The Great Unknown

If we use President Trump’s address to the nation on March 11 as a start date, the coronavirus panic is now three weeks old. That Thursday morning, the airlines were overwhelmed with requests to cancel and change flights. People ran out to buy a lifetime supply of toilet paper. States began to clamp down on civil life with shut down orders and so forth. In the fullness of time, that speech will be seen as the point we moved from indifference to complete panic over the virus.

Now, the week following the initial panic was not a total lock down of civil life, as only a few states had started down that road. It was the following week when the great shutdown of the economy started in earnest, so we are just about ready to wrap up the second week of limited economic activity. Friday is when the government releases the weekly unemployment claims. Last week the number was 3.3 million and this week the number is expected to dwarf that figure.

As this goes to post, the estimates for the number of new claims are between 3.5 million and 5.25 million. The record for number of claims in one week was set last Thursday, so the next report is expected to be the new record. To put that into perspective, these are numbers four and five times higher than previous highs. There is no precedent with tens of millions of people being suddenly furloughed, as businesses are forced to close around the country, because they are told to close by the state.

Right now, 31 US states have some form of lock down in place. Not all are the same and not everyone obeys the edicts. There are plenty of people out and about, but major east coast cities now look like ghost towns compared to normal times. Lots of people are working from home, of course, but retail life has just about come to a halt, which means wholesale life is also slowing to a trickle. No one knows how long this will go on, but conventional wisdom currently says another month.

What this all means for the economy is completely unknown. The St. Louis Federal Reserve is out with a report claiming 47 million people will be out of work at the peak of the fallout from the lock down. That equates to a 32% unemployment rate. We are in unprecedented territory now. According to the report, “These are very large numbers by historical standards, but this is a rather unique shock that is unlike any other experienced by the U.S. economy in the last 100 years.”

Now, there is some hope that the depression will be V-shaped. That is, the economy comes back on in May or June and all of a sudden all of those furloughed people are hired back as business reopens. There will certainly be some of that, as the businesses that have not run out of cash will reopen, hoping to remain viable long enough to weather the storm. Many will have gone under, having run out of cash. Even in a V-shaped recession, it takes a while to fully recover.

The stock market is not always a useful guide for judging the economy, but in this case it can give us some clues. Right now, the robots that do 99% of the trading have factored in what they expect over the next six months. They have also factored in what they expect from government stimulus and bailouts. The Dow Jones has settled in around the 21,000 mark this week. The big sell-offs have subsided and investors are slowly buying into what many think is the bottom of the market.

Still, it is all guessing at this stage. Some states are talking about extending the lock-down into May or even June. China having a second lock-down is going to be seen by the alarmist as a sign the lock-down must continue forever. Given that we’re still at peak hysteria and have yet to hit peak infections, it is not unreasonable to think this carries into May. That means the lower end of that V-shaped recession gets much deeper and the angle coming out of it becomes much more gradual.

The only thing we can be sure of at this point is whatever lies on the other side of this is going to be very different from just a month ago. Politics, for example, are already changing, as the players respond to the new reality. Trump is turning into the wartime president, which is always good for the president’s numbers. He will no doubt become the great cheerleader of the recovery this summer, as he will want to take credit for the recovery from the lock-down, assuming there is one.

The question though is what will politics look like in a world of 30% unemployment, even if it is short-lived? If half the furloughed workers come back by June, that still means a world of unemployment levels not seen in generations. The last time we had double digit unemployment was 1982. You have to go all the way back to the Great Depression before seeing double digit unemployment again. Even allowing for the way these numbers are calculated, no one alive has seen what’s coming.

Lots of people will rush forward at this point arguing that these unprecedented times will suddenly make their preferred world view popular. The libertarians are smugly sure that this time, people will lose faith in government and join the libertarian revolution. The neocons are sure their treachery will be vindicated. On this side of the great divide, there are lots of cheers for the death of the economy, in the belief that putting millions of white people out of work will radicalize them.

That’s the thing though. This is uncharted territory. America is not Weimar Germany or 18th century France or 19th century Russia. We have no examples of a country turning itself off like this. We don’t really know why our rulers are doing this. The claim is the virus threat, but we have had worse virus threats and the ruling class did not go insane like this, so something is different this time. All we can say for sure is we moved from a world we generally knew and understood into a world of the unknown.

How will a people used to excess respond to a world of want? It is entirely possible that we get lots of real poor people again. That is, people with barely enough to feed themselves and a place to sleep. More important, those poor people will be visible to the middle-class again. How will people respond to that? How will people look at the plutocrats in a world with real poverty in plain sight? How will those plutocrats respond to such a world? No one has thought about it, so no one knows.

That means the politics of the future are probably not going to look like anything we have imagined. The old Left-Right axis makes no sense. The Left-libertarian versus Right-libertarian dynamic is now as relevant as Whiggism. If it is a short depression, then politics will revolve around the new state controls that are credited with “saving the economy” from the virus. If it is a long depression, then politics becomes a zero-sum game to see who fills the void of the discredited old politics.

Perhaps we are the first people to look out into the distance and get a glimpse of what comes after post-scarcity society. Maybe it is just a return to scarcity. Maybe it is a world with a high tech palace economy and fewer and fewer people working. Maybe the white nationalist get their wish and everyone becomes a dependent of the state. Maybe this look into the void frightens us and we scurry back to the safety of the past. For now though, we are staring out into the great unknown.


For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!


381 thoughts on “The Great Unknown

  1. I am surprised the Z Man has not understood why our ruling class has shut it down. THEY are at risk. If Dirt people in Missouri and Kansas were dying (they mostly are not) there would be a non stop party on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. Nancy Pelosi would be doing jello shots off Jerry Nadler’s stomach.

    But its the elite: sportsballers, Tom Hanks, Rand Paul, Boris Johnson, and all the rest who are risk. And getting sick. Idris Elba. And don’t laugh — he counts for far more among the elite than you Dirt People.

    Moreover the immediate future is easy to predict. Like the Bourbons our Ruling Class has learned nothing and forgot nothing. There will be a total abolishment of the SAT/ACT on a permanent basis (it is now just “temporary” like telephone taxes still extant to pay for the Spanish American War). No Whites need apply. There will 24/7 hatred of White people on TV, movies, and the internet.

    Already people are advised the police will NOT respond to 911 calls and that in Philly (soon to be other places) home invaders will not be arrested or prosecuted for anything less than murder. Not even investigated. Meanwhile police are advising people to call 911 for hearing anything “racist.” There will be mass gun confiscation with the National Guard and Army mobilized to kick down the door of every gun owner or even every White person in America and seize everything.

    Meanwhile there will be mass firings of White people in corporations for “social justice” and “equity” as part of DIE (Diversity Inclusion Equity aka Die Whitey Die). As neighbors snitch on neighbors for walking their dogs, having parties, etc. It is easy to see why. In Stalinist and post Stalinist Russia, East Germany, etc. those who wanted a rival’s girlfriend, wife, job, apartment had only to denounce them to authorities as a wrecker to seize their opportunity. And the people in top being paranoid weirdos believed every word. We are getting that way here.

    In the short term our elites will just double down on anti-White hatred which is really just class hatred. This stuff has been brewing since the birth of the Managerial Society in the 1920s. Managers want the status and social standing (meaning: you Dirt people grovel before them) that their power implies, in tension with ideals of equality and a just society. Hence “racism” you Bad Whites are lower than low and particularly lower than a Dartmouth Grad who majored in Feminist Studies and works for Goldman Sachs. This is the thinly disguised class hatred brewing since the dawn of the Progressives in the Gilded Age. Seen most clearly in the Vietnam War reaction of the Gentry. Draft evasions, protests, etc. Bush Sr. served honorably in WWII risking his life. His son sat out the war in the Texas Air National Guard. WWII was the last time the Upper Classes saw themselves as one with the nation and the Dirt People and died just the same in a War.

    In the long term, we will see people from the Upper classes move to the middle classes. Not sure how many but it will happen. We will see millions of Middle Class Whites lose their homes, cars, belongings and White neighborhoods and be forced into Mexifornia type places where their kids and themselves are preyed upon by their non-White neighbors and the police enforce a no fighting back law. We will see even more Working Class Whites made into homeless refugees in their own countries. All while we have by law Open Borders, ICE is abolished, “immigrants” are given special aid and privileges and money while the homeless Whites get none. NOTHING.

    Into this vacuum will move a man. We won’t know his name yet. He might be an ambitious Democratic politician forced out by the “No White Men” rule of the Democratic Party. Seeking to out-Trump Trump. He might be a military vet, perhaps someone like Staff Sgt. Samuel K. Doe (White American version) or Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings. The military leadership is dangerously out of touch with its fighting men.

    And this man will not be the only contestant. The loser of the Cartel Wars between the Chapitos (sons of El Chapo) and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel is likely to do a Pancho Villa and invade part of the US and establish a base there. China may decide to simply invade Hawaii and turn the Pacific into a Chinese Lake. The FBI may simply arrest Trump and all Republicans and install their patron Hillary like Roman Imperial Bodyguards before them. I don’t know what or if any of this will happen.

