Conventional Wisdom Is An … Oxymoron

Things that have become conventional wisdom are so often proven dead wrong that we are wise to put “no” in front of anything that is bruited endlessly by the media and advanced by Democratic leaders.

There are so many things in which we naysayers have been right and the conventional wisdom proven wrong that it’s impossible for me to keep tabs. Don Surber does a great job.

Here are a handful from his latest blog: Shutting down the country was a major mistake which people like New York Governor Kathy Hochul are being forced to admit.

President Trump did not push too fast for the COVID vaccine. Big Pharma and the opposition deliberately slowed it down to boost Biden’s election chances by depriving Trump of a triumph even at the cost of many lives of the vulnerable.

Then instead of limiting the experimental vaccine to those who needed it, Biden made the whole thing mandatory, which was unconstitutional and created division. It also undermined public trust in the CDC and public health officials. That trust endangers the public health when the next crisis pops up.

It is likely the COVID virus was not a natural development from Wuhan wet markets.

We said it was created in a lab in Red China.

They called us racist.

They banned us from saying that on Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

We were right.

NBC reported, “The World Health Organization is recommending more investigation into the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a Chinese laboratory, something once dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory but since taken seriously by some experts and officials.”

WHO knew.

Bill Gates and Red China pressured WHO to keep its trap shut. Now that the pandemic panic is over, it is safe to admit the truth.

The shutdowns hurt the world more than COVID did:

The New York Post reported, “Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there is still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from COVID-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities and the less affluent.

“The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call excess mortality, which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of COVID-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths weren’t attributed to the virus.

On climate and environmental issues the lies which have masqueraded as truth are just as ubiquitous as the political lies have been. Global warming is not killing off the polar bears.

The global number of polar bears stands between 22,000 and 31,000, or a midpoint of 26,500. The simple fact is that polar bears are not going extinct. They are not becoming fewer and fewer. Since society started counting them in the 1960s, polar bears have never been more abundant.

Nor is climate change killing off the Great Barrier Reef:

Parts of the Great Barrier Reef have recorded their highest amount of coral cover since the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) began monitoring 36 years ago, according to a report published Thursday.

An AIMS survey of 87 reefs found that between August 2021 and May 2022, average hard coral cover in the upper region and central areas of the reef increased by around one third.

It’s a rare piece of good news for the world-famous reef, which in March underwent its sixth mass bleaching event.

AIMS CEO Dr. Paul Hardisty said the results in the north and central regions were a sign the reef could still recover from mass bleaching and outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish that feed on coral.

Organic farming is not “sustainable,” to use the shibboleth of this age. Practiced on a large scale, it leads to mass starvation and national bankruptcy.

Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.

Sri Lanka is now starving. Long self-sufficient in rice production, it has been forced to import it. Its major export crop, tea, has been devastated and with it the country’s source of foreign exchange.

Overpopulation is not the world’s biggest problem. Depopulation is.

Demographer and futurist Joel Kotkin writes: “On the contrary, we need to worry about the potential ill-effects of depopulation, including a declining workforce, torpid economic growth, and brewing generational conflict between a generally prosperous older generation and their more hard-pressed successors.”

Shrinking populations tend to do poorly, economically, socially and militarily. One need only look to China, where the one-child policy is producing a huge overhang of pensioners with not enough people to support them, or to Japan, where the average age keeps climbing while young people seem to lack direction and confidence, to see what lies in our future.

As Kotkin notes, “John Maynard Keynes warned that ‘chaining up of the one devil [of overpopulation] may, if we are careless, only serve to loose another still fiercer and more intractable.’”

Well, that’s where we are now. And it will be hard to change. The baby bust isn’t taking place just in the United States or the industrialized nations, but all over the globe. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where birth rates are still comparatively high, they’re falling sharply. Having kids involves short-term sacrifice for long-term gain, and people are less and less willing to make short-term sacrifices.

This week’s fairy tale, now that the raid on Mar-a-Lago seems to have fizzled — except as further evidence of DoJ and FBI overreach and incompetence — is that the president has legal authority to forgive a substantial amount of school loans. In fact, long before the courts rule on this — and I believe they will find it an unconstitutional expenditure never authorized by Congress – the ill-considered plan will die aborning. No administration calculation of the cost was made. While the figure of $500 million has been bandied about, a trillion dollars is more like it. And almost all of it this fiscal year.

President Biden’s new student loan forgiveness plan includes three major components. We estimate that debt cancellation alone will cost up to $519 billion, with about 75% of the benefit accruing to households making $88,000 or less. Loan forbearance will cost another $16 billion. The new income-driven repayment (IDR) program would cost another $70 billion, increasing the total plan cost to $605 billion under strict “static” assumptions. However, depending on future IDR program details to be released and potential behavioral (i.e., “non-static”) changes, total plan costs could exceed $1 trillion

The editors of both the lefty Washington Post and Newsweek have opposed it and several vulnerable Democratic congressmen are walking away from it.

Worse, the administration of this is in the hands of the Department of Education, which lacks the underlying income information from applicants, the manpower, or expertise to handle it.

I predict that well before the courts put the kibosh on it, the loan forgiveness plan will end up in frustration for applicants. That will add them to the sea of taxpayers who paid off their loans and those of their children or who never went to college and made their own way in the world and who oppose this desperate, crass Biden Hail Mary play.