The Founders would have been shooting already

ZMan takes a bike ride in the boonies and has himself way too much fun.

Maryland is one of those strange parts of the country where you can go from the land of suburbanite bug men to old time country living in a few miles. Get far enough away from Lagos itself and the state is quite beautiful, with an aesthetic that is unique. The state has always been a strange confluence of the surrounding regions.

I went over this weird little bridge and saw a couple of soyish looking guys standing by a car pulled over to the side of the road. I approached thinking they were having car trouble, but then I saw one of them was wearing a Reason T-shirt. I stopped and beat them. They knew why. Just in case I also said that Hans Herman-Hoppe spells his name wrong. I may have mentioned some unfortunate things about Ayn Rand’s personal life. You can never be too thorough with these types.

Heh. Stupid neo-hippies. Then we come to the more serious part.

Coming back to my bit of the world, I could not help but think about how easy everyone has gone along with the crackdown. Americans may say they don’t trust their politicians or the media, but in the end, they trusted them completely on this panic. You can be sure the politicians and media are both feeling bold right now, having seen tens of millions dutifully follow their commands. No matter what happens in the near term, the long-term cost of that will far outweigh the threat of the virus.

The empty parks and streets are a good reminder that civilization is people, not the stuff made by people. If a bunch of strangers moved into our empty towns right now, it would not be the same. Soon, they would transform the stuff to reflect their will. Right now, our civilization is full of people ready to cower under their bed when the people in charge come up with a decent ghost story. I half wonder if the people in charge are doing this just to see if there is any fight left in us.

All of this reminds me of a great Joe Sobran quote. “By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.”

Some folks complain every July 4th about how “Independence Day” has come to mean little more than an excuse for a barbecue and a good drunk, but in our current disgraceful straits I think that’s a hell of a lot more appropriate than We The Sheeple patting themselves on the back and congratulating each other on how “free” they are.

Rain on the parade

A splash of cold water on that slim hope I was talking about the other day.

Once again, it was goosebumps for diehards when investigative reporter John Solomon told Fox News host Sean Hannity that U.S. Attorney John Durham was issuing subpoenas on behalf of a grand jury. Twitter pulses raced. Former CIA Director John Brennan was closer than ever to a rockpile in prison stripes, wasn’t he? Comey, Ohr, Kramer, Simpson, Clinton were sweating bullets, right?

I will be jubilant if I’m wrong, but I continue to doubt it. I don’t expect the anti-Trump conspirators to be indicted and tried for sedition or treason or any other serious crime by Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice. Nothing we have seen to date points to it.

What should also temper expectations, however, is a hard look at history. When it comes to the Swamp’s subversion of the Republic, issuing subpoenas to bring witnesses before a grand jury means nothing more than issuing subpoenas to bring witnesses before a grand jury. Indictments, trials, and convictions have always been exceedingly rare.

Consider the grand jury convened in the spring of 1947 to hear sensational charges of subversion inside the federal government by Elizabeth Bentley, a key American defector from Soviet intelligence. Ex-KGB courier Bentley would offer testimony against numerous federal government officials, bureaucrats, and others from those early days of the Swamp in connection with espionage rings run inside the U.S. government by Soviet intelligence.

Although the names were completely unknown to the public at the time, the Bentley grand jury witness roster was, as Evans and Romerstein write, “a spectacular line-up, an all-star team of Soviet agents, Communists and close-in fellow travellers.”

As the list demonstrates, this was indeed a Who’s Who of traitors working for Stalin, for the KGB, for communism and globalism inside and around the federal government, including Soviet agents Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White. These two top FDR administration officials were instrumental in the creation of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, helming them both, respectively, in the globalist institutions’ early days.

The most stunning thing about the Bentley grand jury witness list, however, is that no one on it, not even the later-notorious Hiss or White, was indicted for anything.

Why were there no indictments? The reason is quite simple. The government failed to call a witness who could corroborate any of Bentley’s grave charges even though such a witness was already well known to it. That witness was Whittaker Chambers. His testimony about Hiss and White alone would have been crucial to the federal case. “Yet though the FBI was well aware of what Chambers knew and could have told the grand jury,” the authors write, “for over a year prosecutors refused to call him. Hence no second witness in the case—hence no indictments.”

Why didn’t prosecutors call Chambers? FBI records, Evans and Romerstein write, “provide a suggestive picture of attitudes at the Justice Department that guided the grand jury process.”

For example, federal prosecutor Thomas Donegan “was of the opinion Chambers testimony would not be helpful.” Helpful to what?

Oh, I’m pretty sure we can guess the answer to that one easily enough.

Given the FBI’s interview with Chambers to date, it would have been clear that Chambers’ testimony would have been exceedingly “helpful” in pursuit of indictments. Even after Chambers and Hiss sensationally battled in Congress in August of 1948, however, prosecutors refused to call “the former Soviet courier who would become the most famous witness in the Cold War.”

The record indicates that the Department of Justice did not want indictments.

I’m trying real hard to come up with a solid reason to believe that this time around might be different, but I’m coming up empty. Then as now as ever as always, the Deep State looks after its own.

The link I used above is to an archive.is snapshot of the original, which is locked away behind a paywall. As such, it may or may not work for ya, I dunno.

