The Magic Box

Anyone who works in the right answer fields, like engineering and computer science, has run across the magic box gag. This is where someone draws up a process, describing the various inputs and sub-processes. Somewhere toward the end of the diagram is a box into which all of this stuff flows. What comes out of the box is the desired result of the entire process. That box at the end, where all the good stuff happens, is labeled something like “magical happens here.”

It is a stale gag, but a persistent one as it is a very good way to simplify a project for the people who put the magic in the box. The people who will get the magic really don’t need to know what happens inside the box. That’s not their concern. That’s the job of the technical people to solve. In fact, the whole point of the exercise is to make sure everyone shares the same understanding of all the other stuff. The users of the process must trust that the technical people put the right magic in the box.

It does not always go that way through. Even the simplest processes have peculiarities that are not appreciated until you start monkeying around with them. The combination of inputs may create conflicts that require immensely complicated solutions inside the box in order to get the desired result. It’s why after the meeting ends, the technical people erase the board and spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what form of magic will have to go into that box. Magic is not as easy at looks.

This concept is one to keep in mind when evaluating the responses to the virus panic and soon the economic consequences of it. Loads of people on both sides of the great divide think something momentous has happened. They see the flood of changes that have been imposed and rightly assume that it will have a profound long term effect on the country and the West in general. They are probably right, but they disagree as to what will come out of the magic box that is this panic.

The most obvious starting place is with the people demanding we take this extreme measure to stop the virus.  As has been discussed at length here now, they fail to consider the consequences. Instead, their response is something like, “The economy is not important. That will fix itself.” In other words, something magical will happen and things will get back to normal. The magic box will not only fix all the damage done to civil life, it will restore everything back to where it was before the panic.

It’s possible that things bounce back to where they were to start the year. No one knows, because this has never been done. Maybe in a year this whole episode will be forgotten, like the Kavanaugh hearings or the Russia hoax. On the other hand, we could be facing a long depression. The blows to the system could be so profound they cannot magically heal themselves. Instead, things remain broken. In other words, maybe the magic in that box is bad magic, the very worst kind of magic.

That brings up another camp that is now deeply invested in the magic box. There are a lot of people on this side of the great divide that are cheering the lock down. They think it will forever discredit the things they don’t like. The consequences of globalism and the neoliberal order will flow into the hive brain of the public and what comes out the other side is a rejection of all of it. Magically, everyone will come to the conclusions many people on this side held before the panic and subsequent results.

It’s possible that some of those things Greg Johnson lists will come true. It’s also possible that none of them will happen.  People are remarkably resilient to reality, as we see with the panic. If your first response to the prospects of a pandemic are to fill your basement with toilet paper, you are unlikely to draw the best lessons from this panic and its results. The ruling class, the people who triggered this panic, are also unlikely to abandon all the things that allow them to be in power.

The point here is not to take issue with Greg or his post. Greg’s lessons are correct, but they were correct before the panic. He is assuming this sudden crisis will be the magic box that transforms everything. The last half century of history is flowing into this panic and the resulting turmoil. What will come out the other side is a great awakening, as the scales fall from the eyes of everyone wondering how they will pay their rent and feed their kids. The coronavirus panic is the magic box.

Similarly, there is a subset of this thinking that exists in fringe socialist circles, like the remnants of the old alt-right and the Bernie Sanders camp. They cheer the coming collapse, because they think the prophesies will finally come true. America will become Weimar Germany. One version of the game has Richard Spencer delivering his first speech to the new Ethno-Reichstag. The other side thinks they will finally be free to punch those Nazis that secretly control the world.

It is an interesting key value pair. Both camps think their political ideology is timeless and forever relevant. Both sides think history must repeat in the exact same way it happened 90 years ago in Europe. It’s like coordinates on a map. Because the coordinates never change, their place on the great map of human history never changes either. It’s a form of mysticism. In this case, they assume an economic collapse must magically result in conditions most favorable to them.

Again, that magic box may not contain what they imagine. The most likely result is the increased power of the tech oligarchs. They are now helping government track people, all in the name of safety, of course. A world in which drones are used to police citizens identified through their mobile phone as having stood next to the wrong person is not favorable to the revolution. You see, the people in charge have been planning for the arrival of you-know-who for a very long time as well.

In fairness, maybe the critics of the response to this virus are engaging in magic box thinking as well. To assume lots of bad things come out of the other end of the box is just as presumptuous as assuming only good things will emerge. Maybe the great reorder that will occur after this will be better for the Nazis and Bolsheviks camped out in the pumpkin patch. Maybe people will wake up to the reality of neoliberal order and demand changes. Maybe things get back to normal in a hurry.

The one true thing in all of this is no one knows what is inside the box that events appear to be leading us. The panic itself is unprecedented in the modern age, so we are left to guess about what follows. What’s happening with the global financial system is less novel, but the scale is unprecedented. No one can know if the economy will spin back up, as no one has tried to turn it off and then back on. We are in the world of unknown unknowns, the part of the diagram labeled “Magic.”


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273 thoughts on “The Magic Box

  1. My surprising missus.
    She brought up the thought of this rain, rain, rain- what if the crops and planting are flooded again this year, like last year?

    Update St. Louis: Locked down now.
    The blood banks have closed, the workers have it, the stocks may be contaminated.
    Certainly from the poor, selling plasma.

    The DoTransportation office building is closed, their office workers got it too.
    There goes the distribution monitoring, trains, planes, and vehicles.

      • I curse myself for taking a day off.
        I doubly curse myself for abusing the Z-blog.

        Gods, I have so much to do. Sorry-sorry.
        The Zman’s voodoo doll is working fine, though, as I just got handed another $9000 bill. I really should learn– no, I will learn!

  2. There was this blogger I like, calls himself Z-man I think, who posted about people messing with big, complicated systems. It is almost impossible to tell what might happen if you just blindly screw with the system. Even small adjustments can have huge effects on the system. Could break it even. You might not be able to put it back right if you are not careful.

    This is what we have done to the US economy as well as the world economy. There will be no “fast return to normalcy”. You heard it right here Z-man my friend. We are really screwed.

    Now don/’t get me wrong, I am not predicting the end of life on planet earth. I am not Paul Ehrlich. I am predicting the Greatest Depression in history. This coming depression will make the ’30s look like boom times. I don’t see how people in the cities (and I am in one) are going to survive.

    On the other hand, just maybe God will lead us on a great revival and good will come from the suffering ahead. That I can not possibly predict.

    I pray for the young that they may survive the coming times.

  3. An event like the SIP’n the WuFlu (Shelter-In-Place) introduces a little oscillation in the system that never really goes away. The effects of Waco and Ruby Ridge on a certain faction of the population’s understanding of ‘politics’ never stopped having ramifications, even today.

  4. We now know that the mainstream Media is inimical to civic life. We know that they profit by spreading panic, suspicion, and demographic discord. Most of all, with the arrival of COVID, we have learned of their capacity to inflict profound social harm.

    Over the past few weeks, the media has brazenly reaffirmed its status as a cancerous institution. And if our economic displacement proves sufficiently dire in proportion to the severity of the virus, that they are the ones who should be held accountable.

    “They’ll just finger point.” Right. But when the actual deaths don’t add up as badly as the bread lines, then we can finger point. To the data. And we should keep pointing with a smile.

    The media is responsible for rendering millions subservient to Fauci’s squeaky edicts. For weeks, they waited on the word of the media — CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc. — and adjusted their lives accordingly, with the good faith they were being led by a coalition of erudite scientists and competent Journalists. Well, as we will probably see, that’s not what happened. Us just getting screwed and them just skating, well, how the hell can that happen?

    • “But when the actual deaths don’t add up as badly as the bread lines, then we can finger point. To the data.”

      Our side keeps playing this game like the facts matter. Reality, as does time, matter and are persistent regardless of feels. However, you can cleave these people with all the facts and data you want, and nothing in recent history demonstrates this time facts will overcome feels. I know I’m right because these idiots are still winging on about racism and prejudice towards slants. These people will be right back attempting to steer the ship back to their narrative as is convenient.

  5. Nice piece of writing! Question: how much faith do I/we have that those who have the power to define the magic box posess motives that serve the public good? What record exists historically of results that would confirm they have historically acted in the interests of the public good? If they are not doing so now, what checks and balances operate, (if any), to help ensure a positive outcome for that public good?

  6. My question is this: If the tech oligarchs are using this panic to augment their power then shouldn’t we be doing the same?

  7. The magic box has a powerful Ally . It’s evil propaganda arm ” glow in the box ”
    a k a television. Despite what we see in our everyday realities we run home to see what the glow in the box is telling us about the “real world “.

    Divorced myself from television many many moons ago. Always get strange looks when people want to carry on about some new TV series. Can’t really blame people it’s inescapable. They even have goddamn TVs on the gas pumps now when you’re filling up. Bars, restaurants , train stations all plastered with huge flat screen TVs.

    The good news with the ongoing bogus pandemic lots of people out walking getting fresh air . Mostly old people, but still . . . . . Would be great to see their little economic reset come back and bite them in the ass !

    • But how many times can they do this before a real reaction occurs? It’s only been about a decade since the last one. And before that one another decade. Their mistakes are piling up fast and this one could bear consequences that outweigh the previous 2 by a substantial margin.

      • This one may still fly
        Next one,10 years from now will not.Incidentally that will be 2029 a hundred years after the great depression
        And it is going be much worse 1929
        In order for that not to happen the things will have to change radically which will they not

  8. I really doubt that they will be able to fix this by just printing money, but then again it seems to have worked for today. Guess we’ll see. You know who certainly has no way of arising by the same vector. Civic life is dead in America, replaced by a curated, censored and artificially manipulated digitized public space. The reason Spencer is allowed to remain in this space is that the man is a joke and therefore serves as a convenient foil for them. No, this situation is entirely novel, no nation has ever existed quite like this one. The scale of it, the heterogeneous nature of it’s population, the extent to which technological and sociological “progress” has altered it’s social dynamics. There is no road map. Any plans made have little applicability if they are based off lessons learned from the 30s. The continued and rapdily accelerating erosion of public trust in a system led by a clearly clueless leadership class will however continue to open doors to dissident ideas and movements.

    • Spencer is a clown who lives off his reach parents I think he never worked a single day in his life
      That is why he is rooting for the doom while at the same time engaging in the hypocrisy of highest order
      Is there a really a single intelligent being who believes that this narcissistic asshole cares for anything other than self promotion and betterment

      • Right, which is why the media propped him up and allows him to remain on twitter. Like I said, he is a useful foil for them. He is their straw-man of us. Used to discredit our ideas.

    • The more I think about it, the more I believe the best historical analogy for America is the Byzantine Empire.

  9. I love how India is shutting down entirely for this. A country where people swim in raw sewage and dead bodies of a “holy” river and the plague still sweeps villages. Getting Coronavirus doesn’t even move the needle there. Of course this is about an Indian economy that was already failing and now the leadership can blame “the virus” for that. And in another year start a nuke war with Pakistan as another deflection. This is a silly silly world. The kind of era that historically existed just before the outbreak of major wars.

