One of these things is not a LOT like the other

The ever-helpful and considerate SteveF created a handy Chink-N-Pox/Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly “the weather”) compare-contrast chart for us which, unfortunately, I fear we’ll soon be seeing quite a bit of now that the trial run has worked out so swimmingly for TPTB.

AGW WuFlu
Used to increase government power
The public isn’t sure what’s going on but we know we’re being lied to
Attacks on doubters
Economic ruin in fighting it
Fear tactics, embellished stories, and doom and gloom scenarios
Actual deaths
Dramatically over-counted deaths
Disaster doesn’t live up to the hype – deaths fail to materialize
Money grab
Constantly redefined criteria for disaster
Blamed for problems that would have happened anyway
Gaslighting
The possible catastrophe is so dire that any amount of money spent to avert it is well spent

Hope nobody out there was kidding themselves that the Green Raw Deal was dead and buried.

You bought it, you broke it

Now you live with it.

In an April 7 video posted to YouTube, John-Paul Drake, director at Drakes Supermarkets in South Australia, shared a story about a customer who reportedly attempted to return a mass amount of toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

“I had my first customer yesterday who said he wanted to get a refund on a 150 packets of 32-pack toilet paper and 150 units of one liter sanitizer!” Drake said. “I told him [shows middle finger] that. That is the sort of person that is causing the problem in the whole country.”

Prior to telling the story about the man attempting to return his goods, Drake spoke about panic buying and hoarding, claiming that the store’s “product limits” on toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and detergent were implemented in order to allow a broader number of people access to those items.

“If everyone had just bought the things that they’d needed for their immediate short-term, we would be fine,” Drake said. “But the reality is, we’ve had so many people hoarding products and buying products that they’re never gonna use.”

As to how the man was able to purchase so much? Drake said in a LinkedIn post: “He had a team of people buying one of each across all of our stores!”

The twit had some nerve trying to return the stuff for sure. But on the bright side, he’ll never have to worry about running out.

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.

It’s five o’clock somewhere

After the bleak despair of the previous post, how’s about something a little more uplifting, eh?

Some states are declaring what businesses are “essential” and “non-essential.”

Many states, at least, are putting liquor and beer/wine stores in that “essential” category (it’s a pandemic, people, and alcohol has been proven to help*).

But getting out to the store is not easy for everyone — especially for the most vulnerable Americans.

Take Olive Veronesi. She’s 93 years old and lives outside Pittsburgh. She ran out of beer during the coronavirus lockdown and, being in a vulnerable age group for coronavirus, couldn’t leave to get more.

So she made a little sign and held it up in front of her window, holding a Coors Light can. “I need more beer!!” she said from her home in Seminole, news station KDKA reported.

People have sent in comments from all over the world. “Love you to bits all the way from England,” Martin Goodwin wrote. “Oh okay a 93-year-old does it and it’s funny and heartwarming but when I do it I’m an alcoholic,” Ty Mason wrote.

And in this day and age, heroes come in all sorts. Coors stepped up to the task and pledged to help out Veronesi. “Olive asked, and beer is on its way,” Coors Light tweeted Sunday night.

Hey, if Granny wants a beer, she by God oughta have herself one.

Reality bites—HARD

My brother called yesterday to say he’d been listening to the radio a bit, and Limbaugh sounded like he was in a near-panic. I checked the transcript, and it looks like he had it right.

Rush is a pretty smart fella, you know.

How can anybody sane be anything less than scared and outraged and mortified that 22 million people have been thrown out of work over something that may end up killing fewer than 50,000 people? It is unprecedented. And yet there are people who want to maintain the circumstances we are in. And it boggles the mind.

It befuddles the mind. It is so counterintuitive to Americanism. We cannot go on. Trump is gonna be announcing his reopening plans, and already Governor Cuomo has announced that he’s gonna get a consultancy group in there to work on competing ideas ’cause he doesn’t want to be bound by whatever Trump’s plans are.

