Willful Stupidity

A lot of egg, on a lot of faces

Posted on June 17, 2020June 17, 2020 by Mike

Still waiting for the mass apologies that are due for inflicting the COVID idiocy on all of us. Not holding my breath, naturally.

In the early days of the pandemic, there was debate over whether lockdowns were worth the economic costs. Now, with months of data, we know the verdict: Lockdowns did very little to save lives, were not worth their economic costs, and their collateral damage could lead to far more deaths worldwide due to social turmoil and disruptions in medical care and food supplies.

The COVID-19 lockdowns may be one of the biggest medical and economic blunders of all time, and those who supported them may have a hard time reconciling their past views with new data. However, it’s not too late to have an open mind.

It’s understandable that so many people were early supporters of lockdowns when fear and panic drowned out data and reason. We should not, however, be so forgiving of experts who led us astray, nor to leaders who were so quick to destroy people’s livelihoods without strong evidence, without due process, and without full consideration for the unintended medical, societal, and economic consequences of their decisions; all this for a virus which the CDC now estimates has a survival rate above 99.9% for people under 65.

As the world awakens to how fear and panic drove unnecessary lockdowns, we will also witness political fallout as leaders are exposed for how they turned medical decisions into political ones. For example, U.K. political leaders and their scientific advisers are now pointing fingers at each other over who was behind the quarantine policy.

The Danish Health Authority is also trying to exonerate itself from Denmark’s March 13 lockdown order after a leaked March 15 email stated: “The Danish Health Authority continues to consider that COVID-19 cannot be described as a generally dangerous disease, as it does not have either an usually serious course or a high mortality rate.”

Lots, lots more here, all of it adding up to one thing:

It is early and we don’t yet know exactly how this will play out, but the false narrative of lockdowns and the efficacy of their underlying models is disintegrating by the day.

The Clampdown isn’t about any silly-assed virus, and as time goes on I begin to doubt that it ever was at all. It was about an opportunity for the authoritarians to flex their muscles, to see what they could get away. Sadly, that turned out to be one hell of a lot, as millions of purported “Americans” proved all too eager to take counsel of their cowardice and throw away what precious little liberty they still enjoyed.

But the signs were all there almost from the very beginning, and they still abound, as those same authoritarians who piously proclaimed all along that they were only “following the science” double down on fascism yet again, despite the actual science now serving to expose them for what they really were all along. To wit:

Mecklenburg leaders pushed for a mask mandate Tuesday as coronavirus cases and hospitalizations continue to escalate in the county, and asked county health officials to return with an official recommendation by next week.

County commissioners say cloth face coverings are crucial in preventing COVID-19 outbreaks — and could be the deciding factor in avoiding another stay-at-home order.

The Raleigh City Council made a similar step Tuesday toward possibly implementing a mask mandate. In Durham and Orange counties, residents already are required to wear face coverings in public settings where social distancing may be difficult.

Looking like three hots and a cot, bread and water, and steady work making license plates and/or picking up roadside trash are in my near future, I’m afraid. Because I ain’t putting on no face diaper, and I do not give a skinny shit what some whey-faced, lying commie—be he in Charlotte, Raleigh, or Washington—may require of me.

Arbitrary update! Bullshit, plain and simple.

When he announced on May 1 that masks would be worn in public places, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker was emphatic.

“We view this as common sense. This is going to be basically a way of life. No ifs, no ands, no buts, no doubts.”

Yeah, go fuck yourself, little Stalin.

First, Baker’s order said to wear face coverings when in public places and unable to keep a social distance of six feet. Why’d he pick six feet? There is no research showing that six feet means anything in a public space.

That six-foot idea is an arbitrary guess that was “conjured up out of nowhere,” according to Professor Robert Dingwall, a top scientific adviser to the British government, which like the U.S. has adopted six feet as a safe social distance. The authorities guessed that it might be a good distance because some study had shown that a cough could travel six feet in a tightly closed dead-air space. The relevance of that to everyday life — who knows?

Anyone claiming the six-foot rule is not arbitrary should explain why the World Health Organization suggests a three-foot distance and why Austria, Norway, Sweden, and Finland have adopted that rule, and why Germany and other countries use a 4.5-foot rule. Does the coronavirus behave differently in Europe?

Second, the order never defined public places. Did it mean indoors or outdoors? No one knew, and Baker probably didn’t know himself. It seemed as if he was talking about indoor spaces with other people nearby. However, upon hearing Baker’s poorly defined order, anxious people extended it and ran with it. Suddenly, we saw multitudes wearing masks and bandannas everywhere, even when it didn’t make sense because no one was around. They jogged and rode bikes with them on, walked in the parks with them, wore them in their cars. When crossing a street alone, carrying groceries home, or even climbing mountains, they burdened themselves with all kinds of masks.

The disease isn’t contagious in the open air, but the mask-wearing anxiety sure is.

Not at my house, it ain’t.

Not knowing about this disease, people anxiously want to do something. Eight weeks ago, it was buying mountains of toilet paper, and today it’s needless masks. There’s social pressure — the unanimity is worrisome. And Governor Charlie Baker is looking at you. And there are busybodies who will be masked when they light into you. Yikes.

Oh, how I hope one of them tries. They’re gonna get one hell of a lot more than they bargained for.

