YIKES! – Page 2

Playing God

Posted on September 13, 2020September 13, 2020 by Mike

At first I was intrigued. Then it seemed kinda creepy. Then it seemed downright alarming.

On the International Space Station, clusters of nerve cells called mini-brains are developing in ways that scientists didn’t previously think was possible.

The organoids were grown from stem cells at the University of California, San Diego lab of biologist Alysson Muotri, before being packed into a box and shipped to space, where Muotri told The New York Times they’re likely “replicating like crazy.” Now, his team has found that the organoids are giving off brain waves — complex patterns of neural activity — similar to those of premature babies. It’s a bizarre finding that could force scientists to revisit the limitations of lab-grown mini-organs and the ethical issues surrounding them.

Muotri hooked the mini-brains up to spider-shaped robots to read their neural activity, according to the NYT. The findings could be a sign that scientists are approaching the capability to generate at least partially-conscious life in the lab — a development that’s long been little more than a speculative horror story in the field.

“The closer we come to his goal, the more likely we will get a brain that is capable of sentience and of feeling pain, agony and distress,” Christof Koch, chief scientist and president of the Allen Brain Institute, told the NYT.

Greeeaaaat. Cause, y’know, there just isn’t nearly enough pain, agony, and distress going around these days already. Right, genius?

“There are some of my colleagues who say, ‘No, these things will never be conscious,’” Muotri told the NYT. “Now I’m not so sure.”

Oh, this is just BOUND to end well.

If these brain waves are a sign that organoids could be capable of consciousness, neuroscientists will need to grapple with a major ethical dilemma — as continued experimentation would potentially mean creating and destroying self-aware, human-like life. But we may not be there yet, cautioned University of Southern California biologist Giorgia Quadrato, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

“It’s pretty amazing. No one really knew if that was possible,” Quadrato told the NYT, before clarifying that it didn’t conclude that the mini-brains reached human levels of activity.

“People will say, ‘Ah, these are like the brains of preterm infants,’” she said. “No, they are not.”

Like you really, truly know that. Like you could EVER really know it for certain. Like you can predict where it will all lead in the end.

I’m by no means opposed to science and research, of course. And in research, a certain amount of risk is essential, a certain boldness a fundamental job qualification. But in this instance, I suspect these folks might be messing around with things that are probably best left alone.

Holding back the Dismal Tide

Posted on September 3, 2020September 3, 2020 by Mike

Q: What happens if Trump loses? A: More, and worse.

In modern America, hypocrisy and double standards aren’t merely part of the business climate; they’re endemic to the whole society. Former Heritage Foundation scholar and Washington Times writer Sam Francis dubbed this system “anarcho-tyranny”: complete freedom—even exemption from the gravest laws—for the favored, maximum vindictive enforcement against the pettiest infractions by the disfavored.

Rarely has an analysis been so vindicated by events. Even before the 1619 Riots began in May, anarcho-tyranny was already the de facto law of the land. Can you remember the last time anyone in Antifa was punished for anything? I can’t. But I do remember community college adjunct philosophy professor and Antifa thug Eric Clanton walloping three people on the head with a five-pound iron bike lock—and the Alameda County, California district attorney letting him go with probation.

I also remember, in pre-apocalypse New York City, Antifa goons getting into a fight—it’s hard to say who started it—with a group of men calling themselves the Proud Boys. Although no one was seriously injured, the NYPD expended significant time and resources tracking down the Proud Boys, but none whatsoever looking for any Antifa figures involved. Two Proud Boys were sentenced to four years in prison. No Antifa members were ever identified, much less charged with any crime, still much less tried or convicted. At most, the incident was a mutually idiotic brawl for which only one side was punished. The real distinction here is that the Proud Boys are regime dissidents while Antifa thugs are ruling-class shock troops.

All that, though, was child’s play compared to the nightly horrors Antifa—and their BLM allies—have wreaked on America’s streets for three straight months with close to zero official attempt to rein them in, and often with officials cheering them on. Examples—from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to Governors Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, and Tim Walz, to Mayors Bill de Blasio, Eric Garcetti, Lori Lightfoot, Jenny Durkan, Ted Wheeler, and Jacob Frey—are too numerous to catalog fully. The latest atrocity came from Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, who, the instant a career criminal wanted on an active warrant was shot while resisting arrest and, it appears, reaching into his car for a knife, took to Twitter to fire up the mob. His state’s fourth-largest city has burned every night since. It took him days to make even a token appeal for calm.

Then consider the fates of those not destroying America in the name of “social justice.” This story is still “developing” as they say, but as of Friday, August 28, a young man who appears to have had a Molotov cocktail thrown at him, a loaded pistol pointed at his face, and his head bashed with a skateboard after being chased by three Antifa thugs is currently in jail on a charge of first-degree murder.

The fundamental right of self-defense—the bedrock foundation of all our other rights—increasingly is not honored if you’re a member of a disfavored group and your attacker is not.

Our officials—at least in all the Democratic Party-controlled state and local governments—operate in the precise opposite way that they are supposed to. Instead of enforcing the law and maintaining order, they encourage riots, refuse to enforce the law, and then leap into action only when a victim defends himself. This is not incompetence or misguided idealism; it is evil. Should it continue, it will lead either to the collapse of the country or to revolution.

To return to more prosaic matters, should Trump lose, the repowered thought police will greatly expand its “enemies list.” Those deemed “dangerous” by the wokerati will be dogged by authorities. Any suspected dissident not as scrupulous as Caesar’s wife in his every interaction with the state will get the book thrown at him for minor, technical infractions of some law, executive order, or administrative rule. As the poor sucker is hauled away in cuffs by a heavily armed team of feds in windbreakers, CNN and MSNBC reporters—tipped off in advance to get it all on camera—will intone that this “dangerous white supremacist” with “ties to neo-Nazi groups” was “planning attacks.” Months or years later, after being held without bail, the unfortunate target will be convicted of something like mail fraud and given the maximum sentence.

All of this is easy enough to predict because it is either what the Left is already doing where it has the power, or what it says it wants to do.

The lessons of California and New York show that when leftists no longer face opposition, they do whatever they want—or try to. The problem (for them, for now) is that they still face opposition from the red elements still extant in the federal government, from red states, and from red communities in their own states. Once the whole country has gone blue, though, things will be…different.

Don’t kid yourself for one moment that things couldn’t possibly get worse. The above is excerpted from the great Michael Anton’s latest book—at 14.99 for the Kindle version, not exactly cheap, but I’m gonna have to somehow scrounge up the wherewithal to get it nonetheless—and, sobering though it most definitely is, you very much need to read it all. There’s also a fine review of the book by no less a light than Angelo Codevilla which is well worth looking in on, too.

The plot thickens

Posted on August 23, 2020August 23, 2020 by Mike

Don’t call it paranoia, they really ARE out to get you.

“Traitors everywhere. [D] leadership in joint ops w/China [CCP] in effort to regain power? It was never about the virus,” wrote Q on July 31st.

Q then proceeded to explain the many advantages the virus brought the Democrats: It decimated the booming economy and laid off millions of workers, wrecking Trump’s great economic achievements. It stopped Trump’s huge campaign rallies, which showcased his popularity, and sheltered Biden from public appearances, limiting public exposure of his mental condition.

The lockdown also shifted focus from Biden’s burgeoning Ukraine scandal and offered him an excuse to refuse to debate. It encouraged state bailouts for New York and California, and increased the national debt, placing China in a controlling debt position in which it could regain leverage.