    But I do know this — our elites are literally incapable of anything but Class Hatred expressed as anti-White “fighting racism” and the response will be ever more anti-White stuff with the attempt at a “final solution” to the White man problem almost certain.

    • These “white nationalist” are for the most part unemployed parasites who want “free” income
      If you analyze the current divide on the corona question in dissident right/white nationalist sphere you will see that it is precisely along these lines
      I am yet to find a single advocate of the doom in this group who has actually something to lose
      They hope among that the the crises will turn tables and they finally get their rightful place
      All of it covered with hypocrisy of highest order and crocodile tears for “elderly” and humanity as whole
      Truth of course is that in the cruel world of tomorrow that is inevitably coming they will remain what have always been, losers that is
      I guess also it is much easier to accept it for them in an impoverished world of tomorrow, as I said, when everyone is a loser no one actually is
      Leftards (That is what essentially these people are) have always been like this driven by envy and resentment they do not mind/fight for a world in which everyone is equally poor

  2. I think this Virus could solve our Medicare and Social Security problem…what better way to solve it than the Judges and Executioners be non-human….
    Then, who would get laid off is the blood sucking Health (Sickness) Care System workers
    Would you believe 1 (one) Outpatient Kidney Stone Removal (in and out in 3 hours with no complications) cost $72,000 ?? WTF are they smoking??

  3. Just watched the today press conference
    The orange clown:
    We had a great economy and then Deborah came one day and said we had close it all.I asked why she said it is bad like 1917 40 million deaths,. You know that was terrible but they did not know what is social distancing, terrible You saw that curve the other day it could have been steeper you know but we flatten it, tremendous…

    Jesus Christ what a moron

    Current number of alleged corona deaths 5864,alleged number of new deaths 762
    That is 4 days after we have been told that in 2 weeks it will be 240 k peak

    • —————————————————————–
      According to the Book of Judges, Deborah (Hebrew: דְּבוֹרָה, Dəḇōrāh, “bee”; Arabic: دبوراه‎, Dabūrāh) was a prophetess of the God of the Israelites, the fourth Judge of pre-monarchic Israel and the only female judge mentioned in the Bible, and the wife of Lapidoth. Deborah told Barak that God commanded him to lead an attack against the forces of Jabin king of Canaan and his military commander Sisera (Judges 4:6–7); the entire narrative is recounted in chapter 4.
      ——————————————————————–
      Tremendous, it fits strongly lol

  4. A new report released by the UN today calls for: “A large-scale, coordinated and comprehensive multilateral response amounting to at least 10 per cent of global GDP is needed now more than ever.”

    So the UN now wants to be able to tax us.

    https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/sg_report_socio-economic_impact_of_covid19.pdf

    https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/sg_response_and_recovery_fund_fact_sheet.pdf

    https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/un_brand_sg_press_release_march31_2020_10am.pdf

  5. Like Z-Man, I sense that we might be looking into an abyss. China certainly needs some bashing and is no role model, but have are rulers become our worst enemies? Ann Coulter has been one of the few showing some sanity, but she now seems to be taking the path of least resistance (focusing on China) at the expense of the greater good.

    If one asks the cui bono question, it seems that the media and political class are the only ones truly benefiting, if only temporarily, from this potential horror. And it is really scary that most others are following like sheep. We are now learning about the true nature of our fellow citizens (and humans) and it is not pretty.

    The ruling class, to my knowledge, has not articulated an exit strategy. Could Reason be more reasonable than many of those we gave our respect and affection?

    https://reason.com/2020/04/01/the-trump-administration-presents-a-false-choice-between-current-covid-19-control-measures-and-no-intervention/

    • Yes – they often can be more reasonable than a statist on a power-trip.
      I used to be a regular Reason reader – peruses their headlines. Looks like I still agree with about a third of what they write, vehemently disagree with a third, and am completely indifferent to a third of their topics.

  6. If people need to see an example of the upward holiness spiraling in action, I recommend checking out the Corona subreddits.

    The hivemind is absolutely *ecstatic* that Fauci essentially announced indefinite lockdown at today’s Trump presser.

    • Fauci tremendous people, our economy is tremendous I feel strongly we will rebound…. 240 k deaths folks we have a great country… we have to flatten curve and by the way I spoke Persident Xi great friend we get along very well but China could have told us earlier….. here is the great Gouverner of X, great state I have visited twice, I have tremendous gulf curses there… a great country I feel strongly folks we could have had 2.2 millions deaths but I closed borders………..

      This is the man that will lead the country and world out of an unprecedented self inflected crises
      And the rest of western “leaders” are the same or worse (minus a few exceptions)
      Clowns leading “war against a flu” while fear stricken females of both gender begs to be locked
      The glory of Napoleon and Cesar easily fades away when compared to these brilliant strategist, compassionate and brave warriors lol
      There is a reason while females were kept outside of any realm of decision for thousands of years
      There is a reason why men were encouraged to fight and more intelligent among them to learn Socrates and Greeks
      There is the wisdom of ages and its associated eternal truths, those who mess up with the natural order will crumble into ruins, ruins we can plainly see around us these days

  7. ZMan…thanks for your deep analysis….gulp…I think. I can only assume there are reasons behind the massive constant media ampping up of world hysteria to the Wuhan virus. My nervous system feels like it touched the 3rd Rail when I brush up against thinking that this may be Cloward-Piven-Soros-Alinsky-style overload and tank the system. Then consolidate and grab the reigns of power through strong man means…in declining stages. The wahwyn politicians have made the leap to grab power-consolidate-move to tyranny and shut down gun stores and citizen mobility…plus release and dump prisoners across the country. I hope this is my woman fear speaking. I can run fear with the best of them. Being daughter of Commies and knowing what they wanted for this country and world wide, maybe I’m being realistic. I hope not. Am not happy channeling Cassandra.

    • Letting all the convicts out, even murderers and rapists, is a big sign this is end game. Not exactly Cloward-Piven; more like Stalin.

    • Well Range Front; this WAS all about $4T to the banks, they were already in trouble in Dec with liquidity drying up and Wuhan was both problem and opportunity- Wuhan is the new Detroit, heavily in debt gambling – Just in Time supply just too late = bankruptcy.

      So they hyped a flu strain and got $4T

      Problem was then the narrative ran away into PANIC. Now they may have sunk their own boat, and ours.

      However; on your coup fears; no.
      Solve united states for coup.

      You can’t; power is distributed among 85,000 govts, 54 state and territory National Guards, and Air Guard (yes, our governors have their own air forces).
      20,000 plus Independent Police and Law Enforcement orgs; spread over 2 million square miles with 330 million people with estimated 425 million guns and over 12 Trillion rounds of ammunition in private hands, and an aroused, wary population.

      There is no “coup” possible for the above country.

      War; yes. Giant Yugoslavia? YES.

      But coup? No.

  8. I wish Z-man would stop being so optimistic. The State of Florida is now officially closed. Everything. HIDE UNDER YOUR BEDS! … and stay there until you die.

    There was this Z post not all that long ago where our host mentioned that you could not just screw around with a highly complex system — like a modern industrial society. They don’t just stop and restart anytime you want it to.

    We are in a period of time where it is said half the people are living paycheck to paycheck and now there will be no paycheck. Where does the food come from?

    What happens when 100 million people are out of work and have no income? How does any business stay open if the customers are all destitute? Hell, I read that whores are even having a bad time of it (real whores, not politicians)

    Do you really think 100 million unemployed is an exaggeration? Really?

    It took the governments of the west to do this. Is everyone happy now?

    • Look at the people the Normies put in charge. This was almost inevitable. The same low quality people in charge think they are going to “solve” the problem? Exacerbate. Worsen. Make a trajectory to disaster.

      They are not going to solve shit. The Normies are going to pay the price for their stupidity ….. along with everyone else.

      One thing this Zee guy has right at this point – we ARE in uncharted waters. The people I speak to, aka “fools” – think ‘everything will be just like it was’ … because … was. I am not wasting time telling them otherwise. I am just planning with no assurance the past points the way. If it does, woot.

      My concerns now include:

      1. Banks deny us our own cash (pull out as much as you can.)

      2. Currency devalued massively (live as if you have HALF the cash you already do.)

      3. Civil unrest in your area (if you are not already ready for this, welp – hope you can still get what you need.)

      4. Shortage of good and services (make sure you have a larder of basics – and know how to make flour, sugar, etc. into meals; learn basic electrical, plumbing, auto mechanics, carpentry, etc.)

      I have already:

      1. Got cash.
      2. Plan for money to be less, but also more powerful for negotiating – and put off capital purchases as your spending power amidst the incoming tide of poor will be increased.
      3. Already covered.
      4. Already covered, every part of that list and then some + a lot of firewood on hand.