Mask-wearing is not benign, either. (1) Masked faces feel hostile because you can see no relaxation or smile in the person you’re facing. (2) People feel disconnected, and a national survey shows that depression and suicidal thoughts are way up. (3) Public misbehavior is amplified when actors are anonymous — riots, anyone?

People make mistakes, but rigidly sticking with a mistake is inexcusable.

It is that, at minimum. High time Real Americans stopped excusing them, then, and started confronting and defying them instead, openly and aggressively. There’s way more at stake now than any health concerns, real or imaginary, can account for.

Wait, WHO’S got WHAT on WHOSE hands again, now?

Posted on May 17, 2020 by Mike

In COVIDIOT Amerika, there’s “blood on your hands,” and then there’s, y’know, BLOOD ON YOUR FUCKING HANDS. See if you can figure out which is which from the following example, which is by no means the only one out there.

A Colorado inmate released from jail early to ‘slow the spread of Coronavirus’ has been arrested and accused of first-degree murder.

While we’re playing guessing games, take a whack at what the killer might look like according to his (most recent) mug shot. Three guesses, first two don’t etc.

A man who was released from prison last month on parole following policies enacted by Gov. Jared Polis to prevent an outbreak of the new coronavirus among inmates has been arrested in the fatal shooting of a woman last weekend in Denver.

Cornelius Haney, 40, is accused of first-degree murder in the slaying of 21-year-old Heather Perry near the intersection of East Colfax Avenue and Verbena Street on May 9.

Haney was released on April 15, four months early, under an executive order by Polis before that allows inmates to be released on “special-needs parole.”

Cristina lays down the bottom-line law.

Last month a Florida inmate released on March 19 to ‘slow the spread of the Coronavirus’ was arrested on a murder charge just one day after he got out of jail.

Dangerous murderers and sex offenders are being released from prison while pastors, mothers and business owners are being threatened with fines and prison time for violating social distancing orders.

Makes as much sense as anything else does in this back-asswards country nowadays.

Daylight barking madness

Posted on May 1, 2020May 2, 2020 by Mike

Insanity, cowardice, or plain old stupidity?

The Great UnReason of 2020—a fitting name, I think, for the mass panic over COVID-19 that has been fomented by the economic and politically self-interested actors in Big Government and Big Media.

The intellects of the masses of people have been diseased by a virus of Irrationality—what a friend and colleague of mine ingeniously refers to as “COVIDIOCY” and what we may call, COVIDIOCY-20.

COVIDIOCY? Ohhhh, you can bet your ass I’m gonna be getting a lot of use out of that one from here on out.

The aggressiveness of the tumor of illogic that has corrupted people’s minds can be seen for what it is when we stop and consider that no one who is cowering in their homes (“sheltering-in-place”) has so much as remotely thought about the most fundamental of all questions:

What precisely is it that you think is going to happen to you if you do contract The Virus?

The overwhelming majority of human beings—meaning virtually all of them—that contract COVID-19 fight it for about the same amount of time that they do the seasonal flu and then…recover.

The only people for whom The Virus is potentially lethal are one and the same people—the elderly and others who are immunocompromised—for whom all viruses and infections are potentially lethal. As Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University has said, “even some so-called mild or common-cold type coronaviruses that have been known for decades can have case-fatality rates as high as 8% when they infect elderly people in nursing homes” (emphasis added).

More recent studies from locations throughout the country, based as they are on antibody testing, have confirmed what had always been long suspected: Tens of millions of Americans have been infected with The Virus and never even knew it (more thorough information regarding these studies can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here).

They never knew it because their symptoms were mild or they were asymptomatic (like Senator Rand Paul whose experience with The Virus, not coincidentally, receives few mentions from media carnival barkers whose economic self-interest is advanced through 24-hour fear-mongering).

Consequently, they developed immunity to The Virus. They can neither get it nor pass it to others. Thus, Senator Paul’s recent decision to now volunteer helping COVID patients in hospitals.

Of course, the higher infection rate also reveals that the real mortality rate is by several orders of magnitude lower than the numbers which the Experts cited to justify the oppressive policies that they have since imposed upon the country.

It isn’t just studies throughout America, but as well data gathered from other countries such as South Korea, Germany, Iceland, and Denmark that have determined that the real fatality rate from The Virus is anywhere between .1% and .4% — i.e., that of the seasonal flu.

Up to 50%-80% of all those who test positive for COVID-19 are without symptoms. And—get this—about 60% of everyone in their seventies who are infected with The Virus are without symptoms! More have only mild symptoms.

Moreover, the average age in most countries of those who die from The Virus is over 80 years of age, and of these, only 1% had no preexisting conditions.

So, again, the question must be asked: Those Americans who have been seized by the spirit of fear, those of you who studiously remain six feet or more from all other human beings; wear your masks faithfully whenever they dare to venture from their homes; happily embrace the wholesale violation of your Constitutional liberties, the squandering of the inheritance bequeathed to you by earlier generations of Americans who fought and died for it; welcome the swelling by the tens of millions of the ranks of the unemployed and the shattering of the American Dream of hundreds of thousands of small business owners; endorse the indefinite closing of churches and other houses of worship; and vigorously neglect to physically (meaning really) interact with your loved ones—to you who value your own Safety over and above all else, including your own liberty and the overall well-being of others, some of us ache to know:

Of what are you so afraid? What do you think is going to happen to you if you contract…The Virus?!

