Category: Disasters Near and Far

Reserved for natural disasters and other dismaying news not directly related to the WoT

Making the right noises once again

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A most welcome directive from AG Barr.

In prior Memoranda, I directed our prosecutors to prioritize cases against those seeking to illicitly profit from the pandemic, either by hoarding scarce medical resources to sell them for extortionate prices, or by defrauding people who are already in dire circumstances due to the severe problems the pandemic has caused. We have pursued those efforts vigorously and will continue to do so. Now, I am directing each of our United States Attorneys to also be on the lookout for state and local directives that could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens.

As the Department of Justice explained recently in guidance to states and localities taking steps to battle the pandemic, even in times of emergency, when reasonable and temporary restrictions are placed on rights, the First Amendment and federal statutory law prohibit discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers. The legal restrictions on state and local authority are not limited to discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers. For example, the Constitution also forbids, in certain circumstances, discrimination against disfavored speech and undue interference with the national economy. If a state or local ordinance crosses the line from an appropriate exercise of authority to stop the spread of COVID19 into an overbearing infringement of constitutional and statutory protections, the Department of Justice may have an obligation to address that overreach in federal court.

I am therefore directing the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Eric Dreiband, and Matthew Schneider; the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, to oversee and coordinate our efforts to monitor state and local policies and, if necessary, take action to correct them. They should work not only with all Department ofJustice offices and other federal agencies, but with state and local officials as well.

Many policies that would be unthinkable in regular times have become commonplace in recent weeks, and we do not want to unduly interfere with the important efforts of state and local officials to protect the public. But the Constitution is not suspended in times of crisis. We must therefore be vigilant to ensure its protections are preserved, at the same time that the public is protected.

Excellent, stirring words, to be sure—but can he (or will he) make them stick?

The way forward

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Schlichter puts forth a fine agenda.

Red China must be dealt with as what it is – an enemy. If the country’s Maoist mullahs had decided that they wanted China to spin-up into a first world power and responsibly assume a place at the world’s head-table by trading fairly, respecting human rights, not stealing our inventions, and not sending weird bugs across the globe, cool. But Red China wants to dominate the world.

We need to take this moment to understand that Red China is a hostile power seeking to defeat us economically. We need to aggressively repatriate critical industries home from China. We need our own drug industry back, our own rare-earth mining capacity, our own steel sector. We need to waive the frivolous regulatory nonsense that made China attractive to businesses in the first place. If the EPA keeps us from mining rare earth elements, it’s the EPA that needs to go, not our capacity to obtain these critical resources.

We need to do what China does without hesitation: bar Chinese companies or Chinese-controlled companies from participating in critical infrastructure like 5G.

We also need to stop pretending China is a developing nation and demand it fund all international organizations at America’s level. That it owns the WHO, yet pays a fraction of what we do is ridiculous. In too many ways – including in the idiotic climate hoax arena – China gets an edge by pretending it is not a First World nation and getting breaks we do not.

We need to clamp down on espionage, both strategic and economic. We need to openly tell the truth: China targets the Chinese diaspora to use as spies. That’s not racist. That’s a fact. But let’s not let the traitors who are not of Chinese descent off the hook. There are too many people who will sell out their country for a few renminbi. We need to get the FBI out of domestic politics and massively focused on uprooting these foreign agents. All spies should be subject to lengthy prison sentences. This nonsense about just a year or two in jail needs to end. And we need to clear out academia of Chinese nationals, both students and faculty. Why are we training our enemy? Plus, we must ruthlessly expose just who China has bought in our universities, the corporations, and the media.

China is largely to blame for the Wuhan Flu pandemic, but the idea of suing it for compensation is as useless as it is politically attractive. Here’s the way to kill two bats with one stone: impose a penalty tariff on all Chinese goods to create a huge pot of money to compensate the victims of ChiCom lies as well as give our industries a chance to recover.

Most of all, we need to get serious about this conflict, and it is a conflict. We tend to see other people from our own perspective. We are reasonable, fair, and just. But communists are none of those things. These red bastards exploit the patriotism of the Chinese people – who have every right to seek prosperity and freedom – to consolidate power and turn the spotlight off their own manifest failures and tyrannies. We need to get woke, as the hep kids say, woke to the fact that the Mao pals are bad people and we better understand that before one morning we wake up with their boot on our neck forever.

Seconded from here, every word of it, eleventy million bazillion percent. The very idea that we just had a goddamned out-and-proud, Red-in-tooth-and-claw Bolshevik actually make a credible run for one major party’s nomination for President ought to freeze every Real American’s blood, right down to the very marrow.

The New Normal: Safetyism

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A nation of pussies.

To grasp the urgency of lifting the ubiquitous economic shutdowns, visit New York City’s Central Park, ideally in the morning. At 5:45 am, it is occupied by maybe 100 runners and cyclists, spread over 843 acres. A large portion of these early-bird exercisers wear masks. Are they trying to protect anyone they might encounter from their own unsuspected coronavirus infection? Perhaps. But if you yourself run towards an oncoming runner on a vector that will keep you at least three yards away when you pass each other, he is likely to lunge sideways in terror if your face is not covered. The masked cyclists, who speed around the park’s inner road, apparently think that there are enough virus particles suspended in the billions of square feet of fresh air circulating across the park to enter their mucous membranes and to sicken them.

These are delusional beliefs, yet they demonstrate the degree of paranoia that has infected the population. Every day the lockdown continues, its implicit message that we are all going to die if we engage in normal life is reinforced. Polls show an increasing number of Americans opting to continue the economic quarantine indefinitely lest they be ‘unsafe’. The longer that belief is reinforced, the less likely it will be that consumers will patronize reopened restaurants or board airplanes in sufficient numbers to bring the economy back to life.

To cancel most of the country’s economy for a problem, however tragic, that is highly localized was a devastating policy blunder that must be immediately corrected. The lockdowns are taking a scythe to everything that makes human existence both possible and meaningful. Lives are being lost to the overreaction. Heart attack and stroke victims shrink from calling 911 lest they burden hospitals now dedicated exclusively to COVID-19 cases. Cancer victims have had their stem cell transplants put on hold; heart surgeries are being postponed indefinitely. The cancellation of ‘nonessential’ procedures has prevented the diagnosis of life-threatening diseases, writes a former chief of neuroradiology at the Stanford University Medical Center. Tumors and potentially deadly brain aneurysms are going undetected. Drug abuse deaths from economic despair and isolation may already be rising, as data out of Ohio suggests. The United Nations predicts tens of millions more lives globally stunted by extreme poverty and hundreds of thousands of childhood deaths.

US unemployment is at depression levels. Small businessmen who risked their savings and credit in the hope of creating a successful enterprise have had their efforts destroyed. Up to a third of local businesses may never reopen. The damage to supply chains grows deeper by the day. Farmers are plowing under cabbages and strawberries, pouring out milk, and destroying eggs because they have lost their markets. It is almost impossible to plan future production with demand so irrationally depressed. Retail sales registered their biggest monthly drop on record in March. Department stores and local newspapers may become relics.

Many cultural institutions — small theaters, regional orchestras, and opera companies — will never rise again. Demand for progressive causes such as public transit and dense, multi-unit housing will evaporate the longer that fear is stoked. Yet the safetyism rhetoric is unabating. ‘The vast majority of people want to feel safe,’ a doctor told MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle on April 23. ‘Hopefully people will turn to public health authorities and scientists for [safety] strategies.’ Those same authorities dole out positive reinforcement to keep the populace compliant. ‘Americans have done such a wonderful job’ of social distancing, Dr Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force director, encouragingly announced, ‘so we don’t want to jeopardize their efforts with a hasty reopening’, she added.

To be sure, a revolt is brewing against the idea that perfect safety is the precondition for social and economic life. Even residents of blue states are chafing under their mandates, provoking sniffy rebukes from their public health masters. But enough people have embraced fear to destroy the necessary demand side of an economic recovery. The lockdowns signal that it is not safe to shop, travel, or socialize — a message that in most places is false. The bans must be lifted, while protective efforts are targeted intensely at the vulnerable elderly. As a harbinger of liberation, any true public health expert would tell those Central Park joggers and those solo drivers in their cars to tear off their masks and breathe free.

