Leftward ho! – Page 21

Tyranny, straight up

Posted on April 24, 2020April 24, 2020 by Mike

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:

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 sets of laws Part the Bazillionth

Posted on April 21, 2020April 21, 2020 by Mike

Remember back when I mentioned that, amidst the Christian church/synagogue shutdowns, arrests, fines, and threats from His (dis)Honor Bill DeBalledZero, nobody seemed to be including mosques in all that?

Yeah, well. About all that.

A Syracuse mosque is still open for daily prayers amid the Coronavirus shutdown as Christians are threatened and fined for attending drive-in services.

New York is the country’s Coronavirus epicenter with more than 18,000 deaths, however this mosque is still open for prayers.

This mosque located on the north side was once the Holy Trinity Catholic Church, but it closed down due to lack of parishioners — now it is considered a victory mosque.

It ought to be. Because that’s precisely what it is.

The Muslims who attend this mosque are not practicing social distancing. They are standing and praying closer than 6 feet apart, so why aren’t the police raiding this mosque and threatening the attendees with imprisonment and or fines?

Because Islam, silly. Another report:

While virtually every church in the United States is shut down due to coronavirus, and those few willing to defy lockdown orders are threatened with arrest or hauled to jail, a New York mosque is operating with impunity during the pandemic.

The mosque, in Syracuse, New York, had its operating procedures detailed by gushing local media, which described how the facility has modified its practices to adhere with social distancing during the China virus pandemic.

The building, formerly a Catholic church, is disinfected between services – not by cleaning professionals, but by volunteers – and video reveals those worshipers brave enough to leave their homes during the pandemic are not social distancing.

In video to YouTube uploaded by Syracuse.com, a small group of worshipers is seen praising Allah far less than six feet apart, failing to adhere to social distancing procedures and potentially defeating the purpose of worshiping in a room completely covered in plastic.

While this mosque is allowed to operate during the coronavirus pandemic, albeit under slightly modified procedures, Christians are being forced out of their churches across the country.

Shocking, yet not in the least surprising. Back to Cristina for some specifics:

Parishioners who attended a drive-in service at Temple Baptist Church in Mississippi were fined $500 each by police for violating ‘social distancing’ orders.

20 police cars swarmed King James Bible Baptist Church in Mississippi and pastor Charles Hamilton Jr., was told by a cop that his rights were suspended.

A Kentucky church parking lot was littered with nails on Easter Sunday and police officers harassed churchgoers by recording their license plates and leaving notes on their cars.

That’s but a few examples from an ever-expanding list. The conclusion is as obvious as it is appalling:

Clearly Christians are being singled out and persecuted.

Yup. It amounts to nothing more nor less than the mopping-up phase of the PC Left’s long campaign against America That Was, as Proggie walks the battlefield shooting the wounded.

Choices, choices

Posted on April 21, 2020April 21, 2020 by Mike

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.

Bloated numbers

Posted on April 21, 2020April 21, 2020 by Mike

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.

“De Blasio Wants New Yorkers To Rat On Neighbors. Don’t Do It”

Posted on April 20, 2020April 20, 2020 by Mike

Disagree. Strongly.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took to Twitter Saturday to urge his constituents to monitor, photograph and report each other if they aren’t strictly obeying his social distancing guidelines. Just fire off a photo to 3-1-1 of a few guys having a chat in a bodega and Hizzoner will send police officers, with guns and everything, to break it up. What could go wrong?

That rhetorical question is exactly why I disagree with discouraging meddlesome NYC panic-ninnies from snitching out their neighbors. No, no, let a million busybodies bloom, sez I. What more fitting opportunity to not only take a page from Alinsky (make the enemy live up to its own book of rules“) but also enact something of a Cloward-Piven Inversion at the same time? Remember:

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”.

So, yeah: if DeBalledZero wants to turn New Yorkers into a passel of skulking stoolies, then by all means let them oblige the Commie asstard…by lighting up those 311 switchboards morning, noon, and night with reports of real, imagined, or made-up infractions. That ought to be plenty enough to quickly exhaust police resources and manpower on a never-ending parade of bootless snipe-hunts for trifling infractions against The Rules laid down by the Kommissar of Public Cleanliness, until the whole goddamned system collapses into smoking, stinking rubble.

Should DeBalledZero himself be driven to nervous collapse and involuntary institutionalization by the anarchy and chaos resulting from meticulously strict obedience to the letter of his own dictates, well, so much the better.

Update! WHO COULD HAVE FORESEEN THE HORROR.

It is “unconscionable” that Rikers Island inmates who were released due to coronavirus concerns are committing new crimes, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday.

“I think it’s unconscionable just on a human level that folks were shown mercy and this is what some of them have done,” the mayor said during his morning briefing Monday, which came on the heels of a Post report outlining the issue.

You stupid fucking moron. If you’re uncertain about how “unconscionable” it might be, Comrade Mayor, try asking someone who gets robbed, mugged, assaulted, or worse by one of the thugs you just cut loose how they feel about it.

On the other hand, though, they’re the ones who voted you into office, so I guess they’re just getting the government they deserve—good and hard.

De Blasio said the number of re-offenders remains relatively small and that the city was “buckling down” on monitoring and supervising released prisoners.

“We do see some recidivism. I have not seen a huge amount, but any amount is obviously troubling,” he said.

Oh, OBVIOUSLY so, Perfessor. Because there should never have been so much as one act of “recidivism” in the first fucking place. And there wouldn’t have been either, if your dumb ass had sense enough to pour piss out of a boot.

