Welcome to socialism

I only wish I could say he was wrong about this. But I can’t. Because he isn’t.

In mid-March of 2020, the United States of America became a socialist country, despite President Trump’s promise in his State of the Union address one year prior.  To those who lost their non-essential jobs, those who met empty shelves, those who discovered that their “free” education was too costly, those driven insane by incessant fear-mongering, and those faced with capricious and nonsensical restrictions — welcome to socialism.  Deceived by the arrogance of science and appeal to authority, or perhaps with false science to mask nefarious motives, public health and safety were used as a contrivance to replace liberty, freedom, and democracy with the Game of Socialism, in which (elected) tyrants play with our lives.  Do health and safety trump liberty and freedom, and must we sacrifice one for the other?

The Constitution of the United States provides for no limitation of our liberty, freedom, or democracy in an emergency.  Is this because our Founding Fathers had never heard of the Black Death (1347, multiple) or the Great Plague of Marseille (1720) or the Yellow Fever from the Caribbean (1793) or smallpox (vaccine 1770)?  Why, then, did they limit powers in the face of such great calamities?

Absent such powers, the federal government cannot take advantage of panic, real or contrived, to tyrannize the states or the people, and with the 9th and 14th Amendments, neither can the states (or cities) tyrannize their people.  The protections of our Constitution have been eroded over the last century by a crisis culture that has people abandoning liberty for (illusory) safety, as notes Robert Higgs,

But if the dominant ideology does not give strong support to the Normal Constitution, it will eventually be overwhelmed by the Crisis Constitution.  Step by step, a ratcheting loss of rights will attend each episode of national emergency.  And we may as well admit that such emergencies are inevitable.

I ran across a great Eisenhower quote the other day, which will be going into the Notable Quotes sidebar-section forthwith: “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.” It speaks to the very heart of my long-held contention that this awful predicament is not due to the fact that the Constitution has somehow failed to protect US; it’s WE who have failed to protect the Constitution. In our weakness, our timidity, our complacency, we allowed it to be first ignored, then flung down and danced upon—to the point that we recently witnessed one of the most abominable Congresscreatures in American history openly mocking both it and us as she grossly defied its strictures, derisively shrieking like a rabid howler monkey: “Are you serious? Are you serious?!?

The above-excerpted piece is kind of a long ‘un, at least by AmThink’s usual standards; they tend to run shorter pieces than most other aggregator/portal sites do, in the main. But it’s deserving of a perusal nonetheless, link-rich and bang-on.

Inexpertise

Expert me no more experts.

Joe Biden climbed out of his basement last week. Twice! Once to deliver a brief but well-received address at the Democratic National Convention, and once to give a socially distanced interview to ABC News with his wing-woman Kamala Harris. The big news out of the interview is that Biden said he would shut America down again if scientists told him to.

If this is true, then I have a question. Why are we even bothering to consider Biden? Why not just elect Dr. Anthony Fauci, or Dr. Deborah Birx if we want to smash glass ceilings in the process?

Very early on we all made a decision as a society to hand our freedom to a small group of people because they have lab coats with fancy logos. It’s shocking. It is something that America needs to come to terms with because what we did can never happen again.

The misery, joblessness, loss of life, addiction, destruction of businesses, suicides — they all happened. It wasn’t people wanting manicures and brunch, it was peoples’ lives being destroyed. Did we have to do it? Maybe. Maybe we did have to do it, maybe that heavy human toll had to be accepted to stop the spread.

But we didn’t even have a conversation about it. We just pretended the downsides didn’t exist. When President Trump or anyone else said, “Wait, this is gonna hurt people too,” they were called grandma killers.

Biden just told us that as president of the United States he will do whatever the science bureaucracy tells him to do. Then why have a president? What good is he? Literally anyone could do that. If the new rule is that nobody gets to go outside or go to church unless Dr. Fauci says so, then why have a president? Why have a Constitution? Let’s just have a medical board that sends out decrees. Also one for the environment and racism. It’ll be easy, we just do whatever they say while we watch Netflix and order stuff from Amazon while having Zoom drinks.

Sadly, Amerikans have now proved that they much prefer freedom FROM choice over freedom OF choice.

The Watchers

You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.

A Baltimore County, Md., fifth-grader got a visit from the police after his teacher called to report that she had seen a BB gun on the wall behind the student during a class video call.

The boy’s mother, Courtney Lancaster Sperry, a Navy veteran, is warning other parents about a lack of privacy during virtual classes after her son was targeted by a teacher who saw what she thought was a scary-looking gun hanging on the wall of the boy’s bedroom.

“While my son was on a Zoom call, a ‘concerned parent’ and subsequently two teachers saw his properly stowed and mounted Red Ryder BB gun and one other BB gun in the background,” Sperry wrote on Facebook. “He was not holding them and never intentionally showed them on video. In fact, he was oblivious that they could even be seen in the background.”

After the teacher reported the gun, the principal, Jason Feiler, decided to call the police to report the guns and ask that the home be searched.

The principal and the teacher cited a rule stating that students may not bring guns to school and claimed it extended to virtual classes as well, Sperry said, adding that the school handbook does not address rules for virtual learning at all. Besides, “he did not BRING anything to this meeting and he is in his own home,” she said. “They were simply in the background in our home, safely stowed in a room behind a closed door, with no ammunition (if you can even call it that).”

The 11-year-old in question is a Boy Scout, pursuing the rank of Eagle Scout, and is an “outdoors / all-boy kind of kid,” his mom said. “And as his parents and by way of legal rights, he is allowed to own said guns.” In addition to the BB gun, she said her son is training in archery and enjoys shooting his Airsoft gun.

Sperry was, understandably, shocked when police pulled up in front of the family’s home.

