Let a million middle fingers rise

The spirit of American rebellion still lives, and is beginning to awaken at last.



Now get a load of what happened next. Trust me, it’ll warm the cockles of even the most cynical heart.

It may not seem like all that much…yet. But it will be small, seemingly insignificant acts of defiance like this that will snowball into full-on revolt—which is something America has never in its history needed more desperately than it does right now.

Update! Washington state insurrection.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s draconian executive orders mandating business closures and stay-at-home status for all residents has been rejected by county commissioners in Franklin County. The motion passed unanimously. Now, the legal battles may or may not begin but in the immediate future, the county is official reopened for business.

“I move that Franklin County end recognition of the governor’s stay at home emergency proclamation that is now deemed unconstitutional. We support the reopening for all builders and small businesses that want to work,” Commissioner Clint Didier said during a meeting Tuesday morning.

This opens the door for other counties and cities to oppose the order based on RCW 43.06.220(4), which limits the governor’s state-of-emergency powers to 30 days unless the state legislature passes an extension.

Well, I gotta admit I didn’t see THAT coming.

Payback time update! Cockroaches get hit with a spotlight, to their great dismay.

Talk radio great Jamie Allman filed a Sunshine law request for the actual emails of St. Louis County residents who’ve snitched on local entrepreneurs trying to make a living. Most of the complaints were unfounded, involving people “turning in” companies that were deemed essential by the county.

But reading the actual complaints reveals just how terrified the media and corrupt academics have made good people. The complainants are truly scared. They believe that Coronavirus kills almost everyone who gets infected. They believe that washing your car, hitting golf balls at a range, or playing singles tennis can spread the disease to many people.

The 900-page file of complaints is, ultimately, sad. What could be more depressing than a mother begging government officials to put her daughter out of work? Or women asking the county to shut down their fiancé’s company?

Well, about the only thing I can think of is the thought of such despicable, craven panic-ninnies getting away with diming out friends and loved ones without paying a stiff price for such perfidy. Doxx the living fuck out of every last one of these diaper-dragging ratbags; if the old “snitches get stitches” bylaw can’t be practically enforced, then public exposure, scorn, and humiliation is the very least they have coming to ’em.

T’aint funny, McGee

Is it satire, or is it real? The Shadow knows.

Michigan Governor: ‘Revolting Against A Tyrannical Government Is Simply Un-American’
DETROIT, MI—On Meet the Ptess Sunday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer reminded everyone that “revolutions and revolts are simply un-American.”

Whitmer called on the protesters in her state to stop their illegal assembling, reminding them that protesting so-called tyranny is a foreign idea to the history of the United States.

“Protesting and revolting against your wise rulers goes against everything America was built on,” she said. “It flies in the face of every American tradition. Revolting against tyranny has no place in this great country.”

It’d be a lot funnier if I didn’t know that this is precisely the way Whitler and her shitlib cohort really do think.

Bloated numbers

A New York affliction.

According to The New York Times coronavirus report, as of Sunday, April 19, 2:48 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there were 35,676 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Of those deaths, 18,690 were in the New York metropolitan area.

That means that more than half (52 percent) of all deaths in America have occurred in the New York metropolitan area.

What makes this statistic particularly noteworthy is that the entire death toll for 41 of the other 47 states is 7,661. In other words, while New York has 52 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in America, 41 states put together have only 21 percent of the COVID-19 deaths. And all the 47 states other than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have less than half (48 percent).

Now let us imagine that the reverse were true. Imagine that Georgia and North Carolina—two contiguous states that, like the New York metro area, have a combined total of 21 million people—had 18,690 COVID-19 deaths, while metro New York had 858 deaths (the number of deaths in North Carolina and Georgia combined).

Do you think the New York metro area would close its schools, stores, restaurants and small businesses? Would every citizen of the New York area, with the few exceptions of those engaged in absolutely necessary work, be locked in their homes for months? Would New Yorkers accept the decimation of their economic and social lives because North Carolina and Georgia (or, even more absurdly, Colorado, Montana or the rest of what most New Yorkers regard as “flyover” country) had 18,960 deaths, while they had a mere 858?

It is, of course, possible. But I suspect that anyone with an open mind assumes that New Yorkers would not put up with ruining their economic and social lives and putting tens of millions of people out of work because of coronavirus deaths in North Carolina and Georgia, let alone Montana and Idaho (and, for the record, I would have agreed with them).

Lest we forget, even the underwhelming non-NYC numbers are themselves grossly inflated:

The IHME model is considered the gold standard. In mid-March, without social distancing, they predicted 2.2 million American deaths. By early April they reduced their death projection to 100,000 to 240,000 assuming social distancing measures in place. Their April 17 update now projects 60,308 deaths, 3% of their original prediction.

What changed? Social distancing was in already in place when the death predictions dropped by a factor of four. For perspective, 61,000 Americans died in the 2017-18 flu season.

