Death to Liberty!

They’re just rubbing our noses in it now

Posted on August 8, 2020August 8, 2020 by Mike

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

Thou fool.

Physical distancing, mask-wearing could be in place for 2-3 years even with vaccine, Dr. Tam warns. COVID-19 vaccine won't be a 'silver bullet,' chief public health officer says. https://t.co/hJ4rqD5qGz

— CBC News Alerts (@CBCAlerts) August 4, 2020

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.

It’s truly incredible how we went from “we need a brief pause to build hospital capacity” in March to “we must indefinitely suspend any activities that could allow the virus to spread” in August. https://t.co/rFheB88iF0

— James Hasson (@JamesHasson20) August 6, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No it doesn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOLGF, asshole-eyes.

Update! What the hell, more NYC hilarity.

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

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 4, 2020

Aww gee, my heart is just breaking over here.

So what’s next?

Posted on July 29, 2020July 29, 2020 by Mike

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

Posted on July 27, 2020July 28, 2020 by Mike

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, if even one life is saved, amIright?

The Peltzmann effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Normal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defend your home, go to prison

Posted on July 13, 2020July 13, 2020 by Mike

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.

Monopolizing the conversation

Posted on July 12, 2020July 12, 2020 by Mike

Our old blog-bud Doug gets a taste of the Google lash.

Helpful hint. For any political search on the web, I recommend using https://t.co/XCYMbXYwz3 … Google is actively re-ordering search results, censoring news, and hiding damaging information against @thedemocrats.

I proved it long ago here: https://t.co/0poWyNsemC

— Doug Ross ?? (@directorblue) July 8, 2020

Oh, interesting tidbit: I couldn't even find my own 2017 blog post using Google. It was #1 on DuckDuckGo (https://t.co/RYFNlkqWqL)

— Doug Ross ?? (@directorblue) July 8, 2020

The saga continues:

To put it bluntly, Google appears to be deleting search results that criticize its use of algorithms to enforce totalitarian political bias. Looks like I hit a nerve.

What’s next? Is Google going to start deleting blog posts with which it disagrees?

Count on it, buddy. He recommends the same recourse that I’ve been shouting about for a long, long time now: Dump Google, use Duck Duck Go instead. Might want to consider switching hosting-service providers there too, old chum.

Another “fundamental transformation” success story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ummm, about those “benefits” and all:

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

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

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

First mistake: you never ask. You fucking TELL.

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

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

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

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

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

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!!!

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

Whatever you do, DON’T PANIC. Unless they tell you to.

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. A tricky task, this, as it is imperative to avoid giving offense and fostering lasting grievance on the part of those who would level the charge of speciesism. After all, equine phobia is a thing. We must avoid maligning horses and their hoofs at all cost. Needless to say, the same consideration must apply to their owners, as well as their countries of domicile and origin.

Let us discuss the symptoms: Because we are confronted with a new disease, the syndrome and its various manifestations are still regarded as capable of impressive plasticity—that is, they are changing and changeable. The disease can rampage through every organ, bone, nerve, blood vessel and system in your body. The result is manifold noxious, painful, and deadly symptoms that appear to be unrelated to each other. Furthermore, these symptoms are similar to every disease, ailment, malady discomfort and inconvenience that you, or anyone else in the world, has ever experienced. Thus, it is easily confused with other morbidities. But, make no mistake about it, the underlying cause can only be one thing when testing indicates that the pathogen is present.

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. A swab administered between the big toe and second toe with a sterile Q-Tip is capable of rendering a true positive, false positive, true negative or false negative result, based on the suppleness of the skin. In short, the test is just as efficacious as the current Covid 19 test. A small fragment of DNA of the patient’s skin is sufficient for one of the above four possible diagnoses.

However, acute observational skills are also imperative! Let us describe what we definitively know: In addition to the laboratory test, the disease can also be diagnosed visually, if the carrier’s big right toe angulates away from the foot, upward by one fourth of an inch, in either or both directions.

