Culture of Cowardice

A man of (no) honor

Posted on October 29, 2020October 29, 2020 by Mike

Another self-styled “courageous hero” of the Left turns out to be a miserable, slimy little worm.

In 2018, the New York Times proudly published an anonymously written piece from a purported “senior official in the Trump administration,” knowing that this statement was a lie. “Anonymous” claimed that Trump was an idiot, but that a brave band of “senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda.” In fact, the author was Miles Taylor, a low-level functionary in DHS when he wrote the hit piece.

The anonymous article, published on Sept. 5, 2018, bore the lofty title, “I Am Part of the Resistance inside the Trump Administration: I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” As noted above, to give the piece heft, the New York Times claimed that it came from a “senior official in the Trump administration.” We now know this statement was an outright lie, for the Times admitted that the author’s “identity is known to us.”

The article was a nauseating glue of arrogant piety and self-serving condescension. On the one hand, “Anonymous” insisted that he and others like him “want the administration to succeed” and even agreed that “many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.” Nevertheless, his brave little band of saboteurs loathed Trump, and no matter how effective he was, they were going to thwart him. It was paragraph after paragraph of smug, self-righteous glop.

And a confession to having committed numerous acts of sabotage intended to hamper and undermine the Trump admin’s policies and initiatives that, were there any justice in America, would leave the cringing pantywaist wide open to indictment for sedition.

Taylor accompanied his confession with yet another pompous screed in which he explained why he’s so much better than everyone else. If I had to imagine purgatory, it would be sitting in a room listening to this guy trash other people and justify his higher morality and intelligence.

I hope you caught Taylor’s assertion that “Trump is a man without character.” Let’s talk about character. Taylor lied when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked him if he was “Anonymous”…

Even worse than that, Taylor allowed a terrible smear to lie against Victoria Coates’s name. And while he’s acknowledged that he owes Coates an apology, none has been forthcoming.

Nor will it ever be, I’d bet. Oxygen thieves like Taylor don’t apologize for their misdeeds; the most anybody ever gets out of them is one of those too-familiar “I’m sorry if you were offended” pseudo-apologies which, true to form, satisfies no one but themselves. Contrition? Honest admission of guilt? Don’t make me laugh. Bottom line:

Miles Taylor is why the American people voted for Trump in 2016 and why, with all due disrespect for the polls and the pundits, it looks as if he’s going to win again in 2020. Americans have had it up to here and beyond with the self-righteous, dishonest, hypocritical, arrogant, self-serving professional governing class. These people are a plague on the American political body, and they need to go find an honest living in the private sector where they cause less harm.

Yeah, well, they aren’t gonna do that on their own initiative. Tragically, it becomes more apparent each and every day that Real Americans are going to have to take direct and forceful action to root them all out if the country is to survive relatively intact.

Liberty not defended is liberty lost

Posted on October 9, 2020October 10, 2020 by Mike

This. This right here. X eleventymillionbajilliongazillionkadillion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The basic idea that the virus is a form of divine punishment for failing to implement and obey the “right” policies is clearly false – there are far too many case surges in places that did everything “right” – but it’s irresistible for believers in centralized authority.

It also has some appeal to the public, because they want a frightening and confusing epidemic to be made simpler. Do X, Y, and Z and you won’t get the virus; if you got the virus, you must have failed to do X, Y, and Z. It’s comforting because it’s simpler than the truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update! The precedent is the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democrats champion masks because masks acknowledge the rule of fear. They’re symbols of subordination and surrender — yes, subordination to fear of a germ, and surrender of rights and freedoms. In this scheme, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are to be scrapped in favor of contentment with security — however illusory — under the watchful eye and guiding hand of corporatist big government, which, of course, is to be led by the cabal that Biden fronts.

You see, fear is a means. It’s a weapon in the hands of Democrats. The mainstream media are eager henchmen. Power lust drives Democrats to use fear to gain what they covet. A virus, like a crisis, isn’t to be wasted. A contagion that helps manufacture a crisis is too tempting to pass up. Exacerbating fears, and full-on exploitation of whatever may stress the human spirit, are practically trademarked by cynical Democrats.

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

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

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

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

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

The tyranny of fear

Posted on October 7, 2020October 7, 2020 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Forever Lockdown

Posted on September 7, 2020September 7, 2020 by Mike

Don’t look now, but our masters just moved the goalposts yet again.

The notion that we would lock down our society until a vaccine is introduced to counter a virus with a 0.3% infection fatality rate and near-zero risk for non-immunocompromised individuals was shockingly insane. Then we were told that even after a vaccine is in place, the social control will not end because the vaccine will not fully work against COVID-19 for all people. Now, we are beginning to see that because indeed COVID-19 is not that much different from a pandemic flu, the flu itself will now constitute the new threshold for social control and panic in perpetuity. In other words, the totalitarianism that we blissfully accepted in March is here to stay forever, unless we reclaim our sovereignty.

“[Arizona] State officials Monday laid out a plan for ‘aggressively’ combating the upcoming influenza season as the COVID-19 pandemic lingers, with the first step being to urge people to get a flu shot as soon as possible,” wrote the Copper Courier on Tuesday. “The state plans to increase funding for Medicaid recipients to get flu shots, combine flu-shot sites with coronavirus testing facilities, and more, while also advocating many of the same measures meant to head off the spread of COVID-19” (emphasis added).

“Aggressively” combating freedom, more like. But note well the next part, which I’ll boldface for ya.