And, of course, the lockdown allowed the Democrats to relentlessly insist on mail-in ballots as the only safe voting option, thereby setting the stage for record-breaking fraud.

Q focuses on the significant date of January 15, 2020 on which three linked events happened: 1) After long delays, the House finally delivered impeachment articles to the Senate. 2) Trump and China signed a trade deal, which disadvantaged China. 3) The first COVID patient in America arrived from China at Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

The net effect of these developments was that the Democrats put on a big impeachment show, which drew attention away from the silent spread of COVID in America. And the Chinese, who had lost face and money, were reassured that they would soon prevail again.

Helping COVID to spread across America, Democratic politicians in New York and California, such as Nancy Pelosi and Mayor DiBlasio, urged crowds to come out and celebrate the Chinese New Year. Democratic governors like Andrew Cuomo and Phil Murphy forced COVID patients into nursing homes, quickly killing thousands of seniors, thereby driving up the death count that justified the lockdown. And, of crucial importance, Democratic politicians and their allies in the media and medical establishment demonized hydroxychloroquine and denied its use, cutting off access to life-saving treatment.

One of Q’s big themes is “Infiltration not invasion,” the notion that America has been sold to its enemies by powerful politicians and their donors, who gave China access without alarming the American people.

Preposterous; I’m SURE it’s all coincidence, every bit of it. Hey, who you gonna believe: the people who told you the Deep State didn’t exist? Or your own lyin’ eyes?

Add Q to the list of folks who need to be constantly checking their six.

Bane on the ballot

Posted on August 19, 2020August 19, 2020 by Mike

And he has a “D” after his name.

In Christopher Nolan’s 2012 film, “The Dark Knight Rises,” Bane the mercenary revolutionary emerges from the shadows after Gotham City has been at peace for eight years with a clear agenda: Destroy Gotham. He cannot abide seeing Gotham thrive.

A master of psychology and deception, Bane does not just ride into town with an army of evil henchmen. He does do that, and he even robs Gotham’s Wall Street, but mere financial gain is not his motive. He wants to turn Gotham inside out so that it devours itself, discrediting everything Gotham once stood for in the process.

Bane cloaks himself in the enticing language of social justice: “We come here not as conquerors but as liberators, to return control of this city to the people.”

He says this after commandeering a football stadium full of terrified citizens he is “liberating” from their freedom, after he has already murdered the mayor: one noble-sounding sentence in a paragraph of threats. He intends to liberate nothing, and destroy everything. He knows the language of social justice will fool enough gullible people long enough to keep them from stopping him.

Social justice language is powerful because it tugs at our human desire for fairness. It’s also a terrible lie. Selina Kyle—Catwoman—is initially won over by Bane’s tricks. At a lavish Wayne Manor party at the beginning of the film, Kyle tells billionaire Bruce Wayne whose side she is on. “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne,” she says seductively. “You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”

Kyle could have been a speechwriter for the Democratic Party. So could Bane. They both sound like a pastiche of Antifa, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and socialist Bernie Sanders, who lost the Democratic primary battle but has won the ideological war for the party’s soul.

Shhhyeah, right. Like that coven of Commie bloodsuckers has a soul.

Just stay home!

Posted on August 5, 2020August 5, 2020 by Mike

Shhhhhh.

If you are, like me, stuck in a state where coronavirus restrictions have turned your life upside down, bankrupted your business, and traumatized your kids, and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, you might be considering a big relocation. There are plenty of states that are retaining liberty in spite of the Chinese flu virus that has a 99% recovery rate. If you are considering fleeing your state for a new one, then look into the following five states that scored the highest in a data-collection study by the financial site WalletHub, showing which states have the fewest coronavirus restrictions. (Please note that coronavirus restrictions change daily. It is possible that by the time this is published one or more of these guidelines will have changed so verify before you pick up and move.)

After the list, she appends a “Whither Texas” update at the bottom that is, frankly, quite depressing.

Sadly, shockingly, Texas does not make the list of places I would move anymore. The left has taken over the major cities in Texas. Invaders from California, bringing their politics with them, have made Texas a place that needs major rehab. Coronavirus restrictions are also quite stringent and Texas ranked as the 46th-worst state for restrictions on freedom in the WalletHub study. That’s hard to believe, isn’t it? We should all consider that winning a presidency without Texas is going to be damn near impossible. So for that reason alone, it might be a place to move if your goal is moving to politically strategic places. But don’t expect an abundance of freedom in Texas. Those days are over.

It would seem so, alas. Progtard locusts have the most amazing ability to destroy our liberty, independence, and dignity no matter where the swarm ends up.

Let’s follow the science a bit further

Posted on August 2, 2020August 2, 2020 by Mike

I hereby demand MY reparations check.

Welcome to 2020. The New York Times wins a Pulitzer Prize for its “1619 Project,” which depicts slavery as a distinctly American phenomenon and as the very foundation of American civilization. For several weeks, a half-dozen all but unreadable books seeking redefine the concept of racism hover at or near the top of the bestseller lists. Meanwhile, the cities of America become battlegrounds in a race war waged by young people, many of whom think that America invented the institution of slavery.

This is but one of many historical facts about which they’re wrong. The truth is that fewer than 4 percent of the slaves who were transported across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa ended up in the territory of what is now the United States. More slaves were shipped to the small island of Barbados than to the vast areas that started out as British North America and then became the United States.

The same applies to Trinidad and the Windward Islands (Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Dominica, and Martinique). Ditto the Guianas (now Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana). Ditto the Spanish-speaking mainland of Latin American. Over 8 percent of transatlantic African slaves—twice the number sold between Maine and Georgia—were sold in St. Domingue, a French colony in what is now Haiti. Over 8 percent of slaves also ended up in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The largest numbers of all are for Jamaica (over 11 percent) and Brazil (over 30 percent).

In recent years, as schools and universities increasingly focus on racial issues, young Americans’ heads are filled with heaps of information—much of it from books like A People’s History of the United States—about the American legacy of racism and, in particular, the history of slavery and Jim Crow. But virtually none of them know that the slaves who were shipped to the present-day United States were a small fraction of the victims of the African slave trade.

Ignorance also surrounds another aspect of slave history. The other day I posted on Facebook a quotation from Thomas Sowell. “More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.”

Facebook users responded in disbelief. “This can’t possibly be true! What’s he talking about?” commented one, whose Facebook page identified him as a “senior research fellow.” Another, a filmmaker, wrote: “Seems dubious.”

In fact, the white slave trade was a terrifying reality for generations of Westerners from the 1400s to the 1800s. Several sovereign North African entities—the Sultanate of Morocco, and the independent Ottoman provinces of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—were all active in the capture and sale of European and American slaves. Some whites were taken from ships on the high seas in acts of piracy; others were captured during coastal raids on the European mainland and Newfoundland.

As usual, it’s not that liberals don’t know anything; it’s that so much of what they think they know isn’t so. You’re bound to love this next bit:

During the later phase of the white slave trade, European powers paid large sums to the North African powers to protect their citizens from enslavement. After the United States declared its independence, it refused to make such payments, which resulted in the taking of American seamen by Arab pirates. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met in London with the ambassador from Tripoli to discuss the matter. When they asked why Tripolitanians would “make war upon nations who had done them no injury,” the ambassador replied “that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it? Guess some things really never DO change. Read all of it.