Curiouser and curioser

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

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:

BumsOut.jpg

There’s the REAL problem.

Compare, contrast

They think we’re all too stupid to notice things like this. Sadly, it appears they may be right.


(Via Insty)

The iron curtain descends

Soooo, how’s everybody liking their shiny new Police State, eh?

On Saturday, police in Kansas City “intervened” to shut down a parade of elementary school teachers. The staff of John Fiske Elementary School decided to organize the parade as a way to boost the morale of their students and encourage them in their new distance learning adventure. All of the teachers and administrators were in their own cars. There was literally no chance whatsoever of any virus being transmitted from car to car. But a spokeswoman for the police later explained, after the elicit gathering was descended upon by law enforcement, that the celebration of learning was not “necessary” or “essential.”

Two days before the Kansas City community was saved from the threat of cheerful elementary school teachers waving to children from their sedans, police in Malibu arrested a man who was caught paddle boarding in the ocean. Two boats and three additional deputies in vehicles were called to the scene of the non-essential joyride. How could a man out by himself in the Pacific possibly contract or spread the coronavirus? Nobody knows. But orders are orders, after all. And so the man was pulled out of the ocean and hauled away in handcuffs.

Uh huh. Kinda makes one wonder how well those all-important “social distancing” rules were maintained in that patrol car, as well as at the jailhouse. Best not to think too much about that stuff, I suppose.

Officials in other parts of the nation have banned essential retailers from selling non-essential items like mosquito repellent. I suppose the prevention of West Nile and malaria are no longer considered essential. The mayor of Port Isabel, Texas, has decided, for whatever reason, that residents may not travel with more than two people in their vehicles. What if you’re a single parent with two kids? Well, sorry, one of your kids is out of luck. It’s not clear how this rule will be enforced, but some states have made that easier on themselves by setting up checkpoints to stop and question every car that passes through. A driver from New York who gets caught in Florida might face 60 days in jail. I should stop here to remind you that Florida and New York are places in the United States of America, not Soviet Russia.

Sorry, Matt, but that’s become a very difficult proposition to support of late. A distinction without a difference, one might say.

Apologists for our newly established police state will tell me that states and localities have the authority to impose restrictions in an emergency. That is true, but the question of how far their authority actually goes is complicated, and in this case made even more complicated by the fact that these stay-at-home orders, in many cases, are based not on a current medical emergency in the respective state, but on models that forecast the possibility of an emergency in the future. For example, Minnesota is under a stay-at-home order despite having only 29 coronavirus deaths among a population of over 5 million. Perhaps the situation will get worse. Perhaps not. The point is that there is no current emergency in Minnesota or many of the other states currently under lockdown. There is, rather, a model that projects an emergency. And if projected emergencies can justify the effective nullification of the Bill of Rights, where is the limit? Haven’t we now granted the government the power to seize near-total control on the basis of any real or phantom threat?

I would argue that nothing could ever justify such a thing. Indeed, the First and Fourth Amendments — the provisions of the Bill of Rights that seem to be having the worst time of it, recently — serve no purpose and have no reason to exist if they can be canceled or overridden whenever the government might have a specially compelling reason to do so. It is only when the government has a specially compelling reason to violate the amendments that the amendments have any function. After all, we really don’t need them during the times that the government has no interest in infringing on them. It seems that if we toss aside our right to assembly, our right to practice our religion, our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, etc., whenever the government insists that such protections are hazardous to our health, then we might as well not have the rights in the first place. It’s like locking a criminal in a cell but giving him the key to open it along with a stern warning to only use the key if he has a very good reason. Doesn’t the key make the cell a rather pointless accessory? Sure he might remain in it sometimes, but only when he wants to. And it’s precisely when he wants to be behind bars that you don’t need the bars at all.

Funniest thing about it might be that, while we were all keeping a wary eye on FederalGovCo in expectation of the Big Clampdown being launched from Mordor On The Potomac, it turned out to be the states and localities who were the true threat.

But do tell me again all about how the government “fears” an armed populace, as is appropriate and right; that most cops will resist enforcing blatantly unconstitutional edicts; that the 2A is enough all by itself to protect our “unalienable” rights; that all those eleventy bajillion guns out there (kept unloaded and securely locked away as the law requires, of course) will somehow keep us “free” just by their very existence. As bedtime fairytales go, that one’s my favorite.

What we’ve learned

Another fine missive from Skeptic. A lot of this echoes things I’ve said here many times in my darker moments, so it should all seem familiar to you by now.

First – we are learning that, despite the prattlings of hammerheads like Wittle Benny Shapiro and Hannity, we are not in fact “a nation of laws.” We are a nation of MEN – and at the moment, we are a nation whose elected officials are avaricious, tyrannical men. What is being done right now – the quarantines, the lockdowns – are plainly unconstitutional. The phrase “except for” appears nowhere in the Constitution nor the Bill of Rights. So, by whose authority do these mayors and governors acquire the power to lock down their domains? Why, by their own – they are signing their own executive orders giving them that power! Isn’t that convenient?