The Arizona paper was reporting on a press conference held by liberal Republican Governor Doug Ducey and Arizona health department director Dr. Cara Christ, when they warned about “a perfect storm” of lingering COVID-19 mixing with the flu season in the coming months. They warned about mask-wearing and shutting down businesses that don’t participate in their unproven social control rituals. They also revealed that indeed hospitals get overwhelmed to a degree during the flu season and now that fact, which we always lived with every year, will be used to control our lives.

Lest anybody think that the scourges of liberty and proper Constitutional governance exclusively inhabit the Demonrat Party. Hate to tell ya, but the infestation of Statist tyranny is far more extensive than that, I’m afraid.

Folks, we have come full-circle. When this all began in early March, we were warned by the World Health Organization that COVID-19 was the worst epidemic in generations, with an infection fatality rate of 3.4% and a hospitalization rate exponentially higher that was going to swamp all of our big-city hospitals. As such, there was no way to compare it to the flu. Anyone who did was treated almost like a Holocaust denier.

Now, those same control freaks are comparing COVID to the flu! See, if they were right about the threat level of this virus, the contrast between it and the flu would be black and white. Talking about the perfect storm between COVID-19 and the flu would be tantamount to tethering the health care concerns of cancer to those of a cold. But now the truth comes out that this virus really is not that much different from a pandemic flu and that hospitals are always crowded at the peak of even a seasonal flu, much less a pandemic flu.

In July, Justin Hart, founder of RationalGround.com, which promotes a rational approach to the virus, posted on Twitter a series of articles describing emergency measures in various ERs throughout the nation during the 2018 pandemic flu. Yet the media coverage at the time wasn’t incessant, it never became political, and the politicians never gave any thought to shutting down our lives. We lived with it, and few people ever heard of the 2018 pandemic flu.

That is all about to change. Now the flu is the new threshold for perpetual mask-wearing, draconian regulations on businesses and houses of worship, and government mandates of every facet of our lives.

And after that, it will be…something else. Whatever comes to hand for them, so as to keep the Sheeple fearful and compliant, and the slaugherhouse train rolling happily along.

Hence, the politicians have gone from “Don’t you dare compare this to the flu” to “We should be doing this for the flu as well.” In other words, there’s a reason why politicians and the media warn about a “new normal.” It’s not because COVID-19 will necessarily be with us forever; it’s because the tyranny of the government response had nothing to do with COVID-19. That was simply the perfect pretext because so much was unknown about it earlier this year. Now that everyone is conditioned to go along with the suspension of democracy for “public health,” it’s not even a political leap to use the flu as the next excuse.

My boldface above is exactly what I’ve said from the very start of this shamdemic fiasco. Believe me when I tell you that I take no pleasure whatsoever in having been right all along.

At present, we are at the point in this COVID “epidemic” where the flu season, which is driven more by symptoms and not testing, more definitely disrupts people’s daily schedules with illness. As Lamb notes, “By this logic, the virus would never go away and emergency powers will be indefinite.”

And indeed, that is exactly the point. That is their plan … if we let them get away with it.

Unfortunately and to our undying shame, that’s EXACTLY what we’ve done.

All bets: off

Posted on August 30, 2020August 30, 2020 by Mike

More silly questions asked, and answered by moi.

Is There Any Limit To What We’ll Do To ‘Stop Coronavirus’?

Apparently not.

Americans have endured months of business closures, quarantines, mask-wearing, hand-wiping, travel restrictions, limited-attendance funerals and weddings, virtual graduations, closed schools, inaccessible medical screenings and surgeries, park closures, take-out-only food, drive-thru-only banks, coinless cash registers, and sports and concert cancellations — a seemingly endless list of life disturbances that extend far beyond mere inconvenience and cause deep economic, medical, psychological, and societal hardship.

Some churches were recently banned from singing hymns, and a California pastor has been threatened with jail time for opening the doors for worship. Water and power can be turned off to Los Angeles homes if they host a group that violates official limits. Gym owners were locked up for daring to reopen, even with responsible precautions. Ankle bracelets were placed on those who declined to sign legal documents requiring burdensome and intrusive health reporting to authorities. Is this the America we know and love?

You’re joking, right? Please tell me you’re joking.

Until recently — March 2020, to be exact — we could rely on the Constitution and Bill of Rights to constrain government’s control of our lives,

Are you serious? ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?

but with the arrival of one virus, our legal rights seem to have been deemed irrelevant, completely subordinated to the arbitrary whims of politicians. Apparently, they can do anything now, as long as they proclaim it in the name of “safety.”

Without fanfare, without any change to the Constitution, we seem to have unwittingly entered a new era of increasing government power.

“New”? Okay, stop it, you’re killing me here.

Since power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, this should trouble all of us. What might it portend for our future?

More of the same thing we’ve seen for the last, oh, sixty-seventy years, only worse. And faster.

Once a vaccine is recognized, will the government force us to take it?

Yes.

What if we refuse? Could we lose our health insurance?

Losing your health insurance will be the LEAST of your problems, serf.

What about religious objections?

Depends. For Muslims, no problem; you’re fine, carry on. For Christians…wait, you’re a Christian and haven’t been arrested and imprisoned already?

Could we be forced to choose between our jobs and the drug? It’s hard to imagine — until you consider that schools already require immunizations. Doctors are already communicating that the “social contract” matters more than the Constitution.

Why not? Almost everything else does too.

What if we test positive but, like the couple in Kentucky, refuse to bow to health officials and sign a document on the spot mandating we report to them? Do they have that authority?

