Category: Life In The O!gulag

Fascism has a pretty new face!

The Police State Virus

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Alex makes the case for defiance.

There is no other term for the COVID regime than a nascent police state. Governors and bureaucrats, without any legislative authority have demanded that people remain in the homes at their personal whim for a disease with a 99.9% survival rate. 

And then there’s the prospect of the vaccine, two versions of which will soon be available, if not mandatory. 

Could the coronavirus vaccine be “the Mark of the Beast?” One doesn’t have to be religious to see it as such. Public health officials are already boasting that no one will be able to work, travel or go to school without this vaccine that was rushed through approvals for political theater. 

Former Vice President Joe Biden hasn’t ruled out making the vaccine mandatory, though the federal government will likely just punt enforcement to large corporations, similar to how they use Big Tech to manage information on the Internet and Big Finance to take banking services away from dissidents.

Bill Gates has called not only for mandatory vaccines, but also mandatory tracking of people who have received them. 

Are our elites deliberately conspiring to instill fear or are they just idiotic dupes? Probably a little from Column A and a little from Column B. But one thing is clear — the economic, political, academic, and media elites in this country are using a disease with a 99.9% survival rate to transform the country into a police state. Patriots and freedom lovers must resist this by any means necessary.

It never should have been allowed to get as far along as it has, and every day’s delay means a longer, tougher battle to reclaim the liberty so foolishly surrendered.

The Red Death Fizzle

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Imagine my surprise.

Surprisingly, the deaths of older people stayed the same before and after COVID-19. Since COVID-19 mainly affects the elderly, experts expected an increase in the percentage of deaths in older age groups. However, this increase is not seen from the CDC data. In fact, the percentages of deaths among all age groups remain relatively the same. “The reason we have a higher number of reported COVID-19 deaths among older individuals than younger individuals is simply because every day in the U.S. older individuals die in higher numbers than younger individuals,” Briand said.

Briand also noted that 50,000 to 70,000 deaths are seen both before and after COVID-19, indicating that this number of deaths was normal long before COVID-19 emerged. Therefore, according to Briand, not only has COVID-19 had no effect on the percentage of deaths of older people, but it has also not increased the total number of deaths.

These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.

When Briand looked at the 2020 data during that seasonal period, COVID-19-related deaths exceeded deaths from heart diseases. This was highly unusual since heart disease has always prevailed as the leading cause of deaths. However, when taking a closer look at the death numbers, she noted something strange. As Briand compared the number of deaths per cause during that period in 2020 to 2018, she noticed that instead of the expected drastic increase across all causes, there was a significant decrease in deaths due to heart disease. Even more surprising, as seen in the graph below, this sudden decline in deaths is observed for all other causes.

This trend is completely contrary to the pattern observed in all previous years. Interestingly, … the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19. This suggests, according to Briand, that the COVID-19 death toll is misleading. Briand believes that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may instead be recategorized as being due to COVID-19. 

That’s from a Johns Hopkins report, hastily removed and censored since Robert Zimmerman’s original post, to which he helpfully provides a couple of alternative links over at his joint. Zimmerman’s own wrap-up says it all:

In other words, COVID-19 is just another type of flu-like respiratory disease, that is only appearing terrible because doctors and hospitals are incorrectly labeling many deaths as COVID-19 when in past years they would have labeled them based on the existing chronic illnesses the patient already had.

It has all been a scam, a Chicken Little scam induced by some very evil people in government to cause fear and panic in the general population. I leave it to my readers to figure out why.

Regardless, it is time for people to come to their senses. Let the worry warts cower in mindless fear in their basements. Rip off that mask, go back to living your normal American life, free and open, pursuing your happiness.

Amen, brother; you’re preaching to the choir here. But I fear a profound effort will be required before anybody can go back to living normal American lives, assuming there’s even such a thing to be had at all after this man-caused disaster. Petty tyrants all across the nation aren’t going to just back off and relinquish the absolute power they’ve been enjoying so much for lo, these many months without a struggle, unfortunately, and no amount of hard data will persuade them otherwise.

Which, more unfortunately, is assuming that enough of us even WANT those “normal American lives” back in the first place. Maybe the most dismaying aspect of the whole Shamdemic farce was how eager all too many of us—in the grip of a panic manufactured specifically for the purpose—were to surrender their liberty and Constitutional rights to purchase a little phony security. In any event, I can’t recall a single historical instance when lost liberty was regained without a struggle.

The era of cynicism

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It’s the only thing that makes sense anymore.

The Soviet Union, like all radical experiments, went through several phases in its roughly three generations of existence. The first phase, of course, was the revolution, in which the old order was toppled and a battle ensued to fill the void. This initial phase of revolution is always the one that attracts the most attention. This is when the great heroes of the revolution and the great villains of it are made. It is in this phase we get both Lenin and Stalin, hero and villain.

There is a phase that gets little attention and that is when the people come to terms with the irrationality of the world that has been created for them. One reason Stalin was able to send so many to their deaths or to labor camps is so many people kept thinking there was some rationality to the world being created. Some remained idealistic believers in the cause, while others became critics of the cause. They assumed the revolution would bring clarity and rationality when it brought only the opposite.

In time, the people came to terms with this. The humor of the Soviet Union reflected the fact that one got along by accepting the irrational in the same way you accept that the grass is green or the sky is blue. You don’t think about it. The jokes were often about these daily contradictions and how the unfortunate were those who did not get the joke that was at the heart of those contradictions. In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.

This is relevant in our current age as we may be past the revolutionary stage and into that time when the people adjust to the irrational. The legacy conservative media keeps pounding the drum about how “we’re lurching into socialism” when we have been a socialist society for generations now. There is no aspect of our economic life outside the grip of the now semi-permanent ruling class. Telling people otherwise is just part of the way the ruling class controls the population.

Of course, this reality is dawning on even the dullest people, so we are being told that the bad guys are planning a “radical revolution.” The truth is, that revolution is well past the planning stage. It has already happened. From top to bottom, despite party labels or rhetoric, the system is stacked with people committed to the great reordering of society into the egalitarian paradise. The expulsion of Trump from office like a foreign body is the proof that the organism of state is wholly alien now.

In other words, a revolution has occurred out of view from the rest of us and now we are seeing the revolutionaries step out of the shadows. This is not a lot different than how Stalin took control of the party and government. He quietly consolidated his hold on the party, while his rivals were thinking the revolution was still ongoing. By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late. This realization was probably (the) penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.

GREAT line, that one. Onwards.

Now we are in the phase where we get used to the often-bizarre contradictions in the rules being imposed by the new rulers. Some are easy, like the fact that states have put mentally disturbed Jewish men in sundresses in charge of public health. These are ornamental positions, so putting a crazy person in the role allows the governor to display his piety at little cost. Until the Covid hysteria, no one had any reason to know their state had public health officials.

Other bits of the new normal have no explanation. For example, states are now telling people they cannot make noise in their home, as part of the alleged fight against the spread of Covid. In Europe, they are banning the sale of alcohol at certain times, claiming this is to fight Covid.

Hate to bring it up and all, Z, but it ain’t just Europe.

On Wednesday, Nov. 25, restaurants and bars (in Pennsylvania—M) are ordered to suspend alcohol sales at 5 p.m. until 8 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 26. Gov. Wolf says the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is the “biggest day for drinking” and acknowledged bars and restaurants have been hit hard by the pandemic, but this one-night ban is needed.

Uh huh. Now as it happens, this grotesquely un-Constitutional decree was actually issued by the very “mentally disturbed Jewish man in a sundress” ZMan mentioned above (utterly ludicrous photo of said headcase at the GP link), which is pretty funny all by itself. But El Supremo Wolf’s follow-on “don’t blame meeee!” whine is one for the record books.

“The thing that we can’t do is ignore reality and say ‘yeah you folks, for no fault of your own, have been hit hardest by this virus.’ But the virus is what’s doing this. It’s not me. It’s not the administration. It’s not the government,” said Gov. Wolf.

Oh no no no, of course not. As everyone knows, tyranny is never, EVER the fault of an invasive, too-powerful government, even less so of the overreaching crawly things in charge of running it! Why, who could ever countenance making such an outlandish, irrational claim as that, for goodness’ sake? Such talk really ought to be against the law, if you ask me.