Sheesh.

(Via Bill)

One of these things is not a LOT like the other

Posted on April 18, 2020April 18, 2020 by Mike

The ever-helpful and considerate SteveF created a handy Chink-N-Pox/Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly “the weather”) compare-contrast chart for us which, unfortunately, I fear we’ll soon be seeing quite a bit of now that the trial run has worked out so swimmingly for TPTB.

AGW WuFlu

Used to increase government power ✓ ✓

The public isn’t sure what’s going on but we know we’re being lied to ✓ ✓

Attacks on doubters ✓ ✓

Economic ruin in fighting it ✓ ✓

Fear tactics, embellished stories, and doom and gloom scenarios ✓ ✓

Actual deaths ✓

Dramatically over-counted deaths ✓ ✓

Disaster doesn’t live up to the hype – deaths fail to materialize ✓ ✓

Money grab ✓ ✓

Constantly redefined criteria for disaster ✓ ✓

Blamed for problems that would have happened anyway ✓ ✓

Gaslighting ✓ ✓

The possible catastrophe is so dire that any amount of money spent to avert it is well spent ✓ ✓

	AGW	WuFlu
Used to increase government power	✓	✓
The public isn’t sure what’s going on but we know we’re being lied to	✓	✓
Attacks on doubters	✓	✓
Economic ruin in fighting it	✓	✓
Fear tactics, embellished stories, and doom and gloom scenarios	✓	✓
Actual deaths		✓
Dramatically over-counted deaths	✓	✓
Disaster doesn’t live up to the hype – deaths fail to materialize	✓	✓
Money grab	✓	✓
Constantly redefined criteria for disaster	✓	✓
Blamed for problems that would have happened anyway	✓	✓
Gaslighting	✓	✓
The possible catastrophe is so dire that any amount of money spent to avert it is well spent	✓	✓

Hope nobody out there was kidding themselves that the Green Raw Deal was dead and buried.

Had, took, hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray

Posted on April 18, 2020April 18, 2020 by Mike

To all the shrieking panic-ninnies cowering under their beds in full Level-4 Biohazard gear: hope it was worth it.

The … crisis we face is unparalleled in modern times,” said the World Health Organization’s assistant director, while its director general proclaimed it “likely the greatest peacetime challenge that the United Nations and its agencies have ever faced.” This was based on a CDC computer model projection predicting as many as 1.4 million deaths from just two countries.

So when did they say this about COVID-19? Trick question: It was actually about the Ebola virus in Liberia and Sierra Leone five years ago, and the ultimate death toll was under 8,000.

With COVID-19 having peaked (the highest date was April 4), despite the best efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to increase numbers by first saying any death with the virus could be considered a death from the virus and then again this week by saying a positive test isn’t even needed, you can see where this is going.

Since the AIDS epidemic, people have been pumping out such models with often incredible figures. For AIDS, the Public Health Service announced (without documenting) there would be 450,000 cases by the end of 1993, with 100,000 in that year alone. The media faithfully parroted it. There were 17,325 by the end of that year, with about 5,000 in 1993. SARS (2002-2003) was supposed to kill perhaps “millions,” based on analyses. It killed 744 before disappearing.

Later, avian flu strain A/H5N1, “even in the best-case scenarios” was to “cause 2 (million) to 7 million deaths” worldwide. A British professor named Neil Ferguson scaled that up to 200 million. It killed 440. This same Ferguson in 2002 had projected 50-50,000 deaths from so-called “Mad Cow Disease.” On its face, what possible good is a spread that large? (We shall return to this.) But the final toll was slightly over 200.

In the current crisis the most alarming model, nay probably the most influential in the implementation of the draconian quarantines worldwide, projected a maximum of 2.2 million American deaths and 550,000 United Kingdom deaths unless there were severe restrictions for 18 months or until a vaccine was developed. The primary author: Neil Ferguson. Right, Mad Cow/Avian Flu Fergie.

Then a funny thing happened. A mere nine days after announcing his model, Ferguson said a better number for the U.K. would be only 20,000. The equivalent would be fewer than 80,000 American deaths. Technically, that U.K. number was buried in a table in the report under what might be called “a fantastic case scenario.” But could that reduction possibly reflect a mere nine days of restrictions? No.

Soon all the numbers were tumbling. Yet as late as March 31, the New York Times declared: “White House Projects Grim Toll from Virus” citing White House Coronavirus Task Force head Deborah Birx and director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, who in turn cited a model showing deaths up to 240,000. Still awful, but Birx explicitly backed off the Ferguson projection for which she had previously been the Grey Lady’s pompom girl.

Then suddenly Fauci announced a flat figure of “more like 60,000,” the same number the CDC says died of flu two years ago. Probably not coincidentally, until quite recently the agency said there were 80,000 flu victims that year, before lowering it to 61,000 – presumably because people were using that figure to compare to COVID-19 deaths. In any event, the 1968-1969 “Hong Kong flu” killed an estimated 100,000 Americans, or 165,000 adjusted to today’s population.

Moreover, as noted, the CDC now encourages coding a death of anyone “if the circumstances are compelling” even though they haven’t been tested at all. Yeah, wow; it’s not a “conservative myth.” During flu season, that means a lot of flu victims have magically become COVID-19 victims in addition to people who would have otherwise had cause of death listed as heart attack, diabetes, and other co-morbid conditions.

Get hit by a truck, die of COVID19. Get shot by a home-invader, die of COVID19. Jump off a building, die of COVID19. Hey, maybe it IS a “magic virus” after all!

