We Are Soooooo Screwed

Trust us!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can it?

So what’s next?

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

This.

Americans can’t seem to handle wearing masks to stop the coronavirus. Now, imagine if the CDC changed its guidelines to also call for “eye protection” like medical goggles to stop the spread of the virus (and protect your neighbor, as well as yourself).

Well, Dr. Fauci is apparently preparing to do just that.

During an interview with ABC News, Dr. Fauci said Wednesday that he may soon advise Americans to wear ‘eye protection’ to avoid being infected by COVID-19 as deaths along the Sun Belt climb to record highs.

“If you have goggles or an eye shield, you should use it,” the doctor said, before adding that it’s not universally recommended, “but if you really want to be complete, you should probably use it if you can,” he said.

Fine by me, just do it already. I won’t wear your silly-assed face diapers, and I won’t wear your fucking silly-assed goggles either, asshole. Another directive I won’t be complying with, from a piece I linked about a month ago:

A new pandemic is raging. Even before the Covid 19 pandemic has subsided, the WHO has now warned that a virulent form of Hoof and Mouth disease has “jumped” species in record time from horse to humans and is threatening to devastate the planet. It is even more deadly than the original. An appropriate name for the pathogen is being considered, as we speak.

Curiously enough, the pathogen has an affinity for the right foot of its human host. At this early stage of the pandemic, we can already state, with confidence, that the microbe can be detected by the application of a simple laboratory test to the right foot.

Now that we know what we are dealing with, what do we do to prevent the spread? We cannot simply wait for the vaccine. Patience is not an option. There is no time for that. We must act now!

It seems that pressure on the right foot creates a veritable explosion in the number of microbes. The tissue on the bottom of the right foot is suited to hold the weight of the entire body with every step. However, the act of stepping causes the microbe to multiply. Perhaps it is due to the pressure exerted on the big toe of the right foot. Perhaps the skin on the right foot is more attractive to the pathogen than the skin on the left foot which seems inhospitable to it. These are good questions to which the answers, at present, are unknown. Nevertheless, once the microbe is embedded in the right foot, it oozes out, microscopically, through the skin and into the shoe. But, as these are among the smallest of microbes, the story does not end there. The motion of the foot in the shoe, after the pathogen has been released from the skin, causes it to be dispersed upward and outward, diffusing into the atmosphere. Of course, the condition is far more lethal when one wears sandals as opposed to a closed shoe. Nevertheless, the pathogen cannot be contained even in a shoe that is closed. Therefore, we must avoid excreting the pathogen through the action of our right foot, and, more specifically, through our big right toe.

Anyway, along with our Covid 19 lifestyle, what are a few more mandates if the reward for our efforts is the conquest and elimination of yet another new disease? The following rules have been thoughtfully formulated and could easily be incorporated into what we are already doing to combat Covid 19.

First, let us talk about the mask. I recommend that we jettison the shoe or sandal that we wear on our right foot. With all due respect to the shoe industry, this is for everyone. Not only those with a positive or false positive diagnosis. Why? Because we can be a carrier whether we know it or not. Healthy people can make other healthy people sick! Got that? So that means we wear a mask adapted to our right foot—a mask that is impermeable to the pathogen. Even though such a mask does not yet exist, wearing a mask on your foot is a symbolic act that communicates your understanding that the situation is dire and that 50% of us will be goners if we refuse to comply.

Secondly, and this is the final guideline, and, perhaps, the most important one: we must stop proliferating the pathogen when stepping on our right foot. We must stop walking and start hopping!

Yes! I said hop! On our left foot. Now, you might object that hopping on one foot will not get us very far when we have someplace to go. You are right. Therefore, enough said about that! However, I do acknowledge that hopping is tiring, if not tiresome. Especially if you have no alternative, and surely there is none. That is why I recommend, in fact, mandate, that we always carry a cane or a stick in our right hand, or lodge a state-of-the art crutch under our right shoulder to keep us in balance and to prevent us from falling. An implement of this sort will also be of great value in maintaining our social distance and thus enable us to avoid close body-brawling when our fellow human violates our six-foot social space.

Please, let me be very clear as to dispel all misunderstanding: I do not advocate that you employ your hopping-aid as a weapon. However, the violation of one’s social distancing space is an act of wanton aggression that is a menace to the health and safety of society. Law enforcement cannot respond to each, and every infraction–as recent and current riots attest. Therefore, it is up to us to look after our neighbors and to gently remind them that the common good is their good. As we have all experienced under Covid 19, obedience is its own reward.

Seems pretty funny now, but it won’t for long. So where does this leave us? Where does it all end? Clue: it doesn’t—EVER.

Tucker Carlson calls the rioters “Biden voters”—an expression that seems to be catching on and may not bode well for the Left. As Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports, “some Democrats are openly expressing their fear that the rioters are helping Trump,” concluding that the Democrats “are riding a tiger. If they attempt to dismount, they will be eaten by the tiger.” Perhaps the strategy of colluding with the violence-prone “protesters” may backfire; nonetheless, the majority of Democrat operatives seem to be in it for the long haul.