Fine. I’m struggling for ways to break through, to permeate obviously existing great walls of resistance that some people have. Some people, when you start criticizing government, they just tune you out. They’re not interested in it. But this can’t go on! I can’t believe it has gone on this long. I can’t believe… In one way, I can’t believe the American people haven’t arisen in outrage over this yet.

Except the numbers don’t back it up. When you look at the reported infections and the reported deaths and then you look at the model projections, we started with 2.2 million — what a great way to scare people — then it was a hundred thousand, then it became a hundred thousand to 240,000, then last week was going to be the apocalypse.

And it wasn’t.

And now the modeler who has yet to be right — no personal criticism intended, just factual analysis. The modeler who has yet to be right is gonna revise his numbers downward again today to fewer than 61,000 projected deaths by August. There ought to be a lot more death than this. “Well, no, Rush, because we have been practicing social distancing and we’ve been flattening the curve.”

We are destroying people in a number of different ways. The idea that we’re saving people by destroying the U.S. economy is… It’s a nonstarter. It’s absurd. The idea that we can somehow save people by continuing a policy that destroys the U.S. economy — and it will. Let me tell you something about when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties.

My parents and grandparents’ most formative experience in their lives — in other words, the thing that was the top of the list in the way they raised us, the values they attempted to instill in us — was the Great Depression. My dad was born in 1918; my mom in 1928.

His parents never forgot it.

It shaped everything they did the rest of their lives. They had to put up with a lot of other things too. They had to put up with World War II, Korea. They had to put up with the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War threatening to wipe us out and imprison their grandkids. They had a lot on their plate, and the Great Depression was the formative thing because it was so horrible.

And as parents, they were doing everything they could to shield and protect me and my brother from having to go through it. It was the worst thing in their lives. And that’s where we’re headed, if this goes on. We are headed to Great Depression. All we need is a 30 to 40% contraction in this economy. We’ll hit Great Recession territory first and then depression, if this doesn’t stop — and the idea that there are people advocating for this!

But I’ll never forget the fear of the Great Depression my father had. I’d be snarky. “Dad, come on. I wasn’t alive. I don’t care how much you tell me about it, I can’t relate to it. I didn’t experience it.” I was like every kid. “Come on, Dad.” We’re sitting there in our night comfortable home, and we’re driving around. The thought of a Great Depression was the last thing in the world I could even conceive of.

So I’m snarky about it. He said, “Son, you better hope that you never have anything like that happen to you. You better hope you never live through it.” It was that bad for the people who did — and we’re headed for it, and we’ve done it to ourselves. It is not that our economy is falsely created. It’s not that our economy is a house-of-cards sham. It’s not that capitalism doesn’t work.

We are doing this to ourselves — and it’s amazing how quickly. Three years to revive an economy, create roaring circumstances. It took less than two months to wipe it all out. Twenty-two million people filing for unemployment compensation — 22 million — and the idea that there is not an angry outcry from all over the world that this must stop?

That outcry had better happen, because this… We’re beyond now saying this is unsustainable. This is untenable. This is cataclysmic. We’re in the midst of a self-created disaster that we could fix (snap, snap, snap) at the snap of our fingers. We could begin the process of reversing this tomorrow — we could do it May 1st, we could do it April the 30th, we could do it April 21st — and there are forces arrayed against doing that.

I’m in complete agreement with all this…right up until Rush asserts that we could fix all this “at the snap of our fingers.” In fact, I very much doubt—once our “leaders” took the unprecedented, stupefyingly arrogant step of shutting nearly everything down in leg-wetting terror over a virus—that restarting the economy with a hearty “Hey presto!” and a cheery wave of the government magic wand was ever even possible.