“I had no idea what to think. I’ve never been in any legal trouble whatsoever. I’ve never had any negative encounter with law enforcement,” said Sperry. “I had no idea. I really didn’t know what to think.”

“So, I answered the door. The police officer was…very nice. He explained to me that he was coming to address an issue with my son’s school,” the mother told Fox Baltimore. “And then explained to me that he was here to search for weapons, in my home. And I consented to let him in. And then I, unfortunately, stood there and watched police officers enter my 11-year-old son’s bedroom.”

Oh, there’s an issue with your son’s school, all right.

“The officers that responded were appalled at the call and even commended the set-up that my son has for his toys and commended him also on his respect and understanding of the BB guns,” Sperry wrote on Facebook.

They were “appalled,” you betcha. Which did NOT stop them from barging on in anyway and tossing your home for an item that is in no way, shape, or form illegal, please do note.

“The officers were more than nice,” she wrote, “and though they did not have a warrant, I have always been taught to not only comply, but had nothing to hide and allowed them to look wherever they wanted to.”

And comply you did, which was the exact moment you freely gave up your liberty and your rights forever.

But hey, we’re Amerikans, right? It’s in our nature to comply, to obey, to bend the knee and submit to authority. In the land of the “free” and the home of the “brave,” we believe everything they say and do as we’re told. Right?

This story is appalling at every level, with every participant thoroughly disgracing themselves.

Update! What he said.

There is a litany of excuses, to the effect that these were “only BB guns,” and were “properly stored,” and so on.

The fact is that if they had been fully operational AR-15s dangling from the walls with loaded magazines, this illegal intrusion would have been no more justified, either by the insane educrats, or the complisiant coppers.

First off, what, precisely, was the law that was broken? What was the crime that these garbage teachers observed?

And what, had the naïve parent not consented to the police entry without a warrant, would the cops have had to present to a judge in order to get a warrant?

Everybody involved here is an idiot. The teachers are malignant idiots for presuming that their writ extends into private homes simply because they are connected to a computer housed in such homes.

The cops are idiots for not telling the teachers to FOAD.

And mom was an idiot for allowing the coppers entry in the first place.

Nobody involved could be said to have covered themselves in glory here, and that’s putting it mildly indeed. Bill links to another all too similar, and perhaps even worse, story—a one-two punch that pretty much serves to confirm just how thoroughly broken this once-great nation really is.

Open the schools? Hell no. Shut ’em down, burn the buildings, plow the grounds, salt the earth, start over fresh. This is way too big a mess to straighten out any other way.

Ritual purification

Lepers, unmasked.

Purity rituals now extend to almost the entire populace and to every aspect of life. Go to get food at a grocery store and violate the mask or social distancing rule, and you will be called out by the reigning religious authorities — much as Jesus was when he and his disciples were rebuked for gathering and eating grain on the Sabbath.

If you dare to go outside the parameters permitted you, be it travel to another state or to the dentist, the ritual priests will test you to see if you are fit, taking your temperature, testing for antibodies, and then pronouncing you clean or unclean. Go to church and be masked, socially distanced and don’t dare sing.

Persist in your transgressions and you will be at least temporarily cut out of the community by having to live outside the camp until you are healed. You will be a leper.

The Coronavirus has provided the extreme left with a reason to create a huge class of outcasts while also affording the opportunity to fundamentally transform society. Those who previously had been designated as outcasts, including those considering themselves to be disempowered in any way, may now find themselves uniquely qualified to enter the holy circle of the pure.

Ominously, also now outside the camp are those who were once powerful authority figures, namely, the police and the military who were appointed to confront and contain the dark side of society.

But even more worrying, in states like Maryland, one’s neighbor is encouraged to snitch on neo-lepers who endanger public health, as happened in the USSR and East Germany. This is to say nothing of those designated as having leprous minds by Twitter, YouTube and Facebook’s determiners of mental health. Spies now determine who belongs outside social discourse because of criminal thoughts and “hate” speech — which is generally defined as any speaking or writing that opposes the left.

In fact, the leftist elite believe that America’s moral health was compromised irrevocably by the events of 1619, the introduction of slavery now seen as irredeemable original sin. So inherently leprous is America and the West in general that all diseased institutions and cities need to be set on fire, much as physicians once cauterized gangrene.

Rest assured the establishment of the new caste system will continue after the fires. The current virus has set the template for future government dictates. Other diseases will follow Covid-19. More citizens will be placed outside the camp and more kulaks of private enterprise will be destroyed. Society will continue to require purification until the last virus of bad thinking is exterminated.

The authoritarian Left’s work is never done. But they’ll have to do it without any help from me. Myself, I’ll just stick with good ol’ Bob Marley.




Freedom undefended is freedom lost.

The Left NEVER sleeps

And they never give in, they never tire, they never surrender or compromise, admit error or defeat. They just keep chipping away, bit by bit and inch by inch, until they get what they want.

In these times of left-wing mobs filling the streets, assaulting civilians and police officers, destroying property with apparent impunity, flagrantly defying coronavirus social distancing rules, and even seceding from the Union, one of the few consolations for conservatives is the notion that gun rights appear to be safe for a generation to come. Gun sales are booming and ammunition is selling like hotcakes, so Democrats would be suicidal to make another push for gun control, right?

Wrong. Gun control is not dead, nor does it sleep.

If you think the Left will ever abandon any of its cherished policy objectives merely because a majority of the American public strongly disagrees, you haven’t studied how the Left operates.

The Left does not care about “the will of the people” when it runs counter to their agenda. They don’t allow popular opinion to shape government; they use government power to shape popular opinion. And when left-wingers cannot get what they want through legislation, they use other forms of power to impose their preferences on the public.