      Soo… if you are Joe Normie, wimp ass male with no fucking skills – better hit Youtube and learn yourself up.

      • 1. Got cash.

        In the situation you outline, that will be good for toilet paper; used bills are nice and soft.

        Question for the preppers: are you stockpiling salt? Once the electricity goes, there’s not a trillion ways to preserve meat and salt will most likely become be a high-value barter item.

        • Why are preppers always so condescending..? HomerB’s attitude will end up getting him schwacked by the crowd who will certainly appreciate his carefully stockpiled goods.

          • Se my previous reply, Bugman 2. Why are you using this Yiddish term? I don’t live near said persons of high crime propensity – am in a more rustic area. Do you speak of, say, your tenants, Bugman 2? Don’t worry, those government Section 8 checks will continue to flow into your coffers even if you don’t fix the heat, peeling paint.

            Now if you were personally thinking of making that long walk from where my property starts … and my front door to “schwack” someone …. well that would be regrettable for you.

        • Good point Felix. I worked in the salt mines for 15 years and hardly aged at all.

          I have a few things stocked. But I wonder if I really have the one skill I would need to survive the “transition” period into bartertown: ruthlessness.

          Most people assume the transition will follow some kind of normal trajectory, an incremental slide toward savagery.

          We have the tendency to look inland toward the pillboxes on the dunes while ignoring that leaving the relative safety of the landing craft requires stepping into a breech. Or 8’ of seawater with 60pounds of gear strapped to your back. How many of those soldiers planned to tread water?

          Anyhoo. Country squirrel probably tastes better than city squirrel. But prefer chicken fingers and bbq sauce. So perhaps I am already savage enough.

          My advice. A pellet gun with plenty of pellets. And get ALL of your dental work squared away.

          • It’s hard to find a pellet gun review that doesn’t say “broke after X number of times” where X is less than 50. “Hand crank” rifles don’t seem to be able to tolerate the pressures over time and the air ones don’t seem to pack the same punch and are dependent on a scarce resource (the air canisters). Someone elsewhere mentioned that Venezuelans favored crossbows.

          • “But I wonder if I really have the one skill I would need to survive the “transition” period into bartertown…”

            This encapsulates why so many are not prepared for a black swan event. We “transitioned” long ago and cash has been the ONLY way to go for YEARS. You point up one skill I did not list: negotiating skills. Look, based on the stupid and vapid replies/posts, I assume the snark types, bugmen, do not have women folk, nor children or others that depend on them. I certainly hope that is the case – as when yours turn to you in need, being able to make a snappy post at some site isn’t going to get them what they need.

            It might feed the black hole of bugman ego need. Won’t fix the leak under your sink.

        • No need to preserve meat. Plenty of fresh meat will be visiting you on the hoof (or on the $300 basketball shoes du jour, more likely) for weeks to come. The trick is going to be prepping it so that it is safe to eat.

          Y’all think zoonotic diseases from Sus scrofa/domesticus regular pigs is high risk? Well, with Long Pig you ain’t seen nothing yet.

          Oh, and don’t trash the shoes. You may not find them to be your style, but odds are that you paid for them. 😉

        • Eeeasy now, bugman. I doubt I fit the bill of your “prepper” slur, but I will embrace being “prepared.” Took some moment to list some ideas to better oneself, and by extension those that depend on you.

          You, bugman? Some snotty reply. Look, you’d better hope the government gets you that $1 dollar, er, $1200 check soon – you’re gonna need half of that money to get a plumber to unclog your toilet since you can’t do it yourself.

      • To point 1 I would add acquiring some bullion, if one has not already done so. And not just 1 oz gold coins, get some 1/2, 1/4 oz or some 1 oz silver. You don’t want to wind up trading a kruggerand for a sack of potatoes.

        • If shi!t really is going to hit the fan why stockpile gold, why not cigarettes, coffee, and scotch. Valuable medical supplies. Gasoline. Bicycle parts, especially tires. Salt like FK pointed out.

          • One reply to these quality replies. If we indeed have a “side” – we are supposed to be brain-storming ways for our side to succeed – as you men here do.

            I had thought about gold, physical gold. But IMO, if cash, even if devalued by half – loses its value, we’re going to be in a place that is beyond my simple suggestions. I would want ammo and matches.

            Have both.

            Another thing I have been doing as of late is filling out my set of tools so I can repair and build. Basic plumbing supplies – Mapp torch, cutter, some extra copper – or the equivalent if you are in PVC. Some extra, cheap light switches, outlets – they run about a buck and half each. Solder, fuses if you are not on a breaker.

            Hand tools as back up to your corded or cordless.

            But most important are skills. Mine were acquired long ago and I made it my business to pass them on to my sons. That said, sadly I know too many males that have zero skills. Totally dependent.

            They are the bugmen.

        • My money’s in spices that don’t grow in North America. Sam’s Club 2lb containers. I figure people are gonna get desperate for cloves, ground cinnamon, chili powder, garlic powder, oregano, black pepper, and suchlike. Very compact. Shit starts getting wild with my neighbors, I plan to load up the SUV and head to my son’s place in NM. My tent and cots will make okay living quarters and my FNAR (7.62X51/.308 Win) ought to put down pretty much anything in that vicinity.

  9. I have to say, I have been very disappointing with some of our guys. I have always known about accelerationists and understood the sentiment. But seeing our people gloat about the mass unemployment is a little sickening.

    Those same people are also deploying language like “virus denier” and saying those of us who are concerned about our economic future are carrying water for the Jews.

    I guess in an attempt to not be passive aggressive I am referring specifically to Richard Spencer, the guys on FTN, and TRS in general.

    I have a lot of respect for all those guys. But this hardline they have taken on this particular subject has me pretty wary.

    To me, the whole virus thing is something on which reasonable people can disagree. Those folks I mentioned above though have turned it into a litmus test … Either agree with us or you are a Jew. I believe the fancy term is they are creating a false dichotomy.

  10. “Maybe the white nationalists get their wish and everyone becomes a dependent of the state.”

    I know lots of White Nationalists who believe the economy should be subservient to the public interest, none who advocate “everyone becomes a dependent.”

    That strategy isn’t described in either volume of Greg’s “White Nationalism.” Nothing from muh Nazis to that effect. Bad Uncle was no fan of deadbeats.

    I don’t even know any WN Tankies who’d put it that way, for all that that’s what they really mean. Is Tankie fandom really large or influential enough to be worth counter-signalling?

  11. Suppose it was widely accepted that virtually every person on earth would eventually become infected with the Wuhan Flu but that the disease was no more toxic than any other garden variety flu. It should then be evident that there would be no value to the individual in committing social and economic suicide for a threat that was no greater than that which transpired last year and the years before.

  12. Some thoughts: the 1918 Flu pandemic killed about 675,000 Americans. Scale that by population and we’d suffer about 2 million deaths, probably over more than a year. But a 40-50% peak over what normal deaths are. And 20-30 times what’s considered a normal flu year. I tend to agree with Zman in today’s column, lots of uncertainty. Who knows where economic and political rot will take us even through the end of the year? In lighter news, I’m shopping for some cheap shale oil stocks with my enormous $6,000 cash stake 😀

  13. I’ve never once seen someone argue against libertarianism without said argument consisting of 100% straw man arguments. Libertarianism is not anarchism; it just means a reduced role of government in the lives of citizens. And of course libertarianism would solve so many problems that are complained about on the right.

    1. Get rid of welfare and make charity voluntarily organized

    Ilegal immigrants who aren’t working go bye bye, can’t survive. “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” Thessalonians 3:10 Peope who import Somalians have to feed and house them too.

    2. Get rid of affirmative action and quotas

    People can hire whoever they want, and companies that hire H1B-s will be at a disadvantage to companies that hire based on merit and performance.

    3. Let the medical professionals (NOT so-called experts) handle the supposed health crisis. Let people go outside and let people earn their daily bread.

    And on and on. We simply need less government in our lives and more self-reliance. I don’t have time to explain all this. People are basically good because deep down they are a soul, and they can organize better on the community level. This country has gone farther to the left as power has gone away from the county level and taken away by the bloated, inefficient, evil commie FedGov.

    Z-man’s arguments against libertarianism (“they are smug”) are amateur hour at best. Libertarianism is Z-man’s ex-girlfriend that he’s irrationally and perpetually mad at LOL

    • Just checking:

      Libertarians support open borders, free flow of goods and people, right?

      • Yes. That’s just one reason I never joined their party, knew it was a bad idea even in my teens (1970s). “Victimless crimes” — drug use I’ll accept, but most people have a harder time contemplating adult-child “consensual” sex. No matter, I do admit to like many of their ideas, and have even voted for them a few times.

    • “I don’t have time to explain all this.”

      Pfft. You can’t explain it because you are literally wrong about every single thing on earth. You are so bloody stupid, everyone else here has become measurably stupider just from reading your drivel.

      • Elementary, stop all the pussy-footing around: Just come out and tell us what you think!