And why not? Democrat officials from local to state survey the national scene and see sports teams changing their names to appear inoffensive; people lobbying to replace the national anthem; Hollywood celebrating its anti-Americanism with slanted, godawful movies; wealthy corporations subsidizing domestic terrorists; outright traitors to the flag sitting in Congress; generals embarrassing their President; police chiefs kneeling before the mobs and religious leaders washing the feet of those who would depose them; public schools and universities churning out hordes of Leftist hoplites; and the mainstream media and big digital platforms practicing censorship, swaying elections and promoting insurrection.

In brief, what these so-called public representatives observe is a country submitting to the lure of Cultural Marxism, which views the world in terms of interest groups, power relationships, systemic oppression and endemic inequality, victim categories and identity politics, with socialists as the great healers and redeemers. From the perspective of the commissars, what’s not to like?

Add to this political scenario the Leftist COVID-mongers who, as Angelo Codevilla shows beyond the slightest doubt, are engaged in the usurpation of arbitrary political power by stoking public panic, prolonging the lockdowns, constantly “moving the goalposts” even when the famous “curve” has not only flattened but become catenary, and collapsing the nation’s economy in order to unseat President Trump. These blue state authorities and their comrades in a Democrat-controlled Congress are dedicated to establishing the new “new normal,” which is to become the default position of everyday life leading us, as Paul Gottfried writes, into the “new frontiers of madness.”

In a 1965 radio broadcast titled “If I Were The Devil,” Paul Harvey foresaw the socialist plan to take over America, which was as simple as it was methodical. The devil would begin by subverting the churches and proceed, among other steps, to educate authors to produce lurid literature, lard TV with dubious movies, peddle narcotics, tranquilize the public with pills, corrupt the schools, deify science, take from those who have and give to those who wanted in order to kill incentive, and caution against hard work, patriotism, moral conduct, and marriage. And presto! We find ourselves living in the hell that is socialism.

The devil’s program seems poised to bear fruit. Should this be the case, and I suspect it is, we have a plausible explanation for blue state public figures unafraid to violate their mandate, estrange a portion their voters, and act in full view of the nation like the petty tyrants they always essentially were. They are the purveyors of the new regime of American socialism of which, as Dinesh D’Souza baldly states in his recent The United States of Socialism: “In principle, no less than in practice, socialism is the ideology of thieves and tyrants. As for the people who fall for the temptation, they are connivers attracted by the rip-off scheme.”

These thieves, tyrants, and connivers have every confidence that they will shortly possess full control of their fiefdoms in the newly-formed Socialist States of America. After all, if the plot succeeds, it is soon to be their home.

From here, it looks more like the socialists won already, and America That Was is conquered at last. Now they’re just walking the battlefield to shoot the wounded.

The Peltzmann effect

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

Unintended consequences.

In the 1960s, numerous countries (including the United States) began adopting laws that mandated the use of seat belts. The hope was that this would reduce mortality in motor accidents.

However, economist Gordon Tullock once quipped that “if the government wanted people to drive safely, they’d mandate a spike in the middle of each steering wheel.” Why would that be? Because of how we respond to risks. If we know that even the slightest accident might impale us on our driving wheel, we would all drive more safely. While it is a strange thought experiment, we can run it in reverse. If one driver knows that all the other drivers are wearing a seat belt while he also wears a seat belt, that driver faces a lower risk level. As a result, feeling safer, that driver acts more recklessly. He exceeds the speed limit, accelerates at a yellow light etc. This greater recklessness, in turn, increases the risks of an accident.

As a result, there is an ambiguous effect from the regulation. On the one hand, the law reduces risks but it also induces a behavioral response that increases the likelihood of an accident happening. Thus, we must wonder which effect dominates the other.

The same logic applies to face masks. Imagine a fictitious Canadian economist who, fearing the risk of bringing the virus to a loved one or catching the virus himself, avoids situations that would be too risky for his tastes. He avoids going to the coffee shop for a latte and limits himself only to doing groceries. With everyone being forced to wear a mask, he may decide to go pick up that latte. Technically, the activities of shopping for coffee and groceries are individually less risky with mandatory face masks. However, that fictitious economist now exposes himself to two activities that carry a risk rather than a single activity and so he faces a higher likelihood of catching the disease. Just as with seat belts, we must ask which effect dominates: the risk reduction of masks or the behavioral response?

In the end, the answer is an empirical one. Yet, the case of seat belt laws suggests that the precise answer might be elusive. The first paper of importance on the effect of seat belts was published in the 1970s by Sam Peltzman who found that the behavioral response by American drivers completely washed out the effects of the law. Since then, numerous papers on the topic have been published. Some confirm the findings of Peltzman while others infirm them. All these studies confirm that there is some offsetting behavior. They simply cannot agree on how strong it is.

