We Are Soooooo Screwed

Riding the tiger

Posted on March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 by Mike

The unthinkable has now become all too thinkable.

It is a good thing to keep in mind when evaluating predictions about what comes after the great lock down. Trump is no longer talking about Easter as the back to normal date and has extended the lock down through April. Governors are now in a race to see who can come up with the bleakest prediction for when things get back to normal. The Brits now lead the race with six months as their estimate. This is an unprecedented time, which means what was considered unthinkable is very thinkable.

For example, ten years ago most Americans assumed the political classes had learned a hard lesson from Watergate. They had let the security services run wild for too long and suddenly they were a threat to the politicians. The days of a J. Edgar Hoover spying on people were over. Not only was that false, but there was a plot among FBI officials to interfere in the presidential election. They went so far as to concoct an impeachment trap in order to remove Donald Trump.

Six months ago is was unthinkable that these same security agencies would have the president removed by some other means. Six month ago we did not have a third of the country hiding under their beds. We did not have major cities turned into ghost towns by quarantine orders. How unreasonable is it to think that the same people who launched the seditious plot in 2015 would find themselves a Lee Harvey Oswald? It sounds crazy, but we live in an age where the crazy quickly becomes the norm.

What about something less cloak and dagger like martial law? State governors are getting pretty close to the line between state of emergency and assuming dictatorial powers over their states. New Jersey is supposedly issuing travel passes to citizens and arresting people for gathering in their own homes. Los Angeles has suspended the second amendment. Trump has contemplated a Federal quarantine of New York City, which would probably mean troops on the streets to enforce it.

If this does go on for months and the cracks in the ruling class begin to show, is civil unrest really unthinkable? Is civil war unthinkable? Rhode Island now considers New Yorkers persona non grata. Pennsylvania is doing the same. Mainers are now going vigilante on suspected New Jerseyites. Sure, concern for the virus is the stated reason, but a general dislike for New Yorkers is the real reason. There are lots of such divisions in this country. Is civil war really so unthinkable?

Just because something is possible, does not mean it is likely. It is possible to hit the lottery for a billion dollars, but the odds are very small. What we’re talking about here though are the things that were thought impossible or close to impossible just six months ago that are now suddenly possible. Maybe they are still unthinkable within the ruling classes, but we thought the FBI and CIA spying on presidential candidates was unthinkable until not so long ago.

Events have a way of reverbating through history, ramping up in ways the people who initially believed themselves capable of controlling them, of directing them for their own purposes, could never have imagined. And then?

Prison Planet?

Posted on March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 by Mike

Welcome to Prison Nation.

Over the weekend, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio warned that “synagogues” and “churches” that disobey his order to remain shut down may be closed permanently as punishment. One can’t help but notice that the good mayor conspicuously omitted one type of worship facility from this dire warning. But whether mosques are exempt or not, the bigger issue is that Bill de Blasio certainly does not have the authority to permanently close places of worship as a punitive measure for defying his commands. He has the word “mayor” in front of his name, not “sultan” or “king” or “supreme leader.” And the First Amendment still exists, even if he’d prefer to pretend otherwise.

But this is just one example of government officials seizing power that does not belong to them. And it’s not only happening in the United States. Over in the UK, police are setting up checkpoints to questions drivers about where they’re going and why. Those deemed to be engaged in “non-essential” travel will be fined. Some UK police departments have gone so far as to deploy drones to track and follow non-essential joggers, hikers, and dog walkers.

Well, okay then. But that’s only Once-Great Britain, right? As I pointed out last night, the crucial question of whether the English people remain English was answered long ago. A hint as to which way that decision went might be found in the name of the “overpraised Chancellor” Hitchens complained about in the piece I excerpted, which is hardly one of those fine multi-hyphenated English names of old—the ones PG Wodehouse had such riotous fun with, like Cyril Bassington-Bassington, August Fink-Nottle (“Spink-Bottle” to Wooster’s beloved Aunt Dahlia, of course), or Claude Cattermole “Catsmeat” Potter-Pirbright.

Yep, that’s Anglund, and Anglund definitely ain’t what once it was. Thankfully, America is still America, right? And always will be, right?

Well. About that.

This week a pastor was arrested and charged with criminal offenses for holding a worship service. Let us note that this event occurred not in North Korea or Saudi Arabia, but the United States of America. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, of Revival International Ministries, turned himself into authorities after leading his congregation in Sunday worship, which put him in violation of his county’s “stay-at-home” order.

Hillsborough County in Florida, like many other states and localities across the country, has forcibly shut down all establishments that it has deemed “non-essential.” As far as I know, no government at any level, anywhere in the nation, has deigned to label churches essential. Our Founding Fathers, who gave the right to assemble and the right to practice religion pride of place in the Bill of Rights, seemed to have disagreed. But in these times we are not subject to the opinions of the Founding Fathers or even the legal document they wrote. We have entered a point in our history where governors, mayors, and local county boards, can come up with any rule they like, outlaw whatever behavior they don’t like, and enforce their edicts at gun point. But to question this new system, I have been repeatedly informed, is to wish death on our nation’s elderly population.

Pastor Howard-Browne insists that his church took many precautions. Hand sanitizer was given out. Staff wore gloves. Congregants were spaced out as much as possible. They may not have all been 6 feet apart, but they were certainly better spaced than you will be if you wait in line at the grocery store. As it happens, you can go to the grocery store 10 times a day and load your cart up with snacks, candy, and soda. You can then stand in a crowd of densely packed people as you wait to purchase your items from a cashier who may or may not be wearing gloves. All of this, says our Dear Leaders, is both safe and essential. But sitting in a church, a few feet from the next person, taking care to cover your mouth when you cough, and making sure that your hands are washed, is both unsafe and inessential. Does that make any real sense? Probably not. Can the government simply declare all churches non-essential, close them indefinitely, and thus circumvent the First Amendment with so much ease as to render it effectively nullified from here on out? I doubt that was ever what the men who wrote it had in mind, but here we are.

I am trying to imagine a definition of “religious liberty” that includes the government closing churches indefinitely on the basis that they are not essential enough to remain open. I cannot think of one that would be at all cogent or meaningful. Indeed, it has become obvious (if it wasn’t already) that our mainstream notions of “liberty” and “rights” and “freedom” are largely nonsensical, as evidenced by the people who normally assert these concepts as absolutes but now insist that the government has the unquestioned power to lock us in our homes and shut our businesses for as long as it pleases.

Most of us, it turns out, do not have a governing philosophy or set of principles. We are slaves to our emotions. So, if the government scares us enough, we will rip the “Give me liberty or give me death” and “Don’t tread on me” bumper stickers off of our cars and stuff them in the closet while we cower along side it. Then when the threat has passed — or at least we are told that it has passed — we will proudly affix the bumper stickers back on our bumpers again, and sing bravely about our love of freedom.

For as long as the authorities still allow anyone to sing, and not one minute longer. Sadly, tragically, at this point a reasonably objective, historically literate person can only conclude that our Founders wouldn’t lower themselves to piss in our mouths if our gums were on fire. Can’t honestly say I’d blame ’em for feeling that way, either.