Plea for assistance

Posted on July 8, 2020July 8, 2020 by Mike

One of my oldest and dearest friends, fella named Tom King, a riding partner of mine since the 80s, nearly lost his life in a serious motorcycle crash over in Charlotte a month or so back. After lapsing into DOA status on the way to the hospital—fortunately, the accident happened within a mile or so of what used to be known as Charlotte Memorial Hospital, who the hell knows what they’re calling it now—he was revived, but suffered the multiple broken bones, abrasions, and brain-rattling skullcracker of a concussion that seems to go hand in hand with most bad bike spills.

The docs say his recovery since has been nothing short of miraculous, considering the extent of his injuries. I’ve told him he had an angel riding on his shoulder that night.

Tom has always been a damned goofball; I pick on his ass all the time about his advanced-level dorkitude, which ribbing he’s always accepted with grace and good humor, along with the occasional subtle jabs back. He’s a truly serious Ironbutt, though, and a damned skillful rider. I won’t say he’s a better rider than I am, mind, because in my own humble and honest opinion (ahem) almost nobody in the whole world is. But there’s not much argument to be made that he’s put more miles under his ass than I have, even though I started riding at a much earlier age than he did. I harbor no illusions of ever catching up, either.

Whenever we’d make the annual trek to Myrtle Beach for the spring rally, which for a long time was every year without fail, we’d go in a large group of ten or fifteen of our biker buds, with Tom as Road Captain in the front-left position and me solid and unflappable on his right. Those rides and rallies are some of the fondest memories of my life. I really oughta write them down one of these days, before I’m too old to remember ’em all. Don’t know why that never occurred to me before.

Did I say Ironbutt? Tom has never thought a thing about making a run up to Lake Lure just to have breakfast, then heading on up to east Tennessee or some other hours-away place just for the sheer hell of it. He always loved to ride fast as hell on his highway jaunts, too. I never was any kind of shrinking violet myself when it came to the Need for Speed—one of my earliest internet nicks, one I still use here and there, was “speedfreek,” and nobody ever claimed it was inapt—but Tom was so incorrigible about it he used to piss me the hell off blasting down the interstate doing the ton, with me lollygagging behind not even trying to keep up. He’d slow waaaaay down once he’d lost sight of me in his mirrors, and exact his revenge for my ribbing by taunting me, “You gonna keep up or what, Grandma? Jeez!”

Tom worked as a journeyman printer at the CLT Observer for more than twenty years, which means he was around long enough to have made the transition from lead type to the digital age. But after the McClatchy buyout, the Observer did some serious downsizing, and Tom’s entire department was eliminated. Understand: Tom has been a worker his whole life, and it about killed him to suddenly find himself on the street. He found another job at a small printing concern up in Davidson fairly quickly after a couple of piddling pick-up gigs, making considerably less money…and with no insurance benefits at all.

Maybe you can see where this is going, I’m thinking.

It ought to be fairly obvious that Tom is up against it here. So a friend put together a GuFundMe campaign to help defray his horrific medical costs, which will be ongoing as he undergoes an extended course of therapy. I thought I’d mention said fundraiser here, since I am too damned perennially broke myself to offer much else in the way of help for him. If you can afford it in these uncertain times, please do consider tossing whatever you can manage in the pot. My thanks to you, and Tom’s and his wife Jen’s as well.

Oh, and why not take this opportunity to get in an additional jab at him, right? I DID say goofball, I believe. First: me, Tom, and his wife Jen at one of those great Myrtle Beach rallies, at our hotel bar at the Ocean Drive Golf Resort.

Next: a shot of me, Tom, and my ravishingly beautiful late wife Christiana—same day, same location.

Hm. Okay, looking at it again, I see that there is just the merest of possibilities that Tom might not be the only goofball in that one. Which is the only comment I’m going to make on exactly where my bleary, blurry gaze seems to be locked. Last one, of us two boys confirming our coveted Master Goofball status for all time.

Sounds familiar

Posted on July 6, 2020July 6, 2020 by Mike

A chilling echo of an abhorrent past, even as it repeats itself.

After leaving China for America two decades ago, my father only returned to his homeland once. I had turned 18, and I think he wanted to show me something of his youth, of which he spoke little. In the dusty village where he grew up, we met an endless stream of old men who wanted to see the village’s prodigal son. Gifts were offered and extravagant greetings were swapped. Then, after each visitor had departed, my father would tell me, matter-of-factly, what they did to him during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The harmless-looking retired cadre, now an amiable old man who pinched my cheeks, had been the village party secretary who forced my father to perform manual labour — running after cows with a basket to pick up the droppings — because, as the son of a landlord, he could not be trusted with an education. The local businessman, now on his second wife and third Audi, had belonged to a gang of high school children who beat him for being descended from counter-revolutionaries.

Some of my father’s tormentors were blood relatives, who were especially keen to display their revolutionary credentials through violence, a situation that was sadly not uncommon: it was rumoured that Bo Xilai, who nearly supplanted Xi Jinping before being imprisoned, had broken his own father’s ribs as a Red Guard. Only the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 saved my father, who took the university entrance examinations a few years later, and never looked back.

Since the beginning of — shall we call it our 2020 cultural moment? — much ink has been spilled on whether there are similarities between the current protests-cum-riots and China’s Cultural Revolution. Even though some of its cheerleaders openly make the comparison, most commentators dismiss the idea, including UnHerd‘s Daniel Kalder.

To my father, and indeed to many of his contemporaries, the answer is clear. They had lived through it, and although they cannot put their finger on the why, they can feel a certain febrility in the air which reminded them of the events of half a century ago. But with their accented English and unfashionable politics (few, for some reason, are especially well-disposed toward the western Left), they have been largely excluded from the conversation. Or they could be biased, as western Marxist academics used to say of the testimonies of eastern European refugees who had been in Communist prisons.

The parallels are indeed nothing short of chilling, and unless you’re a serious student of this sort of thing there might be even more of them than you previously thought. Admittedly, though, there was one aspect of Red China’s horrifying and brutal societal purge that even as rock-ribbed an anti-Communist as myself can’t find a whole lot to argue with:

In America, students aren’t beating their teachers to death yet, as they did in 1960s China.

Well, hey, let’s not just abandon all hope for that quite yet. Hell, if Real Americans had been beating them to death since they went Red en masse back in the 60s, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.

Tailgunner Joe, though you may loathe his methods, was perfectly correct, one of many discrete pieces of evidence that add up to only one conclusion: no free society can coexist with Communism, nor even tolerate its propagation if it intends to retain its freedom. That may appear to contradict the traditionally-professed American values of free speech and a broad tolerance for dissent, sure enough. But at some point a firm line must be drawn and enforced, lest the Constitution be converted into a suicide pact for real. That line sits well to the right of Red.

(Via Insty)

National chaos worsens

Posted on July 5, 2020July 5, 2020 by Mike

I repeat: hey, sure, why the hell not.

Fort Rucker in flames after Black Hawk Lives Matter protest
What began as a peaceful demonstration by Black Hawk pilots frustrated after years of being marginalized by Chinook pilots turned suddenly violent.

As crowds of aviators were shouting, “Justice for Igor Sikorsky!” a few broke away and began vandalizing CH-47s spray painting “Black Hawk Lives Matter!” on their fuselages. “That’s when it all hit the fan,” said an anonymous warrant officer who was used to remaining anonymous. Suddenly offended by the presence of fixed-wing aircraft and any design that deviated from the main rotor/tail rotor configuration, the swelling mob descended on Fort Rucker’s aviation museum toppling and burning anything with a propeller or more than one main rotor.

