Disasters Near and Far

Trust us!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can it?

Dead giveaway

Posted on August 1, 2020August 1, 2020 by Mike

If it’s truly the planet-killer Plague they claim, then why is nearly everything they’ve said about it a damned lie?

On Wednesday, Florida reported a record high 216 deaths and “the grim news comes a day after the state set the record with 186 virus-related deaths,” as NBC Miami put it.

In fact, the record high for the daily number of deaths in the state appears to have been on July 16, when 123 people in the state were known to have died with the disease.

As of Wednesday night, Florida’s COVID-19 surveillance dashboard showed only 13 deaths on July 28.

As we have reported in this space before, the press is using daily reports from states to paint a picture of a runaway virus.

What the mainstream press keeps forgetting to tell people is that it can take the government days, if not weeks, to record a COVID-19 death. The daily reports aren’t telling us what’s happening now, but what happened earlier in the month. The chart below shows the impact of this. The gray bars represent when deaths are reported by Florida, and the red bars are when the deaths actually occurred.

If anything, what the numbers show is that the virus peaked in that state around mid-July.

And when you throw in how wildly the death count has been inflated using all sorts of diabolical stratagems and jiggery-pokery, even that peak isn’t nearly as scary as they need it to be. Meanwhile, in Georgia, they appear to have themselves a governor and not a wannabe dictator.

I am old enough to remember when the media was trashing Georgia Gov. Kemp for being a first to reopen the economy. Massive death and suffering were sure to follow. That didn’t happen and Kemp never got an apology or an opportunity to tout the success of the reopening.

Then the riots happened over Memorial Day weekend and continued apace following the death of Rayshard Brooks. About two weeks later, Georgia’s case-rate began to climb. The cases were concentrated in Fulton County, where the protests occurred in Atlanta and two adjacent counties, Gwinnett and DeKalb.

By that time Georgia had been open for six weeks. Georgians were not going back on lockdown. We were back to eating out, back to the gym, and getting our hair done. It was starting to feel like we could get back to normal. Most Georgians also don’t take hypocrisy lightly. If thousands of people could be in the streets in downtown Atlanta, there was no way you were going to stop those of us outside the city from meeting friends for a plate of nachos and a beverage on Friday evenings.

Governor Kemp resisted calls to lock down again. He insisted that the freedoms that had been restored be available to Georgians across the state. Nor did the governor let mayors in Savannah and Atlanta place additional restrictions inside their cities. He also ensured no Georgian or business would be fined for not wearing masks or enforcing mask-wearing.

He invalidated local ordinances that mandated masks or levied fines. Following that announcement, there was much screeching and gnashing of teeth from Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. Kemp went on a statewide tour to educate the public on mask-wearing with the surgeon general. He has also consistently modeled the behavior in public and on social media.

However, to those on the left, letting adults assess their own risk and make a personal decision is not allowable

Well, I mean, duh. That IS pretty much their whole raison d’etre, you know. And then there’s this:

Any conservatives afraid to look at the data and form their own judgment ought to instead, look at the people who they’re standing with when they dutifully put on a mask or continue to believe that the economic and social catastrophes inflicted on us had any justification whatsoever.

It’s hard for a normal well-adjusted person to believe that anyone could be so depraved that they’d create a fake medical crisis to inflict the equivalent of a massive bombing campaign on the American people in order to create enough misery to unseat the President.

Or that they’d insist everyone needlessly wear surgical masks in public to keep the crisis going till November.

But, when you find yourself on the same side as Jerry Nadler, Eric Swalwell, the rest of the Democrats, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and Hollywood; all of them insisting that there’s some horrible threat to America we need to take extreme actions against as they ignore the obvious terrible costs, suppress all evidence to the contrary, and flood us with propaganda that would’ve made the Soviet’s envious, you might want to consider whether you’ve maybe gone astray somewhere.

That’s the bonus Reason Number 6 in an article touting 5 reasons why “…wearing masks is anything but harmless.” But speaking strictly for myself, I find the moral case against donning the Mask Of Submission the most compelling of all.