Chinese Yellow Peril Fu Manchu Wuhan Sino-Flu claims another victim

Posted on March 29, 2020March 29, 2020 by Mike

Peter Hitchens’ equanimity.

As I watched the Prime Minister order mass house arrest on Monday night, I felt revulsion, anger and grief – as anyone brought up when this was a free and well-governed country would. I also felt terribly alone.

You could not have known, from anything broadcast that night or printed the following day, that anyone was unhappy with these events. But they were.

So, above all things this week, I would like to thank all the kind, perplexed people who have got in touch with me by so many means, to say they share my doubts about the Government’s handling of Covid-19.

After last week, can we rule anything out? This new Stasi society has a horrifying level of support. Humberside police are already advertising a ‘portal’ for citizens to inform on their neighbours for breaking the ‘social distancing’ rules.

If you think they won’t get any takers, think again. Northamptonshire police have revealed that their control room has had ‘dozens and dozens’ of calls about people ignoring the order.

I must refer you folks once more to a great quote I read someplace in the aftermath of the 9/11 “Somebody Did Something” man-caused-disaster event. A Brit pundit was asked whether he thought Great Britain could hope to successfully stand against Moslem terrorism. The pundit briskly responded, “That isn’t the question. The question is whether the English people remain English.” Alas, that question was answered long ago, it seems.

Most people will, by now, have viewed the online film of Metropolitan police officers bellowing officiously at sunbathers on Shepherd’s Bush Green in London, energetically stamping out the foul crime of lying on the grass (would they have paid so much attention, two weeks ago, to a gaggle of louts making an unpleasant noise, or to marijuana smokers?).

Others will have seen the films, taken by Derbyshire police drones, of lonely walkers on the remote, empty hills, publicly pillorying them for not obeying the regulations. It is genuinely hard to see what damage these walkers have done.

But as a former resident of the USSR, I can tell you that this sort of endless meddling by petty authority in the details of life, reinforced by narks, is normal in unfree societies – such as we have now become for an indefinite period. It is, by the way, also a seedbed for corruption.

Meanwhile, our economy is still crippled, and the overpraised Chancellor Rishi Sunak, like some beaming Dr Feelgood with a case full of dodgy stimulants, seeks to soothe the pain by huge injections of funny money.

He will get this back from us as soon as we are allowed out again. Just you wait till you get the bill, in increased taxes, inflation and devastated savings.

Gee, thank goodness such things could never happen here, right?

It ought not to be so. In fact, several powerful pieces of evidence have come to light, suggesting that the Great Panic is foolish and wrong.

I shall come to these, to underline the fact that it is not I, alone, who have these doubts. I do not claim to be an expert. But I refer to those who definitely are experts, who doubt the wisdom of what we are doing.

He goes on to cite that evidence chapter and verse. Over there or over here, it’s as I’ve been saying: whatever this whole contretemps was orginally all about, it ain’t about that now. Our would-be masters saw their chance, and they jumped on it with both feet. Long, long after the Chinese Fug itself has faded into dim and distant memory, we’ll be dealing with the disastrous consequences of the panicked overreaction to it.

When fear is fueled, principle is abandoned

Posted on March 27, 2020March 27, 2020 by Mike

And the Left is lovin’ it.

Consider, for a moment, what ideas Americans seem to have generally accepted in the last few weeks.

First, there seems to no longer be a question as to whether or not the government has a responsibility to ensure health care for American citizens. The prospect of some hospitals, in some specific locales, exceeding health care capacity has caused the bulk of the American economy, at the behest of government, to simply stop functioning in order to avoid it. In other words, the health of a comparative few is of far greater importance than the personal, financial, and social interests of the many. If we accept that as gospel and the creed of our governance, as it seems we have, then how is Medicare-for-All anything less than a moral imperative?

Secondly, there no longer seems to be any question as to whether our government needs to act swiftly and decisively to defend against an invisible threat which presents an unknown, and unknowable, future impact, even if that means destroying American free enterprise, and the lives and livelihoods of countless millions. Green New Deal, anyone?

Thirdly, this crisis appears to have nullified any devotion to the concept of individual liberty among Americans. A friend in Chicago tells me that he and his young daughters daren’t risk even walking to the park that his tax dollars built, as he risks a $500 fine for doing so. The stiffest resistance encountered by the government officials imposing these infringements upon law-abiding citizens is the quiet grumbling that exists beneath all these loud sermons about “social distancing” and “flattening the curve.”

And finally, as Americans are left unable to care for themselves because the government is prohibiting their free association in the economic marketplace, the government is now facilitating a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers as cash payments to Americans below certain income thresholds.

It is not a coincidence that the greatest economic depression and the greatest expansion of the federal government’s power in American history occurred at precisely the same moment in time (see: New Deal Era). Once you understand that, why American progressives seem all-too-willing to sacrifice Americans’ economic prosperity while promising government-issued security blankets during the crisis shouldn’t be a mystery to anyone.

Americans are being asked to not only accept unnecessarily rigid social restrictions, but to also accept an indefinitely disabled economy for as long as the government sees fit, even though its continued disability has the potential to destroy our free enterprise system and fundamentally alter the American citizen’s relationship with the government.

To justify all of this, Americans are routinely presented the false metaphor that we are at war, and that this war requires sacrifices on our part. But millions of Americans aren’t enduring economic strife, social anxiety, and government-imposed quarantines because modern-day Nazis are looking to enslave humanity. No, we are enduring all of those things as a result of our blanket government policy responses to this pandemic, which apparently require bigger, broader, and more dangerous government policy responses to rectify.

You guys know what I always say: when the Left is winning, America is losing. In a time when government is using panic to expand its reach and power by orders of magnitude, conservative “principles” are old, stale news as the putative Right joins the general stampede to clamber aboard the Big Government bandwagon. All of which means the Left is winning.

Requiem for the Republic

Posted on March 27, 2020March 27, 2020 by Mike

She’s dead, Jim.

In order to maintain something of an economy with most of the nation locked away in their homes, there has been a 2 Trillion dollar payment to individuals, businesses and corporations to stabilize the economy and another 4 Trillion dollar loosening of the Federal Reserve to go along with it. What does that mean? It means that created out of air is twice the annual tax receipts for the United States. There is no way that is not a significant economic event. It is the invention of 1/3 of GDP. That it would not have a drastic and detrimental effect on the future of the nation is insanity only capable of being ignored by graduates of the public school system.

In one fell swoop of a minor pandemic the United States as a nation has abandoned both the republic and capitalism. Individual rights are destroyed, never again to be seen as rational arguments against the power of the state. Capitalism has lost out to the political and economic ideology of Soviet Russia allowing for such things as “travel permits” and sequestration of healthy individuals. It might be politically acceptable to brush all of this off for the time being as we sort out how big of a problem the pandemic is going to be, but it will never return to what it was and what few and precious rights once available to us will no longer be accessible through the courts.