    • I’ve never once seen someone argue against libertarianism without said argument consisting of 100% straw man arguments. Libertarianism is not anarchism; it just means a reduced role of government in the lives of citizens.

      Libertarianism doesn’t mean a “reduced” role of government, it means no government at all. Private armies, private police, private laws and private courts – worse than anarchy.

      I don’t have time to explain all this.

      Then don’t, please.

      • Apparently Purple Dank isn’t aware that a great number of readers and commenters who frequent this site are perfectly aware of Motte & Bailey arguments, and can sniff them out from a mile off. Feminism doesn’t mean x, y and z (all the bad stuff) either; it merely means a, b, & c (all the good stuff). Thus sayeth the nice, pretty church-going feminist whose turn it is to retreat to the motte and speak to all the nicey-nice a, b, c feminist P.R. talking points while the bulk of the ‘sisterhood’ remain in the Bailey burning everything down.

    • Z-man has expounded on this quite a bit beyond a single characterization. To pick out one of your points: “Get rid of affirmative action and quotas”. What makes you think these are involuntary at this point? This is where it gets aggravating, what if a business choses to do these things, i.e. discriminate, against us?

      It’s kind of the flip side of “H1B-s will be at a disadvantage to companies that hire based on merit and performance”. Why should that matter? Is the libertarian content to risk (further) burning down his people and culture to try and score some point?

      Is there anything worthwhile a libertarian will actually stand up and defend? Why do they put the fate of their people up to be decided by some accounting transaction?

    • Sounds just like me from 20 years ago. True libertarianism has never been tried, right?

      Libertarianism can only function within a set of external conditions wholly separate from libertarianism – high-trust future-oriented citizenry, a judicial system that fairly adjudicates contracts, etc… AKA “White America pre-1965,” brought to us courtesy of Anglo-Saxon tradition, Christianity and mercantilism, among many things non-libertarian.

      It’s a sandbox for suburban White guys with 3-digit IQ’s, an interesting sideshow that sheds some useful light on the rough edges of traditional governance – but no one wants to live and raise their kids in a social experiment.

      • It’s less of a proposed system of governance and more of a mind-set,
        Start with the assumption of no government and add only when undeniably necessary,

  14. “When a man stares into the abyss and sees nothing but darkness, this is the time that he finds his character. And it is his character, that keeps him from falling into the abyss.”

    • Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

      Friedrich Nietzsche

      But they will, inevitably they will

  15. “Trump is turning into the wartime president, which is always good for the president’s numbers. He will no doubt become the great cheerleader of the recovery this summer, as he will want to take credit for the recovery from the lock-down, assuming there is one”

    Lol now we are all greatly relieved, Trump will become a cheerleader and we are going to “chearleed” the economy into a tremendous one like world has never seen
    That 11 of March when came and “acted bravely as a real wartime president” will forever live in the infamy as the day when Great Lunacy started

    Folks, doctor Fauci great people, tremendous 240 k dead it could have been 2.2 million but we flattened curve…. great economy folks…………will rebound like we never seen before, where is our great general, general pleas come and tell us how we fighting a war against plague, great people, tremendous people

    Current number of alleged corona virus deaths 5 344 Number of new alleged
    deaths 242 as of this very moment

    Exponential growth folks, doctor Fauci tremendous number of deaths 240k
    in 2 weeks (3 days already elapsed since)

    F*uck the clown world

  16. The one thing that we can predict with some confidence is that hardship will increase for most of the population, and that is a very good thing in terms of the resumption of our ancestral evolutionary drivers and fitness selection. Our population (and most of the First World) will divide into two camps; the whiners and the roll-up-your-sleevers. The former will shriek with ever-increasing volume until Pelosi sends them more gravy. The latter will get to work and buy ammunition. Let the reckoning begin.

  17. Latest #s from my hospital

    • Veteran Testing:
    o We received 4 COVID test results today; 4 negative and 0 positive.
    Total tests sent: 144
    Positive: 5
    Negative: 127
    Pending: 12

    • Thank you for continuing to send these, Roberto. Your percentages are significantly below the average. I suspect this may be attributable to the fact that, as a VA center, the average age of your patients is relatively high?

      Any thoughts?

    • Once again, thanks, roberto. I feel like you mentioned it before, but can you give us an idea, a state even, of your location?

      Here in the wilds of upstate NY, my county (pop. roughly 100K) has 10 confirmed cases, and a single fatality (84 years old).

      • Portland, OR. He was kind enough to share it some days ago. But this room is pretty crowded these days, so easy to miss.

  18. “no one alive has seen what’s coming.” – Which is precisely why we’re going through this. If they knew they wouldn’t be do it. There will be much lamentation and gnashing of teeth over these decisions. In an effort to save (insert thousands of lives) they will condemn (insert millions of lives) to suicide and poverty.

    “How will a people used to excess respond to a world of want?” – Back in the early 90’s I had a high school history teacher who asked this exact question, and his opinion was no less than civil war. Not a war with people in nice formations wearing gray wool or blue wool, but a messier one that looks more like 1980s Colombia, with land owners organizing themselves to fend off mobs of marxist takers.

    “Maybe this look into the void frightens us and we scurry back to the safety of the past.” We’ve already jumped into the void, we’ve fallen five stories down a hundred story building, and are currently in mid-air. What awaits us is a convulsion of mass death and sorrow, but we never really liked each other anyway, so the sorrow will be mostly for ourselves and immediate family members.

    “On this side of the great divide, there are lots of cheers for the death of the economy, in the belief that putting millions of white people out of work will radicalize them.” – There’s no other way to radicalize white people than by doing this, as white cultures, as defined by the summation of white ethnicities, are transactional in nature, and the transactions have stopped.

    • ““no one alive has seen what’s coming.” ”
      Apart from the Gates Foundation etc.
      Or is Bill now officially dead?

      • I believe Bill is spending his time in the land of the future, Africa, looking for those geniuses he talks about.

  19. Very OT so feel free to ignore or delete, but I thought a bit of fun distraction from all the craziness might be welcome. Over at the Althouse blog they have a fun parlor game of naming the best movie of each decade for the last century. Could make for some funny disputes. Opinions? Personally I prefer to name movies that exploit the potential of physical movie-making, for instance “Network” is a good movie but it’s really just a filmed version of a play, there’s nothing cinematic about it.

    My list (American movies only):

    1920s: SHERLOCK JUNIOR
    30s: THE WIZARD OF OZ
    40s: ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN
    50s: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
    60s: GOLDFINGER
    70s: 3-way tie: THE EXORCIST / NASHVILLE / APOCALYPSE NOW
    80s: BLUE VELVET
    90s: BAD LIEUTENANT
    00s: MOULIN ROUGE
    10s: DISNEY’S “FROZEN”

    • Good list.

      The camera certainly liked Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge.

      For the 50s, based on your criteria, how about Shane or The Searchers?

  20. Prolonging the suffering is a feature of curve flattening, not a bug. We’re on the payment plan.

    If this is a jacked up cold bug, staying indoors will keep the thing incubating instead of being neutered/destroyed by warm, damp spring air, sunshine, etc.

    Just my opinion.

  21. I’d really like to know what’s going on. Up here in the Great White North, there are 10,000 cases (confirmed or not I don’t know but that is what is being reported). Our population is 37,500,000. Right now, that’s 0.00027% of the population. If we reach 1% (375,000 cases and 13,125 deaths using a 3.5% death ratio) is that still worth shutting down the economy and throwing the country into a depression, not to mention, the hundreds of billions in additional debt to the government???

    We are also now entering police state territory as the province of Quebec are putting cops at the borders between their province and Ontario and New Brunswick turning back all non-essential travel. I’ve had a social distance warrior complain that I was standing to close to her at Costco the other day when my cart was slightly over the makeshift distance line they had set up. Neighbours are starting to report on neighbours that don’t keep the required distance and municipal governments are now threatening fines for people don’t follow “the rules.” Even my ex-wife won’t let me see our son unless we maintain “social distancing.” He was studying in Australia but came back a couple of weeks ago and is past his mandatory 14 day quarantine and has no symptoms. I basically want to tell her to f#%k off.

    • Bitches be trippin Trojan. Funny thing is if things get much worse and she doesn’t have another man in her life she might start leaning on you for support.

      Lolz at social distancing warrior.

      • She doesn’t have another man in her life, at least not that I know of. I will in no way be a post to lean on for her.

        Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for “social distance warrior” lol! That came from a financial blogger here in the frozen tundra but it’s funny as shit.

    • We have to destroy the country in order to save it. Otherise, experts project 375,000,000 in Canada would have died without the heroic efforts of these, your public mast…er…servants.
      You can thank me later
      Justin T

    • If we reach 1% (375,000 cases and 13,125 deaths using a 3.5% death ratio) is that still worth shutting down the economy and throwing the country into a depression, not to mention, the hundreds of billions in additional debt to the government???