We have learned that the American people will, in fact, submit meekly. After all the talk about 70 million gun owners, nary a single shot has been fired. Screw the shots – in the country that has half of the world’s lawyers, not one lawyer has filed a lawsuit or filed for an injunction. We are reduced to debating the “when” of when they will deign to allow us to live a normal life again, rather than rising up and proclaiming, “YOU CAN’T DO THAT!” We have accepted that they CAN – and we are begging them NOT to. They have taken power that would make Stalin blush and we have said, “yes, sir.”

One of the most chilling aspects of all this has been seeing how very many “Americans” are out there clamoring for even more of it.

For all of those little tyrants, there’s no incentive to open back up. They get to do what they always wanted to do – push people around. They continue to get paid; they are spectators to the economic devastation, not participants. And there will be no pushback from the voters because they get to say they Did Something.

We have learned that – again – our President has precious little control. Trump has, in fact, screwed himself on this thing. Even if Trump were to proclaim that the country will “open up” on, say, April 15, he will simply be disregarded by the governors and mayors, who insist that “their” lockdown must be longer because reasons. The only thing Trump would do is the thing he won’t – demand that the Constitution be returned to full effect, and enforce that using the National Guard if necessary.

We have learned that our side (those discontented with the lockdowns) refuses to engage in civil disobedience. There are no rallies, no protests. We sit at home, making sure not to be around 10 people.

We have learned that a majority of “the people” will seize on the stampeding of civil liberties not as an opportunity to stand up for themselves, but instead to scold others who do stand up, and to virtue-signal with the various “stay home” memes. In fact, the divide seems to be between “getting paid and scolding everyone else” and “unpaid and pissed off.”

We have learned that there will be no consequences to China. Even with what amounts to a WMD attack on the United States, there is a vocal minority (majority?) who will proclaim any anti-China conversation as “racist.”

This is perhaps the thing I find most disgusting of all. By allowing our elites to relocate all American industry to China, combined with Clinton’s ill-advised flip-flop to grant the ChiComs MFN trade status, we weakened our position and limited our options in our dealings with Red China to basically just one: sit back, suck on it, and learn to like the taste.

China is neither a friend nor a trustworthy partner. It is a backwards, primitive dictatorship run by a council of wholly evil megalomaniacs who dream of global domination, and do not lack the will or the means to make it so. For the government of any relatively free nation to allow its greedhead corporatists to relocate so much as one damned factory to a hostile, dangerous adversary-nation without penalizing them harshly for it is the very definition of madness.

But here we all are.

My own business – the one I’ve spent fifteen years building – is in ruins; I’m “nonessential,” so therefore my business is illegal. Maybe I can rebuild after our masters decide to allow me to do business again – but what’s the point? They can – and will – do this again. In a month, in a year, in a decade, who cares? It’ll happen again and I will again be destroyed. Maybe I will rebuild, because I need to make a living, but I will never feel the same way about the business I loved, or the country I loved, again. I do not love the United States anymore.

Nor do I. Nor am I sure I ever really did. In fact, the America I loved—the America I still DO love—had ceased to exist before I ever came of age as anything more concrete than an idea, a historical artifact which I usually refer to here as America That Was. Amerika That IS, FUSA, the USSA, on the other hand, can go hang.

I see idiots like Hannity (again) crowing about Trump’s approval ratings, and how he will win in November. Seriously – who cares? Trump is powerless. He’s weak. He’s letting Fauci run the goddamned country. I always thought he was a fighter, but he’s not. Would we be any worse off with Crazy Bernie as President? I can’t imagine how.

Oh, don’t kid yourself, my friend. It could ALWAYS be worse. And one thing you can count on for sure with an avowed Commie like Bolshevik Bernie is that he will always find a way to make damned sure that it is.

Another thing I’ve said many times here: I don’t think so much that Trump’s greatest flaw is that he isn’t really a fighter. It’s that he still truly does believe in this country—that it remains the America of old, that even though the system has been abused, perverted, and betrayed, it is still salvageable. His manifestly obvious love for his country is so deep and passionate that it appears to have rendered him blind to certain unpleasant realities.

And the bastards who are doing this aren’t missing a paycheck. Are you seeing any news about government workers being furloughed without pay? Me neither.

We’re done, Mike. There will be no Civil War. America has been lost without firing a single shot. Eric Swallwell will not need to nuke us. We’ve done it to ourselves.

The evil bastards have won. Fuck them and fuck this country.

Actually, they won a good while back. All they’re doing now is re-confirming their victory, and testing its bounds for a reference as to what further depredations they’ll be able to get away with next time. And you can be assured there WILL be a next time.

Making China pay

Glenn kicks around a few ideas.

There are many lessons to be learned from the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. But one is already clear: China needs to be isolated from the civilized world until its behavior improves. We are in the current situation, with deaths and economic devastation worldwide, because China handled this outbreak with its trademark mixture of dishonesty, incompetence and thuggery. Were China a more civilized nation, this outbreak would have been stopped early, and with far less harm, inside and outside of China.

Expecting any Communist dictatorship’s behavior ever to improve, or even moderate, is futile. The iron law regarding the behavior of such nation-states can be easily summed up thus: Commies gotta Commie. Brutality; indifference to human liberty, rights, and suffering; oppression; deceit, double-dealing, and manipulation; and, where said nation-state can manage it, bare-knuckled imperialist aggression and adventurism—these are all characteristics that go with Communism like beans go with cornbread. They aren’t aberrations or curiosities; they’re the fundamental building blocks of every Marxist prison-state.