Emphasis throughout is the author’s own, supporting links (of which there are many) not transcribed. My copious excerpting notwithstanding, there’s still lots, lots more where that came from, not one word of which you want to miss.

Update! I mentioned insanity up top there for a reason, you know.

The man we now know as the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, was sent to prison for more than 500 years. He was convicted of 49 murders of prostitutes, girls on the streets and vulnerable runaways, but he was suspected of committing 71 murders in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

He would take the women and girls, have sex with them, and then strangle them, watching the light go out of their eyes as he squeezed the life out of them. Sometimes he’d use a rope and sometimes he’d use his bare hands. He’d pose their bodies and sometimes come back and have sex with the corpses. His first victims were found in the Green River, giving the monster his moniker.

He was arrested in the ’80s but let go for lack of evidence. A task force was formed to track down the serial killer and in 2001 – decades and multiple victims later – Gary Ridgeway was busted again and confessed to 71 murders.

Ridgeway was spared the death penalty because prosecutors knew it would take many millions of taxpayers dollars to give him appeals for the rest of his natural life. There was understandable outrage at the time, but prosecutors assured victims’ families and the general public that he would never ever, ever get out of prison. Never.

And then came the coronavirus and everything changed.

Read the rest, if you have a strong stomach.

Bloated numbers

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

A New York affliction.

According to The New York Times coronavirus report, as of Sunday, April 19, 2:48 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, there were 35,676 COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Of those deaths, 18,690 were in the New York metropolitan area.

That means that more than half (52 percent) of all deaths in America have occurred in the New York metropolitan area.

What makes this statistic particularly noteworthy is that the entire death toll for 41 of the other 47 states is 7,661. In other words, while New York has 52 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in America, 41 states put together have only 21 percent of the COVID-19 deaths. And all the 47 states other than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have less than half (48 percent).

Now let us imagine that the reverse were true. Imagine that Georgia and North Carolina—two contiguous states that, like the New York metro area, have a combined total of 21 million people—had 18,690 COVID-19 deaths, while metro New York had 858 deaths (the number of deaths in North Carolina and Georgia combined).

Do you think the New York metro area would close its schools, stores, restaurants and small businesses? Would every citizen of the New York area, with the few exceptions of those engaged in absolutely necessary work, be locked in their homes for months? Would New Yorkers accept the decimation of their economic and social lives because North Carolina and Georgia (or, even more absurdly, Colorado, Montana or the rest of what most New Yorkers regard as “flyover” country) had 18,960 deaths, while they had a mere 858?

It is, of course, possible. But I suspect that anyone with an open mind assumes that New Yorkers would not put up with ruining their economic and social lives and putting tens of millions of people out of work because of coronavirus deaths in North Carolina and Georgia, let alone Montana and Idaho (and, for the record, I would have agreed with them).

Lest we forget, even the underwhelming non-NYC numbers are themselves grossly inflated:

The IHME model is considered the gold standard. In mid-March, without social distancing, they predicted 2.2 million American deaths. By early April they reduced their death projection to 100,000 to 240,000 assuming social distancing measures in place. Their April 17 update now projects 60,308 deaths, 3% of their original prediction.

What changed? Social distancing was in already in place when the death predictions dropped by a factor of four. For perspective, 61,000 Americans died in the 2017-18 flu season.

The CDC had its own models predicting gloom and doom. In mid-March they projected 160 million to 214 million infected and 200,000 to 1.7 million deaths. Did that leave President Trump any choice but to hit the off switch on the U.S. economy? What if the models were wrong?

Another factor influencing models is the death count from this coronavirus. Projected deaths determine projected need, as in the ventilators mentioned above. How accurate are the death counts?

Task force member Dr. Deborah Brix, on April 7, said the U.S. government is classifying the death of any patient who tested positive for coronavirus as a coronavirus death, regardless of any underlying health conditions that genuinely killed them. If one has a heart attack, and happens to test positive for the virus, he or she will be classed as a coronavirus death. Garbage in, garbage out.

Going further, New York City is including in their death counts, “people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died of it.” Data by presumption? Models based on presumption?

What the hell, why not? Julie Kelly brings it on home for us.

Tests show about 434,000 Americans have contracted the disease so far. Only a few states indicate COVID-19 symptomatic activity; most of the country now is quiet.

Would those facts frighten you into government-ordered submission? If the United States had a population of 300 million and 48 states, would the fact that 18,000 people—sadly, mostly elderly and already sick patients—succumbed to the virus over a period of nearly two months warrant an ongoing lockdown that is destroying the economy, overwhelming unemployment rolls and food bank lines, shutting down schools and colleges for five months, and bankrupting small businesses?

Would it justify increasingly despotic orders from power-grabbing politicians to stop Americans from going to the beach or hosting dinner parties in their own homes let alone canceling graduation ceremonies and weddings and funerals?

Of course, it would pose a public health concern; strategies to mitigate the spread of the virus, particularly among the most susceptible, would be necessary. Plans to prevent a bigger outbreak later in the year would be appropriate.