      In a gynocratic, hyper risk-adverse society, yes. To the gynocrats and soyboys no risk is too small and no price is too great to pay to avoid it. The havoc resulting from avoiding the supposed risk of covid-19 is, to the risk-adverse, a small price to pay to avoid catching the disease.

  22. Zman says; “We don’t really know why our rulers are doing this. The claim is the virus threat, but we have had worse virus threats and the ruling class did not go insane like this, so something is different this time.”

    I am agreeing less and less with Mr. ZMAN lately, but his statement above rings true to me.
    I cannot figure out why the response to this virus is so out of line with previous viral epidemics/pandemics within the last 20 years or so.
    Just check out the statistics for the 2009 Swine Flu vs the corona virus; the huge difference in the response by the govt. is really baffling.

    Note that in previous “pandemics” the medical experts routinely over-estimated the
    # of cases and deaths after all the final data was in.
    I assume they look at probabilities of rates of infections, deaths, etc., establish a range within certain confidence intervals, and then assume the worst or near worst case will prevail. They then sound the alarm to prepare for the worst or near worst case.

    I don’t blame them – that’s their job – they are medical scientists/epidemiologists; they are forced to make predictions in real time with insufficient and “moving” data, and by their nature they lean (way, way over) to be cautious.

    But why haven’t previous pandemics produced a shutdown of the world?? Are we to believe that this virus is worse than the 2009 Swine Flu?? The data says otherwise.

    IMHO I can’t but help to think this is another effort to get rid of Trump. I have no proof to cite, no facts to cite, nothing.
    But it just does not feel right.

    • I like this graphic that attempts to illustrate the scale of the current situation versus past pandemics:

      https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/

      We’ve euthanized the global economy over something that does not even approach the level of the Asian and Hong Kong flus.

      As others have stated, one has to wonder about the real lockdown goals.

      I think there is a push on to implement neo-feudalism and herd more people onto the megacorp dole. I think the Internet-enabled social credit system is coming to limit travel and the best interest rates to the, “right kind of people.”

    • Trump is the shorthand, but what is really going on is that quite a few people are waking up to the hat/color/gender makeover of things, using big government and big business as the tools, and the Powers That Be are getting antsy about the trend of things in the other direction. Trump is the guy at the front of the parade, so he takes the shots and arrows. We didn’t jump when Hillary, Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer said “wait til your father gets home”, so now the house needs to be burned down. And down it burns.

    • John, good summary, I agree.

      WRT Z-man agreement, I’m not sure he cares whether you agree with him or not. That’s sort of a Cochran thing. What Z-man does is make you think and that is valuable in and of itself.

  23. We can’t stop illegal immigration. Trump has signed into law massive expansion of the H Visa programs. We have a virus now that was made possible by our religious devotion to globalism. The economy will probably be wreaked to depression levels. And. Now we are pivoting to the war on drugs?

    Or are we ramping up in South America to make a move on Venezuela? The Chinese are said to have assets there. Perhaps we are already at war with China.

  24. It starts with global economic collapse. It ends with nuclear war. We all know how it ends. We’ve known for 75 years. The only thing we don’t know is the timeline.

  25. Greg Cochran believes the economic impact of the shutdowns will be temporary and that the economy will light up like a Christmas tree once the shutdowns end. The reason for this is because, unlike say a global nuclear war, pandemics do not destroy infrastructure. The infrastructure is perfectly intact. I suspect Greg is correct.

    There is a lot of bullshit being pumped out onto the internet about this disease. All of the credible information, or that which seems credible to me, suggests this is, at most, a 1918 Spanish Flu level event. I don’t recall there being any lasting economic effects from this event and, more significantly, we had the roaring 20’s as the follow on.

      • The 1920 depression was mostly due to the aftermath of WW I. I admit my knowledge of history is sketchy, but pretty sure that Europe in general fared rather poorly. The Flu was sort of a bonus from the Reaper.

    • There was an incredibly bad recession that began soon thereafter. A terrible one. But the old guys from the 19th century were still in charge. They knew what to do. “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. … enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” – Andrew Mellon. Only two other times in the 20th century was this advice inadvertently taken through Paul Volker’s interest rate increases that created the recession of 1981, with the quick and robust expansion that followed and partially with the major contraction of government in 1948, following the war, ushering in the 1950s. This advice will eventually be forced down our throats after the next several years of trying everything else and destroying the currency. So the lighting up like a Christmas tree will look more like Clark Griswold plugging in his Christmas lights in Christmas Vacation. And once they do light up, it will be terribly inflationary for the economy. This is why I’m all in big-oil for the next several years.

      • This is libertarian story telling. The depression of 1920 had different causes than the depression of 1929. The 1920 depression was caused by the contraction of the war state after the massive expansion of the war state (which, btw, is the last time America shrank the military back to pre-war levels after a war).
        The 1929 crash was caused by over a decade of loose monetary policy and a giant stock market bubble. True, the politicians reacted badly to the popping of the bubble and made it worse, but the 29 crash was going to be a lot worse no matter what. The stock market bubble caused other bubbles when people suddenly being made rich by the stock market bubble were spending the loot in other sectors like RE and automobiles and inflating bubbles in these sectors.

        If the politicians did what libertarians like Woods and Schiff want them to do, I don’t think the country would survive it. And what comes next would not be pretty. People like Woods and Schiff, but especially Schiff, have a lot of options we do not have. Schiff is already eligible for foreign citizenship in Israel and no matter what happens is going to be OK. The guy has 10s of millions of dollars and a lot of personal wealth in foreign countries in allocated gold.

        Just the rioting alone would destroy 1/2 the cities in America. Whenever EBT goes down or rumors of EBT going down, there is panic or rioting. Imagine if it went down permanently. The hood is already difficult to manage. Hungry people are not going to lay down and die peacefully. Municipalities across the country would go bankrupt. Just about every pension fund would collapse. Many states would go bankrupt as would the federal government. There would be no V shaped recovery. It would be decades of a far worse depression of the 30s. Worse, the bankers would own everything. The LAST thing that could ever emerge from such a scenario would be a libertarian utopia.

        The time to do something like that was the late 40s. Eventually you reach a point (and we reached it a long time ago) where the status quo is vastly preferable to such radical change even if you assume their ideas are correct. Just punch a libertarian in the face.

        • “It would be decades of a far worse depression of the 30s. Worse, the bankers would own everything.” – Lol. Just wait until they unveil the so called cures you want, they sure as hell won’t do what I want them to do. It worked so well from Juan Peron. It’s not about creating some libertarian utopia. It’s about leaving people the F alone to salvage their lives.

          “If the politicians did what libertarians like Woods and Schiff want them to do, I don’t think the country would survive it.” – Just because libertarians are wrong on dozens of things, they’re not wrong on a state and a people who need to live within their means. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t create productivity out of thin air they way you can with our current monetary situation. Nothing precluded you from buying gold, it’s not some Jew metal that is kryptonite to everyone else. You still have time to get into oil stocks.

          By the way, half the cities in America are as ugly as sin. Pure utilitarianism and blight. So it’s not like you’re saving good architecture when a Kroger burns down in Joliet, IL.

          What they didn’t do in 1920 was to create all kinds of loan facilities for failure to prop everything up. It doesn’t matter whether its a bust from war spending or a bust from the stock market. And hungry people won’t be going down quietly, true, so they will have to be dealt with.

          • The strategy this time around is to extend the credit lines, without any payments to them, for the duration. Add the principal payments to the end of the terms and don’t accrue interest during the time-out. Essentially a financial form of suspended animation. Like those movies where everyone freezes and the primary characters still walk around, the financial version of it. MTT (Modern Time Theory) instead of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory). The question is, when does one demand a restart of payments? Probably at the moment when foreclosing on the remaining deadbeats doesn’t tip the system over.

          • I don’t disagree that it’s a bad situation. The 20s were not the current day. The situation is completely different.
            The nutters have been ranting about hyperinflation for decades and they have yet to be right. There are a lot of deflationary forces happening right now. The money supply is decreasing, not increasing. Unlike other currencies, there is an extremely large market for US Dollars, even outside of the US.

            Whatever amount of gold you have, unless you are filthy rich, it’s not going to help you if hyperinflation did happen. Real prices skyrocket in hyperinflation, not just nominal prices. There would be massive shortages and that would drive real prices through the roof. The deflation that would happen would be just as bad if not worse than hyperinflation.
            Mild inflation over a decade or 2 is vastly preferable to the deflation we would get if they did what Woods, Schiff etc want them to do. There are no good answers, but there are answers that are worse than others.

    • We can only hope.

      The economy that has been shut down is a complex system. Really, no one knows how to restart it. Here’s an attempted allegory.

      Years ago when I started with my dept, we were recipients of a series multimillion dollar grants to create academic computing environments. Those were (initially) the days of big iron computing, not our ubiquitous PC’s, which came later. So we built a computing center—distributed power, false floors, large a/c units, communications—the works.