It’s over. The elephant is dead. Capitalism is gone, the republic is gone. What we have now is an opportunity to feed off of the dead elephant, to stockpile as much as we can, to distance ourselves from each other and prepare for the ultimate battle for survival. The economic collapse is already in motion. It would have come along anyway, eventually, but this stimulus package stacked on top of the already soaring debt and unfunded liabilities will cripple the nation forever. It will implode. That is not to say that it will not chug along on four square wheels for some time, but the last support has been kicked out from under it, that of the belief in the rule of law and an understanding of global economics. Without those, nothing prevents the ceiling up from crashing down. It is what we recognize in Christianity as faith. Remove faith (as we have) and the only thing left are words, memes circulating the popular sites with no structural substance.

I note that hereabouts at least, the Christian churches are among the many things under lockdown, but golf courses…ain’t?!? Strangely, I’ve yet to see much specific mention of mosques, nor of how our newly-decreed statewide lockdown might affect Ramadan. But I do confess the idea of holding “digital Ramadan” observances just tickles me silly.

Oooops!

Posted on March 27, 2020March 27, 2020 by Mike

Never mind.

If it’s true that the novel coronavirus would kill millions without shelter-in-place orders and quarantines, then the extraordinary measures being carried out in cities and states around the country are surely justified. But there’s little evidence to confirm that premise—and projections of the death toll could plausibly be orders of magnitude too high.

Fear of Covid-19 is based on its high estimated case fatality rate—2% to 4% of people with confirmed Covid-19 have died, according to the World Health Organization and others. So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four million could die. We believe that estimate is deeply flawed. The true fatality rate is the portion of those infected who die, not the deaths from identified positive cases.

The latter rate is misleading because of selection bias in testing. The degree of bias is uncertain because available data are limited. But it could make the difference between an epidemic that kills 20,000 and one that kills two million. If the number of actual infections is much larger than the number of cases—orders of magnitude larger—then the true fatality rate is much lower as well. That’s not only plausible but likely based on what we know so far.

Follows, some crunching of what admittedly meager numbers we actually have, an unknown portion of which are either incomplete or unreliable. Conclusion?

This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible.

If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions.

A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns.

I feel confident in sticking with a tried and true central premise of mine: whatever the solution to any given problem might be, if any, it’s EXTREMELY unlikely that it will come from government. I have for years now distrusted both its intentions and its capabilities, and see no reason to abandon that position now just because everybody else has suddenly decided to embrace the old faith again out of nothing but sheer terror.

The excerpt above is from a WSJ article, paywalled of course, so the link I provided above is actually to an archive.is snapshot. It may or may not work for some of you guys, I dunno. But except for the statistical nitty-gritty, I already copped the good parts for ya anyhow.

(Via CBD)

Fact check update! More number-crunching, unveiling the truth behind all the Enemedia lies.

It begins

Posted on March 27, 2020March 27, 2020 by Mike

Shit just got REAL, people.

Waffle House says 418 of its restaurants are closed as coronavirus continues to spread

Updated: Waffle House has increased the number of restaurants closed since this story was first published.

Waffle House, the restaurant chain known for having its own unofficial index used during natural disasters, said it’s closing 418 of its restaurants.

In various social media posts, the chain featured a map showing the 418 closed restaurants, while another 1,574 across the southeastern U.S. remained open. The posts also featured the hashtag “#WaffleHouseIndexRed.

Being a HUGE fan of Waffle House myself—anybody who’s spent as much time on the road as I have over the years simply couldn’t NOT be—this reads like a real tragedy to me. But it ain’t just Waffle House that’s suffering; the national Restaurant Holocaust I’ve been predicting is just getting its boots on, looks like.

The Cheesecake Factory, one of the most popular sit-down restaurant chains in the country, says it will not be able to make upcoming rent payments for any of its storefronts on April 1 because of significant loss of income due to the coronavirus crisis.

The Calabasas Hills-based company informed all of its landlords in a letter dated March 18 (reproduced below) that a severe decline in restaurant traffic has decreased its cash flow and “inflicted a tremendous financial blow” to business. Cheesecake Factory’s affiliated restaurants, such as Rock Sugar and North Italia, will also not make April 1 rent payments.

Company chairman and CEO David Overton writes, “Due to these extraordinary events, I am asking for your patience, and frankly, your help.” He continues, “we appreciate our landlords’ understanding given the exigency of the current situation.” The letter says that the company hopes to resume paying rent as soon as possible.

Cheesecake Factory, for those of you unfamiliar with ’em, isn’t exactly your basic small-time mom-and-pop operation.

The Cheesecake Factory was founded in Beverly Hills in 1972 and maintains its original location on Beverly Drive, with 39 locations in California. In total, it operates 294 restaurants in 39 states, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Toronto, Canada. In 2019, the company also acquired Phoenix-based Fox Restaurants, including North Italia, Flower Child, and The Henry. Most of the company’s landlords are malls, including Simon and Westfield.

In telling landlords that it will not able to pay rent, the Cheesecake Factory essentially confirms that it is in the same position that many independent restaurateurs currently find themselves in. In a statement to investors on March 23 — five days after the letter to landlords — the Cheesecake Factory announced that it would curtail development of unopened restaurants and tap into a $90 million credit line to increase its available cash. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, the Cheesecake Factory has closed 27 locations across the country, and pivoted other locations to a takeout and delivery-only model — which it said just days ago was enabling the company to “operate sustainably at present” — and its stock price has fallen by more than 50 percent in the past month.

With 38,000 employees, the Cheesecake Factory is one of the largest restaurant employers in the country. Given its recent stock woes and the ongoing reduction in business due to the coronavirus pandemic, it seems possible that it, like many restaurants, could end up needing a bailout to survive.

As I keep saying, this shutdown/lockdown business is going to wind up being one hell of a lot more costly long-term than some folks seem to realize. If a huge national chain like CF is struggling, just imagine what this is doing to all the independently-owned places out there—and how many of those businesses are going to simply cease to exist.

Nor is the dismal impact limited to restaurants and bars; pretty much any small business you could name, in any field, is in a similar untenable situation. The jobs they provide, the taxes they pay, the livelihoods their employees depend on—all gone for good, never to return no matter how big a “stimulus” the goobermint finally comes up with. The suppliers and services they support, the customers they serve, the communities they enliven—all damaged if not brought to ruin themselves by this cascade of catastrophe.

Our “leaders,” in the arrogance of their mistaken assumption of omnipotence, decided to light a fuse that cannot be extinguished. Now it’s too late for the rest of us to do anything but sit back and wait for the explosion, and see how much of American society is caught inside the blast radius.

You have been conned

Posted on March 25, 2020March 25, 2020 by Mike

Robert Zimmerman lays out what it’s REALLY all about. Hint: same old thing it always is.

While common sense, caution, and the human ability to adapt to fluctuating circumstances requires our society to react to the COVID-19 epidemic spreading across the globe, our additional ability to think coolly and rationally requires us to not allow our emotions to run wildly and out-of-control, taking actions that might feel good for a moment but do no good and maybe more harm in the long run.

It also requires to look closely at the actions of our lawmakers, whose motives are now commonly not driven by an interest in the country but by their own interests and an insatiable desire for power. Two stories this past weekend were quite revealing in this context.

First we have the incredible request by the Justice Department for new special powers so that it can supposedly react to the epidemic properly.

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.