In an effort to deescalate the situation, the base commander, Lieutenant General Durkan, ordered military police to evacuate the museum until things cooled down. Almost immediately barricades were erected by angry Black Hawk pilots who began spray painting “AMPAB” and “F*** 31B” on the museum walls and displays that were still standing. Declaring the museum an independent country, the pilots called it the “Black Hawk Autonomous Landing Zone” and posted signs reading, “NO MP LZ.” The name was then changed to the “Black Hawk Organized Protest” or BHOP for short. In an effort to show solidarity and understanding, Captain Carpenter who is an Apache pilot, joined the crowd but was shortly beaten into a coma.

Meanwhile, Brigadier General Cathy, a career CH-47 pilot, offered to shine the boots of a Black Hawk pilot and urged other CH-47 pilots to follow his example. His efforts were hampered when he realized that nobody in the army any longer wears boots that can be polished. Nevertheless, General Cathy maintained that his offer was sincere.

“This isn’t ending,” said Lieutenant King, “until everything that flies looks like a Black Hawk and every former Chinook driver buys us a beer whenever we walk into the officers’ club.”

Makes as much sense as anything else does these days.

No mas(k)

Posted on May 19, 2020May 19, 2020 by Mike

Remember what I said the other day about my personal feelings on the wearing of N95 masks for non-surgical purposes?

Yeah. About that.

Every Karen on Facebook is shaming her neighbors for not wearing a face mask. We are being told by governors that if we don’t wear masks we are selfish, horrible human beings with no souls who want Grandma to die a horrible death. Police are tackling people who don’t wear face masks properly in the subway. Grocery stores are throwing maskless people out and denying them service.

But now, there’s another doctor weighing in—besides Dr. Fauci, bonafide sex god and ruler of us all, who also said face masks are largely security theater and of no use to the healthy. Dr. Russell Blaylock, a neurosurgeon, has written an editorial saying that “masks pose serious risks to the healthy.”

First, Blaylock says, there is no scientific evidence that masks are effective against COVID-19 transmission. Pro-science people should care about this.

Beyond the lack of scientific data to support wearing a mask as a deterrent to a virus, Blaylock says the more pressing concern is what can and will happen to the wearer.

Now that we have established that there is no scientific evidence necessitating the wearing of a face mask for prevention, are there dangers to wearing a face mask, especially for long periods? Several studies have indeed found significant problems with wearing such a mask. This can vary from headaches, to increased airway resistance, carbon dioxide accumulation, to hypoxia, all the way to serious life-threatening complications.

Blaylock says studies have also shown that face masks impair oxygen intake dramatically, potentially leading to serious problems.

The importance of these findings is that a drop in oxygen levels (hypoxia) is associated with an impairment in immunity. Studies have shown that hypoxia can inhibit the type of main immune cells used to fight viral infections called the CD4+ T-lymphocyte.

This occurs because the hypoxia increases the level of a compound called hypoxia inducible factor-1 (HIF-1), which inhibits T-lymphocytes and stimulates a powerful immune inhibitor cell called the Tregs. This sets the stage for contracting any infection, including COVID-19 and making the consequences of that infection much graver. In essence, your mask may very well put you at an increased risk of infections and if so, having a much worse outcome.

In other words, if you wear a face mask and contract some sickness, you will not be able to fight it off as effectively as if you had normal blood oxygen levels. The mask could make you sicker. It could also create a “deadly cytokine storm” in some.

That’s plenty good enough for me. Our state kommissar Comrade Cooper can issue whatever decrees he likes, but I’m content to leave the wearing of surgical masks to the pros, thenksveddymuch.

On your feet or on your knees

Posted on May 4, 2020May 4, 2020 by Mike

So here t’is, folks, the be-all end-all post I’ve been mentioning for several days. Since it’s been in the hopper for a week or more now, the opener will seem like old news, but it will still serve as a setup to get us where I want to go, I think.

When you think it’s time to start burying you guns, it’s probably time to start digging them up.

Lansing (United States) (AFP) – Demonstrators, including some carrying guns, entered the capitol building in the US state of Michigan on Thursday and demanded the Democratic governor lift strict coronavirus lockdown orders, as some lawmakers reportedly donned bulletproof vests.

Dozens of demonstrators crowded the lobby of the building in Lansing, where they demanded to be allowed inside the House Chamber.

State police, wearing masks, blocked them from entering. None of the protesters appeared to be wearing masks.

I’ve seen several on our side decrying the supposedly “threatening” behavior represented by the armed protesters as thuggish, excessive, or even self-defeating. They’re wrong about that, I believe, and here’s why:

“Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us,” tweeted Senator Dayna Polehanki along with a photo showing four men, at least one of whom appeared to be carrying a weapon.

“Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our Sergeants-at-Arms more than today,” she continued.

Now admittedly, it’s a damned shame things have come to such a sorry pass. Also, We The People bear at least some of the blame for it, for decades of inattention to the sacred duty of safeguarding our Constitutional rights as they were slowly whittled away.

The truth as I see it, though, is that the problem is not that politicians found themselves fearful and intimidated by the Michigan protesters. No, the problem is that they aren’t intimidated enough, and as a consequence have grown accustomed to their commands being unquestioningly obeyed by the people they are now ruling instead of governing. They have become arrogant, imperious, and completely unconcerned about such trifling irrelevancies as “unalienable rights” and “the consent of the governed.”

For our 2A rights to mean anything at all in terms of preserving the Republic, the politicians and bureau-rats must be reminded from time of their role as public servants. Whenever they seem to have grown forgetful of that, I can’t think of a swifter or surer corrective than letting them have a good, close look at a large gathering of well-armed constituents intent on restoring a proper sense of caution in them. The sight of a gun seems to be the only thing that gets much of a reaction of any kind from them nowadays. Which means we’re all in a precarious place.

It’s to the Michigan protesters’ credit that the reminder was rendered peaceably, without a shot being fired. But you can be certain that, absent the implied prospect of bodily harm should the scoundrels prove obstinate in error, any and all protest will come to naught. Could very well be that it will anyway; that’s what I’d bet on myself, in truth. But I can’t see that any meaningful harm was done by showing the politicians a few rifles on the very doorstep of their workplace, and it may yet prove to be a good thing.

The saddest thing of all is that we might well be on the threshold of a do-or-die, now-and-forever moment here. After our free 30-day (and counting) trial of Communist tyranny and the onset of economic catastrophe to come—not to mention the systemic Deep State lawlessness confirmed by the ongoing Flynn document releases—can any serious person contend that this country isn’t now at a crossroads—an inflection point where the only choice is between abandonment of any hope of a restoration of some semblance of Constitutional liberty…or acceptance of our position as serfs, as slaves?

The situation presents us with a stark question: if not now, when? If the extended lockdown—the exercising by state and local officials of an authority that they clearly do not possess, or not legitimately—doesn’t suffice to stir at least the Three Percenters into open revolt, then what will? How much tyranny is too much for Americans to tolerate? Is there in fact no “bridge too far,” no line our ever-more-brazen masters need fear to cross?

Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman were given four years in a New York penitentiary for the crime of being associated with Gavin McInnes. They were jumped by left-wing street thugs and won the fight. They were arrested, but there was never any effort to find the men who attacked them. There was no effort to find witnesses either. Instead, the police and court relied on material provided to them by Antifa. When he sentenced them, the judge made clear he was doing it for their politics.