My GOD, the balls on these oxygen thieves. But honestly, how can you not love it just the same? Consider:

  • The ability to spew patent claptrap with a straight-face: “The thing that we can’t do is ignore reality…”WHEN “IGNORING REALITY” IS PRECISELY WHAT HE’S DOING
  • Alcohol sales must be banned—because, as has been firmly established by extensive research, testing, and observation, THEVIRUSTHEVIRUSTHEVIRUS!!!™is a bigger lush than Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and the ghost of Ted Kennedy put together, and just looooves itself a good, solid toot—but only between the hours of 5pm and 8am Thanksgiving Day. After 8am, humanity will BE SAAAAAFE!!! again, and can enjoy a snort if it likes. But not a moment before. Because, y’know, SCIENCE!!!
  • A nonsentient cluster of RNA strands and other such granular material—without authority, official standing, or even the ability to speak or sign the unlawful order—is somehow, some way, “what’s doing this.” Again: uttered with a straight face, with as much fake conviction as any lower-tier American pro-pol slime mold can scrape up, as if the man actually expected sensible people to believe it
  • BE SAAAAAAAFE!!! Also, do as you’re told, or else

Please pardon me, all, but I need to ask a simple question at this point:

WHY IN THE EVER-LOVIN’ BLUE-EYED WORLD AREN’T THESE WORMS EITHER LOCKED UP OR SWINGING BY THEIR NECKS FROM A FUCKING LAMPPOST, ANYWAY?

Asking for a friend, that’s all.

Cynicism? You better believe it, chum. It’s the last refuge sane people have at this late date.

“Avoiding death is not living”

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Julie Kelly says give ’em the bird.

There’s only one response to anyone suggesting families shouldn’t celebrate Thanksgiving together this year because of COVID-19: Go to hell.

Actually, there IS one other response available for Real Americans who still retain the gumption to countenance using it: SEND the bastards there.

“Encourage guests to avoid singing or shouting, especially indoors. Keep music levels down so people don’t have to shout or speak loudly to be heard.”

That is not a passage from some dystopian novel or a command by a Marxist dictator or a parody in The Onion. It’s guidance posted on the Centers for Disease Control website courtesy of the United States government. Think about that: Some federal bureaucrat, probably a highly credentialed “expert” with a messianic complex, is telling 330 million Americans that they should not sing. In their own homes. So they don’t spread a mostly harmless virus to other people.

It’s beyond laughable, but this isn’t a joke. These people are serious. And they should receive a collective middle finger from the American people.

If there’s any upside to this God-awful year, it’s the revelation that the people in charge are inhumane sociopaths consumed with their own egos and lust for power. The nation—and the world—is being subjected to a destructive pseudoscientific experiment that has failed spectacularly in its stated mission to “stop” COVID-19 while inflicting an economic, educational, and personal toll that never will be fully calculated.

Everyone has suffered but no one has been punished for unleashing this slow-moving catastrophe. To the contrary, the cabal of culpable government leaders are digging in their boot heels to crush the collective spirit of the country. At a time when people need to be with their friends and families the most, a time when the soul-soothing routine of the holidays has never been more necessary, the government’s soulless apparatchiks seek to strip away our last vestiges of joy.

These people are not healthy. They don’t care about you or your child or your elderly parent. They care only about power and control. They should be mocked then ignored. Sadly, however, millions of brainwashed Americans will dutifully comply. Cherished moments will be forsaken without any guarantee they’ll return next holiday season.

With ya one hundred and ten percent there, Jules. Alas, thanks to the panic-ninnies’ hysterical overreaction to the Red Death—and the audacity with which our new overlords so eagerly exploited it for nefarious purposes—all too many Americans proved all too willing to give up essential liberty to purchase a wholly-false security. In perfect accordance with Benjamin Franklin’s unheeded warning, they have now lost both, and deserve neither.

Velvet glove removed

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Fascist Fauci flexes the iron hand.

WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci has some new coronavirus guidance: “Do what you’re told.”

In an interview Thursday, the coronavirus task force member and infectious disease expert pushed back on the notion that scientists were “authoritarian” for promoting strict lockdowns and social distancing measures.

But the 79-year-old suggested the American spirit of independence had gotten in the way and the nation needed to follow their orders, whether they liked it or not.

“I was talking with my UK colleagues who are saying the UK is similar to where we are now, because each of our countries have that independent spirit,” Fauci said during a panel with other experts in Washington, DC.

“I can understand that, but now is the time to do what you’re told,” he said, as first reported by CNBC.

Tell ya what, I got a better idea for ya. I continue doing exactly as I damned well please; go wherever I need or want to go, for whatever reason I conjure; ignore your precious lockdowns and defy your stupid face-diaper “mandates” completely. While YOU go piss up a fucking rope, you fucking pencil-neck geek.

“Do what you’re told,” proclaims the petty dimestore dictator, the “doctor” who never treated a patient in his life, the parasitic career bureaucrat who has never once been elected to anything. For such a scrawny, weedy, soft-handed little shit, he sure talks big, don’t he? Seems to enjoy throwing his weight around way too much, too. Which I’d guess to be no more than a buck thirty or so. But hey, fascist is as fascist does, always and forever, I guess.

Elsewhere, another bumbling bureaucrat makes another typically moronic assertion.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to President-elect Joe Biden, said that a 4-6 week lockdown that shut down businesses and compensated workers for lost wages may curb the spread of the virus and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed.

Ace slices that baloney:

Shutting the economy down will get the economy “on track”?

The economy that grew 31% last quarter? The economy that is adding a million jobs per month as we come out of the lockdowns?

You’re going to get that economy on track with another month and a half of lockdowns?

When did any Democrat, bureau-rat, or other genus of shitlib ever have the vaguest clue about what might or might not be required to “get the economy on track”? Although since the fundamental premise shared by all such specimens—that the solution to every problem, including economic ones, can come only from government—is a total crock of shit, anything Osterwhoop believes might “get the economy on track” would be a miserable failure regardless. So really, you can’t blame him for his wet-brained stupidity. He is what he is; to expect better from him would be unreasonable and unfair.

Do what you’re told. It’s a sad testament to how far we’ve fallen that an American government employee would ever to dare to say such a thing out loud, in public, without having to immediately go into hiding in fear for his very life. Fauci & Friends’ obvious unfamiliarity with such fear is the reason why the whole country now finds itself completely upside-down, ass-backwards, and in an awful fix.

Throughout government, American “public servants” no longer consider themselves our employees, but our masters. Clearly, that attitude is in need of some serious adjustment.

Flight 93 augers in

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Anton takes stock.

The 2020 election in particular, and our electoral process in general, have been badly compromised.

First there have been the successful efforts by Democrats to loosen electoral administration standards and practices by legalizing ballot harvesting (where partisan “volunteers” go out and collect ballots as well as “assist” voters in filling out their ballots), allowing same-day voter registration, mass mail-in voting, and the like. On the flipside we have Democrats tenaciously fighting any efforts to shore up the integrity of the system, such as requiring ID and proof of citizenship to vote.

Couple all of this with unprecedented last minute rule changes on the eve of what was sure to be the most contested election in generations, if not in American history: all changes designed to favor one side over the other.

Theoretically, none of these measures guaranteed a compromised vote. Theoretically, it’s possible that a system designed to be gamed and abused won’t be. But a party concerned about the integrity of the system wouldn’t expend so much effort making it easier to rig elections; it would do the opposite. The other party, the one trying to do exactly that (if all too often in a desultory, half-hearted way) nevertheless gets attacked as the enemy of “democracy.”

No matter what he does, President Trump will get no credit from his enemies, who are already demanding that he concede before the counting is even over—to say nothing of the lawsuits and potential recounts. If he does, a new standard will have been set, or an old one reaffirmed: in any close election, if the Democrat appears to be ahead, and irregularities appear to be present, they are to be dismissed as nonexistent and the Republican must go gently into that good night.

