Death to Liberty!

Democracy, yes?

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Mike

“Democracy,” NO.

The Façade of Democracy
Democracy today means nothing more than fulfillment of the Left’s agenda and their consolidation of power. Neither Ukraine nor America are democracies.
It appears that the definition of “democracy” is rather fluid. In fact, it doesn’t really mean democracy at all. Rather, it is an authoritarian and undemocratic term used by self-interested politicians to defend and promote their own desired outcomes. Last time I checked, violent coup d’état wasn’t emblematic of “democracy.”

The Democratic Party and even many RINOs assign the same undemocratic meaning to their use of the term “democracy” in the United States.

The United States supported the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, which has been called a “Revolution of Dignity.” But American protesters on January 6, 2021, who were overwhelmingly peaceful—the only murder was committed by a Capitol police officer, who shot an unarmed female protestor named Ashli Babbitt—were called “insurrectionists.”

In contrast, cries of voter fraud in the Ukrainian elections of 2004 were met with serious concern by the U.S government. The mass protests were encouraged and supported and the overturning of the Ukrainian election results heralded as a win for “democracy.”

Cries of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election were summarily denounced and dismissed. The United States rushed to declare the 2004 election results in Ukraine illegitimate. The United States rushed to declare the U.S. presidential election in 2020 the most free and fair in our history.

Is America even a democracy?

Of course not; it was never supposed to be, as everyone here will know full well. The Founders, hallowed be their names, hated and feared democracy as nothing more than “mob rule,” and as time has proven beyond all debate, they were perfectly correct to shun it as they did. It amounts to yet another confirmation of their unimpeachable wisdom, which we have ignored to our own profound detriment.

Just as Democrats had no regard for our own election results in 2016, they had no regard for the election results in Ukraine, when they successfully ousted Yanukovych.

The lifeblood of a democracy is free speech and the general diffusion of knowledge, which ensures the voter is informed. Yet the Democratic Party and the FBI colluded with social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal during the 2020 election and falsely dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.” Was this democratic?

The Democrats continue to pursue their witch hunt against former President Trump in hopes of ultimately preventing him from running for re-election. This effort too is justified with claims of “defending” or “protecting” democracy.

Democracy is a façade in America and when the term is thrown around by Democrats its new meaning is tyranny.

Democracy today means nothing more than fulfillment of the Left’s agenda and their consolidation of power. Neither Ukraine nor America are democracies. Democracy is tantamount to destruction and both Ukraine and America are being destroyed. Democracy is under attack; in the name of protecting democracy, of course.

If Democrats succeed in protecting democracy in America, we won’t have any democracy at all.

Well, DUH. For tyrants such as they, that’s a feature, not a bug. For us as well, really, just not in quite the same way or for the same reasons.

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Stop helping!

Posted on February 24, 2023February 24, 2023 by Mike

Buttplug shits, falls back in it, blames Trump, natch.

Remarks From Buttigieg in East Palestine on His Late Visit Just Make Things Worse
I wrote earlier about how the visit of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was not going well. He refused to answer questions from reporters, and his press secretary had the temerity to claim reporters wanting him to respond was “too aggressive.” The citizens indicated that they were upset that he was coming so late to the table.

Now, there are more remarks from Buttigieg during his visit–and they only made matters worse.

All the people there want is for people to come, care, and help out. That’s exactly what Trump did. Meanwhile, Buttigieg showed up, empty-handed, claiming he wasn’t there for the politics–but then immediately attacked Trump and blamed him for what happened on Buttigieg and Biden’s watch.

REPORTER: “How can [Trump] help?”

PETE BUTTIGIEG: “Express support for reversing the deregulation that happened on his watch.”

That was a pretty slimy effort–to blame Trump–when the facts so far don’t support that any deregulation that happened under Trump had anything to do with the derailment. Reports are now that the derailment was due to an overheated bearing.

So, on top of everything else, here’s Pete trying to mislead people about what happened. It happened on your watch, Pete, Trump hasn’t been in office in two years. And Trump wasn’t standing in your way, preventing you from responding to what happened. Trump also didn’t make Joe Biden go to Ukraine and not East Palestine. It’s disgusting how Buttigieg wouldn’t take responsibility for his actions and those of Joe Biden.

Buttigieg had another moment that summed him up in one sentence, as he ranted about “misinformation.” Criticism of him and Biden is now “misinformation.”

“Sorry, I lost my train of thought,” he said, in an ironic Freudian slip.

What a way to comment on a train derailment. He’s lost more than that, as has the Biden team over their reaction to all this.