That is not an isolated example. Over the last decade this sort of thing has become so common that it is just an accepted part of daily reality. If you belong to a group holding unapproved ideas, you have to go to great lengths to meet in secret in order to avoid being attacked by state sanctioned mobs. If that happens, there is a good chance the police will charge you rather than the mob. The thing political dissidents in current year America fear is that the government will become aware of them.

There used to be a time when Americans associated this sort of thing with totalitarian states or South American dictatorships. The communists would never allow people to hold unapproved opinions. They smashed up illegal printing presses and banished dissident writers. Third world dictators sanctioned mobs to go around harassing people they saw as a problem. The communists are all gone and there are no more South American strong men. America is no longer a free country either.

This reality should be evident to everyone now. Government has spent the better part of the last two months closing shops and forcing people to stay indoors. They are creating bizarre and ridiculous rules for when people must go outside. Cops are pushing people around, harassing mothers at parks and otherwise carrying on like highly feminized goon squads. It’s hard to claim you live in a free country when you need permission from the government go outside to take a walk.

The remarkable thing about this is none of the things described above would have seemed plausible a generation ago. Conservatives liked to claim Bill Clinton was an autocrat, but no one seriously imagined he would so something like this. Left-wingers really thought Bush was Hitler, but even they did not think this was possible. In what feels like the blink of an eye, things we used to think were outside the realm of possibility are now normal. We have slipped into the darkness.

If you are of a certain age, the new normal is particularly tough to fathom. You spent much of your early life being told that the long struggle against communism was all about preventing exactly this. The whole point of America, its reason to exist, was to prevent exactly this from happening. Maybe it was always a big lie. Maybe it is the result of forces too complex for anyone to fathom. It really does not matter. The result is what matters. America is no longer a free country.

Not by a long yard, it ain’t. But is the worst part of the Hare-Kinsman story above that such a shocking, outrageous miscarriage of justice occurred in America…or that most Americans no longer find it particularly shocking or outrageous at all?

Mind you, I’m not advocating any specific course of action here, nor am I likely to do so. The prospect of Civil War v2.0 is an awful one, as I’ve said over and over here, a thing to be dreaded. In fact, I’m hesitant to even mull such notions over in a public forum, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone with a lick of sense.

But what does it say about us as Americans that we accept these travesties, even as we go right on congratulating ourselves for being the “land of the free”?

The questions keep coming: whither liberty? Whither the Constitution; whither America That Was? What senses do we lack that we cannot perceive the shadow of despotism falling over us? Does any of this really matter anymore anyway?

Update! Wilder, in the latest of his CW2.0 Weather Report series, sounds a somber note:

As I’ve mentioned before, a strong economy could take this sort of shock. Our economy isn’t strong. Let’s take New York City. What does it produce? Debt, real estate sales, insurance companies, financial irregularity, the stock market, and national “journalism” that at best is as biased as a Kennedy mother bailing her kids out of jail. If New York City were to disappear tomorrow, the only thing from NYC the Wilder Family would miss is the television show Impractical Jokers®.

Are we richer because of what comes from New York? Are we more stable? Does making another loan to a big corporation so they have enough debt on their books so a New York financier can’t buy them with their own money make us better off? Is it better because the dollars aren’t backed by anything other than a printing press?

In that same time period, manufacturing dropped from 25% of the economy to 11%. Does that make us better off, when critical goods are made an ocean away? Does that make us more stable and able to weather a crisis?

As the economy collapses, it’s collapsing because it has been hollowed out for decades. I will say that studies show, before 1980, Democrats were strongly focused on keeping the manufacturing and construction industries strong, since the unions that dominated that sector were lock-step voters for the Democrats. But, when a shiny new toy of being paid by the big banks plus being able to bring in a whole new class of voters (legal immigrants and illegal aliens) got too big, the Democrats dumped manufacturing and construction.

This collapse has been decades in the making. It won’t be done quickly. And it just might provide the pain to slingshot us into Civil War 2.0.

Revolutions, civil wars, and violent uprisings aren’t usually launched by comfortable, gainfully-employed people who are getting enough to eat.

“The biggest shock since the Great Depression”

Posted on April 30, 2020April 30, 2020 by Mike

Hey, no worries. Professional politicians and Deep State bureau-rats universally assure us it can all be turned back on again as easily as flipping a light switch. And when have those supergeniuses ever been wrong about anything?

GDP falls by 4.8 percent, bringing longest economic expansion on record to abrupt halt
Gross domestic product, which measures the output of goods and services, sank by 4.8 percent in the first quarter on an annualized basis, according to an initial estimate from the Department of Commerce released Wednesday morning.

It’s the steepest decline since the Great Recession, which ended in 2009. Economic growth was tracking at or above 2 percent until mid-March.

With most of the nation stuck at home, large swaths of the economy have shuttered, throwing 26 million people out of work. Consumer spending, which drives around two-thirds of economic growth, has plummeted.

While Wall Street had been steeling itself for the data, the worst is yet to come. First quarter data captured economic activity up to the end of March, but the second quarter will likely include three straight months of decline.

“You’re looking at something like minus 20 percent to minus 30 percent in the second quarter,” White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNBC on Monday, noting that the coronavirus is “the biggest shock since the Great Depression. It’s a very grave shock and it’s something we need to take seriously.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimated second-quarter GDP would be down by as much as 40 percent, for the worst quarter since 1947.

Economists say the U.S. likely entered recession — generally defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in GDP — in the second half of March, when lockdowns began.

“You’re going to see the economy really bounce back in July, August, September,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Fox News earlier this week. “You’re seeing trillions of dollars that’s making its way into the economy and I think this is going to have a significant impact,” he said of the government’s $2 trillion dollar emergency stimulus package meant to buttress the economy.

Damage: done.

A farmer named Shad Sullivan warned in a viral video that “[America’s] food supply is in trouble.”

Farmers are outraged that subpar imported meat continues to flow into America despite warnings to American farmers to put down their own livestock.

“Yesterday, the first shipment of imported beef from the country of Namibia hit the shores of the United States of America,” said Sullivan. “And yet this morning they are telling us to prepare to euthanize harvest-ready cattle.”

Sullivan questioned, “Am I the only one who sees a problem in this?”

Racist.

Over 30 Million Americans Have Lost Their Jobs In The Last Six Weeks
In the last week 3.839 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits for the first time.

That brings the six-week total to 30.31 million, which is over 12 times the prior worst five-week period in the last 50-plus years.

Worse still, the final numbers will likely be worsened due to the bailout itself: as a reminder, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, passed on March 27, could contribute to new records being reached in coming weeks as it increases eligibility for jobless claims to self-employed and gig workers, extends the maximum number of weeks that one can receive benefits, and provides an additional $600 per week until July 31. A recent WSJ article noted that this has created incentives for some businesses to temporarily furlough their employees, knowing that they will be covered financially as the economy is shutdown. Meanwhile, those making below $50k will generally be made whole and possibly be better off on unemployment benefits.

As Mises’ Robert Aro noted earlier in the week, the stimulus packages being handed out across this world provide us with an opportunity to document the anticapitalist process as it unfolds in real time, keeping in mind that when these inflation schemes fail, it will likely be blamed on capitalism.

And Trump, of course. After all, that was one of the main points of this whole disastrous exercise.

But no matter. The damage is done now; assuredly, there will be no going back to where we were from this, our New Normal. Wherever you sit, whatever you choose to believe, it all comes down to one thing.

I do believe I need to set up that song title as a new category here.

An idea whose time has surely come

Posted on April 27, 2020April 27, 2020 by Mike

And, unfortunately, probably gone.