That may well work in securing the White House this time. But if they just ram this through without explaining what really happened, then the legitimacy not just of our electoral system but of our entire government will have suffered an extreme, and possibly fatal, blow. 
No one will really know who won. Partisans on both sides will insist they do, but they won’t—not really. Unless all the anomalies are explained, every count and recount conducted in a fair and transparent manner, the occupant of the White House on January 20, 2021—whoever he is—will sit under a cloud. If he’s Joe Biden, that cloud will be entirely of his party’s own making.

But far more ominously, one half the country—or to be more precise, the class that rules in the interests of (at most) half the country—will surmise that it can rule by fiat. The other half will conclude that they are subjects.

Whether that conclusion resigns the latter to apathy or stirs them to rebellion is the question that will determine the course of our politics going forward.

Agreed, right down the line. The past week’s heinous events have revealed what kind of country America really is. From here on out, we will find out what kind people Americans really are—or if they can still rightly even call themselves Americans at all. I shudder to contemplate what the answer will be. The only thing we can all be certain of is that nothing will ever be the same again. No matter what, politics, elections, the people, their relations with each other, the country as a whole, EVERYTHING has changed—profoundly, irrevocably, and NOT for the better.

Update! Bill, too, is taking stock.

You know, the real problem here isn’t that we have embarrassed ourselves. It is that the Ruling Class and its Ruling Party – the American Oligarchy, in other words – has come out of the shadows in which it customarily operates and, on the third try, managed a naked, but successful coup against Donald Trump.

People thought this was a game. They thought there were rules. There weren’t. There was only win, or lose, and they intended to win.

As I predicted, the tech oligarchs shut down all effective opposition to the coup on their platforms, and put all their expertise to work guaranteeing the success of the coup. The Enemy Media (and that part of the media we thought was not the enemy, but it was too), went all in. The billionaires opened their wallets wide and poured a tsunami of money into the cause. And the politicians loosed Blackshirt storm troopers onto our locked down cities, while we cowered behind closed doors, afraid to breathe free air because of a plague that doesn’t actually exist.
 
Nor did the designers of the coup intend to settle for half measures. Apparently now control of the Senate is at risk as well. Bucket loads of late ballots manufactured from God knows where are flowing into states in the middle of the night, and suddenly a Senate majority that looked safe for the GOP is teetering on the brink. Make no mistake, if the Senate ends in a tie, Kamala Harris will be there to decide every tie vote to favor the Democrats.

We will end up with a Democrat sweep of the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.

And then they’ll do away with the filibuster in the Senate, pack the Supreme Court, and start to work on rendering the constitution itself an irrelevant document. The Second Amendment? Forget about it. And if you think the cops won’t enforce the gun confiscation orders from their bosses, well, you probably thought our elections were honest, too.

And we will take it. We will accept the new order. Why? Because we have become a weak and flaccid nation, addicted to the numb buzz of our social media habits, brainwashed by the tech lords and the media minions of the progressive juggernaut. Our Founders bet their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on America. We won’t risk the time it takes to get out of our chairs, away from the juice of FB and Twitter wired directly into our brains, or ten bucks out of our wallets to support candidates who support America. As for honor, that’s so old fashioned. We don’t do honor any longer. And our children have been “educated” to despise everything America once stood for.

We didn’t lose our nation this week. We lost it years ago. And the GOP helped.

Sad to say, I can’t argue with any of that either. As I said last night: although the long downhill slide began long before, we lost our country fully and for good back in the 60s when we complacently declined to kick Proggy Red’s scroungy ass to the curb, tacitly granting space for his diseased ideology to fester and metastasize. The Founders explictly laid out what would ensue should Americans ever relax their vigilance and become derelict in their duty to defend liberty, to “preserve its blessings for themselves and their posterity.” And now their warnings have been realized, their prescient genius confirmed for all time.

All that’s left now is to pay the tab for that gross laxity. It ain’t gonna be fun.

What comes after every communist revolution?

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Why, the purge, of course.


The above response to AOC’s query, Tweeted by a former Ogabe capo named Michael Simon, has since been deep-sixed—one suspects out of sheer COURAGE!™ and heroism—but there are plenty of other Leftist/Deep State polyps on board the We Have A List train, to include the loathsome David French’s “beard” Eggin McMuffin and frothing lunatic Jennifer Rubin. The Stalin wannabes even have their own websty:

On the website’s landing page, it urges urges that “[w]e must never forget those who helped further the Trump agenda,” adding that “the world should never forget those who, when faced with a decision, chose to put their money, their time, and their reputations behind separating children from their families, encouraging racism and anti-Semitism, and negligently causing the unnecessary loss of life and economic devastation from our country’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The site is a self-described “permanent record” of those who elected the president, including Trump campaign staffers, Republican National Committee members, and affiliated PACs in 2016 or 2020.

Individuals who donated a “significant amount”—$1000 or more—in efforts to re-elect the president and related campaign committees are also blacklisted.Others who worked in the Trump administration; endorsed the president in a public light; were appointed to federal boards, commissions, or the judiciary; and staffed law firms that represented the Trump name in any capacity are named.

Former Pete Buttigieg national surrogates director Emily Abrams wrote before her account went private: “We’re launching the Trump Accountability Project to make sure anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump undermine America is held responsible for what they did.

In response, Human Event‘s Will Chamberlain quipped: “Leading Democrats like @AOC and @JRubinBlogger apparently want to treat Trump supporters like China treats the Uyghurs.”

And why wouldn’t they, pray tell? They’re just following the historical pattern set by their respected comrades and ideological forefathers, after all.

During the USSR’s Great Purge, from 1936 to 1938, it’s estimated that anywhere from 600k to 1.2 million people were slaughtered by the monstrous Soviet regime. No one really knows for sure—the body count has never been refined beyond that, and there’s zero chance it ever will be now. But it’s reasonable to assume that even 1.2 million might be lowballing it.

Now, Americans have always prided themselves on doing everything bigger, harder, and to greater extremes than anyone else. Knowing that, is there any plausible reason to tell ourselves that the Great Amerikan Purge of 2021-??? will fail to live up to that tradition of excess, leaving those Soviet numbers in the dust?

Dereliction of duty

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The dereliction I mean was not theirs. It was ours.

Over the past two days I’ve been composing a post in my head. Tonight I get home and, preparatory to pulling my thoughts together for a post, I check in beforehand on some of my daily (or several times daily, actually) blog stops, WRSA always being one of the very first among those. So what to my wondering eyes should appear but the two images below, which pretty much say everything I was thinking of saying, only way more concisely. So as to preserve readability for the geezer-types among us, I’ll keep them at their original size instead of shrinking ’em down, and stash ’em both below the fold. Don’t let that prevent you from clicking the link and checking them out, though; trust me, you NEED to see these, folks. You really do.

Plenty more on this topic to come, but it’s gonna take me a minute.

Continue reading “Dereliction of duty” →

Clown show

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Treating THEVIRUSTHEVIRUSTHEVIRUS!!!™ with precisely the gravity it merits.

The Oregon Health Authority, offering a public service announcement for Halloween, featured two doctors dressed in costumes, with one dressed as a clown while she announced the daily death statistics and new cases of COVID-19 in the state.

Wearing a red tie, polka dot shirt, bright yellow pants, and a clown face made from makeup, senior health advisor and pediatrician Dr. Claire Poche stated:

Hello. I’m Dr. Claire Poche. I’m a general pediatrician and also a senior health advisor here at the Oregon Health Authority. I’m here with Shimi Sharief, my colleague, who’s also a senior health advisor, and we thought we’d start by giving you a quick update on where we are as a state with COVID-19. As of today, there have been 38,160 cases of COVID-19 in Oregon, with 390 new cases being reported today. Sadly, we are also reporting three deaths today, bringing the statewide total for COVID-19 related deaths to 608.

I know I said I was going to resist embedding any more Tweets from now on unless it was absolutely necessary, but I think we can all agree that in this instance, it most certainly is.



It’s not a good idea; it’s a fucking great idea. I mean, come on: even confirmed clown Lori Lightfoot will never top this.

The binding chains of history

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This one’s going to require a lot of excerpting, but I’m not going to tuck any of it under the fold. It needs to be up front and in easy viewing reach, in its entirety.

