Category: Where Do We Go from Here?

Ramblings about the future of America, the West, and the world in general. References to Oswald Spengler optional.

The New Normal: Safetyism

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A nation of pussies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An idea whose time has surely come

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And, unfortunately, probably gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More, and worse:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet more, and yet worse:

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

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

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

This is scary, scary stuff, folks.

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

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

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

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

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

On the horns of a deadly dilemna

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AG Barr is between a rock and a very hard place.

REMINDER – United States Attorney General Bill Barr was not around in 2017 or 2018 when the DOJ was faced with the issues resulting from an investigation of intelligence leaks and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Security Director James Wolfe.

When the prosecution of SSCI Director James Wolfe was being considered, AG Jeff Sessions was recused; the Robert Mueller probe was ongoing; and as a consequence Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein and U.S. Attorney for DC Jessie Liu were decision-makers.

I’m not going to repeat all the issues, you can re-read them HERE; however, the baseline is that Wolfe could not be prosecuted without running the risk of collapsing key institutions of the U.S. government. The consequences of a Wolfe prosecution were beyond the capacity of Rod Rosenstein, or the DOJ to handle. There would have been massive constitutional crises created and the literal definition of ‘sedition‘ was at the center of it.

When you truly understand this context you also understand why Joseph Pientka III has a blanket protective order over him. The all-encompassing protective order is as much about preserving and protecting the institution of the DOJ as it is protecting the fulcrum of corrupt activity Supervisory Special Agent One, Joseph Pientka III, represents.

The DOJ had to throw a bag over Pientka or eliminate him. Thankfully, and not surprisingly, they chose the former and now he’s under federal protection; so they can continue the cover-up. If it had been an Obama/Clinton AG, they’d have just killed him.

In 2018 DAG Rosenstein could not prosecute James Wolfe without exposing ‘seditious‘ activity within the U.S. government itself. Not pretend sedition or theoretical sedition, but an actual pre-planned subversive operation with forethought and malice.

Likewise AG Bill Barr could not prosecute Andrew McCabe without exposing the same ‘seditious‘ activity; which also encompasses the activity of Rod Rosenstein. Whether Barr wants to protect Rosenstein is moot; if Barr wants to protect the institutions from sunlight on two years of actual seditious activity, he has to protect Rosenstein.

It’s the underlying activity that cannot be allowed to surface; the institutions of government are not strong enough, nor are they set-up to handle, prosecutions that overlap all three branches of government.

However, that said, now AG Bill Barr is facing a downstream and parallel issue within the prosecution of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. How can Michael Flynn be sentenced for lying to the FBI when the DOJ is necessarily refusing to prosecute Andrew McCabe (at least what has been made public) for the exact same behavior?

Against this dynamic, the DOJ has two options: (Option A) go even harder at General Flynn using additional charges that are not as comparable to McCabe. (Option B) find a way to drop the prosecution.

Take the totality of all these issues together. Think about them for a while…

…Now do we see why AG Bill Barr needed President Trump to shut up?

When Barr said “he’s making it harder for me to do my job”, in essence President Trump was making it harder for Barr to protect his institutions. Trump is too much sunlight.

At the heart of the matter, in the real activity that took place, there was a multi-branch seditious effort to remove President Donald J Trump. From the perspective of those charged with the actual administration of justice – there is no way to put this in front of the American public and have the institutions survive. What we are witnessing is a dance between increasingly narrowing rails and the DOJ, via Bill Barr, trying to find an exit.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Personally, I’m surprised they haven’t tried to take Sundance out yet.

“The economy is not a machine”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyranny, straight up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JustFollowingOrders.jpg


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet.

Update! Government is force.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two kinds of people in America now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choices, choices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chicken Little 86’d

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are we not men?

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On your feet or on your knees.

I am thoroughly disheartened – nay, sickened — by the sheeplike behavior of so many of our countrymen. I cannot believe they think the proper response to “our leaders’” overweening usurpations of authorities never granted is to politely ask for their rights back.

Americans don’t do that. Americans exercise their rights openly and confidently. They don’t ask for anyone’s permission.

Your rights are not permissions. They are yours, not because some “authority” has granted them to you, but by virtue of your membership in the human race. To treat them as permissions is to surrender them, such that any “crisis,” whether real or notional, can be used to nullify them. And there are plenty of wannabe dictators who are grasping at that opportunity — with the support of the left-wing media…

It hardly matters what rights you claim if you refrain from exercising them. That’s how the Second Amendment was gutted. It’s how the rest of the Bill of Rights is being reduced to meaninglessness. And if we permit it to go one millimeter further, we are unworthy of the term “free people.”

It’s not about the economy. It’s not about the virus. It’s not about “science.” It’s about freedom: holding onto the pitiful amount we have left after two and a quarter centuries’ incursions upon it, usually in the name of “crisis” or “safety.”