    • I’ve gained a whole new respect for the coronavirus. It takes guts to try and infect the subcontinent.

    • Virtue signaling on its highest compounded by an enormous delusion of grandeur
      While declaring “war” on corona virus each of these clowns sees himself alike to the old drunkard Churchill, resolute and firm in face of the enemy
      Vomit Inducing

  10. The Columbus Dispatch is trumpeting the headline “Coronavirus’ horrific toll on Ohio economy,” but since only six people have died and only 104 have been hospitalized in the state, it’s much more accurate to say “Coronavirus panic’s horrific toll on Ohio economy.”

    ETA: By far the most cases are up in Cleveland and, let’s be honest, nobody really cares about Cleveland.

      • “This train is carrying jobs out of Cleveland!”

        I love that video.

        Lol, he’s got a second one.

        So The Cleveland Board of Tourism was not happy with the first video that I turned in. In fact, they said that upon viewing it, three of the board members moved away.

        They insisted that I turn in a proper Cleveland tourism video, otherwise they will pursue litigation.

        https://youtu.be/oZzgAjjuqZM

        “At least we’re not Detroit!”

        • I had a job interview in Cleveland once and the guy who took me to lunch made it a point to take me to what he claimed to be the first electric street light in America, so I guess we can never take THAT away from them.

  11. After 911, I was astonished that they doubled down on immigration and globalism. This was after I had taken the red pill, but before I taken the black pill.

    Nothing astonishes me anymore.

  12. >It’s possible that some of those things Greg Johnson lists will come true. It’s also possible that none of them will happen. People are remarkably resilient to reality, as we see with the panic. If your first response to the prospects of a pandemic are to fill your basement with toilet paper, you are unlikely to draw the best lessons from this panic and its results. The ruling class, the people who triggered this panic, are also unlikely to abandon all the things that allow them to be in power.

    ———————-

    The argument is, if things have been going against white America for the past century, with no end in sight, then major disruption opens the possibly for change. It is no guarantee obviously. But we know that if things keep going they way they have, things will not change. It is like a mulligan after getting a bad hand. The problem with this argument and white nationalism in general is it assumes white america is some homogeneous entity united by a shared interest. Successful whites who have family and businesses may not want to see everything torn down.

  13. What ties us together as a country? It’s not really ethnicities. We’re now a buffet of ethnicities. It’s not culture. The elites think they’re strengthening the country by doing this. They think it’s a magic box full of social capital. They’re looking for this WW2 era moment when everyone supported the leaders and gladly took their ration cards, etc. What they don’t understand, is that thanks to a half century of their policies the only thing tying us together is the dollar, or what will be left of it after we have unlimited “easing” and many rounds of stimulus (You think this’ll be the only one?) The first fight will be between states that went full retard (shut down) vs the ones that at least kept the doors opened. The full retard states will naturally be the hardest hit and want a bigger cut of the loot. The other states will say “Hey Cuomo, no one put a gun to your head on this.” Bickering will ensue as the lid blows off the deficit. But no one will really have to pay for this until we see it in the inflation figures (Act III). We’ll wait another year for that. The only vote I have is to shift more money out of dollar denominated assets while the dollar is riding high in a panic driven scramble.

  14. Z probably your best post ever: and whatever happens this is America so it will be Federated- that is to say varied and distributed. It will also be Supersized; it’s what we do.

    Ultimately surveillance means nothing if you don’t have the army and police- and they don’t. And we have guns.

    But worst of all they just lost the middle class; the real middle class- the shopkeepers.
    They are the people’s natural sergeants, captains and lieutenants.

    Brace thyselves. This time really is different.

  15. Appropos of nothing, but telling in that it illustrates how much the Magic Box is a clutched straw and how all this plays out is uncertain. My local Fox affiliate this morning aired a segment about how Wuhan has bounced back and is up and running. Yet yesterday it emerged there were cases starting to pop up there and in provinces adjoining Hubei. The ayatollahs of Globohomo knows this will bite them in the ass at least to some degree, so their propaganda whores are having to put on a Big Show that would make Chairman Kim blush. They will concede, and only when push comes to shove, that maybe having all your antibiotics produced in the Magic Middle Kingdom wasn’t such a grand idea. So Globohomo’s Magic Box is limited reduction in Chinese production. Maybe it will be, maybe not, but that straw shows quite a bit of stretching.

  16. well, we know one thing, all the monkeys are at their typewriters plunking away. the incoherence and noise is intolerable. This isn’t even fun to watch.

  17. My observation is if it spins back up and 401k balances rise again? Not many lessons are going to be learned and the tech giants just grabbed more power. The Kennedy Center gets its gay art financed and tranny week celebrations continue.
    Us boomers still live and watch our 401k balance daily.
    It will take the great collapse to change anything and we may or may not be close to that?
    The Federal Reserve has just been spinning along fine since 1913.
    The music is gonna stop
    But whether that is now or 10 or 20 years from now who knows?

  18. In the end, restaurants and movie theaters, barbers and beauticians, money men and political men matter not. Costco and skill sets are what matter. This is a clarifying experience. It won’t keep us out of the Brazilantina outcome, but priorities have been made clear.

    • Barbers and beauticians most definitely do matter, Dutch! My husband and son were schedule for haircuts in a few days. When I texted this morning, the guy said he was still working. About an hour ago he texted he was just closed down by the damned county (with all of 8 fatalities in DFW). Although my son prefers his hair short, he’ll do okay. My husband has curly hair though – somehow I don’t think a grey-fro will suit him.

  19. “There are a lot of people on this side that are cheering the lock down. They think it will forever discredit the things they don’t like.”

    Time and time again, people on our side imagine that because to them an observable phenomenon constitutes incontrovertible validation, every one else will be compelled to admit that they were right all along.

    Forgetting in the process that the same reality can be grist to many mills.

    The Yellow Vests in the winter of 2018/2019 was a case in point. Our side’s coverage was an orgasm of wishful thinking and self-delusion: the neoliberal world order in trouble, european nations rediscovering themselves, national consciousness rising, populism coming of age, etc. Meanwhile every other ideological persuasion was busy making it fall neatly into their own worldview.

    In the present case, while our own are giddy proclaiming Global Supply Chain BTFO’ed and borders good, European Leftists (of the old school) are all over the dearth of medical supplies, claiming it proves that taxes are too low and hospitals are underfunded. Everyone is ready with their own I told you so’s.

    Seeing as since the beginning of the quarantine, the air has never been cleaner, the skies have never been clearer and the pigeon problem has virtually disappeared, I wouldn’t be surprised to see environmentalists making a come back as well.

    We’ve never really moved past the “Detroit is proof of DR2, enough said” mentality. And while we cross our arms and simper with self-contentment like Mussolini on his balcony smugly but vainly expecting cries of “How could we have been so blind?”, we lose an opportunity to press home our narrative.

    • Anon, I like your thinking. Pressing home the narrative is of course essential, but it’s nice to have a series of events play out which logically supports the narrative. I agree all the grifters will spin events to support their world view. Most of my audience I doubt is at the level of even concluding any narrative connecting such events at all. I’ll provide them my version/vision. Find a vacuum, fill it. Easier than changing an already established perception.

      • Last night, as I am checking into the Hampton Inn, the female desk clerk tells me that she “would do as she is told” and that she “will go where she is told to be.”

        This after I had taken several minutes to engage her with corona chat, asking her whether she had considered the costs of cratering the economy and whether she had any confidence in Dr. Anthony “chicken little” Fauci (she did not know who he is).

        You are right that it is easier to find a vacuum and fill it than trying to change an already established perception. I am still learning that lesson although I would have spent more time trying to engage this desk clerk in days of yore.

  20. We’re seeing a real path for a return to quasi-normalcy by sometime in the fall. I’m skeptical about a vaccine, even for next year, but I find credible an estimate that we should have an antigen test by May-June (this would be like a pregnancy test, i.e. specialized, cheap, and fast, unlike the versatile and expensive PCR). Widespread testing would allow relaxing a lot of the social distancing rules. We’re also seeing the private sector react well. Musk supposedly already delivered his promised 1000 ventilators to LA (hopefully he built them, rather than bought them). Wars are periods of extraordinary innovation (think of synthetic rubber, airplanes, and nuclear power as examples), so it’s not magical thinking to expect something similar now. There are a thousand ways we can still screw this up, but a path to quasi-normalcy is starting to take shape. And then we can deal with China, the swamp, and various other problems this crisis has exposed. Because there’s no way we’re going back to the status quo ante.

  21. If things get back to normal quickly, I look forward to buying lots of toilet paper on the street for next to nothing.

    • Toilet paper doesn’t go bad, so just stick it in where you have the space and take one when needed. So, it lasts a year? One less item to buy at the supermarket.

  22. Boeing 737-Max had the magic box whose sole job was to make the plane fly like previous models despite major airframe changes. We still don’t know if / when the 737-max will be approved to fly again.

    • That is a good analogy
      Every single sound engineering analysis has shown that ii was not going to work
      But well paid know nothings pushed it anyway
      “C’mon these engineers, these are just you know numbers My gut feeling tells me it is going to work”

    • K (Whatever);
      Boeing 737 Max is an outstanding illustration of how H1B Tech Globalization = Business Death, sooner or later. Boeing outsourced the control software to Bangalore to save a few bucks. Anybody who has ever had contact with Subcontinent students knows that brazen cheating is their entitled norm, both there and here. Competence tests unfairly strand in the way of Pajit (and his loudmouth sister) assuming the rightful places due them on account of being born into their cast, after all. But this mind set would never carry over into hard-to-check, black-box type code, right_?

      Boeing’s big, possibly insoluble, problem is that, having been exposed for fatal corner cutting on essential control software, to get re-certified, they’d have to find and fix all the other corners that all the Pajits also cut. (And without admitting to any of it because tort lawyers.) Being a brazen cheater, Pajit-1 cannot admit to this and Pajit-2 actually isn’t competent to find them all but will say he did. Everybody knows both Pajits are lying but can’t say so and start over sans Pajits because rayysiss (not to mention costly).

      737 Max may never fly and Boeing itself may crash, despite OrangeMan’s presser pleading.

  23. Its all a magic box. What comes out this magic box will be the inputs to the next magic box. There’s so little we can imagine. Its possible that we get more totalitarian on the elite output, but its possible we get more awareness in the populist output. And those feed into the next Magic Box.

    The hope is we can shift things without a lot of strife or too much break in civilization. That’s the best case scenario and this magic box seems like a well placed one to get that. But it is a best case. Worst case is Argentina. Reality is far more likely to be in between. Question is, how will these outputs be changed in the next magic box?

  24. Few outside of our cognitive class and higher functionaries in the clerisy can or will absorb and integrate into their belief system things presented in the straightforward, dry prose formats. If anything is to come of these many idea-forgers, theoreticians, analysts and presenters of our camp who have cropped up over the past decades on this or other media, then we have to make the terrific jump to terrain now fully owned and occupied by our opponents — to the creative arena. We can make no further headway if we are unable to do this.