I hope and pray I’m being overly pessimistic about all this, mind, but my belief is that it’s way too late to do much of anything now. And whatever we DO attempt isn’t going to make a hell of a lot of difference anyway. In their supreme hubris, our “leaders” have meddled in matters that are much too big for them. Now, as I said last night, we’re all on the express train to the hurt locker. Unfortunately, there ain’t no brakes on this runaway ride, either.

We have made the biggest mistake in history. There will be hell to pay for it. Should it turn out that I’m wrong, nobody will be more ecstatic about it than I will. But I don’t think it’s the way to bet.

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.

Prognosis: negative

On the express train to the hurt locker.

Are we dumping milk because of greed or low demand, no. It’s the supply chain, there are only so many jug fillers, all were running 24/7 before this cluster you-know-what.

Now demand for jug milk has almost doubled. However, restaurant demand is almost gone; NO ONE is eating out. 

Restaurant milk is distributed in 2.5 gal bags or pint chugs; further, almost 75 percent of milk is processed into hard products in this country, cheese and butter. Mozzarella is almost a third of total cheese production; how’s pizza sales going right now??

A bit of history – Years ago (40+) every town had a bottler, they ran one shift a day, could ramp up production easily. Now with all the corporate takeovers (wall street over main street) we are left with regional “high efficiency” milk plants that ran jug lines 24/7 before this mess, no excess capacity.

Jug machines cost millions and are MADE IN CHINA. Only so many jugs can be blown at a jug plant. We farmers don’t make the jugs, damn hard to ramp up production.

I’m a dairy farmer, believe me NO dairyman likes dumping milk; and so far there is NO guarantee they will get paid. Milk must be processed within 48 hours of production and 24 hours of receipt in the plant or it goes bad. Same with making it into cheese and butter, and neither stores well for long.

The same supply line problems exists where restaurants are supplied with bulk 1 pound blocks of butter or single serv packs or pats; and cheese is sold in 10 to 20 pound bags (think shredded Mozzarella for pizza). Furthermore, it is not legal for this end of the supply chain to sell direct to consumers in most states.

We are headed for the same problem with canned veggies. The vast majority of produce comes off and is processed in season; canned or frozen. The supply is already in cans for the season; restaurants use gallon cans or bulk bags of frozen produce.

At some point we will run out of consumer sized cans in stock because home size sales are up (40%+) and restaurant sales are almost nonexistent. Fresh produce out of U.S. season comes from Mexico (different climate). I’m talking sweet corn, green beans, peas, tomatoes, all veggies are seasonal in the USA. Fresh, out-of-season, row crops are  imported. (There are exceptions, like hydroponic grown, but small amount of total).

Eggs? Same problem. Bakeries and restaurants of any size use Pullman egg cases, 30 dozen at a pop, 30 eggs to a flat, 12 flats to a case. There are only so many 1 dozen egg cartons available and only so many packing machines.

Industrial bakeries and processors of packaged food buy bulk liquid eggs, no carton at all. Also in many states it is illegal to sell this supply-chain directly to consumers.

On your standard buffet of any size, do you really think they boil eggs and peel them? They come in a bag, boiled and diced; those nice uniform slices of boiled egg you see on your salad, a lot of them come in tubes boiled and extruded at the same time, just unwrap and slice. Your scrambled eggs come in a homogenized bag on most buffets.

Another example of Main Street being gutted and “improved by wall street” NO local egg processors available or many small egg producers either, all corporate and huge, contracted to sell to the corporate masters.

This is a warning the same problems exist in all supply chains.

The supply chain is farked.

David Osterloh,
61-year-old dairy farmer

Scary stuff.

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.

We can but hope

PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEEEEEAAAAASE.

A former senior advisor to Joe Biden speculated that it’s possible his former boss could choose a vice-presidential running mate who identifies as a woman.

Moe Vela, the founder of Vela Group, told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News host Joel Pollak on Sunday that it is possible that Biden’s vow to pick a woman running mate could include a transgender woman.

Vela reminded Pollak of Biden’s description at the beginning of the year of “transgender equality” as “the civil rights issue of our time.”