It’s a sad commentary on our bizarre state of affairs that MacDonald’s perfectly reasonable, rational article could strike anybody as somehow “radical,” “extreme,” or “dangerous.” But you can be certain that it will.

An idea whose time has surely come

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And, unfortunately, probably gone.

The country has been thrown into an unforeseen and immediate crisis the likes of which we have never seen in American history. There was no warning and no way to prepare; we are in a state of shock that the collective life we led just two months ago is completely and heartbreakingly gone for the foreseeable future.

That’s why it’s time for President Trump to speak to the trauma the nation is enduring, and not just continue the same drumbeat about the “invisible enemy” each day from the White House press room.

The daily briefings featuring the Coronavirus Task Force have become repetitive. Trump’s jiujitsu with the hostile, childish, and hysteria-inducing White House press corps might entertain some of his followers, and undoubtedly it amuses the president himself, but does little to ease Americans’ rising anxiety about the future.

Fauci and Birx, aside from misleading the president with the disastrous Murray models, don’t have much new to offer. Their updates should be short and weekly, not daily, since the health crisis shows major signs of abating.

The president should now pivot to focusing primarily on how to recover both the economy and the spirit of the American people. He needs to speak directly to our fears. He must give cover to governors who have every reason to bring life back to normal in their states rather than listening to the same small chorus of “experts” who have misled him. (Commending New York governor Andrew Cuomo while openly criticizing Georgia governor Brian Kemp isn’t a great idea, either.)

He needs to get his economic team before the public every day to explain how and when we can start getting back to business as usual—and in days, not weeks or months. Most Americans don’t want more government hand-outs or debt-inducing programs. We want to protect the vulnerable, strengthen our health care capacity, and move on before the damage is too great to repair.

Trump performs best when he gives voice to the inner worries of Americans that others are too timid to express. COVID-19 is deadly and scary but Trump promised Americans the cure wouldn’t be worse than the disease. We are now at the point where we need to hear his plan to make good on that promise—and the president must change course accordingly.

I agree with Kelly, for all the good it will do. Jules also makes brief mention of the imminent collapse of the food supply chain, which is but one of several reasons I said above that the time for Trump to try to turn things around may have come and gone. All such attempts now will most likely be too little, too late:

Executives with the Arkansas-based Tyson Foods took out a full-page advertisement in several major newspapers over the weekend, declaring the country’s food supply chain “is breaking.”

The ad, an open letter from company board chair John Tyson was published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

“There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we reopen our facilities that are currently closed,” wrote Tyson, who noted earlier in the letter, “The food supply chain is breaking.”

The discomforting statement from Tyson comes as the company has closed plants in Logansport, Indiana, and Waterloo, Iowa. Similarly, Smithfield has closed a facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where one worker died of the virus, and JBS has shuttered a plant in Worthington, Minnesota.

Tyson’s Waterloo plant, reportedly linked to some 182 cases of COVID-19, is critical to the country’s pork supply.

The letter from Tyson warned all of these closures means “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from the national food supply chain.

“In addition to meat shortages, this is a serious food waste issue,” wrote Tyson. “Farmers across the nation simply will not have anywhere to sell their livestock to be processed, when they could have fed the nation.”

“Millions of animals — chickens, pigs, and cattle — will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities,” he added.

More, and worse:

“During this pandemic, our entire industry is faced with an impossible choice: continue to operate to sustain our nation’s food supply or shutter in an attempt to entirely insulate our employees from risk,” Smithfield Foods, the largest global pork producer owned by the Chinese WH Group, said in a statement on Friday. “It’s an awful choice; it’s not one we wish on anyone.”

“It is impossible to keep protein on tables across America if our nation’s meat plants are not running. Across the animal protein industry, closures can have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions up and down the supply chain,” the statement said. “Beyond the implications to our food supply, our entire agricultural community is in jeopardy. Farmers have nowhere to send their animals and could be forced to euthanize livestock, effectively burying food in the ground. We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who is also is a beef rancher, spoke about the food supply chain on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.

“I’ll tell you why there will be shortages,” Massie said. “Right now there aren’t shortages because there was a supply of meat that was destined for restaurants, and the demand at the restaurants was curtailed when they were shut down. It’s frozen meat, and [restaurants] are repackaging it and diverting that supply to the grocery stores.”

“That supply is going to run out,” Massie said. “The [meat] pipeline has a crimp in it, and that’s at the processing plants.”

In a Tweet accompanying the article, Massie lays it out starkly and directly, with no ifs, ands, or buts: “FOOD SHORTAGES ARE COMING.”

Meanwhile, there are nearly four million gallons of milk per day being poured down the drain—literally.

Farmers are dumping milk and plowing crops back into the soil across the U.S. after the closings of restaurants, hotels and schools in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Farmers are dumping 3.7 million gallons of milk daily and a single chicken processor can smash 750,000 eggs per week, reports Dairy Farmers of America, the largest dairy farm cooperative in the country.

As America’s agricultural industry is confronted by the impacts of the virus, there have been some striking examples of food waste.

Correction: it’s the impact of the overreaction to the virus that they—and we all—are confronting.

Wisconsin and Ohio farmers have dumped thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits.

An Idaho farmer found himself digging ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions.

Yet more, and yet worse:

Meanwhile, South Florida farms, which supply much of the East coast, have sent tractors across the fields to replow beans, cabbage and other ripe vegetables right back into the ground.

‘It’s heartbreaking,’ Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, tells the Times.

The company has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia. 

This is scary, scary stuff, folks.

“There’s a huge amount of milk still today going on the ground in the state of Florida,” said Brittany Nickerson Thurlow, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in Zolfo Springs. “There’s just nowhere to send it.”

The supply chain that ultimately brings milk from a cow’s udder to your refrigerator has spoiled.

Florida had over 15,500 coronavirus cases, including over 300 deaths, as of the Department of Health’s Wednesday evening count. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ statewide “safer-at-home” order remains in effect until at least April 30.

There’s no telling when life on Sunshine State farms will return to normal.

Sorry to have to be the one to tell ya, but this is the NEW Normal. It ain’t pretty. Every passing day under lockdown etches total economic collapse and all its attendant misery—joblessness, poverty, hunger, and death—more deeply in stone. And for the life of me, I can’t see any way out of it.

The Boomers vs the Zoomers

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Or: the Geezer Resistance.

By turning the nation into a weird form of North Korea. the new class gets new perks. Instead of standing in long lines dressed like idiots, they will soon have private shops where they can shop like normal people in a normal society. The next phase of liberal democracy is concierge shopping to go along with concierge health care. You see, who we are is a nation of equals with one set of rules for the Cloud People and another for the Dirt People.

The hero nonsense does not stop with the boot to the masked face. Just as happened in communist societies, fanatics are now rising up among us to hector the rest of us about our adherence to the new rules. This plague first started on-line with the “Cucks and Karens”, as one commenter called them, tone policing anyone questioning the mass idiocy we see all around us. Now they have spilled into the real world, furiously looking to heroically tell people to keep their distance.

Since I will not stand in the idiot line for the market I usually solicit, I went to another market that is not as heroic. They have a fat broad making sure everyone entering is dressed like a train robber. The greeter has not become the enforcer, but you don’t have to stand outside like a moron. This store serves the working and middle-class, while the really heroic store serves managerial types. There is a strong correlation between class and the willingness to suspend the sense of disbelief.

Inside the store they have arrows on the floor, meaning you have to walk up and down every aisle in a specific order. Apparently, heroism now means having to examine every product on every shelf before you leave the store. This is actually dumber than the Soviet-style lines to enter the store. No one is going to traverse the whole store because they forget to get something in aisle one. As a result, people are violating the edicts and going about their business like sane people used to do.

I was one of those sane people, going against an arrow to get something when a Cuck and Karen in their TikTok costumes said something to me about the arrows. The Cuck did the “Sir! Sir!” bit, but I just ignored him. After I got what I wanted, I turned around and he was saying something, but I could not hear it because my hearing is not good and he was talking through his sissy rag. I was ready to ignore him, but then he did the same “Sir! Sir!” bit to an old guy who was violating arrow policy.