The CDC had its own models predicting gloom and doom. In mid-March they projected 160 million to 214 million infected and 200,000 to 1.7 million deaths. Did that leave President Trump any choice but to hit the off switch on the U.S. economy? What if the models were wrong?

Another factor influencing models is the death count from this coronavirus. Projected deaths determine projected need, as in the ventilators mentioned above. How accurate are the death counts?

Task force member Dr. Deborah Brix, on April 7, said the U.S. government is classifying the death of any patient who tested positive for coronavirus as a coronavirus death, regardless of any underlying health conditions that genuinely killed them. If one has a heart attack, and happens to test positive for the virus, he or she will be classed as a coronavirus death. Garbage in, garbage out.

Going further, New York City is including in their death counts, “people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it.” Data by presumption? Models based on presumption?

What the hell, why not? Julie Kelly brings it on home for us.

Tests show about 434,000 Americans have contracted the disease so far. Only a few states indicate COVID-19 symptomatic activity; most of the country now is quiet.

Would those facts frighten you into government-ordered submission? If the United States had a population of 300 million and 48 states, would the fact that 18,000 people—sadly, mostly elderly and already sick patients—succumbed to the virus over a period of nearly two months warrant an ongoing lockdown that is destroying the economy, overwhelming unemployment rolls and food bank lines, shutting down schools and colleges for five months, and bankrupting small businesses?

Would it justify increasingly despotic orders from power-grabbing politicians to stop Americans from going to the beach or hosting dinner parties in their own homes let alone canceling graduation ceremonies and weddings and funerals?

Of course, it would pose a public health concern; strategies to mitigate the spread of the virus, particularly among the most susceptible, would be necessary. Plans to prevent a bigger outbreak later in the year would be appropriate.

The coronavirus crisis in the United States is largely a New York City crisis. One reason why many governors are afraid to fully reopen is over the fear that virus-carrying New Yorkers will flee to their largely unimpacted states.

Happy beachgoers in northern Florida are not a threat; subway commuters in New York City are. The fact that there is outrage over the former and not the latter speaks volumes about the politicization of this travesty while we remain under house arrest for the foreseeable future.

Wall it off. Should Air Force One ever go down inside…well, hey, we can always call in Snake Plissken.

Must there always be a Harvard?

Duh.



This is the part where I’d ordinarily toss off a snide comment or two, but I just can’t even.

Author Erin O’Donnell cited Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor with Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, to make the case for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling as a practice, arguing that the burden should be on parents to prove that they could educate their children in a manner approved by the state.

lolgetfucked, brainiac. Probably oughta have the nurse wipe the drool off your bib before you go making any more demands, seems to me.

Same old same old

Wait, didn’t we have the whole RUSSIANS UNDER EVERY BED thing already?

NBC News Analyst Claims U.S. Lock-Down Protests Created by Russians…
Oddly enough I thought about this yesterday when Washington State Governor Jay Inslee was complaining about citizen protests being a form of “domestic rebellion.” The modern liberal mindset cannot fathom how removing liberty and freedom, from a nation founded upon freedom and liberty, would start to ignite protests. They need to blame something.

In the Democrat collective worldview big government control of their lives is a utopia to be achieved. Therefore those same Chè T-shirt wearing ideologues cannot understand push-back based on individualism. A justification for visible frustration is needed.  What could possibly be causing this anger?… Why yes, the Russians of course. Gottabe.

Greartly as it disturbs me to have to do it, I gotta part ways here with Sundance, if only just a wee mite. It’s not that they don’t or can’t understand push-back based on individualism; as collectivists and authoritarians, they not only understand it, THEY HATE AND FEAR IT. Individualism is the very thing they’re most vehemently opposed to: individual liberty, self-determination, and the basic concept of rights not granted by an all-powerful State are the enemy, an enemy they want to see crushed.

Just how tolerant was the USSR of openly-expressed dissent, anyway? Or Cuba? Venezuela, Red China, Vietnam, Cambodia? Here as everywhere else, the Left understands these things quite well, thanks—not from an attitude of reverence, not as goals to be met or ambitions to work towards, but as objects of hatred most ferocious and implacable. And they intend to put a stop to them once and for all, by any and all means necessary.

All of the various restrictions coming from state governors in response to the COVID-19 do not come from State House and/or State Senate debate and decisions. These are not laws.

The rules restricting liberty, in response to the COVID crisis, have been pronounced without any representative voice supporting them.

All of the rules are arbitrary, and many of these rules will be challenged in court.

However, until those court challenges take place, the only option for a redress of grievance comes in the form of public protest. Currently, there is no way for any citizen to appeal to a representative voice against the decrees from a state governor; other than a public protest.

Rebellion against unilateral and authoritarian power is America. Rebellion or push-back against non-representative government is the thread connecting the patchwork of our constitutional republic. Protest is so critical to our nation that it is protected within the very first amendment to our constitution.