As Obamacare demonstrated, leftists are willing to take the electoral hit for imposing an unpopular policy if they believe that policy will socially engineer a more compliant American public in the years to come. The push for gun control in 2021 will be absolutely irresistible for Democrats if they do exceptionally well at the ballot box in November 2020. Democrat activist groups will loudly demand action, and there won’t be much resistance in a Biden administration or Democrat Congress against those demands.

Gun control groups have heavy financial backing from left-wing billionaires, and they enjoy priceless in-kind support from mainstream media outlets. There is zero chance any significant resistance to their demands will be mounted by a single Democrat lawmaker, no matter what they tell gullible red and purple-state constituents when they run for office as “moderates” who respect the hell out of America’s gun rights.

Gun control is a social engineering step the Left must take, sooner or later. It is vital to redefining citizenship and the power of the State. The Second Amendment enshrines ideals of individual liberty and responsibility that must be wiped out. The people must become utterly dependent on the State for their physical security.

Firearms, and the culture of individual responsibility that surrounds them, are a tangible reminder that the State cannot protect your family – and as the people abandoned to violent mobs in Democrat cities can testify, it doesn’t really have an obligation to try.

This message of depending on the State for security might seem like an odd fit with the Democrats’ “Abolish the Police” mania, and it’s certainly hard to sell abolishing the police with a side order of draconian gun laws to thinking Americans – but remember, the Left isn’t terribly interested in persuading anyone, and will feel secure in its power after a big election victory. Won’t it be absurdly difficult to enforce new gun-control laws, or move toward the outright confiscation that is always and forever the Left’s ultimate goal, after a year of record-breaking gun sales? Yes, but remember, when the Left wants something, the expense of achieving its goals and the amount of compulsive power that must be deployed are features, not bugs. 

John’s closer 〈Walter Cronkite voice〉oughta scaaarrre yuh to death〈/Walter Cronkite voice〉. All the more so because he is one hundred percent correct about it, and if you have a lick of sense you know damned well he is. This is war we’re in now, and the war is forever.

Update! Wanna know who one of our most powerful enemies is in that aforementioned war?

Billionaire liberal activist George Soros told an Italian newspaper that he sees the coronavirus epidemic as a “revolutionary” opportunity.

In an interview with La Repubblica, the Hungarian-born Mr. Soros also denounced President Trump as a “transitory phenomenon” but expressed hope that the COVID-19 crisis has opened up politics in a radical direction.

“I would describe it as a revolutionary moment when the range of possibilities is much greater than in normal times,” he said. “What is inconceivable in normal times becomes not only possible but actually happens. People are disoriented and scared.”

Gee, wonder how that might have happened? And who might have been behind it? Must be a coincidence, I’m thinking.

But Mr. Soros, who was being interviewed by the Rome newspaper on the occasion of his 90th birthday, warned that Mr. Trump “remains very dangerous,” despite seeing him as transitory, because of his efforts to stay in power and avoid prosecution.

“He’s fighting for his life, and he will do anything to stay in power,” Mr. Soros said, also calling the president “a confidence trickster” who can “undermine democracy from within.”

Democracy? When in the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed world did a filthy rich old hardcore Leftist like you begin to give a damn about THAT, pray tell?

Mr. Soros, who bankrolls numerous liberal and leftist causes through his Open Society Foundation and other funding sources, praised the U.S. for still having “a great tradition of checks and balances and established rules. And above all you have the Constitution.”

I find it remarkable that this diabolical carbuncle could even utter those words without them leaving blisters all over his tongue.

George Soros is nothing less than evil incarnate, a rapacious financial marauder bereft of morals or conscience who made himself obscenely rich via undermining entire national economies and raking in quasi-legal billions from his manipulations—taking advantage of troubled times and instability, creating nothing, contributing nothing to the world he casually plunders, with nary a backward glance after he’s all done getting his. Over the course of his too-long life, he has been the direct cause of more harm and suffering for more people, worldwide, than probably any other single human being (if the rest of y’all actual human beings will forgive the implied insult-by-association) alive today. He simply has to be stopped, along with his equally-abominable son, using whatever methods or means necessary. That’s really all there is to it.

They’re just rubbing our noses in it now

STILL think this is really about a virus, do ya?

Thou fool.


Goalposts, on wheels, permanently. Via WRSA, Patriactionary says:

She really thinks Canadians will put up with that!

I pray she’s wrong, and that we don’t put up with it.

There’s never even ever been a vaccine for coronaviruses; who’s to say we’ll even get one, so, what, we’ll remain locked down indefinitely?

NOW you’re getting it, buddy. I repeat: goalposts. On wheels. Forever and ever, amen. As for “not putting up with it,” early indicators are extremely discouraging on that score, and by no means only in Canada, alas. Now for another one a bit closer to home, at least pour moi.



Gee, imagine my surprise. What will the rationale for Comrade’s Cooper’s next “regrettable” Clampdown extension be in five weeks’ time, we wonders? Helpful Hint for the obtuse: this ain’t about “keeping people healthier,” either. And “boost our economy”? Seriously, motherfucker? SERIOUSLY, FOR FUCK’S FUCKING SAKE?!?!?

My God, the balls on that sleazy sonofabitch.

They’re not even bothering with PRETENDING to try to fool us anymore. They’re just waving the bloated, blubbery Phallus Of Contempt—grotesquely engorged, an obscenity—right in our very faces, shamelessly defying the hapless Sheeple to utter Peep One of protest over it.

But hey, never mind all that stuff. Y’all just be sure and always wear your little Mask Of Submission now, y’heah? It’s IMPORTANT.

The top immunologists and epidemiologists in the world can’t decide if masks are helpful in reducing the spread of COVID-19. Indeed, we’ve seen organizations like the World Health Organization and the CDC go back and forth in their recommendations.