    (NOTE: Not claiming this myself as an original thought; I’ve seen this mentioned on this site and others several times in the past by various commenters.But we need to start looking seriously at this issue.)

    I am myself a member myself of the great unwashed. I was elevated over my professional life into the mid and upper reaches of the caste that toils to support the plans and lifestyles of those who aspire to run our lives, and that also maintains the system protecting the rulers. In retirement, and my post-60 years, I’m once again immersed in a younger, working class environment.

    In the particular group I interact with now, there is great awareness that something is terribly wrong. Most of them are aged from 18 through 26. They are all highly techno-competent, though they are all working class. About 1/3 are fresh from a hitch in the military — predominately Marine Corps — junior enlisted to E-5 max. They get most info and entertainment through their smart phones — streaming “TV” series, or YouTube news updates etc. they are a rough, crude, tough and surprisingly thoughtful lot. ALL MALE. They are also deeply historically and culturally illiterate. And they are tremendously cynical about almost everything, and broadly accepting of the fact that bad things are a’coming.

    To move things forward with this sort, we are going to have to carve out space in the area now held for our elites and rulers by the (ideologues and lunatics of the) creative class.

    —> more to follow; kid chores call ….

    • The consequence of each major crises is that it will bring stronger on the top They handled it better, they proved once more that they are significantly better organized and sane society led by more capable men
      This will just speed up what was already inevitable, their domination over degenerate, weak and effeminate west

      • Exactly this. I’ve been meaning to write a comment detailing why China is going to emerge from this crisis stronger than ever and the US is going to exposed as a paper tiger, but work deadlines have prevented it. The globalist talking heads who are screeching that this virus puts an end to the Chinese Century have it precisely backwards.

        China can survive quite nicely without the US. This crisis has exposed the fact that the US is utterly and completely dependent on the manufacturing capacity that we so stupidly off-shored to China over the past 30 years. We lack the capacity to make simple items such as masks and surgical gowns, much less more complex technology like respirators and chemical precursors for pharmaceuticals.

        The real take-away point from this crisis for China is that it is now free to operate as a global force on its own terms. The US is no longer in a position to interfere with China in any significant way.

      • Or, they stopped counting, comfortable with mortal losses.

        Or-or, if responsible, they saw their disruption strategy worked. They could count on the frenzied poodles of the West.

        • If there is no money for their goods? Pharma and others might be the exception because of inelasticity of demand, but other stuff seems doubtful. If we suffer a recession, so does China. We are their biggest trading partner. And of course there is hope that we wise up and restrict/limit trade in strategic items, which obviously includes Pharma.

          • Here, I’ll give you a piece of paper.

            Howard Bloom, a shieking lefty (came up with “zero-sum”, smart), said China was buying time til they became an internal domestic market- with all the world eyeing those low renminbi prices.

            Plus, the 82nd airborne won’t be bringing democracy and purple fingers, instead the Chinese will be making the local rulers rich- just as they did with the Clintons in Arkansas.

  25. What we are doing is setting maniacs with machetes on the magic box. We are throwing sand onto the gears of a very complicated machine nobody understands just to see what will happen. But we have been doing it for years and years. No matter how many idiot lights are glowing red or alarms shrieking, people look at the engine, see that it hasn’t stopped and just assume the lights and alarms are faulty.
    I am guilty of seeing the magic box and assuming unimaginable evil will come out.

    • Thank you Tars. I’ve been guilty of creeping optimism lately. You are helping to bring me back to earth, to reality.

      And yet….

  26. We know the status quo, pre-virus, isn’t reachable; we know that the system rebooted and why. We know China is responsible. We know Europe responded like the syphilitic beggars they are. We know the people of PRC look at their leaders very differently now. We know globalism is a death trap; and that some industries and products have strategic value. To me, it looks like the old system just threw a rod and gakked itself. And everyone saw it happen.

    There has been pressure for real change (here in the US) for decades, and this societal disruption might grease the skids so to speak. So any determined effort by an organized group — even a small group — could push things a lot farther than would be the norm. You can see the Dems going for it already, by rejecting the relief money. Wait until Trump gets on TV and starts hammering nancy and chuck about keeping money pout of literally every American’s hands — and doxxes them live on tv?!. There will be mobs outside their houses with torches and guillotines.

    The more the Dems screw around, the more radicalized the voting populace becomes. Eventually you end up with helicopter justice for all the left wing shit stains.

  27. This is a little off topic, but I’m surprised that there’s been no discussion about what a backstabbing pair of t**ds Mittens Rombleycare and his mini me Mumbai Mike Lee are being right now. Because of their “self-quarantine” they can’t vote in the Senate so Cryin’ Chuck and the Dems are now in the majority and in charge during this “stimulus” vote. Why shouldn’t they basically expect to get everything they want now that they’re effectively in charge of both houses of Congress? And given what a rat fink WIllard has always been, it’s not too much of stretch to think that’s exactly what he wants to see happen. And to make the treachery even more obvious, Amy Clowncar’s HUSBAND supposedly has Corona-chan. Her response? “I don’t see my husband too much. I’m fine to show up for work and vote.”

    • Romney may be trying to hurt Trump, but Mike Lee is smart enough to see that doing the same thing can help, by showcasing exactly what the Democrats are at this crucial juncture.

      • I give Lee zero credit at any time for anything. He started out as a tea party hero, got his chain yanked hard by business and the party, and is now an immigration and green card promoter. He’s worse than useless.

  28. Just checked out Greg’s piece. I agree with most of what he says (as usual).

    There was absolutely no need to bring up RamZ or Z at all – it added nothing to his point. No need to speculate on their motives.

    Gratuitous call-outs and needless counter-signalling are just as harmful as deliberate subversion.

    More grist for the “manners” piece I’m grinding (might be two posts with the latest examples of what not-to-do).

    • As is usual, Greg is brilliant but is a catty bitch.

      I respect him tremendously, but he’s no more fit to lead than Spencer was.

    • Greg Johnson devotes all his considerable abilities, his entire life really, to something and then needlessly undermines it with outbursts of thoughtlessness.

  29. Real/good engineering does not actually work as a magic box
    You have input parameters, you have calculations, you have testing and and you have the final assessment based on these + sound engineering judgment
    If you lock the whole world for a significant amount of time you know what is going to happen even if that particular case never happened before
    Going back to engineering analogy that would be like designing a beam for 250 kips of load and loading it with 1000 kips and saying let us see what is going to happen
    We know what is going to happen, it is going to collapse
    As for sudden waking up of people to the globalist domination and the new revolution in the minds of people, based on every single indication that I saw that is a pipe dream
    What I see is a collective looting be it stores or government funds ( which is your money
    and money of your children) Should this prolong and an inevitable depression come the looting will take a form of literal braking into your homes by diversity of all kinds and some desperate people as well
    It is already and will be much more each man for himself therefore hoping for some kind of collective awakening and solidarity is an illusion born in the heads of the people who sees themselves as leaders of this new revolution
    They motives are for the most part selfish as as they have always been (minus a few exceptions)
    When times like this come you should fear most those that have nothing lose.Breakdown of the society is nothing but an unexpected opportunity for them

  30. I wonder how low we will see the age limit drop before people REALLY start to panic. France just made being out of the house without permission a minor crime; 3,000-Euro fine, 6-months in jail. Better start leaving your cell phone at home if you want to go out to avoid being tracked. Germany will most likely shut the borders completely next week.

    “Italy: We no longer help those over 60”

    https://www.jpost.com/International/Israeli-doctor-in-Italy-We-no-longer-help-those-over-60-621856

    • So far, this guy has been the most right or the least wrong, depending upon your inclination. https://wmbriggs.com/post/29886/

      Again, trusting people who told you open borders is a great idea to give you an honest report on what is happening on the ground is probably not wise.

  31. They’ve removed the ball washers from the local golf course and required each golfer to use a separate cart. Oh the humanity! The tumbrels will be coming around each morning to collect the unwashed balls of the suffering masses.

      • Most courses here require carts, some have special days for walking. Faster you move, more tee times they sell.

    • When Jonah Goldfart’s little newsletter goes belly up, I’m sure he can take up the slack. He’s a known expert at ball washing.

      • Nah, Jonah’s of a group whose balls get washed, not the other way around.

        Now Dan Crenshaw on the other hand…

    • When you read this and your first thought is how Carl Spackler will handle going sans ballwasher.

      • Unwashed balls are a vibrant thang. I recently had a cab driver imported from Da Muddahland and the nasty smell was so bad I told harambe to pull over and let me out then just threw a twenty at him. Dude’s ballwasher was never even installed.

  32. There are only so many hot takes one can have on Coronavirus. Should we shut things down or should we keep them going? Is this serious or not as serious as it’s being hyped up to be? That’s pretty much all anyone is talking about. All blogs and YouTubers are boring at this point.

  33. Since last night I’m seeing the first cracks in the media panic. Talk of how maybe we need to consider starting the economy back up. Coronavirus truther in chief using his bully pulpit to break through. What a relief.

    • Well, here in OR our Grrl Governor has declared martial law, er I mean Total Double Sooper Dooper Lockdown, effective tomorrow. Of course this could just mean that she’s doing this while the panic still rages and before she loses her chance forever. Then her re-election campaign can be all about how she acted decisively and prevented 195,000,000 Oregonians from dying of Kung-flu.

  34. It is impossible to know what the resolutions will be, and that assumes there are some. Magic Box, indeed. Nonetheless, we can all say the following have taken a huge hit:

    1. China
    2. Globalism
    3. Living in dense urban areas
    4. The federal government in general

    I may not like how this winds down, and suspect totalitarianism will win the day, but those things bode very ill for those I hate. It will be interesting and so unpredictable it tempers both my hopes and my fears.

    We don’t know. Tough to admit and it is why people consult the Magic Box.

  35. One thing we’ve definitely learned from all of this.

    When you lose a presidential election and somebody you don’t like wins, the best, most effective, most patriotic course of action is…

    — deny he is the president at all, declare the election phony, negate the people’s will, and accuse the winner of treason;
    — announce your intention to impeach the victor and nullify the vote before he even takes office;
    — publicly negate, contradict and defy every single word the new president says;
    — destabilize the new administration by relentless legal harrassment, violent threats and arrests of all the president’s associates, so that quality staff will be afraid to work with him;
    — organize your press puppets to speak in one voice on all matters, thus making all issues binary and impervious to discussion;
    — make up ridiculous conspiracy theories and use them to constantly harass and investigate the president at every turn, so the administration can never think straight or function properly;
    — when a giant real crisis DOES finally loom on the horizon, that is the right moment to impeach the president over the silliest nonsense you can dig up!

    A man who is beaten down, shouted down, deprived of the best available advisors, mocked and contradicted every waking moment and then subjected to a Theater of the Absurd impeachment is the perfect guy to act with clarity, effectiveness and foresight when the real crisis comes to town.