However, let us take one important fact in consideration: the first laws mandating seat belt use were adopted in the 1960s. This is more than fifty years ago. Yet, there is still a discussion among experts who try to design the most convincing statistical tests. If there is uncertainty about the past, how can experts today be certain that compelling the use of face masks will not result in a greater level of risk taking? What if the offsetting behavior is stronger? Experts and policy-makers probably do not know this information (and I believe that they cannot reasonably be expected to know this). As the damages from faster propagation are exponential (given the nature of the virus), there is a real risk of backfire!

The question of whether or not seat belts, motorcycle helmets, masks, suits of medieval armor, etc save lives might be a fascinating one. It’s probably worth the ongoing research it inspires, I suppose. Ultimately, though, it’s the wrong question. What any and all Americans SHOULD be asking themselves, and constantly, is this: in a supposedly “free” country, with a government whose reach and scope is confined within very explicit limits set by the US Constitution, are ANY such mandates in accordance with those limits? Or do they so flagrantly breach them as to do far greater harm to the Constitution’s continued authority and relevance, thereby harming the nation entire?

Tragically, most of us long ago forgot about just how important that question really is, and no longer care anyway. If they think about them at all, they consider such notions quaint, antiquated, and hopelessly silly—the exclusive province of cranks and fools who are completely out of touch with reality, too thick to really comprehend what government’s true purpose is: to solve every problem, grant every wish, scratch every itch, safeguard every life, and abolish all risk, forever.

Of groupthink, and drooling beasts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First mistake: you never ask. You fucking TELL.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, happy whatever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s always darkest just before the dawn

Posted on July 2, 2020July 2, 2020 by Mike

And right now, it’s pretty danged dark out there.

Let me tell you why I believe the polls… Because in 2016, the polls were accurate. No, not the state polls. The state polls were way off. The average of the national polls, however, was almost exactly correct.

President Trump lost the national popular vote in 2016 by 2.1 points — and just barely beat Hillary Clinton.

The average of the national polls in 2016 had Trump behind Hillary by 3.2 points.

So, as you can see, the average of the 2016 national polls was only off by 1.1 points. That’s what you call some damn fine polling, and right now, those very same damn fine polls have Trump losing to Joe Biden by 9.2 points.

And these polls were all taken before the president stupidly tweeted out video of an idiot yelling “White Power!”

Donald Trump is not only losing this election, if the election were held today, his loss would possibly be catastrophic, would be remembered as one of the most humiliating in history. He’s not only facing a landslide rejection of epic proportions, he’s losing to a 77-year-old imbecile and racist who’s hiding out in his basement.

How is this possible?

How is it even remotely possible Joe Biden is kicking Trump’s butt?

Don’t know how much of what Nolte writes here I actually agree with; Nolte was originally a NeverTrumpTard who eventually came around, and for all I know he might be eagerly reverting to type. But the dismayingly-successful COVIDIOT gambit, followed by the sacking and burning of pretty much every city in America with no response from Trump besides unfulfilled Twitter threats, has undoubtedly shaken his support more than anything the Marxist-traitor Left has been able to come up with so far. And, well, here we all are.

Despite their roots in reality, there is no doubt that these crises — and the White House and Senate’s attempts to tackle them — would be reported differently if Hillary Clinton were president.

The Federalist’s exclusive Friday Oval Office interview revealed a president and West Wing that are happy and optimistic, while realistic about the political danger they face — a stark contrast, publisher Ben Domenech notes in Monday’s Transom newsletter, with his “interviews in the dark days of George W. Bush’s second term.”

“The president clearly believes he is down, and that he has been prevented from using ammunition curtailed by the continued challenge of the virus and without Joe Biden doing things like walking outside and talking for more than 30 minutes,” Domenech writes. “But the president clearly is not of the opinion that Biden’s lead is insurmountable.”

And it isn’t. But a corporate media that have struggled for years to achieve their openly stated goal of defeating the president finally have a working plan. The president and his Republican allies had better get ahead of it, or Democrats will win the Senate –and Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States.

And that there is the problem, really: despite his own natural inclinations, Trump appears now to have shifted—been maneuvered, more accurately, with an unwitting assist of every panic-ninny currently berating sensible people for refusing to don the Mask Of Submission—from the offensive to the defensive. That’s a defeat in and of itself, and I’m unsure how it might be reversed. But it must be, that’s all there is to it. Charles Hurt warns that complacency is the real enemy:

Mr. Trump’s fourth year in office has been an unusual one, to say the least. But even that gives his supporters unwarranted reason to be complacent. They see a president in a time of national threat trying to unify the country while his enemies in Washington and in Congress only work to weaponize every tragedy for their own personal political advantage. With dishonest, evil vermin like this against him, how could Mr. Trump NOT win?

To be clear, any such complacency among Trump supporters is badly misplaced. The only difference between 2016 and 2020 is that this time, Democrats, the political media and the so-called “Deep State” now know that Donald Trump can win. This time, there is nothing they will not do to destroy him.

Something decides every election. oftentimes, it’s the economy, Stupid. Other times it is security. It can even be personality that determines the outcome of an election.