Seated at his kitchen table, finishing off the remains of a Saturday breakfast, Hunter Hollingsworth’s world was rocked by footsteps on his front porch and pounding at the door, punctuated by an aggressive order: “Open up or we’ll kick the door down.”

Surrounded on all sides of his house, and the driveway blocked, Hollingsworth was the target of approximately 10 federal and state wildlife officials packing pistols, shotguns and rifles. And what was Hollingsworth’s crime? Drugs, armed robbery, assault, money laundering? Not quite.

Months prior, in 2018, the Tennessee landowner removed a game camera secretly strapped to a tree on his private land by wildlife officials in order to monitor his activity without apparent sanction or probable cause. Repeat: Hollingsworth’s residence was searched by U.S. government and state officials, dressed to the nines in assault gear, seeking to regain possession of a trail camera—the precise camera they had surreptitiously placed on his private acreage after sneaking onto his property at night, loading the camera with active SD and SIM cards, and zip-tying the device roughly 10’ high up a tree—all without a warrant.

Can the government place cameras and monitoring equipment on a private citizen’s land at will, or conduct surveillance and stakeouts on private land, without probable cause or a search warrant? Indeed, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) interpretation of the Fourth Amendment. Welcome to Open Fields.

The vast majority of Americans assume law enforcement needs a warrant to carry out surveillance, but for roughly a century, SCOTUS has ruled that private land—is not private. Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures” expressed in the Bill of Rights only apply to an individual’s immediate dwelling area, according to SCOTUS.

However, SCOTUS’ Open Fields doctrine has been bucked in Mississippi, Montana, New York, Oregon and Vermont through protections granted by state constitutions, and for many American landowners, the more they discover about Open Fields—the more questions they have regarding the bounds of government power.

In Tennessee, Hollingsworth and Terry Rainwaters, another landowner who discovered multiple trail cameras on his property placed by the state, are taking their cases to state court, claiming violations of the Tennessee State Constitution. The Rainwaters and Hollingsworth stories contain alarming claims regarding the behavior of wildlife officials and raise a bevy of questions over Open Fields, states’ rights, and the sanctity of private property.

It shouldn’t be shocking, I know. All of us should be fully cognizant by now of the boundless reach of the State, at every level. Certainly this past summer has provided confirmation aplenty of even the wildest, most out-there conspiracy theories when it comes to the audacity and omnipotence of the almighty government. Nonetheless, somehow, I have to admit to being shocked by this one.

On bottomland squeezed in the rolling hills of northwest Tennessee’s Benton County, a short walk from the banks of the Big Sandy River, Terry Rainwaters, 53, owns 136 acres of land containing two homes, farmland and an equipment shed. Rainwaters and his son, Hunter Rainwaters, 20, live in one of the homes; a tenant occupies the other. The acreage is the physical center of Rainwaters’ life—a small place to farm, hunt and reside—with one way in, one way out, and a gate that stays locked, backed by “no trespassing” and “posted” signs.

On his way to hunt on his father’s land during the first week of December 2017, Hunter Rainwaters was driving a side-by-side through the property when he noticed an oddity positioned roughly 4’ off the ground. He popped the brakes, backed toward the object and looked in surprise at a trail camera belted to a tree.

“I didn’t see any words or stickers on it, but I knew right away it wasn’t ours,” Hunter Rainwaters recalls.

Following the hunt, he drove back onto the family property and spotted a second trail camera attached to a tree with several branches removed to allow for an unimpeded lens view. Rainwaters dialed his father’s cellphone, and described the two cameras: “I was shaken up when my son called and I knew immediately it had to be the TWRA (Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency),” Rainwaters recalls.

Deeply disturbed, Rainwaters arrived home later in the afternoon and took a look at the two cameras, mulling over whether to remove the pair. Two days later, with Rainwaters in limbo on what action to take—both cameras disappeared.

“Ask TWRA how many cameras they have on people’s private land right now watching their every move,” Rainwaters says. “I’ll bet they won’t answer that question and we all know why. No warrants, no judge, and no crime necessary, just set up surveillance and do whatever they want to.”

And guess what. Go on, just guess.

(Farm Journal asked TWRA multiple questions related to the use of trail cameras in surveilling Tennessee residents, including, but not limited to: Does TWRA have a list of past camera locations and current, active cameras? Who in TWRA is allowed to view the footage? How long are the cameras allowed to operate in place? Does TWRA recommend prosecution for a landowner for breaking or removing a camera? TWRA declined comment: “The Agency cannot comment on matters in litigation, nor can we provide comment on issues that are currently being litigated.” TWRA directed all questions to the Tennessee Attorney General’s office. However, the Tennessee AG office declined comment.)

Okay, I’m NOT shocked by that. Not in the least, I ain’t. But now we accelerate right on past merely shocked, to flat-out pissed the fuck off.

The vast majority of Americans assume law enforcement needs a warrant to carry out surveillance, but for roughly a century, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has ruled that private land—is not so private. Fourth Amendment protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures” expressed in the Bill of Rights only apply to an individual’s immediate dwelling and curtilage, according to SCOTUS. Curtilage is an arcane term loosely translated as the area directly around a home, or the yard.

In 1924, Hester v. United States set up the Open Fields framework and said the U.S. Constitution does not extend to most land: “the special protection accorded by the Fourth Amendment to the people in their ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects,’ is not extended to the open fields.” Significantly, Open Fields is translated beyond its literal sense, and basically is defined as general acreage: woods, fields, farmland, barren ground, and more.

Further, in 1984, SCOTUS gave additional strength to Open Fields in Oliver v. United States: “open fields do not provide the setting for those intimate activities that the Amendment is intended to shelter from government interference or surveillance. There is no societal interest in protecting the privacy of those activities, such as the cultivation of crops, that occur in open fields.”

Disturbing, infuriating, and downright frightening as it is, you need to read all of it. Once you have, you need to do another thing. Distasteful and unpleasant as they are, you must accept and internalize a few realities:

  • You have ONLY whatever liberty Government deigns to allow—which liberty may be denied, wholly or in part, summarily and at Government’s whim, with neither notice nor explanation
  • You have NO rights
  • You have NO privacy
  • You have NO security
  • You own NOTHING, and “private property” is a misnomer; it is NOT private, and is under the control NOT of the putative “owner” but of the State
  • You are NOT in any meaningful sense a “citizen” of the US and your state of residence; you are the wholly-owned PROPERTY of those entities

One needn’t be in the least doubt as to what Thomas Jefferson would have had to say after discovering government surveillance cameras strapped onto trees around Monticello—placed there clandestinely, his permission unsought, by trespassing government spies skulking about in the night like contemptible house-burglars. But it is incumbent upon us—upon ALL of us—to ponder his inevitable response to such an affront thoroughly, and most gravely.

Jefferson and his fellow Founders would have been apoplectic, of course. But there’s no reason at all to think any of them would have been shocked. Those men had a deep and thorough understanding of exactly what government, ALL government, really is. Of how every government throughout history—no matter how well-intentioned, carefully conceived and constructed, and competently administrated—eventually devolves into corruption, despotism, and petty bureaucratic abuse. Having been schooled in the classroom of first-hand experience, they paid strictest attention to the lessons taught there.

Alas, their complacent and oblivious descendants have done no such thing. The lessons of history having been ignored, the explicit warnings of far-wiser ancestors spurned, the inattentive students wound up in precisely the straits foretold for them. Not really shocking at all, is it?

Another victim of Fauxvid tyranny

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Well, damn.

Ninety years after it opened its doors for the first time, Nat Sherman is closing down. Nat Sherman International Inc., which has been owned by cigarette giant Altria Group Inc. since 2017, will cease operations by the end of September, shutting down not only its midtown Manhattan cigar store but also its entire wholesale business.

The decision comes several months after Altria began looking for a potential buyer for the cigar subsidiary; the company announced it was considering the sale of Nat Sherman International Inc. in October.

“We worked hard to successfully transition Nat Sherman International to a new home. The Covid-19 pandemic created new challenges that were unfortunately too big to overcome,” said Jessica Pierucki, general manager, managing director for Nat Sherman.