Multiply all that times ten for China, which also throws extreme paranoia and resentment into the mix—at least some of which is justified by China’s perennial status as whipping boy and/or cash cow abused by pretty much every other major-power nation throughout history—and a good few Oriental cultural beliefs and attitudes of a sort that, before PC speech restrictions were implemented, had been cast in polite company as “inscrutable,” and the somewhat-free world has good reasons aplenty to decouple itself from the thuggish ChiCom slave-state even without considering the Creeping Chinese Crud at all.

This calls for a response.

The response needs to be harsh enough to teach the Chinese government a lesson, which means pretty harsh, as they appear to still think they can brazen this out. Among other things, the United States — and ideally the world community at large — need to sharply reduce economic relations with China. In particular, no one should be relying on them for medicines, medical equipment and other vital goods. (China’s state news service threatened to plunge America into a “mighty sea” of coronavirus by withholding critical medications.) Chinese scientists should no longer have easy access to Western laboratories or universities. Chinese political leaders should no longer find it easy to travel the world.

Fine by me, for whatever good it will do. We should already have been doing all those things anyway, not strictly for purposes of punishing China but also as a matter of simple self-preservation.

Congress should pass legislation stripping the Chinese government of sovereign immunity to lawsuits for COVID-19 damage in the United States. China should be stripped of its leadership roles in international organizations. And finally, Taiwan — a nation that has handled the outbreak better than almost any other nation, but has been excluded from the World Health Organization because its membership would offend the Chinese government — deserves membership in WHO, and full diplomatic recognition from the United States, and the rest of the world.

Diplomatic recognition for Taiwan, along with all the rest of the accompanying goodies? Yes, certainly. But membership in WHO, a corrupt, wholly-owned subsidiary of ChiCom Inc? What on earth has poor little Taiwan ever done to deserve having THAT booby-prize inflicted on ’em?

We should, just as a matter of principle if nothing else, be making the going as rough as we can possibly make it on any and every Communist shitrapy. That, too, is a matter not only of being morally sound and ideologically consistent, but of safeguarding our own national interest. Unfortunately, we have foolishly put ourselves in a very bad position here. Thanks to our enforced reliance on Red China for manufacturing, consumer goods and medical supplies, the underwriting of our national debt, &c, we have now effectively made ourselves the “weak horse” in what was never going to be anything but a dysfunctional relationship. And none of us should be kidding themselves that the ChiCom leadership doesn’t know that very damned well.

Commie tigers never change their stripes

Don’t trust China. China is asshoe*.

Call it the Kung Flu, the Shanghai Shivers, the Wuhan or Chinese virus, or COVID-19 — whatever you want — communist China lied and so far thousands worldwide and the global economy died. The interconnected world has two main hubs, the United States and China. What happens in one will affect the other, as long as China remains the world’s manufacturing and supply hub. You cannot buy antibiotics, Nike shoes, or untold thousands of other products we use every single day that did not originate in part or in whole in China.

Geraghty’s timeline does leave out a couple of dates that bear mentioning. The Democrats in the House passed the articles of impeachment against President Trump on December 18, 2019. On January 15, after sitting on those articles across the holidays, they walked them over to the Senate while the mainstream media gushed over the solemnity of the occasion.  That same day, the first human carrying the coronavirus landed in the United States. He traveled here from China, as thousands did every day. Of course, no one knew he was carrying the deadly virus at the time. China and the WHO were still lying about the outbreak.

The impeachment saga lasted until February 5, 2020. Of course, President Trump and his core team were focused nearly exclusively on that, while at the same time they had little choice but to rely on what the WHO was saying about what was happening in Wuhan. Virus outbreaks come and go and none have caused a global crisis in more than a century. Impeachment was an immediate existential threat to Trump’s presidency and a political act designed to destroy him. When President Trump announced the China travel ban on January 31, the Democrats and the media carried China’s water and denounced the action as an attack on immigrants. As if business travelers and tourists are the same things as immigrants.

Looking forward, we need clear and unified thinking in the West when it comes to China. The communists suppress open media and all dissent domestically. The left ought to hate that. They lie for any reason and no reason at all. They punish scientists for discussing facts. They bury findings that don’t suit them. The coronavirus outbreak has exposed both the WHO and the UN Human Rights Council as bad and unreliable actors who favor China’s communists over their own credibility. The Hong Kong protests exposed much of the western media and even the NBA as cowards more concerned with their bottom lines than the freedoms they rely on to exist. China has used the wealth generated from becoming the world’s manufacturer to buy influence across the world with its Belt and Road programs and to undermine American influence at the same time.

Only Richard Nixon could have gone to China, but that trip may have turned out to be his greatest mistake. Decades later free Taiwan is marginalized, Hong Kong is under threat and the communists in Beijing are more influential, richer and more powerful in overt and insidious ways than ever. The whole world is reeling thanks to China’s rulers. In every way, as long as communists rule China, it should be viewed as a hostile and unreliable entity — villainous in the extreme and an enemy of freedom, decency and human dignity.