The funny thing to me throughout the whole Mueller/Russiagate/Shampeachment fraud was how shamelessly the Left—who for decades had advocated for the Soviet Union in every conceivable fashion, constantly insisting that the US should blindly follow along the same poisoned path—turned on a dime, the moment it became politically useful to them, to shriek with horror at the (baseless) suggestion that an American presidential candidate might have colluded with the Rooskies to aid his election campaign.

And now, here are these same fork-tongued bullshit artists again, haplessly trying to peddle yet another fraudulent charge of sinister Rooskie manipulation because some Americans aren’t willing to go along with the lawless trampling of their God-given rights without protest.

As Sundance reminds us, America was founded on the principle that being ruled from afar without representation to provide the people with a voice in government is the very definition of tyranny, and is therefore intolerable. Such an arrangement renders the government implementing it entirely illegitimate, thereby granting its citizenry not just the right but the solemn, absolute duty to remove its burdensome yoke: “…to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” more appropriate to the governance of a free people. Doubt me on that? Don’t.

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

…He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

Can any of us credibly propose that the despotism of George III was a far grosser provocation than the outrages currently being perpetrated against us by our own governors, mayors, city councils, and even unelected bureaucrats? Is it reasonable to expect those Americans who still cherish their already-dwindling rights under the US Constitution to submit to these latter-day depredations with nary a murmur of dissent?

Sundance has it right: protest against illegitimate authority IS America. It’s bred in the bone, the fabric and foundation of the Republic, hard-coded into our national DNA. Can it be any surprise, then, that the Left hates it so desperately, and will hurl any accusation—no matter how transparently hypocritical, self-contradictory, or spurious—to crush it?

COURAGE!

God, what a puling little pussy-fart.



Skating right by the sorry fact that so much of this phony panic has been generated by Enemedia collectively soiling their Underoos over it via their overwrought reportage, as we say down South: damn if I’da told it, pissant. The only thing remotely to Stelter’s credit here is that he’s almost certainly lying about this. Glenn treats Weepy Spudboy way more gently than I ever will, but hits the mark nonetheless:

Imagine a British journalist publicly stating something like this during The Blitz. Our media class really is like a bunch of middle-school girls.

Sheeeit. If I ever catch my own soon-to-be-middle school-age daughter behaving like Tater Stelter in even the smallest way, Daddy will take up a switch and stripe her little butt chartreuse. Insty includes a couple other good ripostes with that one, too.

Had, took, hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray

To all the shrieking panic-ninnies cowering under their beds in full Level-4 Biohazard gear: hope it was worth it.

The … crisis we face is unparalleled in modern times,” said the World Health Organization’s assistant director, while its director general proclaimed it “likely the greatest peacetime challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced.” This was based on a CDC computer model projection predicting as many as 1.4 million deaths from just two countries.

So when did they say this about COVID-19? Trick question: It was actually about the Ebola virus in Liberia and Sierra Leone five years ago, and the ultimate death toll was under 8,000.

With COVID-19 having peaked (the highest date was April 4), despite the best efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to increase numbers by first saying any death with the virus could be considered a death from the virus and then again this week by saying a positive test isn’t even needed, you can see where this is going.

Since the AIDS epidemic, people have been pumping out such models with often incredible figures. For AIDS, the Public Health Service announced (without documenting) there would be 450,000 cases by the end of 1993, with 100,000 in that year alone. The media faithfully parroted it. There were 17,325 by the end of that year, with about 5,000 in 1993. SARS (2002-2003) was supposed to kill perhaps “millions,” based on analyses. It killed 744 before disappearing.

Later, avian flu strain A/H5N1, “even in the best-case scenarios” was to “cause 2 (million) to 7 million deaths” worldwide. A British professor named Neil Ferguson scaled that up to 200 million. It killed 440. This same Ferguson in 2002 had projected 50-50,000 deaths from so-called “Mad Cow Disease.” On its face, what possible good is a spread that large? (We shall return to this.) But the final toll was slightly over 200.

In the current crisis the most alarming model, nay probably the most influential in the implementation of the draconian quarantines worldwide, projected a maximum of 2.2 million American deaths and 550,000 United Kingdom deaths unless there were severe restrictions for 18 months or until a vaccine was developed. The primary author: Neil Ferguson. Right, Mad Cow/Avian Flu Fergie.

Then a funny thing happened. A mere nine days after announcing his model, Ferguson said a better number for the U.K. would be only 20,000. The equivalent would be fewer than 80,000 American deaths. Technically, that U.K. number was buried in a table in the report under what might be called “a fantastic case scenario.” But could that reduction possibly reflect a mere nine days of restrictions? No.

Soon all the numbers were tumbling. Yet as late as March 31, the New York Times declared: “White House Projects Grim Toll from Virus” citing White House Coronavirus Task Force head Deborah Birx and director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, who in turn cited a model showing deaths up to 240,000. Still awful, but Birx explicitly backed off the Ferguson projection for which she had previously been the Grey Lady’s pompom girl.