The country has been thrown into an unforeseen and immediate crisis the likes of which we have never seen in American history. There was no warning and no way to prepare; we are in a state of shock that the collective life we led just two months ago is completely and heartbreakingly gone for the foreseeable future.

That’s why it’s time for President Trump to speak to the trauma the nation is enduring, and not just continue the same drumbeat about the “invisible enemy” each day from the White House press room.

The daily briefings featuring the Coronavirus Task Force have become repetitive. Trump’s jiujitsu with the hostile, childish, and hysteria-inducing White House press corps might entertain some of his followers, and undoubtedly it amuses the president himself, but does little to ease Americans’ rising anxiety about the future.

Fauci and Birx, aside from misleading the president with the disastrous Murray models, don’t have much new to offer. Their updates should be short and weekly, not daily, since the health crisis shows major signs of abating.

The president should now pivot to focusing primarily on how to recover both the economy and the spirit of the American people. He needs to speak directly to our fears. He must give cover to governors who have every reason to bring life back to normal in their states rather than listening to the same small chorus of “experts” who have misled him. (Commending New York governor Andrew Cuomo while openly criticizing Georgia governor Brian Kemp isn’t a great idea, either.)

He needs to get his economic team before the public every day to explain how and when we can start getting back to business as usual—and in days, not weeks or months. Most Americans don’t want more government hand-outs or debt-inducing programs. We want to protect the vulnerable, strengthen our health care capacity, and move on before the damage is too great to repair.

Trump performs best when he gives voice to the inner worries of Americans that others are too timid to express. COVID-19 is deadly and scary but Trump promised Americans the cure wouldn’t be worse than the disease. We are now at the point where we need to hear his plan to make good on that promise—and the president must change course accordingly.

I agree with Kelly, for all the good it will do. Jules also makes brief mention of the imminent collapse of the food supply chain, which is but one of several reasons I said above that the time for Trump to try to turn things around may have come and gone. All such attempts now will most likely be too little, too late:

Executives with the Arkansas-based Tyson Foods took out a full-page advertisement in several major newspapers over the weekend, declaring the country’s food supply chain “is breaking.”

The ad, an open letter from company board chair John Tyson was published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

“There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we reopen our facilities that are currently closed,” wrote Tyson, who noted earlier in the letter, “The food supply chain is breaking.”

The discomforting statement from Tyson comes as the company has closed plants in Logansport, Indiana, and Waterloo, Iowa. Similarly, Smithfield has closed a facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where one worker died of the virus, and JBS has shuttered a plant in Worthington, Minnesota.

Tyson’s Waterloo plant, reportedly linked to some 182 cases of COVID-19, is critical to the country’s pork supply.

The letter from Tyson warned all of these closures means “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from the national food supply chain.

“In addition to meat shortages, this is a serious food waste issue,” wrote Tyson. “Farmers across the nation simply will not have anywhere to sell their livestock to be processed, when they could have fed the nation.”

“Millions of animals — chickens, pigs, and cattle — will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities,” he added.

More, and worse:

“During this pandemic, our entire industry is faced with an impossible choice: continue to operate to sustain our nation’s food supply or shutter in an attempt to entirely insulate our employees from risk,” Smithfield Foods, the largest global pork producer owned by the Chinese WH Group, said in a statement on Friday. “It’s an awful choice; it’s not one we wish on anyone.”

“It is impossible to keep protein on tables across America if our nation’s meat plants are not running. Across the animal protein industry, closures can have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions up and down the supply chain,” the statement said. “Beyond the implications to our food supply, our entire agricultural community is in jeopardy. Farmers have nowhere to send their animals and could be forced to euthanize livestock, effectively burying food in the ground. We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who is also is a beef rancher, spoke about the food supply chain on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.

“I’ll tell you why there will be shortages,” Massie said. “Right now there aren’t shortages because there was a supply of meat that was destined for restaurants, and the demand at the restaurants was curtailed when they were shut down. It’s frozen meat, and [restaurants] are repackaging it and diverting that supply to the grocery stores.”

“That supply is going to run out,” Massie said. “The [meat] pipeline has a crimp in it, and that’s at the processing plants.”

In a Tweet accompanying the article, Massie lays it out starkly and directly, with no ifs, ands, or buts: “FOOD SHORTAGES ARE COMING.”

Meanwhile, there are nearly four million gallons of milk per day being poured down the drain—literally.

Farmers are dumping milk and plowing crops back into the soil across the U.S. after the closings of restaurants, hotels and schools in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Farmers are dumping 3.7 million gallons of milk daily and a single chicken processor can smash 750,000 eggs per week, reports Dairy Farmers of America, the largest dairy farm cooperative in the country.

As America’s agricultural industry is confronted by the impacts of the virus, there have been some striking examples of food waste.

Correction: it’s the impact of the overreaction to the virus that they—and we all—are confronting.

Wisconsin and Ohio farmers have dumped thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits.

An Idaho farmer found himself digging ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions.

Yet more, and yet worse:

Meanwhile, South Florida farms, which supply much of the East coast, have sent tractors across the fields to replow beans, cabbage and other ripe vegetables right back into the ground.

‘It’s heartbreaking,’ Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, tells the Times.

The company has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.

This is scary, scary stuff, folks.

“There’s a huge amount of milk still today going on the ground in the state of Florida,” said Brittany Nickerson Thurlow, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in Zolfo Springs. “There’s just nowhere to send it.”

The supply chain that ultimately brings milk from a cow’s udder to your refrigerator has spoiled.

Florida had over 15,500 coronavirus cases, including over 300 deaths, as of the Department of Health’s Wednesday evening count. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ statewide “safer-at-home” order remains in effect until at least April 30.

There’s no telling when life on Sunshine State farms will return to normal.

Sorry to have to be the one to tell ya, but this is the NEW Normal. It ain’t pretty. Every passing day under lockdown etches total economic collapse and all its attendant misery—joblessness, poverty, hunger, and death—more deeply in stone. And for the life of me, I can’t see any way out of it.

Oh HELL no

Posted on April 17, 2020April 18, 2020 by Mike

I have a suggestion or three for alternate locations where the goobermint can stick its little chips.

The technocrats are talking about giving people a chip – once they’ve been vaccinated for the CCP virus, or otherwise proven their immunity and state of non-contagion – so that anyone with the right scanner can easily see that interacting with them is “safe.”

Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?

But think about it. Even if you don’t care about personal freedom, don’t respect concerns for societal liberty. Just think about this a moment.

Don’t have to. There’s only way such a thing will ever be done to me or my young ‘un, and that is over my dead body.

The CCP virus is just the flavor of the month. It’s the terrible risk of 2020, the big thing this year. In past years, we have been scared of H1N1, Ebola, SARS, all of which have killed tens of thousands of people. This is hardly the first such epidemic to hit humanity. The list goes on and on.

So… what about next year?

There’s a seasonal flu every year, and some years, it’s especially bad (sometimes arguably worse than this one)… Over a 20 year period, there might be five such really bad flus. Should we agree to a chip for all of them? Or only for certain ones? This year’s virus hits the overweight and the very old worst of all. Maybe the next one will hit the young and the skinny worst. Maybe one will hit the asthmatics worst. There’s ALWAYS someone to protect from these things, and our concern for these innocent victims is laudable.

Then people will ask: Should we have a chip every year, and 300 million tests, every year, just to be safe? You know what they say – “if it saves just one life,” right?

