I'm a smart, mathematically-trained person (Princeton cum laude, Stanford Ph.D.) trying to apply that intelligence to the myriad mysticisms of 2020. We were expecting the year to be a collection of optometrist twenty-twenty-vision jokes and it turned out to be about impeachment, disease, racism, and election chicanery. The consequences of these have been terrible for many and there may be further-reaching, more-terrible things to come. These are my beliefs applying my mind to what we have faced in 2020 in the hope that those who agree will feel support, those who disagree can understand how others can feel differently, and those in between can see some reason to believe what I believe.

     Here's what I believe about 2020, so far.

     We have less racial tension and more job opportunities in the United States of America than four years ago. The United States is energy independent and becoming a major manufacturing nation again. Our military presence in the world is going down rather than ramping up. We have a path to peace in the Middle East between Israel and her neighbors. I believe President Trump has been a positive force for these good things.

     The government and almost all liberals I know tell me about 250 000 people have died of a COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, about the death rate of the Hong Kong flu in 1969 and the Asian flu in 1957. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) stopped calling COVID-19 a "pandemic" and their actual data support a number many times lower with no excess deaths in 2020 over those in 2019 or 2018. In addition to stories of COVID-19 death certificates from deaths unrelated to COVID-19, in addition to grossly-loose CDC criteria for COVID-19 deaths, CDC comorbidity numbers suggest that only six percent (6%, one in sixteen) COVID-19 deaths had no other cause of death. Those 94% averaged 2.6 other causes of death. My own personal experience with friends and friends of friends supports a number about one hundred times lower than the reported 250 000 deaths. I believe the actual number of U.S. COVID-19 deaths is less than 10 000 before 2020 June. (Things seem to have changed considerably around 2020 June as described below.)

     While hospitals reported overflowing were actually empty in 2020 May, they seem to have an abundance of intubated respiratory cases in 2020 November. In the ebb and flow of new diseases, I believe this year's new disease hits lungs harder. I also believe some sick people who would have been sent home to gasp through the night with prednisone pills and steroid inhalers are being rushed into the intensive care unit (ICU) because of the extra hype about COVID-19. I've also been told they're flying people into hospitals from poor regions like our tribal-lands reservations to keep their numbers up.

     There are people who died of COVID-19, there are people who might have had COVID-19 when they died of something else, and there are people who had COVID-19 on their death certificates because the hospitals get a lot of extra money when people are sick, intubated, or dead from COVID-19. I believe this gross over-reporting of COVID-19 is responsible for the discrepancy between official numbers and what we observe. Furthermore, we have people genuinely sick from the disease and people who merely tested positive. Switching from counting the former to counting the latter creates the appearance of increasing COVID-19 rates.

     Studies comparing lock-downs with no-lock-downs and comparing masks with no-masks report no difference in measured COVID-19 rates. I believe that in general and specifically for those who wash their hands, stay home, and avoid sex with strangers.

     Historical reports of genocide, democide, and extermination of people by their own governments total 262 million since 1900. Those same reports attribute 155 million of those deaths to three socialist governments in in Russia, Germany, and China, supported in their time by our progressive left-wing in the U.S. I believe those reports and believe that Democrats supported those regimes with the same values they support today. I worry more about dying from tyranny than from a viral disease.

     Counties with mass executions of their own people tend to have government control of weapons, people's movements, education, and their rights of assembly and commerce before their holocausts, genocides, and democides. Those are the same types of seemingly-innocent, for-people's-own-good controls we're seeing in the COVID-19 lockdowns. I believe there is a direct connection between tyranny and subsequent holocausts.

     Say we accept the hyper-inflated numbers for COVID-19 deaths. Say we reject the history of holocausts or reject that tyranny leads to megadeath executions. I believe the cost of the corona-virus lock-downs in liberty, livelihood, and lives is far greater than the incremental savings of lives for those who exercise reasonable pandemic precautions. Here in the United States hundreds of millions lost their liberty, tens of millions lost their livelihoods, and tens of thousands died from the resulting poverty. "Flattening the curve" not only meant keeping empty hospitals in case somebody with COVID-19 shows up, it also meant lengthening the time our artists, waiters, and service-support people are out of work and we have to do without the good things they do. The Hillsdale College newsletter Imprimis has this to say about lock-down policies and how destructive they have been. The burden of proof for mandatory lock-downs and masks is on those promoting these things and they should take the blame for the hurt they caused.

