California Shows What Happens When Nobody Checks The Administrative State: Everything Burns Down
The Darwinian evolution of our constitutional framework promoted by Woodrow Wilson has fully run its course in California.The Darwinian evolution of our constitutional framework promoted by Woodrow Wilson has fully run its course in California.Glass half empty: Carbon dioxide shortage causing some craft breweries to consider tapping out
After almost two and a half grueling years of shutdowns, restrictions, staff shortages, and rising prices for ingredients, some local breweries are now having to contend with yet another threat to their business models: limited supplies of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is an essential component of the crisp beer experience. CO2 gives beer a bubbly, foamy appearance and taste. It is also important for transmitting beers through taps and canning lines.
"Warm and flat is not where it's at," said Bob Pease, the president and CEO of the Brewers Association. "It's a key ingredient."
But now because of unreliable supply chain lines and contamination at a major CO2 facility, many small breweries are left feeling high and dry.
Night Shift Brewing, in Everett, Massachusetts, near Boston, has already announced that it will have to suspend operations and lay off personnel soon because of the CO2 shortage.
“Last week, we learned that our CO2 supply has been cut for the foreseeable future, possibly more than a year until we get more,” the company reported on Instagram.
"Come October 1, we won’t likely have jobs for many of this team," the post continued.
Though demand for cold, carbonated beverages like beer skyrockets during the summer, demand is not the main cause for the shortage. Contamination in the carbon dioxide facilitated in Jackson Dome, Mississippi, has also greatly affected brewing capabilities. The major energy company Denbury, which owns the rights to the Jackson Dome source, claims on its website that it controls perhaps "the only significant underground deposit of CO2 in the United States east of the Mississippi River." So any disruption at Jackson Dome would cause disruptions in many other industries, including the beer brewing industry.
And Jackson Dome isn't the only CO2 source with processing issues.
“Several of my brewers received a Force Majeure letter yesterday from their CO2 supplier letting them know that their plant in Illinois just suffered a mechanical failure that will shut the plant down until mid-September,” Katie Stinchon, executive director of the Massachusetts Brewers Guild, wrote in an email. “The result is a 30% reduction in contracted volume for at least the next month, and they should expect delays.”
And according to some experts, the supply chain issues have a greater impact on microbreweries than on major corporations.
"Large brewers ... may have a technology called carbon capture at their breweries that helps insulate them from supply disruption," Pease noted.
Still, despite the added setback, Pease and other brewers remain optimistic that they will be able to withstand what Pease hopes will be a short-term shortage.
"Our members have faced a long string of challenges, and we have found ways to overcome most of them," Pease said. "We will try to help our members overcome this one."
Pease said he hopes that the carbon dioxide supply issue will be resolved within the next three months.
Rattankun Thongbun/Getty Images
Horowitz: What have we gotten from two years of mask-wearing?
It’s truly hard to overstate the damage done to a generation of children by the two-year masking regime. From language and developmental inhibition to social and behavioral anxiety, these Chinese cloths have created a generation of bumbling fools. So, was it worth it?
In a preprint published in the Lancet, Ambarish Chandra of the University of Toronto and Tracy Beth Høeg of the University of California at Davis replicated a CDC study comparing counties with school mandates to those without mandates. However, rather than using the CDC’s artificial and arbitrary number of counties and duration of study, they extended the study using a larger sample of districts and a longer time interval, employing almost six times as much data as the original study. Using this updated method to measure the relationship between mask mandates and per-capita pediatric cases, they found “no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates.”
The study observed over 1,800 counties from July through October 2021, which is presumed to be the largest observational sample ever conducted on the mask issue.
In fact, for most weeks, there was a non-statistically significant higher case rate among the masked counties. What this demonstrates is that with all of the CDC’s observational studies, arbitrary endpoints were clearly manipulated to show results they knew did not reflect reality.