The truth is masks have become the new wedge issue, the latest phase of the culture war. Mask opponents tend to see mask wearers as “fraidy cats” or virtue-signalling “sheeple” who willfully ignore basic science. Mask supporters, on the other hand, often see people who refuse to wear masks as selfish Trumpkins … who willfully ignore basic science.

Whether one is pro-mask or anti-mask, the fact of the matter is that face coverings have become politicized to an unhealthy degree, which stands to only further pollute the science.

Last month, for example, researchers at Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy responded to demands they remove an article that found mask requirements were “not based on sound data.”

The school, to its credit, did not remove the article, but instead opted to address the objections critics of their research had raised.

The problem with mask mandates is that public health officials are not merely recommending a precaution that may or may not be effective.

They are using force to make people submit to a state order that could ultimately make individuals or entire populations sicker, according to world-leading public health officials.

That is not just a violation of the Effectiveness Principle. It’s a violation of a basic personal freedom.

NOW you’re REALLY getting it, buddy. That’s precisely what they’ve done, all right; horrifying, to be sure. But even more horrifying is how handily they’ve gotten away with it so far. I dunno, it begins to look as if we may have waited a bit too late to start in on thumping the living daylights out of Ken and Karen a la my earlier post. We should’ve been doing it from jump, just on general principle.

A paean to pubs

They matter far more than you might realize.

Due to the draconian responses to COVID-19, America has been seeing the temporary triumph of the new ax wielders. A whole network of institutions that are the bedrock of neighborhoods are under attack, including shops, bars, pubs, restaurants, concert halls, movie theaters and churches. Even some church choirs are silenced by a ‘no singing’ rule.

The smashers of neighborliness and camaraderie are, like Carrie Nation, doing so in the name of righteousness and the improvement of American’s physical health—a principle that seems fair enough.

But if the health of Americans was truly the issue, there would not be so much arbitrariness and inconsistent application of rules and regulations. The people who are under the laws of the new Prohibition can see the inconsistencies clearly. It seems odd to them that COVID-19 virus is apparently far more active in churches, small businesses, and eateries, than it is in densely packed crowds of protestors whose righteous ideology apparently immunizes them from the virus’s deleterious effects.

It even would be acceptable if it were a sensible means of protecting one’s and others’ health. Most reasonable people are open to sensible precautions. But even when the State has allowed the denizens of the cities and small towns it is “protecting” from the virus to gather, government officials continue to regulate venues in ways that have nothing to do with health but which make the public discourse and camaraderie of bars, cafes and eateries nearly impossible.

For example, recently the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board updated their COVID guidelines to define the acceptable purchase of alcohol at a restaurant or bar. If you want a drink, you have to purchase a meal, defined as “food prepared on the premises, sufficient to constitute breakfast, lunch or dinner.” Just to be absolutely clear, “a snack, such as pretzels, popcorn, chips, or similar food, does not meet the definition of a meal.” Also, no drinking after eating your meal! “Additional drinks may be purchased while the customer is consuming the meal, but no further drinks may be purchased after the meal is finished.”

Not only is the customer told when, where and how to eat and drink, but more arbitrary regulations ensure no friendly give and take is allowed. Customers who formerly enjoyed shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow discussions have been replaced with expressionless, masked and muffled anonymous clients who sit at tables six feet apart from one another, only daring to lower their masks to eat, not to talk. Meanwhile, the familiar senior citizen coffee klatsches at McDonald’s have been abruptly disbanded and sausage biscuits are now impersonally dispensed from the takeout window.

What do all of the minute regulations have to do with public health? Not very much.

One cannot help but wonder if in addition to suppressing free discourse, something else is at work; namely H.L. Mencken’s view of puritanism, which he called “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

People who knew who you are and with whom you amiably rubbed elbows at the bar or in the pew, are now excised from your life. At the local café, it’s been your neighbor you’ve been talking with. It’s your neighbor whose business you’ve been supporting. The camaraderie, humor and mutuality of belonging to the human race is there at the local tavern. The mutuality of the faith community that recites creeds, sings hymns and prays together is found when meeting in person, not in cyberspace. ‘Tavern’ and ‘tabernacle’ spring from the same Latin root, taberna.

Just as bad, the demise of the familiar pub, the neighborhood restaurant and cafes; and the shutting down of church fellowships seems to have left protest marches as the only viable outlets for free speech.

Something is profoundly wrong with a society when the only acceptable and freely chosen social gatherings are protest marches rather than humble camaraderie as the unifying emotion. Something’s desperately amiss when the chief form of socialization is angry protest. It’s on the local level that true diversity exists, not on the macro stage with blaring megaphones drowning out all other voices.

Those whom you would rule, you first make afraid: dehumanize them, demoralize them, isolate them, confine them, terrorize them. Anybody out there seriously think the Left doesn’t understand all that, better than anybody ever has?

“Safety” theater

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.



Aww gee, my heart is just breaking over here.

So what’s next?

This.

Americans can’t seem to handle wearing masks to stop the coronavirus. Now, imagine if the CDC changed its guidelines to also call for “eye protection” like medical goggles to stop the spread of the virus (and protect your neighbor, as well as yourself).

Well, Dr. Fauci is apparently preparing to do just that.

During an interview with ABC News, Dr. Fauci said Wednesday that he may soon advise Americans to wear ‘eye protection’ to avoid being infected by COVID-19 as deaths along the Sun Belt climb to record highs.

“If you have goggles or an eye shield, you should use it,” the doctor said, before adding that it’s not universally recommended, “but if you really want to be complete, you should probably use it if you can,” he said.

Fine by me, just do it already. I won’t wear your silly-assed face diapers, and I won’t wear your fucking silly-assed goggles either, asshole. Another directive I won’t be complying with, from a piece I linked about a month ago:

A new pandemic is raging. Even before the Covid 19 pandemic has subsided, the WHO has now warned that a virulent form of Hoof and Mouth disease has “jumped” species in record time from horse to humans and is threatening to devastate the planet. It is even more deadly than the original. An appropriate name for the pathogen is being considered, as we speak.