Then suddenly Fauci announced a flat figure of “more like 60,000,” the same number the CDC says died of flu two years ago. Probably not coincidentally, until quite recently the agency said there were 80,000 flu victims that year, before lowering it to 61,000 – presumably because people were using that figure to compare to COVID-19 deaths. In any event, the 1968-1969 “Hong Kong flu” killed an estimated 100,000 Americans, or 165,000 adjusted to today’s population.

Moreover, as noted, the CDC now encourages coding a death of anyone “if the circumstances are compelling” even though they haven’t been tested at all. Yeah, wow; it’s not a “conservative myth.” During flu season, that means a lot of flu victims have magically become COVID-19 victims in addition to people who would have otherwise had cause of death listed as heart attack, diabetes, and other co-morbid conditions.

Get hit by a truck, die of COVID19. Get shot by a home-invader, die of COVID19. Jump off a building, die of COVID19. Hey, maybe it IS a “magic virus” after all!

Model defenders declare the plummets were based on the success of severe restrictions of civil liberties. “It just means we won,” declared an article in The Atlantic. Wrong. The bottom range of the models presumes the best-case scenario. If the low end is 100,000, that’s the low end.

This is what what they are, it’s what they do. The entirely-predictable Progressivist progression goes something like this: be back-asswards wrong about something, exaggerate and overhype something, fuck things up badly because of it, then either A) claim to have been right along, that without your farsighted palliative measures things would undoubtedly be a hell of a lot worse; B) claim you failed only because your already-extreme measures just didn’t go far enough; or C) blame Reagan/Bush/Trump/conservatives for the mess you made. If none of those options fools anybody to Proggy’s satisfaction, then we’ll get: HEY, LOOK, OVER THERE! CLIMATE CHANGE/COMMON SENSE GUN CONTROL/HOMELESS EPIDEMIC/RAPE CULTURE/OPIOID CRISIS/RUSSIAN BOTS!!!!

Bottom line? This:

That’s not proof that public health interventions are worthless; merely that since the Plague of Athens four centuries B.C. and before, epidemics have risen and fallen quite on their own. Nobody needed Big Brother looking over their shoulder and cracking a whip; nobody needed to implode their economies and leave their citizens with tops reading: “I survived the ‘worst epidemic in history’ and all I have left is this crummy t-shirt.”

Leaving us with one simple question: can a hard number be put on how many times goobermint “experts” like Fauci have to be proven wrong before the shrieking panic-ninnies finally lose their purblind faith in them? Or will good ol’ Charlie Brown go right on attempting to kick that football no matter what, forever and ever, amen?

Are we not men?

On your feet or on your knees.

I am thoroughly disheartened – nay, sickened — by the sheeplike behavior of so many of our countrymen. I cannot believe they think the proper response to “our leaders’” overweening usurpations of authorities never granted is to politely ask for their rights back.

Americans don’t do that. Americans exercise their rights openly and confidently. They don’t ask for anyone’s permission.

Your rights are not permissions. They are yours, not because some “authority” has granted them to you, but by virtue of your membership in the human race. To treat them as permissions is to surrender them, such that any “crisis,” whether real or notional, can be used to nullify them. And there are plenty of wannabe dictators who are grasping at that opportunity — with the support of the left-wing media

It hardly matters what rights you claim if you refrain from exercising them. That’s how the Second Amendment was gutted. It’s how the rest of the Bill of Rights is being reduced to meaninglessness. And if we permit it to go one millimeter further, we are unworthy of the term “free people.”

It’s not about the economy. It’s not about the virus. It’s not about “science.” It’s about freedom: holding onto the pitiful amount we have left after two and a quarter centuries’ incursions upon it, usually in the name of “crisis” or “safety.”

Free men accept that life entails risk.
They don’t ask their “leaders” to “protect” them.
When “leaders” tyrannize them “for your own good,” they rise up.
Such “leaders” become lamppost decorations, pour encourager les autres.

Are you a free man or a sheep?

From what we’re seeing of late, the answer to that question is far from encouraging. Happily, though, sometimes it doesn’t take all that much in the way of pushback or defiance to force our masters to relent:



Good on ya, Master Chief. They may well take us down in the long run, but at the very least we can make ’em work for it.

Update! This may seem to be unrelated, but it strikes me as yet another depressing aspect of the Great Knuckling Under.

Land O’ Lakes drops ‘racist’ Native American image after nearly 100 years
The new label was announced in a press release from Land O’ Lakes in February, though it made no specific mention of removing the Native American image from all products.

The press release shared “the new packaging will show up in a variety of ways, including through a new front-of-package design that features the phrase ‘Farmer-Owned’ above the LAND O LAKES brandmark,” as well as include pictures of farmers and co-op members on the label.