What else would one expect from this nest of slimery, slithery sewer-crawlers. I repeat: couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes.

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The results are in: masks and lockdowns are the BUNK

Posted on February 24, 2023February 24, 2023 by Mike

Don Surber’s title really says it all.

Masks worked. They just didn’t stop covid
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens pointed out what was obvious three years ago: masks don’t stop viruses. Nothing short of a hazmat suit does. Viruses make their rounds every few years, eventually deteriorating into a strand of the common cold. They are deadly at first. Indeed, this manmade concoction has killed 1.12 million Americans.

But that is less than 1% of the population; in fact it is 1/3rd of 1% of the population.

And even that “1.12 million Americans” number is the bunk as well, grossly inflated to include as it does deaths by gunshot wound, traffic accident, cancer, flu, random misadventure, and anything else the lying liars of FederalGovCo could misattribute to FauxVid and hope gullible panic-ninnies would gulp down whole.

I was sanguine about the virus. The masks and social distancing were medical theater just as TSA is security theater. Both make the public feel safer, and as an added bonus they give the Karens on the left a reason to feel morally superior to those of us who realize it is all for show.

At the height of the mask hysteria, Kyle D. Killian wrote in Psychology Today, “This week, on social media, I reposted a photo of a white woman carrying a sign that reads ‘I’d Rather Bury My Family From COVID Than See Them Enslaved to the Fear of It.’ Why? I was curious about others’ thoughts on it.”

He wrote, “Highly educated intellectuals—people literally paid to type and talk—must resist the urge to make fun of this person or to lecture down to them about virology, science, etc. What is key, crucial in fact, is not dismissing or mocking this person, but interpreting the signage as an indicator of a fear-based response.

“In this case, masking requirements have been equated in this person’s mind to a fundamental loss of freedom or liberty.”

ANALYSIS: True. Because that is EXACTLY what they were, and ALL that they were. The real problem for Killian and his ilk is that a small handful of us still give a damn about that, rather than being not just willing but eager to surrender essential liberty in exchange for a false sense of security and safety, like the vast majority of gutless pussies here in the Land of the Skeer’d and the Home of the Slave.

…”Fear has clouded this person’s thinking; instead of seeing social distancing and masks as a way of caring for others, putting the Golden Rule into action, or acknowledging that some folks feel just fine but are actually asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus, she sees them as a threat.”

Fuck you and your ersatz Golden Rule all to death, pusnuts. Quite the contrary, in truth: fear has clouded panic-ninny thinking, to the extent that it has made THEM a threat—a credible and serious one, which is going to have be dealt with mercilessly because better men and women than your kind will ever be have permitted you to get away with this creeping paternalistic incrementalism for far too long.

Which brings me to Mister Stephens, who occasionally is an isle of sanity in that Sea of Craziness that calls itself the New York Times. He has taken shots at the Pandemic Panic amid the screeching of the baboons who run that zoo.

On April 24, 2020, barely a month into the two weeks to flatten the curve, he wrote, “America Shouldn’t Have to Play by New York Rules. A national lockdown is bad medicine and worse politics.”

He was half-right on the second line. It was bad medicine, but it was excellent politics for the opponents of Making America Great Again who wanted to get rid of President Trump. Stephens’s heart was in the right place in 2020.

He wrote, “I write this from New York, so it’s an argument against my personal interest. But I don’t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs because people like me choose to live, travel and work in urban sardine cans.”

Okay, then. I’m in no wise a huge fan of Bret Stephens myself, but I do have to admit that last bit was damned well-reasoned and -expressed.

The lesson learned is never trust Washington. The American people can be fooled — but only once. It is time to live the words of General Stark, who fought for the freedoms we have. There are worse things than covid. One is masks. Another is suffering the self-righteousness of the ignoramuses who pushed masks.

Annnnd whoot, there it is. As some of us said from the very beginning of this shameful, endless fiasco, the primary issue was never about masks, (anti-)social distancing, or even public health in general. It was about liberty, no more nor less. And once you’ve traded that priceless jewel away for a mess of “safety” pottage, there’s one and only one way you’ll ever get it back again. However many of their despicable progeny have long since either forgotten, willfully abandoned, or outright rejected that fundamental truth, our Founding Fathers knew it well enough, and some few of us still do today.

So be it, then.

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One of these things is not like the other

Posted on February 22, 2023February 22, 2023 by Mike

In his state-of-the-nation address, Putin was a helluva lot more honest and accurate than Pedo Joe was in his. Which, by now, can’t come as any great surprise to anyone.