The coronavirus crisis in the United States is largely a New York City crisis. One reason why many governors are afraid to fully reopen is over the fear that virus-carrying New Yorkers will flee to their largely unimpacted states.

Happy beachgoers in northern Florida are not a threat; subway commuters in New York City are. The fact that there is outrage over the former and not the latter speaks volumes about the politicization of this travesty while we remain under house arrest for the foreseeable future.

Wall it off. Should Air Force One ever go down inside…well, hey, we can always call in Snake Plissken.

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

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

Disagree. Strongly.

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

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

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

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

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

Update! WHO COULD HAVE FORESEEN THE HORROR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sheesh.

(Via Bill)

What we’ve learned

Posted on April 9, 2020April 9, 2020 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But here we all are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Live and (not) learn

Posted on April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 by Mike

Even when people are chanting the old “everything has changed” mantra, some things never really do.

Beyond China, the issue is preparedness. Actually, for almost twenty years, the issue has been preparedness. Since 9/11, freeborn citizens of advanced democratic societies have been subjected to a level of inconvenience and continuous surveillance they would never have previously entertained, from the pointless security theatre of the shoeless shuffle through LAX and O’Hare to the rubber-stamp FISA court warrants to monitor every aspect of Carter Page’s life for years on end with no probable cause. And what’s the upshot of all this 24/7 surveillance?

They didn’t see it coming.

New York, for example, is a city that has already had a huge smoking crater blown into it – and what’s the upshot? Eighteen years on, as I noted last night, after expenditures of billions on purpose-built federal, state and local bureaucracies, a city of eight million people can’t cope with an extra four thousand patients in critical condition.

Why? It’s not as if bio-warfare wasn’t expected to be part of our future: Immediately after 9/11, you’ll recall, there was the anthrax scare, and enthusiastic modeling about what would happen in the event of a suitcase nuke. And in the end hospitals are as overwhelmed as if all that money-no-object Homeland Security spending had never happened. As Kate Smyth has pointed out in our comments section, if Isis weren’t already planning something like this, the ease with which you can wipe out a third of the Dow Jones Industrials will surely have some of the savvier jihad boys dusting off the old bunsen burner.

The most significant change after 9/11 – “the day the world changed” – was the doubling of the rate of Muslim immigration to the west. Will we do the same now? More open borders, more flights from Shanghai and Beijing, more transfer of what’s left of western manufacturing to the Chinese Communist Party, more shrieks of “Raaaaacist!” at any questioning of Beijing’s official lies, never mind whether any advanced nation needs mass immigration or unscreened self-identified “refugees”…

The changes we make this time will be existential. We are suffused in death not only because of Chinese lies but because of those we tell ourselves, suppler and more beguiling as they are. “Preparedness” does not mean merely PPE and ICU, but requires also addressing borders and immigration and political correctness, and diversity unto death. In much of the western world, we are shutting down the economy and daily life, because our rulers could not bear to shut down their own virtue-signaling diversity bollocks.

Will it go the same next time? Absent serious sustained pushback, what do you think?

From here, I can see two possible ways things might go. Either we will continue on down the path to absolute tyranny, with states escalating from the current lockdowns to the establishment of curfews, then to declarations of martial law and the deployment of National Guard troops to strictly enforce them. The current nascent progression from verbal admonition or a citation and fine from law enforcement for infraction of The New Rules will rapidly advance to arrest and incarceration. There will be grumbling in some quarters, but no effective resistance.

Alternatively, the current restrictions will gradually be eased as it becomes evident that the coronavirus outbreak didn’t quite live up to its billing as a devastating planet-killer, and people who have grown extremely restless from their mandatory “stay home” period will be eager to return to something as close to whatever the hell “normal” used to be as they can. A general, widespread withdrawal from paying such close attention to international affairs and politics will ensue, which will in turn serve to blunt any “serious sustained pushback” against the idiotic, dream-world Leftist policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

Ever alert to any offered opportunity, the Left’s shrieked accusations of “RACISM!” at anyone with the otherwordly temerity to reference both China and COVID-19 in the same paragraph—as if the one could ever possibly have any relationship whatsoever with the other—will resume with vigor and volume. And the dastardly, genocidal perps of such naked atrocities will go back to being cowed by them, and methodically marginalized into fearful silence.

If the example set by our response to late 2001’s mysteriously-motivated “Some People Did Something” man-caused-disaster event is a reliable indication, and the Wuhan Fug doesn’t do a sudden 180 from current trends to more or less depopulate the nation’s close-packed urban areas instead, the latter option is way more likely. Such a relaxation of vigilance will allow the politicians and big-business tyros who collaborated to sell this country out to the ChiComs for a fistful of yen to quietly get back to doing dirty business with the abominable Reds more or less as before.

The treacherous and untrustworthy ChiComs themselves will face no serious consequences for their habitual lies, their brazen deceptions and misdirections, and the fact that they nonchalantly and knowingly poisoned the entire fucking world, murdered a largish portion of its elderly, and inflicted mass terror and tragedy on wholly innocent civilians. They, too, will quickly and quietly go back to Yellow-Peril business as usual, which means infiltrating and undermining as many other sovereign nations as possible, covertly sabotaging their economies, sapping their will and resolve via propaganda and manipulation, and expanding Red Chinese influence and power to heretofore undreamed-of levels.