Curiously enough, the pathogen has an affinity for the right foot of its human host. At this early stage of the pandemic, we can already state, with confidence, that the microbe can be detected by the application of a simple laboratory test to the right foot.

Now that we know what we are dealing with, what do we do to prevent the spread? We cannot simply wait for the vaccine. Patience is not an option. There is no time for that. We must act now!

It seems that pressure on the right foot creates a veritable explosion in the number of microbes. The tissue on the bottom of the right foot is suited to hold the weight of the entire body with every step. However, the act of stepping causes the microbe to multiply.  Perhaps it is due to the pressure exerted on the big toe of the right foot. Perhaps the skin on the right foot is more attractive to the pathogen than the skin on the left foot which seems inhospitable to it. These are good questions to which the answers, at present, are unknown. Nevertheless, once the microbe is embedded in the right foot, it oozes out, microscopically, through the skin and into the shoe. But, as these are among the smallest of microbes, the story does not end there. The motion of the foot in the shoe, after the pathogen has been released from the skin, causes it to be dispersed upward and outward, diffusing into the atmosphere. Of course, the condition is far more lethal when one wears sandals as opposed to a closed shoe. Nevertheless, the pathogen cannot be contained even in a shoe that is closed. Therefore, we must avoid excreting the pathogen through the action of our right foot, and, more specifically, through our big right toe. 

Anyway, along with our Covid 19 lifestyle, what are a few more mandates if the reward for our efforts is the conquest and elimination of yet another new disease? The following rules have been thoughtfully formulated and could easily be incorporated into what we are already doing to combat Covid 19.

First, let us talk about the mask. I recommend that we jettison the shoe or sandal that we wear on our right foot. With all due respect to the shoe industry, this is for everyone. Not only those with a positive or false positive diagnosis. Why? Because we can be a carrier whether we know it or not. Healthy people can make other healthy people sick! Got that? So that means we wear a mask adapted to our right foot—a mask that is impermeable to the pathogen. Even though such a mask does not yet exist, wearing a mask on your foot is a symbolic act that communicates your understanding that the situation is dire and that 50% of us will be goners if we refuse to comply.

Secondly, and this is the final guideline, and, perhaps, the most important one: we must stop proliferating the pathogen when stepping on our right foot. We must stop walking and start hopping!

Yes! I said hop! On our left foot. Now, you might object that hopping on one foot will not get us very far when we have someplace to go. You are right. Therefore, enough said about that! However, I do acknowledge that hopping is tiring, if not tiresome. Especially if you have no alternative, and surely there is none. That is why I recommend, in fact, mandate, that we always carry a cane or a stick in our right hand, or lodge a state-of-the art crutch under our right shoulder to keep us in balance and to prevent us from falling. An implement of this sort will also be of great value in maintaining our social distance and thus enable us to avoid close body-brawling when our fellow human violates our six-foot social space. 

Please, let me be very clear as to dispel all misunderstanding: I do not advocate that you employ your hopping-aid as a weapon. However, the violation of one’s social distancing space is an act of wanton aggression that is a menace to the health and safety of society. Law enforcement cannot respond to each, and every infraction–as recent and current riots attest. Therefore, it is up to us to look after our neighbors and to gently remind them that the common good is their good. As we have all experienced under Covid 19, obedience is its own reward.

Seems pretty funny now, but it won’t for long. So where does this leave us? Where does it all end? Clue: it doesn’t—EVER.

Tucker Carlson calls the rioters “Biden voters”—an expression that seems to be catching on and may not bode well for the Left. As Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports, “some Democrats are openly expressing their fear that the rioters are helping Trump,” concluding that the Democrats “are riding a tiger. If they attempt to dismount, they will be eaten by the tiger.” Perhaps the strategy of colluding with the violence-prone “protesters” may backfire; nonetheless, the majority of Democrat operatives seem to be in it for the long haul.  

And why not? Democrat officials from local to state survey the national scene and see sports teams changing their names to appear inoffensive; people lobbying to replace the national anthem; Hollywood celebrating its anti-Americanism with slanted, godawful movies; wealthy corporations subsidizing domestic terrorists; outright traitors to the flag sitting in Congress; generals embarrassing their President; police chiefs kneeling before the mobs and religious leaders washing the feet of those who would depose them; public schools and universities churning out hordes of Leftist hoplites; and the mainstream media and big digital platforms practicing censorship, swaying elections and promoting insurrection.

In brief, what these so-called public representatives observe is a country submitting to the lure of Cultural Marxism, which views the world in terms of interest groups, power relationships, systemic oppression and endemic inequality, victim categories and identity politics, with socialists as the great healers and redeemers. From the perspective of the commissars, what’s not to like? 

Add to this political scenario the Leftist COVID-mongers who, as Angelo Codevilla shows beyond the slightest doubt, are engaged in the usurpation of arbitrary political power by stoking public panic, prolonging the lockdowns, constantly “moving the goalposts” even when the famous “curve” has not only flattened but become catenary, and collapsing the nation’s economy in order to unseat President Trump. These blue state authorities and their comrades in a Democrat-controlled Congress are dedicated to establishing the new “new normal,” which is to become the default position of everyday life leading us, as Paul Gottfried writes, into the “new frontiers of madness.”  

In a 1965 radio broadcast titled “If I Were The Devil,” Paul Harvey foresaw the socialist plan to take over America, which was as simple as it was methodical. The devil would begin by subverting the churches and proceed, among other steps, to educate authors to produce lurid literature, lard TV with dubious movies, peddle narcotics, tranquilize the public with pills, corrupt the schools, deify science, take from those who have and give to those who wanted in order to kill incentive, and caution against hard work, patriotism, moral conduct, and marriage. And presto! We find ourselves living in the hell that is socialism.