Back in the 90s there was a little Nat Sherman store on Broadway, if I remember right, a couple of blocks from Union Square. I was working at Cheap Jacks close by at the time, and used to stop in on the walk to work now and then to grab a pack of their cigarillos, which I liked a lot. Hate to hear they’re gone. But this is only one of many, many chapters in an ever-lengthening tale, with no happy ending in sight.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

Bad cop, no donut

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Remember last night when I said as a general thing, I don’t have any problem with cops?

There are exceptions to that general rule. This would certainly be one of them.

A video showing a police officer arguing with a group of Orthodox Jews in a New York town has drawn angry reactions from people online, who see it as evidence of persecution and harassment of the US Jewish community.

The confrontation apparently happened in Monsey, a place in Rockland County famous as a major center of Orthodox Judaism in the US. It shows a police officer standing on the doorstep of a house, engaged in a heated argument with a group of people, one of whom apparently owns the property.

The officer says his patrol was responding to a complaint about cars parked in front of the house and noticed that a gathering of more than 10 people was underway inside, which he called “an issue.”

Perhaps so. It wouldn’t be in America, but this obviously is not that place. Not even close, it ain’t.

The owner, who is dressed as an Orthodox Jew, disagrees that “a few friends” calmly coming together is an issue requiring police intervention. Both parties speak angrily, suggesting that the dispute has been going on for some time without progress. It was not immediately clear how the situation was resolved.

The argument apparently stems from Covid-19 social distancing rules that are in place in the county. A gathering of over 10 people would not be allowed in a public space – even a park – in the town of Ramapo, to which Monsey belongs.

Orthodox Jews in the US, as well as in other parts of the world, have been notably resistant to lockdowns designed to slow the spread of infection. They say the rules are incompatible with their religious practices.

Oh, it’s a lot bigger than that; the Fauxvid clampdown edicts are incompatible with the most fundamental values and ideals of the former US—every last one of them. Actually, they’re not just incompatible with those values; they are a direct violation of them. Which of right ought to be considered wholly unacceptable—the stuff of uprisings and overthrows, of pitchforks, torches, and state and local would-be despots swinging by their necks from trees and lampposts in every place these unlawful edicts, enforced by Gestapo/Stasi tactics, are imposed.

Sadly, if there’s one thing we all should have learned by now, it’s that if you don’t immediately rise up and shut such goddamned outrages down, you’ll be getting more of them until such time as you do. You either nip the insidious weed of tyranny in the bud with a quickness, or you watch it grow until the garden of liberty has been taken over and strangled to death by it. Sorry and all, but there simply is no middle ground here.

Now why don’t all you fascist-fellating panic ninnies out there just go ahead and tell me the fairy tale claiming this arrant horseshit is aaallll about a virus (because BE SAAAFE!!!) again. That one’s my favorite.

Mask on, mask (never) off

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You weren’t really fool enough to think they were ever going to take the jack-boot off of our necks, were you?

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said on Wednesday that the state will extend Phase 3 of the coronavirus reopening plan for three more weeks.

The state moved into Phase 3 on Oct. 2. Phase 3 allowed bars, amusement parks and movie theaters to reopen, but with limits on capacity and rules about social distancing and face coverings.

And in three weeks, there’ll be another extension. Count on it, people. But hey, at least I was wrong when I predicted that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas would be suffering the same ignoble fate as Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and etc, wasn’t I?

Ummm. Kinda.

Halloween is not canceled, but the NC Department of Health and Human Services has recommended that people take precautions such as not sending kids out door-to-door to solicit candy.

The state also notes that having kids reach into a bowl for candy is a high-risk activity that should be discouraged. Large indoor Halloween or costume parties are also a bad idea.

Okay, I guess “recommended” is at least somewhat better than “forbidden.” In Amerika v2.0, we gotta take whatever scraps and crumbs our benevolent masters deign to throw us, it seems.

Free advice, from me to you: if you own a small business in a Democommie shitrapy like NC, particularly in the bar/restaurant/entertainment industry, and it hasn’t collapsed around your and your employees’ ears already: permanently shut that thing the fuck down IMMEDIATELY. I do not mean next month. I do not mean next week. I do not mean tomorrow. I mean friggin’ yesterday. Close the doors, bar the windows, and never look back.

If you can somehow conjure up a gullible, wet-behind-the-ears nimrod to buy the business off you, then sell it for whatever the mark is willing to give you. Don’t negotiate, don’t haggle, just take the sucker’s cash and run. Better to bite that bullet and take your financial lumps now, before things get even worse, which they almost certainly will. Then quickly move away to one of the handful of relatively free states that still remain, while that’s something you’re still permitted to do without being penalized for it. Take some small comfort in having denied Kount Koopula the opportunity to bleed you for any more of your hard-earned in taxes, fees, licenses, and the like, and be glad you escaped without further damage.

“Is the nation’s top law enforcement agency protecting society from sociopaths or is the bureau itself sociopathic?”

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Take a wild guess.

After 9/11, the FBI spent few years going after very petty Islamists while covering its collective eyes to the work of major sources of trouble, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestinian Authority, and Saudi Arabia—each beloved by parts of the ruling class. But before and after this period, these profiles more often than not pointed to the ruling class’ favorite enemy: fellow Americans “excessively concerned with their liberties.”

The FBI’s method? Place agents among the target group, stoke their sentiments, and lead them to say or do something that could be characterized as a crime, then arrest them and claim credit for foiling a plot. In intelligence lingo, that is provocation. In legal terms, it’s entrapment. By whatever name, this is the work of cheap, dirty cops.

In the 1950s, the joke was that any meeting of a Communist Party cell in the New York area was likely to consist of two-thirds infiltrators, half from the FBI and the other half from the New York Police Department. But these FBI infiltrators, like those of the Vietnam era in the 1960s and early ’70s, and like those who penetrated organized crime were merely watching. Doing an honest job. They were not provoking or entrapping, not creating something that would never have been there except for their presence.

Fast forward to our time. The contrast between how the FBI behaves with regard to persons connected to the ruling class and those who are not speaks for itself. The 918 Americans who died in mass suicide in Jonestown Guyana in November 1978 were victims of a cult that had been closely associated with the California Democratic Party. Relatives of the people who were being drawn in had complained to the FBI. But the FBI had refused to keep an eye on the movement, and later officially argued that doing so would have infringed on its political and religious liberties.

And yet when the Tea Party movement arose to protest collusion between the Republican and Democratic parties against popular sentiment on a host of political issues, the FBI rushed to infiltrate it.

The FBI has been corrupt since its inception, and it always will be. Its officials, both high and humble, conspired to first rig and then reverse a legitimate election via a plethora of obviously illegal and unethical acts, for which they will suffer no consequences whatsoever. It is a rogue, unaccountable, out of control agency whose continued existence in any nation that dares to flatter itself with empty platitudes about “liberty” and “the rule of law” is an abomination. It should be dismantled. Period.

Update! Let’s not leave this out.

One of the strangest details of the exclusive New York Post story involving the recovered data from a computer linked to Hunter Biden is the story of the laptop itself and what is alleged about it. You can read about the evidence alleging that Hunter Biden was trading influence with foreign actors in Matt Margolis’s piece here. But what also interested me was the part of the NYP investigation where they claim there’s a sex tape and pornographic photos starring Hunter on the laptop—and the FBI knew about it in December.

Let’s forget for a moment that there’s reportedly a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack and romping with hookers on the laptop. That’s par for the course, isn’t it?

What about the part where the FBI had possession of this information back in December? Why didn’t the FBI come forward with this evidence about Hunter Biden’s emails, which appear to show collusion and influence-trading? Isn’t that something they should have told the president or members of Congress? Was the FBI deliberately covering it up? If the good citizen who came forward and alerted the FBI of the contents of the laptop had not made a copy of the information, it would still be under FBI lock and key. But the computer repairman did make a copy and sent it to Rudy Giuliani. If true, it’s a stunning indictment of the FBI that an American citizen—who alerted them to alleged multiple crimes involving a guy with the last name Biden—knew not to trust them and made other arrangements should they try to cover it up (which, apparently, they did).