All this Americans will proudly hail as “victory,” congratulating ourselves heartily for our courage, our perseverance, and our unswerving commitment to defense of our “freedom.” Y’know, precisely as we did after all those other wars we lost.

The Teflon Don

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

Even in the current mess, the treacherous swine aren’t having things ALL their way.

A newly released ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that the attempts by the media and the Democratic Party to bash Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic have failed to sway voters. In fact, since the last time they polled the question, approval of Trump’s response to the pandemic has swung hugely in his favor.

According to the poll, which was conducted March 18-19th, 55 percent of voters approve of the way Trump “is handling the response to the coronavirus.” The poll shows a dramatic shift in opinion from a week earlier, when only 43 percent approved of Trump’s response to the virus.

This was not the only poll to show the public rally behind Trump during the pandemic. An Axios/Harris poll found virtually identical numbers in a survey conducted March 17-18, with 56 percent of Americans approving of Trump’s response to the pandemic, up from 51 percent in their previous poll.

In fact, the Harris poll shows Trump’s numbers have improved across the board. His overall approval went from 49 percent to 53 percent.

I saw a cheering sight earlier today, for whatever it might be worth. In the far corner of a local Wal-Mart parking lot, an enterprising middle-aged couple had set up a display table and awning to hawk miscellaneous Trump merchandise. They had “Trump 2020” banners flying over their little stand, with T-shirts, MAGA hats, and such-like paraphernalia on offer.

Now that was all fine and well, but better still was the gaggle of about fifteen or twenty customers queued up for their turn to plop down some hard-earned and grab themselves a souvenir. The crowd was chatting gaily among themselves, smiling and laughing, just generally enjoying a warm, pleasant Friday afternoon. Naturally, I honked and waved as I passed by.

Maybe I’m making a lot out of a little here, but I haven’t seen any impromptu Biden merch-purveyors around anywhere, and don’t expect to either. If I do, I don’t anticipate such a thing being any better-attended than Senile Grampy Joe’s campaign rallies have been.

Given the overwhelmingly negative coverage by the fake news media, complete with blatantly false stories, the fact that Trump’s approval in handling the pandemic is in positive territory is remarkable.

Au contraire, mon frere. At this point, all that “overwhelmingly negative coverage” is one of the things that’s driving those spiking numbers up. The peurile propaganda purveyors of Enemedia Inc, thanks to their own core dishonesty and doot-brained stupidity, have now created the situation they would very much like to have forestalled: the more they slam Trump, the harder his backers dig in their heels in support of him.

The horrid, hapless dolts have officially made Trump’s tongue-in-cheek campaign boast that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” into something very close to literal fact. Personally, I wouldn’t be much fussed about it if he took a Sunday afternoon stroll down Fifth Ave with guns ablaze myself, so long as it was Enemedia “journalists” he was blasting at. In fact, I’d guess more than just a few of us would be happy to chip in on ammo if that were the case, so as to avoid any risk of his running dry while doing the Lord’s work.

That’s how awful, how utterly despicable these alleged “people” are. Their own burning hatred and contempt, for Trump and for every Real American alike, has flashed back to sear them so badly that real Americans are now perfectly willing to overlook a broadening spectrum of transgressions solely for the purpose of pointing and laughing when the smug, whiny pinheads get their panties all in a wad over it. Trump is Our Guy, period, and to hell with what the enemy might think or say. The more the libtards screech the better we like it, and the more we hope to see of it from our esteemed Preznit.

Ask yourselves why we hate you, pissants.

It’s like the moronic mandarins of the mainstream media – luminaries like Honest Dan Rather, Brian “Badass Like Buttigieg” Williams, and Zombie Cronkite – got together to create a plan to make people hate the media even more than they already did. It was a daunting challenge, since people view the mainstream media as something akin to syphilis without the upside. But it’s as if they finally succeeded, accomplishing, against all odds, something besides failure, leveraging this pandemic to destroy the media forever. The Chinese Coronavirus Bat Soup Syndrome has taken what’s left of the media’s reputation, poured gasoline on it, then lit it on fire before flattening it with a bulldozer and finally having a Scat Francisco hobo download last night’s free bologna sandwich on the remains.

This was the media’s time to shine, a moment when we needed clear, objective information delivered by intelligent people who asked the important questions people care about so Americans could protect themselves and their families. It was a critical juncture when the media could step up and show us all that yes, the media is still important. It still matters. It still deserves our respect.

Instead we got, “Mr. President, isn’t accurately pointing out that the coronavirus originated in China racist?”

Really.

That was a thing.

Pointing out that the Wuhan flu came from Wuhan is racist.

Yep. If there’s any silver lining to be found shining forth from the grim Chinese Flu dustup, Leftymedia’s most spectacular self-beclownment to date—along with the collateral damage they incur from it—would have to be it.

Federalism: yer doin’ it wrong

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Mike

Actually, it’s not that they’re doing it wrong. It’s that they don’t have even the foggiest understanding of it to begin with.

10th amendment, you literally discovered the 10th amendment. https://t.co/d4dJESEpyU

— Serana Verina Mistress of AR-14s. (@UsagikoNat) March 16, 2020

More hilarious responses to this embarrassingly clueless Bulwark bint here. Another spectacular self-beclowning along the same lines:

I’m not the first person to make this observation but it truly is remarkable the degree to which local and state officials as well as private entities and businesses are making these massive public health policy decisions while the feds seem to be moving much more slowly.