…There are more requests on the list, including the ability for the chief judge of any district court to “pause court proceedings” when the court is impacted by civil disobedience or other emergency situations. Such a “pause” could be put into effect for pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures. In other words, this would effectively throw habeas corpus out the window for the duration of the pandemic. You could, in theory at least, be arrested and tossed in a cell and left there indefinitely without getting the chance to appear before a judge and ask to be released, have bail set or anything else.

Remember, this is essentially the same Justice Department that for the past three years has worked hard to misuse the FISA court in an effort to overthrow the legal election of a president they don’t like, even as they abused their power to put several people in prison and ruin the lives of others for relatively minor process crimes that would not have even existed without their fake investigation.

You think they won’t misuse these new powers, should Congress give such to them? And in what way do any of these totalitarian and unconstitutional powers contribute in any way to overcoming COVID-19?

They don’t. That’s the giveaway, see. Even for those blind or naive enough not to have seen what was coming early on, rely on loathsome Demo-dimwit James Clyburn to be stupid enough to give the game away.

House Democrats are indicating they want to go bigger and broader than the already massive economic stimulus package offered by Senate Republicans to blunt the coronavirus pandemic.

On a Thursday conference call featuring more than 200 members of the House Democratic caucus, lawmakers one by one laid out a sweeping wish list of provisions they want to see included in the nascent package, including a boost in infrastructure spending, an expansion of Social Security benefits and funding for states to set up an all-mail voting system in the event the pandemic extends into November’s elections.

“This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision,” Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told lawmakers, according to a source on the call.

It is at that, and they’re making the most of it. Hey, isn’t there an old saw, probably apocryphal, about the Chinese word for “crisis” having a dual meaning, also signifying “opportunity”? Back to Zimmerman for the closer:

Can you imagine removing these restrictions next year, when the flu returns (as it always does) and causes even half those deaths? And if the lockdowns have been removed this summer because the Wuhan virus has subsided, I will not be surprised if they are re-imposed next fall, due to the annual much more serious flu season. A precedent will have been set, a precedent that every single one of our power-hungry and very corrupt politicians will wish to use, as often as possible.

Fortunately, we do have an election coming in November. If these thugs in power continue their effort to make themselves our dictators, we will have a chance to tell them otherwise.

The big question however is: Will we? I wish I knew.

Which brings to mind another, darker old saw: If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.

The rights and the wrongs

Posted on March 25, 2020March 25, 2020 by Mike

VDH isn’t often wrong. And he’s mostly right here, too. Mostly.

There is some evidence from Germany and to a lesser extent South Korea, that it may be possible to see the fatality rate dip below 1 percent. And with the breathing space from the lockdown, better hygiene (the degree of constant and near-obsessive cleaning at businesses that are still open is quite amazing), more knowledge and data, better medical protocols, the use of some efficacious drugs, warmer weather, and experience with the disease will, in perfect-storm fashion, begin to mitigate the effects of the virus.

Should we get the lethality rate down to German levels (currently two to three in 1,000), then we can cautiously assume that those who predicted that the coronavirus could eventually be contextualized as a bad, H1N1-like flu will no longer be demonized as nuts, and life can resume with reasonable precautions and focused quarantines and isolation.

Yeah, aside from that whole collapsed-economy thing we’re all gonna be just peachy-keen.

In two or three weeks, if we can just allow most businesses to reopen, gear up to pandemic testing, track cases and contacts in the manner of past protocols that lessened polio, tuberculosis, AIDS, and measles outbreaks, and focus on the ill and elderly, then the economy will reboot.

“Most businesses” assumes that “most” will survive. At least in the bar/restaurant industry, very many of them will not. The effects from that are going to be felt way beyond just some out-of-work wait staff and bartenders, too.

But now the current economy is starting to resemble a patient in an induced coma, one whom no one knows whether he will recover after the respirator is disconnected. But still, there are reasons for optimism: historically low interest rates will eventually encourage big-ticket buying.

By people employed in precarious, thin-margin sectors who haven’t worked in weeks? It’s often said that most Americans are only one or two paychecks away from homelessness. Those people are now past that threshold, with no end in sight. I dunno, maybe I’m just too much of a gloomy Gus and all, but seems to me the math and the optimism are somewhat in conflict at the moment.

Hanson goes on for a bit in that overly-sunny vein, bless his heart. But then we come to the good stuff.

In a sophisticated society under lockdown, is it more existentially valuable to know how to fix a toilet, replace a circuit breaker, or change a tire, or to be a New York fashion designer, a Hollywood actor, or a corporate merger lawyer? At 9 p.m., when you go downtown in need of a critical prescription, are you really all that furious that a law-abiding citizen who has a gun and concealed permit is also in line—or would you be more relieved that gun control laws might ensure that his ilk never enters an all-night pharmacy?

So who is important and who not?

We were often told globalized elites on the coast were the deserved 21st-century winners, while the suckers and rubes in-between had better learn coding or head to the fracking fields.

But who now is more important than the trucker who drives 12-hours straight to deliver toilet paper to Costco?

Sorry, but here’s another nit I must pick. Any trucker who drives 12 hours straight these days is going to find himself out of work somewhere around the 13th one. Electronic logs track every minute of the driving day; with ironclad rules mandating not only total hours but also occasional thirty minute breaks throughout, and freight companies closely monitoring the data so as to avoid thousands of dollars in fines levied by state authorities who monitor ditto, there just ain’t no wiggle-room left in the workday.

My brother, an owner-operator who hauls containers out of Savannah, routinely finds his legal driving time running thin when he’s about 20 minutes away from his home. He then faces a stark choice: pull over somewhere and shut down (a problem all its own considering the chronic shorage of rest-stop parking), step out of the cab, and walk laps around his rig for the required “rest” period (you’re actually not supposed to just sit inside the truck and relax, or lie down in the bunk if you’re driving a sleeper). Alternatively, he can just say to hell with it, go on home and park the damned thing, and hope like hell nobody catches him at such reckless brigandry.

There have also been occasions when his entire daily duty-time allotment is nearly used up only a few miles from his home, which means a shutdown of ten hours before he can make another move legally. On those occasions, he usually just parks at a truck stop not far from the house and has the wife come pick him up and ferry him on home. Then she gets to drag herself out of bed at four AM next day to drop him off again, which she just LOOOOVES. A time or three he’s even had me do it, although I live a good forty miles or more from his place.

He’s gotten away with defying the thirty-minute-break rule a good few times, but is currently on probation after being busted twice recently—”condition yellow,” his employer calls it. One more infraction, and he’s out on his condition-red ass to join all those waiters and bartenders out there on the soup kitchen line.

So sorry again, Victor, but those heroic truckers won’t be driving any twelve hours straight, I’m afraid. Not for long, they won’t. Oh, many if not most of them could easily do it without excessive risk to anybody; hell, most of the old pros from the paper-log days have, in fact, a bazillion times over. I have myself, in fact, and more than just once or twice too. They’re certainly willing enough, mind; running long hours on the road all by your lonesome is simply what they do; it’s the job, no more, no less. But the law—as handed down to us from On High by college-boy goobermint eggheads who never hauled a load or humped freight on a loading dock a single day in their life, and don’t know anybody who has either—don’t allow that sort of thing. And while there used to be certain cracks you could slip through in order to get the job done, those cracks have all been sealed up by technology and the nanny-state mindset now.