That, too, is par for the course.

Fireflying in an Alliance lockdown

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We’re too close for comfort.

As the “two weeks to flatten the curve” Wuhan virus pandemic has stretched to “you’ll be free when we say so and we may never let you go to church or synagogue again,” many of us have turned to TV to fill the hours and help us mark the days. Woke sports provide no respite from the social civil war anymore. TV is mostly mental poison these days, but not entirely. Firefly is flying again, with all its episodes available on Hulu. I’ve turned to re-re-re-watching Firefly over the past week or two. It’s not as good as I remember it being when I first watched it. It’s better now. 

Firefly is a spaghetti Western set on the edges of a galaxy still in turmoil, much like The Mandalorian is now. Firefly has trains and cattle drives and heists, and it probably shouldn’t work. But it does. Capt. Mal christens his beat up but mostly reliable ship Serenity after a climactic but losing battle, despite knowing the very name will raise suspicions about him and his crew with the Alliance and its operatives. He’s more loyal to the cause than it was loyal to him, but that’s just who he is.

Nowadays, we have the government of California telling its residents they must wear a mask between bites when they go out to eat and they won’t be allowed to buy gas-powered cars in a few years. New York is snooping on Orthodox Jews to make sure they’re not gathering in large numbers to pray — while violent riots are allowed night after night whenever they spring up in any Democrat-run city. The NBA denounces America while it turns a blind eye to slavery enforced by its corporate partners in Beijing. This is all asinine and unconstitutional and wrong. The Alliance just keeps creeping in on us, spoiling for a fight in some Serenity Valley.

Because the network ruined its one shot at broadcast glory, Whedon and company wrapped up what they planned to take place over several seasons into the one film, Serenity. That film feels a little compressed compared to the series, but it’s consistent in character and message. Serenity also has a message that offers some grit in our time of plague: “You can’t stop the signal.”

Tech tyrants Facebook and Twitter tried stopping the NY Post signal this week. That blew up in their faces, as it should, and as Serenity predicted it would. 

Oh, did it now? Tell me, how many have left Twitter for Gab or Parler? Did the Malignancy Twins suddenly reverse their censorship and election-tampering policies to allow a truly free, open, and impartial platform, and I just missed the announcement? Did they reinstate Trump’s, McEnany’s, and the Republican Congressmen’s accounts? Are they allowing people to Tweet and re-Tweet the NY Post expose all of a sudden? Have they had their protected status under S230 duly revoked, as it damned well ought to be?

No? To ALL of that? Well, hey, get back to me when it truly HAS “blown up in their faces” then, ‘kay? Until such time, it’s safe to say that the signal has indeed been stopped.

Settling the accounts

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Malpractice.

So, now that we know lockdowns have prompted an international tragedy comparable only to miseries suffered in times of war, and that almost none of it was warranted, who pays?

Three guesses, first two don’t etc.

Will the unrepentant taskmasters of “social distancing” be forced to defend this disastrous Stone Age-era approach to a world in despair? How can small business owners in states demolished by capricious decrees imposed by power-hungry governors seek recompense?

Who will ask Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx to step away from the media spotlight long enough to witness first-hand the dystopian climate their guidance has created on desperate college campuses or the empty hallways in high schools or vacant kindergarten classrooms?

Wrong question. The right one: why the hell does either of them still have a job?

Fauci, after all, again this week bragged that he advised the president back in March to “shut the country down.” His only regret is that the country wasn’t shut down “completely.”

But Fauci isn’t living with the repercussions of his wrongheaded advice. To the contrary, he still receives fawning media coverage and now is embroiled in a battle with Team Trump over the use of his comments in a campaign ad. Ironically, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out in an editorial on Tuesday, Trump might lose the election because the president “listened to Dr. Fauci too much on lockdowns.”

Birx just warned that holiday family gatherings might be iced as she pondered aloud “how to bring that safety into the household.”

The “science!” and the experts we heeded in a moment of crisis turned out to be dead wrong; the world will suffer the aftermath for years to come. And their legions of victims deserve answers and accountability or, at the very least, an apology.

Quoth Judge Smails:



Liberty not defended is liberty lost

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This. This right here. X eleventymillionbajilliongazillionkadillion.

I am so grateful that President Trump is on the mend. As Mark pointed out last week on The Mark Steyn Show, the Chinese coronavirus has actually affected the leaders of three out of seven G-7 countries: Boris Johnson, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau (wife of PM Justin Trudeau) and now President and Melania Trump. That’s a very worrisome number. Without firing a single shot, the evil Chinese government has directly threatened the lives of our leaders, all the while murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents with their repulsive biological warfare.

As Mark put it, the virus (whether it was lab or wet-market born doesn’t matter) is a declaration of war. It is cowardly, ridiculous and pathetic that after almost seven months, we still aren’t discussing this seriously. In fact, the only things we in the West have been taking seriously are the disgusting, totalitarian, Chinese-inspired lockdown policies. We are destroying our lives for nothing. We are ignoring the New Cold War at our peril.

Every single person needs to reject “the new normal”. It’s the “new normal” of Communist China, terrorizing citizens and attempting to regulate everything about our lives, including the bits of food that we chew in our mouths. It’s repulsive.

Demand the regular normal. Every one of us mad about this needs to force our leaders to accept that terrorizing us about “cases” – and not hospitalizations and deaths – cannot go on. “Hospitalizations and deaths are the proper measure.” They must also be forced to admit and act on the fact that there is another way to manage this.

As has been widely documented, the “cure” (and it is certainly not a cure) is worse than the disease. We must, as President Trump rightly and bravely advised, stop living in fear, because it’s no way to live. We must focus our efforts on turning the tide of submissive, “safetyism” and understand that in addition to the physical ailments it causes, the Wuhan Chinese Communist Coronavirus has a very dangerous and deep ideological payload. That’s what we are up against. Are you up for the fight? The November election is a big part of this fight and we need to win. As Mark quoted Rush Limbaugh: there is no plan B.

No, there really isn’t. But as things continue to go ever more pear-shaped with every passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that the 2020 election, that ANY election, is not going to fix this. Laura links to a thread by the brilliant John Hayward, whose self-ghettoization to the Twitter shitpit—rather than carrying on with the longer-form blog posts he started out with back in his Doc Zero days—frustrates the hell outta me, blast it. Happily, though, there’s always good ol’ Threadreader to help me cope with that annoyance.

The Wuhan coronavirus carries a heavy ideological payload of conformity and submission to authority. The Chinese are aggressively using it to promote their model of fascism. Others of an authoritarian bent are making political use of it as well.

The basic idea that the virus is a form of divine punishment for failing to implement and obey the “right” policies is clearly false – there are far too many case surges in places that did everything “right” – but it’s irresistible for believers in centralized authority.
 
It also has some appeal to the public, because they want a frightening and confusing epidemic to be made simpler. Do X, Y, and Z and you won’t get the virus; if you got the virus, you must have failed to do X, Y, and Z. It’s comforting because it’s simpler than the truth.

This is a very old compulsion, going all the way back to using supernatural mythology to explain the weather and natural disasters. Please the gods and there will be no famine; if there is famine, you must have displeased the gods. We hunger for simplicity and assurance.

The inherent problem with such ways of thinking is they invite mob psychosis. People who think famine was caused by displeasing the gods become violently angry at suggestions to the contrary. Those who profit from the enforced belief system will eagerly fan the flames of anger.

The enforced belief system quickly acquires heavy moral overtones. Obedience is righteous; disobedience is sinful and evil. Debates become one-sided crusades. Information that contradicts the simplified, moralistic belief system is suppressed.

Human beings have a great appetite for living this way. It’s not entirely irrational. People working hard to provide for their families just want to know a simple formula for living safely, a clear set of procedures they can follow to make everything be okay.

The coronavirus is dangerously useful to people who want to create fusions of ideology and morality, people who seek to forcibly restore faith in authority after it fell to an all-time low, and those who assert the superiority of centralized control over individual freedoms.

In truth, the big advantages authoritarians have in such a crisis is their callous disregard for individual lives and their ability to lie without consequence. China was trapping sick people in their homes by welding the doors shut. They quarantined cities bigger than New York.