Similarly, a study of fatality rates in 35 European countries during the 2020-2021 winter peak found no positive relationship between reduced mortality rates and mask compliance. If anything, there was a reverse correlation. “While no cause-effect conclusions could be inferred from this observational analysis, the lack of negative correlations between mask usage and COVID-19 cases and deaths suggest that the widespread use of masks at a time when an effective intervention was most needed, i.e., during the strong 2020-2021 autumn-winter peak, was not able to reduce COVID-19 transmission,” concluded the author in an April study published in Cureus. “Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences.”
Several months ago, an observational study published in Medicineby German doctor Zacharias Fögen compared the overall case fatality rate in 81 counties in Kansas without mask mandates compared to the 24 with mandates. He actually found a statistically significant higher fatality rate in the mask counties. “Results from this study strongly suggest that mask mandates actually caused about 1.5 times the number of deaths or ∼50% more deaths compared to no mask mandates.”
Dr. Fogen posits as a potential reason for negative efficacy that the mask-wearing can make the virions smaller and cause them to penetrate deeper into the alveoli, where they can cause pneumonia instead of bronchitis. “A rationale for the increased RR (risk ratio) by mandating masks is probably that virions that enter or those coughed out in droplets are retained in the facemask tissue, and after quick evaporation of the droplets,hypercondensed droplets or pure virions (virions not inside a droplet) are re-inhaled from a very short distance during inspiration.”
While negative efficacy is still a hypothesis, there have been documented negative side effects to mask-wearing. A preprint Italian study from earlier in May found that short-term surgical mask usage was associated with an increased inhaled CO2 level greater than 5000ppm in 90% of 10- to 18-year-olds in the sample. “Shortly after wearing surgical masks, the inhaled air CO2 approached the highest acceptable exposure threshold recommended for workers, while concerningly high concentrations were recorded in virtually all individuals when wearing FFP2 masks,” concluded the authors. “The CO2 concentration was significantly higher among minors and the subjects with high respiratory rate.”
Yet here we are, over two years into this saga, and schools are still masking children, while some that stopped are bringing back this barbaric practice. To this day, people with severe mental and physical disabilities are being forced to wear masks when seeking medical attention at health care facilities. Trauma survivors who suffer panic attacks from having their faces covered are forced to choose between panic attacks and loss of medical care.
But children will, by far, be the most harmed by this policy. The language development impediment that will result from the past two years of inhumane mask mandates is incalculable. The head of the U.K.’s Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills found that children suffer from “limited vocabulary,” while some babies “struggled to respond to basic facial expressions,” partly due to interacting with people wearing face masks.
Talk about a cost-benefit analysis!
To this day, only a few states have banned mask mandates from coming back. The New Hampshire governor recently vetoed a bill from the state legislature banning local school boards from implementing such immoral policies upon children. What we really need is a ballot initiative in every state to spell out in the state’s constitution that a person has a fundamental right to refuse to wear a medical device and cannot be discriminated against in the realm of public accommodations for exercising that right. Moreover, there should be criminal penalties for any adult who forcibly masks a child.
Horowitz: New study shows mask-wearing children at risk for ‘unacceptable’ CO2 levels, cautions against the practice
We've spent over a year debating nonexistent evidence that masks effectively protect against the spread of viruses. However, there has been little debate and few published studies on potential harms of mask-wearing, a reality that has allowed zealous maskers to aggressively push their mandate as harmless, with no downside. Well, now we have a randomized controlled trial published in JAMA that raises serious concerns about this practice.
