07 May 2020

Bob Murphy Show ep. 118: David R. Henderson on the Anti-Stimulus Bill, and Organizing a Protest of the CA Lockdown

All Posts, Bob Murphy Show, Coronavirus, David R. Henderson 11 Comments

Here’s the audio, and video below:

11 Responses to “Bob Murphy Show ep. 118: David R. Henderson on the Anti-Stimulus Bill, and Organizing a Protest of the CA Lockdown”

  1. Tel says:

    UK wrongologist has been wrong before.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8164121/Professor-predicted-500-000-Britons-die-coronavirus-accused-having-patchy-record.html

    Now a rival academic has claimed Prof Ferguson has a patchy record of modelling epidemics, which could have led to hasty Ministerial decisions.

    Professor Michael Thrusfield of Edinburgh University said Prof Ferguson was previously instrumental in modelling that led to the cull of more than 6 million animals during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, which left rural Britain economically devastated.

    Then, Prof Ferguson and his Imperial colleagues concluded: ‘Extensive culling is sadly the only option for controlling the current British epidemic.’

    But Prof Thrusfield, an expert in animal diseases, claimed the model made incorrect assumptions about how foot and mouth disease was transmitted and, in a 2006 review, he claimed Imperial’s foot and mouth model was ‘not fit for purpose’, while in 2011 he said it was ‘severely flawed’.

    Now a lot of people are reporting that Prof Ferguson broke “lockdown” to visit his girlfriend Antonia Staats … but if you search around for the truth, actually Ferguson stayed home and it was Staats who came knocking on his door. Makes you wonder … when you see who Staats is associated with.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avaaz

    * Supported destabilization of Libya.

    * Supported the early rebels in the Syrian War.

    * Supported destabilization in Iran.

    * Links to MoveOn in the United States and GetUp in Australia via various senior people.

    * Links to the Center for American Progress via Tom Perriello.

    So Ferguson is effectively a stooge for a manipulative activist group … while Antonia Staats is busy making sure he stays onside with the team during these lonely times. How touching.

  2. Jim says:

    I found the tailing end of this a bit frustrating. Dr. Henderson said he studied pandemics before but doesn’t know the definition of “quarantine” and it’s relationship to “isolation.” In short, you ONLY quarantine non-sick people. You “isolate” sick people. People who are “quarantined” are people where are NOT sick but were exposed and so MIGHT come down with the disease.

    https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/index.html

    • Tel says:

      For hundreds of years, islands were used as quarantine stations. They put sick people on those islands. No one ever called them “isolation stations”.

      http://www.ellisisland.se/english/quarantine_islands_newyork.asp

      What happend when a ship arrived?

      Any yellow fever or cholera patients on an incoming vessels, a signal is set, and one of the steamers belonging to the New York quarantine service comes and brings the sufferers to the appropriate Island.

      Immediately upon reaching the island they are stripped of their clothing, which is at once burned in a furnace constructed for that purpose, and they are placed in the sick wards.

      New York has had a “Quarantine Commissioner” since 1863, but there’s never been an “Isolation Commissioner”.

      What’s more, the legal concept of “quarantine” always applied to people who entered a country, generally immigrants, but also regular merchant or tourist traffic, and it operates at the nation’s border (i.e. at major ports of entry). There’s never been even the concept of an everywhere quarantine. It’s ridiculous.

    • Harold says:

      Often both sick and exposed but not sick people are kept away from everyone else. This is usually refered to a quarantine. It is not likely to be helpful to the healthy people in quarantine.

      I think the most useful distinction would be that keeping groups of people that include some who are not sick away from everyone else is quarantine. It is certainly not isolation.

  3. Tel says:

    This is the calibre of Australian politicians and their economic understanding.

    http://catallaxyfiles.com/files/2020/05/Capture-3.jpg

    • random person says:

      I would respond to that by saying:

      Whether there is or is not a money tree, agriculture and other things need to happen so that there is food and other things to buy with the money.

      Otherwise, the money is no good.

  4. random person says:

    The propaganda in Democratic states (in the sense of states where the US Democrat party is dominant) is stuff like, “We can bring the economy back to life. We can’t bring your grandmother back to life.” (I didn’t copy-paste that, but I remember reading something like it awhile back, probably on a local politician’s twitter account.)

    Mostly, they’re painting it as a choice between saving lives and preserving the economy (the implication being that anyone who cares about the economy doesn’t care about saving lives).

    You can get around this somewhat, if instead of talking about preserving the economy, you talk about more specific things, like preventing homelessness or preserving the food supply chain. (Which is mostly how I think about it anyway; the “economy” is too big of an abstraction for me.)

    But only somewhat. Even talking about preventing homelessness or preserving the food supply chain… there’s a ton of people who seem to have forgotten that there’s other ways to die besides COVID-19, and it’s not always clear whether they want some kind of magical safety net with no holes that doesn’t let anyone become homeless or starve, or if they think homelessness and starvation are appropriate sacrifices to make for protecting people from COVID-19, but in any case, talking about homelessness and starvation is like, slightly more socially acceptable than just talking about “the economy” in more abstract terms, but not by much. Most people just want to freak out over coronavirus. Although there are a few local politicians talking about the homelessness problem… but not from the perspective of ending the lockdown, just from the perspective of building out the social safety net. (I’m not sure where this fantasy of a magical safety net with no holes comes from.)