Because an emergency has been declared, a vaccine is being rushed to market and will be ready between six months and two years from now. It will be administered alongside the greatly anticipated vaccine for Covid 19. By necessity, we have dispensed with the usual safety controls required for other drugs. Fortunately, therapeutics, such as hydroxychloroquine, widely in use for over 70 years for other diseases, and proven safe for them, is frowned upon by pharmacists. They are withholding the drug from the patients whose doctors prescribe them for Covid 19. Obviously, the pharmacist’s judgment should and does pre-empt the advice of the patient’s doctor! The pharmacist studied drugs in school. That is why he or she is called a pharmacist. What does a doctor know?

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!

Fortunately, our experience with Covid 19 has paved the way for imposing the additional discipline required for battle against the soon to be renamed disease originating from the beloved horse. First of all, we have become accustomed to sheltering in place. We now have learned to distinguish between essential and non-essential businesses. We wear a mask and we maintain social distance. Furthermore, we are intensely motivated to continue to observe the above admonitions, rules, and guidelines, thanks to our recent and current riots.

The riots have taught us that the nonessential businesses are the ones that the rioters have looted, ransacked, and burned. We know that they are nonessential because we are still alive even though those businesses are gone. If they had been essential, I would not be writing this essay and you would not be reading it.

This would seem to be satire worthy of the Bee itself…OR IS IT?!? No matter what, we must all proceed with extreme caution to eliminate all risk until we’re absolutely certain one way or the other. Therefore, I am pleased to join the author in her urgent call for a new national and/or state and/or local and/or neighborhood decree requiring every American to…

No, I can’t do it; you gotta go read the whole thing to find out.

Yeah, happy whatever

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

I was all set to uncork my annual rant about how the 4th of July should be a national day of mourning rather than a celebration of “freedom” we longer enjoy, but James Bovard raised the bar on me this year.

How many Americans will greet July 4th Day with gratitude that their governor is no longer compelling them to “shelter in place” or “stay at home” so they can celebrate their freedom? Most of the media is ignoring the fact that this Independence Day is occurring under the most dictatorial restrictions of the modern era. But anyone who values their liberty must recognize the Great Political Unleashing that has occurred this year makes a mockery of the Founding Fathers’ intentions.

Do America’s politicians and media have any special suggestions on how the tens of millions of people who lost their jobs due to the shutdowns should celebrate Independence Day? How should small business owners who have been bankrupted mark July 4th?

The media and many politicians heaped derision on people who publicly protested against the lockdowns that were destroying their livelihoods. But after a Minneapolis policeman brutally killed George Floyd, politicians cheered as mass protests exploded in cities across the nation. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio sent police to disperse attendees at an Orthodox Jewish funeral for violating his restrictions on public gatherings but endorsed mass protests against police brutality.

Twelve hundred health professionals signed a letter declaring, “We do not condemn these gatherings as risky for covid-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health.” Any tattered remnant of credibility retained by public health officialdom was shattered when they declared that supporting protests against police brutality “should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.”

Who knew that COVID-19 only infects “deplorables” and reactionaries?

At the same time that politicians joined and cheered mass protests against the police, many states continue effectively outlawing religious services. Would church services be permitted to resume if parishioners promised to cuss the police? The “experts” might also permit a vast rally to confer sainthood upon Anthony Fauci, the media’s favorite lockdown hysteria monger.

The pandemic pried open authoritarian Pandora’s Boxes at all levels of government. Trump’s Justice Department asked Congress to approve suspending habeas corpus for the duration of the pandemic. Norman Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, warned, “You could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over.” The same type of pre-arrest power could be exercised to detain anyone suspected of being infected or failing to obey lockdown orders. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, one of the most principled members of the Senate, tweeted in response to the news of the power grab: “OVER MY DEAD BODY.”

I could easily (and happily) excerpt a hell of a lot more, but you really need to go read it all; his closing line is as forthright a call to resistance in the spirit of our revered Founders as one can imagine. And be sure to get out there and celebrate your “freedom” on the 4th—if your state or local government will allow that sort of thing, that is. Don’t forget to wear your Humiliation Mask. No fireworks, of course. Too scary.

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