The 2020 election is shaping up to be the “Make it stop!” election. Ardent Trump supporters love Mr. Trump and will walk through fire over broken glass to vote for him. Rabid anti-Trumpers despise the president and will loot and riot through tear gas to vote against him.

This election will be determined by an altogether different group of voters. These voters don’t particularly like Mr. Trump, but they also aren’t crazy haters. Many of them voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and are open to doing so again.

Today, they see rioters in the streets, smashing store fronts, torching police cars and toppling statues. They are appalled, and they just want it to stop.

Mr. Trump claims to be the “law and order” guy, but the mayhem continues under his administration. Mr. Biden is desperate to curry favor with the peaceful protesters so he cowardly declines to forcefully condemn the lawlessness and rioters.

The average voter is watching it all and just wants it all to stop. If a vote for Mr. Biden would make it stop, that’s what he will do. Same with Mr. Trump.

It’s kinda tough for Trump to run on “law and order” when he’s the guy ultimately responsible for seeing to it that law and order is maintained…and anyone can see that he has failed to do so. To wit:

Trump’s campaign has suggested that riots and more disorder will happen if Biden is elected. The problem with this argument is that disorder is already happening now under President Trump.

Admittedly, Trump has had a difficult fight from the beginning. He has been hamstrung by investigations, a hostile deep state resistance from career civil servants, and a nakedly partisan propaganda campaign by the media. Nevertheless, he has a job to do. He’s not merely citizen Trump. He’s not just an observer. It’s his FBI. It’s his government to run. It’s his military to command. If he can’t run it, he needs to fire people until he can get the right people where they belong.

It’s not entirely clear whether Trump’s reluctance to use force is a cynical calculation that this chaos works to his advantage, or a vague instinct that anything he does will boomerang. It does not matter; there is a job to do regardless of electoral consequences.

As it stands, the country and the president are diminished in the face of extended disorder. A strong and swift response, while controversial, would restore the sense that the nation is not up for grabs. It would also do much to restore Trump’s prestige. Impotent tweeting and inaction encourages more assaults, demands, and brinksmanship.

Voters need to understand that ejecting Trump will not lead to a restoration of order. But Trump needs to understand that inaction will not bring it about, either.

Here’s hoping it does. But there IS at least a feeble ray of hope amidst all this gloomy darkness.

President Trump has told people in recent days that he regrets following some of son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner’s political advice — including supporting criminal justice reform — and will stick closer to his own instincts, three people with direct knowledge of the president’s thinking tell Axios.

Behind the scenes: One person who spoke with the president interpreted his thinking this way: “No more of Jared’s woke s***.” Another said Trump has indicated that following Kushner’s advice has harmed him politically.

…Several conservative allies of the president have reached out to him and advised him to reduce Kushner’s influence over his re-election campaign.

For God’s sake listen to ’em, Mr Preznit, sir. They have a much better idea of where your best interests lie than any damned liberal ever will, however highly your liberal daughter might think of him.

‘Trump has a Jared problem,’ is how one conservative activist who works with the White House on immigration puts it. ‘Jared is a total fuck-up. Everything he touches turns to lead.’ Others groan about ‘four more years of Jared’ should the President be re-elected in November.

And if Trump does, we all do. Dump him. An hour ago wouldn’t be too soon.

Various sources in, or connected to, the administration are stunned by the amount of power Kushner wields. He is a 39-year-old rich kid who had no experience in government before 2016, yet he is in charge of Middle East diplomacy, police reform, a major immigration reform package, criminal justice reform, PPE procurement during COVID-19 and construction of the border wall.

Kushner’s inexperience might be excusable if he were particularly brilliant. People who have sat in meetings with him, however, describe him as ‘slow’, ‘a moron’ and ‘not really that bright’. He struggles to master detail. One official suggests he doesn’t have the acuity to master one, let alone all, of the tasks the President gives him. For instance, he was in charge of producing the 600-plus-page immigration reform package, but conservatives were horrified at how little he knew about the issue he was leading on. He didn’t even seem to know what was in his own proposal; others had to step in when he was unable to answer the more technical questions.

One conservative source who attended a briefing on the plan led by Kushner told The Spectator he was shocked that Kushner seemed to have no sense of how to answer basic questions about chain migration and the diversity visa lottery. ‘He presents as someone very knowledgeable and in the know until he faces questions,’ the source said. ‘He goes off the record or on deep background so people don’t realize he’s a fucking idiot.’

Some assign sinister motives to Kushner’s missteps. His negative influence on the administration, it’s whispered, goes beyond incompetence and veers toward deliberate sabotage. Several individuals close to the administration claim Kushner’s history as a rather progressive Democrat makes him far more ideological than he lets on, and this causes him to subvert Trump’s populist agenda. ‘The depths and lengths Jared is going to to stab Trump in the back [are] quite profound,’ one source claimed. ‘Trump’s been burned by Jared so many times,’ said another.