Of course they don’t. Hasn’t stopped a one of them from wielding it anyway though, has it?

Can they put us under house arrest and shackle us with ankle bracelets until the time of their choosing? They will surely tell us it is for everyone’s safety. This opens the door to an array of other so-called unsafe behaviors to follow.

NOW you’re getting it, bright boy.

In days past, we would roll our eyes at such cynical paranoia, but are we still rolling them? Will the government that now advises us to carry cash and willingly give up our belongings to robbers look away as our other civil rights are trampled? Should we expect any protection from politicians that allow mobs to flout COVID-19 rules but will gleefully jail a pastor? It appears this is less about safety and more about control.

By George, I think he’s got it!

Surely the original shutdowns and other measures were of noble intent, but the law of unintended consequences can quickly show its dark side. Until now, we’ve endured all of this to protect not only ourselves but also others because Americans are a helpful bunch. When the storm comes, if you ask us, we’ll always pitch in to toss sandbags or pick up debris. We’ll bring meals. We’ll donate money. We’ll wear a mask, too; a flavor of patriotism infused the pandemic response for a while as Americans willingly sacrificed to serve the health and welfare of their communities.

But it’s time to ask, how far will this go?

As far as we allow it to, same as it ever was. Know what else is also the same as it ever was, though? The somewhat less than staggering COVID body count, that’s what.

The CDC silently updated their numbers this week to show that only 6% of all coronavirus deaths were related to the coronavirus alone. The rest of the deaths pinned to the China coronavirus are attributed to individuals who had other serious issues going on. Also, most of the deaths are related to very old Americans.

Straight from the horse’s…uhh, mouth:

Comorbidities
Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.

SO, just over 9k deaths that were actually, truly COVID deaths, then. The rest—that other niggling, paltry little ninety-four fucking percent—were basically old, sick folks who already had one foot in the grave and one on a banana peel, a significant percentage of whom were probably not going to make it till Thanksgiving, whither corony-V or no.

But does it get better still, you ask? Hey, these are goobermint “experts” we’re talking about here. Of COURSE it does.

Testing, testing, testing — that’s how Pelosi and the Democrats say we’ll defeat the coronavirus. Meanwhile, President Trump and his administration are conducting “operation warp speed” at breakneck pace to develop therapeutics, diagnostics, and a vaccine for the Wuhan flu. Unlike testing, treatments will actually do something for you when you come down sick with the disease. But now we’re learning the overwhelming majority of those who have tested positive for the coronavirus should really have been found negative after all.

According to The New York Times, potentially 90 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 have such insignificant amounts of the virus present in their bodies that such individuals do not need to isolate nor are they candidates for contact tracing. Leading public health experts are now concerned that overtesting is responsible for misdiagnosing a huge number of people with harmless amounts of the virus in their systems.

Hm; might help to explain why the CDC’s “experts” are backpedaling with no little alacrity on their previous recommendation that every man, woman, child, and embryo be tested hourly, maybe.

Bottom line? If there was some kind of ongoing competition with an award for the biggest, most extravagant swindle in all of human history, with all this COVIDiocy we could call it a wrap and declare an all-time champeen with utmost confidence. Now let’s just see how many of those FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!!!™ panic ninnies and dimestore dictators are willing to chow down on a heaping helping of crow and follow THAT science.

Answers itself

Posted on August 26, 2020August 26, 2020 by Mike

Ask a silly question.

COVID-19: The epidemic is ending, why do government restrictions remain?

Easy-peasy: because governments like them. To ask the question, truly, is to answer it. Robert knows this quite well already, of course.

This essay is going to include a number of graphs [data source], showing the daily numbers related to the Wuhan virus since the beginning of the epidemic. All show that the epidemic is truly tapering off or ending, regardless of where you live. All also strongly suggest that the lock downs, restrictions, mask mandates, and the many other odious rules that were imposed initially for just a few weeks to prevent our healthcare system from being overwhelmed but have remained in force now for many months should immediately be cancelled or removed.

And yet, these restrictions remain, in one form or another, with some rules (such as the mandate to wear masks) being expanded, sometimes to the point of idiocy. That they remain proves again that those lock downs, restrictions, mask mandates and other rules had little to do with the disease. Instead their goal was to impose new authoritarian rules on the citizenry, meant to establish new precedents of power and control for the petty dictators who wish to rule us like servants.

DINGDINGDINGDINGDING! Ladies and gennlemens, we have ourselves a winner!

Zimmerman has put together a nice collection of facts and figures—ie, actual science—that solidly confirms what I said from the very beginning about all this: the phony Covid Clampdown was never really about any stupid virus in the first place. Read it all.

Next up

Posted on August 22, 2020August 22, 2020 by Mike

Any bets on how many of the Sheeple will just bleat a servile little BAAAAH and happily go along with this?

As a symbol of submission, forcing us to obliterate our individuality by wearing masks was not explicit enough. So they pushed the envelope even further.

How much further, you ask? I blush to even tell you.

Gov Janet Mills says – servers must now wear face shields upside down so that their breath is directed up, not down. Yes she wants you to wear a dog cone… peak insanity. I wish this was a joke.. its real 😆 #facecovering #faceshield pic.twitter.com/cnyojzTd3c

— Dr Sherri Tenpenny (@BusyDrT) August 19, 2020

Desperately hoping, hoping against hope, that it’s some kind of parody or satire? That it’s just a bitter joke? That it isn’t real—CAN’T POSSIBLY be real?

Sorry, chum.