“As Land O’Lakes looks toward our 100th anniversary, we’ve recognized we need packaging that reflects the foundation and heart of our company culture—and nothing does that better than our farmer-owners whose milk is used to produce Land O’Lakes’ dairy products,” said Beth Ford, President and CEO, Land O’Lakes, in the press release.

“As a farmer-owned co-op, we strongly feel the need to better connect the men and women who grow our food with those who consume it,” Ford said.

Is it really necessary to “connect” them beyond having them buy and eat your damned butter? Because if it is, I’m just damned if I can see the why of it. Or how a bunch of mealy-mouthed gobbledygook from some college-kid corporate flack who probably never yanked a single bovine teat in her life is gonna get the job done. Until such time as you can explain those mysterious profundities to me, grab that plunger-handle and get to churning, lady.

But if you think that’s depressing stuff—and it is—wait till you get a load of the backstory.

Did you know that back in the 1950s, when Land O’ Lakes wanted to update their logo, they hired an American Indian artist to do the job. He came up with Mia, the logo we’re all familiar with, to honor American Indian culture and their traditional connection to nature.

I checked into it a little myself, and WeirdDave ain’t just making it up.

Mia first appeared on Land O’Lakes packaging in 1928, and was originally designed by illustrator Arthur C. Hanson for the advertising firm Brown and Bigelow.

Native American artist Patrick DesJarlait, of the Ojibwe tribe, redesigned the packaging in the 1950s to foster “a sense of Indian pride,” the Minnesota Reformer reported.

His son, Robert DesJarlait, told the outlet that the image — which has been slammed by many as “racist” — has become a “paradox” for Native Americans.

“He was breaking a lot of barriers…Back in the ’50s, nobody even thought about stereotypical imagery. Today it’s a stereotype, but it’s also a source of cultural pride,” DesJarlait told the outlet.

As well it might be, too. As Dave says, you can be pretty confident that there were few if any Native Americans among the SJW screechers demanding Land-O-Lakes’ capitulation to mindless PC here.

Puzzling, innit, the way those screechers have managed to “fundamentally transform” a legitimate source of cultural pride into some kind of shameful offense against all human decency. In the end, though, this isn’t really about butter, or marketing, or the Land-O-Lakes mascot, or respect for Indians and their heritage, or even “racism” itself. In the end, it’s really about this:


So is the above gutting of Ilhan Omar-Elmi really related to the topic at hand? You just better believe it is, chum. Because collapsing American society, dismantling America, is ALWAYS what it’s about with the Left—every single time, every single issue, every single word of every single argument. Until you begin to get your head fully around that, you ain’t fighting back, and you damned sure ain’t winning. You’re just chasing your tail, that’s all.

When the government fears the people, there is liberty

When the people fear the government, there is…Gretchen Whitler.

RETALIATION? Michigan’s Democrat Governor Threatens to EXTEND Stay-At-Home Order in Response to #OperationGridlock Protesters
Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has threatened to extend her extreme stay-at-home order in response to protesters who rallied against it at the state’s capital on Wednesday.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Governor Whitmer said that the protest was “irresponsible” and that “we might have to actually think about extending stay-at-home orders, which is supposedly what they were protesting.”

“When you see a, you know, a political rally — that’s what it was yesterday — a political rally like that, where people aren’t wearing masks, and they’re in close quarters, and they’re touching one another, you know that that’s precisely what makes this kind of a disease drag out and expose more people,” Whitmer said.

Thousands of protesters had converged for a protest called “Operation Gridlock” to protest her order, which is one of the strictest in the nation.

Sorry and all, but this wretched, petty tyrant has now made it abundantly clear that something a lot stronger than peaceful protest will be required to properly rein her ilk in. The really nice thing about tar, feathers, stout ropes, and tall lampposts, though, is the worthy example thereby provided to all the other dimestore dictator wannabes across the nation. Pour encourager les autres, as the saying goes.

Swinging just one or two of these fleabitten sumbitches ought to plenty enough to get all of them back on track, and any who can’t or won’t get their minds right from said example(s) we’ll all be better off without anyway. Call it Darwinian natural selection at work in the real world. Hey, politics ain’t beanbag, amIright?

Not that I would ever advocate any such thing, of course. That would be wrong against the law.

Oh HELL no

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.

O Brave New World, that has such fascists in it!

Some folks are shocked and/or angry about CooCooCoomo’s pronouncement, but I think he’s more right than wrong here. Although probably for the worst possible reasons.

(CNSNews.com) – New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo predicted “a new normal” when the state’s economy reopens – in the environment, economics, civil rights, and social justice.

“People are restless. We have to talk about the reopening of the economy. How do we do this? We have to build a bridge, from where we are to the reopening of the economy. Well, what does that look like?” he said during a press conference on Wednesday.

“Let’s say that where we’re going it’s not a reopening, in that we are going to reopen what was. We are going to a different place, and we should go to a different place, and we should go to a better place. If we don’t learn the lessons from this situation, that all of this will have been in vain,” Cuomo said.
 