People who resist COVID-19 restrictions are often accused of being selfish and caring only about their own freedom. While that might explain the actions of some, moral arguments can be made against many of the restrictions.

Although simple appeals to “freedom” are indeed less popular today than in the past, we should not disregard them. Nearly all our responses to COVID-19 require balancing one concern against another, and individuals and institutions will come to different conclusions as they try to strike that balance.

Freedom implies the right to conclude something different than the state and order your life accordingly. That is no small thing.

We should also resist the ratcheting effect of a growing culture of safetyism, most excellently discussed in an UnHerd article by Matthew Crawford. He writes, “At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed.”

Accepting invasive rules that affect personal behavior in a low-risk environment conditions people to accept that kind of intrusion into their lives. This is one reason people are particularly against masking their children, who are especially prone to manipulation. If we do this, what kind of human are we helping to produce? People who care only about coronavirus statistics gloss over these negative consequences.

It is also morally problematic to indefinitely treat the healthy as the maybe-sick. Inasmuch as we are required to do this at all, we should do it with the lightest hand and for the shortest duration possible. “Eliminate all risk” is not a reasonable standard. Politicians, however, almost always eager central planners — with a few exceptions — seem willing to just drop the hammer.

Which should tell all Real Americans everything they’ll ever need to know about them.

NYC Kommissar DeBalledZero doing a bang-up job

Posted on July 31, 2020July 31, 2020 by Mike

Coming soon to a soon-to-be hellhole near you, as ever-more New Yorkers flee the cesspit they created to begin the process all over again in your hometown.

It’s the Great Black Tar Way.

A cluster of junkies has turned Broadway into a shooting gallery, injecting drugs unhampered in broad daylight and then shuffling around in a zonked-out stupor, seemingly oblivious to the Midtown bustle around them, The Post has learned.

If that wasn’t enough, the addicts are peppering the area with used syringes, turning individual planters on 40th Street and Broadway into mini needle parks.

“They’ve taken over the tables, blatantly using needles and shooting up heroin all day long,” said a local worker who asked that he only be identified as James. “There’s no police action, there’s no reach-out. There’s nobody preventing this, and you know we’ve had multiple calls to 311 but nobody really responds. It’s becoming a real problem.”

He called his own 311 calls “futile exercises.”

The Post spotted several of the spent needles dumped at the scene — and even caught one of the vagrants shooting up out in the open on Tuesday afternoon, with no one stepping in or saying a word.

The accompanying pictures are…well. Hate to say it and all, because I still have plenty of friends in NYC and its environs, people I love and care greatly about. But the sad, sorry truth is this: New Yorkers twice elected the asshole primarily responsible for The City’s current sad collapse into misery and chaos. They should now be forced to enjoy what they voted for.

I suppose the ship already sailed on that Big Beautiful Escape From New York-style Wall idea, eh…?

Restaurant holocaust

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

Told ya so.

New economic data released Wednesday by business review website Yelp shows that approximately 60 percent of restaurants that had to shut down during the pandemic have permanently closed their doors.

Outlined in a July economic impact report, this figure is notably higher than the same data from March, where Yelp found 53 percent of all restaurant closures were indicated as permanent closures.

Countrywide data indicates that the most permanent closures have occurred in California, Texas, Florida and New York — states that have been or are currently especially affected by the virus.

Overall, as of July 10, 26,160 restaurants closed in the U.S., an increase of 2,179 since June 15.

Bad as that is, it’s only the beginning. Partial, tightly-controlled “reopenings” requiring no more than fifty percent capacity, early close times, no bar seating at all, and the like will no more than delay the now-inevitable tsunami of destruction. The sad, sorry fact is that the restaurant biz as we once knew it, along with many other worthwhile and irreplaceable things, is now gone for good—all wilfully and wantonly destroyed by bureaucrats on a power-rampage; a compliant press; Democrat-Socialist politicians intent on unseating Trump by any means necessary; and the foolish, unnecessary panic instigated at the behest of that nefarious combine.

Thanks just the same there, Juggsy

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

Nice of her to admit it, I guess, even though we all knew it already anyway.