Right. And so very, very wrong, too. Tons of very good stuff along these lines in this one, all of which you should peruse, culminating in this:

The risk of putting too much information in the hands of government used to be well-understood by Americans, but this risk appears to have been forgotten, with the philosophy of our Founding Fathers going untaught for generations.

We want to think this is a leap. We desperately want to tell ourselves that the slippery slope argument is just fear-mongering, that it would never get that bad, not here, not in America.

But in recent weeks, we have seen mayors ban gun sales, in blatant defiance of the Second Amendment. We have seen governors ban church services, in blatant defiance of the First Amendment. We have seen manufacturing brought a standstill in state after state. We have seen police ticketing married couples just for walking together on the sidewalk, and taking down license plates of cars parked at a drive-through church service.

If these past few weeks have proven anything at all, is that we can risk no further erosion of our liberty, because too many of these petty bureaucrats hold too much power… and because too many of them are far too quick to follow the lead of Rahm Emanuel – Chicago’s former mayor, and Barack Obama’s former chief of staff – who enunciated the modern statist approach so proudly and so succinctly:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Nailed it, clean and tight. We can only hope that there are enough of us left who understand all this—or, even worse, wouldn’t eagerly applaud the implentation of a federal forced-chipping program. If the last month is any guide, alas, that hope is a truly forlorn one.

Up next: a plague of locusts

Posted on April 12, 2020April 12, 2020 by Mike

No, really.

A new wave of locusts is threatening Africa with devastation and starvation, even as the COVID-19 pandemic undermines efforts to fight the locust plague.   Parts of the continent already experienced the biggest locust outbreak in 70 years, just weeks before the coronavirus hit. Now a second wave is on its way, with some locust swarms 20 times the size of the first.

Billions of young desert locusts are coming, threatening plants and crops. This second invasion includes more developed locusts known as “young adults,” which are especially voracious eaters.

The Nairobi-based Climate Prediction and Application Center said the locusts are “invading the Eastern Africa region in exceptionally large swarms like never seen before.”

In Ethiopia, six million lives are at risk as the locust outbreak threatens to cause “large-scale crop, pasture and forest-cover loss, worsening food and feed insecurity,” according to the FAO.

And Ethiopia’s agriculture ministry says the problem is worsening as the locust swarms are now appearing in locations where they had not been previously sighted.

Lord, have mercy.

Wait, whut?

Posted on April 10, 2020April 10, 2020 by Mike

Brack sends.

WASHINGTON — US researchers have opened another safety test of an experimental COVID-19 vaccine, this one using a skin-deep shot instead of the usual deeper jab.

“It’s the most important trial that we’ve ever done,” Dr. John Ervin of the Center for Pharmaceutical Research told The Associated Press afterward. “People are beating down the door to get into this trial.”

The experiment, using a vaccine candidate developed by Inovio Pharmaceuticals, is part of a global hunt for much-needed protection against a virus that has triggered an economic shutdown and forced people indoors as countries try to stem the spread.

Inovio researchers packaged a section of the virus’ genetic code inside a piece of synthetic DNA. Injected as a vaccine, the cells act as a mini-factory to produce harmless protein copies. The immune system makes protective antibodies against them — primed if the real virus ever comes along.

Inovio research and development chief Kate Broderick likens it to giving the body an FBI wanted poster so it can recognize the enemy.

But after the skin-deep injection, researchers must hold a device over the spot that gives a little electrical zap. The synthetic DNA is large when it comes to penetrating human cells, and the pulse helps the vaccine more easily penetrate and get to work, Broderick said.

DNA vaccines are a new technology. But Inovio has experimental vaccines against other diseases that are made the same way that have passed initial safety testing.

Hate to be a loony paranoid conspiracy nut, a crank, or a total wet blanket about this, I really, truly do, but…a shallowly-implanted “vaccine” that must be activated electronically? Gee, THAT doesn’t give off a creepy, Big-Brotherish sort of vibe at all. Wonder what else that eensy-weensy, totally benign, harmless “little zap” might be activating in there?

Reminder: I am NOT a doctor, know little to nothing about this sort of thing, and freely confess to being most likely full of crap here. Also, I am not, nor have I ever been, any kind of “anti-vaxxer.” But based on the information above, along with my own knowledge of what the US government truly is and is not nowadays, I can’t honestly say I’d be completely at ease with being given a “vaccine” like this, either. Or required by law to take one.

How do you know they’re liberals?

Posted on April 10, 2020April 10, 2020 by Mike

1) Their assumptions are at odds with observable reality; 2) their smugness, their arrogance, their sense of entitlement know no bounds; 3) they greatly enjoy lecturing their less-enlightened “inferiors” about things they themselves know absolutely nothing about.

I was chatting with a friend of mine recently and the topic of gun sales came up. My friend’s father owns a gun range near me and she said he’s seen a huge amount of liberals coming in to purchase weapons in recent weeks.

How does he know they’re liberals?

“They’re shocked to discover they can’t just walk out of the store with a gun.”

We’ve all heard about gun sales skyrocketing recently, but I hadn’t considered some of the tangential effects of the phenomenon until I spoke to my friend. Not only are many liberals suddenly learning to love their Second Amendment rights, many of them are finding out that the gun control narrative in this country — as repeated loudly and often by Hollywood and the mainstream media — is a complete lie.

The hilarity really takes off once a formerly hoplophobic libtard actually gets xzhis/xzher/xzhits delicate mitts on a firearm. Suggestion for any sane people present: DUCK AND COVER.

We tried to look at just who the new firearm purchasers were and we believe that more than 60% of these individuals were first time buyers. I can’t describe the amount of fear in my staff as we had the buyers show proof of safe handling as part of the purchase process as required by law. You have never seen so many barrels pointed at sales staff and other customers. It was truly frightening. We had to keep stopping the process to give quick safety lessons. We are adding many more basic classes in the coming weeks and encouraged these buyers to please attend. We hope they do.

Eh, not so sure about that myself. Consider: these doofi will likely wish to show off their new Tools Of Empowerment to all their friends, striking tough-guy poses, waving their piece around, and muzzle-sweeping everybody in the living room. Would that not make it more likely, then, that a lot of libtards are going to wind up shot dead because of such antics? The resultant thinning of the Proggy herd would certainly make life easier for the rest of us.

Okay, okay, I’m only kidding. I think.

While the safety of the employees at the range is a very serious matter, the most amusing and annoying part for the staff has been watching these first-time buyers discover just how stringent gun laws in California really are, including one of our newest laws requiring background checks before buying ammunition. Bouslog says it’s a bridge too far for the people who have been told their whole lives that it’s easier to get a gun than an abortion.

More than a dozen of these buyers (men and women) actually thought that since they filled out and signed everything, they could just walk out and go home with the firearm. Several actually said they saw how easy it was to buy a gun on TV and why did they have to fill out all these forms.

The majority of these first timers lost their minds when we went through the Ammo Law requirements. Most used language not normally heard, even in a gun range. We pointed out that since no one working here voted for these laws, then maybe they might know someone who did. And, maybe they should go back and talk to those people and tell them to re-think their position on firearms – we were trying to be nice.

Most were VERY vocal about why it takes 10 days minimum (sometimes longer if the DOJ is backed up) to take their property home with them. They ask why do I need to wait 10 days if I need the protection today or tomorrow? We pointed out again that no one working here voted in support of that law.

They really went crazy when we told them that for each firearm they had to do the same amount of paperwork and they could only purchase ONE handgun every 30 days. Again, we didn’t [vote] for that law.