Putin Says He Suspended Russia’s Participation in START Treaty, Blasts Western Decadence in Address to Nation
The first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is this Friday.

“We aren’t fighting the Ukrainian people,” Putin said in the speech broadcast on all state TV channels. “The Ukrainian people have become hostages of the Kyiv regime and its Western masters, which have effectively occupied the country.”

He told his audience of lawmakers, state officials, religious leaders and soldiers that Western sanctions hadn’t “achieved anything and will not achieve anything.”

The Russian president also blasted “western elites,” who have been open about their goal “to inflict a ‘strategic defeat’ to Russia,” adding, “they intend to transform the local conflict into a global confrontation.”

Putin also accused the West (of) targeting Russia’s culture, religion and values because it is aware that “it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”

“See what they do with their own peoples—the destruction of the family, cultural and national identity, perversion, mockery of children, and pedophilia are declared the norm,” Putin said.

The Russian leader said adults have the right to live as they want, and Russia has no interest in invading private lives, but advised people to “look at the Holy Scriptures,” and the sacred books of other major religions. “Everything is said there,” he declared, “including that the family is the union of a man and a woman.” This pronouncement drew applause from the audience.

“Millions of people in the West understand that they are leading to a real spiritual disaster,” Putin added.

True, dat. They just haven’t decided yet how far they’re willing to go, how drastic the measures they’re willing to take, in order to head it off, assuming it isn’t already way too late. However sincere Putin may or may not have been with the soaring rhetoric above, just compare & contrast with Phony Jaux’s incoherent blibbering in Poland.

Biden boasted that NATO is “more united and more unified than ever before” to fight Russia, setting the stage for a prolonged war.

“Putin is confronted with something today that he didn’t think was possible a year ago — the democracies around the world have grown stronger, not weaker; but the autocrats around the world have grown weaker, not stronger,” Biden said.

Throughout his boilerplate, cliché-ridden speech, Biden frequently slurred his words including during the “rousing” close to the speech. Biden, whose policies forced masks and experimental vaccines on Americans against their will during the pandemic, began loudly shouting about “freedom.”

“There is no sweeter word than freedom,” Biden said. “There is no nobler goal than freedom. There’s no higher aspiration than freedom. Americans know that and you know it,” he added.

“Freedom. The enemy of the tyrant and the hope of the brave and the truth of the ages is freedom!” Biden declared.

We can only hope it is at that, you stupid jackass. But if it does prove to be so, that won’t bode at all well for you and the other behind-the-scenes tyrants who run you.

How bitter the irony, that the day should come when a Russian despot sounds so much more like our Founders than our own fork-tongued notional “President” does, and that Putin’s invocation of the themes of faith, family, and rectitude should ring in the American ear more clearly than Biden’s empty, vapid gasbaggery regarding “freedom,” a concept he neither cares for nor comprehends—a sacred ideal which, in reality, he has spent the entirety of his five miserable decades occupying high government office constantly seeking to undermine, overthrow, and obliterate.

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When you’re Right, you’re right

Posted on February 17, 2023 by Mike

Surber runs down a disturbing list of some of the many, many things we foolish, overly-paranoid Reich-wingers had right all along.

Kang and Kodos on The Simpsons say, “Foolish Earthlings.”

Lefties say foolish right-wingers.

Nik Popli of Time magazine wrote, “This isn’t the first time a culture war has targeted a common household appliance (ie, the ongoing crusade to ban gas stoves—M). Republicans have been venting their frustration over federal energy-efficiency standards for more than two decades — including over the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that forced U.S. consumers to switch to more energy-efficient light bulbs.”

Conservatives warned at the time that the replacement — Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs — contained mercury.

On July 31, 2007, Dr. John Balbus, Chief Health Officer at Environmental Defense Fund, assured one and all that there was no problem with CFLs.

He wrote, “Despite some alarming news reports, you don’t have much to worry about. If a CFL breaks, some of the mercury that’s contained in the bulb will evaporate into the air. How much? It’s hard to be certain, but one study looking at long tubular fluorescent bulbs found that over a two-week period, only 17% to 40% of the mercury in the bulb evaporated. The rest remained stuck in the bulb. Roughly one-third of the mercury that evaporated did so in the first eight hours after the breakage; the rest seeped out slowly over the remainder of the study period.”

Foolish right-wingers.

15 years later, lighting manufacturer TCP reported, “You’ve seen the headlines. CFL light bulb bans started making their way through state legislatures last year, and California has become the second state to sign one into law. Vermont’s light bulb ban passed in May, forbidding sales of CFLs as of February 2023. California’s phase-out begins in January 2024.”