Model defenders declare the plummets were based on the success of severe restrictions of civil liberties. “It just means we won,” declared an article in The Atlantic. Wrong. The bottom range of the models presumes the best-case scenario. If the low end is 100,000, that’s the low end.

This is what what they are, it’s what they do. The entirely-predictable Progressivist progression goes something like this: be back-asswards wrong about something, exaggerate and overhype something, fuck things up badly because of it, then either A) claim to have been right along, that without your farsighted palliative measures things would undoubtedly be a hell of a lot worse; B) claim you failed only because your already-extreme measures just didn’t go far enough; or C) blame Reagan/Bush/Trump/conservatives for the mess you made. If none of those options fools anybody to Proggy’s satisfaction, then we’ll get: HEY, LOOK, OVER THERE! CLIMATE CHANGE/COMMON SENSE GUN CONTROL/HOMELESS EPIDEMIC/RAPE CULTURE/OPIOID CRISIS/RUSSIAN BOTS!!!!

Bottom line? This:

That’s not proof that public health interventions are worthless; merely that since the Plague of Athens four centuries B.C. and before, epidemics have risen and fallen quite on their own. Nobody needed Big Brother looking over their shoulder and cracking a whip; nobody needed to implode their economies and leave their citizens with tops reading: “I survived the ‘worst epidemic in history’ and all I have left is this crummy t-shirt.”

Leaving us with one simple question: can a hard number be put on how many times goobermint “experts” like Fauci have to be proven wrong before the shrieking panic-ninnies finally lose their purblind faith in them? Or will good ol’ Charlie Brown go right on attempting to kick that football no matter what, forever and ever, amen?

Oh HELL no

Posted on April 17, 2020April 18, 2020 by Mike

I have a suggestion or three for alternate locations where the goobermint can stick its little chips.

The technocrats are talking about giving people a chip – once they’ve been vaccinated for the CCP virus, or otherwise proven their immunity and state of non-contagion – so that anyone with the right scanner can easily see that interacting with them is “safe.”

Sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?

But think about it. Even if you don’t care about personal freedom, don’t respect concerns for societal liberty. Just think about this a moment.

Don’t have to. There’s only way such a thing will ever be done to me or my young ‘un, and that is over my dead body.

The CCP virus is just the flavor of the month. It’s the terrible risk of 2020, the big thing this year. In past years, we have been scared of H1N1, Ebola, SARS, all of which have killed tens of thousands of people. This is hardly the first such epidemic to hit humanity. The list goes on and on.

So… what about next year?

There’s a seasonal flu every year, and some years, it’s especially bad (sometimes arguably worse than this one)… Over a 20 year period, there might be five such really bad flus. Should we agree to a chip for all of them? Or only for certain ones? This year’s virus hits the overweight and the very old worst of all. Maybe the next one will hit the young and the skinny worst. Maybe one will hit the asthmatics worst. There’s ALWAYS someone to protect from these things, and our concern for these innocent victims is laudable.

Then people will ask: Should we have a chip every year, and 300 million tests, every year, just to be safe? You know what they say – “if it saves just one life,” right?

Right. And so very, very wrong, too. Tons of very good stuff along these lines in this one, all of which you should peruse, culminating in this:

The risk of putting too much information in the hands of government used to be well-understood by Americans, but this risk appears to have been forgotten, with the philosophy of our Founding Fathers going untaught for generations.

We want to think this is a leap. We desperately want to tell ourselves that the slippery slope argument is just fear-mongering, that it would never get that bad, not here, not in America.

But in recent weeks, we have seen mayors ban gun sales, in blatant defiance of the Second Amendment. We have seen governors ban church services, in blatant defiance of the First Amendment. We have seen manufacturing brought a standstill in state after state. We have seen police ticketing married couples just for walking together on the sidewalk, and taking down license plates of cars parked at a drive-through church service.

If these past few weeks have proven anything at all, is that we can risk no further erosion of our liberty, because too many of these petty bureaucrats hold too much power… and because too many of them are far too quick to follow the lead of Rahm Emanuel – Chicago’s former mayor, and Barack Obama’s former chief of staff – who enunciated the modern statist approach so proudly and so succinctly:

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Nailed it, clean and tight. We can only hope that there are enough of us left who understand all this—or, even worse, wouldn’t eagerly applaud the implentation of a federal forced-chipping program. If the last month is any guide, alas, that hope is a truly forlorn one.

Everything old is new again

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by Mike

Might the long-treasured notion of a visceral, uniquely American dedication to individual liberty, Constitutional governance, and democracy be no more than an empty boast? Might the pull of the broader human tendency towards authoritarian despotism be far stronger?

FEW PRESIDENTS HAVE interpreted their wartime powers as broadly as Abraham Lincoln, whose presidency—for all of its many successes—did have what some consider a “dark side.” Most famously, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the first year of the Civil War, responding to riots and local militia actions in the border states by allowing the indefinite detention of “disloyal persons” without trial. Habeas corpus, which literally means “you have the body,” is a constitutional mandate requiring the government to give prisoners access to the courts.

Lincoln ignored a Supreme Court justice’s decision overturning his order, and over the next few years, the Great Emancipator, in one of the war’s starkest ironies, allowed these new restrictions, which also imposed martial law in some volatile border areas and curbed freedom of speech and the press, to expand throughout the Northern states.