      One thing never done was to produce our own power, so when there were outages, everything went down. Indeed, we set up our power regulation/distribution units to shut down if there was even half a cycle change. Well, as we grew and grew, the process of bringing literally hundreds of system back up was a lengthy, but more importantly an increasingly complex process.

      Certain systems for external communication needed to be brought up first so other systems could talk to the outside world as they came up. Systems that worked together needed to be brought up together or they’d go off line after a period. And that’s not even considering environmental prerequisites like a/c running for a period to get humidity and such to spec’s before even attempting restart of the center.

      What was most problematic however was individual system failures. Ever have an incandescent light bulb burn out? Rarely does it do so while you are reading under it, does it? Usually blows when first powered on—pop—and you know you need a new bulb. So it was with us. Systems went down and they would not spin up—hardware failure. Sometimes a critical machine—and for all intents we were dead in to water until fixed, or worked around.

      We had of course, a 9 page check list to document the process of restoring operations, and if all went well, perhaps we’d be up in an hour. But as often as not, one or more systems were dead and we’d be out of business until we repaired. The odds were against us with so many systems.

      So where is the 9 page check list for restarting the US economy? We had a check list, because we created and built our operation from scratch and had experience of dozens of outages and restarts over the decades. Where is the experience of shutting down the largest economy on earth and restarting it documented?

    • There are apparently a bunch of videos from citizen journalists showing hospitals are empty, even in NYC with their body trucks and ships and the alleged epicenter of the virus.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8jbAByesDQ

      The lugenpresse was caught showing footage of an Italian hospital and saying it was a NYC hospital!

      These liars cannot be trusted. They lie about everything and they are lying about the details at minimum of this. I have mostly taken the press with a grain of salt, but I didn’t think they could be so brazen knowing everyone has a video camera with them at all times. It’s easy to forget sometimes what liars they are.

    • All of the credible information, or that which seems credible to me, suggests this is, at most, a 1918 Spanish Flu level event.

      My money says that the final numbers – at least in the U.S. -will more closely resemble SARS than the 1918 flu. The biggest difference I can see between the covid-19 hysteria and SARS and the Spanish flu is that in the latter cases any/all ECONOMIC effects were entirely the result of the illness itself. In the case of the alleged covid-19 pandemic the economic effects are being and will continue to be the results of the hysterical efforts to combat the disease rather than due to the disease itself. I hope – SINCERELY HOPE – that Mr Cochran is right. I just do not believe he will be. We are in utterly UNcharted territory here, folks. Nobody has ever been crazy enough or stupid enough or risk-adverse enough to attempt to put the world’s economy on pause before. Nobody freaking knows what will happen when our political masters finally deign to release the majority of us from house arrest. Maybe the world’s economy will rebound quickly and by the fall everything will be hunky dory. Maybe so but I doubt it. You do not monkey with complex systems for free. Murphy always – I say again FEKKING ALWAYS – gets to play his games. For my money Cochran is just another magical thinker whistling past the graveyard.

  26. In small doses paranoia can be helpful. As long as concern does not lead to anxiety manifesting itself into paralyzing paranoid psychosis. Adverse paranoia. Is there any other kind? It’s ok that we don’t know. In actuality that’s all we need to know. Things will change. Opportunity knocks. We will never recover as a people from this. Let the new people rise up from the ashes. The tree of liberty needs refreshing. It’s ok to be white.

    • So long as it does not reduce you to huddling in a corner, paranoia is survival-positive. If nothing else it produces a heightened situational awareness. As I go about my daily work of delivering food I see people – MOST PEOPLE, IMHO – with the situational awareness of a rock. They blithely go about their lives utterly unaware of 99.999% of what goes on around them. They step out or turn in front of me trusting ME with THEIR/b> safety. My native paranoia takes care of me.I try very hard never to put MY health/safety in the hands of someone else. I always yield the right of way simply because I can watch them better when they’re in front of me than when they’re behind me. I always try to maintain a good following distance simply because it gives me room/time to react in case the guy ahead of me pulls some monumentally boneheaded maneuver.

      I simply cannot understand the mindset that trusts other people with one’s own safety. Whether it be fellow drivers or politicians and bureaucrats it makes no sense to me to trust someone I do not know. I once asked my (African-descended) next door neighbor (whom I have lived alongside for over 20 years) if she would trust me with her health, welfare and finances. She replied with a strong “No! Of course not.” “Then why”, I asked her, “would you trust some politician or bureaucrat in City Hall,Austin or D.C. with those areas of your life?” She looked at me like I had been speaking Russian.

  27. What permanent loss of rights will come from this? They have been arresting and fining at least one pastor for holding church services. A month ago, nobody thought this was possible. Not to be outdone, some municipalities are directly assaulting the 2nd amendment as well. Maine says, “hold my beer” and throws the 4th under the bus. While some states, counties and the feds release prisoners and stop responding to 911 calls, others threaten arrest and jail for failure to social distance.
    Everyone thinks their ideology is going to benefit and everyone wants to exercise the “never let an emergency go to waste” and ramp up their worst impulses. Release prisons? REALLY?

    • This is only revealing what was already true. We haven’t had rights for decades but for the indulgence and sufferance of the elites in preserving the fiction. Now more people know the real score.

      • Yes. And we are provided with ample daily examples of fellow white men and women – elected “leaders” and regular neighbors, who would turn you in to the stasi for five minutes of good safe feelz and social praise from the hive. So I hope people are keeping score.

        • It’s up to us to keep score and keep reminding people of who called the shot and pocket on GloboShlomo.

          I’m Noticing a lot of “this isn’t the time…” and “let’s talk about something else” interference-running out there. Like opposition electoral advice about who they “want to run against,” doing the opposite is the best assumption.

          This is the MAGA-Con version of Stalin using Mother Russia to re-patriotize the kulaks as Hortler invades.

          • I’m not sure if this is “it” or a test run…

            I think the smarter ones (ie the funny hat wearers) would prefer to back down and learn from the mistakes made and cover their exposures for next time.

            The problem is, their dumber, browner pets may not allow them to do so.

            So do I know? Hell no!

  28. The virus and lockdown threaten many small and medium sized businesses more than the huge corporations. For our overlords this seems like it might be an opportunity.

    In the same way they hate red state people/deplorables/rural Americans/Trump voters/white folks, they don’t like it that so many people still work outside the multinational corporate structure. They’d love to herd us into that, where we’re more easily controlled and they can utilize their diversity agenda.

    They increasingly want more control over what we say, how we live, how we think, what we do, etc. The people who own and work in smaller companies aren’t as subject to the globohomo program as others, and this is a problem for the corporate oligarchs and the government leviathan that wants to increase their power and influence and wants a population of compliant, interchangeable workers in their new N. American economic zone.

    • Exactly. Big business is the Trojan horse that will fence everyone in. Want a job, benefits, the means to live at a level greater than waiting for your EBT card to refill? Then get on board, brother.

  29. We don’t really know why our rulers are doing this.

    I think I know why the Dems started it.

    The claim is the virus threat, but we have had worse virus threats and the ruling class did not go insane like this, so something is different this time.

    What is different this time is that Donald Trump is currently residing at 600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the left has pulled out the stops to depose him. As I wrote in an earlier post, they had shot their wad with Russia-gate and Impeached Forever and this was just something else to throw at Trump hoping it would stick. Unfortunately for them (AND US) it stuck – sort of The left is in the position of the dog that kept chasing cars until it caught one. I don’t believe they expected their hype to evolve into full on HYSTERIA! I most certainly do not believe them to possess the level of Machiavellian cunning and political competence to have caused this. I am a firm believer in Hanlon’s Razor.

    Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity

    I refuse to believe that Pelosi, Schumer and company are that smart! NO! FEKKING! WAY!

    • At least we get the amusement of Trump playing Roadrunner to their Wile Coyote, and watching the dynamite blow up in their faces as he beep-beeps away.

      • In the real world:
        Road Runner max 20 MPH
        Coyote max 35 MPH.

        They start lying to you early.
        About everything.
        For no good reason other than they can.

        • It wasn’t that Roadrunner was faster, but that Wile’s schemes were so stupid. I stand by my analogy. This is a hilarious string btw.

          • Wil E. Coyote not so much stupid, rather that he was supplied by ACME (it was hard to see, but the fine print on the boxes: Made in China)

          • Cartoons were silly, but I still got a real kick out of seeing my first live roadrunners out West. Same with quail. Sorry, comes from growing up in suburbia with the yearning to have been a settler.

          • Roadrunners here are like cats, they literally walk up to you in the yard and make roadrunner noises—hard to describe. Folks often feed them hot dogs (raw). Perhaps that’s why they’re so friendly.

  30. We have no control over anything as this disease was not coincidental (see American Thinker two days ago). The obstacles for Trump, I.e., us, keep rolling off the Globalists assembly line and they will not stop. See Schiff’s plans to investigate the virus response—red meat for MSNBCNN.

    Rush Limbaugh said three times yesterday “If I say this I’m going to get into trouble” and then did not complete the thought. So trying to shine light on saving the economy over trying to save lives that cannot be saved will result in clamping down on freedom of speech. Balls in a vice.

