This final post in the “COVID on Trial” series will go into the implications of the analyzed data, hopefully serving the purpose of an early warning system.
The Pros and Cons of Early Warning Systems
Early warning systems are set up with different levels of sensitivity in order to serve their purpose while balancing the harm caused by disturbing peace of mind against the harm caused by failing to adequately disturb peace of mind, so much so that action is called for in order to remove the disturbance.
Imagine being in a card-game in 1912 on the Titanic, and you are playing for a big pot and you have really great cards — but then some young punk “lookout” starts yelling that there is an iceberg dead ahead.
Because you are in the middle of a card-game having fun and about to win lots of money, you do not want anything to disturb your peace of mind. You’d like to continue living your life just as before, without changing anything.
Having an early warning system in place is a personal burden to you because, personally, you don’t feel any danger or hear any noise or notice any rumblings — you’d rather ignore warnings which do not fit with your current or immediate experience of things.
But when hazards are known and credible threats, then early warning systems are actually desired.
When coal miners of the past went deep into coal mines, they carried a cage with a canary in it in order to serve as an early warning system regarding the build-up of toxic gases such as carbon monoxide.
Due to a special respiratory system involving air sacs, the canary is a species which gets air intake both when it breathes in, and even when it is in the process of breathing out (exhaling).
By having a sensitivity to carbon monoxide that is set to be more sensitive than the human miners, a knocked-out canary meant it was time to leave the mine before suffocating.
The extra sensitivity of the canary to the real world evidence on the ground meant that the peace of mind of the miners would get disturbed before they personally felt endangered and on the verge of suffocating.
An early disturbance of one’s peace of mind can be life-saving when the threat is immense. In Part 3 of the COVID on Trial series, it was discovered that there are approximately 700,000 unexplained deaths which took place in the USA from 6 Mar 2020 to 6 Mar 2022.
Whenever there are hundreds of thousands of unexplained body bags, people should become concerned. Over a million excess deaths were found in the two-year time frame, and it is possible that COVID was responsible for 150,000 to 300,0000 of those deaths.
But that leaves more than 2 out of every 3 excess deaths unexplained. Because of the heavy hand of government officials during COVID, a natural place to look for the explanation of the vast majority of excess deaths is the government.
The Logic of Proportionality
People may complain that it disturbs their peace of mind to believe that governments could ever kill people, but such black-and-white mindsets are naive. It is next to impossible for a government to NEVER kill anyone, considering how many ways that governments interfere in the business of people.
In the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment from 1932 to 1972, the government withheld the promising medical treatment of penicillin from black patients who had syphilis, even though that very treatment had become the standard-of-care for syphilis.
*Note how this is similar to Pharmacy Benefits Managers refusing to fill doctor prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine.
There were at least 28 who died of syphilis and who likely didn’t have to (because penicillin was available, but the government refused to give it to those suffering), and another 100 or so who died of medical complications.
In 1986, the negligence of government officials got 7 people killed when the space shuttle Challenger was launched in cold weather against the recommendations of the rocket scientist in charge of providing the shuttle with its solid-fuel rocket boosters (pictured below the shuttle).
By not heeding the warning of the rocket scientist and postponing the launch until warmer weather, the rubber O-rings were not compliant enough to seal and burning fuel leaked out and the shuttle exploded, meaning that those government officials who signed off on the launch were guilty of bureaucratic manslaughter.
It isn’t a question of whether governments kill people or not, as they clearly do kill people at times. One hopes that the peace and the prosperity which can come from good governance massively outweighs those rare times when governments cause people to die.
But just as important is to be on the lookout for growth in the “Police State.” Police states are guilty of causing many, many innocent civilians to die — as well as for holding political prisoners.
Instead of being an all-or-nothing issue, it is an issue of proportionality, and it is very important to estimate a “point-of-no-return” where the exponential growth in a totalitarian police state is called into public attention before the growth has already gotten so out of control that there is nothing that peaceful civilians can do about it.
How much excess death and politically-motivated imprisonment is “too much”?
As said above, police states are known for causing excess death and also for holding political prisoners. An efficient early warning system would let you know before the fact when a police state is about to grow out of control.
In 1933 NAZI Germany, there were 409 political prisoners in internment camps such as Dachau for every million German civilians.
In the USA currently, there are dozens and dozens being federally detained for being involved in a January 6th protest at the Capitol.
If you just look at those numbers, they do not even look close — and the federal government does not look ANYTHING like the government of NAZI Germany in 1933.
But those dozens being detained right now are not the ONLY federal prisoners being detained right now, and there is a possibility that many others are being detained not so much because of being a threat to civilians, but because of daring to criticize or failing to comply with the federal government.
The CEO of Qwest, Joseph Nacchio, failed to comply with government requests for the private cellphone activity of all of its customers back in 2001/02, because he felt that it violated the rights of US citizens to give the government access to that private data.
Not long after, he was federally convicted of “insider trading” and sent to federal prison. This is also one of the things that they are currently trying to investigate Trump for, and the FBI raid on Trump’s home is one of the hallmarks of totalitarian police states and banana republics where the rule of law means nothing.
Conservative commentator and intellectual, Dinesh D’Souza, was also held in federal custody for an offence so mild that no one before him had ever served jail time for it.