     The famous video of white Powderhorn-Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin choking and killing black George Floyd on 2020 May 25 is reported to have obvious production errors like lighting from the wrong time of day and Floyd's hair changing during the video. Derek Chauvin and George Floyd are reported to have been friends and co-workers for seventeen years. I believe the video was a piece of theater rather than a real death.

     The platform that the Bolsheviks and the National Socialists presented centered around government control of economics, manufacturing, distribution of wealth, travel, health care, education, science, and guns with strong racial policy and anti-semitism. I understand the American progressive, left-wing Democrats supported these movements in their time. I believe these are precisely the components of today's American left-wing Democrats in their so-called "Democratic Socialism" and their support for violent, racist, anti-semitic organizations like BLM, BDS, and ANTIFA.

     After seeing the outpouring of Trump support and the similarly-graphic reports of apathy about Biden, I expected a landslide for Trump like Reagan versus Mondale in 1984 or Nixon versus McGovern in 1972. Reports show Trump was winning in several states that had sudden surges of all-Biden votes without a single vote for any other candidate. I believe this election was as crooked as the roulette wheel in the movie "Casablanca," "as honest as the day is long."

     I believe in science. The scientific first question about a claimed-scientific phenomenon is, "Is it real?" The scientific first attitude should be doubt. If you hear "the science is settled" and doubt is called "science denial," then it's pseudo-science. After eugenics, impending ice age, we're running out of oil, acid rain, mercury in tuna fish, the ozone layer, global warming, and climate change, now we have corona virus COVID-19. In case I had doubts about my doubts, a lead COVID-19 scientist in our news medium is Greta Thunberg. I reject political pseudo-science.

     I believe in the opinions explored and explained in the now-libertarian writings from the Magna Carta in 1215 through the Constitution of the United States of America in 1789. These writings point to a set of values that make America wonderful, powerful, and unique. I articulate these values as human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract. To the extent we have pursued these values, people have lived enormously better. That the human world has gone from mostly-starving to mostly-well-fed is due to a greater fraction of the human race embracing these values of economic, political, and personal freedom.

     I believe in our Bill of Rights. On 2019 March 9 a friend and I went upstairs in Philadelphia's Independence Hall to the chamber where twenty-six senators ratified these ten amendments on 1791 December 15. The Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, may sound mean and ugly, but it's our safety net keeping tyranny from running amok. The Tenth Amendment, keeping the federal government out of state or local issues (like health care, education, abortion, and marriage), directly keeps our bigger government out of our smaller and personal issues. These have been breached and invaded severely and need to be restored,

     As I have explored those values over 4½ decades I have tried to understand the values of my political opponents. While Karl Marx and his colleagues had a set of quite-different values they were pursuing in their development of their theory of communism, I believe the greatest difference between the values of America's conservatives and liberals is that we conservatives have values and liberals do not. Ayn Rand calls it the difference between our "moral premise" and their "expediency of the moment."

     America is a success in many ways where most of the world has failed. Liberals are happy we're becoming like the rest of them. I believe they're horribly wrong in wanting that. Exemplars of socialized, government medicine like Germany, England, and Canada keep an entire, second, private healthcare system for people who haven't the money or time to come to the United States for treatment. People from Latin America pour across our borders, legal or not, to take advantage of far-better job opportunities than they have at home. Asians come for our education opportunities and stay for their own careers. We're doing something right.

     Liberalism today, indeed for most of its history, is about whining and trying to wangle getting for themselves and their friends what somebody else has earned amid an aura of sanctimony. I believe most practicing liberals in America today have convinced themselves they're pursuing something important when there really isn't anything there beyond taking the fruits of other people's labor for themselves and taking down those who have worked hard to be successful. Liberalism sanctifies whining and hate. (I said elsewhere, "They don't act like they want liberalism, they want the extermination of conservative values. They don't want to live, they want us to die.")

     I believe today's American Democrats are seriously deluded about their history, their platform, and the consequences of their ideas. Conservative and liberal visions can't both be right. Maybe they're deluded, maybe we're deluded, maybe both sides are deluded, but wouldn't we rather have the vision that supported Lincoln, Chamberlain, Churchill, Reagan, and Israel than the vision that supported Davis, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Mao, and Chavez? (I would use King and Wallace as an example as the swell of support for George Wallace came from Democrats, but there was a large community of otherwise-liberal Democrats who supported Martin Luther King in spite of the civil-rights movement being Republican.)