— Sam Stein (@samstein) March 13, 2020

Which, y’know, is PRECISELY FUCKING WHY our Constitution was written and our federal gummint set up in the way that they originally were, you fucking moron. See, the Founders’ whole idea was that the closer to the people their government was, the more responsive, flexible, and accountable to them it would necessarily be, as opposed to having the nation entire dominated by an out-of-touch and out-of-reach central bureaucracy that…

Oh, for criminy’s sake, why am I bothering? I’m wasting my time, and annoying the pig.

Lordamighty, what are they even TEACHING in government schools nowadays, anyway? Anything? Anything at ALL?!?

Never mind. Best not to answer that one, I’m afraid.

NOTE: In case you didn’t already know, and there’s absolutely no reason that you should, the Bulwark is the perenially struggling, Lefty-financed vanity project of NeverTrumpTard Cruise Cap’n Bill “Ahoy there!” Kristol. Because Muh True Conservative Princibuls™ don’t care where the cash comes from.

Backstory

Posted on March 12, 2020March 12, 2020 by Mike

I just gotta bring Georgiaboy61’s most excellent comment out front here, for anybody who might have missed it.

The convoluted logic by which Turkey was admitted to NATO was that Kemal Ataturk was a secular modernist ruler, and that by admitting the Turks, we could bottle up the Soviet Black Sea fleet while having the ability to station intermediate range nuclear missiles on their border.

The provocation of stationing missiles right hard up against the Soviet border was lost on the foreign-policy hawks, who did not realize that they had set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis by their action. Ataturk may or may not have been what he represented himself to be – a secular moderate (there is considerable evidence that he was not who he claimed to be) – but the fact remains that Turkey has been an explicitly Islamic nation for almost all of her long history, and perhaps the oldest and most-determined of the Islamic enemies of western (Christian) civilization.

We see this today under the neo-Ottoman ruler Recep Erdogan, an unreconstructed Islamic supremacist and Sunni Muslim who longs to return his nation to its glorious “golden age” as a new 21st-century caliph. Under Erdogan, Turkey is reverting to its historical mean and what it has heretofore always been – an explicitly Islamic nation.

Erdogan has done more than talk. He is one of the founders of ISIS/Islamic State, the Sunni Muslim direct-action jihad-terror group which has caused so much trouble across the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. In the recent past, Erdogan has been the biggest supporter of the group, and his son, Bilal, was caught red-handed smuggling oil to market in Turkish-flagged ships, the revenue from which had been funding the group’s operations.

Erdogan is also part of the cabal of globalists and other mischief-makers attempting to infiltrate millions of Muslims into old Europe, would-be conquerors for the new caliphate. His latest stunt along the Greek border is just his latest gambit. One in a long line of them.

The U.S. should remove its equipment, personnel and weapons from Turkey, as soon as possible, and then inform Ankara that they are no longer members of the NATO alliance. And if the other NATO members complain, then the U.S. should threaten to dissolve the alliance entirely. Once done, Turkey can then be treated as precisely what it is – an enemy of western civilization and of the alliance. Whereupon, if requested by Athens, NATO assets can be moved to Greece, should the need arise, to reinforce their borders.

Endorsed, to the last syllable, with all my heart and soul. Well done, G.

Again and again, the West has attempted to rehabilitate its Moslem enemy without Moslem consent or cooperation, recasting them as “moderates,” as “peaceful,” as civilized people who are “just like us” at bottom, who “love their children as much as we do,” without a single shred of evidence supporting any of it. The West perpetuates this pathetic self-delusion exclusively for its own near-term comfort and convenience, but the only thing such puerile folly has ever achieved is to convince the enemy of our weakness, our decadence, and our cowardice.

We crave safety so desperately that we’re willing to try nearly anything to get it, excepting of course the one and only thing that ever will: an honest, clear-eyed acceptance of certain unpleasant realities, along with the flinty resolution to act in accord with them.

Monsters!

Posted on February 27, 2020February 27, 2020 by Mike

Whoever fights Deep State monsters should see to it that in the process she does not become a monster herself. And if you gaze long enough into the Swamp, the Swamp will gaze back into you.

Because socialism is preferable to someone tweeting mean things about the media. https://t.co/1dXoJ2tkAB

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 26, 2020

Poor Megan—now a fully-paid-up DC doyenne now completely adapted and in sync with her environment thanks to her comfy, cozy WaPo sinecure—and her fellow NeverTrumpTard Old Guard pundits still keep using that word, “libertarian.” I do not think that it means what they think that it means. Ashley so-deftly administers the coup de grace:

"I support limited government" and "I want a socialist president" is pretty hard to square up

— Ashley (@luvofUSA) February 26, 2020

Oh, it ain’t merely “pretty hard” there, Ash. It quite literally cannot be done. As they say, one of these things is NOT like the other.

Nature, taking its course

Posted on February 15, 2020February 16, 2020 by Mike

UNEXPECTED!™

John Alpert is an American photojournalist whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary Cuba and the Cameraman. He first went to the island nation in 1972, a little more than a decade after the Cuban Revolution. Over the next 45 years, Alpert returned to Cuba, each time taking pictures of its towns and cities and people. The images he took are a timeline that chronicle how Castro’s socialist revolution played out for the Cuban people in the years that lay ahead.