    • Helps when you have the entire Global establishment on your side – we won’t have that luxury when the Gap-Toothed Sheboon steps into 1600 at some future date.

  36. The Globalists have to be pretty satisfied with just how easily most of the population rolled over on this.

    In addition, the general population did the work of shaming the outliers for them. Prison rules will work on a larger scale, it seems.

    Perma-Crisis will be easy to maintain, if they choose it.

    • This is true now, and it is depressing. The demonization of the young people who won’t comply is Exhibit A. But if the lockdown continues much longer, there will be civil unrest. It’s hard to see how that works to their benefit.

      • In the short cycle, civil unrest accelerates the need to invite and quarter federal troops and exta-constitutional laws to keep order and more importantly the “social-distancing” needed to prevent the china syndrome.

        Luckily, as Meme notes, their psyop advance has primed the sheeple to self-police so the actual heavy lifting has been done already. The rest is procedural.

        Cue Dennis Prager, et al. “Real patriots stay inside their homes!”

        If they come for our guns, otoh, the long cycle is underway and then God help us all.

        • 283rd Division, enroute to Chicago.
          Governor Abbot already has the National Guard pacifying Dallas.

          Among the powers Champaign, Illinois Mayor Feinen gained after signing the executive order was the power to ban the sale of guns, ammunition, alcohol, and gasoline. Feinen could also cut off access to individuals’ gas, water, or electricity.
          *
          She signed a sweeping executive order giving her the ability to ban because of…Wuhan coronavirus?
          There are no cases of the virus in town or the surrounding areas.
          *
          Deborah Frank Feinen, signatory of the Champaign-Urbana Chapter of Bend the Arc Jewish Action’s pledge to Reject White Nationalism, granted herself these powers.

  37. Those of a certain age may rememmber this.
    In the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, there was a bit where Bullwinkle would say: Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!
    You never knew what was going to appear from the hat, but it was never a rabbit.
    There are loads of Bullwinkle’s out there saying virtually the same thing – and they know just as much as Bullwinkle did about what’s going to appear.

  38. Radical change is unlikely to spring forth (https://theamericansun.com/2020/03/23/a-premature-celebration/) . The system is more resilient than many realize. Underlying it all are self-propagating systems.

    Yourself and others are keen to say we are dooming the economy.

    Yet the argument never seems to be brought up that following economic bounceback will be large.

    This is in fact the historical pattern. West German, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam.

    All were crushed and economies destroyed and bounced back.

    • I agree with that – if the fallout from this affair doesn’t involve long-term legal changes to the economy. But… West Germany, Japan, and South Korea were pretty unpleasant places to live in the late 40’s into the 50’s. Not what I want for myself or my kid.

    • The other day, I suggested the rulers would begin bombing cities if the virus did not yield to social distancing. Your examples are all places reduced to rubble by American air power. Not just their cities, but their cultures were turned to dust as well. Not exactly the models most people favor. Further, it took decades to recover. Into the late 1970’s Korea was a poor country. The economic miracle started after the reforms of the early 1980’s. Thirty years of poverty is not a great example to sell people. Germany did not recover until the 1970’s.

      There’s also the fact that none of this happened in isolation. Rich Uncle Sam made it possible for Germany, Japan and Korea to build first world economies after being smashed to bits. Who is the rich uncle now?

      • Glad you made the destruction analogy because we don’t have that problem now.

        There are no rubble or ruins we need to rebuild.

        Instead we have QE and unlimited QE to funnel in. Modern monetary policy has been decided upon since 08.

        (The GOP are however squandering their chance for election. Make UBI happen and give people money…)

        What exactly do you think is going to happen when restrictions lift?

        Suddenly American’s won’t want to go get haircuts, nails done, eat out?

        These are the jobs being most lost during this.

        When they bail out the airlines do you suddenly think hordes of families will never return to Disney? (And you don’t think the prices will be low to drive the traffic?)

        • Hey, you brought up the comparison. I just rejected it. A better comparison would be 2008. That was tepid compared to this and we had about a decade of stagnation. The Fed never was able to unwind much of what they did to halt the credit freeze following the mortgage collapse.

          I’ll caution you that even on the internet, the choice are never the two most extreme positions. Most of life happens in the vast middle. False dichotomies always lead to false conclusions.

          Speaking of UBI, I’ve explained in the past why that may be the dumbest idea in the history of economics. It’s why college debt is at 1.5 trillion.

          • Regarding 08 ‘stagnation’ the perpetual growth meme is an interesting one to bring up. Are the main economic problems of’ today’ from the decade of stagnation? Does a massive illegal workforce stem from 08 and the stagnation?

            I don’t think so. You yourself have blogged about the corrupt elite taking money and jobs out of the country – this was the trend long before 08. 08 was and is a blip.

            Again I ask do you think that barbers who are furloughed now are not going to go immediately back to work as barbers to cut peoples hair? This is largely a services ‘recession’ which will reset itself quickly.

            I stand by the comparison because the very fact we have an absence of the hardship and physical destruction will in fact make the bounce back quicker, by a lot.

            There are no restaurants that have to be physically rebuilt. The ovens and cook equipment haven’t been bombed. We don’t have to rebuild roads for people to commute. etc.

          • To be honest, I’m not sure what point you are making. Will the economy recover eventually? Sure. I’ve never said otherwise. In the long run, all sorts of things will happen. You made the comparison to the wrecked economies of Japan, Germany and Korea. I pointed out that between the wrecking and the recovery, there was a) a lot of misery and b) a super power minimizing the misery.

            Your assumption that we will recover quickly from this is without basis. You are hoping the magic in the magic box is good magic.

          • I think this has been illustrating to me to realize that people like yourself, ostensibly fellow travelers, are in fact committed to the current order deep down.

            Without an 08 recession the economy would be stronger. What comes with that? More Wokeness, more anti-white propaganda and actions.

            The Cathedral was stunted in 08. That was a good thing. If it gets stunted again and we don’t have the time of decadence for Drag Queen Story Hour anymore – I consider that a benefit.

            Or as you would say; it’s a tradeoff. I’ll trade a recessed economy for less Woke Capitalism.

            Ultimately this is likely an age thing – and a life of comfort thing I expect.

            Be well.

          • I’ll trade a recessed economy for less Woke Capitalism.

            Yes, because everyone knows once you put the economy in the magic box, out pops rainbows and puppies!

            Ultimately this is likely an age thing – and a life of comfort thing I expect.

            Sort of. I’ve spent 30 years solving really hard problems for a living. I know my limitations. More important. I know your limitations. I was young once too.

          • About the only thing in the magic box that might help is your past…”suspicion” I’ll call it, that as times get harder women will defer increasingly to men. I’ll admit that I thought it would have happened by now, but no dice, so I’m not sure it will ever happen.

          • Since morbidity declined in the last recession, we will become immortal in the next depression!

            Multivariate analysis is not for the faint of heart.

          • ET, This is a case of NIH trying to support the flavor of the day diet they like(high carb, soy,veg ) with misapplied data for a cargo cult result.

            This is also a classic “post hoc ergo proctor hoc error” in reasoning .
            A lot of medical and hygiene advances made during the roaring 20’s .showed results in the 1930’s

            Antibiotics first entered widespread use in the 1930’s . do you think that might have been important in improved life expectancy?

          • The argument seems to be, from the resilience of a service economy… to the resilience of a service economy?

            The service economy that will save us from those icky, male-dominated factory jobs and the culture that follows?

            (Even allowing for automation, as toolbox fashion is a guy thing.)

          • UBI is something I tactically support because it helps hollow out the Empire. I’d like our communities to be economically-based on something less “meta.”

            The worst part of our present system isn’t the market aspects. The elite capture, usury and cross-generational accumulation of debt are worse.

            This shitshow is exposing major flaws and hypocrisy in the present system and a UBI critique is good for pointing those out, but in itself UBI is not a solution for anything – it’s just another form of cross-generational can-kicking.

            I’m not a “pay your own way” lolbert but soaking future generations for more than they are literally worth is not a workable strategy, and that’s what happens whenever you write IOU’s on the grandkids.

          • UBI normalizes welfare and will backstop the modern day robber barons who populate our upper 1/10 of 1% elite. It has no other purpose than to establish a minimum wage for slaves.

          • Technology eliminates the value of labor and urbanization and its associated cultures makes it impossible to raise kids without an unacceptably high level of sacrifice.

            How do we fix that without free religious capital we don’t have.

          • Having already been priced out of the rumored $1000+ check going to everyone else due to My “high income”, I can already see how UBI is going to shake out.

            My job will be to pay for it. For others. No thanks. I use a flip phone and drive a 23 year old car. (By choice)

            The fact that I’ll be paying for the installment payments on iPhone monthly payments and 7 year car loans for stupid people who can’t save a month’s income infuriates me to no end.

            Meanwhile, the currency gets inflated and my savings get worth less and less.

            UBI will kill the middle class.

            (not a boomer, either)

          • “Boomer Remover” because they’re pissed, they know they’ll be paying the bill.

            Those warm brown hands in the nursing home may not be the only problem.

            Lord knows the hillbilly CNAs in rest homes across the South already ignore their clients. Poor, dear, sweet Mrs. Peebles, 104 years old and immobile, was moaning, “please turn me, please turn me, I haven’t been moved in hours” to the wife, a cleaner in one such home. (She did, and watched over the good Mrs. P after that.)

            The female managers and staff are too busy playing palace politics and smoking in the parking lot. (They drove the missus out of that job, of course.)

          • Its also probably inevitable as modernity cannot tolerate high levels of unemployment.

            As I’ve said before, we don’t need AI to wreck everything. We just need small incremental increases in the quality of software and robots , enough to make wages to low to buy enough to keep the lights on or for a disruption to create seriously unemployment.

            Hell an increase in “working at home” will nuke hundreds of restaurants and other businesses that cater to the lunch crowd causing massive spill over effects much as the transition to online media has for music, books and a lot of other jobs.

            In the end, either we allow the economy to collapse to a much less complex model , more “grow your own food, buy only what you need, only one person works outside the house” or we prop it up with massive amounts of printed money.

            And note you can’t tax this, not enough revenue in the system and seizing all the cash at say Apple is a one time thing and highly counter productive.

            As for the price inflation, this is of course spot on but the end result is the economy will be managed to some level of stagnation.

            Too bad our managers are crap but I suppose the upside is that with such low fertility, there really isn’t a logical model for growth over the long haul anyway,

          • A few years ago, I asked a very wise retired hedge fund manager friend what will people do in a world with massive unemployment. “A convenient epidemic” was her reply. I don’t think that the epidemic is the coronavirus, but what do we do when technology is so advanced that half of the adult population is permanently redundant?

            I think that there will be a return to the land because as long as you can eat and sell or barter your surplus food, you’ll survive. You may be poor, but you will survive.

      • These countries also came up from the ruins relatively-debt free in addition to having a rich uncle – see Michael Hudson’s most recent debt jubilee piece at Unz (yes, lolbert economist but the debt jubilee’s a solid concept).