Researchers from Germany conducted a blinded randomized controlled trial of 45 children wearing masks and measured the baseline carbon dioxide levels during inhalation and exhalation behind various masks as compared to the levels of unmasked children. The results are very concerning:
We measured means (SDs) between 13 120 (384) and 13 910 (374) ppm of carbon dioxide in inhaled air under surgical and filtering facepiece 2 (FFP2) masks, which is higher than what is already deemed unacceptable by the German Federal Environmental Office by a factor of 6. This was a value reached after 3 minutes of measurement. Children under normal conditions in schools wear such masks for a mean of 270 (interquartile range, 120-390) minutes. The Figure shows that the value of the child with the lowest carbon dioxide level was 3-fold greater than the limit of 0.2 % by volume. The youngest children had the highest values, with one 7-year-old child's carbon dioxide level measured at 25 000 ppm. (Emphasis added.)
Why has nobody in our government bothered to study this before experimenting on children for a virus that doesn't affect them?
The German researchers conclude that there is a concern of mask-wearing causing hypercapnia, and as such, children should not be forced to wear masks: "This leads in turn to impairments attributable to hypercapnia. A recent review concluded that there was ample evidence for adverse effects of wearing such masks. We suggest that decision-makers weigh the hard evidence produced by these experimental measurements accordingly, which suggest that children should not be forced to wear face masks."
While it might seem like the mask mandates are over, they are still largely in place in many workplaces, including an impervious mandate for health care workers who often work 10-hour shifts. The mandate is still in place for 2-year-olds on six-hour flights. The facts that the only RCT studying carbon dioxide effects shows reason for concern, that the only RCT on mask efficacy shows no evidence of meaningful effectiveness, and that children rarely get sick from this virus make the continued mask mandates senseless.
The public health fascists are already attempting to mischaracterize COVID variants in order to reinstitute masking, a trend that has already started in California. CNN had a doctor on the air this week suggesting that masks need to be a part of a new dress code.
Potential carbon dioxide poisoning is but one side effect that needs to be studied. Last month, a group of Alachua County, Florida, parents had their children's masks cultured in a lab and found dangerous pathogens growing on them. Where are the studies on microbiological harms?
The findings of this survey support what we already know to exist in terms of side effects from mask-wearing. A published survey of over 25,000 parents of German schoolchildren found that 68% reported impairments caused by masks. The impairments included: "irritability (60%), headache (53%), difficulty concentrating (50%), less happiness (49%), reluctance to go to school/kindergarten (44%), malaise (42%), impaired learning (38%), and drowsiness or fatigue (37%)."
Until now, one could have dismissed this as unscientific hearsay. However, with this degree of carbon dioxide increase from just a few minutes of mask-wearing, it makes sense that so many children would feel lethargy and malaise after an entire school day.
Masks increase the volume of dead space, which facilitates carbon dioxide retention, according Megan Mansell, a hazardous environs PPE expert. "An area covered in the study is dead space increase, where not only is there an accumulation of rejected respiratory emissions, but a pathogenic concentration of rejected bodily waste and pathogen picked up from pulling airborne microbes, in addition to periodontal bacterial contributions, which thrive in low-oxygen, warm, moist areas," warned Mansell, who recently spoke against the mask mandate at an Alachua County School Board meeting.
Many parents likely ignored the concerns about mask-wearing and carbon dioxide poisoning because they didn't see their kids faint or any immediate severe effects. But Mansell, who is a former district education director for children with disabilities and special needs, believes that there are potential long-term impacts every moment a child's breathing is restricted by masks.
"Deoxygenation and hypercapnia can have permanent impacts on human growth and development, and we can anticipate profoundly incapacitating conditions such as cerebral palsy, in addition to far lower birth rates, as stillbirth rates have increased fourfold in mandating regions," asserted the PPE expert and child advocate. "This has an impact on all lives, even the unborn."
The obvious question is why would there be any difference for adults if the implication of this study is that masks increase carbon dioxide levels across the board? The concerns definitely apply to everyone, but Mansell contends the mask mandates are especially dangerous for children. "Child masks are unregulated garbage with no efficacy or safety standards, and no two are alike, so while one child may breathe freely and have no visible signs of distress, another child could have a similar-looking but far more restrictive apparatus on, and no one would be any the wiser."
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