Naturally. What we’re all pleased to misnomer “liberalism” isn’t a set of political opinions, nor a mere ideology. It is a religion, and its faithful acolytes will always and forever put advancing the agenda way before friendship, family ties, decency, and common sense six days a week, and twice on Sunday. If Trump doesn’t realize this by now, he’d better wake the fuck up, and fast. He has no more than three and half months to turn this out-of-control bus around, before we all wind up bleeding in a ditch on the Left side of the road, dazed and wondering how the hell we got there.

Following the science

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

Wherever it may lead.

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

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

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

Masks and respirators do not work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The science is settled, the facts are in

Posted on June 26, 2020June 26, 2020 by Mike

COVID is a sham, and masks are the bunk.

I wore surgical masks daily for 36 years as an anesthesiologist. Their purpose was to reduce the chance that I would infect an open wound with bacteria from my mouth. This article of faith has been shown to be false. If staff who are working outside of the immediate sterile field do not wear masks, there is no increase in wound infections. And this is in a closed environment where staff will be present for hours. This casts a very large cloud of doubt on the utility of masks for COVID-19.

Another problem arises when we look at the use of masks by the public. Even accepting the uncertain premise that masks are useful, “incorrect use and disposal may actually increase the risk of pathogen transmission, rather than reduce it, especially when masks are used by non-professionals such as the lay public.” Given that most “masks” are simply kept handy for use when required, set aside, and then re-used, most mask-wearing by the public is likely to increase virus exposure, not reduce it.

But do properly used surgical masks reduce disease spread in the general public? To say there are almost no data would not be overstating the case. When households with sick kids were examined, even rigorous mask-wearing provided no statistically significant improvement in adult infections.

Let’s put that in plain English. Even if you did everything to protect yourself with surgical masks, even keeping it on when your kid wants to see your face, it might reduce your chance of getting sick, but we can’t prove it. And that’s in a well designed study intended to get a meaningful result. “[H]ousehold use of face masks is associated with low adherence and is ineffective for controlling seasonal respiratory disease” (emphasis added).

What about homemade cloth masks? In a study using influenza, masks made from cotton T-shirts “should only be considered as a last resort to prevent droplet transmission from infected individuals.” They were only one third as effective when worn by the sick person as a surgical mask. If you’re sick, they’re better than nothing, but that’s not much. The CDC says, “Cloth face coverings may slow the spread of the virus and help people who may have the virus and do not know it from transmitting it to others.” Translation: It might help, but we don’t have any data to back that up.

As we can see from other studies, even surgical masks have minimal benefit in preventing you from getting sick. This was confirmed in a hospital study. Cloth masks had a “relative risk” of flu infection thirteen times greater than medical masks. “Moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection.”

What about the fabled N95 respirator masks? “Respirators work as PPE only when they are the right size and have been fit-tested to demonstrate they achieve an adequate protection factor.” Translation: If you haven’t gone through the fit-testing I’ve been through (the first model didn’t fit!), N95s won’t reduce your exposure to the virus. Sorry.

Of course, smarmy, grasping little pétit dictators like NC’s own Comrade Cooper almost certainly know all this, and issue royal decrees mandating universal mask use anyway. Might there be an explanation for that, you ask? Oh, there certainly might at that.

Merriam-Webster defines pseudo-science as “a system of theories, assumptions, and methods erroneously regarded as scientific.” The Oxford dictionary clarifies by stating, “a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.“

Pseudo-science quickly emerged as the principal domain of Technocrats, but they soon found that scientific debate with those promoting real science was most inconvenient to their social engineering goals. The solution was simple: claim that their own pseudo-science was indeed the real science, and then refuse debate by excluding all other voices to the contrary.

The American public is being spoon-fed a steady diet of pseudo-science in order to justify the wearing of face masks, social distancing and contact tracing. Yet, the actual science points in the polar opposite direction.

Furthermore, those who try to present the real science are shamed, ridiculed and bullied for having such narrow-minded views.

This is a clear sign of Technocrats-at-work. Instead, these are the ones who should be exposed, shamed and ridiculed.

In sum, these dangerous and destructive policies are designed to curtail economic activity, break down social cohesion and control people.

There you have it, folks. And yet somehow, as I always say, here we all are.

Vipers in the nest

Posted on June 26, 2020June 26, 2020 by Mike

A fellow named Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London, did a survey. The answers merely confirm what we all already know.

“In order to find out how willing liberal Americans are to jettison the country’s cultural identity, I decided, on May 7th, to ask what I thought were outlandish questions…” he wrote. “The answers I received amazed me. I then repeated the exercise on June 15th, after the George Floyd killing and subsequent protests to see whether things had gotten even crazier. It turns out they have.”

“Respondents on these platforms lean young, liberal, and white,” Kaufmann noted, but he wanted that, as these groups are the most politically extreme. After getting the survey results, he focused on the 414 respondents who identified themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal.”