As the war drew to a close, though, some historians believe Lincoln may have begun to recognize the dangers of his own unprecedented expansion of presidential war powers. More than 13,000 civilians were arrested under martial law during the war throughout the Union. But it was in Missouri, in particular, nearly a thousand miles from the nation’s capital and far beyond the federal government’s day-to-day reach, that Lincoln was confronted with the most dramatic example of his internal security measures’ unintended consequences.

In the months before he was assassinated, Lincoln found, to his surprise, that he was unable to convince Missouri’s Republican leaders—who had grown accustomed to their newfound powers—to put an end to martial law in the state. The lesson he learned, historians say, may have been a simple one: “It is much easier,” says Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University, “to put these restrictions in place than it is to stop them.”

Though he worried privately that these new powers might be misused, Lincoln publicly scoffed at the notion that his administration’s suspension of civil liberties would have any long-term consequences. In a letter published before the 1864 election, Lincoln compared the wartime measures to the bitter medicine a patient takes when sick. He could not believe, he wrote, “that the American people will, by means of military arrests during the rebellion, lose the right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the law of evidence trial by jury, and Habeas corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future . . . any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics [medicines] during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthy life.”

When Lincoln wrote these words, though, some historians argue, he may not have realized just how far things had gone in Missouri. Martial law was declared early in the war in the frontier state, which sent thousands of men to fight for both sides of the Civil War. With the population sharply divided on the issue of slavery, the state was riddled throughout the war by hundreds of small skirmishes, many of them involving neighbors fighting neighbors and guerrilla bands torching farms and crops.

Lincoln was certainly aware of the measures being taken in his administration’s name, but it was only after the 1864 elections that he felt he could do something about them. Lincoln had tried to persuade the military commander in the area to consider ending martial law earlier in the war, but he had been rebuffed. “The peace of the State rests on military power,” the officer had replied. “To relinquish this power would be dangerous.”

What Lincoln didn’t realize, scholars say, was just how much the fierce fighting in Missouri had hardened attitudes there—and how much the leaders of Lincoln’s own party had grown accustomed to the status quo.

The first signs of trouble appeared in the state’s election results. More than 165,000 Missourians had voted in the 1860 presidential election, with only 17,000 voters supporting Lincoln. But four years later, Lincoln had received 70 percent of just over 100,000 votes cast. The question, of course, was not just how Lincoln had grown so popular, but what had happened to the rest of the voters. “Essentially,” writes Neely, “much of the Democratic Party in the electorate in Missouri, likely a majority, had disappeared.”

See? No matter how dark the situation may seem, there’s ALWAYS a bright side to be found.

Neely, for one, believes Lincoln probably understood what had happened: The state’s Republicans had used their newfound war powers not just to shut down newspapers and arrest those they considered disloyal but to intimidate and disenfranchise the Democrats, many of whom supported slavery and some of whom were sympathetic to the Confederacy. The Republicans, in other words, reigned supreme in Missouri. They had the Army at their backs, and they liked it that way. “What Lincoln had attempted to guard against in his internal security policy had come to pass,” writes Neely.

Lincoln’s appeal to end martial law fell on deaf ears. “Allow me to assure you,” replied Gen. Grenville Dodge, the newly appointed military commander in the area, when he received Lincoln’s suggestion that martial law be repealed, “that the course you proposed would be protested against by the State authorities, the legislature, the [constitutional] convention and by nearly every undoubtedly loyal man in North Missouri.”

Stymied, Lincoln turned, instead, to the state’s new governor, Thomas Fletcher…Lincoln asked Fletcher to call for neighborhood meetings so preparations could be made to end martial law. “At such meetings,” Lincoln said, hopefully, “old friendships will cross the memory; and honor and Christian Charity will come in to help.”

To Lincoln’s surprise, the governor, too, refused him. “It would madden the true men of this State,” Fletcher wrote, “to talk to them of reliance on the ‘honor’ and ‘christian charity’ of these fiends in human shape.”

It was at this moment, historians believe, that Lincoln may have realized how far his civil liberties restrictions had been taken—and how difficult it might prove to restore those liberties. “Governments that assemble these powers tend to be rather reluctant to give them up,” says Foner. Particularly, it seems, during a violent, highly personal civil war. “Lincoln had miscalculated. He could not at first believe that liberty could be permanently diminished among the liberty-loving American people,” writes Neely. “Missouri proved him wrong.”

No government action is ever “temporary,” period. Whenever the people freely agrees to yield up their rights and liberty, whatever the reason given for it, they will never reclaim them without a fight.

(Via Bill)

Prohibition is new again too update! Will we ever learn the lessons our own history teaches?

It was immediately obvious when stay-at-home orders rolled out across the country that the economic effects of the novel coronavirus could be ruinous to the American restaurant industry. As an Onion headline recently quipped, “Study finds most restaurants fail within first year of it becoming illegal to go to them.”

As many as 75 percent of the independent restaurants that close in response to this pandemic are forecast to permanently fail, a horrifying prospect. My neighborhood is a veritable gastronomic tour of East Asia, to say nothing of the Mexican and North African cuisine, the local coffee shops, and the unspeakably perfect French-Vietnamese pastries. We would be poorer, culturally and literally, without them.

But the danger here isn’t only that these particular restaurants may never reopen for normal business: We also risk losing an enormous body of culinary knowledge that could take decades to recover. It happened to drink during Prohibition, and it could happen to food with COVID-19.