I thought this had to be a parody. Sadly, it’s not. https://t.co/Mxjo42PW9e https://t.co/XInbuRCeuA pic.twitter.com/gOkTk91cEx

— 𝓜𝓸𝓵𝓵𝔂𝓟𝓲𝓽𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓻 🇺🇸 (@MollyPitcherPat) August 19, 2020

Yeah, tell me again, whydon’tcha, how this is all about combatting a deadly, world-ending virus. About being “safe.” About following the SCIENCE™!! That one’s my favorite.

(Via Larwyn)

Update! Enforced estrangement, and a “life” that is no kind of life at all.

I must confess that gratitude was not always forthcoming whilst jostling for service at a crowded pre-Covid bar.

Yet the now silent sterility of Britain’s once bustling pubs perfectly personifies our ‘new normal’. Separated into smaller ‘bubbles’, prohibited from interacting with others, the demise of such establishments is an inevitable consequence of enforced estrangement.

While pubs on one level are just a convivial way to dress up our social hopes, the pandemic state of them illustrates a wider truth. For life, the way we live it now, means that the avoidance of death is more important than what we do with what we’ve got.

When Covid-19 emerged, many millions of drifting souls, finally forced to confront their own mortality, looked to their governing elite for direction, and unsurprisingly found neither courage nor perspective, just naked fear.

Almost immediately, every relational, fulfilling, communitarian component of human existence was sacrificed, with society – whipped into frenzy by a compliant press, happily policing its own lack of dissent – transfixed by the fallacious elimination of ‘preventable death’.

Constantly haunted by warnings that reunion might result in a ‘deadly second wave’, innumerable ‘little platoons’ have not and will not return. This is the harm actually, irrevocably being done to society now. Note well the shrillness of those insisting, ‘what harm can masks do?!’ They screech this disingenuous question precisely because they at some level know exactly how much harm is being done to freely lived life by this medical-security theatre.

In the continual absence of metaphysics, life – shaped for many years by the pursuit of comfort – is now defined by the avoidance of death.

In our post-religious faith terror of death, our irrational, cowardly belief that it is either possible or even desirable to create a risk-free society, we have confused life with mere existence. We have foolishly traded essential liberty for a little temporary safety, lost both, and deserve neither.

Humiliating update! What really ought to be the absolute last word on the COVIDIOT shamdemic…but won’t be.

We’ve known for months now that COVID-19 has virtually no chance of causing serious complications for young and healthy people.

If you remove just six states with extraordinarily high nursing home deaths from the U.S. data, COVID-19 never even reached the CDC’s threshold for an epidemic. [They define epidemics in terms of fatalities not, as one might expect, cases.]

Data released by the Texas Department of Health in July shows that COVID-19 is less lethal there, regardless of age, than the flu was just two seasons back!

As I reported last month, the flu put way more of a strain on our hospital system just two years ago than COVID-19 has. Yet we coped and it somehow never even became national news.

As I reported on Wednesday, just like the stories we initially heard about COVID-19’s deadliness, the scare-mongering about its extraordinary level of contagiousness also turned out to be total BS.

Infected people with no symptoms basically have no chance of spreading the virus.

As I also reported Wednesday, one reason for that is around half of us very likely have pre-existing “crossover” immunity from having been infected with other strains of coronavirus that only produce common colds.

As I’ve pointed out again and again and again, the people most insistent that we obey all these humiliating rules are routinely photographed in flagrant violation of them. Unless you think they care more about your life than their own, it’s patently clear they don’t believe a word of the fear-mongering BS they’re peddling to us.

Finally, as I reported last month, literally thousands of doctors and scientists, including a Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist, have been trying to cut through the media gaslighting since it began to sound the alarm that none of the lunatic suicidal restrictions inflicted on us make any scientific sense at all.

At worst, we’ve got a virus that’s somewhat more deadly than the flu to the old and antecedently ill but less so to everyone else.

There was never any reason for the mountain of hardship, misery, and death brought down on our heads by the deranged response to COVID-19 and there’s even less reason now.

There’s simply no way to look at Governor Mills’ order that restaurant staff parade around in public wearing dog cones around their neck other than as a deliberate attempt to force the hardworking people of Maine to participate in their own humiliation in order to create what Theodore Dalrymple has aptly called “an easily controlled society of emasculated liars.”

The dog cones make it painfully obvious.

But the same is true of forcing us to wear masks, keep completely arbitrary distances away from each other, shutting down our businesses, closing down our schools, and all the rest of the sickening defilements of America’s founding commitment to individual liberty that wouldn’t have accomplished a damned thing even if all the scaremongering about this virus hadn’t turned out to be complete garbage.

Anyone paying close attention has known all this since the greatest and deadliest hoax in history got started way back in March. But there’s no excuse for anyone not knowing it now.

They only got away with doing this to us because we let them. And it’s long past time we all stopped being willing participants in our own degradation.

Brilliantly, bluntly put, cogently argued, with a ton of supporting links throughout—Michael Thau has laid down one hell of a fine piece of work with this one.

“Safety” theater

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

Odd how closely it parallels our farcical post-9/11 Security Theater, innit? Why, it’s almost as if the goobermint only has one tune in the whole hymn book.

If you go to a restaurant in Gotham right now, you might be subjected to a temperature check. It’s no big deal, it takes a second — but it’s pointless; plenty of COVID-positive people don’t have a fever. So why do we do it? It’s part of a growing trend of COVID-19 security theater. We do things that have no bearing on our actual safety but that make us feel safe.

Take masks. It makes sense to wear masks inside businesses or for any close contact with strangers.