        Burning the bank books is always going to have mass appeal. The banksters spend jillions on tactical libertarian shills like Shapiro to Judas Goat the public into voting to keep their children in debt-slavery.

        • Hudson is a Communist.

          The debt-jubilee is not proposed in good faith. It is twirled like a magic wand to appeal to loan-burdened liberal arts graduates and the catladies at Naked Capitalism. The real objective is to remove the gravity that binds the entire system together, thereby destroying it and resetting to Year Zero.

          The other, better, way, is to simply begin first intimidating and then liquidating the creditors, and expropriating the property of those who flee to Tel Aviv.

          • No peeking in my “magic box” until Hannukah, Veg. You’d be a very happy boy on Christmas Day, don’t worry.

          • Hudson sells “practical Marxistism”, true, the State is always his ultimate savior.

            But! The aryan Babylonians introduced Jubilee, and used it to great effect.

            The neoAssyrian rulers of Egypt used jubilee to break Joseph’s ruinous taxation of grain and cattle, and drove the Hyksos back into razed Canaan/Old Babylon, where the potentate “K” built his temple to Ra-Amen, what we call the First Temple of Solomon.

            Hyksos priest Set-Moses, ‘Child of Set’, fled, leading his tribe of welfare workers through the Sea of Reeds delta, where they witnessed the tidal wave from Thera’s eruption that shattered the Israeli coastline.

          • I ponder if the Thera eruption (there were several), what Plato called “Atlantis” in his political fantasy novel, was the main trigger for the Greek Dark Age, the Bronze Age Collapse, of which Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey are the only records.

            Solomon came later, even trusting the Habiru lunar calender; he probably refurbished an empty Temple, as have people been rebuilding the ruins of HarMegiddo, which has been twenty cities, piled on top of each other. The sturdy stones were simple to reuse.

            I also thought that the 9 tribes of the Sea Peoples might be Habiru Semites, but the Sea Peoples came from the west, whereas the Sons of Heaven came earlier from lost Sumer, the east.

        • Having the US military provide defense not only against foreign foes, but internal ones, is one hell of a subsidy. People forget that we meddled in their politics all along the way. I take a backseat to no man in my criticism of the current economic system. That said, setting the world on fire, hoping for a miracle, is probably not a great idea. Maybe it is inevitable. Could be.

          • The current fire is a Chinese production – I’m just using the heat to warm up my takes.

            Things like this are going to happen b/c Clown World regardless of what we do. Might as well smell some roses, enjoy some sunshine and consider our glass half full while everyone else wipes themselves unto despair.

            Why look a gift Horseman in the mouth?

          • “Things like this are going to happen b/c Clown World regardless of what we do.”…

            “Why look a gift Horseman in the mouth?”

            Ho, standing O. Standing-fookin-O.

        • I suspect debt forgiveness for student loans of some type is inevitable. The loans are a bad debt as it is now. Defaults are building and simply too many to pursue. Also all these indebted youth are not contributing to our consumerist economy, i.e., the can’t get out there and buy shit they don’t need.

          And in support of such students, society sold them a bunch a goods under false pretenses—like a college degree is your ticket to a good life and then let colleges offer them phoney degrees in worthless disciplines.

          • All that needs to be done is to re-liberalize the bankruptcy laws: let people take on the credit risk of discharging their debt. If lenders then want to lend to deadbeats, which they always do, especially with the Fed buying the notes, then so be it.

          • Feds need to go after college endowments for students who default who either 1.) don’t graduate and/or 2.) fail to learn a skill that can produce the income to pay the loan back.

            Would force colleges to be MUCH more picky. It would also put at least half of them out of business. Will never happen.

          • Of course colleges should be more picky, but no one will accept such. Minorities would go back to their traditional position of back ground noise, or magic 10%. And for Whites, half the population won’t accept that their darlings just are not college material.

            Best we can do is to establish national merit testing and have the Fed’s pay full ride while limiting such to certain numbers of majors. Everyone else gets squat and pays their own way.

          • Forgiving the debt matters less than “and what do you do next?” Do you continue with federally subsidized and guaranteed student loans that are not tied to the value of the degree (ability to repay) and which allow the university to have no skin in the game? As long as you continue to privatize the benefits and socialize the costs, the problem will recur.

          • Exactly, Viz – see 2008 vs. today – the same parasites have learned no lessons because they suffered no harm.

          • We forgive the loans of anyone that actually learned something useful.

            The sociology and girl science people can work their debts off via four years as a full-time asbestos-removal and lead-pipe replacement crewperson.

        • Debt jubilee, on the books, is a tool by which lenders do not get too carried away with lending, because the reckoning is built into the system as an agent to limit things, and everyone understands it.

          A random debt jubilee, in response to overloaded lending books, is simply a destructive reset to the system, that obliterates everything so something new can be built in its place.

          A properly wielded debt jubilee is something put in place now, to be triggered at a stated and specific date in the far future, so the lenders can shape up their act over time. But that’s not how it would be wielded, in this day and age.

          • grey, that will certainly keep the average person away from a lot of debt…which is not a bad thing in the long run. I get that credit jumpstarts a lifestyle, but how much effort and money is spent by the average household just paying interest? If you do a jubilee every ten years, for example, debt will be taken out that pays off when the jubilee hits.

            Which goes to my point, which is the economy can be structured around future, planned jubilees. To throw a jubilee out there in response to overdebtedness is simply setting the economy on fire.

          • In the Fertile Crescent jubilees happened about once every generation or two, coinciding with a change of monarch or the like.

            It’s primarily just a means of clearing multi-generational debt to prevent the usurers from hoarding all the capital over time. It’s too blunt a weapon for needs-based debt relief.

            When lending is causing macro problems in your society, the lenders should take a haircut.

            The “trickle down” idea that taxpayers will be rewarded for suffering to save the banksters has been disproven by the rapacious buybacks & self-dealing our present generation of elites has indulged in.

          • Grey, the rulers of Mesopotamia were not idiots – they dealt with this kind of Talmudry from the beginning.
            by outlawing those kinds of transactions under penalty of death, keeping jubilee dates uncertain and simply refusing to assist in or permit the collection of such debts, among other means.

          • Payday loans and pawnshops sound great, if I can fix the car to get to my job, or feed the kids tonight, without a month’s wait on paperwork.

        • Hudson did a good job in his book about debt jubilees to differentiate between commercial debt (no jubilee) and private loan debts (occasional jubilees).

          The former had long term value, the latter could accumulate to the point where individuals and their families could literally never escape debt, which helps no one in the longer term.

          I have no faith in any US politician to structure a debt jubilee in any form. They seem to do the opposite: protect commercial stupidites at all costs; force stupid loans taken by less sophisticated borrowers for dumb crap (like phones, or useless degrees) to drive them further into debt.

      • I don’t think our cities or culture is going to be reduced to rubble, Zman, but your question is still valid: “Who is the rich uncle now?” It COULD be a liberated marketplace, like America had prior to, say, 1932. But that would appear to be impossible, given our ugly statist reality. So our future may be Brazil or Argentina.

        • Brazil or Argentina is likely the mean on this sort of thing, and reversion to the mean is powerful indeed. The trick is to carve out your own life and community amidst the squalor of the larger thing. Many Brazilians and Argentinians do just that.

        • A liberated marketplace will just end up an Oligarchy worse than what we have. Our tech overlords will see to that.

          The options that might work Distributism, Nationalist Populism Socialist Nationalism or some combination thereof.

          Alternately we just take care of our own people and let modernity continue its catabolic collapse cycle .

          Go long on minimalism and growing your own food.

    • A lifetime of doom-mongering media has made it really hard to say that everything will be all right. It just doesn’t feel right. Yet it almost always is. Hole in the Ozone, ice age, AIDS, rising seas, peak oil, Y2K, 9/11, SARS, Ebola, GFC, and now this. Admittedly they’ve gone all in. They want a literal depression, I think. No sports, movies, shopping, church, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings. Good thing about going all in, is all that’s left to do is show your cards. Well I say read ‘em and weep. America isn’t going to knuckle under to a bunch of commies.

      • But the decline took centuries in the last case. The first two were in decline almost from their very formation.

      • I’ll add: The Ottoman Empire, and the Austria-Hungarian Empire. Both huge in their day, both torn apart by internal contradictions and racial/ethnic/religious groups wanting self rule.

    • Fertility rates in the developed world, including China here are far below replacement and the US and China are both at record lows.

      That alone suggest that a system driven by the need for every increasing consumption and production is not sustainable.

      Its got time, some at least but it is a goner.

  39. After watching the Democrats try to raid the Treasury for all their pet causes yesterday, it’s obvious this whole thing is nothing except a power grab. The treatment for anyone not already in terrible health is simple, cheap, and effective. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/stunning-ny-doctor-vladimir-zelenko-finds-100-success-rate-in-350-patients-using-hydroxychloroquine-with-z-paks-video/
    If the government wanted to “do something” effective, it would involve putting everyone in an infected area on malaria preventatives. Instead, power-grabs continue while the media panics the herd.

    • I’m still shaking my head at Dems trying to ramp up abortion funding in a pandemic. Muh optics, oh gawd…

    • Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining is me on anti-malarials. A sizeable percentage of the population do not handle this poison circulating through our bloodstream with civility. If you deploy anti-malarials against covid nineteen in great numbers you had best hide the scalpels, trocars and bone saws or else “redrum, r-e-d-r-u-m ….”

      • Which one? I heard the Mefloquine has all kind of bizarre physiological side-effects. It was developed, then dropped by the military.

        I was in group where we all took Chloroquine weekly for 5 months with absolutely no side effects.

        • The effects were so profound that I stopped taking them a decade ago. Fellow trekkers have since told me their experience with malaria was no worse than the flu. I haven’t contracted it yet or at least appear asymptomatic.

          A form of chloroquine for Asia was the least bizarre, and the first anti-malarial I was prescribed, although I took it more frequently than weekly this was spread over about six weeks. Lariam turned me into an original gangster. Malarone for Africa, from what of it I can remember, was the one that converted me into The Shining character.

          The primary aspect of these meds was inability to sleep at all for days on end. Not a wink. The absence of sleep certainly contributed, but I began experiencing other negative effects as I was ramping up taking the meds before leaving home, so it wasn’t just the sleep aspect. The travel clinic switched meds and varied dosages but I’m done with them altogether.

          • One friend decided to forgo the Chloroquine and do a bottom to top journey through India. The next time I saw him he was a really weird shade of yellow – which I thought hilarious as it was in Maine in January.

          • Dog, that really depends of the flavor of malaria. There are four species that routinely infect humans, with P. falciparum being the absolute worst. Other forms are usually milder, although some can lay dormant in the liver and re-infect.

            Still, no human body is in better shape after an infection than before it.

        • Look, the drug is FDA approved and been in use since the mid-forties. Side effects are always a fear, but what’s the choice if your going to a ventilator anyway? Let folks choose. Albeit, passing such out on the street corner to asymptomatic people is probably suboptimal.