Having reached the age where I no longer bite my tongue in public, I said to the guy, “It is bad enough we have to put up with nonsense, we don’t need idiots like you pretending to be the police of us.” He then heroically said something about it “being about all of us” and I reminded him that the most likely way for him to end up in the hospital was to keep talking. The old guy, heroically chimed in with a vigorous “Fuck you, asshole” and a middle-finger at Cuck and Karen.

The Boomers get a lot of grief from certain people and some of it is surely justified, but the only rebels I see in my travels these days are old-timers. This was not the first time I’ve seen an old person tell one of these prissy heroes to do an unnatural act when confronted about a mask or other dumb stuff. All the butch young guys are sheltering in place, heroically self-isolating while whining about the Boomers. The growing protests we see are almost all old people. Zoomers ain’t our heroes.

I myself have taken to saying “Moron” whenever I walk by another masked pissypants—not whispering it, not muttering it under my breath, just saying it in a normal tone of voice and passing right on by. Not saying it threateningly or angrily either, mind, just making a casual observation and moving on. It’s the native curmudgeon in me being brought to the fore at last, maybe. But I can’t help but feel that I probably should have been doing it long before this whole shitshow descended on us.

Last laugh

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Why yes, I AM still enjoying this rare bit of smoker schadenfraude. Why do you ask?

There’s not much to laugh about these days, but the news that smokers might be protected from Covid-19 is certainly one of them. With study after study showing that smokers are under-represented in coronavirus wards, the renowned French neuroscientist, Jean-Pierre Changeux, is working on a randomised control trial to test the effect of nicotine patches on Covid-19 patients.

This is far from being a crackpot theory. Changeux has explained his hypothesis at length here. In simple terms, he says that nicotinic acetylcholine receptors play a key role in the development of the disease and that nicotine can put a brake on it. If he is right – and the banter heuristic says he is – it would not only save thousands of lives but would also be one in the eye for the ‘public health’ groups who have been claiming that smoking and vaping are risk factors for Covid-19.

These groups are so used to lying with impunity that they wasted no time in asserting that smoking caused coronavirus complications when the pandemic began. In the US, newspapers have been filled with reports that smokers and vapers ‘may’ be at greater risk from Covid-19, a weasel word that requires no evidence. A group of doctors in New York urged governor Andrew Cuomo to ban the sale of all tobacco and e-cigarette products on the false premise that ‘mounting evidence demonstrates the link between tobacco use and increased risk for progressive Covid-19’. Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation has been taking occasional breaks from flattering the Chinese Communist Party to make evidence-free assertions about smokers being ‘likely’ to suffer more from the coronavirus.

Is there ANYTHING the panic-mongering “experts” have gotten right about this? Anything at all? Snowdon lays out some numbers in support of the argument for smoking’s health benefits before diving into the schadenfraude deep-end his own self:

People scoffed when Emmanuel Macron exempted tobacco kiosks from France’s lockdown on the basis that they provide an essential service. Who’s coughing now?

Far be it from me to preempt the conclusions of the professor’s research, but let us consider for a moment the policy implications of nicotine being the only tried and tested prophylactic for Covid-19. We could issue Lucky Strikes on prescription. We could #ClapForOurCigarettes every Thursday evening. The case for closing down Public Health England would be stronger than ever. We could open the pubs, but only to smokers and vapers. We might allow a few non-smokers in to enjoy the possible benefits of passive exposure, but only if they stand two metres apart. There is everything to play for.

The icing on the cake would be if British American Tobacco is first out of the blocks with a vaccine. Everyone who works for the World Health Organisation would have to go unvaccinated on principle and rely instead on herd immunity. Smokers would, of course, be pushed to the front of the queue for vaccination. They paid for it, after all.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But, by God, wouldn’t it be fun?

Oh, it already is.

NotACoughInACarload.jpg


Hey buddy, can I get a light?

Hope and despair

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A little tough love.

Listen. You were always going to suffer and die. Everyone in your family was always going to suffer and die. Everyone you know was always going to suffer and die. All your earthly efforts were going to come to nought, your country and culture — and, least we forget, “the economy” — were going to degenerate and disappear, and the sun was going to expand into a red giant and consume the earth as though it had never existed. All that was always going to happen, and you knew it all along, or would have if you had been paying attention.

If you are in despair now but weren’t before, you’re an idiot. You do realize this game you signed up for is called mortal life, right? Did someone not explain that to you? Were you expecting something different? I don’t know anything about your situation, but I know it hasn’t fundamentally changed. You were born on death row. Don’t you think that should have made you a little tougher than this?

As for the all the dupes and caitiffs and hypocrites and quislings you suddenly find yourself surrounded by — I hate to break it to you, but they were already like that. All you’re seeing now is what their true colors were all along. That’s what the word apocalypse actually means, you know: Revelation. Revealing. Uncovering. The green field coming off like a lid. For just a second, you get a glimpse of all the men behind all the curtains in the world. The whited sepulchers may have looked nicer before they were opened, but they were full of dead men’s bones all along.

You should have come to terms with death and suffering and evil a hell of a long time ago, but if you somehow haven’t gotten around to it yet, well, now’s your chance to do so. (Or not. Distraction is always an option, of course. I hear porn sites are offering premium memberships for free.)

Shall I close by saying that God loves you and everything’s going to be all right? Fine. God loves you, and everything’s going to be all right. Just keep in mind that God has loved everyone who has ever lived on this earth, and that “everything being all right,” by God’s standards, is evidently consistent with every imaginable human tragedy. Go read Candide sometime. Or the Book of Job. Or any history book, really. God’s love offers no assurance at all against the kinds of things you’re probably scared of. In the end, I’m afraid there’s just no substitute for learning not to be scared of them. And there are only two ways of doing that.

Good stuff; read it all.

I’ve long been amused, since way before the recent farcical hysteria, by news reports or those scolding seat-belt commercials making specious claims about “lives saved” or “deaths prevented.” Sorry, no. In all of human history, there has never been a single death “prevented,” nor a single life “saved.” There have been deaths averted, lives spared, yes. But that’s a strictly temporary reprieve, a postponing of the inevitable fate that faces us all.

In the long run, there ain’t no long run. It turns out that life really is nasty, brutish, and short after all. Deal with it.

Now let’s get to the hope, by which I mean tonight’s Feel Good Story Of The Week.

A Florida kennel at an animal shelter is empty for the first time in history since all of its dogs were adopted.

Volunteers at the Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control cheered in front of empty dog cages in celebration.

According to the organization, the kennel is just one out of three at the facility, which usually houses strays and overflows from the adoption kennel. It is also the first one to have been emptied completely.

Happy tidings indeed. If that story don’t make you feel a little bit better about things,then I’m afraid I just can’t help you.

(Via WRSA and Larwyn)

Stand update! A small victory.

HOUSTON, Texas — Harris County law enforcement officials backed down as the owner of the Federal American Grill decided to re-open his restaurant on the city’s west side despite orders directing restaurants to be closed except for curbside orders. Multiple law enforcement agencies in Houston said they were not responsible for enforcing the ordinance.

“We’ve complied 100 percent until now,” Brice told the Houston Chronicle. “What I don’t like is that the government is picking and choosing which businesses win or lose. They are sinking the economy. We have to stand our ground and get people back to work.”

After he announced the re-opening of his restaurant for dining-in, customers flocked to his side. Brice said he is only seating up to 30 percent of his capacity in order to maintain social distancing.

Sounds sensible enough to me. Good on Houston LEOs too, for upholding their oaths and ignoring unlawful orders. TL Davis, while somber and realistic, remains guardedly optimistic:

This is communism in the 21st Century. This is what we have allowed to take over capitalism and individual freedom. Part of that is something Ted Nugent spoke about on Glenn Beck. Hunters, people who enjoy traipsing through the countryside to down, butcher and eat their food from nature, vote in the single digits, i.e., less than 10%. While I am no big fan of the vote at this point, where there is no actual representation due to the dilution of the Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929 that froze congressional representatives at 435, it’s the only current defense against communism short of civil unrest. If hunters voted at 90%, as they should be by now, it would change the entire dynamics of every rural state in the Union and maybe some of those on the fringes of it. 