No it doesn’t.

But why are people wearing them outside, when they’re not near anybody? Neighborhood message boards across the country are filled with complaints like: “I saw a bicyclist without a mask today!”

The problem is messaging from the top. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coronavirus guru, is the man we all look to for direction. In March, he said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” Now he’s gung-ho, yet his mask instruction is very convoluted.

He wore a mask to throw out the first pitch at the Opening Day game at Nationals Park — while standing more than 60 feet away from the nearest person. Then he sat down in the stands with his wife and friend, and they all took turns wearing and removing their masks.

In restaurants in New York, you must wear a mask to your seat. But then you take it off to eat, drink and talk, which is clearly where all the danger lies.

Not to worry; once the dwindling few NYC restaurants still hanging on by their fingernails are driven under too, that little conundrum pretty much solves itself. Of course, the, ummm, flexible standards the “elite” hold themselves to are yet another indicator that this whole shamdemic thing is just so much smoke. But speaking of NYC, there IS some truly hilarious news:

The governor of New York has begged the city’s wealthy, who fled the coronavirus outbreak, to return and help it recover.

Andrew Cuomo said he was extremely worried about New York City weathering the Covid-19 aftermath if too many of the well-heeled taxpayers who fled to second homes decide there is no need to move back.

“They are in their Hamptons homes, or Hudson Valley or Connecticut. I talk to them literally every day. I say. ‘When are you coming back? I’ll buy you a drink. I’ll cook,’ “ Mr Cuomo told MSNBC, naming popular getaways for the rich.

Lawmakers have proposed a wealth tax targeting the city’s 100 billionaires to help fill a $30 billion (£23bn) budget shortfall created by the Covid-19 crisis.

However, Mr Cuomo, a Democrat, said he could not support greater taxes on the ultra-wealthy as rich people already have one foot out of New York City and he fears they will leave for good if their taxes go up.

Instead, he wants the federal government and New York’s congressional representatives to send billions of dollars in aid.

LOLGF, asshole-eyes.

Update! What the hell, more NYC hilarity.

.@NYCMayor: I’m laying off 22,000 city workers if the feds don’t give us a bailout pic.twitter.com/iWkSh4N8yJ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 4, 2020

Aww gee, my heart is just breaking over here.

Trust us!

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

Following the science. The ACTUAL science, that is, not the self-serving, overhyped malarkey fed to us by Feckless Fauci and his dimestore dictators.

Nothing like this has been tried in the whole history of humanity, certainly not on this scale. You might suppose, then, there was absolute certainty that there would be a causal relationship between lockdowns and the trajectory of the virus. Just as the FDA doesn’t approve a drug unless it is proven to be safe and effective, one might suppose the same would be true for a policy that shattered every routine and trampled human rights in the name of disease mitigation.

Surely! It turns out that this is not the case. It was pure speculation that lockdowns would suppress this virus, and that speculation was based on a hubristic presumption of the awesome power and intelligence of government managers.

For five months, governments all over the world have been freaking out, ordering people around to do this and that, passing mandate after mandate, and yet there is no evidence that any of it matters to the virus.

Already in mid-April questions arose. Prof Isaac Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program at Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development, looked at the data around the world and concluded that the virus comes and goes after 70 days regardless of the policies deployed. He found no relationship at all between locking down and transmission and death.

Fast forward to mid-July. Data scientists investigated the experience from the spring. They too found no relationship between the virus and policy. Putting it very bluntly: “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.”

That’s awesome to consider. Billions of lives fundamentally altered. Economies wrecked. Centuries-old traditions of liberty and law thrown out. Police states everywhere. And to what end? The data indicate it was all for naught. Apparently, you cannot control a virus with state policies. The virus just doesn’t seem to care.

Neither do our masters. They ginned up a panic amongst a cowardly, ignorant populace, then used it to ring the bell on pretty much every last item on their letters-to-Santa wish lists. “All for naught”? I think not, alas.

At some point, we are going to have to throw in the towel. Whether a country locks down or stays open has as much predictive power over deaths per million as whether it rains today is related to the color of my socks. Or whether hurricanes are controlled by literacy rates.

In other words, the claim that lockdowns control viruses is pseudoscience or magical thinking of a deeply dangerous sort; it wrecks economies and lives.

Why, it’s almost as if we’ve been sold a pig in a poke, by people harboring nefarious intentions or something. But no, that just CAN’T be right.

Can it?

Beginning to figure it out yet?

Posted on July 27, 2020July 27, 2020 by Mike

It still amazes me how dismayingly many conservative op-ed writers and bloggers—people usually given to gimlet-eyed skepticism about blanket statements or decrees from government and its pet “experts,” as they certainly should be—allowed themselves to be suckered by it. But the contrived Covidiot “crisis” was a steaming, stinking heap of bullshite from jump.

More than 8 weeks have passed since the publication of the ICL (Imperial College of London, the selfsame one whose “scientific models” got the stampede rolling with their initial hysterical prediction of 2.2 million American deaths from the Little Plague That Wasn’t—M) team’s warnings against reopening, meaning we can now see how their model performed.

As with other examples of ICL COVID modeling, their attempt to predict the effects of a US reopening can only be described as an embarrassing scientific failure.

The image below shows the three modeled scenarios from May, as depicted in the ICL report for the five states under consideration. Note that even under the “constant mobility” scenario of remaining under lockdown, their model predicted an increase in COVID deaths for every state except New York, which had already peaked. Under the reopening scenarios where mobility increased 20% and 40% respectively from its lockdown state, all five states were predicted to surge into apocalyptic territory by the middle of July. Under the 40% scenario, this even entailed upper boundaries of more than 4,000 deaths per day (the bands represent the 95% confidence interval). Massachusetts and New York, two of the hardest-hit states from the first wave back in March and April, would easily match or exceed their previous COVID-19 daily death records.

