If you haven’t heard of Hocus Pocus Dominocus before it’s because you didn’t hang around Chicago and Mayor Harold Washington. He used the term when referring to all the bullshit his political rivals were playing.
The hocus pocus has only stepped up.
I got into a Twitter repartee with a guy over the new Texas abortion law. Our country always sets policy based on anecdote and not data. Politicians use little stories to move opinion and their drones on social media spew it out.
Whether you agree with the Texas law or not, the standard they set is 6 weeks. Once a pregnancy hits six weeks, no more abortions.
The person I got in repartee with said many women don’t find out for a long time if they are pregnant or not. I found an article that said most women know within 2-4 weeks.
Neither is a basis for setting policy on. Do you know what is?
Transparent assumptions, unbiased, hypothesis tested, peer-reviewed statistically significant studies.
Here is another case in point. A black historian wanted to push the idea that America was founded on racism. He also wants to motivate people to get vaccinated against Covid. He spread this story about how a slave who was a gift to the preacher Cotton Mather in Boston inspired the smallpox vaccine.
You can search online for this story, and it is in several places. Is it true or not? I don’t care. What should drive vaccination policy is data.
Here is some data on Covid.
First, almost 100% of people survive their bout with Covid. If you are healthy, you will get sick, feel shitty, and then go on with your life. The average age of death for Americans today is 78. The average age of death from Covid is 78.
Covid affects older people much more significantly than younger.
The historian equated Covid to Smallpox.
Smallpox killed indiscriminately. 30% of everyone that got smallpox died. When you look at the CDC website, there isn’t a mention of Cotton Mather and the slave. Smallpox was a dangerous killer that only was eradicated in the 20th Century.
Covid is not Smallpox. Covid is not the 1918 Spanish Flu.
Yesterday, the New England Journal of Medicine put out this peer-reviewed study on Covid vaccines. It turns out, their effectiveness declines over time. If you actually get Covid, your body will produce antibodies and you are better defended against Covid than if you don’t get Covid and get the vaccine.
We are also seeing that the Covid vaccine doesn’t stop you from getting Covid. If you get the smallpox vaccine, you are ironclad protected against getting smallpox. You have no fear.
So, that weakens the case for the vaccine. The reason to get it is that it seems like people who get the vaccine have fewer symptoms and an easier time when they get Covid. But, if you are healthy and want to avoid the vaccine it’s not a pox on society.
By the way, masks and lockdowns don’t work to stop Covid either. All they are is an excuse for totalitarian-leaning politicians to exert more control over people.
Another piece of hocus pocus dominocus is the alleged fraud in the Presidential election. I saw another piece today that showed a lot of smoke around mail-in ballots . It certainly seems there could be fraud with mail-in ballots. As a person who grew up in Chicago, I know the Democratic Machine has rigged hundreds of elections and did it with a straight face.
But, like OJ Simpson murdering his wife, unless you prove it in a court of law it’s simply a dumb anecdotal assertion just like the ones I illustrated above.