When Prohibition began in January of 1920, the United States was a nation teeming with what we’d now call craft breweries. Beer production measured in gallons had nearly doubled in the previous two decades, and though the total brewery count had declined from a peak above 4,000 in the 1870s, it was still at a healthy 1,300 when the Volstead Act took effect. After Prohibition ended, about half that number came back, but the industry was fragile and still subject to onerous regulations. Aside from a very brief post-war spike, American breweries steadily died off, bottoming out at a mere 89 nationwide in 1978.

That’s the beer environment into which I was born and which persisted until the mid-1990s. American beer was weak, bland, and boring compared to foreign options like Belgian tripels and the then-exotic Guinness Draught. Its sole purpose was intoxication. One of my college professors thought (likely rightly) he was imparting deep wisdom when he revealed we could look beyond your Nattys and Bud Lights to sample such lofty brews as Pilsner Urquell, which I would now characterize as a pretty basic Czech lager.

The beer market re-expanded after deregulation at the state and federal level allowed small-scale exploration of new brewing techniques and recovery of knowledge Prohibition destroyed. Pre-pandemic, we were blessed with more than 7,000 American breweries, an all-time high. That’s been fantastic for we who are alive and of drinking age now, but consider the timeline here: It took eight decades to reach pre-Prohibition brewery numbers. If this pandemic has a comparable effect on restaurants, we’d get back to this past January’s level of local dining options around 2097.

I’ve called it Restaurant Armageddon, but the carnage won’t be limited to just restaurants. It’s merely one among many industries we’ve willfully destroyed, ostensibly to combat a “plague” whose death toll is nowhere near serious enough3 to justify such wanton, suicidal destruction.

We can but hope

Posted on April 13, 2020April 13, 2020 by Mike

PLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEASEPLEEEEEAAAAASE.

A former senior advisor to Joe Biden speculated that it’s possible his former boss could choose a vice-presidential running mate who identifies as a woman.

Moe Vela, the founder of Vela Group, told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News host Joel Pollak on Sunday that it is possible that Biden’s vow to pick a woman running mate could include a transgender woman.

Vela reminded Pollak of Biden’s description at the beginning of the year of “transgender equality” as “the civil rights issue of our time.”

Pollak asked Vela, “This vice presidential choice, now — I’m saying the next bit facetiously, but I hope you’ll take it in the spirit it’s given — Joe Biden has said that the transgender movement is the civil rights movement of our time, so isn’t it somewhat cisgenderist to say you’re going to pick a female vice president, or can one qualify by identifying as female?”

Vela responded, “Oh wow, Joel. I never thought I’d get a question I’d never heard before. This is my 179th interview in four months and you just did it. I have to send you something like a gift of some kind.”

During a CNN debate with Bernie Sanders in March, Biden promised to choose a woman as his running mate.

“If I’m elected president, my cabinet, my administration will look like the country,” he said. “I commit that I will, in fact, pick a woman to be my vice president.”

Or, apparently, a manwymryn. Whichever.

No mention whatsoever of trivial considerations such as qualifications, political acumen, ideological compatibility, principles, experience, etc. But hey, as long as the right boxes are checked that’s all that really matters. Right, Gropey?

Curiouser and curioser

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

Unpossible, I say!

As of Wednesday (April 8), officials in eight remaining states have yet to issue full stay-at-home orders. Those states are Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. Officials in three other states — Alabama, Missouri, and South Carolina — only issued stay-at-home orders within the last few days after being resistant to enacting such a measure in the weeks prior.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that those states, due to their inaction, would reap the consequences in the form of higher COVID-19 death toll projections. But that has not been the case.

According to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which tracks the coronavirus outbreak in each individual state, predicting its death toll and hospital resource usage, all but one of the states in question have downgraded their death toll projections.

In addition to downgraded death toll projections, the states also saw significant downgrades for their projected hospital resource use, which include intensive care unit beds and ventilators.

The data doesn’t suggest that social distancing as a whole is worthless, or that it isn’t having any effect. But it does raise the question of whether every single state and locality needs to institute the same exact stay-at-home-on-government-orders regime. Many commentators have suggested that such measures might well be necessary in some places, but not necessary in others. The fact that both hospital usage and fatality projections are going down even in states without stay-at-home orders indicates that these people might be right.

I’d say so, yeah. But YMMV—particularly if you’re a Democrat-Socialist apparatchik looking to take advantage of widespread panic to advance your eternal agenda of glomming more power and control while you have the chance. Julie Kelly suggests that it might be time to shitcan the scare-mongers.

Those alarming forecasts were based on a model produced by the University of Washington late last month. Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, assembled a set of graphs to show how COVID-19 would overwhelm the country’s health care system, causing a shortage of hospital beds, intensive care units and ventilators.

Murray also originally calculated that 2,271 people would die on April 15, which would be the peak “death day” in the United States. But that wasn’t the only scary news. Sick people would by dying in the streets and entryways outside of hospitals across the country because no beds would be available.

The Murray model has been fully embraced by the president’s top two health advisors, Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The pair presented the doomsday model to President Trump on March 28, which prompted his decision to extend the CDC “social distancing” guidelines until the end of this month. (It bears repeating that the Murray model factored in “full social distancing” such as the shutdown of schools and nonessential businesses as well as stay-at-home orders through the end of May.)

Birx and Fauci also presented Murray’s charts to the White House press corps on March 31. Birx, relying on the model’s most extreme range of total fatalities, warned that upwards of 240,000 people would die of coronavirus in the United States by the beginning of August. The next two weeks, Birx admonished at the time, would be particularly painful. “As sobering as that number is, we need to be prepared for it,” Fauci told the socially distanced reporters in the briefing room. “Is it going to be that much? I hope not.”