Amen. Sadly, it’s on us that such an obvious truth—a truth which ought to be the very first assumption informing all intelligent attitudes towards Communist shitrapies one and all—is even a matter of debate at this late date. Through our schools and universities, our news and entertainment media, and our politics, we’ve provided the dark, humid environment in which the parasitic Communist fungus can take root and flourish. We should have been digging up and burning the diseased, moldy thing instead. Exhibit A:

“Mom, can you look at this assignment?” A few weeks ago, before the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic forced my school-aged children home, I looked at the homework sheet my high school-age child was referring to and quickly realized what prompted the question. The freshman world history reading assignment was about parents raising “theybies.”

Scratching my head, I read through the assigned article, which included definitions such as “gender is a social construct” followed by leading questions asking students to regurgitate gender theory. The next day, my child received an assignment that taught him about critical race theory before he read an article about when black singer Lil Nas X’s song “Old Town Road” was kicked off the country music charts. The class? Physics.

Needless to say, now with my kids home and me overseeing their daily e-learning, this is a great opportunity to take a deeper look at the left-wing theories on race and gender, not to mention climate change, that public schools are pushing on my children.

My 11-year-old middle school son was assigned the following two videos for “Integrated Global Studies” class. The first is an alarmist video that promotes donations to a bogus fund. The second has countless grammatical errors and lacks any sort of sourcing.

Before Halloween last fall, the same school sent out this memo regarding cultural appropriation, sharing a Teen Vogue video and explaining that cultural appropriation is “defined as the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another.” (So I guess the school’s annual “Luau Madness” party is also off).

So how are we to reckon with the above-cited truth, about Red China and about Communism itself, when The Long March Through The Institutions—part of a brilliantly-conceived and flawlessly-executed project for bringing about Communist tyranny not through violent revolution but surreptitiously, via the “fundamental transformation” of American culture—has proved to be such a smashing success? Have we in fact committed cultural suicide?

How do societies and cultures end? What causes the death of societies and cultures? It is not always the obvious threats.

Today we are struggling with the coronavirus which has unfortunately sickened many and killed some Americans. The deaths are tragic, but so are the many Americans who die annually from the flu, from cancer, and from auto and industrial accidents. The death rate from the coronavirus will be low, far below any existential threat to American demography.

Here is the critical fact: the death of societies and cultures is usually suicide. Members of the society lose faith in its institutions, reject its cultural values, demonize their fellow citizens, enthusiastically entertain foreign ideologies, and open their doors to foreign adversaries. This is particularly devastating when elites turn against the society’s institutions and culture. The initial result is social conflict, loss of confidence, and eventually civil war and or foreign invasion.

With the Democrat Party, all colleges and universities, the school system, and the mainstream media all devoted to anti-American progressive values and objectives, it is clear that America is 75% gone. Who is left to uphold American society and culture and the values of freedom, opportunity, prosperity, individual integrity, and family unity? We know that the half of the American population in “flyover country” maintains American values, even while the national elites on the coasts despise that population, infamously characterized by the Democrat Presidential Candidates Hillary Clinton as “the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.” The Republican Party, faced with a pro-American candidate for president, retreated in part, while another part fought against, so it is unlikely to be the cavalry coming to save America. Do not bet against seeing the emergence of the United Progressive States of Socialism.

Hate to say it and all, but especially after all we’ve witnessed the last couple of weeks that 75% estimate seems pretty low to me.

*NOTE: The source of that hilarious quote can be found here.

Put not your faith in goobermint “experts”

For they are but morons, and liars as well.

The government models used to predict the extent of the coronavirus pandemic are off by huge margins in the latest coronavirus tracking numbers.

The government predictions reported by the IHME Covid Tracking (https://covidtracking.com/data/ ) for Apr 5th were as follows:

– All beds needed: 179,267
– ICU beds needed: 33,176
– Invasive ventilators: 26,544

These numbers were posted on their website on Sunday.

The actual numbers as recorded at The Covid Tracking Project:

– Actual hospitalizations: 22,158
– In ICU: 5,207
– On ventilator: 656

So overnight the IHME — the official group Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have been promoting cut their numbers by more than half!

Here is what the IHME NOW HAS for April 5th:

– All beds needed: Was 179,267 … Now is 90,353
– ICU beds needed: Was 33,176 … Now is 17,589
– Invasive ventilators: Was 26,544 … Now is 14,951

They cut their projections by almost HALF!… And THEY’RE STILL TOO HIGH!

They’re making it up as they go along!

This is completely unacceptable.

Millions of Americans will lose their jobs due to these panic-driven lockdowns.

The first people to be fired should be the ones who drove this panic!

I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for it if I were you, Jim.

Optimistic update! The Other McCain directs his feet to the sunny side of the street.