The devil’s program seems poised to bear fruit. Should this be the case, and I suspect it is, we have a plausible explanation for blue state public figures unafraid to violate their mandate, estrange a portion their voters, and act in full view of the nation like the petty tyrants they always essentially were. They are the purveyors of the new regime of American socialism of which, as Dinesh D’Souza baldly states in his recent The United States of Socialism: “In principle, no less than in practice, socialism is the ideology of thieves and tyrants. As for the people who fall for the temptation, they are connivers attracted by the rip-off scheme.”

These thieves, tyrants, and connivers have every confidence that they will shortly possess full control of their fiefdoms in the newly-formed Socialist States of America. After all, if the plot succeeds, it is soon to be their home.

From here, it looks more like the socialists won already, and America That Was is conquered at last. Now they’re just walking the battlefield to shoot the wounded.

“Experts,” bureaucrats, and ruination

He’s not just incompetent; he’s a fraud and a liar, too.

There are so many things wrong with the picture of Dr. Fauci taking in a Washington Nationals baseball game that one does not know where to start – and no it is not the fact that at that moment he is not wearing a mask. The first thing is that he is there at all, unlike the rest of America that he forbids from watching a baseball game. They’d like to take in a game too but only Fauci, secure in the knowledge that he has a regular job and a regular paycheck gets to enjoy America’s new favorite national pastime, players kneeling during the National Anthem.

Dr. Fauci took a break from his world tour long enough to take in a game and throw out the first pitch, which was predictably wild and to the left, the latest in a long series of curveballs he has thrown at us. After all, doing photo shoots ad interviews for InStyle Magazine can be exhausting. As the New York Post reported:

Dr. Anthony Fauci can add cover model to his resume.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, ditched his mask to pose for the September cover of InStyle magazine.

The top infectious disease expert invited photographer Frankie Alduino to his home last month to capture him sporting sunglasses and a button-down for the glossy, poolside shoot.

Fauci and his wife, bioethicist Dr. Christine Grady, also spoke with journalist Norah O’Donnell for an interview that will be featured in the issue.

To ask a question that would be asked of President Trump at the next press briefing had he done so, how many COVID deaths were there during the photoshoot or during the baseball game that people watched on TV because they have no jobs, they have lost their businesses or are just locked up in their homes under your order? The left-wing press would never ask such a question of the great Dr. Fauci, who once suggested millions would die if we didn’t shut up, sit down and obey his sage advice. Photo-ops are things evil conservative Presidents do.

Certainly, Fauci took umbrage at the question of where was his mask and why he was not social distancing with colleagues while he was sitting in the stands at the game. As the New York Post reported:

“I had my mask around my chin. I had taken it down. I was totally dehydrated and I was drinking water, trying to rehydrate myself,” Fauci insisted. “And by the way, I was negative COVID literally the day before. So I guess people want to make a big event. I wear a mask all the time when I’m outside. To pull it down to take some sips of water and put it back up again, I guess if people want to make something about that, they can. But to me, I think that’s just mischievous.”

You weren’t rehydrating yourself, Dr. Fauci, you were being a hypocrite, a fraud and a liar. Why can you and your companions juke elbow-to-elbow while you and your ilk ban people sitting three to a pew in a church in observing the constitutional freedom of religion you took from them?

Lord protect us from arrogant, power-drunk goobermint “experts” and their capricious whimsy. I’ll say this much: if Fauci’s brazen, staggering arrogance in enjoying a de facto private major-league baseball game—a once-mundane leisure activity you’ll never have the opportunity to enjoy again yourself—while letting the very mask he and his fellow dimestore-dictators nationwide demand that YOU wear properly until they tell you different by God dangle uselessly under his chin doesn’t leave you spluttering with rage, then you have no business calling yourself a Real American.

Believe it or not, though, this gets worse still. Over a grotesquely-extended sinecure stretching all the way back to the fucking 80s, when he flubbed the AIDS “crisis” in the exactly the same way he did this one, the despicable little creep Fauci has been wrong repeatedly, attempting to gin up baseless panic after baseless panic, over and over and over again, as if it was a cherished hobby with him or something.

Which serial futility and self-beclownment, mind, is no kind of obstacle to “success” when you work way down in the deeps of the topsy-turvy rabbit hole that is Big Government Wonderland.

Let’s get to some just plain vanilla stuff that I’m surprised the media doesn’t talk about when it comes to Tony Fauci. The first one may not be a big secret because it comes up a lot, but it merits meditation upon. And that is that this guy has had the same federal job for thirty-six years. It’ll be 37 years this year he’s had the same job in the federal bureaucracy. That is unusual. That means you’ve had to survive many different presidents, many different parties, many different regimes, many different social changes. And yet he’s always there. Now, I only know one other guy that pulled that off in American history: J. Edgar Hoover.

We’re talking deep state. Fauci survives because he does what the deep state wants him to do. He’s also a superb politician. And that’s very important. He’s got an M.D. degree. But the idea he’s a physician is a joke. The idea that he’s a scientist is a joke. And I wish Kary Mullis hadn’t passed away last summer because he could really be talking to this. Fauci is not a scientist. What he is is just a world-class bureaucrat. And that’s why he has survived for 36 years. That and the fact that he does what deep state people would like him to do.

Now, here’s a little trivia question. And you would think in our money-mad culture, this would have come out. There are two million people getting a paycheck from the federal government as employees. Who do you think the third highest-paid employee in the entire federal bureaucracy is? It’s Tony Fauci. Now, how do you bury that? That’s just a factoid you’d think somebody would come out with. Of two million people, he’s not in the top one percent of the one percent. (He’s in the .00015 percent!)