Done and done, Theo.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this lackwit missed her true calling in life when she decided to run for Congress instead of heading on down to Flashdancers in Manhattan for a job working that Pole. Hey, it’s honest work, she woulda made fantastic tips (about fifteen hundred a night; ask me how I know), and would’ve made a lot of horny fellas very, very happy.

I just can’t see any way around it, fellas: she’s dumb as a bag of hammers, but she’s also a smokin’ hot, sexy little thing. Great big bodacious titties; nice, warm, open smile; smooth, un-self-conscious dance moves and gyrations—c;mon, man, what’s not to like? Other than pretty much every squawk emitted whenever she opens her fat, stupid yap, I mean.

Link to Theo Spark’s Tweet-tit capture via MisHum, who throws in:

We’ve dealt too long with gloves on and at least one if not two arms tied behind our backs. Fight. Fight back against the progressives who want to destroy this country.

24 flawless carats of Gott Damned Skippy.

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.

Fare thee well

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

…to Ol’ Remus, of Woodpile Report fame. I’m sure you all knew it already, but I was holding off on mentioning it myself until some solid confirmation of his death was out there, and sadly, it appears that is now the case. Remus was one of the good guys. Like the great Mike Vanderboegh—another strong, dauntless voice for Truth and The Right—he will be sorely missed, but never forgotten.

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.

Apologies to one and all

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Mike

For the delay in posting the new Donnybrook edition this week, y’all. Had a major automotive disaster over the weekend: apparently, either the timing chain or the camshaft broke, bending a few valves and leaving me without compression and therefore stranded until I could get a tow-truck out to drag the shattered carcass on back to the house. Been coping with that mess all week so far, which has of necessity shifted all other considerations to the back burner for the nonce.

To make matters worse, after consulting with the fine folks at Hosting Matters it seems almost certain that all those suspicious user registrations I mentioned last week are most likely the precursor moves for another catastrophic Russian hack attempt, a la the one that laid us so very low this past winter. So for now anyway, registration is disabled. I’m considering either just forgoing registration permanently or implementing a Captcha-type deal for user logins. I hate to do that, really; I know it’s a damnable pain in the ass, particularly for those of you who comment most frequently around here. So I dunno; we’ll see about that, I suppose. Maybe the absence of any login process at all for a while will be enough to persuade those nefarious creeps to look elsewhere to get their sick jollies.

Brother, can you spare a…

Posted on July 10, 2020July 10, 2020 by Mike

At first glance, this seemed kinda absurd to me. Then I gave it further thought, and…I dunno, it still seems kinda absurd to me.

Pearl Jam, the Eagles, Guns N’ Roses, and Green Day are among the bands who have received loans from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program, Rolling Stone reports.

According to data from the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department, the money will go to supporting and retaining the artists’ crews and staff; Rolling Stone notes that the Eagles’ loan is listed under their touring company and will help save 50 jobs. Larger loans—between $350,000 and $1 million—were taken out by the Eagles, Pearl Jam, and Disturbed. Out of 660,000 recipients, Rolling Stone reports that over 40 musicians and bands received loans for over $150,000, including Weezer, Imagine Dragons, Chainsmokers, Nickelback, and Jason Isbell.

Various major and independent labels also received PPP loans, including Sub Pop Records, Third Man Records, and Knitting Factory Records, who each received a minimum of $350,000.

Not one of the above-named bands are outfits I would think of as needing any federal aid to scrape by; I’d far rather see that dough put into the hands of the struggling, lower-tier road warriors out there who are certainly worse off than they are, and if I was still working the road myself I’d likely resent this, at least somewhat.

On the other hand, though, as the article notes, the assistance is earmarked for their crews and support staff, which makes it seem a bit more reasonable. Although it’s also true that even those guys typically haul down bucketfuls more cash than your average bar band does.

There’s this, too: the fact that no bands, great or small, have been allowed to ply their trade and earn their living during this summer’s touring season is entirely on the goobermint. Also, although people don’t realize it, even the big-name acts earn most of their dough not from record sales, but from touring and merch sales. So why the hell shouldn’t they insist on compensation from the very assholes who shut them all down on a pretext?