    • Its disgusting and demoralizing. But I don’t know if anyone outside the dissident wire even notice or care. In the crescendo of panic, a return to the status quo is intoxicating.

      As long as people feel that they are gonna get a slice, the black box Is working just fine thanks.

      I don’t see how they come through this without ending up with 75% of the dem platform in place.

      College loans are gonna go away. All those laid off waitresses with masters degrees?

      Feels like a compromise for the ages. Trump gets four more but the needle moves left hard and after that its full convergence.

      Meanwhile, “Tech” and the “right” will grease the tracks for them.

      And remember Barr and all those sealed indictments and the investigation into dem corruption, Ukraine money laundo, and ongoing coup? Me neither.

      The cure/treatment will come once the pie has been allocated. It is magic.

    • Wait, I thought the C&A anti-malarials cure was Nobel Laureate Dr. Michael Levitt of New York. Touted big time on Hannity yesterday.

      Typical. So typical.
      I wonder who’ll get the contract.

  40. One magic box thinking you continuously see is “We need to product X, now!!! It needs to be just like we did in WWII”

    The funny thing is they have no inkling of how X is made. They fail to realize the disaster that global trade has been for our industries. You know where we can’t even make aspirin now. But hey, we can just magically conjure up production.

  41. Disorder in the existing system is a necessary condition for change but not sufficient. Without dissatisfaction, there is no social change.

    There’s a lot of stray social voltage in the air right now but it’s undirected. We don’t yet have the organization and infrastructure to make anything but local, ad hoc use of this energy. Our first major disruption event has happened well before we’re ready.

    On the white-pill side, this means we’re probably right in assuming that system shock is going to be a regular feature of late-stage Clown World as its ambitions exceed its abilities.

    Bad Gaia is not going to beat the Bad Guests for us. We’re just starting to build the networks and infrastructure it’s going to take to win in the future. It’s a grassroots level brick-by-brick project right now.

    I’m optimistic on a longer timeline – that hasn’t changed. We’re in the pre-history phase of post-liberal democracy-America, building the critical mass of dissidents it will take to make widespread positive gains possible down the road. Our revolution is still at the angry guys talking in bars stage – we haven’t had our Tea Party, much less Lexington & Concord.

    That said, our critiques and predictions are proving more accurate and useful than Big Other’s so far. A lot of our guys were already prepped and it’s nice to see some mannerbunds stepping up and functioning as we’d hoped in crisis.

    • “That said, our critiques and predictions are proving more accurate and useful than Big Other’s so far. A lot of our guys were already prepped and it’s nice to see some mannerbunds stepping up and functioning as we’d hoped in crisis.”

      This. It is hard to see how the federal bureaucracy hasn’t been so discredited by this panic and debacle that Big Other doesn’t try to co-opt some elements, such as bringing back domestic production of pharmaceuticals. This will be a fig leaf.

      But your larger point is spot on. We are still gestating.

    • I’d add, or emphasize, folks here are in the main, have been nothing short of prescient. Certain concepts and ideas were brought up and discussed here a week or more before they became mainstream on the news and elsewhere. Prepping is more than stock piling supplies—it’s ideas as well.

    • Given our small numbers and limited capacity for organization (if for no other reason, because Facebook and Google will track us down and bust us up), a coexistence model looks like what we are headed for. This is the Brazil/Argentina model. There are three major groups in their cultures, as far as I can tell. The dirt people who live mostly away from the big cities; the poor and violent, who live in the big city favelas; and the cloud/cloud wannabes, who live across the system and the landscape, but work the others for sustenance and protection. Everyone has his role to play, and the greater system lurches along, as the poor get some level of gibs, the clouds get to try to engineer the society through government involvement in everything, and the dirts find their own way, working the edges of the system and staying mostly out of the way of all the rest. Meanwhile, over time, the currency gets devalued, the average level of well being, however one wants to measure it, slides slowly and inexorably lower, and ambitious people, not content to work the system for their modest piece of the action, pack up and emigrate.

      We are travelling down a similar path now, but we are just not as far along. Recall that, a century ago, Argentina and Brazil were numbered among the most wealthy countries of all. They did not disappate through revolution and a clearing of the ground for something new, as some here expect our culture to do. Instead the competing factions called a sort of a truce, and learned to work around the edges of each other, in a sort of pact to avoid mutual assured destruction. We are still in the mental state of all sides against all, with the idea that either the dirts, the clouds, or the poor recipients of the gibs will prevail over the others.

      C-virus, crashing markets, mental exhaustion and PTSD on everyone’s part, suggest instead that the three sides will make eventual, grudging peace with each other. Everyone will get some of what they want. We get our own communities, largely free of totalitarian local oversight, in exchange for allowing the clouds to exercise all of their Capitol City schemes on mostly other people, and the poor will get bunches of gibs from money printing, which everyone will pay for in a perpetually falling currency. But from our end of things, land, a home, a community, a full larder, healthy families, survival skills, and mutual community protection will be the parts of things that work for us. In exchange, we leave the others alone to do their thing. Not a permanently stable set of circumstances, but probably the best we will get. The alternative is all-against-all, a variation of the WW1/WW2 state of affairs. And we don’t come out of that one very well. Are China or Russia going to give us a Marshall Plan and the space to recover? Hell, no.

      • Dutch, in this generation’s timeline, that’s pretty much how I see it.

        We’ll have to maintain a sort of binocular focus to see the future with proper “depth perception” – what we can practically accomplish on one hand vs. our ideal society.

        When I refer to apartheid White America, it’s generations down the road after we first accomplish something similar to what you describe.

        A lot of our current infighting now comes from conflicting visions of a future that will never be realized unless practical steps are first taken.

        There’s no reason why Groypers. Nazis etc… can’t form a caravan of dissent until their respective paths start to actually diverge. The majority of necessary practical steps are common to all of us for a long stretch of road yet.

        • The petty divisions probably matter a lot less than you think. If and when a strong horse emerges, they will all flock to it. I don’t think change would necessarily take generations either. History has been moving at a greatly accelerated pace these days. If their side can go from normalizing gays to normalizing trannys in a span of less than a decade, imagine how fast we could go if things tilt our way. Chaos levels are increasing with unrivaled rapidity.

          • stop, i’m getting hard.

            in all seriousness, you’re right. that said, if the “other side” gets the upper hand, we’re likely going to face genocide.

            i think more NWL and UMC white will break our way than we realize though. i’ve come to the conclusion that most are just cowards following the strong horse, doing what’s best for their careers.

      • Why do the elites want to create this?

        Life was better for both elites and dirt people in the old America. Yet they are still importing millions of non whites and destroying the nation’s social fabric.

        It’s also not clear that we wouldn’t be better off in a poorer place like Argentina, left alone on the plains or the mountains. The Feds intrude into every place in the USA.

        We are going to see the brain drain patterns change, though. From rural to large cities, to rural to smaller, more local cities. Frankly there’s no benefit to moving to NYC anymore for a young white guy. Female driven jobs, hordes of non-whites, impossible to save. I definitely see the appeal of a big city but that life has just about been wiped out by mass immigration.

        • One possible reason: the political elites live too long, get too rich, and never, EVER step down. Nancy Pelosi? Joe Biden? They will do absolutely anything to stay in power (including Great Depression 2.0….bigger, better, badder).

          Ironically this makes their one day successors even more outrageous and strident. It’s the only way to make themselves visible (see: AOC)

        • I think you’re actually ascribing more predictive capabilities to the elite than they had (and have). This whole shitshow started generations ago with each step being profitable to at least some of them at the time. Weakening national borders means cheaper labor and even some of the socially revolutionary craziness makes sense if you think in terms of markets. The old business elite was pro-natalist while the new one is feminist, pro-gay, and anti-natalist. That’s because they’ve seen the business case for women as independent consumer and worker units instead of as the creators of new consumers and workers through raising families.

          Each step in the creation of Pozamerica made sense in the light of the prior ones. That’s all that was necessary to drive the whole progressivism train forward. I don’t think that our elite really had a grand plan. It’s just that at some point they decided to take our society down a “catabolic” path, shoveling social capital into their economic furnaces to be turned into larger profits for themselves. Now there certainly are certain (((elements))) who do seem to have been following a playbook, specifically the ones written by Alinsky and his fellow travelers. They certainly have benefited from the chaos, maintaining cohesiveness as the society around them collapsed. It’s a chicken and egg problem though. At this point the treasonous schemes of the WASP elite and (((eskimos))) pretty much always dovetail nicely.

          • The Great Replacement was top down.
            The WASP natalists were largely toppled in the revolution of 1913; this is why fobs and knobs like Empire Teddy, Puppet Wilson, HSBC Taft, and ‘the Butcher of Haiti’, FDR, were cultivated.

            Coolidge struck back with the immigration reforms of 1924, which bought our culture time.
            Note that the banksters struck back-back in 1929-1930, first with the crash of the Euro wheat markets and the English pound in January ’29, the shock wave of which hit ‘our’ overleveraged speculators in Black September.
            There was a dead cat bounce buying the dip in ’30, but the base of agriculture, commodity, and equipment lenders and producers were already wrecked.

            A repeat of the restrictive Immigration Act might do the trick, of bringing the termites and rats out into the light. We’re seeing their pre-emptive attacks against nativist populism now.

  42. In a time of great uncertainty, ancient wisdom tells us that the only tangible thing you can do to improve your survival prospects is to make yourself more robust and capable. Don’t sit on the couch eating potato chips and whining about how bad things can get. Get your ass up and chop some wood if nothing else is convenient. Oh, and start a garden in the backyard. It’s Springtime after all.

    • But I’m disabled by severe work allergies.
      REM sleep may be cardio, but getting off that couch is an aerobics marathon.

      Pearl in the first “Blade” movie is my hero.
      Sitting in the dark, nothing moving but my eyeballs and one finger on the remote.

  43. Dissidents are smart and resourceful. Using my cell to control me? F*** you, I’ll throw it out. Vibrants chimping out when the free money for stupid people runs out? Screw them, I’ll get a gun and shoot, shovel, and shut up. Can’t deal fairly on the open market because of govt incompetence and corruption? Black markets work too. Playing by the rules has become a game for suckers? Fine, I won’t play anymore. There are enough guns, mutineers, rebels and dissidents to thwart the Usual Suspects on anything. Just ask the gun grabbing politicos in Virginia.

    There’s no magic inside that box. It’s just people agreeing on what they want, and coming up with ways to achieve it. We no longer agree on any of that and now we have to start parting the road between us. This panic will probably do that nicely if things keep going the way they are. Any road we take will have pot holes, bridges out, and dangers. But… we all know where the one we’re on will go.

    Best of luck to ya, folks.

    • Bingo, Out here in Deplorableland we have the frequent freedom to simply ignore unwelcome dictats. The barter economy is alive and well. Cash is king.

  44. Pattern recognition time.

    Look at this! https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

    Almost exactly one-half of the registered coronavirus cases are in NY. I suspect mostly NYC. It makes sense, actually. NYC is full of crowded restaurants and bars where people eat and drink almost on top of each other. Also, the subway system is a filthy breading crowd for all sorts of evil things.