To see how these predictions held up, I indicated the daily death totals for each state for July 20th with a small red dot on the graphs above.

If you don’t already know perfectly well exactly how they held up…well, dammit, you certainly should by now, that’s all. But I’m afraid some of us, a great many most likely, never will get it. The growing legion of increasingly-belligerent Face Diaper Ninnies afflicting the land like a biblical plague testifies well enough to that.

The long and the short of it: you’ve been had, people. Hoodwinked, bamboozled, and with your own eager cooperation and full participation, too. But hey, all it cost us was our liberty, our prosperity, our Constitutional rights, our livelihoods, and our country.

Hey, if even one life is saved, amIright?

Of groupthink, and drooling beasts

Posted on July 22, 2020July 22, 2020 by Mike

We are currently being ruled by an unholy coalition-dictatorship of the two of them.

Having lived through the Russian Revolution, Ayn Rand knew well the nature of the mob—a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out…closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own.

The drooling beast is on the prowl against any independent thought or truth regarding the coronavirus outbreak, the George Floyd riots, and, for that matter, anything else. Hype and hoax, readily recognizable to the intellectually honest, fuel the mob think.

The death toll from Covid-19 will be a small fraction of what was initially projected, depending on which outlandish projection (they ranged from 2.2 million to 100 million in the US) is used as the denominator. The beast, of course, never acknowledges its own fallibility or incompetence.

“Systemic racism” has become the endlessly repeated epithet, but nobody can point to a single institutional system in the US that practices it. The statistics don’t even bear out that police forces are systemically racist, although some police, white and black, individually are. In the US, the last systemically racist institution to fold up that tent was the Democratic party, and it routinely wins 90 plus percent of the black vote. The beast, of course, never acknowledges its own hypocritical inconsistency.

While Covid-19 and systemic racism have been hyped and hoaxed, the same mob has consistently ignored or downplayed Covid-19 totalitarianism’s and the riots’ destruction of the economy. A disease that will kill less than one tenth of one percent (less than .001) of the US population is worse than the Black Plague (which wiped out 1/3 to 1/2 of Europe’s population), but a catastrophe already worse, by the unemployment numbers, than the Great Depression is merely a temporary economic squall.

If you have either not contracted or survived the coronavirus and thought you were out of the woods, think again. We are entering a forest so dark and deep many of us won’t make it to the other side.

So while people lockdown, work or not work from home, social distance, face mask, and compulsively sanitize, cowering before the small risk of a germ (how do they even get up in the morning?), they’re blissfully unaware that the world is bankrupt. A tsunami the likes of which none of us have ever seen has already made landfall and will permanently deprive millions, perhaps billions, of their livelihoods and millions, perhaps billions, of their lives. The coronavirus cowards are running from an ant into the arms, claws, and fangs of a very hungry beast.

Robert closes on a more hopeful note, but I can’t honestly say I share his optimism.

Via WRSA, who titles his excerpt from it the “Quote of the next decade.” A lot longer than just that, I’d say.

The New Normal

Posted on July 16, 2020July 16, 2020 by Mike

Let’s not kid ourselves: it’s real, and it’s here to stay.

On a recent cross-country relocation trip, I had the opportunity to speak with dozens of strangers, friends, and family from all walks of life and hear their views of the current crisis. The vast majority of these people couldn’t name anyone they knew who had died from the illness. Most of them didn’t even know anyone who was hospitalized.

But all of them knew of someone who has lost a job.

Will there be classes in the fall? Sports? Parties? No idea. Life is on pause. Aimlessness replaces activity.

Canceled sports seasons, weddings, and trips. Lost jobs, wages, and opportunities. Lonely deaths and Zoom funerals. Americans across the country are suffering from the draconian and interminable response to Coronavirus. And yet for millions, the virus exists only as a graph on the nightly news.

For them, the pandemic is an abstraction. The response is not.

So far, 135,000 Americans have died from COVID-19—allegedly. That is a minuscule portion of the total population: roughly .04 percent. What percentage of these actually had respiratory symptoms or died from other causes is unclear. What is clear is that America saw a short-lived and moderate spike in excess deaths in April. The normal average of 58,000 deaths per week in April jumped to 78,000 before rapidly restabilizing in mid-May.

It isn’t clear that the lockdowns or mask mandates actually saved any lives. Sweden, which never locked down, followed a similar trajectory of excess deaths as the rest of the West. Perhaps nature is merely mocking our efforts. It would not be the first time.

Regardless, in a country where 3 million people die every year, 130,000 deaths is not an apocalypse. Would the average American have noticed a 4 percent change in overall mortality without media fanfare? Probably not.

At present, the country is in limbo. When does all this end? When we have a vaccine? When there are zero deaths? If so, this “pandemic” could last for years.

Everyday people suffer regardless. Our “new normal” is an abomination. It is fundamentally anti-social, inhuman, and imposed without our consent. It warehouses the elderly and enervates the young. It wrecks romance, instills fear, and alienates communities. This kind of life isn’t new and it isn’t normal. We had a name for it in the past: tyranny. It cannot be allowed to last. Our liberty and livelihoods depend on it.