The more things change

Posted on July 10, 2020July 10, 2020 by Mike

Any of this sound familiar? At all?

With all the recent troubles we’re again being invited to an honest and open conversation about race, or said differently, the browbeatings will be resumed. Try this for honest and open: many of us, probably most of us, are tired of your whining, your so-called grievances, your violence and crime, your insults and threats, your witless blather and pornographic demeanor—all of it. You’re not quite 13% of the population yet everything has to be about you, all day, every day. With you, facts aren’t facts, everything’s a kozmik krisis, and abusive confrontations are your go-to.

Here’s the thing: some of us despise you, although fewer than you believe, but most of us plain don’t care about you or your doings. There was a time when we did care, but you betrayed our good will and played us for fools. We laugh about it now, but we actually believed you wanted equal opportunity and mutual respect and to live in harmony—all that stuff. Ain’t it a hoot? Imagine our embarrassment.

We talk among ourselves just like you do. It’s true, we have “frank and open discussions” when you’re not around. Why? Partly because it’s exhausting to tippy-toe around you. Partly because you think it’s your celestial right to tell us what we can say. And partly because you’re alarmingly aggressive or painfully dim-witted by turns. We never know which “you” will pop out of the box, or when. But mainly because you’ve revealed yourself as grasping opportunists without honor or principle. There’s your deal-breaker. There’s more.

During the recent riots you expected us to believe heisting snack food then torching the place was “standing up for justice”. When we didn’t buy it, you told us the looting and arson wasn’t done by the rioters after all, no, all the bad stuff was done by rioters from out of town. Apparently you think it makes a difference to us. And if we don’t fall for that one, you tell us you’re the real victims, you’re the ones “hit hardest” because the neighborhoods you looted and burned are, um, looted and burned.

We’ve never stood in your way but we don’t really care if you have good neighborhoods or not. The evidence says you don’t care either, unless we build and maintain them for you, what your enablers call “investments in urban communities.” They don’t mention the return on our past “investments”. Our former neighborhoods weren’t improved by your arrival. Your contempt for ordinary civility tells us no level of “investment” would make a difference. Listen up. It’s simple. Just like our neighborhoods are our responsibility, so are your neighborhoods your responsibility, not ours. Your clownish leaders will tell you otherwise but they’ve always been your responsibility and they always will be your responsibility. Accept it or don’t, you’re the ones who live in them. There’s more.

Your air conditioned, smart phone equipped, EBT-financed “poverty” doesn’t wash to begin with, yet you’d have us believe poverty causes crime. There’s no payday for assault and rape and random killing. Police say 20% of your criminal violence is related to dope-dealing, okay, business disputes of a sort, but it says the rest of it is largely pro bono. We also notice you have a working knowledge of jury nullification and take pride in not “snitching”, typical gang behavior.

We say “what you think, you do. What you do, you are.” We know what you think—we hear it every waking minute. We know what you do. How could we not know what you are? Just so it gets said, crime causes poverty. It drives away productive people, their businesses and the opportunities you said you wanted. More bad news: you’re free to accuse them of anything you wish but they’re not coming back.

Schools haven’t been educating our kids for a long time. They’re too busy conjuring up new ways to teach yours, in fact, we’re beginning to think yours are the only ones who matter. There’s always some new scheme claiming dazzling success which, in the end, amounts to handing out the answers with the tests, or taking the annoying hard stuff out of the coursework, or entering unearned grades by hand. Whatever they’re doing they’re doing it wrong. Your kids are telling us, in every way they know how, they have neither the interest nor the inclination for academics. Perhaps we should listen. If what they want is “out” it’s worth considering and probably worth encouraging.

You tell us the schools have “failed to meet their needs.” And what are their needs, pray tell? Higher standards and tougher tests? Stricter rules and a dress code? Or some alternate universe where credit is earned for putting teachers in the ER, or for a string of abortions before the tenth grade? If you’d tell us what their needs are we’d at least know what needs we’re failing to meet. Until then we’ll mark it down for what it is, another lame excuse. They’re supposed to be schools, not day care or orphanages or theme parks.