    Could this at partially explain the extent of the current hysteria with much of news media centered in NYC?

    • People think the governor is burnishing a resume and there is some of that. He’s also desperate and realizes these events are far out of his hands for many of the reason you cited. He’s looking at economic collapse more than anyone else in the United States and knows it.

      • Upper New York state is very much like the upper midwest. So Cuomo, unlike deBlasio, cannot so readily dismiss the concerns of the deplorables.

        • And yet he is dismissing upstate. New York City, like Washington DC, is a nearly recession-proof city. Upstate is very far from so, especially when our economy has been knee-capped for decades by a combination of globalism and Albany capriciousness (think of the fracking ban). I’m already seeing/hearing of small businesses and manufacturers that are screwed. Jobs lost, business down for the surviving businesses, fear and desperation. And yet, Andy thinks every square inch of New York State has to respond to this the same way, and to sell this he’s daily spouting utter rubbish on TV. Very few people have covered themselves in glory this month, but Cuomo’s been bottom of the barrel. If Trump decides to promote a return to normalcy, you can bet Cuomo will dig his heels in all the harder. He doesn’t give a toss about upstaters, never did. He knows nothing of us.

          • It’s still all around in The CNY. Manufacturing base, even after 60 years of Albany and federal fuckery, is impressive. Running a small manufacturing operation getting hammered.

    • There are some studies that suggest that Chinese and Jews have some kinda molecule (or lack of one) that doesn’t bind to Vitamin C, so they are more susceptible to the Chinese Flu. On top of that, Italians are handsy, overly social, and great disease vectors (just ask my deceased English grandmother). Guess which American megapolis has these three ethnic groups in abundance? So by those theories, I’m not surprised NY got it bad. Also, if the American media were all headquartered in, say, Oklahoma City, would the hysteria be there? I don’t know, but probably.

      • The study discussed here https://tinyurl.com/j2tcw6j suggests that vit D supplementation (for those who are deficient) has a protective effect w/ regard to respiratory infections. If you live in the cloudy, frozen north, you might want to consider it.

        • Vitamins D and C in very large doses.

          Sunshine and oranges- same cure as 1918.

          I’m re-thinking the Bat AIDS re-infection effect, too. We adjusted, socially, to HIV-AIDS, the former world-killer. Well, the fashion industry killer, that is.

          And bubonic plague continued with regular outbreaks, such as the surges in 1515 and 1666. It wasn’t known what caused Bubonic plague until 1897.

      • OTOH, I wonder what sort of hysteria there would be if the American media remained hq’d in NYC and there were < 100 cases there, but out in Okie land there were 25k cases?

        • We’ve talked about Washington DC’s disconnect from the rest of America, but NYC is, as well. Here be dragons in suburban northern NJ.

        • Well, the MSM ignored the pain med racket, so…yeah, maybe they would ignore WuFlu in flyover country.

      • Definitely Asian and Jews are 2 groups greatly, if not mostly, affected.
        Hassidic Jews in NYS have enormous rate of infection. Israeli cases grow up exponentially and presently Mossad directs the operations of “social distancing”, including but not limited to shutting down all public transportation and employing terrorist tracking technologies.
        Italy is another curios case: besides being one of the oldest populations in Europe they had an enormous influx of Jewish genes 2000 years ago when Emperor Titus brought 2mils of Judean slaves to Rome. Most of them assimilated into surrounding population no doubt.
        And then there is an amazing phenomenon of only 2 Muslim countries being significantly affected: Iran and Indonesia, whose population’s genetics are definitely different from Arab and African muslims.
        Curiouser and curiouser.

        • Good stuff, Anna.
          Curiouser and curiouser indeed.

          Blowback? Can’t outsmart Nature, the original author of designer viruses.

          More weird facts:
          *800 million viruses fall from the sky, every hour, on every square square meter on Earth.
          *9 out of ten cells in the human body is an alien. Only 10% of us, is us.
          *Humans have from 30 to 100 trillion microbes per body inside.

          I’m thinking that the religious Question is more a question of epidemiology.

          (Prepping to get conversant with pozymandias’ proteges. Time for some proper equipment, the Whiteworld way.)

          • Good news! Huge crowds gathering in NYC’s Chinatown, in a show against racism.
            Corona-chan, let’s goooooo

            Schizophrenia’s cognitive dissonance defeats itself. Ha! Thought you’d use Mother Nature, did you? Highest IQ, eh?

    • It certainly explains the rapidity of it’s spread there. Also explains why the people who run things are especially fearful. As you said, most of them live there. Frankly I don’t know how they could possibly prefer it. I would feel like a sardine in a tin. Perhaps the psychological effects of living like this is the cause of some of their madness.

      • I believe it was last year or 2018 which saw a first-time decrease in the country’s Big 3 cities (NYC, LA, Chicago). I wonder if this causes people to leave those big cities (and others too) even more aggressively. That would be a welcome development…500K is about the biggest any one city should get.

  45. Observations of late.

    Flying back to California to work I recognized a pattern I’d only seen before in elevators.

    If I say X people are in an elevator, and none of them is with another, you can diagram for me where they will be standing, how they will be spaced. They will automatically adjust their positions whenever someone is added or subtracted.

    They maximize space out of courtesy in this instance.

    Watching the (few) people in line at security at the airport, and in the fast-food ordering/pickup areas, and in seating areas, they all showed this same sort of positioning, shifting effortlessly like a flock of birds in flight with arrivals and departures.

    In this case, they are doing so out of some combination of courtesy and fear. I pray the balance will stay to the courtesy side.

    In terms of the patients I’m seeing, it’s still the worried well and those lamentable psychic frailties already suffering from whatever the upgraded version of PTSD that inevitably comes out of this is going to be called. A future growth industry. You read it here first.

    I feel the need to talk about tests and evaluating the results thereof. This is the kind of stuff they used to teach in college. I think it got elbowed out by Auto-ethnographic Feeling Studies.

    What does it mean when they tally “confirmed cases”? It means the number of positive tests. There’s no other way to confirm it as there are no definitive physical findings, even on autopsy.

    In order to have any confidence at all in any test you have to know the rate at which it is false-positive and at which it is false-negative.

    A screening test, one meant to be applied to those without symptoms, should be very sensitive – not missing any real cases – which comes at the unavoidable price of increasing the rate of false positives.

    With every other test that has serious implications what happens next with a positive result is that a more specific confirmatory test is run, one that is more rigorous, often a ‘higher’ technology test-wise, more expensive and generally less widely available.

    After this the doctor considers the results: what are the odds that this positive test actually represents the presence of disease? At this point Bayes Theorem comes into play. It’s like a mathematical lens to focus the data better, weighing the evidence for you as it were. All we need to know about it here is that it critically depends on the pre-test probability in the population being tested of whatever it is you are looking for.

    All of this is to be able rationally to judge whether a positive test, any positive test, is significant in the first instance. Results, especially in critical cases, demand to be viewed with a critical eye.

    Here’s the deal with Covid-19 testing. It makes a shambles of all I’ve just outlined, fulfills none of the criteria.

    There are variety of vendors for the tests, thank God and capitalism, and their methods are not all the same. None can tell us anything about their rates of false-positives and -negatives. How could they? It’s not like they’ve been running control groups.
    ,
    Our screening tests therefor are of uncertain provenance.

    But that’s okay: if someone comes up positive we go to the more specific confirmatory test, right?

    Nope, this is it. Judge, jury, executioner.

    Well, then at least we can use logic, apply Bayes Theorem to the results, salvage some utility from this thing.

    No, we don’t know the likelihood of a positive test in the normal host population because the prevalence has never been measured.

    The conscientious scientists and companies are producing these as screening tests. They are exquisitely sensitive so as not to miss a thing, but again at the mandatory cost of producing more false positives.

    Here’s my point: the disease counts are necessarily being elevated by overly-sensitive testing methodologies.

    Otherwise, if these are all real the way the numbers are growing it’s gonna get grim. Ten-thousand new US cases yesterday (March 23). It was 500 on March 15 when I started following that particular stat.

    Free stock tip to close the show: from where we are now, it’s hard to see anything but upside for Chinese mail-order brides and Asian massage parlors.

  46. As a project manager I’ve done more process mapping sessions with teams than I can remember. Only one of those maps ever had a “magic box”. I was asked to lead a one-day event for a bunch of people from Marketing. They had some new electronic targeting product they bought and were sure it really was magic. So we ended up with a ridiculous map of crap flowing into the box and “validated” sales leads flying out the other end. Since I would have nothing to do with implementation of this nonsense, I didn’t care. Never would have allowed it on one of my projects.

  47. Good points all. The real black swan for me is the current Fed exercise of blowing up the currency they’re in charge of by buying all the garbage financial assets in the entire economy. There’s not one, but two magic boxes.

    This probably would have happened no matter what though the virus-panic sped up the process. It was a bit of luck (*ahem*) that the virus-panic coincided with their financial panic so that people who get their news from half-informed coworkers will be none the wiser, though I’m not sure how much it will matter when they wake up and find themselves in Don “Peron” Trump’s vision for Argentinian America.

    • Not necessarily. Donald Trump is a man of the marketplace “as it exists” (especially in NYC). He’s not a socialist, and his instincts aren’t that bad (read: tax cuts, anti-globalism, secure borders, right-wing judges and justices, America First, wiping out regulations, resisting new wars, etc.). Nor is he a denizen of the Deep State; the multiple media/political hoaxes show they’ve been desperate to get rid of him. So now the panic is showcasing Trump as a leader and (along with help from the feckless Democrats) may be ensuring his reelection. Can the Empire be saved? No, nor should it be, we all agree. But with 4 more years of Trump it may be possible to bring something out of the mess that’s not catastrophically awful. As Zman says, we just don’t know at this point. (And I do apologize for my incongruously hopeful thoughts, lol.)

      • Trump is a man who zigs and zags, who appears to change his opinion based on new information. We are so fortunate for that. Way too many people in politics are set in their ways, and no evidence will move them from their positions and beliefs. Not only that, but it is all about the “skim” they can generate for themselves, and crisis is simply something to be used to increase the skim, the rest of us be damned. Things could be a lot worse.

        • “Trump is a man who zigs and zags, who appears to change his opinion based on new information.”

          I call that adapting to and dealing with reality as it stands.

          That is how effective leadership is supposed to function.

          I totally agree that we have a lot of ideologically rigid deadwood in our politics. Just look at the stupid surprises in the Dem stimulus bill that are the same old “woke” giveaways and set asides.

  48. We don’t know what we don’t know. Why is this so different? What aren’t they telling us? The sky is falling. We must make juju. You want some bad thoughts? We will know when we know. We may never know. The leadership in government is a good indication of the incompetence we are burdened with. It’s everywhere.