    The Left/Globalists are in complete control. You can’t stop a tidal wave. Newsom just said that the virus expands progressive power, and “President Trump has been very helpful to California.” — Very kind of you, Gavin. If Trump reverted to 1930, he’d be Hoovered, in spite of Ann Coulter With Big Balls.

    Ammo will be a very valuable commodity in the days ahead.

    • Rush is probably departing this mortal coil in the next couple of months…he should just say what he’s thinking; knocks on the door from the Stasi be damned.

      • I suspect if/when you hear Rush come out and say what he really thinks – that’s likely a sign the docs have told him how much/little time he has left

      • Really – How much $ does the guy need at this point, when he’s already got millions? How long does he expect to be around and employed – given his audience is all aging and dying? I briefly listened to talk radio when I outgrew reading Hot Air/Gateway Pundit, end of GWB/beginning of Obamination. I outgrew talk radio far more quickly than I did cuckservatism lite, and I don’t believe it’s attracting a new audience or the children of its older listeners.

        • How much $ does the guy need at this point, when he’s already got millions?

          The more you have, the more you’ve got to lose. That’s why there is no such thing as effoff-money, only effoff-mindset.

          • Rush has really only one thing, his audience. No children. So he’ll talk until they carry him out. He needs no money, he just needs an audience.

          • @felix, that’s the truth. Humor is critical. Staying always pissed off gets you wrapped around the axle, eyes too close to the ground, while a little humor gives perspective.

        • So his analysis sucks? He gets huge flack from the Left so he’s right over the target. He just coined a phrase: Government by (virus) model. The guy is brilliant.

        • Meaning you think he does it for the money? At this point, his motivation may be just because he likes to hear himself talk, or he craves the attention, or he wanted that medal he got on tv a few weeks ago, or possilby he has some other deep dark ulterior motive. But, it sure ain’t for the money.

    • “If I say this I’m going to get into trouble”

      I don’t listen to Rush, so I don’t claim this is the case, but any chance it’s a rhetorical device? To get people to focus on that particular topic?

      Say something flat out in plain speech and it might be buried, lost in the noise, or forgotten. But say “I can’t talk about this…” and suddenly everyone’s attention is focused.

      • I got the distinct impression that he just wanted to say, you have to put the economy ahead of this pandemic, which is going to claim certain lives regardless of what we do. That might make him sound too calloused. I don’t think he used it as a rhetorical device; I believe that he was concerned about the way it would be interpreted if he was too direct. I don’t know what he was withholding.

        There’s an avalanche and a confluence of so many events happening that assist the Left’s goals, one of which is to curb free speech. Limbaugh clearly curbed his own speech. Everybody has to be careful about being a realist, a capitalist, or being reasonable about not shutting down the economy. Do you notice just how detailed the discussions are in every circle on coronavirus? Why should that be the case? It wasn’t the case back in 2009. But this virus is THE ONE. So the confluence that I see is public discussion in hyperdrive compounded by an atmosphere in this country that is quick to jump on the realist and crush his or her free speech. Yeah, I’m a bit paranoid but my paranoia is magnified a hundredfold by my anger at what the masses don’t understand about the free market, their inability to make good voting choices, and Democrat globalists and bureaucrats who will gladly use an evil means to advance suicidal ends.

  31. Zman is right regarding the economy. It is like we have jumped off a cliff into a lake without knowing how deep it is or if there are rocks just under the surface. I’m not sure if the lockdowns are necessary, but we are totaling flying blind.

    It is a hell of a thing to bet the country on.

    Keep up the good work Z.

    • Brings back a memory. I knew a disabled student in the dorm who was almost completely paralyzed, neck down. Some arm movement for his chair controls. Used to get called to his room to help him in/out of chair.

      One day I was talking to him wrt his “accident”. Seems he was quite an athlete in HS and one day was with friends and *did* jump off cliff into a shallow river on an impulse. As he put it, typically when these accidents occur, paralysis is instant, consciousness not lost, and your body naturally floats to the surface—face up or face down. Face down and you drown before any help reaches you, face up and you live. After a brief moment or two, he finished by saying, “unfortunately, I floated face up”. I can never forgot that conversation.

      So are we going to float face up or face down?

      • More likely he dove in. This is a surprisingly common cause of such total paralysis. Look before you leap, but really, really look before you dive. 🙁

        • Yes, he dove in. I related the story poorly. However, he took responsibility for his youthful indiscretion.

      • Compsci – Those types of stories terrify me. I recall a movie my husband watched, based on a true story, of a Brit who had been extremely athletic and ended up that way (cannot remember cause of paralysis) and no one wanted to let him go and he was desperate to be set free. To be trapped in one’s own body that way, with everyone ‘helping’ you – I pray that when/if I do something really stupid and/or my time comes, I end up face down.

        • I left some of the story out. It has an amazing (to me anyway) end. This man was a “Mormon”, the church took care of him as one would family. Believe it or not, he was married later on and had two children—don’t ask me details, I do not know, but I’m told such is possible. He was for a while employed (as webmaster) by the college my dept was part of. We would meet each other often in the elevator and chat for a bit (talking was a hard for him). He was a better man than I for sure.

        • Christopher Reeve was an American actor, … best known for playing…. Superman.
          On May 27, 1995, Reeve was left quadriplegic after being thrown from a horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Virginia. He used a wheelchair and needed a portable ventilator to breathe for the rest of his life. He lobbied on behalf of people with spinal cord injuries and for human embryonic stem cell research, founding the Christopher Reeve Foundation

  32. I don’t think White Nationalists wish for everyone to become a dependent of the state. I think that a world where POC get free stuff aplenty while whites pay the bulk of the taxes that support those gibs is humiliating to us. We are quasi slaves in this system. I don’t want to pay deadbeat tyrone’s child support so that tawneesha can comfortably pop out 3 “school to prison pipeline” children who my own children are going to be forced to have to endure. So we might as well all be on gibs, since the implementation of a full gibs economy is obviously not going to be sustainable and will fail and collapse the whole gibs system. The USA is less than 60% European at this point and dropping fast. Relative to 50 years ago we barely build anything here, our only net positive exports now are agricultural, and we don’t guard well against the theft of the only thing we do still produce that has value (technology) because doing so would be racist so a slower collapse was inevitable anyway. We have an immensely large national debt we will never be able to pay back without a radical change in how society is structured and our economy has been thoroughly gutted by the excesses of greedy mostly small hatted elites and POC gibs including lost productivity due to affirmative action policies. At least if things collapse quickly, we would have the chance to claw our way up from the ashes of the failed multicult experiment within our lifetimes and MAGA for real this time. We might well fail, but I’d rather live free and strive for a real victory than semi-comfortably slide slowly into an inevitable defeat.

    • People of various hats, turbans, colors, and genders have been feeding at the trough for a while now. We likely have hit the moment where there is no one left to slop the hogs. Make of that what you will, and plan accordingly. No one knows what it means or how it all goes, but there is change afoot, and people hate change.

      • They sure do. It’s gonna be rough whatever happens. But I see potential and am optimistic.

    • I think we’re all accelerationists on occasion when pissed off, but what you’ve detailed really is absolute best case scenario. We don’t know the future and it pays to be cautious and keep our powder dry. You assume far too much – how will the white man think of you when you’ve been cheerleading for his financial disinheritance…will he assume you have his best interests at heart? Probably not.

      • I think you misunderstand me. I’m not cheering for anyone’s financial disinheritance. If the state tries to take your wealth I will be firmly opposed to that, and end to this process of wealth redistribution and preferential hiring of POC is what I am cheering. A return to true meritocracy. An end to gibs. And I’m a 26 year old white male in 2020 USA, I’m always pissed off. Wouldn’t you be?

        • Feel you on that bit, early 20s here.

          Thanks for clarifying, I have no disagreement. One thought – it is posible for things to go from very bad to worse to even worse. Just because the state falls doesn’t mean something better will replace it. Just finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s calamitous 14th century. (((Tuchman))) but still terrific book. After the plague hit mid-century catastrophes continued to fall like hammer strokes for the next 100 years leading to extensive depopulation.

          Seems like there’s an underlying assumption that if we can just get an explicitly euro society with explicitly euro leaders all the other dominoes will more or less align. I’m not so sure. We are US but we’re no angels. We need be politically craftier than we are now. Probably more brutal too. That’s why Z’s thing against young guys entering the military is mis-guided. We ought to take possession of the military, starting with the marines. That is what am going into after uni.

          • This virus isn’t the plague though, not even close. Clown world is the plague and the cause of this downturn, without clownworld we would be in the south korea boat. They still have an economy, they still have a population that is 99% korean, they were able to make masks for their people and their infection rates were minuscule. We live in gutted clownworld economy so we have little mitigation and our inept donor class puppet leaders have done things to make what could have been a molehill into a mountain. If things do go completely to pot, the virus will not have been the cause, but the spark that set off a powder keg that was already full to bursting.