You pester us with the “civil rights movement” of fifty years ago as though it happened last week, with tedious 1960s footage and cloying voice-overs, in an endless loop, like Groundhog Day, decade after decade. It’s understandable, you haven’t met any real resistance since those days. Breaking news: none of it matters any more, it all devolved into just another swindle, an extortion racket, “pay up or we’ll make a stink—and the bad optics are on you”.

Schools now teach something called White Privilege, which claims no overt act is necessary for us to be racist, in fact, absence of such acts is said to be direct evidence. It’s the “original sin” concept in a different wrapper, meaning our putative racism is bone deep and can’t be discharged by good works. Even so, they say we must atone in perpetuity for being white. They suggest we devote our lives in selfless service to you. No. Sorry. Whatever white privilege there may be, it isn’t enough. In fact, being subjected to White Privilege prattle is worth a couple of privileges.

Speaking of privilege, 60% of your college grads—and 20% of all of you—are employed by government. The intent is to create an artificial middle class of course, hence the trivial positions with imaginative titles and weighty salaries. In the lower reaches it’s the quota hires, typically unqualified. It’s a great offer. You pretend you’re doing something useful and we pretend to believe you. The rest of your grads are largely diversity directors, window dressing, teachers of dubious “studies” and improbable “histories”, and similar warehousing schemes for the otherwise unemployable. It’s as good as it’s ever going to get, except for those on the skinny end of the bell curve—for whom we have genuine, i.e., earned respect. You’d be a fool to leave it on the table, for as long as it lasts.

So here’s the deal. If you want to know what we really think of you, the answer is we don’t, unless you’re making yourself unavoidable or we’re cleaning up your latest mess. We can safely rely on you to make astonishingly irresponsible choices and blame us for the consequences. And you’ll demand we make good on them for you. We won’t take a chance on your sincerity ever again. Take it somewhere else, you have no credibility left with us. You’re a net liability, predictable to the point of surety. So we attend to our own lives and our own problems. It’s as it should be. We recommend it. As for you, frankly my dear, we don’t give a damn.

Now as y’all doubtless know already, Ol’ Remus and his Woodpile Report have been missing in action for a month or more. The above is one of his posts…from 2015. But somehow it still seems as fresh as tomorrow morning’s dew, don’t it? Bill says it best:

This one is about five years old, but reads as if it were written yesterday (which should tell you something about the endless, grinding monotony of the left’s approach to things).

They’re eternally running the same old routines from the same old playbook, only, y’jknow, more so.

Plea for assistance

Posted on July 8, 2020July 8, 2020 by Mike

One of my oldest and dearest friends, fella named Tom King, a riding partner of mine since the 80s, nearly lost his life in a serious motorcycle crash over in Charlotte a month or so back. After lapsing into DOA status on the way to the hospital—fortunately, the accident happened within a mile or so of what used to be known as Charlotte Memorial Hospital, who the hell knows what they’re calling it now—he was revived, but suffered the multiple broken bones, abrasions, and brain-rattling skullcracker of a concussion that seems to go hand in hand with most bad bike spills.

The docs say his recovery since has been nothing short of miraculous, considering the extent of his injuries. I’ve told him he had an angel riding on his shoulder that night.

Tom has always been a damned goofball; I pick on his ass all the time about his advanced-level dorkitude, which ribbing he’s always accepted with grace and good humor, along with the occasional subtle jabs back. He’s a truly serious Ironbutt, though, and a damned skillful rider. I won’t say he’s a better rider than I am, mind, because in my own humble and honest opinion (ahem) almost nobody in the whole world is. But there’s not much argument to be made that he’s put more miles under his ass than I have, even though I started riding at a much earlier age than he did. I harbor no illusions of ever catching up, either.

Whenever we’d make the annual trek to Myrtle Beach for the spring rally, which for a long time was every year without fail, we’d go in a large group of ten or fifteen of our biker buds, with Tom as Road Captain in the front-left position and me solid and unflappable on his right. Those rides and rallies are some of the fondest memories of my life. I really oughta write them down one of these days, before I’m too old to remember ’em all. Don’t know why that never occurred to me before.