Pollak asked Vela, “This vice presidential choice, now — I’m saying the next bit facetiously, but I hope you’ll take it in the spirit it’s given — Joe Biden has said that the transgender movement is the civil rights movement of our time, so isn’t it somewhat cisgenderist to say you’re going to pick a female vice president, or can one qualify by identifying as female?”

Vela responded, “Oh wow, Joel. I never thought I’d get a question I’d never heard before. This is my 179th interview in four months and you just did it. I have to send you something like a gift of some kind.”

During a CNN debate with Bernie Sanders in March, Biden promised to choose a woman as his running mate.

“If I’m elected president, my cabinet, my administration will look like the country,” he said. “I commit that I will, in fact, pick a woman to be my vice president.”

Or, apparently, a manwymryn. Whichever.

No mention whatsoever of trivial considerations such as qualifications, political acumen, ideological compatibility, principles, experience, etc. But hey, as long as the right boxes are checked that’s all that really matters. Right, Gropey?

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.

Up next: a plague of locusts

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.

Curiouser and curioser

Unpossible, I say!

As of Wednesday (April 8), officials in eight remaining states have yet to issue full stay-at-home orders. Those states are Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. Officials in three other states — Alabama, Missouri, and South Carolina — only issued stay-at-home orders within the last few days after being resistant to enacting such a measure in the weeks prior.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that those states, due to their inaction, would reap the consequences in the form of higher COVID-19 death toll projections. But that has not been the case.

According to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which tracks the coronavirus outbreak in each individual state, predicting its death toll and hospital resource usage, all but one of the states in question have downgraded their death toll projections.

In addition to downgraded death toll projections, the states also saw significant downgrades for their projected hospital resource use, which include intensive care unit beds and ventilators.

The data doesn’t suggest that social distancing as a whole is worthless, or that it isn’t having any effect. But it does raise the question of whether every single state and locality needs to institute the same exact stay-at-home-on-government-orders regime. Many commentators have suggested that such measures might well be necessary in some places, but not necessary in others. The fact that both hospital usage and fatality projections are going down even in states without stay-at-home orders indicates that these people might be right.

I’d say so, yeah. But YMMV—particularly if you’re a Democrat-Socialist apparatchik looking to take advantage of widespread panic to advance your eternal agenda of glomming more power and control while you have the chance. Julie Kelly suggests that it might be time to shitcan the scare-mongers.

Those alarming forecasts were based on a model produced by the University of Washington late last month. Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, assembled a set of graphs to show how COVID-19 would overwhelm the country’s health care system, causing a shortage of hospital beds, intensive care units and ventilators.

Murray also originally calculated that 2,271 people would die on April 15, which would be the peak “death day” in the United States. But that wasn’t the only scary news. Sick people would by dying in the streets and entryways outside of hospitals across the country because no beds would be available.

The Murray model has been fully embraced by the president’s top two health advisors, Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The pair presented the doomsday model to President Trump on March 28, which prompted his decision to extend the CDC “social distancing” guidelines until the end of this month. (It bears repeating that the Murray model factored in “full social distancing” such as the shutdown of schools and nonessential businesses as well as stay-at-home orders through the end of May.)

Birx and Fauci also presented Murray’s charts to the White House press corps on March 31. Birx, relying on the model’s most extreme range of total fatalities, warned that upwards of 240,000 people would die of coronavirus in the United States by the beginning of August. The next two weeks, Birx admonished at the time, would be particularly painful. “As sobering as that number is, we need to be prepared for it,” Fauci told the socially distanced reporters in the briefing room. “Is it going to be that much? I hope not.”

But this week’s Pearl Harbor and 9/11 didn’t happen. Widespread death and devastation couldn’t be found.

Aside from two states, the rest of the country escaped terrorist-attack level fatalities this week. Between April 4 and April 9, a little more than 8,000 people in the country reportedly died from COVID-19; more than half of the fatalities occurred in New York and New Jersey. A tragedy no doubt, but certainly not the “hardest and saddest week” for most Americans, as Adams warned.