Individuals at the stand-off between Cliven Bundy and federal officers in 2014 have also been federally detained. Dr. Simone Gold of America’s Frontline Doctors is currently being federally detained, along with dozens of others.
The Duty to Lay Out a Worst-Case Scenario
Because of how tragic it is to live under totalitarian police states, there is a duty to lay out the worst-case scenario to serve as an early warning. Researchers call it the Precautionary Principle when you lay out a case even if the evidence behind it is currently weak.
While not every federal prisoner is a political prisoner, the short list above reveals that a growing fraction of all federal prisoners are. The analysis below assumes that one third of all who are currently being federally detained are being detained because of criticizing US government.
First let’s look at the exponential growth in federal detainees overall, keeping in mind that they are not all political prisoners, per se. Notice how, before the police state got out of hand (i.e., for the first 50 years of data), the prevalence rate of federal imprisonment was only 106 inmates per million:
Because the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2013 allowed — for the first time in US history — for the dissemination of domestic propaganda by government officials, numbers after 2013 have to be taken with a grain of salt.
After the government made it “legal to lie” to the American public, government estimates may begin to look more rosy than they really are. You can see the effect of this in the graph below, when non-government estimates of federal prisoners diverged from the “official” estimates:
An exponential growth model fits the data well, and that fits the tide of history well: when governments grow out of control, they do so exponentially (at an increasing pace over time).
Because it is dutiful when in dark times, let’s examine a “worst-case” scenario where a full third of current federal prisoners are assumed to be political prisoners:
The flat orange line in the graph represents the share of the German population being held in internment camps in 1933, almost 100% of which were political prisoners whose only “crime” was to be critical of the NAZI regime.
According to the modeled growth in the US police state, Americans cannot expect for conditions to be as bad as they were in NAZI Germany until about 2050 — though they can expect for things to be at least half as bad from this point, moving forward.
Proportionality requires that we remind ourselves that these are “worst-case” assumptions, and that it is only necessary for them to be published because of how dire the actual outcome of totalitarianism is.
Reminding ourselves that growth is exponential in nature makes it important to be alarmed early on.
If it turns out that the hundreds of thousands of unexplained deaths from 2020 to 2022 are related to the growth in the police state, then it is important for the American public to know about it, especially considering the recent bill that doubled the size of the IRS.
Here are figures even before COVID which at least suggest that some of the growth in unexplained recent death may have been political:
While not serving as proof of anything, there is a disturbing rise in death after the Affordable Care Act was implemented, with most of the growth in death being found among non-Hispanic white Republicans.
Republicans as a group are older than others, and this shows up as a higher baseline death rate in 2009 in the orange line at top. But even starting from the higher baseline, they STILL saw more relative increases in death.
Putting it all Together
These data serve as an early warning signal which might help us reach a peaceful and prosperous future by minimizing the delay to a much-needed reform here in the USA. An alternative is to look the other way while the police state grows.
Notice how the cutoff date in the end is before COVID, so that this preliminary analysis doesn’t even include the excess death seen during COVID — which would make the above analysis an underestimate of the problem currently faced.
Let’s allow ourselves to be alarmed enough at the early warning signals — in order to take action to restore the rule of law in the USA, against a growing police state which has been picking up steam in the last few years. Our future, and the future of our children, and maybe even that of the world, depends on our response to these signals.
Reference
[Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment] — 1.1.3 The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/tuskegee-syphilis-experiment
[Challenger shuttle disaster] — Engineer Who Opposed Challenger Launch Offers Personal Look at Tragedy. https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_Colloquium1012.html
[almost 27,000 held in internment camps in 1933 NAZI Germany] — Holocaust Encyclopedia. Political Prisoners. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/political-prisoners
[Qwest CEO who refused to violate the individual rights of his customers] — Business Insider. Only One Big Telecom CEO Refused To Cave To The NSA ... And He's Been In Jail For 4 Years. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-and-the-nsa-2013-6
[Man put into federal jail merely because of “acting tough” in front of federal officers (standing his ground), even though he did nothing to harm them] — Idaho man jailed for role in Nevada ranch standoff suing US. https://apnews.com/article/courts-las-vegas-lawsuits-nevada-idaho-d891ad189f24ff8bd097e8de149ba3bf
[Dinesh D’Souza served some federal time for mild campaign finance offence which no one had been jailed for, before he got jailed for it] — Dinesh D’Souza Sentenced in Manhattan Federal Court to Five Years of Probation for Campaign Finance Fraud . https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newyork/news/press-releases/dinesh-dsouza-sentenced-in-manhattan-federal-court-to-five-years-of-probation-for-campaign-finance-fraud
[Dr. Simone Gold held in federal custody] — Founder of America’s Frontline Doctors is sentenced to prison for role in Capitol riot. https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1533
[federal prisoners over time] — Bureau of Prisons. https://www.bop.gov/about/history/
[recent prisoner data] — Prison Policy Initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
[recent trend in US mortality] — Political environment and mortality rates in the United States, 2001-19: population based cross sectional analysis. https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/377/bmj-2021-069308.full.pdf
[vital statistics of the USA] — National Vital Statistics Report No. 60. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf
National Vital Statistics Report No. 70. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-08-508.pdf