Did I say Ironbutt? Tom has never thought a thing about making a run up to Lake Lure just to have breakfast, then heading on up to east Tennessee or some other hours-away place just for the sheer hell of it. He always loved to ride fast as hell on his highway jaunts, too. I never was any kind of shrinking violet myself when it came to the Need for Speed—one of my earliest internet nicks, one I still use here and there, was “speedfreek,” and nobody ever claimed it was inapt—but Tom was so incorrigible about it he used to piss me the hell off blasting down the interstate doing the ton, with me lollygagging behind not even trying to keep up. He’d slow waaaaay down once he’d lost sight of me in his mirrors, and exact his revenge for my ribbing by taunting me, “You gonna keep up or what, Grandma? Jeez!”

Tom worked as a journeyman printer at the CLT Observer for more than twenty years, which means he was around long enough to have made the transition from lead type to the digital age. But after the McClatchy buyout, the Observer did some serious downsizing, and Tom’s entire department was eliminated. Understand: Tom has been a worker his whole life, and it about killed him to suddenly find himself on the street. He found another job at a small printing concern up in Davidson fairly quickly after a couple of piddling pick-up gigs, making considerably less money…and with no insurance benefits at all.

Maybe you can see where this is going, I’m thinking.

It ought to be fairly obvious that Tom is up against it here. So a friend put together a GuFundMe campaign to help defray his horrific medical costs, which will be ongoing as he undergoes an extended course of therapy. I thought I’d mention said fundraiser here, since I am too damned perennially broke myself to offer much else in the way of help for him. If you can afford it in these uncertain times, please do consider tossing whatever you can manage in the pot. My thanks to you, and Tom’s and his wife Jen’s as well.

Oh, and why not take this opportunity to get in an additional jab at him, right? I DID say goofball, I believe. First: me, Tom, and his wife Jen at one of those great Myrtle Beach rallies, at our hotel bar at the Ocean Drive Golf Resort.

Next: a shot of me, Tom, and my ravishingly beautiful late wife Christiana—same day, same location.

Hm. Okay, looking at it again, I see that there is just the merest of possibilities that Tom might not be the only goofball in that one. Which is the only comment I’m going to make on exactly where my bleary, blurry gaze seems to be locked. Last one, of us two boys confirming our coveted Master Goofball status for all time.

How many strikes do we have to give ’em before they’re out?

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

Glenn keeps saying how “sad” and horrible it is that the public no longer much trusts the goobermint’s health “experts,” but I don’t see it that way myself. I mean, come on: when your trust has been misplaced, your faith in over-powerful and unaccountable authorities betrayed, only a damned fool would continue to trust them.

We listened as bureaucrats like Dr. Anthony Fauci dictated economic, social, political and health policy from the widely watched White House stage, successfully shutting down businesses, sending people in fear to their homes, upsetting entire national industries and shuttering the doors on schools — all while claiming a complete hands-off approach to economic policy, political policy, education policy. All while claiming he spoke only to the “science” — all while waving his wand over the ever-changing “science.” All while pressing, pressing, pressing for patience until the development of a global vaccine. All while expecting his rapt, fearful audience to turn blind eyes to his own conflicts of interest with the development of a global vaccine — namely, that he sits on the board of the Bill Gates’ Decade of Vaccines campaign, aimed at developing and selling cure-all shots for what ails humans around the world.

And for the most part, the media did turn blind eyes.

Turn blind eyes, hell. They were cheering him on. And as long as what he says works to Trump’s and America’s disadvantage, they will go right on doing it.

The science was that the science was ever-changing, so to keep up, the rules, the regulations, the mandates, the orders, had to — simply had to! — change as well.

That’s not science. That’s flipping a flipping coin, again and again and again.

Well, in America, it’s time for the citizens to take back their rights from the charlatans. Scientists, on the coronavirus, have spent all the capital they have. They deserve to be drummed out and sent home. It’s time for the individuals to chart their own courses on personal health care.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me as many times as Fauci has since the AIDS scare back in the 80s—which he was wrong about too, along with every other damned thing he’s pronounced upon since, yet inexplicably still holds his powerful position rather than mopping a Wal-Mart restroom in Keokuk—well, I don’t even begin to know who gets shamed over that.