Gee, why is that?

TCP reported, “Because CFLs and linear fluorescent lamps — aka those long, slender tubes in overhead fixtures — contain the known toxin mercury, the CFL light bulb ban is framed as a protection for both waste workers and the wider environment.”

So we switched over to LEDs. I cannot wait to find out what the flaw is in LED so lefties can ban them as well and replace them with wax cylinders that provide light as they burn down. Remember, the answer to the question what did socialists use before they used candles is electricity.

Foolish right-wingers keep being right.

Hey, it’s right (ahem) there in the name, and there’s a reason for that.

Know thine enemy

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Mike

Our old friend Jeff Goldstein names names.

There’s nothing to be gained by arguing with anarcho-communists

Here’s visual proof. And some harsh words to go along with it.

It’s time we begin thinking of Antifa and those who align with the putative “anti-fascist” movement — themselves the epitome of contemporary fascist brown shirts cosplaying as radical Marxists — as foreign creatures, actual Others whose minds we will not change and whose behavior we should not allow. These people are quite explicitly anti-American in every important sense: they have no regard for the rights of those they oppose; and yet they’d claim every conceivable right for themselves, including their “right” to harm those whose goals don’t comport with theirs. And their true goal — their prime objective — is to cleanse the earth of those who won’t bow to their desires and fill the ranks of their mob.

In the comments to the video from Amagansett Press (link provided in Jeff’s post—M), supporters of the videographer, Jason, laud him for his willingness to stand up to this particular mob, and to argue his case intelligently and thoroughly, with a degree of cultivated calm.

Me, I have a different take — one I may not have had 22 years ago when I started the original protein wisdom website: arguing with committed leftists is useless. They are fixated by ideology, impervious to logic, and dedicated to achieving power any way possible. Grievance politics is just one way of trying to do that, as the victimization gambit has proven profitable to that end.

And so watching this video — watching a sincere citizen committed to the absolute protections of the First Amendment be treated with such disrespect, hostility, belittlement, and utter hatred, no matter how much he pleads his case — at first saddened me, then sickened me, and finally angered me.

But the twist is this: I found myself not angry at the anarcho-communist punks who lie as easily as they breathe. Because I know who and what they are, and I’ve long since learned that those of us who relish our founding ideals cannot peacefully co-exist with them, making some sort of future separation inevitable at this point. Rather, I found myself getting more and more angry at the 1A auditor who so clearly and desperately wants to find common ground with these malicious faux-revolutionaries that he grants them a respect they haven’t earned and gives them plaudits they don’t deserve, however mildly.

It’s admirable that he stood his ground. But as the interaction moved along, it became completely obvious that nothing he argued was going to sway this mob of larping Maoists, who viewed him with utter disdain, and with no intention of considering his positions, however much he pleaded that they intersected with their putative causes. And that’s because violent, committed leftists don’t have any real causes: instead, the causes they adopt at any moment are mere pretexts toward power, control, nihilism, and the complete destruction of the whole of traditional western culture and values.

Annnnd DINGDINGDINGDINGDING we have a winnah, folks!

Read all of it. Provides me with the perfect excuse for re-running one my all-time punk rock faves.

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Questions, questions Vol XXVLLIII

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Mike

Kunstler has a few.

How and why else has the evidence of those crimes been so sedulously suppressed when it should have been served up to a grand jury post-haste in 2019, as soon as Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced? The darn thing was absolutely stuffed with a rich documentary record of crime from the lowest (drugs and whores), to the highest (payoffs from foreign actors). The extraordinary lengths that the DOJ and FBI traced to hide it, or pretend to not look inside it, is one of the most transparently degenerate acts ever seen in US history — and continues to this day.

And now, all of it unwinds rapidly, all the organized deception and lying. You could argue, perhaps, that US government agencies, this aggregation of interests we call the Deep State, just went plumb insane from guilt, fear, and shame over its own long-running, rampant criminality, but even that fails to answer how come, for instance, the CDC is still pushing booster shots of a toxic bio-engineered cocktail that maims and kills people. Are they aiming to reduce the US population on-purpose — at the same time that the DHS is ushering millions from other countries across the border illegally? Is the Deep State working China’s will against us and the rest of the West? Did we collaborate with our adversaries in our own collapse?

A: Yes.

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Stand down, serfs!

Posted on February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 by Mike

Nobody is coming for your guns gas stoves. Except when they are, that is.