We had people cuss at us and stomp out when we explained that secondary identification had to be part of the paperwork, as they felt insulted that what they had wasn’t good enough. We have a number of Yelp reviews calling us names and other things about how bad we are because of this whole new buyer rush.

Aww, there comes that whole useful-idiot thing to bite them in the ass again. Every one of them firmly believes xzhe/zxshe/it will be part of the nomenklatura crowd after the Glorious Revolution, and are always just shocked as hell to find themselves handed a blindfold and stood up against a wall instead.

The iron curtain descends

Posted on April 9, 2020April 9, 2020 by Mike

Soooo, how’s everybody liking their shiny new Police State, eh?

On Saturday, police in Kansas City “intervened” to shut down a parade of elementary school teachers. The staff of John Fiske Elementary School decided to organize the parade as a way to boost the morale of their students and encourage them in their new distance learning adventure. All of the teachers and administrators were in their own cars. There was literally no chance whatsoever of any virus being transmitted from car to car. But a spokeswoman for the police later explained, after the elicit gathering was descended upon by law enforcement, that the celebration of learning was not “necessary” or “essential.”

Two days before the Kansas City community was saved from the threat of cheerful elementary school teachers waving to children from their sedans, police in Malibu arrested a man who was caught paddle boarding in the ocean. Two boats and three additional deputies in vehicles were called to the scene of the non-essential joyride. How could a man out by himself in the Pacific possibly contract or spread the coronavirus? Nobody knows. But orders are orders, after all. And so the man was pulled out of the ocean and hauled away in handcuffs.

Uh huh. Kinda makes one wonder how well those all-important “social distancing” rules were maintained in that patrol car, as well as at the jailhouse. Best not to think too much about that stuff, I suppose.

Officials in other parts of the nation have banned essential retailers from selling non-essential items like mosquito repellent. I suppose the prevention of West Nile and malaria are no longer considered essential. The mayor of Port Isabel, Texas, has decided, for whatever reason, that residents may not travel with more than two people in their vehicles. What if you’re a single parent with two kids? Well, sorry, one of your kids is out of luck. It’s not clear how this rule will be enforced, but some states have made that easier on themselves by setting up checkpoints to stop and question every car that passes through. A driver from New York who gets caught in Florida might face 60 days in jail. I should stop here to remind you that Florida and New York are places in the United States of America, not Soviet Russia.

Sorry, Matt, but that’s become a very difficult proposition to support of late. A distinction without a difference, one might say.

Apologists for our newly established police state will tell me that states and localities have the authority to impose restrictions in an emergency. That is true, but the question of how far their authority actually goes is complicated, and in this case made even more complicated by the fact that these stay-at-home orders, in many cases, are based not on a current medical emergency in the respective state, but on models that forecast the possibility of an emergency in the future. For example, Minnesota is under a stay-at-home order despite having only 29 coronavirus deaths among a population of over 5 million. Perhaps the situation will get worse. Perhaps not. The point is that there is no current emergency in Minnesota or many of the other states currently under lockdown. There is, rather, a model that projects an emergency. And if projected emergencies can justify the effective nullification of the Bill of Rights, where is the limit? Haven’t we now granted the government the power to seize near-total control on the basis of any real or phantom threat?

I would argue that nothing could ever justify such a thing. Indeed, the First and Fourth Amendments — the provisions of the Bill of Rights that seem to be having the worst time of it, recently — serve no purpose and have no reason to exist if they can be canceled or overridden whenever the government might have a specially compelling reason to do so. It is only when the government has a specially compelling reason to violate the amendments that the amendments have any function. After all, we really don’t need them during the times that the government has no interest in infringing on them. It seems that if we toss aside our right to assembly, our right to practice our religion, our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, etc., whenever the government insists that such protections are hazardous to our health, then we might as well not have the rights in the first place. It’s like locking a criminal in a cell but giving him the key to open it along with a stern warning to only use the key if he has a very good reason. Doesn’t the key make the cell a rather pointless accessory? Sure he might remain in it sometimes, but only when he wants to. And it’s precisely when he wants to be behind bars that you don’t need the bars at all.

Funniest thing about it might be that, while we were all keeping a wary eye on FederalGovCo in expectation of the Big Clampdown being launched from Mordor On The Potomac, it turned out to be the states and localities who were the true threat.

But do tell me again all about how the government “fears” an armed populace, as is appropriate and right; that most cops will resist enforcing blatantly unconstitutional edicts; that the 2A is enough all by itself to protect our “unalienable” rights; that all those eleventy bajillion guns out there (kept unloaded and securely locked away as the law requires, of course) will somehow keep us “free” just by their very existence. As bedtime fairytales go, that one’s my favorite.

STOP THE PRESSES!

Posted on April 7, 2020April 7, 2020 by Mike

Biden is right—not just once, but twice.

Sleepy Joe Biden said Tuesday during an interview from his home in Delaware that he is locked in his basement.

This is the best the Democrats have.

“…and I know I’m locked in a basement..” said Joe.

“Are they worried he will wander off and get lost?” Trump’s campaign said trolling Biden.

Biden also forgot the name of his own plan, calling it the “Make Work” checklist instead of “Make It Work.”

Ouch. Time for another nap, Grampa Joe.

On the other hand…

Posted on April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 by Mike

A different—and far bleaker—view, forwarded to NC Scout by our old chum Historian.

I work at a hospital. Not as a doctor, to the well-concealed disappointment of my late mother (and the well-concealed satisfaction of my late father, who loathed doctors,) nor a nurse or a medical technician; my job is to ensure that the facility itself is capable of supporting the demands of those who use it. I’m a construction project manager for a mid-sized non-profit hospital in one of the mid-Atlantic united States, and I’m good at what I do.

Generally, this hospital is well run, well organized, and well staffed with high quality people, ranking among the top US hospitals, part of a larger system also well ranked. If friends or family were to need care, I’d take them to my hospital, which I consider one of the two best in the system and the area, one reason I accepted an offer to work there.

For the uninitiated, this is a non-trivial modification. A negative pressure room or isolation room, has to exhaust ALL of the air coming out of the room directly to the outside. Standards are for 12 air changes per hour, and the room must meet certain negative pressure standards. That means that the entire volume of the room gets replaced every 5 minutes. Our facility policy is to filter all of that exhaust to ensure that we are not placing passers-by at risk of infection, further complicating matters. Normal air conditioning, even in many areas of a hospital, recycles most of the air to reduce energy costs, so when you throw that air away, as you must do for an isolation room, you significantly increase the load on the air conditioning system. It is a BIG change.

I’ll spare you, gentle Reader, the details, but in 3 days last week we went from about 10% isolation rooms in our hospital to 15%, i.e., a 50% increase in isolation rooms by dint of much effort by a number of contractors, vendors, and hospital staff. Those rooms were virtually empty last week, and hospital volumes were WAY down. It was rather eerie. After that success, I was directed to convert another 12% of our rooms to negative pressure, and we are working that now.

This is now much more difficult as seriously ill patients are starting to swamp the hospital, and the rooms which were empty a week ago are all now filled or rapidly filling with patients on O2 or intubated, most of whom had been seen a week or two ago, evaluated as not seriously ill, and sent home with instructions to come back if they started to feel worse, not better. Well, they DID get worse, and they are coming back. In significant numbers, and this is just the beginning.

Like I said, this is pretty grim stuff for sure. But there’s a glimmer of hope as well, a demonstration of fearlessness, compassion, and humanity that provides some affirmation to lay upon the scales as a counterweight to horror and hopelessness.

(Via WRSA)

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