Free men accept that life entails risk.
They don’t ask their “leaders” to “protect” them.
When “leaders” tyrannize them “for your own good,” they rise up.
Such “leaders” become lamppost decorations, pour encourager les autres.

Are you a free man or a sheep?

From what we’re seeing of late, the answer to that question is far from encouraging. Happily, though, sometimes it doesn’t take all that much in the way of pushback or defiance to force our masters to relent:



Good on ya, Master Chief. They may well take us down in the long run, but at the very least we can make ’em work for it.

Update! This may seem to be unrelated, but it strikes me as yet another depressing aspect of the Great Knuckling Under.

Land O’ Lakes drops ‘racist’ Native American image after nearly 100 years
The new label was announced in a press release from Land O’ Lakes in February, though it made no specific mention of removing the Native American image from all products.

The press release shared “the new packaging will show up in a variety of ways, including through a new front-of-package design that features the phrase ‘Farmer-Owned’ above the LAND O LAKES brandmark,” as well as include pictures of farmers and co-op members on the label.

“As Land O’Lakes looks toward our 100th anniversary, we’ve recognized we need packaging that reflects the foundation and heart of our company culture—and nothing does that better than our farmer-owners whose milk is used to produce Land O’Lakes’ dairy products,” said Beth Ford, President and CEO, Land O’Lakes, in the press release.

“As a farmer-owned co-op, we strongly feel the need to better connect the men and women who grow our food with those who consume it,” Ford said.

Is it really necessary to “connect” them beyond having them buy and eat your damned butter? Because if it is, I’m just damned if I can see the why of it. Or how a bunch of mealy-mouthed gobbledygook from some college-kid corporate flack who probably never yanked a single bovine teat in her life is gonna get the job done. Until such time as you can explain those mysterious profundities to me, grab that plunger-handle and get to churning, lady.

But if you think that’s depressing stuff—and it is—wait till you get a load of the backstory.

Did you know that back in the 1950s, when Land O’ Lakes wanted to update their logo, they hired an American Indian artist to do the job. He came up with Mia, the logo we’re all familiar with, to honor American Indian culture and their traditional connection to nature.

I checked into it a little myself, and WeirdDave ain’t just making it up.

Mia first appeared on Land O’Lakes packaging in 1928, and was originally designed by illustrator Arthur C. Hanson for the advertising firm Brown and Bigelow.

Native American artist Patrick DesJarlait, of the Ojibwe tribe, redesigned the packaging in the 1950s to foster “a sense of Indian pride,” the Minnesota Reformer reported.

His son, Robert DesJarlait, told the outlet that the image — which has been slammed by many as “racist” — has become a “paradox” for Native Americans.

“He was breaking a lot of barriers…Back in the ’50s, nobody even thought about stereotypical imagery. Today it’s a stereotype, but it’s also a source of cultural pride,” DesJarlait told the outlet.

As well it might be, too. As Dave says, you can be pretty confident that there were few if any Native Americans among the SJW screechers demanding Land-O-Lakes’ capitulation to mindless PC here.

Puzzling, innit, the way those screechers have managed to “fundamentally transform” a legitimate source of cultural pride into some kind of shameful offense against all human decency. In the end, though, this isn’t really about butter, or marketing, or the Land-O-Lakes mascot, or respect for Indians and their heritage, or even “racism” itself. In the end, it’s really about this:


So is the above gutting of Ilhan Omar-Elmi really related to the topic at hand? You just better believe it is, chum. Because collapsing American society, dismantling America, is ALWAYS what it’s about with the Left—every single time, every single issue, every single word of every single argument. Until you begin to get your head fully around that, you ain’t fighting back, and you damned sure ain’t winning. You’re just chasing your tail, that’s all.

Everything old is new again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Bill)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above the fray

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Being “elite” means never having to say you’re sorry.

Take any contentious issue—travel bans, the advantages of masks, the Chinese compromising of WHO, the entire industry of grievance politics infecting criticism of China’s despicable behavior, delayed testing by the Centers for Disease Control and FDA, modeling, the efficacy of antimalarial drugs—and our elite seem unable to admit they were wrong, and wrong with a great deal of costly arrogance.

It is no exaggeration to say that most models that the best and brightest offered the public, from the imported Imperial College in London to those from the University of Washington and many more besides, were not just inaccurate, but quite mistaken in two tragic ways: First, they were accepted as gospel by governments and thus their flawed assumptions became the basis for policies that in many cases may prove counterproductive. Second, the modelers themselves either did not promptly correct their warped inputs, or were not completely forthcoming about their data and methodologies, or blamed their flawed assumptions on others or circumstances beyond imagination, or claimed that their mistakes were in fact salutary—if not sorta, kinda planned—in galvanizing a presumably infantile public to accept draconian measures that it otherwise would not.

I know a plumber and an electrician, both skilled in the pragmatic engineering of pipes and wires, who would not dare to think they could offer a model of plumbing or electrical prediction if they had no idea of the real size of the denominator and were likewise unsure that the numerator was widely accepted as accurate and clearly defined.