Only one other state—Michigan—has more than 1,000 recorded deaths so far. Populous states such as California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas have fewer than 500 fatalities. Many states are still in the double-digit range.

Further, the Murray model has been revised dramatically since its publication. An April 2 update predicted more than 93,000 total deaths by August; the April 5 update revised that figure downward to about 82,000. The total number of hospital beds needed dropped drastically between the two updates, from 262,092 beds to 140,823 beds. Predicted demand for ICUs dropped by about 10,000; ventilator demand dropped by nearly 12,000. Some of the model’s state-by-state projections also changed.

Beds and ICUs are aplenty across the country. There are so many ventilators available that we will now supply the machines to other countries in need.

Rather than admit the inherent flaws in the Murray model and confess the doomsday scenarios were completely unwarranted, Fauci, Birx, and Adams are stepping up their demands to keep the country under house arrest while the once-vibrant U.S. economy dives into Depression-era territory.

Curious indeed. Why, it’s almost as if there might be a different agenda at work here than the one they’ve been shrieking about. As if—I dunno, it’s such a crazy, out-there idea I really hate to even think it—as if goobermint bureau-rats and “experts” might possibly be ass-covering, incompetent liars or something.

Ohnononono, that’s just ridiculous. Sorry I mentioned it, folks. Go home, stay home, wait for further instructions from the proper authorities. That is all.

Update! Heard this great old tune on the radio earlier, and it seemed particularly appropriate for a Saturday night house-arrest music selection.



Killed by the cure

So how’s everybody liking their 30-day free trial of Communism?

Over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic and societal shut down (the communist trial run) it should be understood by those communists cheering on the lockdown of humanity and the destruction of the market system, the person most likely to be designated as the new Tsar of America is Donald Trump, someone capable of running a multi-trillion dollar economy, who understands production better than Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, James Comey or whatever communist cut out Washington has to offer.

If we are to be forced into a “climate saving” lockdown and re-tooling of the American economy, of which this fake pandemic is pretext and having seen the American patriots and their terror-filled responses to all other machinations of communist principles overlaid on their capitalist system, then the outcome is already known. So, since communism seems to be undeniable, largely because through the dilution of the American educational system, the slow progression of communist government displacing capitalist government, we ought to at least focus ourselves on determining our tyrant.

I am all for a mass march on Washington to demand capitalism and a release from self-imposed captivity. I am all in on a state by state effort toward the same goal, release, freedom, liberty, etc., but none of my fellow citizens seem to think it is such a situation and even if it is, it is much too dangerous to group ourselves together in such a manner as we might further enrage the communists in charge (as they have proven over the past few weeks that in fact they are) of our lives, our liberty and our persons to the degree that they can fine and imprison us for exerting our individual right of movement and commerce.

Understand the situation we are in. If any Democrat is elected president, this will be the model for fighting climate change. I finally heard this understanding of the situation  broached on talk radio. Finally, someone understood that after we had gone this far, any health issue might be used as an excuse to thus confine us. My thoughts went to the amount of lives that could be saved by keeping the majority of us off the roads, except by the communist practice of “travel permits” allowing us to go to work at pre-determined and acceptable jobs or for specific purposes only, but the idea of combating climate change is equally useful to those wishing to impose communism on America.

And if you’re telling yourself “it can’t happen here,” you’re a damned fool.

TL also has a post up on the release of his Lies Of Omission doc, which you can stream for free if you have Amazon Prime. And, of course, you can still donate to the fundraiser for the Belmont Playboys doc if you’re so inclined, too.

Update! I for one welcome our new Green overlords.

