less than two comorbidities, are not obese, or have received a vaccine. Taking this a step further, this number does not account for unrecorded COVID cases so the number is likely even lower (Read)
• Based on empirical data, not simulations, lockdowns have zero effect on rates of fatal infection (Read)
• Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4% (Read)
• In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion (Read)
• In 2020, billionaires gained $3.9 trillion (Read)
• In 2020, 493 new individuals became billionaires (Read)

None of the above stats account for the effect of vaccines. If you scroll to the bottom of the newsletter, you'll see how vaccines affect things (hint: it's a lot). Should government policy stop harming citizens? Yes. Should we live our lives in constant preparation for the absolute worst-case scenario at the expense of everything else? No. Should we celebrate the end of the "pandemic"? Yes.

The regime needs to drop the Sword of Damocles dog and pony show and reflect an understanding of the virus as endemic, albeit in a much milder form on account of vaccines. No threats of lockdown. Unmask the kids. Send Fauci to Elba. Mask and vaccinate if you are vulnerable or concerned. End the conflation of health advice and political policy. Turn off the panic spigot. There is no zero-case count scenario. End the case count. Carry on. Live your life. Human flourishing is good. Etc.

Headlines

📰 General News

• Thieves are stealing California’s scarce water. Where’s it going? Illegal marijuana farms (CalMatters)
• Texas Democrats' escape to block voting bill will cost around $1.5 million, legislator says (NBC)
• Biden Administration Green Lights Putin’s Pipeline (Free Beacon)
• What’s in Democrats’ $3.5 Trillion Budget Plan—and How They Plan to Pay for It (WSJ)
  • The "Save the World" package deepens the grand, bottomless money well
• Biden’s Strategy: Treat Trump Like a ‘Crazy Person’ (Atlantic)
  • Curiously, this also goes for the 78 million people who voted for him.
• Congressman Jim Banks (R-IN) who, earlier this year, advised his party to rebuff support from corporate PACs has subsequently accepted tens of thousands in corporate PAC donations. (Popular Information)
  • If you haven't realized by now, 99% of GOP representatives are humiliation fetishists who get off on having an office in D.C. and their name in the paper.

🇨🇳 From China

• China Moves to Ease Child-Rearing Costs, in Drive to Boost Births (WSJ)
  • From article: "The government said it would exempt the costs of raising a child under the age of three from personal income tax and encourage local governments to offer families with children preferential policies when buying and renting homes."
  • A notably different approach from the American Families Plan which hands families a tax credit just for having a kid.

🌍 From South Africa

• How ‘equity’ ideology plunged South Africa into inequality and chaos (NY Post)
  • From article: "By 2021, only 3% of blacks cited racism as a serious problem… The same survey found that 83% of black South Africans were in full or partial agreement with the following statement: 'Politicians are talking about racism to excuse their own failures.'"
  • Sound familiar?
• Boiling The Frog In South Africa (American Conservative)
  • From article: "There are about 14 million registered taxpayers in South Africa, out of a population of nearly 60 million. The bulk of income tax revenue comes from just 574,000 individuals. The ANC’s wager has always been that this tiny tax base could be squeezed for all it’s worth in order to fund lavish social benefits for the rest of the population."
  • From article: "Under majority rule, “the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight."
  • Sound familiar?

🦠 Virus that shall not be named...

• U.S. Life Expectancy Fell by 1.5 Years in 2020, the Biggest Decline in Generations (WSJ)
  • The headline sounds much more shocking than it actually is. If you're curious about why, you can read this great breakdown of why the "life expectancy metric" is a poor way to measure a nation's, well, life expectancy. (Read)
• Psaki Confirms More COVID-19 Cases in White House That Were Not Disclosed (Epoch)
• Australia, under lockdown, sees worrying jump in COVID-19 cases (Reuters)
• Rand Paul roasts Fauci for his involvement with gain of function research in Wuhan. Things got very contentious (Watch)
• The Flimsy Evidence Behind the CDC’s Push to Vaccinate Children (WSJ)
  • From article: "My research team at Johns Hopkins worked with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020. Our report found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia."
• Gavin Newsom: "We don't have to worry about being back this fall for in-person instruction if we all get vaccinated." (Twitter)
  • See note above: the mortality rate among healthy children under 18 is zero
  • Newsom desperately clinging to the last vestiges of his petty power in an elementary school classroom makes for great theater and is a little too on the nose
• ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late’: Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients (AL)
  • Straight up Panic Porn
  • The 7-day moving average for deaths in Alabama is 8

Nashville Politics

• Chattanooga center for immigrant children sues state over license suspension (Lookout)
• Tennessee launches $20M program for state employee buyouts (TNJ)

Nashville News

• Meet SkyMap, our exclusive tool to enrich the news viewer experience (Channel 5)
  • A nifty piece of technology that overlays roads and other features on top of aerial helicopter footage
• Metro Police testing out closing weekend traffic on Lower Broadway (WSMV)

Nashville Education

• More Tennesseans of color walk away from teaching profession if they fail first licensure test, report shows (Chalk Beat)
  • In order to meet diversity mandates, administrators will either abolish the tests or make them easier.
  • Hard to see how this would be good for students if we are to use performance as a metric.
  • Is the new metric just a diversity quotient?
• Linden Waldorf Took Its Classes Outdoors During the Pandemic (Scene)
• CDC advises masks for unvaccinated students, staff but Nashville schools won't require them (Tennessean)
  • As pointed out above, the mortality rate among healthy children under 18 is zero
  • Shelby County—acolytes of the lower-case "s" science (also known as fear) and not well versed in the upper-case "S" Science—announced it will require masks for all students and staff regardless of vaccination status (Read)
  • Tennessee Stands is coordinating a response to the motion in Shelby County (Read)

Nashville Development

• Middle Tennessee's economy is springing back to life. Can the housing market keep up? (Tennessean)
• Vanderbilt pays $55.5M for Midtown properties (Post)
• New tech school raises $10M (Post)
• 12South building sells for $2.8M (Post)
• Germ-X parent adding 60+ jobs in Smyrna (Post)
• Beaman site buyer releases renderings, tweaks plans (Biz Journal)
• Amazon moves into first Nashville Yards tower as headcount eclipses 2,000 (Biz Journal)
• See Nashville from 40 stories up as Four Seasons alters the downtown skyline (Biz Journal)
• Spring Hill GM plant partially halts production amid worldwide chip shortage (Homepage)

Interesting Idea of the Day

🗺 The Greater Idaho Movement seeks to unite a coalition of Red counties in California and Oregon wanting to avoid Blue state policies that seek to undermine the Second Amendment, tax cattle farming, criminalize hunting, and more. The movement has picked up steam over the past year. (Read)

Graph of the Day

💉 Vaccines for the vulnerable dramatically reduce deaths but have done little for case counts. End the case count (Read)

Words of Wisdom

Have a great Thursday