Well, it SHOULD not be allowed to last, right enough. Then again, though, it never should have been allowed at all—not least because, once you’ve allowed tyranny to gain a foothold, there’s only just the one way of getting rid of it. And the procedure is neither pretty nor pleasant.

The fact that so many Americans laid down and took it without demur doesn’t say anything good about how much liberty really matters to them, either. My God, even now they’re willing to don the Mask Of Submission simply because their Masters decree it—while the death rate, never having approached anything like the planet-killing Überplague levels predicted in order to initiate the Great Stampede, continues its long, steady decline. As if all that wasn’t bad enough:

Hundreds of labs in Florida reported to the state that 100 percent of people they tested for Covid-19 had the virus, according to a new investigation by FOX 35 News. Other testing centers reported positivity rates upwards of 80 and 90 percent. In actuality, the positivity rates for most testing centers were often under 10 percent and usually under 20 percent.

When FOX 35 contacted the labs with high positivity rates, several labs confirmed that the numbers were wildly inaccurate. Orlando Health, for example, had reported a 98 percent positivity rate, but confirmed to reporters that their positivity rate is actually 9.4 percent.

Prediction: the plastic shields in front of every cashier in every store you go into; the “safe social distancing” stickers on the floors of all those stores; the facemasks at chain restaurants printed or stitched with the logo of said restaurants; periodic house arrest, along with shutdowns of all “non-essential” businesses, but never a single government department, each and every one of which is absolutely vital to the continued smooth and above all else SAFE function of a Nation In Mortal Peril—these, and so many other symbols of our New Normal will be with us forever. The current state of affairs, intolerable and batshit-insane as it is, is only Phase One.

What’s most astonishing about the Covid-19 operation is the manner in which the elected government was circumvented by public health experts (connected to a power-mad billionaire activist.) That was a stroke of genius. Most people regard the US as a fairly stable democracy and yet, the first sign of infection triggered the rapid transfer of power from the president to unelected “professionals” whose conflicts of interest are too vast to list. Equally fascinating is the fact that the lockdowns were not the brainchild of Donald Trump but the mainly Democrat governors who shrugged-off any Constitutional limits to their power and arbitrarily ordered people to stay in their homes, wear masks and avoid close physical contact with other humans. All of this was done in the name of “science” and condoned under “emergency powers” despite the fact that mass quarantines of healthy people have no historical precedent or scientific basis. No matter, this was never about science or logic anyway, and it certainly wasn’t about saving lives. It was always about power, pure, unalloyed political power. The power to push the economy into freefall destroying millions of jobs and businesses. The power to bail out Wall Street while diverting attention to a fairly-mild infection that kills roughly 1 in every 500 people. The power to create a permanent underclass willing to work for table scraps or less. And the power to fundamentally restructure human relations so that normal intimacies like handshakes, hugs or social gatherings are entirely banned. This, of course, was the most ambitious part of the project, the basic changes to human interaction that date back thousands of years, and which are now seen as an obstacle to a new order in which the individual must be isolated, desensitized and kept in a constant state of fear to be more easily controlled and manipulated.

On top of that, all of this is taking place in plain sight where anyone with even minimal critical thinking skills should be able to see what is happening, but very few do. Why is that?

Fear. Fear has gripped the population and is preventing typically intelligent, perceptive people from seeing something that’s right beneath their noses.

We’re not saying that Covid doesn’t kill people, and we’re not suggesting that Covid is a bioweapon released on the public for nefarious purposes. (although that’s certainly a possibility.) What we’re saying is that scheming elites and their allies in the media and politics see every crisis as an opportunity to advance their own authoritarian agenda. In fact, the restructuring of basic democratic institutions can only take place within the confines of a major crisis. That’s why the CIA, the giant corporations, the WHO and the Gates Posse gathered for meetings that anticipated an event just like the Covid outbreak. They needed a crisis of that magnitude to achieve their ultimate objective; total control. That’s what they mean when they say there will be “no return to normal”, they mean they’re replacing representative government with a new totalitarian model in which the levers of state power will be controlled by them. So while the virus outbreak might be coincidental, the management of the crisis certainly is not.

I don’t think so. Our species has withstood myriad epidemics in the past without ever resorting to the extremist measures we have taken during this latest outbreak. Take the state of Oregon, for example, whose Democratic governor Kate Brown just signed another executive order extending a state of emergency through Sept. 4. The move comes months after the peak in deaths was reached in mid-April. As of Tuesday, Oregon’s death toll is a meager 240 nearly 90% of who are over 65 with underlying health conditions. That means that Brown shut down a $226 billion per year economy, put tens of thousands of people out of work, destroyed countless small and medium-sized businesses and plunged the state deep into debt, to save roughly 24 or 25 people under 65 with no underlying health conditions. That’s not the reaction of an intelligent, responsible political leader acting in the best interests of the people. That is the reaction of someone who is either criminally insane or doing someone else’s bidding. So which is it?

Like many of the other mainly Democrat governors, Brown also issued a “mask” mandate, punishable by a fine. The new executive order was neither approved by the House or by any other democratic body. It’s just Brown testing the limits of her new emergency powers. Interestingly, the mask mandate comes a full three months after the state reached its peak in fatalities which means that it has less to do with controlling the infection than it does with using the virus to usurp tyrannical powers. Does that mean Brown or the other Democrat governors are closet tyrants?

Tyrants they inarguably are, by definition; their own actions confirm it, placing the issue well beyond further debate. But they’re not remotely “closet” tyrants. After long years of skulking, of attempting however halfheartedly to hide their true nature, they’re now out in the open, for all to see who can stomach a look: proud, defiant, and without trace of shame or remorse.