“So we’re going to a different place, which is a new normal. We talk about the new normal. We’ve been talking about the new normal for years. We are going to have a new normal in public health. By the way, the way we have a new normal in an environment, the new normal in economics, a new normal in civil rights, a new normal and social justice, right? This is the way of the world now,” he said.

We are indeed going to find ourselves saddled with a “new normal” from here on out, pretty much no matter what anybody does. But it isn’t going to be a nice, happy place. Coomo’s statement, though, is one among several that puts the lie to recent Righty crowing about how the coronavirus panic has singlehandedly discredited so many cherished liberal tropes—globalism; densely-packed urban areas over surburbia; mass transit instead of private autos; open borders and unrestricted immigration; the desirability of big, intrusive government, etc—for good, thereby rendering them, shall we say, unsustainable.

Somebody should maybe tell the Left that, though, because from where I sit it sure looks like they fully intend to double down, rather than shamefacedly admitting the error of the Leftist Way and slinking off the national stage to rethink a few things, and current reality be damned. Interestingly enough, it seems some Leftard states are already making bold moves towards this New Normal.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has announced the Northeastern Directorate will keep all citizens within the region on lock-down through May 15, 2020, with a possible extension depending on an agreement within the Blue State alliance members.

Six other governors from within the Northeastern Directorate form the regional alliance.

Northeast states: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Delaware have assembled an authoritarian alliance, without legislative approval and without legal precedent, to block any federal efforts to reopen the economy.

The Blue State leaders have determined it is in the best interests of the Northeastern citizenry for individual rights to be suspended under a post-constitutional framework. The government in this region will determine when the advancement of individual rights will be permitted and will set the parameters of permitted civic, social and economic engagement.

All citizens within the Northeastern Directorate are now captive to arbitrary rules on business ownership, property rights, contract terms, movement and assembly. Under the terms of a regional health emergency, as outlined by the command and control structure, currently citizens within the containment area are quarantined and not permitted to exit their homes, petition government or request redress for grievances.

But the Northeastern Directorate isn’t the only region to kinda-sorta declare its independence from the former Republic:

(Bloomberg Opinion) — California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear.

Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”

“Nation-state.” “Export.”

Hey, fine by me, and don’t let the door etc. Feel free to take some of the other Democrat-Socialist shitholes like, say, Chicago, Portland, and Seattle along with ya when you go, too. We ask not your counsels or your arms. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

Above the fray

Being “elite” means never having to say you’re sorry.

Take any contentious issue—travel bans, the advantages of masks, the Chinese compromising of WHO, the entire industry of grievance politics infecting criticism of China’s despicable behavior, delayed testing by the Centers for Disease Control and FDA, modeling, the efficacy of antimalarial drugs—and our elite seem unable to admit they were wrong, and wrong with a great deal of costly arrogance.

It is no exaggeration to say that most models that the best and brightest offered the public, from the imported Imperial College in London to those from the University of Washington and many more besides, were not just inaccurate, but quite mistaken in two tragic ways: First, they were accepted as gospel by governments and thus their flawed assumptions became the basis for policies that in many cases may prove counterproductive. Second, the modelers themselves either did not promptly correct their warped inputs, or were not completely forthcoming about their data and methodologies, or blamed their flawed assumptions on others or circumstances beyond imagination, or claimed that their mistakes were in fact salutary—if not sorta, kinda planned—in galvanizing a presumably infantile public to accept draconian measures that it otherwise would not.

I know a plumber and an electrician, both skilled in the pragmatic engineering of pipes and wires, who would not dare to think they could offer a model of plumbing or electrical prediction if they had no idea of the real size of the denominator and were likewise unsure that the numerator was widely accepted as accurate and clearly defined.

When California Governor Gavin Newsom warned that 25.5 million Californians “will” get the virus in the eight weeks following March 18, albeit without his shelter-in-place orders, he was also essentially stating that, at a then 2.6 percent lethality rate for Californians known to have the active virus, about 1 million would die. As I write, 24 days out from his prediction and nearing the half-way point to Doomsday, about 23,000 Californians have tested positive, and either are fighting the disease or have recovered. Since late January, about 650 of 40 million Californians have died from the disease, in a state where well over 700 people die from some cause every day.

If 10 times that number of known positive tests are now actively infected, we legitimately could assume at least 222,000 residents are now active or past carriers. Those who advised Newsom to shut down the world’s sixth-largest economy, including universities like Cal Tech, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the commerce and livelihoods of 40 million residents, apparently did not factor into their models some possible collective immunity among thousands of Californians who, for months, were on the front lines of arriving flights from China.

Nor did modelers seem to factor in the ability of people to social distance even before the shutdown was ordered, or the fact that a virus that does not kill 95.5 percent of those who are infected, but not frontline health workers or over 60 years old, may be deemed by the public manageable in a way that does not require having multigenerational small businesses ruined, or careers destroyed, or retirement savings accounts wrecked, or key appointments with doctors postponed or canceled.