While I believe we have suffered from the ongoing communist agenda promoted since Woodrow Wilson, there are ways to counter and perhaps eradicate it from American life, but a few people would have to recognize this pandemic for the blessings it offers and spend a lot more time trying to point out those blessings. 

He goes on to list and analyze some of them, winding up thusly:

While we now have the tools to rectify a lot of damage done over the years, there is no assurance that these points will be made. They certainly won’t be made by the current media. Our stated goal at 12 Round Enterprises is to expose these actions even prior to the pandemic. We can take it back, we can change America forever. Or, we can lose again, only this time, it’s for all the marbles.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. After long decades of passively watching as our liberty was incrementally taken from us, we suddenly find ourselves confronting a true now-or-never, do-or-die moment. Choose wisely and hope’s flame will continue to flicker, until the next challenge confronts us. Choose poorly and the final darkness will envelop us, once and for all.

Freedom fighter update! Comrade Sundance gives us the straight izvestia.

A review of controlled social media shows various acts of civilian rebellion are being met with police arrests, detention and incarceration.

Some states have released inmates to make room to jail rebellious soccer moms and subversive members of churches who are non compliant with the dictates of their local command and control authority.

According to the national Lügenpresse proximity alerts have been sounding in/around west coast beaches as well as multiple parks in the northeastern unified control zones. As a result, additional enforcement personnel have been dispatched to these hot spots to avoid any outbreak of spontaneous liberty.

Compliance, while increasingly tenuous, is being maintained.

Simultaneous to the targeting of the rebels, armed behavior modification coaches (local police) have taken positions around Blue state public parks and beaches to identify, separate and arrest targeted provocateurs and subversives attempting to express liberty against the interests of the COVID-19 ministry.

He has pictures from the front lines too, including this:



Disgusting, abominable, intolerable, and as un-American as it’s possible to imagine. The mind reels. I’ve read dystopian sci-fi and PAW fiction that was easier to swallow than this is.

Preview of coming attractions

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If you like the panic-ninny overreaction to the Chink-N-Pox, just wait until you get a load of the rationale your masters plan to use to indefinitely confine you to your home over next.

You knew this was coming:

Public want radical response to climate change with same urgency as coronavirus, poll finds
The government should be more radical and put in place serious policies to fight the climate crisis with the same urgency as it has to coronavirus, voters believe. A new survey by pollsters Opinium found 48 per cent of the public agree that the government should respond “with the same urgency to climate change as it has with Covid-19”, with just 28 per cent saying it shouldn’t.

Environmentalists said the polling figures were a “green light” for the government to be more ambitious in tackling the climate crisis and that politicians had not yet caught up with public opinion on the issue. The polling is the latest evidence that public opinion is moving fast towards seriously tackling the crisis, following a surge in attention given in the issue last year amid international protests. The start of 2020 was punctuated with climate-related disasters like forest fires in Australia and major flooding.

Yes, it’s the Independent, a left-wing British newspaper. and, yes, we’ve been seeing this conflation of the coronavirus and “climate change” for at least the past month. The overreaction to Covid-19 has resulted in the summary abrogation of the First Amendment in the United States without so much as a shot fired, and in the imposition of lockdown orders in formerly semi-democratic Britain and in the never-really-democratic “social democracies” on the Continent.

Politicians the world over, it seems, just couldn’t wait to unleash the heavy hand of government on their hapless, trusting citizens. and now, having gotten a free look at how willingly the people transform themselves into sheep, petty tyrants in statehouses around the U.S. and in European capitals are hardly likely to let go. It seems that all you have to do is stand on a podium surrounded by doctors, frighten people into think they’ll all soon be extras on The Walking Dead, and you can get away with anything, the Constitution be damned.

And thus is the game given away. Never mind that the “legal goal” is a fiction that can easily be repealed. The absurd panic over the coronavirus is now being used as a stalking horse for further, even more punitive measures against the citizenry. After all, if the government can forbid you to leave your home out of fear of the flu, what can’t it do? Further, the longer the lockdowns last, the more “new normal” they will come to seem, so that the next government mandate, and the next, and the next, will be seen as part of a legitimate continuum, rather than the enormities they are.

And that ain’t no accident, either. Nor is it coincidence. What it is, is enemy action.

Already, those advocating for a swift reopening of the economies are being accused of wanting to kill grandma by the moral brow-beaters. In their eyes, even one death is too many, and the capitalist economies should not reopen until we can absolutely guarantee that no one will ever die of anything ever again.

Now let me see, who was it that said “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” again, now?

The “progressives” are trying to forge a chain from coronavirus to “climate change.” Having softened up the population and herded them into pens, unleashed the petty police on them, and condemned them to a life of terrified solitude until their masters deign to free them (with restrictions, of course!), government is now very nearly free of all constitutional and moral restrictions.

Again: Accident? Coincidence? Or that third thing I mentioned?

Some folks out there have challenged the get-the-boot-off-our-necks crowd with the query: So, how many people are you willing to let die of Chink-N-Pox so you whiny little bitches can go back to work? But that’s the wrong question, seems to me, and is more or less irrelevant anyway, since A) none of us has any real control over who will die, or of what, and B) none of us are getting out of this world alive anyway.

What I’d much rather have an answer to is: How many more of your already-vanishing Constitutional rights are you willing to give up forever in order to contain a malady that looks more every day like much ado about very little? Do you REALLY trust your rulers and their pet “experts” that much—even after EVERY SINGLE ONE of their computer-model projections have proven wrong, and their doomsday predictions have had to be hastily revised over and over again?

Make no mistake, people: when I said “permanent” and “forever” just now, I meant it. History has proven again and again and again that rights relinquished will never be given back; they must be TAKEN back, almost always via violent force. But what really curdles my cream is the abandonment of the fundamental principle that—no matter the crisis, the calamity, the season, the general public mood, or the supposed justification—directly and incontrovertibly flouting the US Constitution is NEVER acceptable. If you’re the gummint—federal state, or local—YOU DON’T GET TO SHUT DOWN THE CHURCHES, for one example, regardless of the supposed “risk” to however many of whomever from whatsit.

Yeah, yeah, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Got it. If I remember correctly, exceptions to the clear injunction against any restriction of the people’s unalienable rights are countenanced therein, if reluctantly, in time of war or insurrection only. Well and good.

But a blanket, across-the-board imposition of house arrest? No right to peaceably assemble? Businesses shuttered indefinitely by government decree, the purchase of certain arbitrarily-selected consumer goods forbidden? Freedom of movement now punishable by legal sanction, up to and including arrest? Gun stores closed, ammo sales locked down? No right to attend worship services?

No, sorry, but…NO. Contrary to what panic-ninnies both Left and Right are now screeching, nobody wants to get sick. Nobody wants to die, or to recklessly endanger others, to have “blood on their hands.” So stipulated. Nonetheless, Constitutional principles are supposed to be fundamental, not to be contravened by any government that hopes to sustain its claim to legitimacy. Here’s how I see it:

The tension between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, between the states and federal government, is by design. It is supposed to be challenging to “get things done” in government. Sure, crises require sacrifices, but we must be careful to preserve the structure that protects our liberties in the long run.

We are thankful that the U.S. Department of Justice recognizes the serious threat to the constitutional structure these sorts of action present. Americans do not lose constitutional rights during crises. “There is no pandemic exception,” DOJ writes in its statement of interest in the case, “to the fundamental liberties the Constitution safeguards.”

It is a great tribute to our Constitution that these checks and balances are working to create the friction necessary for Americans to take notice of the deeper issues at stake here. But we must take note and demand much better from our public officials. Federal and state executives would be wise to take a step back and consider the long-term implications of the actions they are taking. They must preserve and respect the constitutional structure that guards our liberty.

The American spirit in 2020 still shouts, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” as Patrick Henry did in 1775. No exception for Covid-19.

Forever and ever, amen. Peggy Ryan calls BS:

What are we doing, America? We’ve destroyed a booming economy, turned a record number of jobs into record unemployment numbers, and given up our basic tenets of liberty — all so we won’t get sick?