But back to the good stuff again.

Do we really need to ask such questions of whether the presence of the czar for diversity and inclusion at Yale is missed as much as the often-caricatured cop on patrol at 2 a.m. in New Haven?

Do social justice student protestors who surround and heckle the politically suspicious now in ones and twos also scream in the faces of the incorrect plumber who unclogs their locked-down apartment drain?

The virus has reminded us again, but in an unorthodox fashion, that the world is bifurcated by the degreed versus the non-college educated, rural versus urban, sophisticates in opposition to supposed rubes—and the dichotomy has been telling. I don’t suppose Rick Wilson will go on CNN again to do his fake-Okie accent to ridicule the supposed unwashed, who deliver his food and energy, as viewers might wonder what exactly was his expertise.

Oh, I dunno. I wouldn’t be willing to place any bets on what depths a pustulent lowlife like Wilson might or might not be capable of stooping to.

When your refrigerator goes out under quarantine and your supplies begin to rot, do you really need another rant from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)—or do you rather need a St. Michael Smith and St. Uriel Mendoza to appear out of nowhere as the archangels from Home Depot to wheel up and connect a new one?

The real head-scratcher is how so many people ever convinced themselves they needed anything at all from the cretin Waters other than a cheerful, courteous “drive around to the first window, please” in the first damned place.

China syndrome

Posted on March 22, 2020March 22, 2020 by Mike

Tucker expands on some of those Bigger Problems I mentioned below.

There are serious long-term problems facing America, as we’ve told you about for years on this show. Thanks to outsourcing, this country no longer has the same reserve of stable middle-class manufacturing jobs we did even 30 years ago.

In coastal cities, housing has become astronomically expensive. Prices are rising far quicker than wage growth. And most tragically, an opioid epidemic kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. One of the chief reasons for that is a synthetic opiate called fentanyl that is smuggled in from abroad.

Now, these might seem like unrelated problems, but they’re not. A single theme unites them — a systematic decision by many of our country’s most powerful leaders to sell out America to China.

Those jobs that were outsourced, they went to China. Those rising home prices, all-cash Chinese buyers are a major contributor to that, though it’s almost never said out loud. Fentanyl — made in China with the knowledge and tacit approval of the Chinese Communist Party.

China is no longer simply an economic rival of the United States; it’s becoming a dangerous enemy. But instead of protecting us from this threat, an existential one, our leadership class collaborates with the other side.

The scariest part is that as China has grown more powerful, America has grown more dependent on it. Outsourcing our manufacturing power brought American companies big short-term profits. Head to Florida, and you’ll see the houses they’ve built with those profits. But in the long run, that decision made this country dangerously dependent on a nation that seeks to displace us on the world stage.

The saddest and most infuriating part is that none of this needed to happen in the first place. China didn’t just one day magically overtake us. Our leaders made that possible. They abetted it. They profited from it. They betrayed us.

And Americans voted for ’em anyway, and will again too. Which makes this depressing splash of cold-water reality look more relevant than ever:

Top Men

Posted on March 22, 2020March 22, 2020 by Mike

Bitter Clinger is not impressed.

It’s not just infuriating, it’s depressing, to see how mentally softened our country has become. Reduced to a shadow of ourselves, once the greatest, most inspiring nation to grace the planet. A nation colonized by men that sailed across oceans to a wilderness unknown without modern convenience or assurance of survival to have what they coveted most, personal autonomy. A nation that sent men to the deepest depths of the oceans and planted flags on the moon.

And what are we reduced to by media-induced panic? A nation of cowards, that casts the eye of suspicion on our fellow countrymen for the crime of a public sneeze or clearing of the throat.

My Little Clingette recently travelled to Spain on a school trip, one wrought with government travel bans, social distancing advisories, the ever-present “abundance of caution”, airport screenings, and a rucksack replete with hand sanitizer, alcohol-wipes and the like.

Upon her return, the top men of government, medicine and science have deemed it proper that she be quarantined for a fortnight, because, you see, having travelled makes her a hazard to society, or so say the top men. Mind you these same men of science have informed us that a child, moments from birth, is no child at all and may be summarily executed. These same men of medicine have assured us that injecting livestock with hormones is a dangerous practice, but injecting an eight year old with hormone blockers is sound medicine. These same men of government ply us with sound logical practices such as the forgoing of jurisprudence for the rapists, murderers and drug peddlers that invade our country from lands afar and near that pillage our great nation by way of government trough and illicit acts.

As a child of the internet generation, Little Clingette is given to trust the collective knowledge of the keyboard. So she is convinced that a visit to grandma’s house is tantamount to issuing a death sentence to her elderly maternal role model, and while I love her heart for being so concerned, a part of my heart breaks for her that she is assuredly is symptomatic, not of COVID-19 (or as it is referred to in House Clinger, “The Boogeyman Virus”), but of a deeper, more worrisome disease, one that is increasingly pervasive in our society. She suffers from fear, and fear is a dreadful disease most certainly. For while a bacteria, a virus, a stranger, or whatever other form that risk may manifest as may indeed kill you, fear itself will cripple your growth and life in a way that Polio or Ebola never could.

I still say that if our Top Men—with their superior wisdom, judgment, and access to much information we lesser beings lack—were really all that concerned about CV-19, they wouldn’t be in Washington conducting the usual business in the usual way right now as if there was nothing to worry about.

They’ve lied to us, and lied to us, and lied to us—about everything under the sun, for years and years and years. We know this full well. We know they’re not to be trusted; we know their intentions, ethics, and behavior all habitually fall a good ways short of honorable. Yet now, all of a sudden, we’re going to start believing them? We’re going to start trusting them, we’re going to just take it on faith that they have our best interests at heart—that they mean well after all? That they’re only “here to help,” as the bumper-sticker joke goes?

I could be all wet, I could be overly cynical, I could be a damned idiot, but…nah, brah.

Never let a crisis go to waste

Posted on March 22, 2020March 22, 2020 by Mike

The folks who are pleased to thump their big, manly chests over what they’re a-gonna do when The Shit Hits The Fan appear to have missed the fact that it just did.

The current gamble seems to be to shut down the nation indefinitely to suppress a virus that is especially deadly to some demographics and experts agree cannot be contained, only slowed. The New York Times claims the basis of many U.S. officials’ decisions so far is a report from Imperial College London, and other models that spit out similar results. It says to contain the virus it will be necessary to quarantine Americans for two- to three-month stretches repeatedly over the next 18 months.

The alternative, says the report, is 4 million Americans dead, half who would otherwise have lived but instead die for lack of medical capacity such as ventilators. If we merely quarantine sick people and those at risk, a “mitigation” strategy, it projects the U.S. death toll at about 2 million, again half from lack of ventilators, not depth of disease.

This is why state governors are shutting down restaurants, schools, entertainment venues, government offices, parks, historical sites, churches, and travel. Most Americans and businesses likely can sustain a suspension of their lives for two weeks, the usual annual vacation time.