When California Governor Gavin Newsom warned that 25.5 million Californians “will” get the virus in the eight weeks following March 18, albeit without his shelter-in-place orders, he was also essentially stating that, at a then 2.6 percent lethality rate for Californians known to have the active virus, about 1 million would die. As I write, 24 days out from his prediction and nearing the half-way point to Doomsday, about 23,000 Californians have tested positive, and either are fighting the disease or have recovered. Since late January, about 650 of 40 million Californians have died from the disease, in a state where well over 700 people die from some cause every day.

If 10 times that number of known positive tests are now actively infected, we legitimately could assume at least 222,000 residents are now active or past carriers. Those who advised Newsom to shut down the world’s sixth-largest economy, including universities like Cal Tech, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the commerce and livelihoods of 40 million residents, apparently did not factor into their models some possible collective immunity among thousands of Californians who, for months, were on the front lines of arriving flights from China.

Nor did modelers seem to factor in the ability of people to social distance even before the shutdown was ordered, or the fact that a virus that does not kill 95.5 percent of those who are infected, but not frontline health workers or over 60 years old, may be deemed by the public manageable in a way that does not require having multigenerational small businesses ruined, or careers destroyed, or retirement savings accounts wrecked, or key appointments with doctors postponed or canceled.

Elite wisdom, which in its allegiance to the scientific method eventually is likely to find an antidote and vaccination against the virus, still fails us in so many other ways in which it should not, in part also because its high priests rarely face the consequences of their own ideological and scientific pronouncements.

Whatever the end result of this crisis, few at the WHO, CDC or the state health directors are going to lose their jobs in a way the small restaurateurs and Uber drivers most certainly will.

In their boundless “wisdom,” the Ruling Class “elites” seem determined to leave us with pitchforks, torches, and heads on pikes as our only possible recourse.

Making China pay

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Glenn kicks around a few ideas.

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

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

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

This calls for a response.

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

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

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

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

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

Commie tigers never change their stripes

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Don’t trust China. China is asshoe*.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The price

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Was it worth it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a partial list I will expand:

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

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

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

Specialty retailers–bookstores, hobby stores.

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

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

Venues for music or live theater.

Gyms aren’t getting anything without guests and attendees.

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

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

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

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

Oh, if only

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Glenn posts a good ‘un from Fakebook.

The debate over immigration is over: restriction wins.

The debate over borders is over: they are needed.

The debate over globalization is over: the era of autarky begins.

The debate over Europe is over: it is a geographic expression, not a polity.

The debate over global warming is over: it is irrelevant.

The debate over international institutions is over: only nations matter.

The debate over the People’s Republic of China is over: it is a menace to the community of nations, not a member in good standing.

Crisis is clarity.

I don’t disagree, and I do realize that all these most welcome developments will be a while yet in shaking out. But purely in the interest of indulging my own bred-in-the-bone contrarianism, I have to note that things like lax border enforcement; One-Worlder globalization; the EU, UN, ICC, and the accompanying international-bureaucratic Kraken; and most especially Red China are ALL still very much with us. The legions of Leftist advocates for those things are all still with us, too.

THAT’S the problem we’re going to have to take care of first, before we can begin to tackle all those others. So yeah, gonna be a while yet. Another most edifying rumination along those lines:

“In just ten days, we discovered that neither the tampon issue, nor the participation of transsexuals in the Olympic Games, nor the climate emergency were real problems, nor emergencies, nor anything of the sort. They were just fictitious problems, the pastimes of a generation that hadn’t known tragedy.” – Itxu Diaz, National Review

How many times are we supposed to have died? Net Neutrality, Budget cuts, Donald Trump’s very existence were supposed to have killed us all already. How many failed predictions of global warming/climate change/ManBearPig destroying us in 10 years have we seen blow by us without incident? If there was an actual environmental catastrophe incoming, no one would actually believe it.

Aside from that, we have the whole woke subculture. (Have I ever mentioned that I utterly despise the term woke? It’s cheap knock-off black culture) Microaggressions? Safe Spaces? What, are you that fragile that you cower in fear of my words? I guess Evil White Males like me must be some kind of sorcerer. Trans-activism is just like the rest of their celebration of mental illness. I have never heard an actual argument about cultural appropriation, especially since the same people used to moan about inclusion. It is a giant screaming mess like an out of control daycare without the cute part.

*cough-cough* Liberalism, defined *cough-cough*

The central thesis of the Ricochet piece is that sane people can no longer afford to fritter away either resources or attention on the fake “crises” Proggy uses to incrementally advance his authoritarian agenda. Leftism has always been what you might call an ideological luxury item. Everywhere it provides entertainment for pushy, overindulged brats. Nowhere is it a real necessity. I almost just lifted the whole brief essay, but the excerpt ought to be enough of the rich, buttery goodness therein to get you headed over to savor the whole thing.

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