Elite wisdom, which in its allegiance to the scientific method eventually is likely to find an antidote and vaccination against the virus, still fails us in so many other ways in which it should not, in part also because its high priests rarely face the consequences of their own ideological and scientific pronouncements.

Whatever the end result of this crisis, few at the WHO, CDC or the state health directors are going to lose their jobs in a way the small restaurateurs and Uber drivers most certainly will.

In their boundless “wisdom,” the Ruling Class “elites” seem determined to leave us with pitchforks, torches, and heads on pikes as our only possible recourse.

The Founders would have been shooting already

ZMan takes a bike ride in the boonies and has himself way too much fun.

Maryland is one of those strange parts of the country where you can go from the land of suburbanite bug men to old time country living in a few miles. Get far enough away from Lagos itself and the state is quite beautiful, with an aesthetic that is unique. The state has always been a strange confluence of the surrounding regions.

I went over this weird little bridge and saw a couple of soyish looking guys standing by a car pulled over to the side of the road. I approached thinking they were having car trouble, but then I saw one of them was wearing a Reason T-shirt. I stopped and beat them. They knew why. Just in case I also said that Hans Herman-Hoppe spells his name wrong. I may have mentioned some unfortunate things about Ayn Rand’s personal life. You can never be too thorough with these types.

Heh. Stupid neo-hippies. Then we come to the more serious part.

Coming back to my bit of the world, I could not help but think about how easy everyone has gone along with the crackdown. Americans may say they don’t trust their politicians or the media, but in the end, they trusted them completely on this panic. You can be sure the politicians and media are both feeling bold right now, having seen tens of millions dutifully follow their commands. No matter what happens in the near term, the long-term cost of that will far outweigh the threat of the virus.

The empty parks and streets are a good reminder that civilization is people, not the stuff made by people. If a bunch of strangers moved into our empty towns right now, it would not be the same. Soon, they would transform the stuff to reflect their will. Right now, our civilization is full of people ready to cower under their bed when the people in charge come up with a decent ghost story. I half wonder if the people in charge are doing this just to see if there is any fight left in us.

All of this reminds me of a great Joe Sobran quote. “By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.”

Some folks complain every July 4th about how “Independence Day” has come to mean little more than an excuse for a barbecue and a good drunk, but in our current disgraceful straits I think that’s a hell of a lot more appropriate than We The Sheeple patting themselves on the back and congratulating each other on how “free” they are.

Rain on the parade

A splash of cold water on that slim hope I was talking about the other day.

Once again, it was goosebumps for diehards when investigative reporter John Solomon told Fox News host Sean Hannity that U.S. Attorney John Durham was issuing subpoenas on behalf of a grand jury. Twitter pulses raced. Former CIA Director John Brennan was closer than ever to a rockpile in prison stripes, wasn’t he? Comey, Ohr, Kramer, Simpson, Clinton were sweating bullets, right?

I will be jubilant if I’m wrong, but I continue to doubt it. I don’t expect the anti-Trump conspirators to be indicted and tried for sedition or treason or any other serious crime by Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice. Nothing we have seen to date points to it.

What should also temper expectations, however, is a hard look at history. When it comes to the Swamp’s subversion of the Republic, issuing subpoenas to bring witnesses before a grand jury means nothing more than issuing subpoenas to bring witnesses before a grand jury. Indictments, trials, and convictions have always been exceedingly rare.

Consider the grand jury convened in the spring of 1947 to hear sensational charges of subversion inside the federal government by Elizabeth Bentley, a key American defector from Soviet intelligence. Ex-KGB courier Bentley would offer testimony against numerous federal government officials, bureaucrats, and others from those early days of the Swamp in connection with espionage rings run inside the U.S. government by Soviet intelligence.

Although the names were completely unknown to the public at the time, the Bentley grand jury witness roster was, as Evans and Romerstein write, “a spectacular line-up, an all-star team of Soviet agents, Communists and close-in fellow travellers.”

As the list demonstrates, this was indeed a Who’s Who of traitors working for Stalin, for the KGB, for communism and globalism inside and around the federal government, including Soviet agents Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. These two top FDR administration officials were instrumental in the creation of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, helming them both, respectively, in the globalist institutions’ early days.

The most stunning thing about the Bentley grand jury witness list, however, is that no one on it, not even the later-notorious Hiss or White, was indicted for anything.

Why were there no indictments? The reason is quite simple. The government failed to call a witness who could corroborate any of Bentley’s grave charges even though such a witness was already well known to it. That witness was Whittaker Chambers. His testimony about Hiss and White alone would have been crucial to the federal case. “Yet though the FBI was well aware of what Chambers knew and could have told the grand jury,” the authors write, “for over a year prosecutors refused to call him. Hence no second witness in the case—hence no indictments.”