New York is the epicenter of America’s coronavirus outbreak, with nearly 40 percent of all U.S. cases and the highest per-capita infection rate (632 cases per 100,000 residents). So if the computer-modeled projections have failed to accurately predict the course of the pandemic in New York, what about the rest of the country? In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis came under harsh criticism for delaying a statewide stay-at-home order. DeSantis pointed out that Florida’s outbreak was mainly confined to three counties (Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach) on the state’s southeast coast, and argued that local restrictions were sufficient to prevent spreading the disease. National media demonized DeSantis as irresponsible, yet his state continues to have relatively low levels of coronavirus infection. Florida’s per capita rate (57 per 100,000 residents) is about 90 percent lower than New York’s, and in many counties is substantially lower than the statewide level. As in New York, the outbreak in Florida has fallen short of the model projections that forecast that the patient load from coronavirus cases would exceed the capacity of the hospital system. The IHME model forecast that Florida would not reach the apex of its outbreak until early May, so we don’t know what numbers the state will be reporting at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak there, but so far the numbers are far below what they were predicted to be at this point.

None of this debunking of doomsday forecasts should be interpreted as an argument against “social distancing.” In fact, the effectiveness of these mitigation efforts may explain why the pandemic has failed to become the disaster that the projection models predicted. We are certainly not past the crisis point yet. Far away from the “epicenter” in New York, local outbreaks are turning into mini-epicenters. In Louisiana, for example, St. John the Baptist Parish and Orleans Parish now have America’s highest per-capita death rates from coronavirus.

While the cumulative totals of cases and deaths continue rising, the media are doing a lousy job of reporting the most important numbers: How many COVID-19 patients are currently hospitalized? How many new patients are admitted to the hospital each day, and how many patients are discharged? The reason for “social distancing” policies was to slow the spread of the disease, to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic and avoid overwhelming the hospital system. We have reason to believe that these policies are succeeding in that regard, and something else may explain why we may be averting the “apex” crisis: chloroquine. The anti-malarial drug which Trump famously touted as a “game-changer” in the fight against coronavirus is now being prescribed to thousands of patients, and anecdotal reports indicate that the drug is effective. The number of COVID-19 hospitalizations may have been reduced by this treatment and, if so, chloroquine was probably a variable not factored into the models that projected a shortage of ventilators and ICU beds.

We are still a long way from the point at which we can evaluate the course of this pandemic with the safety of hindsight. It may be many weeks before it is considered safe to hold large gatherings at church or sporting events. We are doing better than the doomsday models predicted, however, and this is good news. When will the media report that news?

Don’t be ridiculous, man. How on earth is reporting the news fairly and honestly going to help them get rid of Trump and regain power for their Democrat-Socialist partners in crime?

The price

Was it worth it?

It took only 15 days after the coronavirus outbreak was confirmed in the U.S. for Boba Guys, a popular San Francisco bubble tea chain with 400 employees and 17 locations, to shut its doors.

With an average daily income of only $7 above daily expenses, the typical small business has a median cash buffer of 27 days of burn before it runs out of money.

Karen Mills, prior head of the Small Business Administration (SBA), said recently that “20%, even 30%, of small businesses could fail even in a good scenario.” Without immediate support to buffer the cash flows of stalled businesses waiting for the economy to reopen, it is a matter of days until millions begin to shut their doors, driving unemployment up significantly and sending the economy into a tailspin.

Small businesses make up over 99.9% of businesses, employ about 59 million people (about 47% of the U.S. private workforce in 2015), create over 41% of new jobs, and account for 45% of GDP.

A Goldman Sachs survey of 1,500 small businesses found that 96% of owners were already feeling the effects of COVID-19. More than half said their business would not be able to continue operating for more than three months because of the economic stresses caused by the pandemic.

With 47% of the private workforce facing potential layoffs, unemployment could rise rapidly into the double digits, substantially driving down the 45% of GDP that small business represents, and lasting for a substantial, years-long recovery.

Even if the death rate from the Creeping ChiCom Crud suddenly spikes to the scarifying levels our masters have been predicting, I still can’t see that the Great Clampdown was worth the cost that decades of impoverishment and misery from destroying the economy is going to exact. And that doesn’t even take into account the freedom we’ve thrown away, which will assuredly NOT be coming back.

Update! Michael Z Williamson gets specific on which businesses will fail.

By week 2, unemployment went from 3% to 10%.

It really hasn’t occurred to most of you that businesses fail from not engaging in business. This just tells me the socialist indoctrination centers (schools) have utterly failed to explain how business works.

Most businesses operate on tiny margins, especially stores and restaurants. Now, restaurants that can do takeout are managing, mostly (at reduced capacity and with reduced employees). But fine dining establishments or sit-down-only ethnic restaurants aren’t. They’re closed. That means no income for any of the owners or employees, followed shortly by no income for the landlord, who is also probably a small business, so stow your socialist-indoctrinated hate.

Keep in mind that every one that fails means unemployed workers as well. And just because YOU can find a workaround for their product, doesn’t put money in THEIR pocket.

Here’s a partial list I will expand:

Theaters, who have managers, ushers, concessionaires, ticket takers.

Restaurants and bars who have managers, cooks, servers, cleaners.

Restaurants need food suppliers. If they’re not selling food, they’re not ordering food from the suppliers. (One corresepondent reports his factory produces sliced cheese. 80% drop in orders with so many restaurants closed or doing less business.)

Specialty retailers–bookstores, hobby stores.

Hotels–no one is renting rooms if they’re not traveling for leisure or business. Hotels employ maintenance, housekeepers, clerks, often entertainers.