Another “fundamental transformation” success story

Posted on July 7, 2020July 7, 2020 by Mike

Even as the COVIDIOT panic continues to fades away into the nothingburgerness from whence it came, there are still plenty of fascists intent on flexing their Almighty State muscle. To wit:

The President of the Royal Society says that people who refuse to wear masks should be publicly shamed like drunk drivers, highlighting again how the entire issue has become another part of the ‘cancel culture war’.

“The message has not been clear enough, so perhaps people do not really understand the benefits or are not convinced of them,” writes Venki Ramakrishnan. “Whatever the reasons, we need to overcome our reservations and wear face coverings whenever we are around others in public.”

“It used to be quite normal to have quite a few drinks and drive home, and it also used to be normal to drive without seatbelts. Today, both of those would be considered antisocial, and not wearing face coverings in public should be regarded in the same way.”

Ramakrishnan’s demand follows two Royal Society reports that claim wearing masks significantly reduces the risk of COVID-19 transmission.

However, as Toby Young notes, the evidence cited by the reports is flimsy at best.

“I’ve had a look at the Royal Society paper that supposedly confirms the effectiveness of masks. It’s unimpressive. Note the threadbare evidence on which it bases its sweeping conclusion,” writes Young before quoting the report itself.

“We have found only two randomised control trials in the primary literature on the use of face masks to reduce onward transmission; one was underpowered, and the other showed significant reduction when adjusted for actual mask usage in a posthoc analysis.”

This all emphasizes once again how the issue of mask wearing has been amplified way beyond the entire coronavirus debate and has become a symbol of mass obedience.

Ummm, about those “benefits” and all:

The primary “benefit” of mask mandates is to the fascists exclusively: they get reassurance that We The Sheeple are all still firmly locked in their iron-fisted grip and under their control. But even if the Mask Of Submission DID provide anything like the protection people like Herr Ramakrishnan spuriously claim, one must ask oneself: is it really worth the price of relinquishing one’s precious liberty, one’s dignity, and one’s fundamental right to self-determination merely to reduce the risk of illness or death somewhat?

“Can We be Allowed to be Adults, Please?”

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

First mistake: you never ask. You fucking TELL.

Life is risk. No one makes it out of this thing alive. We take on risk doing benign, basic things daily. It’s time that the politicians recognize, and the media accepts that the adults in our country have the right to make decisions about risks they are willing to take as it pertains to COVID-19. This isn’t academic. The media and politicians focus exclusively on the lives that have been destroyed by the mortality rate of the virus, which is tragic. However, they ignore the greater and much larger destruction of lives it has caused for those who remain, many who haven’t even gotten sick. Millions upon millions of job losses. Businesses shuttered and lost, millions of children displaced from school and the parents who had to suddenly become teachers and the stress and despair that comes with it all.

This virus isn’t going anywhere; that’s a simple fact. It’s time that we start learning to live with it like we learn to manage the risk, as with so many other things in our lives. First thing that needs to happen is that we need to get some real facts about the virus so we can make informed decisions. We also need to stop allowing ourselves to be manipulated and led like children by the media and the politicians. We need to stop living in a fantasy world where we think it’s possible for most of the public to stay at home indefinitely and wear a mask for the rest of our lives when we venture out. This cannot continue and it shouldn’t continue.

I don’t want to live in this world. I want to go to the movies, attend concerts and football games. I want to go to a bar with my friends. I want to go to church and not have more than half the pews roped off. I want to live my life again, fully. I think that most people do and frankly we have a right to demand that we get our lives back. Not in a “new normal” but in the old normal.

We can go back to our lives, we can open the country and the world, the real question is, are we willing to be adults and stop cowering in our homes hoping in vain that we can weather a storm that’s not going away anytime soon.

With the contrived COVIDIOT CRISIS!!! being extended again and again and again with very little real resistance, current indications are…not encouraging, to put it mildly. Too many “Americans” have been trained too well, too thoroughly, for too long. They’ve accepted the bit completely, even eagerly. They’ve come to enjoy the taste, and will not be pleased should it ever be removed.

Damned if I’da told it

Posted on July 3, 2020July 3, 2020 by Mike

I’m linking the archive.is version of this pathetic bleat, not because the original is paywalled but because I just can’t bring myself to link to a site caled Treehugger.com.

I will state this up front: I hate fireworks. They are loud and they are dangerous and they are polluting and they scare my dogs and my kids and me. This year, I hate them more than ever; for reasons nobody quite understands, they are ubiquitous weeks before the Fourth of July. According to Gothamist, noise complaints related to fireworks in New York City are up a crazy 4,000% over last year. But it’s not just New York; according to the Associated Press, “They’ve become a nightly nuisance ringing out from Connecticut to California, angering sleep-deprived residents and alarming elected officials.”

This is all after a dream-time when some urbanists fantasized that we would learn from the lockdown and appreciate the quiet streets and clean air. Instead, some say the boom in fireworks is all about making noise and blowing off steam after being locked inside.

The rest of this mincing mess of an article is every bit as gallingly pussified as you would expect. Apparently, Pajama Boy has had all sense of shame edited right out of his wretched DNA, and is incapable of being embarrassed by his own public admission of mewling spinelessness. All that soy, probably.

On the bright side, sort of, if wretched pantywaists like this “guy” had been all America That Was had to storm the beaches at Normandy on D-Day, we would surely have averted the current stupid rhubarb over the national anthem, at least. It would be Deutschland Über Alles.

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