He had asked them to disagree or agree with 16 questions that aimed to gauge support for “a radical blow to American cultural nationhood.” Besides the three mentioned above, the next most supported changes were, in order:

“Rebalance the history taught in schools until its voices and subjects reflect the demographics of the population and heritage of Native people and citizens of color” (60 percent support among liberals, and 60 percent support among very liberals);

“Allow our public parks to return to their natural state, before a European sense of order was imposed upon them” (58 percent support among liberals, and 68 percent support among very liberals);

“Remove existing statues of white men from public spaces until the stock of statues matches the demographics of the population” (51 percent support among liberals, and 60 percent support among very liberals);

and “Gradually replace many older public buildings with new structures that don’t perpetuate a Eurocentric order, until a more representative public space is achieved” (52 percent support among liberals, and 59 percent support among very liberals).

In addition, majorities of “very liberal” respondents supported destroying Mount Rushmore and renaming streets and neighborhoods according to racial quotas. So did significant percentages of “liberals,” as you can see in the below graph. A third or more supported renaming the United States of America something “that better reflects the contributions of Native Americans and our diversity as a people.”

When he asked these same questions soon after the George Floyd killing and subsequent riots, support for cultural revolution had increased and support for President Trump had dropped, among both self-described liberals and conservatives.

“All of these protest-driven changes are statistically significant,” Kaufmann writes. “…Far from being a disaster for the Left, as in the past, the protests and rioting seem to have invigorated it.”

Did someone mention Proggy being emboldened by his recent victories just now? Why yes, I believe someone did.Kaufmann remains optimistic that this dismal trajectory can still be reversed, but his proposed solutions don’t impress me.

“Faced with neglect or hostility from the media and educational establishment, conservatives should use civil society institutions, associations, and media to keep the country’s customs and traditions alive in recognizable form. This may extend to advocating for, or relocating, statues and other elements of heritage,” he says.

“Relocating” and “advocating for” are not synonymous, but contradictory. The only proper response, the only one that should be considered, is a hearty “go fuck yourself,” perhaps followed by a stern glare of warning and a snarled “just you fucking try it.” That steely-eyed warning must then be righteously supported by actions—not compromise, not half-measures. Sadly, this ain’t gonna cut it:

To keep America’s traditions and principles alive requires boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning the left’s sources of cultural power. It requires taking spoils after successful tactical operations, such as cutting off federal funding to higher education, enacting full-scale school choice at the state and local levels, buying American-made products from smaller businesses that don’t fund Marxist change agents, and starting and joining new cultural institutions to replace the formerly apolitical ones they’ve mind-hived, like the Boy Scouts and League of Women Voters.

And hey, remember to vote Republican, too!

In a pig’s eye. Proposals like this presume we’re still dealing with rational but well-intentioned fellow Americans, not committed Leftist who viscerally hate America, our way of life, and ourselves personally with an almost marvelous malevolence and venom. Such civilized measures may have had a ghost of a chance of working had they been undertaken decades ago, although I’d posit that even that’s doubtful. They will certainly avail us nothing at this late stage.

We have allowed these vipers into the American nest, to flourish and multiply until the nest was overrun. Boycotts and replacing the institutions the Left has poisoned—ie, ceding defeat by abandoning them—will never suffice to clear it and make it habitable again.

To win, you must truly fight

Posted on June 26, 2020June 27, 2020 by Mike

Mercilessly, remorselessly, viciously, until not one brick is left standing upon another, as the great Curtis LeMay is reputed to have said.

There’s a lifelong maxim that states that only the complete destruction of one’s enemies will suffice.  Merely winning a particular battle is not enough.  If they survive the defeat and can come back to fight another day, then the ultimate victory is not assured.  In contrast, the contest still hangs in the balance, and the outcome of any one battle may not be the overriding determinant of the final result.

This thought is summed up in the work The 48 Laws of Power, a bestselling 1998 book by American author Robert Greene.  Law 15 states, “[A] feared enemy must be crushed completely.  If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out.  More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation.  The enemy will recover and seek revenge.  Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.”

The Democrats follow these rules consistently.  They never let up, not for even the briefest moment.  Neither the Democratic Party nor the liberal media have accepted President Trump as the legitimately elected president for an instant.  By refusing to recognize his election victory as valid, they have absolved themselves of any obligation or requirement to accord either Donald Trump or the office of president with the respect and deference that is ordinarily due.  In their minds, his “illegitimacy” gives them free rein to bombard him with all manner of public disrespect, to disavow any policy or accomplishment of his as meaningless, and to concoct an endless stream of fantastical so-called crimes and transgressions that require immediate investigation, with the thinly veiled aim of ending his tenure.

In the end, the upcoming election is not about Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden. The 2020 version of Biden is plainly afflicted by severe, paralyzing dementia, but even in his so-called “prime,” he had no particular vision or core convictions. This is an election either for Trump or against Trump. Biden’s presence is irrelevant.

The roughly 43% of the solid for-Trump vote and the approximately 45% of the always-anti-Trump vote are already baked into the election. The election will turn on that casually-attentive, somewhat-persuadable 12%. The Republicans will make their usual mistake of thinking that the merits of the issues–the facts on the ground, like how far back the economy/employment has come by November and whether or not the racial tension has smoothed out a bit—will carry the day.