Did I mention rage before? Well, if that last article doesn’t push you well beyond rage and straight on into KILLING MAD territory…well, you’re probably either dead, or you’re reading this here post with your silly little mask on, you fucking idiot. In any event, the article paints a most repellent picture, one that serves to clear up one hell of a lot about why FUSA is in such awful shape. It’s a portrait that encompasses far more issues than our current catastrophe alone.

Fauci’s misbegotten career could easily have been the inspiration for Lawrence Peter’s work, if he was a bit older. Certainly, his picture should be emblazoned on the cover of every future edition of Dr Peter’s book. It would be a fitting tribute to the miserable, contemptible oxygen-thief.

Update! Leftymedia and preening peahen Fauci: birds of a feather, peas in a pod, on the same team, partners in crime.

He reinforces their preferred narrative about the virus and has assisted them in moving the goalposts to suit their agenda. Often he is vague, leaves out encouraging information, and even ignores alternative points of view. Despite telling Senator Rand Paul he was not “the be all, end all,” his public demeanor implies a far more inflated self-image.

With a new virus, the failure to hear competing theories has warped public perception, causing widespread panic. And Dr. Fauci himself has been inconsistent. White House advisor Peter Navarro was not wrong about many of Fauci’s missteps in his op-ed for USA Today. Even now, The Expert™ dithers on kids returning to school despite the fact that 20 other industrialized nations have done so without incident or needless restrictions.

Now, see, that right there is something I don’t quite get. Nobody on the notional Right should be demanding that the government schools reopen, soon, late, or ever. Seems to me that a golden opportunity exists here: keep the schools closed, abolish the federal Dept Of Ed, then quickly move on to disband the teachers’ unions and replace the whole dysfunctional dumpster-fire with a ground-up-new system structured very, VERY differently—one whose focus is on actually educating rather than indoctrinating. But YMMV, I guess. Onwards.

Fauci is often referred to as “the top infectious disease expert in the country.” Is he? I am sure there are other comparable minds on infectious diseases in the United States and globally. In fact, several have come out with views that are different than Fauci’s, but they rarely get airtime outside of podcasts and maybe Fox News.

Fauci is, in fact, the top government bureaucrat working in infectious disease. He joined the government during the Reagan administration. Does his government service mean we should ignore Nobel laureate and Stanford University biophysicist Michael Levitt? After he and his team studied 3,546 locations worldwide with COVID-19 outbreaks, they determined the curve is self-flattening.

Then there is Dr. Harvey Risch. He is a Yale epidemiologist who has done a review of the studies of outpatient use of hydroxychloroquine with an antibiotic and zinc. He is advocating for the use of the combination early in diagnosis to prevent hospitalization based on his findings. There are similar findings in France and India. Yet 44 states are monitoring its use, and medical associations are disciplining doctors for using it to treat patients.

Why isn’t Dr. Fauci telling the public that we may have an effective outpatient treatment? Shouldn’t he be calming fears by celebrating our improvements in therapy for hospitalized patients lowering the death rates? Maybe tell the FDA to let hydroxychloroquine to be used off-label for the foreseeable future? Dr. Risch believes this could save thousands of lives.

Of course, he should. Instead, he goes on television and wrings his hands over case numbers. It is maddening for anyone following the science of COVID-19.

Well, naturally. This isn’t about science, anymore than it’s about a virus, or public health, or anything else you’ve been told. Whatever might have been the case early on, this is now about power, and control. Nothing more, nothing less.

Beginning to figure it out yet?

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?

The Peltzmann effect

Unintended consequences.

In the 1960s, numerous countries (including the United States) began adopting laws that mandated the use of seat belts. The hope was that this would reduce mortality in motor accidents.

However, economist Gordon Tullock once quipped that “if the government wanted people to drive safely, they’d mandate a spike in the middle of each steering wheel.” Why would that be? Because of how we respond to risks. If we know that even the slightest accident might impale us on our driving wheel, we would all drive more safely. While it is a strange thought experiment, we can run it in reverse. If one driver knows that all the other drivers are wearing a seat belt while he also wears a seat belt, that driver faces a lower risk level. As a result, feeling safer, that driver acts more recklessly. He exceeds the speed limit, accelerates at a yellow light etc. This greater recklessness, in turn, increases the risks of an accident.

As a result, there is an ambiguous effect from the regulation. On the one hand, the law reduces risks but it also induces a behavioral response that increases the likelihood of an accident happening. Thus, we must wonder which effect dominates the other.

The same logic applies to face masks. Imagine a fictitious Canadian economist who, fearing the risk of bringing the virus to a loved one or catching the virus himself, avoids situations that would be too risky for his tastes. He avoids going to the coffee shop for a latte and limits himself only to doing groceries. With everyone being forced to wear a mask, he may decide to go pick up that latte. Technically, the activities of shopping for coffee and groceries are individually less risky with mandatory face masks. However, that fictitious economist now exposes himself to two activities that carry a risk rather than a single activity and so he faces a higher likelihood of catching the disease. Just as with seat belts, we must ask which effect dominates: the risk reduction of masks or the behavioral response?

In the end, the answer is an empirical one. Yet, the case of seat belt laws suggests that the precise answer might be elusive. The first paper of importance on the effect of seat belts was published in the 1970s by Sam Peltzman who found that the behavioral response by American drivers completely washed out the effects of the law. Since then, numerous papers on the topic have been published. Some confirm the findings of Peltzman while others infirm them. All these studies confirm that there is some offsetting behavior. They simply cannot agree on how strong it is.