Oregon’s Eugene Council Bans Natural Gas Hookups in New Residences

City says it aims to be free of fossil fuels despite strong public opposition

Wasn’t someone saying something about “for the Greater Good” just a moment ago? Why yes, I believe someone was at that.

After more than two years of debate, the Eugene City Council voted on Feb. 6 to ban natural gas hookups in new residential construction, becoming the first city in Oregon to prohibit new homes from using gas furnaces, water heaters, or appliances.

During a closed meeting, the council first decided to deny a request by opponents to put the issue on the May ballot. According to DHM Research, 70 percent of those surveyed oppose the ban.

The council then voted 5-3 in favor, citing concerns about climate change, and public health, and saying the ban would reduce carbon emissions, and eliminate the air quality hazards of gas stoves.

And thus is it established, beyond all further argument or discussion, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people has indeed perished from the Earth.

It did not die of natural causes, mind; it was murdered, by people who have names and addresses. That ought to be borne in mind, not just by the people of Eugene, but by every last man Jack of us who still like to think of themselves as Americans.

Update! When it comes to the larger issue here, the song remains the same: it’s the Leftism, stupid.

The Power-Mad Utopians

America needs a broad popular front to stop the revolution from above that is transforming the country

What happens in politics when one major party, or a major faction in both parties, commits itself to doomed utopian projects of social and economic engineering and seeks to capture and use government to impose its vision from above? In such cases ordinary political consensus and compromise become irrelevant. What is needed, in such cases, is the broadest possible coalition to defeat the mad and impossible schemes of these utopians.

Which coalition must stand resolved to do violence on behalf of themselves and their stolen liberty—not to merely die for freedom, but to kill for it. Y’know, exactly as our Founding Fathers were, hallowed be their names.

As Buck Throckmorton notes, the above-linked article is a long ‘un. And, as I will note, it suffers from the by-now-obligatory insistence on a purely political solution to problems caused by politics—a misguided, impossible dream truly Quixotic in its gross proportions. Those things stipulated, it’s still worth a look anyhoo.

The Forever Plan(demic)

Posted on February 13, 2023 by Mike

More “experts,” God help us.

Are there places you should still mask in, forever? Three experts weigh in

There are still hundreds of thousands of COVID cases reported in the U.S. each week, along with a few thousand deaths related to COVID.

“Cases,” yet. Another word redefined for the convenience of shitlib tyrants and wannabe despots. “Related” to Fauxvid—do I detect the faintest pitter-pat of the wretched orphan Honesty, coming in on its little cat-feet? I mean, they for once didn’t claim these deaths were from Fauxvid, y’know?

But with mask mandates a thing of the past and the national emergency health declaration that will expire in May, we are in a new phase of the pandemic.

No, we are not. There is no longer a “pandemic,” the “pandemic” is over. Even Pedo Jao Bai-Deng said so, back last September. Not exactly a source one would want to count on in the normal run of things, of course. But hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Life looks a little more normal here in the U.S. than it did a few years ago, but decisions on how to deal with the virus aren’t over yet.

And they never will be, not as long as Americans remain tolerant of your precious “experts” making all their decisions for them.

China had a huge increase in cases last month after abandoning its zero COVID policy, and another variant prompted renewed recommendations in some airports. Researchers estimate that more than 65 million people are struggling with the effects of COVID — a disease we still have to learn about.

Speak for yourself, and the rest of the pussified and pusillanimous. The intelligent, observant, and independent of mind know everything about The Virus The Virus The Virus!™ they’ll ever need to, thenksveddymuch.

Wondering if and when you should still be masking up? NPR asked some experts.

“Experts,” forsooth.

Said “experts” tell us everything you would expect from them, and nothing you wouldn’t: Be afraid, be very afraid, every minute of every day, for the rest of your micromanaged existence, until you are given permission to do otherwise by Proper Authority. For the Greater Good, as always.

The rest of the NPR piece amounts to a rhetorical firehose-nozzle spraying metric tons more of this patent horseshit over all and sundry, which shouldn’t come as any great surprise to anybody; it is, after all, NPR—Official State Media, the Mouth Of Sauron—we’re talking about here.

I have to confess, I’m beginning to be as pessimistic about the likelihood of Heritage Americans ever rising up to throw off the yoke of this oppression as our good friend Wes usually is.

(Via Ace)

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The Great Debunkening

Posted on February 11, 2023February 11, 2023 by Mike

Looks like the science is finally settled.

I’m pro-science. That’s why I’m anti-mask

The landmark Cochrane study shows that the mask skeptics were right

I believe in the scientific method: make an observation. Ask a question. Form a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Listen to the answer. Insisting on the answer before pursuing this methodological approach is not science, it is propaganda.