The Democrats will instinctively operate on the correct presumption that it is their skill at employing the 48 Laws of Power approach to campaigning in addition to the facts on the ground that will win the day. President Trump’s team had better get up to speed quickly on waging effective trench warfare in 2020, or they will find themselves outflanked, out-maneuvered and out-gunned in the most crucial electoral battle of our lifetime.

Actually, after the previously undreamed of and rapidly escalating horrors of the last several months, I’ve come to believe that it isn’t about the election either; given the Left’s recent string of unqualified victories, Trump himself is all but irrelevant too. As Feinstein himself notes earlier in the article, the Democrats are not interested in governing the country. It is now so plain as to be inarguable that their goal is to destroy the government, establish a Communist tyranny, and get on with the eternal Progressivist project of remaking mankind entire to better suit them. So confident has the Left become after their long string of wins that they’re not even bothering to hide their ambitions anymore:

In a Wednesday interview with Fox News Channel, Greater New York Black Lives Matter president Hawk Newsome warned that if the country “doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it.”

“If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down the system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively, I could be speaking literally,” Newsome told The Story host Martha MacCallum.” It’s a matter of interpretation…”

“Burn down the system and replace it” IS what you want, shitbird, according to your seditious terrorist organization’s own despicable founders.

Naturally, Trump weighed in, and he ain’t wrong.

President Trump weighed in on Newsome’s threat, tweeting: “Black Lives Matter leader states, ‘If U.S. doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it’. This is Treason, Sedition, Insurrection!”

It surely is at that, Mr Preznit, sir. So may we expect you to stop talking and actually DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT? Say, right after you get around to declaring pAntiFa a terrorist organization like you promised?

Real Americans are in a fight for their very lives at this point. So when do we start acting as if we were, pray tell? When do we start taking our Leftist enemy at his word, and crush him as he deserves?

Update! SteveF recommends this typically brilliant Kipling poem in comments to the previous post, but I think it’s more apropos to tack it onto this one.

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
They were icy — willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.

Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not suddently bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

Speaking strictly for myself, I’m what you might call an early bird; I started on hating ’em myself a long, long time ago.

Civil disintegration

Posted on June 22, 2020June 22, 2020 by Mike

And a very uncivil war.

What seems most obvious is that a civil war, like any war, requires two sides pitted against one another in outright combat or in destructive ideological engagements. And given the mass capitulation of mayors, governors, police chiefs, media editors, entertainment celebrities, CEOs and members of Congress to the insurrectionary cadres holding the nation hostage — forces of disarray like Antifa, Black Lives Matter, raging Twitter mobs, hate-promoting institutions like the SPLC, the ACLU, The Nation of Islam and others — one is hard pressed to locate and identify a respectable “other side” of the struggle.

Admittedly, there is a beleaguered though resolute president (abandoned by many who should logically be his allies, including members of his own party), a small number of conservative commentators who have stood their ground in the public square, and an inchoate “silent majority” (assuming it is indeed a majority), but they scarcely comprise a visible and identifiable “other side” equal in approximate strength to an active, vociferous and bellicose hostile power. That being the case, we cannot say that a de facto civil war is in progress. The side of law and order seems to have surrendered without much in the way of robust and concerted resistance.

We can say that the nation has grown dysfunctional and largely ungovernable — civil disintegration, not civil war — and will remain so unless those who believe in the Constitution and re-possess sufficient authority in the military and government agencies, backed by a genuine silent majority emerging at election time, can mount a viable defense against the agents of destruction. This does not mean that the left will be defeated or lay down its arms, only that the playing field — or battlefield — will have been made rather more level.

At that point, once a balance of forces is achieved and a meaningful engagement of opposing sides becomes possible, we may have entered a condition of veritable civil war, whether institutional or manifest, unless a resolution or armistice can be worked out. And the only resolution that might make some initial sense is an official divorce between the warring segments of the nation, a secession of states from the federal system, red and blue states going their own ways. Such would inevitably involve manifold complications, with citizens of differing political loyalties abiding in the same state, the division of economic and industrial property, the re-assignment of components of the military, the complexities of foreign relations, and so on.

People keep blathering hopefully about this “secession” business, as if it was anyplace near the realm of actual possibility. I’m kinda surprised to see the usually sober Solway doing it though, and apparently taking it seriously—even going so far as to suggest such a thing might be done peacefully.

Sorry to rain on the fantasist parade, everyone, but it’s a delusion, an entirely absurd proposition. Or does anybody really want to argue that the federal government of the US of A might entertain the notion of dissolving itself to allow states, regions, or whatever other imaginary subdivision go their separate ways without a tremendous, inconceivably bloody struggle?

Do I really need to point out how that worked out the first time around?

It’s a fever dream, the aimless woolgathering of a madman. Which is not to say that the nation won’t end up riven asunder, mind. In fact, any realistic assessment of the unbridgeable chasm between Normals and the agressively batshit-insane Left would almost have to conclude that some kind of division is well-nigh inevitable. But it ain’t gonna be peaceful, and it ain’t gonna be bloodless. It’s gonna be brutal, nightmarish, and destructive, with no guarantee of ending well for any of us.