We’re allowing governors to restrict people’s movement; prevent citizens from assembling; and order mandatory masks, testing, and vaccines. These governors now claim the right to track our every move, to surveil every American in order to ensure compliance. This shutdown is not just a slippery slope to socialism and communism; it’s a downhill slalom.

How did we get here? Americans aren’t cowards who would eagerly surrender liberty for immunity. But therein lies the genius of the left. It’s not just about you and me, now, is it?

The left has hostages: our aging parents, grandparents, sick relatives. Either we put down the Constitution and slowly back away or the hostages will die.

Too many Americans have died for our liberty for us to squander this treasure over a virus. Over a million American soldiers — young, healthy — ran headlong into gunfire, navigated mine fields, dodged bombs, and otherwise gave their lives so Americans can be free.

Not a single patriot sacrificed his life, his future, to keep Americans from getting sick.

The government claims it’s protecting us from the virus. With the Constitution in lockdown, who’s protecting us from the government?

Just us, as always. Like I said last night, the Constitution doesn’t protect the people; it is the people who must protect the Constitution. Ryan closes out with a dead-on quote:

“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” —Daniel Webster

Precisely so. It’s dismaying to see how many of us have forgotten that truism, or never understood it in the first place.

Blood on your hands update! Reasonable people can disagree honestly and respectfully. Then again, some people are just irredeemable assholes.

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Just this once I’ll forego my customary “fuck you in the liver with a rusty railroad spike” comeback and let Linda handle it.

But, in fact, we are making a choice that returning to work is worth the risk – EVEN OF OUR OWN FAMILY. We take sensible precautions. We do the outside errands of our elderly family (and, often, of neighbors, as well).

But, in the end, some risks just have to be taken – for example, those who are considered essential and frontline. No one tells the nurses and truckers to stay home. We accept that they are putting their own, and their family’s lives at risk – for YOU to stay home, safe.

Don’t see those sanctimonious ones criticizing them. Instead, they are filled with praise for their “bravery”.

Financial problems have destroyed more than one American family. Long-term financial problems – not just “Oh, I can’t buy the latest shoes!” or “Bummer, I have to drink homemade coffee, rather than my $5 Latte” – can cause the emotional, physical, and mental breakdown that leads to a lifetime of despair.

It’s not selfish to prefer to keep your family intact. It’s not a bad thing to think that children deserve to have their mother and father living together. It’s not evil to NOT want (corrected from opposite meaning) to see the frugality of a lifetime wiped away, because NO ONE should die. Ever.

Even old people with multiple illnesses/conditions. Even if they were already hanging on by their toenails to life.

This is not Un-Christian. This is a realistic understanding that we cannot ask the entire country to upend itself for months, solely to make you feel better about having sacrificed US. Yes, US. Because most of those who are saying these things, are still getting a paycheck. Government workers, large corporations, schools.

If this is not devastating your finances, I just don’t want to hear from you. You haven’t skin in the game. You have nothing to lose by Virtue Signaling your willingness to see the rest of us suffer to make you feel better.

As she suggests, a sense of proportion is one of several important things that have gone right out the window in this debate. And that ain’t helping any either.

“The economy is not a machine”

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And even if it was, with many machines shutting ’em down is a lot easier than cranking ’em back up again.

The coronavirus is having a profound impact on our economies. Faced with economic downturns, governments have traditionally attempted to spur employment and restore economic health by propping up aggregate demand. Scholars differ on the track record of these interventions, yet all agree that governments, by stimulating demand, aim to provoke productive activity. Today, though, rather than trying to stimulate activity in the wake of the pandemic, governments are aiming to stop it. And at this task, everyone must agree, governments are performing splendidly.

Once the coronavirus is under control, restarting the economy faces many obstacles—especially social distancing. If we continue to remain at arms’ length from one another, we will hamper our natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,” identified by Adam Smith as a key source of economic growth.

An even bigger impediment to renewed economic vigor, however, is the theory and practice of mainstream macroeconomics. The brainchild of John Maynard Keynes, modern macroeconomics focuses exclusively on aggregates, especially aggregate demand, and GDP. The economy is modeled on what economist Arnold Kling calls “a GDP factory,” or perhaps a machine. This machine produces stuff (GDP) and does so at peak efficiency when properly fueled. The fuel is aggregate demand—total spending—and it’s the job of government to ensure that the supply of fuel into this machine remains adequate.

Even if government control of aggregate demand is necessary for an economy to function even tolerably well—and we aren’t sure that it is—such control is clearly not sufficient. If entrepreneurs can’t introduce new products, if businesses are denied access to low-cost supplies, and if prices are prevented from changing, the market process falters. It produces fewer of the goods and services that are the stuff of our prosperity. The same conclusion pertains if workers are prevented from showing up at farms, factories, and offices, in which case no amount of extra aggregate demand will cause markets to produce more. To stop people on the ground from producing is to stop the process by which people, cooperating in markets, generate prosperity.

Standard macroeconomic thinking is today especially counterproductive. By maintaining the fiction that the economy is a simple GDP machine that will always work as long as it is sufficiently fueled with aggregate demand, attention is diverted away from the problems introduced into the market process by government interventions, as well as by major disruptors, such as Covid-19. The myth is maintained that if government keeps pumping funds into consumers’ hands and businesses’ coffers, all will be okay.

In Europe, for example, attention is focused on devising ways for governments to increase their public debt, without paying higher interest on it. But how will entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers return to their normal activities? Imagining how the provision of some services will work in the future (will movie theaters survive?) is a fascinating intellectual exercise, but one with little practical utility. Solutions will be found by entrepreneurs through trial and error, the same way that progress has always happened. What we need is not more fuel pumped into the GDP machine but assurances that its internal processes aren’t blocked. Governments have purposefully stopped the economy. To get it moving again, we eventually must remove obstacles that keep individuals from participating in market processes, both as consumers and as specialized producers.

That will be the difficult part, since those obstacles have been gumming up the works since way before anybody every heard of the Shanghai sniffles, and are now firmly established and entrenched. Expect extremely stiff resistance from the hordes of paper-shuffling bureau-rats hired to perpetuate and expand them, too.

Tyranny, straight up

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You guys know I am neither a reflexive cop-sucker nor a knee-jerk supporter of the police. I’ve known enough of them over the years, more than a few quite closely, to know that they’re every bit as diverse in their attitudes, beliefs, and overall outlook as any other group of humans is. Some are selfless and heroic. Some struggle mightily to rise above their own flaws and frailties, with varying levels of success. And some have absolutely no business whatsoever wearing a badge, carrying a gun, and wielding power over others.

The Chink-N-Pox clampdown is underlining those distinctions in bright, bold red, whether we like it or not.

On Tuesday, an Idaho mother was arrested in front of her children for refusing to leave a playground that was apparently closed by the city due to the novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

Video of the confrontation shows a woman later identified as Sarah Brady, 40, being cuffed for refusing to leave an area playground. “Do it,” Brady dared an officer threatening to arrest her.

“Her kids are here! Her kids are here! What is going to happen? Who’s got her kids?” another woman at the playground can be heard saying as Brady is taken away in handcuffs.

“After receiving several calls to Ada County Dispatch, Meridian Police responded to Kleiner Park on April 21 2020 at around 3:50PM,” said a press release from Meridian Police Department.

“Upon arrival, officers saw that metal signage and caution tape announcing the playground closure due to COVID-19, was removed,” the department continued, adding, “Officers informed those gathered several times that the play structure was closed, and that they were welcome to utilize other areas of the park if they chose.”

After asking questions about the public playground’s closure and refusing to leave when asked, Brady was arrested and hit with one count of misdemeanor trespassing.

Brady was “non-compliant and forced officers to place her under arrest to resolve the issue,” the department said. “She was arrested for trespassing.”