Convention facilities–who have lots of overhead, and lots of staff and/or contractors for support, displays, decorations, etc.

Venues for music or live theater.

Gyms aren’t getting anything without guests and attendees.

He has many, many, many more, as if the above weren’t all too much. Then he gets to the REALLY grim stuff—what the effect of all this will be in only a few more weeks—before asking the big question:

The point is there are ZERO non-essential jobs in even our nominally free (though massively government controlled) market. If a job doesn’t generate income, it goes away.

The question comes down to: How many people are you willing to starve and murder over a virus that the experts agree won’t be significantly worse than the four previous major viruses, in the last half century?

Since it’s way too late to fix this now, and there’s no going back from here, it looks like we’re about to find out.

Portents and alarums

Houston, we have a problem.

It has become accepted knowledge that America’s intelligence agencies missed 9/11 warning signs — but that’s not entirely true.  Signs were seen, but they impelled no action. We were so convinced that the fall of the Soviet Union as the end of history precluded any need for urgency. Yet, even if there had been, no one, at that point, knew how to react.

I don’t think I need to remind everyone of what happened on 09/11/2001.

Au contraire, I’m afraid. From the looks of things, there all too many American memories in serious need of refreshing.

I share this vignette as a means of showing that there are always signs. We, for whatever reason, miss them, or we ignore them for political purposes, or we refuse to believe them because they contradict the core tenets of our belief system.

I believe that China’s actions today may be telegraphing an intent we are choosing to ignore. They show all the signs of a nation preparing to attack America. China seeks a bespoke world run by China with “Chinese characteristics” — a dream that under Trump was drifting away.

China appears to be laying the groundwork for a “justified” attack on the United States, perhaps in the South China Sea or perhaps elsewhere. It will be a military attack, not an act of terrorism, and the excuse will be America’s deliberate transmission of COVID-19 in Wuhan.

When the Chinese became accusatory, it’s telling that they didn’t blame the CIA, always the usual suspect. No, they blamed it on American soldiers.

American military deliberately infecting China is an act of war worthy of a military response.

In October, the 2019 World Military Games were held in Wuhan. Chinese media triumphantly trumpeted the Americans winning just eight medals, while China won 239. It was then that we supposedly infected Wuhan citizens with the “American virus.”

China is now defenestrating foreign media, sending home reporters from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post at just the opportune moment. No nation wants journalists around when it is planning a sneak attack.

The ChiComs are making a mistake there; the “journalists” of those bastions of collectivist America-hate would certainly come down solidly in favor of the Chinese. They’re “pacifists,” see, in any hostilities America initiates in pursuit of its own national interests, which are considered “illegitimate” each and every time anyway. That peaceable, “war is bad” attitude is subject to immediate revision anytime the US is attacked, for any reason whatsoever.

Even worse, though, is the fact that we live in an age when the portion of the nation roosting in urban-blight zones, college towns, and “blue” states would be out in the streets to cheer the ChiCom invaders on, happy at the eternal dream of the establishment of a Commie shitrapy here coming true at long last.

Then, as always, the useful idiots of the Vanguard will find themselves put up against a wall—UNEXPECTED!™—and the rest of us will be the ones cheering, albeit bitterly.

Whither freedom?

Going, going, gone.

Here’s a sensible question. If the mayor of the most notable metropolis in the country can openly suggest that the government has the right to permanently shutter the doors of a church if it refuses to comply with “social distancing” guidelines, or any other edict the government finds necessary in a given moment, then what can’t the government do?

If ever there was a question better left unasked…

Just a few weeks ago, the threat of COVID-19 was considered by nearly everyone to be potentially far deadlier than it has yet proven to be. The fatality rates, hospitalization rates, and the predictions of American death tolls (once routinely touted as “over 2 million”) associated with infection were all much higher three weeks ago than they are today. And yet, as the dire projections about the impact of infection has become considerably smaller with new data and improved medical readiness, the social restrictions placed upon the populace have become progressively more obstructive and draconian.

Got that? The better the health outlook has become, the harsher the government’s restrictions on you have also become.

Coincidence, I’m sure.

If that isn’t bothersome to you, maybe you should think about the fact that these social restrictions seem to have only become harsher on you. Some Americans are enduring no government obstruction in their lives, and others still are actually enjoying more freedom than they would have before these social obstructions in your lives were introduced.

Consider this. A junkie can wake up on a brisk morning in the streets of San Francisco, defecate on the sidewalk in plain view of onlookers, and insert a used needle into his arm to inject illegal narcotics into his veins. The cops will make no effort to stop him, for, you see, that might be a violation of his supposed “rights.” That’s much the same as it was before the coronavirus pandemic, so I should probably add that this junkie’s sleeping and social arrangements may very well be in violation of “social distancing” guidelines, also.

Now, consider that he is far less likely to incur the attention of law enforcement, or even the news media, than you might incur for the crime of choosing to attend your local church, should it have the audacity to be open. It is you, don’t you understand, who is the public health menace. 

To put it mildly, the social fabric is being torn apart. And for what?