And of course they constantly lie about how many cases and deaths they really had, and even though everyone knows they’re lying, everyone implicitly treats the lies as truth by only comparing more honest and open societies in their “worst coronavirus responses” analysis.

You really don’t want to live under any of the authoritarian regimes that claim to have done a bang-up job of handling the coronavirus. Even if their claims were true – and they aren’t – you wouldn’t want to live through the measures they imposed on outbreak areas.

What the coronavirus DID reveal in many Western societies was bureaucratic sclerosis, bloated agencies that forgot about their core missions, hyper-politicization, and media-driven panicky stampedes. We should address those problems without becoming MORE authoritarian.

Indeed we should have. Alas, that ship left the dock and floated off beyond the visible horizon and away along about, oh, mid-April or thereabouts.

The sad reality is that the only truly “novel” thing about the Novel Coronavirus was the lowing complaisance Americans allowed themselves to collapse into in response to opportunistic and illegitimate official authoritarianism, enabled by what was quickly revealed as a grotesquely-oversold flu bug. Reclaiming any semblance of liberty after such a grievous error will be a long and arduous struggle—assuming such a thing is even possible in the first place, without requiring a surfeit of bloodshed and misery to accomplish it.

Update! The precedent is the problem.

Once whatever challenges Americans face are declared medical emergencies, it now appears they have no constitutional rights. All individual actions can now be controlled by executive fiat. If behavior that runs contrary to the objectives of America’s most powerful establishment institutions can be declared a pathology, the inconvenience of due process can be discarded. They’ll just put you in an asylum and throw away the key. They’ll lock you down. They’ll tell you where you can go, who you can see, what products you can consume, and what content you can watch.

Anyone who doubts this need only consider the events of the past nine months. A two-week “lockdown” to “slow the spread” has turned into a catastrophic shutdown with no end in sight. The entire nation has been turned into a medically supervised asylum as corporate elites mop up what’s left of independent businesses. Whatever chances America ever had of crawling out of debt have been drowned by trillions in new federal borrowing. Life in America may never be the same again.

The scariest thing about this medical usurpation of the constitutional rights of Americans is the precedent it has set. One may argue forever over whether or not the COVID-19 virus required this level of lockdown, but at least it was a virus. At least it was a genuine medical challenge. If this virus didn’t actually merit these measures, perhaps the next one will. But what if any agenda of social control can be medicalized?

Medicalization of political issues is sort of like the liberal rhetoric of compassion but more potent. It provides a powerful tool for self-aggrandizing opportunists, in an irony that utterly escapes rank and file liberals. For example, low-income multi-family housing, imposed scattershot into neighborhoods that were previously 100 percent single-family homes, offers financial windfalls to tax-subsidized investors. But now the hard-working residents who just want the people they live around to pay the same prices they did, and make the same sacrifices they did, aren’t just personally defamed as racists. Now they’re said to be suffering from a collective pathology. The cure, demanded because this is a health emergency, will undermine if not virtually erase their standing in court to object. Investors get rich. Residents get ruined. Racism is supposedly cured.

The Soviet Union also redefined dissent as pathology, ie, a mental disorder. PRO TIP: that is not a coincidence.

The “climate emergency” is also moving swiftly towards being defined as a health emergency, with all the streamlining of process and obliteration of constitutional rights inherent in such a declaration. It isn’t hard to see where this is going: micromanagement of virtually everything people do. To justify this, America’s elites, looking down from lofty heights, see a nation with a pathological need to overindulge in resource consumption. Sustainable options abound to address potential resource scarcity—clean natural gas, nuclear power, biomass conversion, hydropower, indoor agriculture, desalination, and eventually, commercial fusion. And of course, mass immigration is not inevitable, it’s a policy choice. More resources, slower population growth. Problem solved. But these options don’t allow opportunistic special interests to make more profit. They don’t allow America’s establishment elites to amass more power.

Everything put in place to combat the COVID pandemic is furthering the creation of a medical slave state. A medical emergency was declared, everyone was told to go on lockdown, and with fitful exceptions, everyone went on lockdown. The population is now desensitized to the term “lockdown.” That a medical emergency can erase constitutional rights is now a fact, not conjecture. And the technology of surveillance and control has taken a giant leap forward with contact tracing, facial recognition, the inevitable tiers of privileges that will be attendant to individual vaccination status, and the fact that the American people, by and large, accept this.

And THAT RIGHT THERE is our biggest problem of all—one that may prove to be insuperable, and ultimately lead to our undoing.

President Trump, on three critical issues—the pandemic, systemic racism, and climate change—has been a consistent voice of common sense. This fact, that Trump opposes alarmist overreaction to these issues, and without fear or hesitation exposes the hidden agendas behind the overreaction, is the real reason he is bitterly opposed by every establishment institution in America. President Trump is one of America’s last hopes to reverse the permanent medicalization of public policy, bypassing the constitution.

No one man can reverse all this, and none but a fool would hope for such. Wiser heads always recognized that Trump could only stave off the crisis temporarily, thereby providing a brief opportunity to brace ourselves for the coming firestorm.

FUD update! Fear is a weapon, and a mighty one at that. But it cannot be successfully wielded without the permission of those under its sway.

Democrats champion masks because masks acknowledge the rule of fear. They’re symbols of subordination and surrender — yes, subordination to fear of a germ, and surrender of rights and freedoms. In this scheme, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are to be scrapped in favor of contentment with security — however illusory — under the watchful eye and guiding hand of corporatist big government, which, of course, is to be led by the cabal that Biden fronts.
 
You see, fear is a means. It’s a weapon in the hands of Democrats. The mainstream media are eager henchmen. Power lust drives Democrats to use fear to gain what they covet. A virus, like a crisis, isn’t to be wasted.  A contagion that helps manufacture a crisis is too tempting to pass up. Exacerbating fears, and full-on exploitation of whatever may stress the human spirit, are practically trademarked by cynical Democrats.

Fear has always been an ally to tyrants, whatever the stripe. How dreary that fact, and how tragic the history of the last century, in particular. Red terrors, pogroms, Kristallnacht, and Cultural Revolutions are the dramatic manifestations of weaponized fear. But there are more mundane applications of fear. With learning, experience, and advancements, tyrants are honing the means.

Tyranny is showing a blander face nowadays. Stalin’s stern look and Hitler’s glowering expression have given way to the corporate cool of Xi Jingping or the facelessness of U.S. corporate, sports, and education leaders who operate in a loose confederacy to impose “progressive” orthodoxy. Or via the checked-out expression of the Democrats propped up standard-bearer.

Submit and behave well, admonish today’s autocrats, or you won’t have a job, your reputation will be trashed, and your kids won’t have a future. Sound familiar?  What other is cancel culture, now being practiced on these shores? A kid with a MAGA cap, Nick Sandmann, can attest to news outlets eagerness to destroy his future. How many Americans do their jobs in silence, dreading that one remark, one act of independence, can cost them their incomes?

Cancel culture is no more than a stop on the road to a greater smothering of rights and liberty.     

He reels off another good line towards the end: “Courage is requisite to freedom.” Yes indeed. T’was ever thus, and ever shall be.

Hotting up

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It’s about fucking time.

Federal agents said Thursday they thwarted a plot to violently overthrow the government as well as kidnap and harm Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — a conspiracy that included visits to her home in northern Michigan and training with firearms and explosive devices.

The alleged plot mainly involved six conspirators unhappy in part about Whitmer’s coronavirus restrictions, calling her a “tyrant.” They wanted to create a “self-sufficient” society free from they called unconstitutional state governments and discussed plans to storm the Capitol and take hostages, according to FBI documents filed in court.

Organizers allegedly met starting in June, including at a Second Amendment rally in Lansing and in a Grand Rapids shop basement accessed through a secret door hidden under a rug.

The plot also included at least seven members of a Michigan militia known as the Wolverine Watchmen accused by state officials on Thursday of targeting police, making threats to “instigate civil war” and helping to plan Whitmer’s kidnapping, according to state and federal officials. 