And “masks work” was never more than propaganda — rooted in mechanical plausibility, not actual science — furthered by public health officials, left-leaning government leaders, the press and the party faithful starting in 2020 and continuing to the present day.

The left is holding fast to the idea that masks do work, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In fact, as of February 6, mask mandates have been reinstated at four elementary schools in Marin County, California.

Will there be redemption for those who had the audacity to challenge authoritarian public health bureaucrats? No, it seems. Will there be a change in policy now that the science is clear? Again, no, it seems.

Will there be a doubling down, with the self-proclaimed pro-“science” crowd continuing to insist masking works despite the scientific evidence showing us that they don’t? Yes. It appears so.

What seems clear is that the enthusiastic, religious devotion to the dogma — “masks work” — signified adherence to a set of beliefs: I mask therefore I am good. I mask my children therefore I am loyal to the Democratic Party and public health diktats. I mask therefore I care. I am a loyal follower of “the Science.” My faith is unwavering.

Those who claim to be on the side of “the Science” will continue to push unscientific policies in order to prove that they were right all along. This is the sunk cost fallacy writ large. Don’t admit mistakes. Ignore the actual science in favor of “the Science.” And continue to punish those who challenge. As well as those most vulnerable who simply aren’t in a position to challenge at all.

“Science” has apparently been rebranded by the left. It is now a slogan — a tagline — shouted at heretics to signify one’s moral superiority and loyalty to the party. What we have now is “science” that ignores the scientific method, which means “the science” is a cult. And a dangerous one at that.

Yes, it most certainly is. That is neither coincidence nor happenstance.

The larger issue here is that Leftists, having by now promoted their misbegotten ideology on up to de facto religious-cult status, while also being constitutionally incapable of leaving anything under the sun imaginable alone and untampered with, must therefore pretzel actual science into “The Science” in order to bring it into compliance with their contradictory catechism.

They’d adamantly deny there’s any religious-cult aspect to their beliefs, natch, particularly as it applies to the Church of the Eternal Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ denomination. But the truth couldn’t be more obvious to any reasonable, thoughtful person.

Which is not to suggest that science and religion are incompatible, mind. It’s just that they’re two very different things, that’s all—distinct modes of thought whose focus is on two separate realms, which we might think of as the practical and the ethereal. Religion is definitionally a matter of faith, and matters of faith are NOT amenable to empirical proof. That built-in contradiction in terms is just another of the myriad reasons why, intellectually speaking, shitlibs can’t help but trip over their own dicks fifty times before lunch every day.

Intellectually speaking.

The aforementioned Cochrane study is here, and says this:

One of the largest and most comprehensive studies on the effectiveness of masks found they do almost nothing to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.

The study reviewed 78 randomized control trials—experiments that have long been considered “the gold standard” for medicine—which assessed the effectiveness of face masks against flu, COVID-19, and similar illnesses. It found that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” for the general public, no matter what kind of mask is used. Even N95 masks, considered the most effective at filtering airborne particles, showed no clear benefit for health care workers.

The study was published on January 30 by the Cochrane Library, a world-renowned medical database that is famous for its high-quality evidence reviews. It comes as a battering ram to the recommendations of the U.S. public health establishment, which urged children as young as two to wear masks throughout the pandemic.

“This amounts to the scientific nail in the coffin for mask mandates,” said Kristen Walsh, a clinical professor of pediatrics in Morristown, New Jersey. “I just can’t wrap my mind around the fact that some schools are still actively forcing children to wear masks, much less children who need to see faces to learn.”

You shouldn’t try; it makes sense only when you recognize that the Scamdemic entire wasn’t really about health or safety, but about the twin pillars of authoritarian tyranny: power and control.

(Via Ed)

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Free speech: dead as the dodo

Posted on February 11, 2023 by Mike

The incomparable John Hayward’s latest.

A generation after the supposed triumph of classical liberalism at the “end of history,” free speech exists nowhere on Earth as a matter of principle. Every single tech mogul’s commitment to free speech evaporates when powerful authoritarians demand censorship.

Authoritarian foreign regimes know they only need to threaten blockage of Western social media services to make their management comply with censorship demands. Some push back harder than others, but in the end, they all cave. They can’t afford to lose access to growing markets.

Tech moguls rationalize to themselves that they can still do some good in oppressive countries by complying with some censorship demands – it’s better than being silenced completely. Any way you rationalize it, it’s a power calculation that limits the speech of the powerless.