    On a poll on nextdoor.com, only 10% of us wanted to end the lockdown immediately. In fact, that’s gone up to 11% since I first remember seeing it. But still, a small minority. 28% said sometime in May. 60% said June or later.

  5. random person says:

    Incidentally, the last time I used the f-word was in response to a domestic violence situation in my neighborhood. Another reason to end the lockdown.

  6. random person says:

    What do you mean you don’t support socialism? I was under the distinct impression you were a bourgeois socialist.

    “Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

    It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class.” – Karl Marx describing the philosophy of bourgeois socialism
    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

    Alright, so, I realize you don’t support protective duties, but I’m pretty sure you do support free trade and prison reform “for the benefit of the working class”, so pretty sure that makes you a bourgeois socialist, yes?

    I looked this up after people kept insisting I was a socialist, which baffled me since I had never spent all that much time even thinking about socialism, and I realized the only thing in common with all the different forms of socialism described by Marx was some sort of concern for the working class. So I can literally just wave a sign around saying, “Bosses shouldn’t torture their workers!” and be an anti-torture socialist. So I guess all the people saying I am a socialist are actually right, because I am against torture.

  7. random person says:

    Agree that opposing the lockdown isn’t just a pro-Trump thing… it’s also not just a libertarian thing either.

    These are some paraphrases from some activist mailing lists I’m on. I’m paraphrasing, for the most part, rather than giving actual literal quotations, to protect the privacy of the people on the mailing lists. I’m also leaving out some of the more radical stuff deliberately, since part of the point of discussing these things on mailing lists and not more openly … well, some things just shouldn’t be discussed too openly.

    “I have experience which has shown me how well intravenous vitamin C works. I’ve been quite upset that doctors haven’t been using it. I called some health officials and politicians to tell them about it. More of us should call. Hopefully, intravenous vitamin C will be adopted nationwide and many lives will be saved.”

    There’s a link to this webpage, which states, “There has never been a more urgent reason to contact your representative in Congress than H.R. 6666. This Orwellian bill threatens our freedom as individuals more than any piece of legislation we’ve previously seen. … H.R. 6666 is conspicuously vague. It allocates $100 billion in taxpayer funds to entities of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) choosing for contact tracing and for “other purposes.” No additional purposes are specified which establishes the potential for abuse of individual rights in myriad ways. The bill creates a de facto, federally-funded “health” police force with power to “conduct diagnostic testing for COVID-19, and related activities…at individuals’ residences”, paving the road to violations of constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. H.R. 6666 is especially ominous for children because if passed, it could lead to family separations—as promoted by the World Health Organization—despite the fact that children are reliant upon parents and guardians in nearly every way.”
    https://childrenshealthdefense.org/advocacy-center/tell-congress-that-h-r-6666-covid-19-testing-reaching-and-contacting-everyone-trace-act-is-unconstitutional-and-threatens-the-liberty-of-all-americans/

    “Letting some or all people not pay property taxes by either by allowing people who are economically pressured fill out paperwork to opt out from property taxes, or by trusting people to make up their own minds about whether they can afford to pay the property taxes, would help relieve at least some of the pressure. It would not be enough, but it would still help. And hopefully landlords with economically pressured tenants could have the option to pass property tax savings onto their tenants.

    By studying the history of India under British rule, where brutal land taxes caused famines, we can see the harmful effect of land taxes on people’s ability to make it through disasters.

    Some quotes from “Open letters to Lord Curzon on famines and land assessments in India” by Romesh Chunder Dutt follow,
    https://archive.org/details/openletterstolor00duttrich/page/18/mode/2up/search/taxation+falls+heavily

    “Land revenue is the most important item of the Indian revenues, and so it happens that the taxation falls heavily on the cultivators of the soil, and reduces them to a condition of chronic poverty. They can save nothing in years of good harvest, and consequently every year of drought is a year of famine.”

    “Such, briefly, are the land administration arrangements in the five different portions of the Indian Empire, and if we examine somewhat closely the deathrates of the famines which have occurred in India within this generation, i.e. within the last twenty-five or thirty years, we shall find that deaths have generally been most numerous, and famines have been most intense and fatal, in those places where the cultivators are the least protected against over-assessment.”

    There’s a link to this webpage, which states a number of things including, “NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warned that the “corona crisis” will be used for the massive and permanent expansion of global surveillance.”
    https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

    “We found that COVID-19 infections are highly pandemic in countries where malaria is least pandemic and are least pandemic in nations where malaria is highly pandemic,” with a link to this:
    https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.26355/eurrev_202004_21038

    “According to a New York doctor, severe social distancing may cause more people to die”
    with these two links:
    https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/03/why-severe-social-distancing-might-actually-result-in-more-coronavirus-deaths/
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W2CAZG3ucg

    A quotation from this article, saying, “”My phone had run out of battery for about 15 minutes, and when I turned it on, I saw these warning messages.” That was a Taiwanese citizen, whose quote was shared in multiple media outlets. Police officers had checked up on him, to verify that he had not violated the mandatory 14-day quarantine.”
    https://www.eetimes.com/apple-google-prep-tech-to-trace-covid-19/

    “We need to start telling politicians that we don’t want forced vaccines (especially ones that are rushed and don’t include full animal and 3-phase clinical trials), medical status certificates, and most importantly no contact tracing … Instead we should focus on treatments like the Chinese treatments and the Thailand combination of 3 approved anti-viral drugs which result in 70% less mortality than the US … this doesn’t have to end with people saying, “I survived covid-19 but my freedoms didn’t.””

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