The militiamen are, of course, correct: Whitler IS a tyrant, plain and simple. If there’d been any doubt about that before she brazenly declared her intention to defy a Michigan Supreme ruling officially confirming her tyrant-straight-up status, there damned sure can’t be any now.

The federal court filing alleges the conspirators twice conducted surveillance at Whitmer’s personal vacation home in northern Michigan and discussed kidnapping her to a “secure location” in Wisconsin to stand “trial” for treason prior to the Nov. 3 election.

“Several members talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor,” an FBI agent wrote in the affidavit. “The group decided they needed to increase their numbers and encouraged each other to talk to their neighbors and spread their message.”

If they’re tyrants, it ain’t murder. It’s no more than justice—a concept to which “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” to borrow a pertinent phrase, has rendered all too many Americans insensible.

After the charges were revealed, Whitmer slammed President Donald Trump for failing to condemn in strong enough terms hate groups, such as the far-right Proud Boys, whom he told to “stand back and stand by” during the debate last week.

“Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry, a call to action,” the Democratic governor said. 

Yeah, fuck you too. Here’s hoping we’ll eventually learn whether you can sing that same skrawky tune of yours with a nice, stout length of hemp around your neck, bitch.

She also warned those who threatened violence: “We will find you, we will hold you accountable and we will bring you to justice.”

Not if the Wolverine Watchmen, God bless ’em each and every one, catch up with your malignant ass first you won’t. On that most frabjous of days, you’ll get a long-overdue schooling on what “accountability” and “justice” REALLY mean, or did before you and a whole sorry pantload of other evil bureau-rats warped and perverted those fine words beyond any real meaning. And just in case anyone out there has any concerns about the propriety or morality of such seemingly radical steps as these, may I remind one and all:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

Seems clear enough to me.

Incongruous update! Well, that got weird awful quick.

Several media outlets, including the New York Times and the UK Daily Mail have attempted to cast the individuals as “right-wing” and “Trump supporters,” but at least one suspect, Brandon Caserta, held views more nuanced than that.

Breitbart News reviewed Caserta’s Facebook profile shortly before it was deleted.

In several YouTube videos, Caserta opined about rights and the illegitimacy of government.

“The Constitution is illegitimate,” he said in one posted on May 16, 2020, which was removed after Caserta’s account was terminated.

“Authority doesn’t exist, dude,” Caserta said, seated in front of an anarchist flag, “and, like, the law doesn’t exist.”

Other videos, including some Breitbart News reviewed on Caserta’s Facebook page prior to deletion, the suspect criticized the police, calling them “obedient order-followers.”

Hmmmm. FBI false-flag op, perhaps?

Something rotten update! Stinky, hinky, not on the up and up.

At least two of the six people indicted on Thursday were not right-wing militia members, Trump supporters, or Proud Boys, as Whitmer irresponsibly represented. According to information coming out on Thursday evening, one of the ring leaders of the plot is a leftist insurrectionist anarchist who hates President Trump. Another, Pete Musico, shares the same philosophy.

It makes you wonder what else do we not know about these Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Ty Garbin, Kaleb Franks, Case Daniel Harris, Brandon Caserta, and others up on state charges in Michigan.

Producer Robby Starbuck, Reddit, and probably 4Chan went to work to trace back the social media breadcrumbs left behind by the feds, who likely “disappeared” most of the social media footprints of the men who’d been charged.

Either the Michigan militia boys need to tighten up their recruitment and security sharp-ish, or that’s the cold, ghostly hand of a false-flag op I feel on my shoulder all of a sudden.

The tyranny of fear

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The esteemed and estimable Heather MacDonald bats around my new least-favorite phrase—Stay saaaafe!—safetyism generally, and asshat Frank Bruni specifically, like so many cat toys.

We set highway speeding limits to maximize convenience at what we consider an acceptable risk to human life. It is statistically certain that every year, there will be tens of thousands of driving deaths. A considerable portion of those deaths could be averted by “following the science” of force and velocity and enforcing a speed limit of, say, 15 miles an hour. But we tolerate motor-vehicle deaths because we value driving 75 miles an hour on the highway, and up to 55 miles an hour in cities, more than we do saving those thousands of lives. When those deaths come—nearly 100 a day in 2019—we do not cancel the policy. Nor would it be logical to cancel a liberal highway speed because a legislator who voted for it died in a car accident.

We could reduce coronavirus transmission to zero by locking everyone in a separate cell until a vaccine was developed. There are some public-health experts who from the start appeared ready to implement such radical social distancing. The extent to which we veer from that maximal coronavirus protection policy depends on how we value its costs and the competing goods: forgone life-saving medical care and deaths of despair from unemployment and social isolation, on the one hand, and the ability to support one’s family through work and to build prosperity through entrepreneurship, on the other. The advocates of maximal lockdowns have rarely conceded such trade-offs, but they are ever-present.

Under today’s safetyism mentality, sacrifice and risk-taking become unthinkable. The martial virtues of courage and stoicism have been sidelined and pathologized. When Trump briefly left Walter Reed on Sunday in a motorcade to greet supporters, a doctor at the hospital complained that the Secret Service agents in Trump’s limousine “might get sick. They may die.” These are the same Secret Service agents who are expected to take a bullet for a president. They were behind a plexiglass barrier in the car; all occupants were masked. Under our feminized ethos, showing resoluteness during a crisis, reassuring the public about one’s well-being, are no longer positive traits in a leader; they are violations of maximal risk aversion. (Of course, medical information about a president’s condition should be transparent.)

Reopening is still the right policy. Mandatory outdoor mask-wearing is merely a way for government to turn citizens into walking billboards of fear, sending the false message that danger is everywhere. Infection rarely leads to death. Most of the infected recover. Given his governmental duties, the surprise is that Trump—as president, another kind of front-line worker—has not gotten sick before now.

Last week, Trump gave a debate performance embodying what the Left likes to call toxic masculinity. Today, anticipating his departure from the hospital, Trump tweeted: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” The mainstream media blew its top, calling the tweet “dangerous,” “gross,” and “almost impossible to believe.” Let them fume. Trump is now modelling masculine leadership at its best: upbeat, rational, and unbowed.

Precisely so. And that’s also exactly why Proggy hates the man so viciously, with every fibre of his cowardly, emasculated being—the poor, sad little twerp-ass.

Be saaaafe!

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You got played, suckas.

If this video doesn’t get your blood pressure up after months of being forced to wear masks “for your safety,” then you’re probably dead already from the Chinese WuFlu (or at least that’s what the coroner scribbled on your death certificate).

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Representative Wendy Ullman (D-Bad People) were caught on a hot mic giggling about the “political theater” they were about to partake in at a press conference. Wolf is heard telling Ullman he’s going to take off his mask to speak while Ullman responds that she’s going to keep hers on for the cameras to make sure people see her in it. “I’m waiting so we can do a little political theater,” she says, laughing. “So it’s on camera!”

In other words, it’s all a game and you’re the butt of the joke. Enjoy this sh*tshow while I contemplate throwing a brick through a window somewhere.

Which will accomplish nothing whatsoever. Rather than ruining some poor schmo’s home or storefront to no good purpose, you might try throwing those bricks—and/or other needful things—at the heads of the dimestore dictators who’ve made such utter fools out of you, instead.

Update! The dimestore-iest dictator, the tinpotty-est tyrant of them all decrees: you bleating sheep either bend the knee, or you’ll feel the lash.

Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) announced on Tuesday that the city will “aggressively” move to enforce mask mandates and fine those who refuse to wear a face covering.

The mayor spoke about the continued actions in the city to combat the Chinese coronavirus, citing hundreds of additional city agency personnel handing out masks, encouraging testing, and “pushing back against misinformation.”

De Blasio also announced an additional enforcement measure: mask patrols.

“Anyone who is not wearing a face covering will be offered one, will be reminded it is required, and anyone who refuses to wear a face covering will be told that if they don’t put one on they will be fined, and anyone who still refuses will be fined,” he explained, noting that it will “happen aggressively.”

Oh, I’m quite confident it will, Herr Fuehrer. Tell us, though, what you intend to do once there aren’t any cops left in NYC to do your stormtroopin’ for you?

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