     Ask a Democrat about the 2020 election. Go ahead, try it. I believe the only response you get will be a vicious diatribe against Donald Trump and a few harsh words about the Republicans. Except for President John F. Kennedy, the history of the Democrats has been awful from slavery and Stalin to Carter and Chavez. The Democrat president before Kennedy was practicing-Klan-member Harry S Truman and after Kennedy was Lyndon B. Johnson, as racist as any Klan member and responsible for the economic devastation and class stratification of his Great Society. I believe most Democrats have been deluded into thinking that they're responsible for the Republican causes that they opposed at the time. The most noteworthy of those is rights for Black Americans.

     Donald Trump is a bold, brash, boisterous, billionaire braggart who likes beautiful women and is dedicated to his country. Joe Biden appears to be a demented pedophile and was in the White House as Vice President during the most-corrupt period in American history where he was quiet and complicit. He has appointed the slimiest and most-corrupt people in our recent history for posts in his anticipated presidency. (My Election-Day choice was based on what these men would do in office rather than their personal faults.) I believe there is no test of character or patriotism where Biden would come close to measuring up to Trump. Whatever one may think of Donald Trump's personal strengths and weaknesses, none of the prominent Democrats would pass Trump's level of character and patriotism, "Not nobody! Not no how!"

     Finally, I believe in an almost-contractual obligation of those living here in the USA to respect these values in interacting with others. What people do at home is up to them, "what happens there stays there," but when we interact with each other, it is incumbent on all of us to give others the latitude to pursue their happiness their way until it hurts somebody else. I'll intervene with help for my friends, I'll even give unwanted advice to strangers, but, at the end of the day, or even all day, America is about economic, political, and personal freedom and we all have a responsibility to make that happen. I believe conservative values and behavior are far closer to that respect than what liberals do and pursue. (Libertarians embody those values the best, but I know too many libertarians who bend those values when it suits them and when they think nobody is looking.)

     My latest breakthrough in understanding the COVID-19 mess is to divide the phenomenon into 2020 January through May, "pre-Floyd," and 2020 June through the present, "post-Floyd." If all I saw were post-Floyd, then I might be tempted to believe the hype, at least for a little while. Medical professionals are finding themselves believing in a pandemic even when what we see in our observations is dramatically less than what we hear in our news and reporting media.

     Pre-Floyd was easy. Until mid-May I could find no cases in my expending circle of family, friends, friends of friends, and medical professionals. My pulmonologist had four cases in the Phoenix valley, do the math, maybe four hundred total out of four million people living here, figure four deaths from this disease. Extrapolate that upper-bound to a country of 330 million and we get something around three hundred dead. That's consistent with CDC data showing no excess deaths at all. Even with an extra factor of ten just for statistical uncertainty and giving in to media hype we get three thousand actual COVID-19 deaths pre-Floyd, far short of the 100 000 reported.

     As I said before, in case I had doubts about my doubts, the political timing, the choice of Greta Thunberg as the COVID-19 expert, and the deception in the New York Times cover make pre-Floyd COVID-19 apparently and obviously hype.

     Post-Floyd we see actual COVID-19 sick cases, not just showing positive with an up-the-nose PCR test as I did in 2020 July. (We should treat any claims of COVID-19 threat with skepticism from the pre-Floyd lies.) I know half a dozen and suspect at least a dozen more, medical people I trust say there are many intubated patients who all tested positive for real, so a total of three million cases in the United States is believable. With two percent mortality, figure 60 000 dead of COVID-19. I believe what I see rather than what I hear.

     It's easy. Ask yourself how many people you know who are actually sick from COVID-19 compared to the media-claimed numbers. Don't get mad at me for pointing out the obvious. Just look for yourself.

     I continue to believe that an organization with a terrible history should not be supported even if they do some good things like Planned Parenthood or has a nice name like Black Lives Matter. I can believe in legal abortions and the dignity of all races without supporting a terrible legacy or a vision of hate.

     So this is where I stand on this year. It came out rather longer than I originally planned. ("My tragic tale I won't prolong, And if you do not enjoy the song, You've yourself to blame if it's too long, You should never have let me begin.") We'll see what 2021 has to bring.