SPOILER ALERT: it played out exactly the way it always does, in every place it’s tried. Shocking, I know.

To a young photojournalist who was idealistic and somewhat naïve at the time, socialism seemed to portend a bright future for Cuba. With its people happy and well taken care of by a paternalistic government, things were going well. But as time moved one, Cuba’s house-of-cards communist system fell apart. The free goods and services given to the Cuban people were funded not by the country’s top-down collectivist economy, but by a massive infusion of hard cash, gasoline, food, and other provisions from the Soviet Union. When the Soviets eventually pulled the plug as their own socialist economy was crumbling, the day-to-day lives of the Cuban people fell on hard times, a rude reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s observation the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

The once vibrant island nation of Cuba is but another place where socialism added to its unbroken trail of failure. The country’s capital, Havana, was once an international tourist destination. Known as the “Jewel of the Caribbean,” Havana was a glamorous city with beautiful homes and modern vehicles. After six decades of socialism, only the communist rulers and their cronies live in upscale homes, and the country’s poorly maintained roads are traveled by junker cars built in the middle of the last century.

Easy prediction: the longer they cling to socialism, the more all of these things will worsen. In some quarters, this strange phenomenon of escalating decay, collapse, and chaos is known as “bad luck.” In others, it is sometimes referred to as “getting the government you deserve—good and hard.” Not to worry, though; it’ll be diff’runt here in the US.

I find this next bit of puffed-up, self-dramatizing sanctimony hilarious:

Among the greatest heroes of the Cuban Revolution were two foreigners whose battlefield exploits were so legendary that they became the only non-Cubans to be awarded the rank of Comandante in Castro’s army. One was an idealistic 29-year-old American named William Alexander Morgan, the other a ruthless Marxist revolutionary from Argentina named Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Hailed by Castro for acts of valor that earned him the affectionate nickname “the Americano,” Morgan said he joined the Cuban Revolution because “the most important thing for free men to do is protect the freedom of others.”

Uh huh. And then—as also always, always, ALWAYS happens under Marxism/communism/socialism/Progressivism/WTFever—EVERYBODY’S freedom was taken away—along with their hope, their health, their wealth, their dignity, and their future. One just imagine the eager naif Morgan’s surprise at yet another thing that always happens:

A fervent anti-communist, Morgan was personally assured by Castro that communism would play no part in the future of the new Cuba. But once Castro had consolidated an iron-fisted grip on power, he revealed his true stripes.

NO! That just can’t be right. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.

I don’t quite grasp how any halfway intelligent person can honestly claim to be both a socialist revolutionary and a “fervent anti-communist” without suffering severe neck, spine, and brain injury from the whiplash effect of extreme cognitive dissonance. But that’s what the man says, so maybe I missed something somewhere along the line. Anyhoo, at the end of this article is a link to another worthy compendium on socialism’s inevitable failure from the same author.

Stolen valor—again

Posted on February 15, 2020February 15, 2020 by Mike

IE, just your typical Democrat-Socialist “war hero.”

When Mayor Pete Buttigieg talks about his military service, his opponents fall silent, the media fall in love, and his political prospects soar. Veterans roll their eyes.

CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Mr. Buttigieg Sunday if President Trump “deserves some credit” for the strike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. “No,” the candidate replied, “not until we know whether this was a good decision and how this decision was made.” He questioned whether “it was the right strategic move” and said his own judgment “is informed by the experience of having been on one of those planes headed into a war zone.”

But Mr. Buttigieg’s stint in the Navy isn’t as impressive as he makes it out to be. His 2019 memoir is called “Shortest Way Home,” an apt description of his military service. He entered the military through a little-used shortcut: direct commission in the reserves. The usual route to an officer’s commission includes four years at Annapolis or another military academy or months of intense training at Officer Candidate School. ROTC programs send prospective officers to far-flung summer training programs and require military drills during the academic year. Mr. Buttigieg skipped all that—no obstacle courses, no weapons training, no evaluation of his ability or willingness to lead. Paperwork, a health exam and a background check were all it took to make him a naval officer.

Mr. Buttigieg was assigned to a comfortable corner of military life, the Naval Station in Great Lakes, Ill. Paperwork and light exercise were the order of the day. “Working eight-hour days,” he writes, was “a relaxing contrast from my day job, and spending time with sailors from all walks of civilian life, was a healthy antidote to the all absorbing work I had in South Bend.” He calls it “a forced, but welcome, change of pace from the constant activity of being mayor.”

During a November debate, Mr. Buttigieg proclaimed: “I have the experience of being commanded into a war zone by an American president.” The reality isn’t so grandiose.

Mr. Buttigieg spent some five months in Afghanistan, where he writes that he remained less busy than he’d been at City Hall, with “more time for reflection and reading than I was used to back home.” He writes that he would take “a laptop and a cigar up to the roof at midnight to pick up a Wi-Fi signal and patch via Skype into a staff meeting at home.” The closest he came to combat was ferrying other staffers around in an SUV: In his campaign kickoff speech last April he referred to “119 trips I took outside the wire, driving or guarding a vehicle.” That’s a strange thing to count. Combat sorties in an F-18 are carefully logged. Driving a car isn’t.