But start extending these bans to one and two months, and then to four and six months, and people are going to revolt as they sit chained to their houses, watching their jobs, businesses, and retirement accounts disappear, replaced with funny money taken from yet-unborn generations and no end in sight. Numerous people are already skeptical and fed up with the lockdowns, and we’re not a week in.

Strangely, though, the US Congress—at least 2 of whose members have been confirmed as infected with COVID-19, with several more exposed—remains open for bidness. Guess these noble “public servants” are all vitally crucially vital personnel, absolutely indispensible to the mighty challenge of shepherding the nation through these bleak days.

Just one competing projection, from the Hoover Institution, suggests “the total number of cases world-wide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000″ (emphasis added). This is near the annual death rate due to flu in the United States alone. We don’t know if that estimate is accurate either, but that’s the point.

We’re acting as if coronavirus is for sure going to amount to the worst-case scenario without knowing that is true. If we all do shelter in place for the next year and a half while politicians pass the equivalent of the Obama-Bush stimulus that suffocated the economy 12 years ago, the “experts” will insist the nation’s long-term ability to provide for itself was required to save millions of lives. There will be no way to prove them wrong, even if they are.

It seems a fool’s errand to pre-emptively and indefinitely risk everyone’s livelihoods without hard information about what is happening and a risk assessment that includes the serious dangers of killing the U.S. economy, not what computers project will happen with lots of missing, unreliable, and rapidly changing information.

Come, come now. Similar computer models turned out to be one hundred percent reliable on Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly “the weather”), didn’t they?

If we continue the present course U.S. politicians are taking, “we’ll be spending a lot more than we’ve ever been willing to spend before to avoid flu deaths. Eighty-three percent of our economy will be suppressed to relieve pressure on the 17% represented by health care. This will have to last months, not weeks, to modulate the rate at which a critical mass of 330 million get infected and acquire natural immunity,” writes Holman Jenkins at The Wall Street Journal.

Is it right for the nation to require our children’s futures be destroyed to keep alive less than 1 percent of our population until the next flu season? Could we not attempt to keep them safe by less disastrous means?

Probably so….if that’s what all this was really about. But it isn’t—not anymore, it isn’t. Whether or not you accept the premise that Chinese Yellow Peril Fu Manchu Wuhan Sino-Flu is the planet-killer plague some have said, it’s abundantly clear that The Powers That Be have identified it as a fine tool for their own nefarious purposes, and are wielding it to apply the finishing touches to the “fundamental transformation” they hoped for from the Ogabe junta.

Funny, innit, how the actions we’ve seen taken to “protect” Americans in certain states and cities all seem to be straight off the eternal Democrat-Socialist wishlist? Closing gun shops; banning gun and ammo sales; severely restricting freedom of movement and peaceable assembly; forbidding the sale of alcohol, with close monitoring of other purchases; fines for businesses who refuse to toe the line and obey authoritarian edicts; all that, and more. All just coincidence, no doubt. Strict rationing and curfews soon to follow, to be enforced by local police and/or the National Guard.

True national treasure Mike Rowe ponders the question of whether the response might wind up doing more harm than the disease itself.

For the uninitiated, I coined the expression “Safety Third” back in 2008, during an episode of Dirty Jobs. It was a smart-ass way for me to challenge the ubiquity of those Safety First banners, and debunk the popular notion that safety was always the most important thing on the job site.

After years of Safety First indoctrination, and a front row seat to it’s unintended consequences, “Safety Third,” became a slightly subversive way for my crew and I to remind each other that our safety was in fact, our responsibility, and that no amount of compliance could ever keep us out of danger. Safety, I argued, was not a value to be “ranked,” but rather, a state of mind to be maintained. Thus, “Safety Third” became an hour-long special that stirred up a great deal of conversation around personal responsibility, risk equilibrium, and the unintended consequences of ranking Safety above everything else.

Which of course, is precisely what our leaders are doing right now.

Today, in the name of safety, the United States of America has been shut down. Which brings me to your question – are we overreacting?

I honestly don’t know. I’m not an expert, and I’m in no rush to be labelled a “virus denier.” But I am concerned that the medicine we’re prescribing might turn out to be more deadly than the virus we’re trying to kill – especially if we don’t know the criteria by which we can re-emerge from our bunkers. And I’m not alone.

But I do know that recessions and depressions can impact a country in ways no less catastrophic than a pandemic. And we are most assuredly headed for both, if we continue to operate from a “Safety First” state of mind. Because “Safety First” is never a long-term solution.

We are being bombarded everyday with facts and information with extreme urgency but no context. Imagine for a moment, if the millions of automobile accidents in America were reported on with the same frenzied, up-to-the minute drama as each new virus infection? Imagine if all 40,000 annual automotive fatalities from those accidents, were announced in the same fashion as every virus fatality. Would any of us ever drive again?

Wrong question. Given where we find ourselves now, would we even be ALLOWED to?

Personally, as an avowed non-expert with a large Facebook following, I do think a temporary shutdown makes sense, while we gather more information and answer some pressing questions. Who exactly does this affect? How exactly is it passed? Can you develop an immunity? Does it mutate and if so, how often? And of course, it’s worth repeating that the lockdown wont work unless everyone participates, which is easier to do in Wuhan than it is during Spring Break in this country. Consequently, people are arguing over which is worse – hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, or another Great Depression. Unfortunately, I think that misses the point. I think the worst-case scenario, is both.

As I wrote the other day, it feels to me like America is going through the five stages of grief at varying speeds. Some of us are still in denial, some are angry, some are bargaining, some are depressed, some have accepted some version of the reality in which we currently find ourselves, and all of us are trying to keep up with the latest information which is bombarding us from all sides. The evidence is obviously sparse, but it would be a mistake in my view, to not treat this thing very, very seriously. If our hospitals become overrun with virus victims, the rest of the population will have no healthcare system at all. But, it’s equally dangerous to think that a long-term shutdown is the answer.

I don’t say this lightly. I have two elderly parents solidly in the “at risk” group, and believe me, I want to do all I can to protect them. But I also know that Safety First is no way to live indefinitely. We are at base, a Safety Third nation. We can’t remain in the air raid shelter indefinitely – if we do, they’ll be no country left, when we finally emerge.

Ahh, but there’s the rub, Mike; as is becoming all too clear, in Mordor On The Potomac that’s considered a feature, not a bug. The big worry isn’t the use of a pandemic as cover for an audacious power grab. That, after all, is the nature of politicians and bureaucrats and must be expected from them—just another case of the scorpion stinging the poor old frog. Far worse is the fact that Americans—either from a surfeit of fear or blind faith—have been stampeded into yielding up most of what little remained of their rights and liberties without resistance or demur.

In the end, nobody had to take our country from us. We surrendered it willingly, without the firing of a single shot.

Update! Prognosis: piss-poor.

By what authority? None dare speak these three words. A month or so ago, we ridiculed China’s totalitarian response to coronavirus; now we replicate it. The governor of our most populous state just grounded its citizens as though they were his children. Unelected health czars make decisions without the consent of the governed. Martial law, forcing the shuttering of businesses and the sheltering in place of individuals, characterizes the situation in states and locales far beyond California. Yet America remains more at peace now than at almost any time over the last two decades.