Why didn’t prosecutors call Chambers? FBI records, Evans and Romerstein write, “provide a suggestive picture of attitudes at the Justice Department that guided the grand jury process.”

For example, federal prosecutor Thomas Donegan “was of the opinion Chambers testimony would not be helpful.” Helpful to what?

Oh, I’m pretty sure we can guess the answer to that one easily enough.

Given the FBI’s interview with Chambers to date, it would have been clear that Chambers’ testimony would have been exceedingly “helpful” in pursuit of indictments. Even after Chambers and Hiss sensationally battled in Congress in August of 1948, however, prosecutors refused to call “the former Soviet courier who would become the most famous witness in the Cold War.”

The record indicates that the Department of Justice did not want indictments.

I’m trying real hard to come up with a solid reason to believe that this time around might be different, but I’m coming up empty. Then as now as ever as always, the Deep State looks after its own.

The link I used above is to an archive.is snapshot of the original, which is locked away behind a paywall. As such, it may or may not work for ya, I dunno.

I. Just. Can’t. EVEN

Probably gonna want to sit down for this one, folks.

STUNNING! US Gave Wuhan Lab $3.7 Million Grant to Study Horseshoe Bats that Carry Coronavirus

Well, stunning IS one word for it, I suppose. I can think of a few others.

In late March FOX News host Tucker Carlson reported on a CHINESE study on the origin of the novel coronavirus.

The coronavirus came from either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention or Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.

The study concluded the deadly virus came out of local laboratories in Hubei Province. The smoking gun in the study is the link to horseshoe bats which are not sold in local markets and not native to Wuhan. In fact the closest colony is 900 kilometers away. There is no evidence horseshoe bats were sold in the Wuhan wet markets. The local labs used this bat specimen and the virus came from a lab in Wuhan.

Reports linking bats to the coronavirus started making the rounds back in January. But a recent paper published in the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention found the source of the coronavirus is a laboratory near the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan.

But that’s not all.

And it isn’t. It really, really isn’t.

According to documents obtained by British media outlet Daily Mail, scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is an agency of the US Department of Health and Human Services responsible for biomedical and public health research.

US Congressman Matt Gaetz said, “I’m disgusted to learn that for years the US government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities.”

Well, disgusted IS one word for it, I suppose. I can think of a few others.

CF Archives

Categories

Comments policy

NOTE: In order to comment, you must be registered and approved as a CF user. Since so many user-registrations are attempted by spam-bots for their own nefarious purposes, YOUR REGISTRATION MAY BE ERRONEOUSLY DENIED.

If you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to find yourself caught up as collateral damage in one of my irregularly (un)scheduled sweeps for hinky registration attempts, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.

ALSO NOTE: You MUST use a valid, legit email address in order to successfully register, the new anti-spam software I installed last night requires it. My thanks to Barry for all his help sorting this mess out last night.

Comments appear entirely at the whim of the guy who pays the bills for this site and may be deleted, ridiculed, maliciously edited for purposes of mockery, or otherwise pissed over as he in his capricious fancy sees fit. The CF comments section is pretty free-form and rough and tumble; tolerance level for rowdiness and misbehavior is fairly high here, but is NOT without limit.

Management is under no obligation whatever to allow the comments section to be taken over and ruined by trolls, Leftists, and/or other oxygen thieves, and will take any measures deemed necessary to prevent such. Conduct yourself with the merest modicum of decorum, courtesy, and respect and you'll be fine. Pick pointless squabbles with other commenters, fling provocative personal insults, issue threats, or annoy the host (me) and...you won't.

Should you find yourself sanctioned after running afoul of the CF comments policy as stated and feel you have been wronged, please download and complete the Butthurt Report form below in quadruplicate; retain one copy for your personal records and send the others to the email address posted in the right sidebar.

Please refrain from whining, sniveling, and/or bursting into tears and waving your chubby fists around in frustrated rage, lest you suffer an aneurysm or stroke unnecessarily. Your completed form will be reviewed and your complaint addressed whenever management feels like getting around to it. Thank you.

CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski

Subscribe to CF!

Support options

Shameless begging

If you enjoy the site, please consider donating:

Correspondence

Email addy: mike-at-this-url dot etc

All e-mails assumed to be legitimate fodder for publication, scorn, ridicule, or other public mockery unless specified as private by the sender

Allied territory

Alternatives to shitlib social media: A few people worth following on Gab:

Fuck you

Kill one for mommy today! Click to embiggen

Notable Quotes

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums

FREEDOM!!!

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Daniel Webster

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
Charles Bukowski

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
Ezra Pound

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Frank Zappa

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
Bill Whittle

Best of the best

Finest hosting service

Image swiped from The Last Refuge

2016 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards

RSS feed

RSS - entries - Entries
RSS - entries - Comments

Boycott the New York Times -- Read the Real News at Larwyn's Linx

Copyright © 2026