Them that did it don’t talk about it. Them that talk about it didn’t do it. That slight twist on a hoary old SpecWarrior truism will peel the mask off a braggadocious little REMF queef like Buttplug every time.

JUSTICE FOR JUICY!

Posted on February 11, 2020February 11, 2020 by Mike

Again: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was indicted Tuesday by a grand jury in Chicago after a special prosecutor re-investigated allegations he bogusly reported being the victim of a January 2019 hate-crime attack, officials said.

Smollett, 37, was indicted on six counts of disorderly conduct related to making four separate false reports to Chicago Police Department officers, claiming he was the victim of a hate crime while “knowing he was not the victim of a crime,” special prosecutor Dan Webb said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon.

Webb was appointed by a Cook County judge to continue looking into the false allegations after the Cook County State’s Attorney Office dropped all charges against the actor.

He said his office has made arrangements with Smollett’s attorneys for the actor to voluntarily appear at an arraignment on Feb. 24 in the Criminal Division of Cook County Circuit Court. Webb’s investigation began Aug. 23, after Cook County Circuit Court Judge Michael Toomin appointed him special prosecutor.

Toomin directed Webb to launched an independent investigation to determine whether Smollett should be further prosecuted for the allegedly false reports he made to police and whether “any person or office involved in the Smollett case engaged in wrongdoing, including the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office or individuals in that office,” Webb’s statement reads.

That last bit sounds like it might turn out to be the most, umm, interesting part of this whole shitshow, I think.

Meatless makes morons

Posted on January 30, 2020January 30, 2020 by Mike

Well, DUH.

The vegan diet is low in – or, in some cases, entirely devoid of – several important brain nutrients. Could these shortcomings be affecting vegans’ abilities to think?

Hrmmm…let me see…since veg-head types seem to be overwhelmingly liberal/Left, I’m gonna have to go with “Oh HELL yes!” on that one.

The idea that avoiding meat is bad for our brains makes some intuitive sense; anthropologists have been arguing about what our ancestors ate for decades, but many scientists think that there was a lot of bone-crunching and brain-slurping on the road to evolving these remarkable 1.4kg (3lb) organs. Some have even gone so far as to say that meat made us human.

One reason is that intelligence is expensive – the brain devours about 20% of our daily calories, though it accounts for just 2% of our body weight – and what better way to find the enormous array of fats, amino acids, vitamins and minerals these fastidious organs require, than by feasting on animals which have already painstakingly collected or made them.

But though it’s hard to imagine our ancestors choosing turnips over tuna, today it’s a different story. According to the latest statistics, there are around 375 million vegetarians on the planet. In the West, veganism has ditched the hippie stigma to become one of the fastest-growing millennial trends; in the United States, it grew by 600% between 2014 and 2017. Meanwhile in India, meat-free diets have been mainstream since the 6th Century BCE.

Might at least partially explain why most of India is such a horrid, back-asswards dump, no? And why average IQ scores are declining, abruptly reversing a steady, 3-points-per-decade increase throughout the 20th century?

Ideally, to test the impact of the vegan diet on the brain, you would take a randomly selected group of people, ask half to stop eating animal products – then see what happens. But there isn’t a single study like this.

Instead, the only research that comes close involved the reverse. It was conducted on 555 Kenyan schoolchildren, who were fed one of three different types of soup – one with meat, one with milk, and one with oil – or no soup at all, as a snack over seven school terms. They were tested before and after, to see how their intelligence compared. Because of their economic circumstances, the majority of the children were de facto vegetarians at the start of the study.

Surprisingly, the children who were given the soup containing meat each day seemed to have a significant edge. By the end of the study, they outperformed all the other children on a test for non-verbal reasoning. Along with the children who received soup with added oil, they also did the best on a test of arithmetic ability. Of course, more research is needed to verify if this effect is real, and if it would also apply to adults in developed countries, too. But it does raise intriguing questions about whether veganism could be holding some people back.

In fact, there are several important brain nutrients that simply do not exist in plants or fungi. Creatine, carnosine, taurine, omega-3, haem iron and vitamins B12 and D3 generally only occur naturally in foods derived from animal products, though they can be synthesised in the lab or extracted from non-animal sources such as algae, bacteria or lichen, and added to supplements.

Others are found in vegan foods, but only in meagre amounts; to get the minimum amount of vitamin B6 required each day (1.3 mg) from one of the richest plant sources, potatoes, you’d have to eat about five cups’ worth (equivalent to roughly 750g or 1.6lb). Delicious, but not particularly practical.

And though the body can make some of these vital brain compounds from other ingredients in our diets, this ability isn’t usually enough to make up for these dietary cracks. For all of the nutrients listed above, vegetarians and vegans have been shown to have lower quantities in their bodies. In some cases, deficiency isn’t the exception – it’s completely normal.

For now, the impact these shortcomings are having on the lives of vegans is largely a mystery. But a trickle of recent studies have provided some clues – and they make for unsettling reading.

Well, unsettling if you’re a vegan, that is. Seeing as how there isn’t the slightest chance of me ever willingly making that switch, pas de sweat over here, thanks.

All my snark aside, this is actually a pretty interesting read.

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