In fairness, Brady’s arrest was the culmination of a planned protest against the lockdown, and Brady was inarguably acting in a, shall we say, intentionally provocative manner. Near as I can make out, the cops performed their duty as professionals, with restraint; no surprise, since they had been sent out by their masters to do a job that was in all likelihood distasteful to at least some of their number. All in all, I’m more inclined to put most of the blame on the city authorities whose nonchalant assumption of dictatorial powers placed the Meridian PD squarely between a rock and a hard place. I note, too, that not ONE of those city authorities seemed to be present to oversee the proper execution of his edicts. This, then, is key:

An extended video of the incident shows an officer earlier in the exchange apologetically saying that “someone” had taken down the caution tape from the closed-off area before Brady — who is reportedly married to a law enforcement officer in another department — and others argued that they are on public grounds supported by their tax dollars.

That same officer suggested the issue should be taken up with the mayor, rather than law enforcement.

Bingo. On the other hand, though, staging a protest DOES amount to “taking it up with the mayor” in practical terms, probably in way more effective fashion than sending a strongly-worded letter or speaking at a city council meeting. I truly hate that petty local and state-level tyrants are driving wedges between honorably-intentioned cops and the citizenry they’d prefer to be protecting than oppressing, a wedge that’s already doing damage even in small-town Idaho.

No, I don’t hate cops, I really don’t. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been even-handed and rational with this post so far. That said, though, I just can’t find a way to make myself comfortable with this:

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WELL! I know I certainly feel a lot safer with this dangerous predator removed from our midst, don’t you?

Total number of deaths in all of Idaho as of today: 54. Population of Idaho as of 2020: just under 1.83 million.

Sefton, from whence the above pic etc etc, says:

I’m pausing for a moment because I am honestly on the verge of tears as I collect my thoughts and try to write something coherent. I’m also enraged because what we are enduring amounts to a Reichstag Fire moment. Please do not fucking lecture me about the massive deaths from Chinese Lung AIDS that warranted the actions taken. The models and statistics are about as reliable as a Magic 8 Ball and the confirmed mortality rate is somewhere in the 0.1-0.3% range which is akin to a bad flu season. What is being done to us has never happened before; not during all the other outbreaks, not after the stock market crashes, not after 9/11. Never. This is tyranny, straight up. It’s at our throats with a My Pillow in one hand and a Khalid Shiekh Mohammed rusty hacksaw in the other. The past three years were a complete refutation and rejection of the anti-American progressive globalist enterprise. In fact, it might have been down for the count. This virus was not planned, but it was an opportunity that was seized upon not only to destroy Trump, but to punish us for electing him, and now the opportunity to subjugate us permanently.

There is indeed a plague upon this nation. It is the Globalist Left that includes the Democrat Party, the propagandist media, governmental bureaucracy, academia and anyone and everyone who support it. Ronald Reagan once said:

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

You tell me if what is going on right here and right now is not an extinction-level event. Because it sure as hell is. Tick-tock-tick-tock.

Thanks to the now-evident authoritarian streak that lurks within the hearts of so many American politicians and goobermint officials at every level, we’re all going to be confronted with some difficult choices as this illicit lockdown drags on and on—a lockdown which now threatens to rip the already-tatterdemalion fabric of American society completely asunder. If they don’t care about the rest of us, you’d think the politicians and bureau-hacks would at least be canny enough to recognize how much danger they’re putting their own decidedly non-essential carcasses in with this crap.

And yet.

Update! Government is force.

Let’s start with the good news. Americans are starting to push back against all the authoritarian COVID-19-related edicts and, if social media is an indication, shaming people who call the authorities to report neighbors who are violating social-distancing rules. In Michigan, voters are circulating a recall petition against a governor whose illogical list of permitted activities bans the purchase of seeds to grow food — but allows the purchase of lottery tickets.

It’s a start, but only a small beginning. It’s a shame that it would take such monumental government overreach to spark a backlash. We’re all used to the nonstop, slow-motion infringements, which are imposed (albeit in different ways, perhaps) by leaders of both parties. Finally, as we’re all prisoners in our homes and subject to hastily drafted and arbitrary suspensions of our fundamental liberties, Americans are learning a civics lesson.

Fears of a pandemic have exposed government for what it really is: a collection of petty tyrants who will grab any power they can to impose any idea they prefer. And it all comes to force. The news reports are infuriating. A man is handcuffed after playing ball with his six-year-old daughter in a park. A paddle-boarder, enjoying the surf alone off Malibu beach, is arrested and taken to the police station, as if the latter isn’t more dangerous than the former.

In one social-media posting, two New York police officers apparently threatened to cite a couple for sitting next to each other outdoors — even though the two are married. Increasingly, American policing is all about blind obedience to authority. It’s about the letter rather than the spirit of the law. If you think officers will resist an order to confiscate your weapons once the order comes down, then you are woefully naïve.

“[P]ublic officials at all levels of government are now exercising emergency powers rarely seen outside the context of total war,” Healy wrote. Yet the “crisis hasn’t yet led to massive new presidential power grabs” and “Trump has been a piker next to FDR, George W. Bush or even Barack Obama.” My only wish is that Americans would consistently stand up against all such power grabs, regardless of the party affiliation of those who engage in them.

Newsom and governors in Oregon and Washington have come to a collaborative agreement for “reopening” their respective states, but the guideposts are imprecise and still come down to this: People will be free to go about their lives again when they say so. Even in a health emergency, this is not how an even free-ish country should operate. I’m astounded at how quickly and totally every constitutional protection has evaporated.

Since so many folks misunderstand what the Constitution is, does, and does not do, I’ll say it again: The Constitution protects NOTHING. Being no more than words written on paper, how can it possibly “protect” or “guarantee” anything? The Constitution enumerates, specifies, codifies rules and principles. It must BE protected, by a morally-upright, vigilant people who harbor no illusions about the true nature of government. The Constitution hasn’t let us down. Its home truths are all right there still, clear as crystal, inspiring and ennobling just as they will forever be. Intact, indomitable, unbreakable.

Still there…waiting. Waiting for us to step up, to honor it properly by requiring every one of our so-called leaders, highest to lowest, to maintain the respect that is its due. To fulfill its promise in the only way possible: by meeting its challenge. By proving ourselves worthy of that promise.

I can’t say I expected as sudden a power-hog stampede as this, but the rebellion against Obama’s “fundamental transformation” that resulted in Trump’s election—along with the repeated failure of every attempt so far to discredit, hogtie, or remove him from office—seems to have driven the Ruling Class into frenzied desperation. The thing I find most surprising is that, after so many years of incremental federal encroachment, the big-daddy power-grab of them all emanated not from Mordor On The Potomac but from governors, mayors, and city councils. I have to admit I did NOT see that coming.

Two kinds of people in America now

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Them that still has a job and get a paycheck…and them that don’t. Might behoove those in column A to pretend they have a wee mite of empathy and concern for the column B folks who are rightly worried about their ability to feed their newly-strugging families and keep a roof over their heads, I’m thinking.

In a turn of events that should surprise no one, thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets to protest the draconian lockdown measures that have destroyed the economy and millions of lives along with it. Many in the media seem to be perplexed about this development. They are doing quite well, personally — still pulling an income, still able to do cable news hits from their home studios — and they can’t imagine why anyone would be so upset about being asked to stay home and watch Netflix and play video games, as Patton Oswalt put it in a tweet that has half a million likes.

But those who lack the privilege of a media personality or famous comedian may find that Netflix and video games are paltry comfort when they return home after spending six hours in line at a food bank. Agree or disagree with the methods of the protestors, but any reasonable and decent person should at least understand why they are protesting. In the past month, 22 million people have lost their jobs. Plus another several million who didn’t qualify for unemployment or couldn’t apply because the unemployment sites are crashing. Contrary to how Dr. Fauci has characterized it, these numbers represent more than a mere “inconvenience.” Many Americans have lost everything. And not because of some natural disaster or act of God, but because the government has forbid them from going to work.

Illegally and unconstitutional forbidden them to go to work. Let’s not leave that part out. As time goes on, state governors continue their wanton destruction of the economy and impoverishment of tens of millions, the rebellion escalates, and it becomes time to get the torches alight and the tar a-boiling, it will begin to matter.