Discourse On Voluntary Servitude

Posted on June 21, 2020June 21, 2020 by Mike

That’s the best-known work of French judge and philosopher Étienne de la Boétie, a passionate and uncompromising advocate for human liberty and against tyranny. As y’all reprobates and nogoodniks may or may not have noticed, I have been stealthily expanding the “Notable quotes” section with some more good stuff lately, and ran across a memorable one from de la Boétie via a WRSA link to yet another excellent Robert Gore piece, which I will get to excerpting anon in its own post. But seeing the one I plonked into the sidebar mentioned in a comment at SLL inspired me to revisit some of de la Boétie’s work myself, which I admit to having all but forgotten about after his having been glancingly mentioned back in my college French class back in the Pleistocene or thereabouts.

So without further ado, enjoy (if that’s the right word; it makes for pretty uncomfortable reading, actually) these bits from his seminal Discourse On Voluntary Servitude, also known as “The Against-One.” It’s somewhat lengthy, but quite rewarding; you should bookmark it and read it all when you get the time. Written in around 1548 when de la Boétie was only 18 years of age (!), the central thrust is that tyrants hold power only because and for as long as the people concede it to them. Its relevance to current-day America’s self-inflicted contretemps is self-evident.

To achieve the good that they desire, the bold do not fear danger; the intelligent do not refuse to undergo suffering. It is the stupid and cowardly who are neither able to endure hardship nor to vindicate their rights; they stop at merely longing for them, and lose through timidity the valor roused by the effort to claim their rights, although the desire to enjoy them still remains as part of their nature. A longing common to both the wise and the foolish, to brave men and to cowards, is this longing for all those things which, when acquired, would make them happy and contented. Yet one element appears to be lacking. I do not know how it happens that nature fails to place within the hearts of men a burning desire for liberty, a blessing so great and so desirable that when it is lost all evils follow thereafter, and even the blessings that remain lose taste and savor because of their corruption by servitude. Liberty is the only joy upon which men do not seem to insist; for surely if they really wanted it they would receive it. Apparently they refuse this wonderful privilege because it is so easily acquired.

Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?

It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement. It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done because they had to. This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and considering as quite natural the condition into which they were born…Nevertheless it is clear enough that the powerful influence of custom is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection. It is said that Mithridates trained himself to drink poison. Like him we learn to swallow, and not to find bitter, the venom of servitude.

By this time it should be evident that liberty once lost, valor also perishes.

Like I said, uncomfortable reading—not least for how thoroughly it reinforces the truth behind the hoary old saw which claims that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Despite how desperately the Left would like to believe otherwise, some verities really ARE eternal.

Derac(ist)ination

Posted on June 19, 2020June 19, 2020 by Mike

Et tu, Mrs Butterworth’s?

Both hot cereal maker Cream of Wheat and syrup brand Mrs. Butterworth’s have confirmed they’ve initiated packaging reviews in the wake of PepsiCo’s bombshell announcement on Wednesday that it would retire Aunt Jemima after 131 years.

That was quickly followed on Wednesday by a statement from Uncle Ben’s, which said it is “evolving the visual brand identity.” A spokesperson said the brand is “evaluating all possibilities,” so it is unclear if the name Uncle Ben will remain.

Once again, this marks a dramatic shift for these brands’ corporate parent companies, who just two months ago had little or no comment on the mascots’ roots in nostalgia for slavery.

“Nostalgia for slavery,” is it? Well, okay then. An easy call to make, I guess, especially when you hear the exaggerated Negro patois that fairly well screams—FOR JUSTICE!—from this old ad:

Sheeit, cuz, dat syrup ho be talkin’ all black n shit, nomesayn?

The Mrs Butterworth’s talking syrup-jug ads featured a woman named Kwelzeesha Obunto Bootylicious McCorkle for many…oh, no, wait, it was actually some cracker-ass bitch named Mark Kay Bergman, who later went on to voice female characters on South Park until her suicide in 1999, as well as doing…ummm…Disney’s Snow White?!?

Hey, can’t get much more “nostalgic for slavery” than that, right? Or black-stereotype-y, either.

Fucking idiots. But hey, you corporate crawly things keep right on with all the bowing, scraping, and forelock tugging to a pack of ravenous PC hyenas that will never be satisfied no matter how hard you grovel, by all means. Then, one day, maybe we’ll end up like this:

Activists Fight Racism By Driving All People Of Color Out Of Pop Culture
U.S.—Activists are fighting racism by demanding that people of color be removed from all media, brands, logos, mascots, and anywhere else they might pop up.

“Anywhere we see a person of color, we see racism. So we must end racism by making sure people of color are not depicted anywhere,” said white liberal activist Petunia Faucett. “We will not rest until all pop culture icons of color are eliminated. Then, racism will be over.”

Suuuure it will, genius.

Update! Well, this would explain a lot.

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