You've probably heard stories about masks creeping back here and there, ahead of what some warn is a return of mandates this fall.

I'm not infallible, but my gut tells me this won't amount to much, and that no major mandates are coming.

In case you've forgotten, though, or if you subscribed after I released it, you might get a kick out of my Covid charts quiz. If lockdowns and masks work, this quiz will be a breeze!

For instance, one part asks you to identify where on a chart of health outcomes the mask mandate was introduced in various countries. Since the answer is always completely random and seems to have no connection to anything, it's virtually impossible to answer correctly.

Have fun:

https://www.CovidChartsQuiz.com

As long as we're back on this for the moment, I have some interesting charts for Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Remember when Sweden did well without the lockdowns and masks, and your friends said it didn't matter because the only valid comparison was between Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia?

(These were the same people who thought it was fine to compare the United States with New Zealand, though.)

What you're seeing in these graphs are the trend lines (the dashed ones) for mortality rates leading into the "pandemic" years. It is obvious that in the countries other than Sweden there is a significant uptick toward the right side of the graph, but not for Sweden.

In other words, Sweden stayed by far the closest to its pre-existing trend.

(If the graphic is too hard to read, click on it to make it resizable.)

These are the facts that matter, because different places use different criteria to classify something as a "Covid death." By focusing on mortality in general we avoid this problem. (And we likewise capture deaths caused by lockdown.)

Back to the United States: as I say, I think it's doubtful that strong measures will be brought back in any systematic way. But it's demoralizing that we even have to consider the possibility that they could return -- how is it not obvious to most people how useless all of that was?

Yesterday the mayor of Salt Lake City wrote on Twitter: "On this day two years ago: with schools about to reopen and our elementary students still unable to receive a COVID vaccine, I took action to require life-saving masks in our schools and help them reopen safely."

Life-saving masks.

Don't worry: nobody will trouble her by asking how Sweden's 1.8 million schoolchildren managed to survive despite neglecting this "life-saving" strategy. Our compliant press would consider that rude.

All of this information is sitting right there, right out in the open, for any curious person to see.

And yet so many people don't even want to see it.

Remember the Enlightenment, whose general thesis (with exceptions) was that human beings could be trusted to use reason to reach correct conclusions?

I believe we have lived through the refutation.

Rational argument has come up against a limited and flawed human race.

I intend to keep trying, but I'm also building a community of people who don't need to be convinced that madness is madness and that the institutions are corrupt. I want to build networks whereby we awake people can help each other: hiring each other, for example, or helping each other with homeschooling, starting a new career, building a business, parenting in a hostile world, money management, weight loss, whatever.

I do not want to have to tell my kids I did nothing -- or that all I did was shoot down other people's ideas without offering anything of my own.