Last month, we were wondering whether the cure could be worse than the disease; this month, it seems clear that the cure and the disease were always the same thing. Rely on Chinese communists to produce your medicines and fill your supply lines with breakable crap, and this is what happens. Rely on globalist socialist flimflammers to remedy the situation with “calm expertise,” and they will instead send in an army of anti-American boffins to complain, arrest fathers playing catch with their daughters, and find ways to blame the whole out-of-control exercise in petit-tyranny on Christians and Southerners. For the first time since the James Younger Gang was roaming these parts, grown men are walking around with bandanas covering their faces, but their eyes are telling a whole other story. There’s only so much despotism that free people will endure, and if the price for life is the surrender of everything that makes life worth living, then those bandanas begin to feel like something else entirely. If all these municipal Napoleons-in-aspiration getting fitted for shiny hobnailed jackboots right now can’t control their shared impulse to rule over other men, then these bandanas might become a more permanent fixture. If there’s one thing Americans have always understood, it’s this: where speech and religion and personal defense are all outlawed, be an outlaw.

I, for one, welcome this grand display of government intrusion from coast to coast. Unlike the invisible Chinese virus hunting us surreptitiously, this overbearing application of government force is right out in the open for all to see. The more unscrupulous Democrat mayors openly brag about shutting down private businesses, banning gun ownership, and ripping congregants from church pews. They’re closing every house of worship in sight until their constituents learn to supplicate at the steps of City Hall and nowhere else! Democrats are always gravely warning about creeping fascism from others, but they insist we ignore the rank smell of authoritarianism emanating from their every local executive order. Lone drivers are pulled over for no other reason than to remind the riffraff that they are powerless before their local lords; neighbors are enticed by official favor and bounty to snitch on isolated joggers running through their streets; married nonagenarians are forcibly separated “for their own good.” Only the Democrats could follow the examples of Boko Haram and the Chinese Communist Party in taking advantage of human misery for their own gain. There is no need to imagine the historical totalitarianism of the ’30s and ’40s when it is now bursting forth before us with a vulture’s plumage for all to see. And for that, I am thankful.  

Well, now that we’re getting an awful peek behind the socialists’ GND curtain with this partial shutdown of the economy. Does it feel as if the American people are jumping up and down with excitement that “revolutionary change” on an “epic scale” has finally begun? Does it seem as if we’re “committed” to this path?  Millions of Americans out of work. GDP contraction. Stock market and retirement savings up in smoke. A Constitution left in tatters. All to decrease electricity usage in the United States by five to ten percent and slash the demand for gasoline in half. If this is what it feels like to destroy capitalism and usher in a new era of universal misery, please stop teasing me with the amuse-bouche of collapsing just part of the economy. I can hardly wait until we are allowed to indulge ourselves with the gluttonous feast of shutting down the whole thing. What a world Biden has promised us! It is as one anti-fracking Greenie declared online: “We now see the ‘glorious vision’ of a world free of fossil fuels.” Except the Green New Deal requires twenty times the effort and sacrifice and many more orders of magnitude in national debt to finally free ourselves of the dastardly hydrocarbons they abhor. Imagine the bliss we will discover from our future of permanent social lockdown. Thank goodness China Joe and the Green tyrants have such grand vision to go with their good intentions. We can save the planet by destroying ourselves over and over again!

Or maybe enough Americans will find this depressing glimpse into the future the Democrats promise us more than enough for one lifetime. Perhaps America will wake up to the reality that the Green New Deal and the Chinese virus share an identical life force. Maybe we won’t have to fight the war to come because enough of the great-grandchildren of the last generation to fight state-sponsored evil will finally recognize the Democrats’ counterfeit promises of unobtainable perfection here on Earth. Either way, at least we can finally see for ourselves what the Democrats have in mind. This miserable police state is the only future they desire.

It was always that way. It was always obvious too, for anyone with eyes to see, although it’s true that they’ve been more up-front and brazen than ever before with this Chink-N-Pox shinola. Yet half the electorate votes for them nonetheless. Again:

BumsOut.jpg

There’s the REAL problem.

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