However, let us take one important fact in consideration: the first laws mandating seat belt use were adopted in the 1960s. This is more than fifty years ago. Yet, there is still a discussion among experts who try to design the most convincing statistical tests. If there is uncertainty about the past, how can experts today be certain that compelling the use of face masks will not result in a greater level of risk taking? What if the offsetting behavior is stronger? Experts and policy-makers probably do not know this information (and I believe that they cannot reasonably be expected to know this). As the damages from faster propagation are exponential (given the nature of the virus), there is a real risk of backfire!

The question of whether or not seat belts, motorcycle helmets, masks, suits of medieval armor, etc save lives might be a fascinating one. It’s probably worth the ongoing research it inspires, I suppose. Ultimately, though, it’s the wrong question. What any and all Americans SHOULD be asking themselves, and constantly, is this: in a supposedly “free” country, with a government whose reach and scope is confined within very explicit limits set by the US Constitution, are ANY such mandates in accordance with those limits? Or do they so flagrantly breach them as to do far greater harm to the Constitution’s continued authority and relevance, thereby harming the nation entire?

Tragically, most of us long ago forgot about just how important that question really is, and no longer care anyway. If they think about them at all, they consider such notions quaint, antiquated, and hopelessly silly—the exclusive province of cranks and fools who are completely out of touch with reality, too thick to really comprehend what government’s true purpose is: to solve every problem, grant every wish, scratch every itch, safeguard every life, and abolish all risk, forever.

Of groupthink, and drooling beasts

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

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.

Defend your home, go to prison

Anybody out there who didn’t see this coming?

As we reported earlier, in a very disturbing move, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who displayed guns on their property to defend themselves from a huge group of BLM protesters, had a warrant served on them and had the AR-15 Mark McCloskey displayed in that incident seized.

It’s not yet clear why the weapon was seized and there have been no charges lodged against the couple.

People who care about the Constitution were very troubled by the action against the McCloskeys.

As attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon explained, “Missouri is a Castle Doctrine state, permitted among the broadest latitudes of any state in using even deadly force to protect yourself or your property. This couple used NO force, despite the imminent threat from a trespassing mob. The seizure of weapons is government overreach.”

I appreciate the courage it took to make a statement like this under the circumstances, really I do. But this goes way, WAY beyond mere “government overreach.” This is thuggish revenge-seeking by a petty little dimestore dictator, for one thing. But to put the thing more directly: this is tyranny, straight up. No more, no less.

Because the couple dared to defend themselves, about 300 protesters then came back on Friday, screaming and harassing the couple again. This time, the McCloskeys had private security backing them up on their balcony.

Why wouldn’t the mob return to threaten, harrass, and terrorize these poor people again? They’re aware now that they have the sanction and support of local authority, total carte blanche to do whatever they like.

Really, though, why would any of the rioters, looters, and violent savages all across America stop the mayhem? Their every demand is being met, their every desire satisfied. People are taking the knee, washing the feet, apologizing, groveling, and generally abasing themselves at the rioters’ direction. Those few of them who DO get arrested are quickly cut loose, to go out and do the same thing all over again.

Meanwhile, a perfectly peaceable and innocuous couple defend their home and their very lives—in perfectly legal fashion, guilty only of exercising the “rights” supposedly guaranteed them by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, mind— against a demonstrably violent, aggressive mob…only to have their legally-owned property stripped from them, left defenseless by the order of a slightly more subtle brand of thug.

Ahh, but there’s somewhat of a happy ending here, thanks to the heroic Real Americans at local gun shop Alien Armory Tactical, who grok what it’s really all about:

( IF ANYONE KNOWS THE ST.LOUIS COUPLE PLEASE PASS THIS POST ALONG TO THEM ) Let me say this to all the St.Louis city cops. You should of protested serving this warrant! This couple did what they needed to do to protect private property as the property was being ambushed. I’ve seen videos and some of these so called protesters were carrying firearms and they clearly broke the gate to make way on to the private property ( A THREAT ) To the couple that had this warrant served, please come on by our shop and we will gladly rearm you with a brand new ar15 for ( FREE ) thats right if you see this post contact our page and we will gladly assist you with a replacement for you to protect your private property for FREE! Also we will assist you with some FREE firearms training so if anything were to happen you will be better prepared, we will take you with your brand new ar15 and show you how to be better prepared! Thank you from your friendly neighborhood watch?http://dlvr.it/RbNdXQ

Bless their hearts. Oh, and lest anybody wonder about what or who might be putting wholly despicable Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, the putrescence responsible for the ongoing government persecution of the McCloskeys, up to it:

Gardener received funding in her run for the job from George Soros. Soros has helped back people for district attorney/prosecutor positions across the country to help transform the criminal justice system.

Ol’ George sure knows how to get his money’s worth, don’t he? When he buys a scumbag-Left politician, by God they STAY bought.

Update! This may not seem so heroic, perhaps. But given the overall shitty climate these days, I’d say it still counts.

Five Guys employees in Daphne, Ala., who reportedly denied three police officers service have been fired or suspended, the restaurant said.

“Five Guys and the Daphne, AL franchise want to thank the Daphne Police Department for their support in working together toward a resolution,” Five Guys said in a statement Friday. “The actions the Daphne, AL franchise have taken include termination and suspension of the employees involved.”

A local Fox 10 news outlet reported that police officers were refused service Tuesday night by several Five Guys employees.

The officers claim that six or seven employees in the establishment turned their backs on the officers as they entered the restaurant chain. One officer reportedly heard an employee say, “I’m not serving them.”

The officers then left and went to another restaurant.

“The Daphne Police Department appreciates the outpouring of support from our community and from supporters of Law Enforcement across the country,” Daphne Police said in a statement earlier this week. “We also want to thank Five Guys on a corporate and local level.”

Five Guys has the best french fries on earth, bar none. After this, I plan to be eating a lot more of ’em.

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