Pun Salad

Real-life examples from congressional primaries in the past few months forecast the many failings of mail-in voting. Note that mail-in voting is different from legitimate absentee and military/overseas voting, although recent reports show that even those votes are subject to mistreatment and potential loss.

On the surface, “vote-by-mail” sounds like a quick and easy way for every registered voter to participate in our democracy. In reality, it opens the U.S. to fraudulent elections on a massive scale that will probably result in invalid results, contested elections, and delays lasting weeks, if not months.

A New Jersey postal worker was arrested Wednesday for dumping almost a hundred mail-in ballots into dumpsters in multiple towns.

The Justice Department charged Nicholas Beauchene, a 26-year-old mail carrier with "one count of delay, secretion, or detention of mail and one count of obstruction of mail" for discarding approximately 1,875 pieces of mail on his route. The discarded mail included "99 general election ballots" and was recovered from dumpsters in two different New Jersey townships.

This week dozens of esteemed medical experts with blue-chip academic credentials published a warning about the destructive policies adopted to address Covid-19. Since the Sunday publication of this “Great Barrington Declaration” more than a thousand biological scientists and more than 1,500 medical practitioners have added their names to the petition. Yet it’s been almost entirely ignored by the media outlets that spend much of their days presenting themselves as obedient to science.

Lockdowns are typically portrayed as prudent precautions against Covid-19, but they are surely the most risky experiment ever conducted on the public. From the start, researchers have warned that lockdowns could prove far deadlier than the coronavirus. People who lose their jobs or businesses are more prone to fatal drug overdoses and suicide, and evidence already exists that many more will die from cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, and tuberculosis and other diseases because the lockdown prevented their ailments from being diagnosed early and treated properly.

Yet politicians and public-health officials conducting this unprecedented experiment have paid little attention to these risks. In their initial rush to lock down society, they insisted that there was no time for such analysis—and besides, these were just temporary measures to “flatten the curve” so as not to overwhelm hospitals. But since that danger passed, the lockdown enforcers have found one reason after another to persevere with closures, bans, quarantines, curfews, and other mandates. Anthony Fauci, the White House advisor, recently said that even if a vaccine arrives soon, he does not expect a return to normality before late next year.

While [the GBD-signing] scientists are not the first to express such views, given the degree to which their stance conflicts with the prevailing wisdom that everyone has a moral obligation to participate in efforts to “stop the spread,” it is not surprising that they have already encountered significant opposition. Among their primary detractors is Yale epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, who considers their proposal akin to a suggestion that society “cull[] the herd of the sick and disabled. It’s grotesque.”

 It is hard to see where Gonsalves reads into the Declaration, which seeks to balance the interests of all demographics, a call to “cull[] . . . the sick and disabled.” This accusation is merely part of the drama in what has become coronavirus theater.