A woman at a protest in Maryland held a cardboard sign saying she wanted to save her business. “I need to work to live,” the sign read. Democrat politicians would call that woman “selfish.” Talking heads on MSNBC would say she is part of a “death cult.” But it seems to me that she’s just a woman who wants to salvage the business that she has poured her sweat and tears into. And she wants to survive. Both of these seem like perfectly reasonable goals. Disagree with her approach if you want — though, honestly, I can’t see the problem with the approach — but to sneer at her and the other protestors, as so many in the media have done, is morally repugnant.

I would like to propose an unofficial rule for any further discussion of these protests and the lockdowns that prompted them. Before you give your opinion, you should first reveal whether you still have an income. The rest of us would like to know if you are earning an income while you smear your fellow Americans for wanting to earn an income. Indeed, it’s rather striking that the loudest voices in favor of the shutdown are primarily people who have lost nothing because of it. It is bad enough for those who’ve lost nothing to wag their fingers at those who’ve lost everything, but to call them selfish? Well, that level of hypocrisy is just too much to bear.

It is indeed. And there’s no good reason for the people who are toting quite a load already, with little to no real justification, to do so. More from Insty:

It’s no surprise that a major center of resistance to the shutdown has emerged in Michigan, whose Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has shown all the sensitivity of an angry third-grade teacher in administering a shutdown regime that often makes no sense — banning sales of seeds in stores that are open for other purposes, or allowing sailboating but banning powerboating. Her response to the protests, a threat to extend shutdowns further, seems calculated to inflame things further.

People don’t appreciate being lectured and condescended to and bossed around. They especially don’t appreciate being urged to sacrifice by people who make no sacrifices themselves. And that’s a different sort of class divide: When rulers ask for sacrifices without making any, they’re displaying a distinct lack of, well, class.

Sadly, to succeed in their job, our leaders will need to possess humility, empathy and self-discipline. Those traits are in sadly short supply in our leadership class. We will all pay a price for that, though if recent history is any guide, our leaders will pay less than the rest of us.

Yep. But the price our “leaders” and “elites” must pay can rise with shocking rapidity, and if they continue blindly along their present path, they’ll find that the pain of settling accounts might not be limited to the merely allegorical.

Update! We must all pray that Robert Zimmerman is wrong. But deep in our hearts, we know he’s right.

I don’t want to mince any words here. This Great Wuhan Depression was ordered by the governors of our fifty states. It is their economic collapse, through and through. They knew that if they shut down everything for a month or more the economy would collapse, and yet they did it anyway. And sadly, President Trump aided them in this effort by publicly activating the National Guard when requested by them in order to enforce these lock down edicts.

Moreover, I fear that this economic crash will be exacerbated by the accompanying loss of freedom. You can’t turn an economy around on a dime, but if freedom is allowed you raise the odds that things can recover faster.

Sadly, the government edicts, many of which literally nullified the Bill of Rights, have set a precedent that is very hostile to freedom, and one that our governments now appear to be following with enthusiasm. The so-called “plans” being announced by various state governments, many following federal guidelines developed by the Trump administration, all dictate which businesses can operate, when businesses shall reopen, and how people will behave. The idea of letting freedom do the job seems quite quaint to our modern rulers. They would much rather rule as dictators, setting the rules without referring to law or legislation.

Meanwhile, the facts on the ground continue to suggest that the Wuhan flu is not the deadly plague that many politicians and health experts have claimed. With the rate of new cases apparently peaking, we can now make a reasonable prediction of how many the virus will eventually kill (recognizing that for many political reasons some of these numbers have been padded), and find that the numbers will likely end up comparable to a high flu season, and far less than many other causes of death that we routinely take for granted. In addition, there is clear evidence that the lock downs were unnecessary and that our health system was not going to be overrun. In fact, though the data remains incomplete at this moment, the overall mortality rate is actually low this year, when compared to recent years.

Thus, this virus did not warrant the panic that ensued, the destruction of the economy, and the nullification of the Bill of Rights. But yet that is exactly what our elected officials have done, destroyed the economy and nullified our freedoms.

Unless we as citizens take action to oppose this, our country will never be the same, and millions more will suffer as the economy continues its crash, hindered from recovering because we are now no different than socialist Venezuela or communist Russia.

This country will assuredy NOT ever be the same—not least because of how very far down the road to true socialism we had already come before this latest state-mandated, panic-inspired lurch to the extreme Left was perpetrated.

Choices, choices

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Our would-be masters will narrow and restrict them as much as possible, until we’re well and truly cornered.

Presently, billions of people around the world are ‘living’ under mandatory stay-at-home orders, purportedly to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. Aside from the question as to whether quarantine is the most effective method for fighting this particular pandemic, what exactly will be required from us before any semblance of normalcy returns?

One possible requirement – aside from being discouraged from ever shaking hands again – is the mandatory participation in a global vaccine program, underwritten by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Big Pharma and an assortment of other people who supposedly have the best interest of the global citizenry in mind. Should we be concerned?

Despite so much uncertainty with regards to the real mortality rate, US medical spokespersons are uttering incredibly irresponsible statements that only serve to instill a sense of fear throughout society. Dr. Fauci, for example, said in the course of his above interview that “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you.” Meanwhile, World Health Organization (WHO) special envoy David Nabarro told the BBC that “some form of facial protection, I’m sure, is going to become the norm.”

Now, judging how the medical experts are preventing entire nations from acquiring herd immunity, together with the media’s refusal to consider the merits of hydroxychloroquine, this leads to what should have been the last resort: a vaccine program, which could very well turn out to be mandatory; a requirement forced on individuals before they are able to participate in any sort of public events again.

This much was suggested by none other than the world’s premier vaccine pusher, Bill Gates, who said in a recent interview that any sort of mass gatherings “may not come back at all” without a wide-scale vaccination program. Some would call that a form of blackmail, used against a desperate people who would do just about anything right now to get back to life as they once knew it. Those days appear far in the future. Just this week, the UK announced that people will have to “live with some restrictions” until a vaccine is developed.

To be clear, few people would question that vaccines have been an inherent good for civilization; they have helped eradicate some of the worst diseases mankind has ever faced, like smallpox and polio. But today things are not so straightforward as simply eradicating a pandemic. Presently, there is a major push being made – with Bill Gates at the vanguard of those efforts – to introduce a vaccine that contains nanotechnology to ‘mark’ and surveil those injected. As just one example, consider the work being carried out by ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members. It recently announced it was exploring “identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization.” In other words, tracking devices embedded inside of vaccines.

While the world would welcome a vaccine that eradicates the coronavirus, many would find it unacceptable to be forced to have a vaccine that contains any sort of surveillance technology. At this point in our battle against a pandemic, which has created millions of newly unemployed, the last thing people need in their lives right now is yet another source of worry. Let’s develop a vaccine against coronavirus, Mr. Gates, but please hold the tracking add-ons.

Don’t you people get it yet? The tracking add-ons are the whole point.

So how’s THAT working out for ya, Bill?

Posted on      by     

When His (dis)Honor Red Bill DeBalledZero gets a bucketful of dung hurled in his face by constituents repurposing his New York Narc Line for the better, you know there’s still hope for America.

De Blasio’s social distancing tip line flooded with penis photos, Hitler memes
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s critics let him know how they really felt about him ordering New Yorkers to snitch on each other for violating social-distancing rules — by flooding his new tip line with crank complaints including “dick pics” and people flipping the bird, The Post has learned.

Photos of extended middle fingers, the mayor dropping the Staten Island groundhog and news coverage of him going to the gym have all been texted to a special tip line that de Blasio announced Saturday, according to screenshots posted on Twitter.

One user sent the message “We will fight this tyrannical overreach!” to the service and got an automated message that in part said, “Hello, and thank you for texting NYC311.”

“F–k you!” replied @MorganLSchmidt1, along with a meme showing Adolf Hitler and the words “TO THOSE TURNING IN YOUR NEIGHBORS AND LOCAL BUSINESSES — YOU DID THE REICH THING.”

“Start flooding their reporting text numbers with this pics!” the tweet added.

Other profane messages included a photo of a bowl of gummy candies in the shape of male genitalia and a sign saying “EAT A BAG OF D–KS.”

All good stuff, yes, but this next one is probably my own personal fave.