Domestically, we’ve seen government officials using economic leverage and ideological affinity to limit speech in collusion with their Little Partners in the private sector. The ruling left-wing Party has operatives in tech companies that did much of the dirty work.

The power calculations have shifted a little lately, especially after Musk bought Twitter, but they’re still power calculations, not adamant defenses of free speech as a matter of principle. The variables changed, but the equations remain.

A troubling percentage of the free world’s population evidently believes censorship IS free speech – as though speech were a limited resource that must be allocated by the State with an eye toward “justice” and “equity.” Only by silencing some can others be truly free to speak.

“Hate speech is not free speech!” is a pure power calculation: those with power will decide what constitutes “hate speech.” They invariably rule that disagreement with their ideology and political demands is “hateful” and must be silenced.

How utterly convenient for them.

In America That Was, the very place where such forgetfulness was never supposed to happen, we somehow lost sight of the fact that “offensive” speech is the very embodiment of free speech—that once we’ve allowed TPTB to stifle speech they deem “offensive,” the hourglass has been turned over, the countdown to the inevitable loss of yet another Constitutionally-enumerated right has begun. Thus:

Speech is vital to political organization – in the Internet era, they are nearly synonymous. Twitter mobs have a direct pipeline to real political power via lazy, biased legacy media – provided they agree with the ruling Party. That pipeline is tightly shut against dissidents.

“Disinformation” is also a crude political calculation, not a high-minded and principled commitment to protect the population against fraud. We see examples every single day of disinformation that is tolerated, and boosted, when it comes from members of the ruling Party.

As with hate speech, the powerful decide what constitutes actionable “disinformation,” and they cannot resist the temptation of heavily tilting those scales against dissenters and speakers of forbidden truth. Party apparatchiks are never banned or reprimanded for disinformation.

The “end of history” was actually the triumph of authoritarianism, not classical liberalism – political scientists and commentators were just too giddy over the fall of the Soviet Union to see it. Individual rights, beginning with free speech, have steadily eroded since then.

It’s Doc Zero; reading it all isn’t mandatory, but you’re going to want to nonetheless.

1

It’s settled

Posted on February 9, 2023 by Mike

The Science™ has spoken.

Fauci: now he tells us

Fauci lied, and now he is admitting it. In writing. In a peer-reviewed journal.

To be clear, Fauci is not claiming that the vaccines were utterly worthless. He still maintains that in certain specific cases–atypical, but the ones that generally kill you–the vaccines serve as a sort of pre-treatment. Not a great one, but a somewhat effective one. But he flat out admits that the claims about the vaccine possibly preventing infection and transmission are simply bogus and always were.

No, I am not exaggerating. He even admits that flu vaccines would never meet the standard to pass muster for use if they were for any other virus. Fascinating. And hardly how they are advertised.

Ace follows up.

Here’s one quote from the paper:

As of 2022, after more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines, very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been noted. As pointed out decades ago, and still true today, the rates of effectiveness of our best approved influenza vaccines would be inadequate for licensure for most other vaccine-preventable diseases. Even decades-long efforts to develop better, so-called “universal” influenza vaccines–vaccines that would create more broadly protective immunity, preferably lasting over longer time periods–have not yet resulted in next-generation, broadly protective vaccines, although a large number of experimental vaccines are in preclinical or early clinical development.

He writes that the successful true vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella gave rise to hope that similar vaccines could be developed for respiratory viruses.

But he then points out that “Science,” represented in his physical body, has long known that respiratory viruses work differently and could never be truly vaccinated against.

But he then points out that “Science,” represented in his physical body, has long known that respiratory viruses work differently and could never be truly vaccinated against.

In stark contrast, the non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods (Table 1) and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others.

In other words: Because these viruses incubate in the mucosal tissues (nose, lung tissues) and not the bloodstream or the body as a whole, they do not encounter the body’s immuno defense system until after they’ve already begun sporing off out of the mucosal tissues to infect other people.

So: No vaccine injected into the body will ever be of much use in keeping mucosal viruses from spreading person-to-person.

And he always knew this, he says now.

Just another thing he lied and lied and lied about, in his role as Science Personified, to achieve the political objective of Making People Do What a Power-Mad Bureaucrat wants them to do.

Yep, that’s just about the size of it. The Scamdemic was a political maneuver, a bare-nake power grab, right from the very beginning. The only real surprise here, for those of us who realized that sorry fact early on, is that Fauci is actually ‘fessing up now.

2

1

Another FederalGovCo cash grab

Posted on February 7, 2023February 7, 2023 by Mike

The goobermint is your enemy.

Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich…

They’re coming after waitresses’ tips now: “monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from an employer’s point-of-sale system.”https://t.co/WAvh0t2cNN

— Mike Palicz (@Mike_Palicz)

February 7, 2023

Hey, no need to fret, it’s a purely “voluntary” program. For now.

3

The burning question

Posted on February 2, 2023February 2, 2023 by Mike

TL asks it.

If Not War, Then What?

One cannot be loyal to the United States of America, that government is gone, overthrown, dismissed. The only thing left of it are the documents that rightfully informed the people of their God-given rights and some formative departments and offices that maintain the structure of the government, but without the effectiveness or responsibilities thereof. Our government is performance art, nothing else.

What can be done? What can we do about it? That’s a question that, in truth, has a violent answer. When a people have been stripped of every aspect of privacy; had their wages and incomes (completely different things) subjected to digital confiscation at any moment; are being forcefully injected with poison; watched the past generations being snuffed out in nursing homes and their children and grandchildren either killed outright or chemically altered to prevent reproduction; have come to know that the future is even more oppressive, violent and hostile and that the process of altering that formulation of caustic actions against them is now politically impossible, the only thing left is to recognize the enemy and engage them.

Since I cannot imagine a commission of demonic acts greater than that to which we have already been subjected, I doubt anyone will do anything no matter how vile and vengeful our illegitimate government is. We are stuck in a 1950s frame of mind about America and being subjected to a 1984 dystopian reality without the will or ability to engage in a 1946 Athens, TN response.

So, what’s left?

Fret not, TL. People just have to get good and hungry, that’s all, and there aren’t enough of those people quite yet.

Until then, all we can do is wait…and watch. The concept of Constitutional liberty, as an issue, has faded almost completely from the picture for the majority of Americans (In Name Only); some don’t really care much either way about it, some are actively, openly hostile to it. Many of those who might once have been motivated to action by it have been lulled to sleep by indolence, sloth, and relative comfort and ease. Even those who recognize how truly awful the situation has become nonetheless feel no urgency, no impetus to risk their homes and lives to finally do something about it.

Yet.

Yes, the notion of the Former USA as the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is now nothing but an obscene joke. But as with all aspects of life on this poor Earth, these things too are by no means permanent. Once their children are going hungry—wailing out loud from the physical anguish that comes along with too-long-empty bellies—and they can no longer find either the means or the ability to put food on the table for them…well, we might all be surprised at just how powerful a wake-up call that is, for all parents with the least shred of dignity and self-respect left to them.

7

A future so bright

Posted on January 31, 2023January 31, 2023 by Mike

We have to be dragged into it against our will, kicking and screaming.

Road Trips in Our Long-Term EVs Have Been…Interesting

Broken chargers, full charging stations, single-digit temperatures, and optimistic range estimates have tested our patience.

While winter has seen many travelers stranded at airport check-in counters this year, MotorTrend editors have been braving the open road in our expanding fleet of long-term electric cars, trucks, and SUVs. During road-trips, MT’s Slack channels often become a de facto logbook of our exploits, capturing the headaches and small victories of long-distance EV driving in real time. Here’s a lightly edited look at how our drivers have fared in the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning, the 2022 Rivian R1T, the 2022 Volkswagen ID4, the 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance, and the 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 when holiday travel peaked, the weather and temperatures turned nasty, or they simply headed to far-flung destinations.

If you thought that was tons o’ fun, just wait till our antiquated and way-overtaxed power grid crumbles into pieces-parts under the weight of all these state-mandated struggle buggies. The only practical answer? This.

Chris Reed: I’m going to still drive the same vehicle I am now in 2040. I won’t be alone.

Assuming you’ll be allowed to, that is.

People routinely go down memory lane when they see decades-old vehicles — lovingly and ingeniously kept up for years despite replacement parts no longer being readily available — still on the streets long after they typically would have been consigned to scrap heaps. While wealthy collectors of older vehicles focus on classic sports or muscle cars, those with economic motives often prefer those they grew up with, such as the Volkswagen Beetles first sold in 1949. It was the best-selling car in the world in 1968 — popular in the U.S. in large part because of its countercultural associations, popular elsewhere more for its durability, affordability and excellent (for its time) gas mileage. In 1972, the Beetle passed the original Ford Model T to become the most manufactured vehicle in history.

Now there is an increasingly strong chance that this phenomenon — of aging vehicles still being a common sight long after they were first sold — will just keep growing in the United States, and that it could be strongest of all in California.

So I guess they’ve finally gotten it done, then: we are all Cubans now.

1

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