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.

Following the science

Posted on July 1, 2020July 1, 2020 by Mike

Wherever it may lead.

Denis Rancourt, PhD, has published over 100 peer-reviewed studies in his career, but ResearchGate choose to censor and remove this paper because it didn’t fit the narrative of the Great Panic of 2020 over COVID-19. Such censorship proves the existence of an alternative agenda.

Again, this underscores the Technocrat methodology of shaming, ridiculing and censoring anybody that comes forth with real science that refutes their pseudo-science. ⁃ TN Editor

That’s the lead-in to the deepest of deep-dives into the (actual, not pseudo) science confirming the abject folly of wearing the Mask Of Submission to stave off the Shanghai Sniffles.

Masks and respirators do not work.

There have been extensive randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies, and meta-analysis reviews of RCT studies, which all show that masks and respirators do not work to prevent respiratory influenza-like illnesses, or respiratory illnesses believed to be transmitted by droplets and aerosol particles.

Furthermore, the relevant known physics and biology, which I review, are such that masks and respirators should not work. It would be a paradox if masks and respirators worked, given what we know about viral respiratory diseases: The main transmission path is long-residence-time aerosol particles (< 2.5 μm), which are too fine to be blocked, and the minimum-infective dose is smaller than one aerosol particle.

The present paper about masks illustrates the degree to which governments, the mainstream media, and institutional propagandists can decide to operate in a science vacuum, or select only incomplete science that serves their interests. Such recklessness is also certainly the case with the current global lockdown of over 1 billion people, an unprecedented experiment in medical and political history.

Yeah, well, that would be that “alternative agenda” mentioned above rearing its ugly head. Hinderaker offers further confirmation from his own home turf, which also applies nationally:

Politicians love to say that they are “following the science.” To hear them talk, you would think they spend hours poring over data and they go where the numbers drive them. If only.

The COVID epidemic has brought out politicians’ faux reliance on “science” in spades. As good an example as any is my state, Minnesota, where our governor, Tim Walz, has offered one tribute after another to “science” as he has driven our state off the road and into the ditch with an irrational shutdown that protected all but the vulnerable.

When Walz issued his harsh shutdown order, he attributed it to “science” in the form of an allegedly super-duper Minnesota Model that forecast doom from COVID in terms of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. It later turned out that the model was created by a couple of graduate students over a weekend, but never mind. It was “science” and it was the basis for the governor’s assumption of dictatorial control over six million lives.

When Version 1 of the model turned out to be an embarrassment, woefully wrong by every metric, it was succeeded by a less pessimistic Version 2. Version 2 then fell to Version 3, which was issued on May 13, less than seven weeks ago. Version 3 was supposedly “science” informed by experience. How did it fare?

So the model was off by a factor of 24. This might be funny, except for the vast damage that our governor has inflicted on Minnesotans in reliance on politicized “science.” A dart board would have produced a far more accurate result than the much-touted “Minnesota Model.”

A cynic might suspect that Governor Walz knows the model is ridiculous, but simply enjoys exercising dictatorial powers under his own emergency decree–a decree that apparently continues in force in perpetuity. He also knows that he has the press on his side. If a Republican governor bungled an issue as badly as Walz has bungled COVID, in reliance on a pathetic arithmetic construct that is wrong by a factor of 24 times, it would be the the scandal of the age. But every reporter in Minnesota, with one exception (not counting Scott) runs interference for Governor Walz and his brutally failed policies. Why? Because they are loyal Democrats, and they went into journalism to serve their party.

Bingo. As John notes, “science” has nothing to do with any of this. And it hardly require a cynic to recognize the dictatorial push behind this sham. In fact, with every passing day it requires a fool NOT to.

The Mask Of Submission has worked beautifully, alas, at its actual intended purpose: as a FUD generator, and as public evidence of what compliant, docile little lambs most Amerikans have become.

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