      • Have they though? I mean if you are referring to global warming that’s not really an imminent apocalypse like this thing is, more of an abstract chronologically indefinite religious narrative about our sins against gaia and another reason why we first world white people are bad and why we should live more like the sainted natives. They are certainly hyping things up, but I think that’s just a short sighted attack against trump. They never seem to contemplate the long term effects of their actions. I don’t think this will work out in their favor. To people who benefit from the status quo, creating chaos is rarely beneficial.

    • Yeah, it’s kind of like the race argument: We’re unable to precisely define boundaries; therefore, race doesn’t exist or small racial differences don’t matter.

      Yet race exists and racial differences matter.

      We’re unable to precisely define the boundary betwixt the mountain over yonder or the valley below; therefore, the mountain doesn’t exist and elevation differences don’t matter.

      Yet mountains exist and elevation differences matter.

      There are many other examples.

      Math is a template for decoding reality, nothing more. Has it been correctly applied?

      Sometimes yes, other times no.

      We know a few important things about Ms. Corona.

      I no longer care about debating these with willfully blinded ideologues, led by the likes of Chump and Rush Blimpbaugh, who ridicule legitimate concerns because they intend to use my loved ones as buffers to protect their interests.

      Let me be clear: If you’re not with me, then you’re against me. And vice versa, of course.

      If that means anarchy, then so be it. If anarchy destroys us all, then so be it. Unlike the “dissidents” on the fake Right , I am absolutely willing to face that possibility. Call it my juju.

      I am done here. Have at it.

      • “I am done here.” Well, glad you go that off your chest. Now you can go gather more TP, finish you manifesto and get on with the revolution.

        Good day sir!

          • If it is any consolation, in northern NJ the weather today is beautiful and area (except for the shutdown of restaurants) looks superficially normal. We see people actually working. It gives some hope that things might at least partially rebound. Sanity will need to return from the ground up.

            As a relatively moderate “normie”, I must thank Z Man for providing a platform for views and insights on this current hysteria not found anywhere else. It gives a feeling of not being totally alone.

            Either we are crazy or they are crazy.

          • There even was toilet paper and paper towels at the local Shop-Rite earlier this afternoon.

        • How u doing, Tred? Although, unlike u, I actually do it the hard way. Have a nice day! 🙂

        • It was interesting on Sailer’s site how commentator Tiny Duck went from eliciting many angry responses, to just a few, to just getting marked as a troll, then ignored completely, and then…gone.

  49. Speaking of magic box, the computer software used to predict the coronavirus spread is based on undocumented code written in C 13 years ago. It has never been peer reviewed and the guy refuses to open source it.

    https://twitter.com/neil_ferguson/status/1241835454707699713

    Had a conversation with a nurse who was praising Gretchen for shutting down Michigan. She is one of the nurses on a team to estimate how many people the hospital she works in should expect from the virus. I asked where the evidence was for the 70% infected rate cited, and she linked me a f&^*(ing NowThis video and chided me for refusing to believe the CDC.

    Stupidity is far more unpredictable than cool calculation, and the current level of stupidity shown is so unpredictable that thinking even a month down the road is a fool’s game. The best strategy is to ruthlessly exploit weaknesses wherever you find them at the moment for your own team’s benefit.

    • I know someone who works in the medical field. They said the doctors at their facility have gone nuts. One, who passed out at work because he came into work with a high fever and the normal flu, now doesn’t want to come into work. The others are in various states of panic. This is the point where in an old film the level headed male lead would slap someone while telling them to get a grip.

      • Fish rots from the head. Higher up the hierarchy you go, the more insanity. Sanity will come from the dirt people if anywhere. We’re in bad shape.

        • Lol at the dividend income/pensioned beneficiaries of the (((multiracial, global))) economy wargaming the coronavirus on this website! Isn’t the ability to obtain insured medical care and self-isolate via telecommuting or out in the countryside grand? Must be due to all that high intelligence, hard work, and decisive leadership ability! Amirite?

          At the end of the day our rulers and their truckling dependents (including the faux “dissidents” found on this website) regard ordinary Americans as buffers to keep the lights on and absorb the blow. That is the reality. Everything else is propaganda that rationalizes political failure and serves indolence, cowardice, and greed.

          Can’t help but note the number of upvotes Z receives with every written fart. What an obsequious lot!

          • Asked because of your handle. Got my notice Friday. (Doing well though, if anybody out there cares to know. Story for another time.)

            It’s a smart crowd here, not necessarily privileged.

          • Still voting? Gun-rich, ammo’d up?

            +1 for the ballsiness.
            Hint: don’t sh*t in your own nest.

            Huh. We like the reasoned answers we find here. The Zman’s private blog allows even lunatics like yours truly to vent, as he said, because we have nowhere else- yet he sees past the day’s consensus factory.

            So c’mon, genius. Give us the good stuff.
            Show me what you got.

      • If I passed out at work from the flu I wouldn’t come in either, I could kill my patients.

        Also its just possible that the panic is justified. Maybe Corona Chan is nasty enough to inflict lingering lung damage n a fair measure of infected people or deadlier than we think. There is talk of both.

        Deadly or not assuming medical people are other first responders are obliged to work no matter what in a society like ours is risible. We show them so little care (c.f 9-11) logic dictates its every man or women for themselves.

        • Nice to see the Z Man climbing down from his high horse and conceding his own wishful thinking. Some genies are out of the bottle and won’t go back in. The current response, though, is not a panic. It is calculated. There was some panic buying, but the governments, presidents, and governors who are in the room where decisions are made with me there are doing as I tell them. Whereas Z Man is entirely excluded at this time. Z Man is straw manning here with the notion that people like me in favor of serious measures (not extreme ones) say damn the consequences and “the economy is not important and that will fix itself.” That’s really cheap and false. We can chew gum and walk at the same time: deal with a health crisis and an economic one.

          • “We [The state governors and leaders] can walk and chew him at the same time.

            The States of California would beg to differ with you.

    • Highly institutionalized nations like ours won’t change as rapidly as we’d like. But the more crises and the more rapidly they come their increased frequency will steadily chip away at those foundations. Clown World is in a perpetual state of war with reality. The further down the Wonderland rabbit hole we go the more goofy we become. Look at that Dem emergency response bill. They are running out of runway their long-game is kaput. It’s not just something to put on the table in opposition to Orange Man. If in power they would absolutely go for it. Our thing would grow faster than the heroin the Fed is feeding the markets. Volatility will always work in our favor even if the FBI goes full Stasi.

      The Chinese are now seen by nonZogged nations are having handled this crisis better and they are turning to China for supplies and leadership. There is growing evidence that it was US service personnel engaged in an international military exercise near Wuhan that may have introduced the virus to China. The Europeans are beginning to push back against the Fagin ratcheting up of draconian measures towards Iran in a time of crisis. There are a lot of things in the works that have become magnified by the virus and the reaction to it. Throwing it all into the lap of the American ruling elite will be great fun for our side. “We have to do something” should yield a lot of dividends….Vice President Abrams…we should be so lucky.

      • Forgive me for being Captain Obvious here, but YV’s comment (not to pick on you) observation about the Chinese brings to mind an interesting pattern I’ve noticed about this panic, first in articles on mainstream news sites and then comments in various forums, about how the ‘compentent’ Chinese (and the Russians, too!) are taking up the slack for things like manufacturing medical equipment and sending personell in planeloads to other nations because the Americans ‘can’t handle it’. It has the same flavor as how the Chinese as of late are paying to be portrayed in the Hollywood movies they’ve been financially backing.

        The pattern of articles seems carefully distrubuted to elicit comments such as this – an attitude coming sideways at you in a familiar forum from a familiar commenter (again, not picking on you YV). In some cases on various message boards – even here in Z’s comment section – I’ve read some comments that just seem very out of place – not robotic but odd enough to trip my Authenticiy Alarm.

        It is interesting to observe in real time the propaganda distribution channels at work.

        • Agree 100%. The ccp has alot more media and politicians in their pocket than we realize.

          They also ramped up their propaganda now that the USA has a somewhat nationalist pres. All other presidents were chicom puppets.

          That said, the west is also insane and incompetent. Ultimately all they have to do is wait and eventually we will collapse.

          • Competent enough to have a spy embedded as Dianne Feinstein’s driver for 20 years. Competent enough to fill up 20% of our elite academic institutions with their students. Competent enough to abscond with large amounts of our intellectual property. Competent enough to marry the daughter of a Taiwanese shipping magnate to the leader of the senate(McConnell). China has a lot of it’s own problems but they are in a great position to exploit our societal weaknesses and they are doing so with great aplomb.

          • Yeah, hence my comment about the West being insane and incompetent. I didn’t mean “also” to imply that China was incompetent as well.

            Everything you mention is quite common sense that somehow our society has forgotten.

          • UFO-society has forgotten by way of being completely indoctrinated with the idea that all people are individual blank, equal slates. From that perverted viewpoint, it’s irrelevant how many Chinese people come here because once they step on the magic dirt they have no more ties to China than anyone-else. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to normies and reading their comments on political issues and they just do not get race realism, tribalism, race differences at all. Even normies who show signs of hope by disliking muslims (which is common around my area), don’t really get it at all besides seeing that one group as a problem. That tweet Trump sent out about not having anything against the Chinese or other Asians and protecting them around the world, and only having a problem with their commie govt. was met with the usual Pavlovian response. I commented that the Chinese Govt. is made up of Chinese people! Most just don’t see the connection…
            One thing I believe though is that virtually everyone on the right side of the political spectrum-as well as some others, would follow a nationalist platform if that’s what they were told to do. It would come mostly natural to them imo. If this theory is true, it would make the republi-frauds the most evil of all because it is they who have the ear of that group of people that is salvageable but they keep them firmly on the reservation. The Leftists are what they are, and everyone on the right (and some others) already hate them. It’s really the republi-frauds that are blocking any real conservativism or nationalism…

          • Collapse into a re-ordering, but to who’s benefit? That’s the problem, innit?

            Total war, without weapons.
            Culture war, dawa (soft war) , the hudna (false peace) until jihad.

            Well worn precepts, tested through time.

        • I’m not saying the Chinese are competent but how nonZogged nations are beginning to see them. A good many countries would like to not have to depend on the US. If China is working the propaganda well enough to start peeling away dependence on the US it will accelerate our problems. Unz.com has a lot on this subject. A lot seems farfetched but international sentiment is moving in that direction. If the origins of this does turn out to be US troops then that drift will only accelerate.

          This is something that’s been going on for a decade or more largely because of all the arm twisting we do in every corner of the globe on behalf of the Fagins.

          https://www.unz.com/article/last-man-standing/

          • Definitely agree that the Chinese feel they can wait out the current phase of the Campaign, and garner allies against the
            madness. They can read the tea leaves.
            Millions lost is old hat to them.

            I was hyperventilating a bit, as I had been chatting with those renowned experts, the taxi drivers Jameez and Gunesh.

            The Indian-Muslims talk to their families back home, and they are spooked.
            They told me this virus is a financial war, and pre-staging the real thing.

            War in the kingdoms of the South East means genocide. Fagin’s demons have met their match.

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