But this week’s Pearl Harbor and 9/11 didn’t happen. Widespread death and devastation couldn’t be found.

Aside from two states, the rest of the country escaped terrorist-attack level fatalities this week. Between April 4 and April 9, a little more than 8,000 people in the country reportedly died from COVID-19; more than half of the fatalities occurred in New York and New Jersey. A tragedy no doubt, but certainly not the “hardest and saddest week” for most Americans, as Adams warned.

Only one other state—Michigan—has more than 1,000 recorded deaths so far. Populous states such as California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas have fewer than 500 fatalities. Many states are still in the double-digit range.

Further, the Murray model has been revised dramatically since its publication. An April 2 update predicted more than 93,000 total deaths by August; the April 5 update revised that figure downward to about 82,000. The total number of hospital beds needed dropped drastically between the two updates, from 262,092 beds to 140,823 beds. Predicted demand for ICUs dropped by about 10,000; ventilator demand dropped by nearly 12,000. Some of the model’s state-by-state projections also changed.

Beds and ICUs are aplenty across the country. There are so many ventilators available that we will now supply the machines to other countries in need.

Rather than admit the inherent flaws in the Murray model and confess the doomsday scenarios were completely unwarranted, Fauci, Birx, and Adams are stepping up their demands to keep the country under house arrest while the once-vibrant U.S. economy dives into Depression-era territory.

Curious indeed. Why, it’s almost as if there might be a different agenda at work here than the one they’ve been shrieking about. As if—I dunno, it’s such a crazy, out-there idea I really hate to even think it—as if goobermint bureau-rats and “experts” might possibly be ass-covering, incompetent liars or something.

Ohnononono, that’s just ridiculous. Sorry I mentioned it, folks. Go home, stay home, wait for further instructions from the proper authorities. That is all.

Update! Heard this great old tune on the radio earlier, and it seemed particularly appropriate for a Saturday night house-arrest music selection.

Killed by the cure

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

So how’s everybody liking their 30-day free trial of Communism?

Over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic and societal shut down (the communist trial run) it should be understood by those communists cheering on the lockdown of humanity and the destruction of the market system, the person most likely to be designated as the new Tsar of America is Donald Trump, someone capable of running a multi-trillion dollar economy, who understands production better than Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, James Comey or whatever communist cut out Washington has to offer.

If we are to be forced into a “climate saving” lockdown and re-tooling of the American economy, of which this fake pandemic is pretext and having seen the American patriots and their terror-filled responses to all other machinations of communist principles overlaid on their capitalist system, then the outcome is already known. So, since communism seems to be undeniable, largely because through the dilution of the American educational system, the slow progression of communist government displacing capitalist government, we ought to at least focus ourselves on determining our tyrant.

I am all for a mass march on Washington to demand capitalism and a release from self-imposed captivity. I am all in on a state by state effort toward the same goal, release, freedom, liberty, etc., but none of my fellow citizens seem to think it is such a situation and even if it is, it is much too dangerous to group ourselves together in such a manner as we might further enrage the communists in charge (as they have proven over the past few weeks that in fact they are) of our lives, our liberty and our persons to the degree that they can fine and imprison us for exerting our individual right of movement and commerce.

Understand the situation we are in. If any Democrat is elected president, this will be the model for fighting climate change. I finally heard this understanding of the situation broached on talk radio. Finally, someone understood that after we had gone this far, any health issue might be used as an excuse to thus confine us. My thoughts went to the amount of lives that could be saved by keeping the majority of us off the roads, except by the communist practice of “travel permits” allowing us to go to work at pre-determined and acceptable jobs or for specific purposes only, but the idea of combating climate change is equally useful to those wishing to impose communism on America.

And if you’re telling yourself “it can’t happen here,” you’re a damned fool.

TL also has a post up on the release of his Lies Of Omission doc, which you can stream for free if you have Amazon Prime. And, of course, you can still donate to the fundraiser for the Belmont Playboys doc if you’re so inclined, too.

Update! I for one welcome our new Green overlords.

Last month, we were wondering whether the cure could be worse than the disease; this month, it seems clear that the cure and the disease were always the same thing. Rely on Chinese communists to produce your medicines and fill your supply lines with breakable crap, and this is what happens. Rely on globalist socialist flimflammers to remedy the situation with “calm expertise,” and they will instead send in an army of anti-American boffins to complain, arrest fathers playing catch with their daughters, and find ways to blame the whole out-of-control exercise in petit-tyranny on Christians and Southerners. For the first time since the James Younger Gang was roaming these parts, grown men are walking around with bandanas covering their faces, but their eyes are telling a whole other story. There’s only so much despotism that free people will endure, and if the price for life is the surrender of everything that makes life worth living, then those bandanas begin to feel like something else entirely. If all these municipal Napoleons-in-aspiration getting fitted for shiny hobnailed jackboots right now can’t control their shared impulse to rule over other men, then these bandanas might become a more permanent fixture. If there’s one thing Americans have always understood, it’s this: where speech and religion and personal defense are all outlawed, be an outlaw.