Socialism, the default answer to all crises, describes the federal government we soon get but nobody really deserves. Government destroyed civil society in joining the panic. Now it seeks to replace it. In this, our government compounds one disaster with another.

Americans could withstand this deadly disease, as horrible and contagious as it is. That deadly disease, the one that infected Venezuela and Cuba and points beyond, seems another matter. And this seems one of the lasting scars of the panic from the pandemic.

This is a power grab. It transfers power from the private sphere, society, to the state. It came about because of the Rorschach-test response to every crisis. People in government see every inkblot as “bigger government.” We do not trust our neighbors to guard their health. So government tells them to stay home from school and work and church and gyms and theaters and arenas and almost everywhere else (the politicians imagine themselves too important not to gather). Then the state, after creating this economic crisis by its heavy-handedness, proposes to solve it through more heavy-handedness. They destroy, and then they destroy again.

It is all enough to make one want to practice social distancing from fellow citizens. Fear fear. Covid-19? It is not the Black Plague.

Fascism is deadlier than the coronavirus. If only a surgical mask could save us from that.

There’s only one thing that can, really. And I’m afraid we no longer have anywhere near enough of it to do the trick.

Jersey dhimmis embrace Teh Suck

Posted on March 21, 2020March 22, 2020 by Mike

While your attention was diverted, a thing happened.

New Jersey City Approves Changes to Noise Ordinance to Allow Islamic Call to Prayer to Broadcast Five Times a Day – Beginning at 6 AM
After extensive debate, the City Council on Tuesday night voted 5-4 to approve changes in Paterson’s noise control ordinance that supporters say will allow mosques to broadcast the Islamic call to prayer five times a day.

The vote drew an impassioned standing room only crowd of more than 120 to City Hall, including some Christian pastors who opposed the measure, saying it would create a nuisance for people who live near mosques, as well as members of Paterson’s Muslim community, who praised the ordinance as a victory for religious inclusion.

Hey, long as those pesky Christian pastors don’t try something truly offensive and dangerously confrontational like, oh, reading from the Bible audibly in the vicinity of a mosque, say. Or, heaven forfend, handing out pamphlets advocating Christianity where a Mooselimb might see you.

Because that would be wrong.

But another resident, Steve Bauer, said mosques’ loudspeakers would be “blaring” in neighborhoods. During his comments, Bauer mentioned Islamic terrorists, including the man who was living in Paterson in October 2017 when he killed nine people at a Hudson River bike path in Manhattan.

Public nuisance isn’t the real issue; volume isn’t, and the time of day the devotional yodeling gets cranking damned sure isn’t. The issue is the establishment of a preferred state religion, most especially the official embrace of a hostile, alien pseudo-religion which is savagely antithetical to every last principle this pathetic joke of a nation used to proclaim.

City officials quickly interrupted Bauer to tell him he could only comment about the noise ordinance.

“With all due respect, this is a religious issue,” Bauer responded.

One would think so, perhaps. But ask the FBI anytime yet another known-wolf Muzzrat drives a truck onto the sidewalk to crush the infidel about his possible motive and you’ll quickly find out different.

The revised ordinance approved on Tuesday night listed 14 exemptions to the city’s noise regulations, including one that covered “bells, chimes or carillons…while being used in conjunction with religious services.” The revised ordinance also said that the call to prayer already was exempt from the noise control regulations under state law.

I’ll let Cristina say it for me:

The Islamic call to prayer should never be allowed in any city in the United States.

Amen.

It is a total nuisance and it is also a way for the Muslims in the community to show their dominance, forcing a city with Christians, Jews and perhaps agnostics to be subjected to Islam.

It is every bit of that, yep. Unfortunately, shamefully, this is just another in a lengthening list of wars we lost a long time ago. And in war there ain’t no do-overs.

In case you didn’t know, Paterson is but a short drive from a certain place in lower Manhattan some of us used to refer to as Ground Zero. A thing happened there also way, way back in antiquity—a seemingly major event at the time which has now been totally forgotten. In the fall of 2001, that was; you could look it up if you’re interested, I suppose. But hardly anybody is anymore, so why bother?

*spit*

A modest proposal

Posted on March 18, 2020March 18, 2020 by Mike

It’s time—past time, actually, WAY past—to eliminate Communism from the face of the earth, once and for all.

We must not underestimate the economic threat because the Chinese Communist Party is using the pandemic to achieve its goal of supplanting the United States as the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, and military power.

Sounds unbelievable?

Nope, not a-tall.

DISCLAIMER: I am in no way, shape or form anything like an expert on medical issues. It’s why I’ve avoided much mention of the Chinese Yellow Peril Fu Manchu Wuhan Sino-Flu and its attendant panic to date, contenting myself with leaving such commentary to folks like our esteemed boozum-chum Aesop—experienced professionals in the field actually possessed of some expertise therein, in other words.

That said, though, my feeling all along about this burgeoning catastrophe can be summed up quickly and easily: the misery attributable to said Chinese Yellow Peril Fu Manchu Wuhan Sino-Flu, however severe (or not) the havoc it wreaks may (or may not) turn out to be, will almost certainly pale in comparison to the damage said attendant panic will cause.

Yeh, yeh, yeh, stop flopping around on the floor like a fish for a sec and just bear with me while I try to explain the reasoning behind this outlandish position of mine, willya?

To me, it’s something of a no-brainer. COVID-19 itself is specific, see, whatever harm it does being limited roughly to the death toll and the suffering of those afflicted with it, along with those close to them. However many folks may sicken and even die from this thing, our culture, whatever few shared ideals we still retain, perhaps even certain assumptions about our mode of living aren’t directly threatened by the disease. The disease itself could conceivably shake the foundations of American society, yes. But odds are that, as with many previous pandemics, American society can survive it.

The panic, on the other hand, is non-specific, or general; its impact is necessarily going to be spread across our entire nation, its institutions, our very way of life. It will permeate every strata of American society, much as I’m sure our self-styled “elite” would like to delude itself otherwise.

The US economy, for one thing, isn’t remotely likely to recover fully from the current artificially-imposed partial shutdown—certainly not quickly, maybe not ever. Contrary to the bland, hopeful assertions of those foolish enough to harbor a childish faith in their control over such things, national economies are complex and fragile things. They cannot simply be turned off and then back on like lights, with the mere flick of a switch.

Those bars and restaurants now closed “for two-three weeks” only, to reopen after this “crisis” has passed? Nuh-uh. Ain’t happening. More of them than some may wish to think won’t be reopening at all—ever. Bars and restaurants all run on wafer-thin margins; there is simply no way they can sustain the hit of a weeks-long shutdown and survive intact. Excepting the few whose owners have very deep pockets indeed—and who don’t mind seeing those deep pockets transformed into mighty thin ones with a quickness—many, perhaps most, of the rest will go the way the dodo did.

All those waitresses, bartenders, cooks, managers? Even the illegal-alien dishwashers and busboys? To the bread lines with ye, and tarry ye not. The impact of the now-imminent restaurant-biz bloodbath will then wend its savage way through the restaurant-supply houses, the food-and-beverage-supply vendors, the alcohol distributors, the cleaning staff for the tonier joints that hire outside companies to do it, etc.