An NYPD source said that “dick pic” photos of real penises have also been texted to 311, and a caller phoned in a tip that de Blasio was seen performing oral sex on someone “in an alleyway behind a 7-11” early Sunday.

YES. More like that one, please. Remember to include a detailed description of the burro Bill was observed blowing with your report next time, too. Thank you.

The inundation of off-color texts was so large the city had to temporarily shut down the service.

“The city has begun vetting everything before dispersing the information to precincts,” the NYPD source said.

And then, after you guys get done with all those, umm, essential services, maybe youse could get back to work doing some actual police work.

Sounds crazy, I know, but it just might work.

Bloated numbers

Posted on      by     

A New York affliction.

According to The New York Times coronavirus report, as of Sunday, April 19, 2:48 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there were 35,676 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Of those deaths, 18,690 were in the New York metropolitan area.

That means that more than half (52 percent) of all deaths in America have occurred in the New York metropolitan area.

What makes this statistic particularly noteworthy is that the entire death toll for 41 of the other 47 states is 7,661. In other words, while New York has 52 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in America, 41 states put together have only 21 percent of the COVID-19 deaths. And all the 47 states other than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have less than half (48 percent).

Now let us imagine that the reverse were true. Imagine that Georgia and North Carolina—two contiguous states that, like the New York metro area, have a combined total of 21 million people—had 18,690 COVID-19 deaths, while metro New York had 858 deaths (the number of deaths in North Carolina and Georgia combined).

Do you think the New York metro area would close its schools, stores, restaurants and small businesses? Would every citizen of the New York area, with the few exceptions of those engaged in absolutely necessary work, be locked in their homes for months? Would New Yorkers accept the decimation of their economic and social lives because North Carolina and Georgia (or, even more absurdly, Colorado, Montana or the rest of what most New Yorkers regard as “flyover” country) had 18,960 deaths, while they had a mere 858?

It is, of course, possible. But I suspect that anyone with an open mind assumes that New Yorkers would not put up with ruining their economic and social lives and putting tens of millions of people out of work because of coronavirus deaths in North Carolina and Georgia, let alone Montana and Idaho (and, for the record, I would have agreed with them).

Lest we forget, even the underwhelming non-NYC numbers are themselves grossly inflated:

The IHME model is considered the gold standard. In mid-March, without social distancing, they predicted 2.2 million American deaths. By early April they reduced their death projection to 100,000 to 240,000 assuming social distancing measures in place. Their April 17 update now projects 60,308 deaths, 3% of their original prediction.

What changed? Social distancing was in already in place when the death predictions dropped by a factor of four. For perspective, 61,000 Americans died in the 2017-18 flu season.

The CDC had its own models predicting gloom and doom. In mid-March they projected 160 million to 214 million infected and 200,000 to 1.7 million deaths. Did that leave President Trump any choice but to hit the off switch on the U.S. economy? What if the models were wrong?

Another factor influencing models is the death count from this coronavirus. Projected deaths determine projected need, as in the ventilators mentioned above. How accurate are the death counts?

Task force member Dr. Deborah Brix, on April 7, said the U.S. government is classifying the death of any patient who tested positive for coronavirus as a coronavirus death, regardless of any underlying health conditions that genuinely killed them. If one has a heart attack, and happens to test positive for the virus, he or she will be classed as a coronavirus death. Garbage in, garbage out.

Going further, New York City is including in their death counts, “people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it.” Data by presumption? Models based on presumption?

What the hell, why not? Julie Kelly brings it on home for us.

Tests show about 434,000 Americans have contracted the disease so far. Only a few states indicate COVID-19 symptomatic activity; most of the country now is quiet.

Would those facts frighten you into government-ordered submission? If the United States had a population of 300 million and 48 states, would the fact that 18,000 people—sadly, mostly elderly and already sick patients—succumbed to the virus over a period of nearly two months warrant an ongoing lockdown that is destroying the economy, overwhelming unemployment rolls and food bank lines, shutting down schools and colleges for five months, and bankrupting small businesses?

Would it justify increasingly despotic orders from power-grabbing politicians to stop Americans from going to the beach or hosting dinner parties in their own homes let alone canceling graduation ceremonies and weddings and funerals?

Of course, it would pose a public health concern; strategies to mitigate the spread of the virus, particularly among the most susceptible, would be necessary. Plans to prevent a bigger outbreak later in the year would be appropriate.

The coronavirus crisis in the United States is largely a New York City crisis. One reason why many governors are afraid to fully reopen is over the fear that virus-carrying New Yorkers will flee to their largely unimpacted states.

Happy beachgoers in northern Florida are not a threat; subway commuters in New York City are. The fact that there is outrage over the former and not the latter speaks volumes about the politicization of this travesty while we remain under house arrest for the foreseeable future.

Wall it off. Should Air Force One ever go down inside…well, hey, we can always call in Snake Plissken.

Chicken Little 86’d

Posted on      by     

Probably the most level-headed, even-handed, and just plain sensible examination I believe I’ve yet seen of the current contretemps.

Although the full story of the 2020 corona crisis cannot yet be told, already it is clear that it will have three parts: medical, economic, and cultural-political. The effects of the first two parts, especially the first, are already patent. The novel coronavirus presents a public health issue. Some regard it as a public health emergency of the first order. Others are less anxious. The issue is up for debate. As we write, the falling rate of hospitalization and leveling off of fatalities may seem to support an optimistic outcome. But even if the sunny interpretation is correct, Benjamin Jowett’s observation is to the point: “precautions are always blamed,” he said: “When they are successful, they are said to be unnecessary.” Maybe the tide is turning because we have been so assiduous in following severe “mitigation” procedures: staying home, practicing “social distancing,” and the like. Or maybe the tide is turning because the epidemic, like all epidemics, has reached its natural peak and is receding on its own. Opinions vary.

Less debatable are the economic consequences of the epidemic. We don’t know anyone who believes that they are other than catastrophic. The question is, however, whether the draconian measures imposed to slow the spread of the virus are justified. Whether or not this nasty respiratory disease presents an “unprecedented” challenge is open to interpretation. What does seem unprecedented is the experiment of suddenly shutting down almost all economic activity in a complex market-oriented country like the United States. It is one thing to switch off the mighty engines of prosperity and wealth creation. We are about to discover whether they can be restarted so expeditiously.

Which brings us to the third part of the corona caper, the cultural and political aspects. It is hardly surprising that this crisis, like all crises, has presented an opportunity to advance political agendas. Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, was speaking a home truth when he observed during the economic panic of 2008 that you should “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” That sounds, and it may in fact be, cynical. It is also a truth acted upon by all parties at all times. From this perspective, the coronavirus is not only a deadly pathogen. It is also a political opportunity. It is too soon to say who will be able to make the most of that opportunity. A presidential election looms, which makes our hall of mirrors more fraught and disorienting than ever. The intensity of the scramble is a token of the high stakes involved.

But all that is just politics as usual. More noteworthy, and more worrisome, are three other features of our cultural-political situation—of “the way we live now”—that this crisis has revealed. First, there is the issue of fragility. The Western world, and the United States in particular, comprises the richest and most powerful societies in history. The fact that they can be brought to a quivering standstill by a bug that sickens and kills a minuscule part of their populations should give us pause. Is that fragility real and unavoidable, or is it chosen?

Second, there are the interrelated issues of widespread docility, on the one hand, and eager authoritarianism, on the other. We suspect that aspiring totalitarians will ponder the response to this epidemic with thoughtful anticipation. How quickly an entire population can be herded like obedient sheep, willing to be subjected to the most extravagant prohibitions! We speak of “sheltering in place.” Is it clear that we are not “cowering in place”?

The other side of that docility is the rude overbearingness of those with the power to direct our lives. Federal authorities in this instance have imposed upon us less stringently than state and local officials, some of whom have been quick to monitor and punish any hint of independence.

Longtime readers will know that we are fond of a sermon preached by C. S. Lewis in the dark days of 1939. “I think it important,” he said,

to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective…The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice…The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward.

Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the crisis we face is the possibility that Lewis was being too generous when describing human nature.

I really don’t need to tell you to read it all, do I?

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