I, for one, welcome this grand display of government intrusion from coast to coast. Unlike the invisible Chinese virus hunting us surreptitiously, this overbearing application of government force is right out in the open for all to see. The more unscrupulous Democrat mayors openly brag about shutting down private businesses, banning gun ownership, and ripping congregants from church pews. They’re closing every house of worship in sight until their constituents learn to supplicate at the steps of City Hall and nowhere else! Democrats are always gravely warning about creeping fascism from others, but they insist we ignore the rank smell of authoritarianism emanating from their every local executive order. Lone drivers are pulled over for no other reason than to remind the riffraff that they are powerless before their local lords; neighbors are enticed by official favor and bounty to snitch on isolated joggers running through their streets; married nonagenarians are forcibly separated “for their own good.” Only the Democrats could follow the examples of Boko Haram and the Chinese Communist Party in taking advantage of human misery for their own gain. There is no need to imagine the historical totalitarianism of the ’30s and ’40s when it is now bursting forth before us with a vulture’s plumage for all to see. And for that, I am thankful.

Well, now that we’re getting an awful peek behind the socialists’ GND curtain with this partial shutdown of the economy. Does it feel as if the American people are jumping up and down with excitement that “revolutionary change” on an “epic scale” has finally begun? Does it seem as if we’re “committed” to this path? Millions of Americans out of work. GDP contraction. Stock market and retirement savings up in smoke. A Constitution left in tatters. All to decrease electricity usage in the United States by five to ten percent and slash the demand for gasoline in half. If this is what it feels like to destroy capitalism and usher in a new era of universal misery, please stop teasing me with the amuse-bouche of collapsing just part of the economy. I can hardly wait until we are allowed to indulge ourselves with the gluttonous feast of shutting down the whole thing. What a world Biden has promised us! It is as one anti-fracking Greenie declared online: “We now see the ‘glorious vision’ of a world free of fossil fuels.” Except the Green New Deal requires twenty times the effort and sacrifice and many more orders of magnitude in national debt to finally free ourselves of the dastardly hydrocarbons they abhor. Imagine the bliss we will discover from our future of permanent social lockdown. Thank goodness China Joe and the Green tyrants have such grand vision to go with their good intentions. We can save the planet by destroying ourselves over and over again!

Or maybe enough Americans will find this depressing glimpse into the future the Democrats promise us more than enough for one lifetime. Perhaps America will wake up to the reality that the Green New Deal and the Chinese virus share an identical life force. Maybe we won’t have to fight the war to come because enough of the great-grandchildren of the last generation to fight state-sponsored evil will finally recognize the Democrats’ counterfeit promises of unobtainable perfection here on Earth. Either way, at least we can finally see for ourselves what the Democrats have in mind. This miserable police state is the only future they desire.

It was always that way. It was always obvious too, for anyone with eyes to see, although it’s true that they’ve been more up-front and brazen than ever before with this Chink-N-Pox shinola. Yet half the electorate votes for them nonetheless. Again:

There’s the REAL problem.

Priorities

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

Ted Cruz lays ’em out, in another of his trademark bursts of unleavened awesomeness.

The Ayatollah leads chants of “death to America.” He pledges to destroy America, which he calls “the Great Satan.” And Senate Dems want to send him millions??? At the EXACT SAME TIME, Senate Dems are blocking desperately need relief to small businesses in America. ? #Priorities https://t.co/o44wqG9bOm

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 10, 2020

Backstory:

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz unloaded on his Democratic colleagues on Friday in response to Sen. Dianne Feinstein sending a letter to President Trump declaring that she is “disappointed” in his administration’s plan to block funding to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran. The Democrats’ demand of Trump to help Iran get $5 billion in aid, Cruz noted, comes “at the exact same time” that they are “blocking desperately need relief to small businesses in America.”

“The coronavirus has hit Iran hard, with the potential for even greater spread in the region,” the high-ranking Democratic senator tweeted Thursday along with a copy of her letter. “In the interest of international security, President Trump should support Iran’s request to the IMF for emergency funds to contain this virus.”

“I am disappointed to see reports that your administration intends to block Iran from receiving $5 billion in humanitarian aid from the IMF to combat the coronavirus pandemic,” the letter begins. “Providing these funds to Iran would help it respond more effectively to the disease and mitigate the risk of further destabilization in the region.” She goes on to urge Trump to reconsider so that the infamously tyrannical regime can receive the billions in aid from the IMF.

Feinstein’s letter was issued the same day that Senate Democrats blocked an urgent request from Sec. Mnuchin to increase the amount of cash in the emergency small business loan program recently established by Congress from $350 billion to $600 billion.

As the New York Post’s editorial board explains, instead of agreeing to the desperately needed increase in cash on Thursday, the Democrats “issued partisan demands”: “They insisted the new money include $60 billion for ‘community-based lenders’ that serve minorities, women, nonprofits and other groups. And the bill also had to OK an immediate $250 billion for cities, states, hospitals, food stamps and other needs.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) explained in response that “everything is an opportunity.” This was an “opportunity” to address “disparities” she suggested are plaguing the country.

“And if they don’t get their way, no one gets a dime more,” the Post’s editorial board noted. “Never mind that businesses face bankruptcy or that 17 million people filed for jobless benefits in recent weeks.”

Now, if you’re a Real American and not a despicable Commie toe-rag, you’d read that last sentence just as it is. But Pelosi and her fellow Democrat-Socialists see something more like this:

Never mind that evil capitalist running-dog exploiters face social justice or that 17 million people are now permanent wards of the State and reliably dependent Democrat-Socialist voters.

See? Easy peasy. As Cruz says, it’s all a matter of perspective.

Willingly to the slaughter

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

When we decide to hang the Americans, they will sell us the rope.