It’s healthy for Americans to maintain skepticism about the motives and effectiveness of our government. Right now, there is a lot which calls the government’s motives and effectiveness into question. Like what I suspect is a growing number of Americans, I am completely unconvinced that the harsh measures being foisted upon the American people, as collective units amongst the states, are entirely necessary, and even more unconvinced that a similar outcome could not have been achieved with fewer rigid restrictions upon healthy and less at-risk individuals and American life, in general. And as days pass, I’m ever more convinced that the utter annihilation of the economy that we’ve seen, and the trillions in spending of taxpayer money that we absolutely, positively do not have, could have been significantly less damaging if we had demanded fewer government restrictions throughout this crisis, rather than more.

Sure, but how was THAT supposed to provide our masters with any kind of trial run for making certain America had accepted the bit fully?

If you think it’s bad now, though, just wait till the next time they decide to put the boot on American necks and press down. And if you think there isn’t going to BE a next time, you’re a damned fool.

Numbers game(s)

They ain’t adding up.

All admit that the numbers that are scaring the sense out of the country are mathematical projections. All projections are based on assumptions about the ever-changing numbers of “confirmed cases” of COVID-19, as well as of deaths resulting therefrom. But few—and here it seems we must include many “health officials”—consider that the latter numbers are themselves “soft” and tell us next to nothing about how much, how little, or what kind of dangers the virus poses to us.

To make intelligent decisions about countermeasures, we would need have hard data about all these matters. Yet, for two months, doctors such as Anthony Fauci have messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on projections based on meaningless numbers. Watching the several curves resulting from the testing that is now ongoing and that is projected to continue as the country suffers will provide only more guesses, that will feed more models and more disputes.

The most important fact about COVID-19, its true mortality rate, is the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. No algorithms. Simple arithmetic.

In short, Fauci, et al., are showing themselves to be typical of our bureaucracy: over-credentialed, entrusted with too much power, and dangerously incompetent.

It’s mind-blowing to see how many of us who long since accepted American bureaucratic realities are now willing to set it all aside and squander their faith and hope on those same demonstrably inept, corrupt, and untrustworthy bureaucracies…with no evidence whatsoever of even the slightest change or improvement therein.

Learning the true figures about precisely what danger the virus poses to whom must begin by taking into account one thing we know for sure about COVID-19: that many, if not most, of those infected by this unusually contagious virus show few or no symptoms. This suggests eventual near-universal contagion.

But we don’t know how many of these asymptomatic people there are. Hence, meaningful epidemiological testing must include a random representative sample of the population, regardless of whether they are presumed to be infected or not. The numbers resulting from monitoring what happens to the health of individuals in this sample over a few weeks would tell exactly what percentage of people in each category and subcategory suffer what consequences from whatever contact with the virus they happen to have.

Backed by the media, Fauci and company have contended that actions by anybody, ordinary citizens, elected officials, or physicians that do not follow proper bureaucratic procedures are illegitimate. Who the hell do they think they are? We belong to ourselves. Not to them.

Surely, President Trump’s low point came when he supported bypassing roll call votes in the passage of a $2.2 trillion bill as part of his and other executive officials’ decisions to shut down the country. Making decisions on the basis of meaningless curves and bureaucratic authority rather than through open debate about hard facts followed by roll call votes is not just undemocratic. It’s stupid.

I’d tell you to go read it all, but it’s Codevilla, so I’m sure you know that already,

MORE TESTOSTERONE, STAT!

A risk-free society ain’t a healthy one.

The panic over the virus is something new to modern society. This virus is not a threat to humanity, but it is treated as one. We know there was no panic over the Swine flu, the Asian flu, the Hong Kong flu and so on. There was no panic over the great influenza outbreak of 2017 that killed 80,000 Americans. Yet with the death toll soaring to 4,000 with the Chinese flu, America is paralyzed with fear.

It could be that when a civilization becomes sufficiently advanced, three things happen that change how it interacts with the world. One is the birth rate falls. This is something we have seen all over the world. Once a society can reliably feed its people and it reduces interpersonal violence to a certain level, total fertility rates fall. At the same time, the society feminizes. Women begin to take up positions of authority in both civil and government institutions, changing the nature of those institutions.

That’s the third thing, what we are seeing today. A society dominated by women is extremely risk averse. The focus first shifts to elevating the value of life, then to guarding the children against any potential risk. We saw this happen in the 90’s and 00’s with the millennial generation, who were sheltered from everything. Finally, the society shifts to organizing against any threat, even those that promise to merely trim a few years off the lifespan of the octogenarians.

A society that is hyper-focused on preventing even the slightest risk is not a society taking great risks to explore the stars. Maybe that’s why the cost of going back to the moon is prohibitively high. The safety precautions that would be required make the venture pointlessly expensive. The reason it takes ten years to build a building that a century ago only took a year to build, is that today’s society is risk intolerant. If just one worker gets a hangnail or stubs a toe, the cost is considered too high.

Ahh, but the cost of quivering in terror at the mere prospect of risk is far higher. Or will be when a stronger, bolder, more virile one comes along to kick its cowardly ass, subjugate it, and eventually replace it completely, while the lily-livered, man-bunned MenWymryn all cringe weeping in a corner—soiling their expensive designer skinny-jeans in fright, pleading from their weak knees for a mercy not forthcoming from their steely-eyed conquerors.

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“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
Bill Whittle

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