No big deal really, though, right? I mean, how much of an impact can the restaurant industry really have on the greater US economy anyway? I mean, we’re talking here about an industry that only accounts for…ummm….let’s see, now…carry the naught…

$899 billion-with-a-B in projected 2020 sales, employing 15.6 million people. Gee, guess those numbers are gonna be dropping some soon, eh?

And here’s the hell of the whole thing: all this was done to us on purpose.

By fucking Communists. Who, even now, propose to keep right on doing it to us.

A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.

“Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resources—especially those that force dependence, and to proliferate global information systems; to as Chinese sources put it, ‘leap-frog’ industrially, ‘overtake around the corner’ strategically, capture the ‘commanding heights’ globally. Beijing intends to reverse recent U.S. efforts to counteract China’s subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at U.S.-Europe relations. In other words, Beijing will use COVID-19 to accelerate its long-standing, strategic offensive,” the Horizon report states.

We’re witnessing Beijing’s attempt to scrub its culpability for the pandemic from the world’s memory. Chinese Communist propagandists declare, “China is owed a thank you for buying the world time” and the New York Times dutifully repeats it.

After covering up the novel infection and unleashing it on the world, Beijing’s rulers bought up the world’s supply of protective gear and respirators.

Then they sell these critical goods to Italy while portraying themselves as the heroic humanitarian savior of the world, not unlike a pyromaniac who takes credit for calling the fire department.

Now, as China’s factories come back online at the same time the West’s economies shut down, Beijing sees further opportunity to extend its soft power and tighten its grip on global supply chains.

Don’t take my word for it. Authoritative policymakers and leading players in China’s government-industrial system have told us.

And damned if they haven’t at that. Do NOT miss a word of the rest of this article; it’s going to infuriate you no end, I promise. Which is exactly what it damned well ought to do.

Contra my title up there, I do admittedly understand just how unrealistic a proposal it actually is. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, or somehow in error. As fantastical as it may seem to some, the simple fact is that Red China has wantonly and willfully inflicted a disaster UPON THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD that is of truly staggering proportions, a monstrous crime against humanity for which they MUST face vengeance and retribution.

Worse yet, this atrocity was inspired by the insidious imperialism of Red China, a nefarious lust for power that festers at the root of the black Communist heart to rule the world entire. As the cited article confirms, even after the ChiComs’ evil acts have been laid bare for all with eyes to see, they continue to scheme in hopes of advancing the Great Cause of global Marxism despite exposure of their brazen criminality.

Worst of all, this is by no stretch the first such murderous atrocity for the ChiComs specifically, nor for Communism more broadly.

It is more clear than ever before that the vile scourge of Communism is a threat the world can no longer afford to tolerate, indulge, or ignore. With this abominable act, Communists have now proven themselves to be deadly enemies not just of all who would live free of their yoke, but of every living human on the face of this Earth. There is no “peaceful coexistence” to be had with such as them. One way or another, sooner or later, here as everywhere, it must be destroyed—leaving neither root nor branch, to purloin a fine phrase.

Update! Via Vanderleun: take heart, people.

It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

Groundswell of support update! It ain’t quite as, shall we say, stringent an approach as the one I favor. But I’ll take it anyway, and will view it as a a good start.

The idea that the People’s Republic of China can become a responsible stakeholder in the international community—that it can “be like us”—is being laid to rest behind the masked faces of petrified Westerners scurrying through airports to get home.

Amidst the 24/7 breathless media coverage and calls for politicians to “do something,” one fundamental question still needs to be addressed forthrightly and in the open: Who did this to us and what to do to prevent it from happening again?

The question about assigning agency and blame is pretty straightforward to answer: The communist Chinese state, which for more than three decades has been draining capital and knowledge from the West, benefiting from our greed and myopia, has just let loose a virus that in the coming months is about to effectively paralyze Europe and the United States and bring severe pain, both human and economic on the world. The “eruption at a wet market” explanation for the virus has to be questioned until we know the full story, if for no other reason than the fact that Beijing suppressed data for two months when the coronavirus first appeared, and even to this day refuses to come clean as to exactly what happened. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now spinning propaganda stories that both seek to somehow pin the blame on the United States, and that try to frame their bungling, denial-ridden, heavy-handed reaction as some kind of model for the world.

As a result of all this, the West is now shutting down, at least for a while. The ultimate cost to the world, in terms of new government debt, failed businesses, and human lives and suffering, is difficult to quantify at this point. But there are indications that the fallout from the Wuhan Virus could be transformative.

We must acknowledge our own complicity in what is now unfolding. The belief that globalization, through the radical centralization of market networks, was the unavoidable path forward has been exposed as a grave, near-delusional miscalculation. The offshoring by corporations of supply chains to China has not only eviscerated communities that were previously reliant on manufacturing jobs, but has also brought with it an unprecedented level of vulnerability and fragility to our economies. The populist revolts that have wracked Western democracies for the past several years are in part rooted in the pain that these dislocations have caused. Worse yet, for the past three decades, this offshoring process has favored an adversary that is determined to replace us as the hub of global economic and military power and place itself at the new normative center of the world.

Should the fallout from the Wuhan Virus prove to be as damaging as it looks like it might be, the first casualty should be China’s quest to become the premier manufacturing center for the world.

It should be the first of many, too.

(Via Ace)

Steps along the road to ruin

Posted on March 16, 2020March 16, 2020 by Mike

Step by step, inch by inch.

Communism needs a healthy host, a prosperous one that can support the first years of communism, preferably one where communist agents can be voted into office with messages of socialism. This is what makes a democratic republic with a capitalist system the most susceptible to communist propaganda. Socialism is the stepping stone, the softer version that cooperates with capitalism to keep the economy strong, but it is how a capitalist system transitions to communism.

The role of socialism is to engage the citizens of a successful and wealthy capitalist system. From their wealth and leisure, those who have benefited from capitalism are confronted with its failures in exaggerated form. The plight of a single person living in poverty is magnified to represent an entire class of people “left out” and “downtrodden” with the recipient of the message having no possible understanding of those terms. It seems wrong that they are wealthy and others are poor, but the rules are the same for everyone and no one can protect someone from themselves or their decisions. Socialism takes advantage of these poor decisions and the self-inflicted victims of them to institute social programs that can never succeed except for a few propaganda examples, because they cannot change human nature and that is the true cause of the disadvantaged. The purpose is to create more social programs, more government, more government employees working continually toward the ideal of communism, which is universal employment by the government that equals total control of the population.

The question never asked is: “How will communism avoid the same failures?” The truth is, they can’t and don’t intend to. It is a selling point, not an objective. But, they will control the information about those failures and they will not cease to exist, but cease to be reported.

Gee, none of THAT sounds familiar at all, now does it?

Found this ‘un via e-mail tip from TL Davis, for which I thank him. At a cursory glance it appears to be a quite new blog, but I’m gonna go ahead and throw 12 Round into Ye Olde Blogrolle and my bookmarks anyway, on the expectation of more good work to come.

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