Comrades, the ministry of coronavirus compliance is making it easy to be a good state citizen. If you spot a non-compliant citizen participating in life without adhering to the dictates of the state, there’s now mobile APP’s for quick snitching.

Comrade citizens are now able to take a picture of the non-compliant behavior (citizen spotted outdoors, not wearing a mask, unauthorized gatherings etc), upload the picture to the state ministry, and the state compliance division will dispatch local enforcement teams to correct the non-compliant behavior, or remove the citizen.

Elsewhere, Sundance provides a quick rundown of another tyrannical decree:

In the latest round of edicts from the Michigan Ministry of Coronavirus Compliance, Governor Getchen Whitmer extends the citizen home arrests through the end of the month. Additionally forbidding any travel between state residences.

Subversive citizens, acting against the interests of the state, will be captured and fined.

Additionally, the state-defined list of approved “non-essential” products is further restrained to forbid the purchase of any home gardening, private food growing or other subversive and regulated activities.

However, Michigan citizens may purchase Lotto tickets as they are deemed essential to the state ministry of compliance monitoring.

The first-term democrat dictator issued a new order that continues to require residents to stay under home confinement unless they seek to: engage in approved forms of isolated exercise; travel for a job essential to the administration of the state; care for a loved one (as defined by the state which does not include contact with a person to whom you do not have a direct familial relationship as defined by legal connection); or pick up pre-approved “necessary” supplies including approved/regulated food products and/or medicine.

COMRADES! Think it might be a good idea, in light of the Great(er) Depression despotic governors, mayors, and city managers have now made inevitable with the over-reaction to the over-ballyhooed Chink-N-Pox “crisis,” to maybe plant yourself a garden so as to keep your family from going hungry? Better rethink that.

Crazed Democrat Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer prohibited big box retailers from in-person sale of seeds because according to her, food is non-essential.

Whitmer also called on Home Depot and Lowes to shut down to close certain sections like flooring, garden centers and plant nurseries.

In the immortal words of another pissant dimestore dictator:

Kommissar Whitmer says you can eat cake, Michiganders. But hey, you voted for her, you got her, now you get to enjoy her.

Update! Welcome signs of a backlash against Kommissar Whitmerova.

A Change.org petition demanding the recall of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) went viral on Saturday, quickly shooting well past 80,000 signatures.

The online petition had about 60,000 names in the morning and, by the afternoon, had surpassed 80,000.

Just one small caveat:

Legally, the petition is meaningless, but it may indicate an appetite on the part of some Michiganders to remove their governor.

Oh well, back to the good old stout-rope-and-a-hanging-tree option it must be, then. That one is most definitely NOT “meaningless.”

“Michigan’s typical small business owners obey laws, but they may not notice the progressive agenda being pushed by our radical leftist Governor Whitmer,” said Rosanne Ponkowski, president of the Michigan Conservative Coalition.

“Dope shops are open, while cigar shops are closed.”

Dope smokers matter. Cigar smokers don’t. Beginning to get it now?

National disgrace

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

Weird Dave goes the fuck OFF.

People, what the fuck are we doing? More to the point, what the fuck are we allowing to be done to us? Why in the hell are we putting up with this police state that is being imposed upon us in the name of “saving lives”?

Look, I expect lefties to take advantage of any crisis, real or imagined, to grab more power and control. That’s what they do. That’s their bag. I mean, this is deep blue Philadelphia.

He mentions Philadelphia in the context of the implementation there of something called the “Anti-COVID-19 drone task force,” and large teams of Philly cops now bodily removing anyone not wearing a mask from mass-transit buses and trains.

No, really, it’s true. There’s video. Onwards.

And Colorado? Well, the state is suffering from an infestation of Californians, so it’s at best purple. These things happen. Dad handcuffed and led away by cops in front of 6-year-old daughter for violating social distancing. They were playing tee ball at a park. And Virginia is suffering from the same infestation from NOVA and Gov. Blackface. Police fine VA church $2,500 for holding service with 16 people spaced far apart

Still, we can rely on red states to show a little more fealty to the Constitution, right? States like…Kentucky? Kentucky to record license plates of those attending services this weekend and require them to quarantine for 14 days.

or…Mississippi? States don’t get much redder than Mississippi. Mississippi churchgoers fined $500 while attending drive-in service

Funny how it seems to only be Christians who are being hauled off, fined, and/or generally harrassed for attending church services, even if they’re observing the rules and have been extremely careful to cross all the T’s and dot all the I’s to ensure the safety of everyone involved. Why, it begins to appear as if the whole point might be something other than merely limiting the spread of the murderous, planet-depopulating Chink-N-Pox, don’t it?

Apologies, by the way, for daring to insult Red China with that outrageous racist slur. Because along with being Christian and attending worship services, daring to imply any connection between the NothingtodowithChinavirus and…uhhh…Voldemort Nation is one of those things you Just Don’t Do here in the land of the “free” and home of the “brave.”

Next up, a now-depressing Reagan quote.

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.
― Ronald Reagan

This thread wanders into conspiracy theory territory, but woven in there is a good point about the bulwark of liberty that is the 2A. We say that being armed will protect our liberties, but look at just how many of them we have surrendered voluntarily. We’re still armed. To the teeth. And yet our liberties are being taken one by one, and all we do is schedule some range time while muttering Molon Labe.

As the guy says in the Twitter thread Dave links, “We’ll be the first dictatorship with an armed population.” Begins to look that way, sure enough. Conspiracy theorizing or not, there’s some good stuff therein, however bitter the taste, and it’s well worth a look. Dave closes his rant out with this:

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