            Like Z, I would advise against joining the military, it only ever seems to be utilized to fight people we have nothing to gain by fighting, and you won’t have a say in what you do, you will be a cog in the machine. The chaos we caused in the middle east is in large part to blame for the current crisis in Europe. And the Iraqi parliament voted to kick us out recently, we aren’t even adept enough to maintain puppet gov’ts anymore. I wouldn’t want to see you get maimed or die fighting saudi arabia’s and israel’s enemies. You aren’t allowed to chose who you fight when you join the military, those decisions are made from up on high, and they won’t be promoting anyone who displays integrity, they will promote confirmed swamp creatures. Like LTC Alexander Vindman. A fat soy child good boy who toes the party line of those in power. I think the real war, if there is one, that serves the American interest will be fought here on the ground by civilians.

        • At least you (and I) are still young. If shit pops off now we might be able to live normally in our late 30s onwards. The Yeltsin years were 10 years or so.

          But the experiment of forced “diversity”, discouraging assimilation, and refusing to punish the criminals has quite honestly never been tried. I do know that the vast majority of urban whites would be instant road kill. Then the 3rd world hordes would probably duke it out in the cities. But we just don’t know.

          Our elites are truly insane.

    • This. Sunshine dissidence is cheap. I’m seeing a lot of pretend edge-lord dissidents clutching their priors like a woobie now that darkness falls. Real dissidents work well in darkness.

      • This is scary, I’m seeing a lot of fear in everyone right now, across the board. People will adapt though. Necessity is the mother of invention. And adaptation. We survived as hunter gatherers in the frozen north for hundreds of thousands of years, this will be a cakewalk comparatively.

  33. O/T: This is what Anarcho-Tyranny looks like at its essence. Guy gets robbed, defends store w/ firearm. HE goes to jail w/o bond and is facing 20 years in prison. Cop response- “You should have let him rob you and called us instead.” I.E. State monopoly on force/violence and you are a helpless peasant.

    Watch the Tucker Carlson video and you’ll see, in technicolor, where we are headed as a nation. They want you defenseless and stupid and if you don’t comply your ass will burn for it w/ years of incarceration.

    https://www.infowars.com/bye-bye-2nd-amendment-virginia-man-charged-for-shooting-masked-intruders/

    https://www.arlnow.com/2020/03/29/police-store-employee-charged-after-shooting-would-be-thief/

    • Look, the last citation does not support your claim. In the report, the employee in question shot a guy breaking into store. No threat of life or limb provided. In this State the same law prevails. You can use deadly force to prevent deadly force, not property theft. However, you can brandish to ward off theft. This is reasonable.

      • Cool, give me your address, Ima come by and rob your house blind. So be a good little bitch boy and roll over while I do so. Is that really the stance you want to take here? You get the government you deserve, and you are a BIG part of the problem.

        Until the three came into the back room and drew down on him (i.e. too late) THEN he can fire? ‘Men’ like you got us into this situation with your meek passivity about the need for righteous violence just FYI. The correct answer for most of our history was: “Don’t rob a store if you don’t want to get shot.” Don’t vote, I beg you.

        • Again, wrong. This State has stand your ground laws. He could easily have taken up a defensive position, drawn down on whomever approached, gave warning, and fired if approached.

          Most likely the person in the cited story, blasted at some guy at the door or shot him in the back as the perp attempted to flee. Whenever I see these “stories” it’s almost always some clown acting before thinking and then talking to the cops without benefit of a lawyer.

          If your thinking in self defense situations resembles your response to my posting, you’d best leave your gun at home, it will do you little good.

      • At least the defendant will have a chance at a jury trial. They do sometimes render a sensible verdict, in this case, it wouldn’t be the one the Commonweath seeks.

        • Yep. Jury Nullification still happens from time to time in the good ol’ ‘land of the free.’ Or so I’m told. Any betters on how much longer that can last in our Brave New World?

      • “in accordance with the law” does not necessarily equal “reasonable”.

        Maybe it’s a shit law. (Written by shit people and passed by other shit people.)

  34. We cannot forget that the plotters and the schemers never take a day off.

    Bill Gates Calls for a “Digital Certificate” to Identify Who Received COVID-19 Vaccine

    https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/bill-gates-calls-for-a-digital-certificate-to-identify-who-is-vaccinated/

    I often wonder what evolutionary purpose these parasites serve. They are not true leaders. They spend their entire lives hatching nefarious plots to force everyone else to live in their vision of the ideal World.

    • Mark of the beast V6.6.6 (update coming to improve user experience and fix bugs relating to resistant nodes).

  35. I wonder what effect the shutdown will have on the banking system? I remember reading that the levels of indebtedness in the economy are much higher than in 2008 and that Deutsche Bank was in trouble and laying people off. Loans that cannot be repaid will not be repaid and loans that were perfectly reasonable when made in February may have become very risky in this new environment. If banks become shaky, will investors pull their money out, even if it means government bonds at negative interest rates? Will the FDIC raise deposit insurance limits to $500K or one million to reassure depositors? Will the Fed inject additional trillions in “quantitative easing” to ensue liquidity? A series of bank failures could make the present economic problems look like a walk in the park.

    • The Fed will keep all the big banks whole, this time around. Expect a comprehensive workout of distressed debt and enterprises, and the handover of a significant additional part of the economy to big business, by the time it is all over. Think of single payer __________ in pretty much every industry. Just another step in the evolution of things.

    • Unless social disruption and rage mandates otherwise, they will fudge the books and make black-box deals to float each other until the status quo resumes.

      They’re doing the same no-transparency backroom BS they did in 2008. How about America calls them out for a change?

      • One of the takeaways so far is supernaturally balancing the Magic Books is a permanent fixture until everything collapses. It is 2008 times eleventy. Next time, if there is one, that will grow exponentially.

      • Yep. The higher up you go the more fake and gay it becomes. They built an elevator to the moon out of derivatives last time around. They never took it down. Instead, they fixed the last “problem” by building a moon base out of more derivatives and so they are even less likely to take that down this time around.

        Wait, thats no moon!

  36. Up until this point the people most affected are low wage individuals whom the expanded unemployment payout was very likely a raise. Now that the great madness is going to bring the pain to the nobility I expect anger towards the lockdown will increase.

    But the great takeaway is how feckless our leadership is. Those who push conspiracy theories should make note of these events. There is no grand conspiracy, no puppet master behind the curtain. Just hyper emotional administrators who are unable to do basic math.

    This explains much of our society, why we have so much immigration (LOOK AT THOSE POOR PEOPLE), and why we can’t build infrastructure anymore (think of the poor little birdie), or even why we don’t have factories (it puts POISON into the air).

    Its hard to see any actionable items as a result of this. God help us all.

  37. Prediction? Future not good. From there fill it your own dystopian scenario, probably be close to accurate.
    I notice that most predictions everywhere are all on how will the future be economically. Its like the pandemic part is not that deleterious to us. Tells me something.

    I think we should learn canning and how to smoke squirrel meat.

  38. here’s an interesting article about what’s been happening in the international financing arena..

    https://mises.org/wire/why-world-has-dollar-shortage-despite-massive-fed-action

    For a few months before the virus hit, there were frequent reports that The Fed was pumping hundreds of billions of dollars because there was a Dollar shortage.
    I see these actions as reinforcing the Dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency; I see this as an effort to make the US Dollar into the sole worldwide currency. They’ll need to print many trillions for distribution to every country there is; if they don’t adopt the Dollar as the only legal currency, they won’t be able to trade in the world markets. The pandemic may be part of this effort to crash the world’s economy to force them to change.

  39. Look for corporate consolidation on the other side. The weak will fall away and the big corporations will get bigger and more powerful. They will continue to grow at the expense of private small businesses. The beast keeps growing.

    • I think you’re right. This will make corporate stranglehold on the economy worse and the gov can’t believe all the new powers that just fell into its lap. Plus if this doesn’t kill the debt dollar I don’t know what would, it really must be immortal.

      On the other hand, I think it is good for resistance to immigration, outsourcing and globalization. So kind of a mixed bag really.

      • On the other hand, big business likes immigration, outsourcing and globalization.

        • That is true. Forces that have never collided head-on on this scale, are about to ram into each other, politically and economically. What happens then is anyone’s guess.

        • Well, if big business accepts a CARES Act loan, it must guarantee:

          the funds it receives will be used to retain at least 90% of its workforce, at full compensation and benefits, until September 30, 2020

          it intends to restore not less than 90% of its workforce as of February 1, 2020, and restore all compensation and benefits to the workers no later than four months after the termination date of the declared public health emergency

          it will not outsource or offshore jobs for the term of the loan and two years after completing repayment of the loan

          it will remain neutral in any union organizing effort for the term of the loan

          Since they’ll take the money, their nefarious plans re immigration, outsourcing and globalization will occupy a little timeout.

          • The Loan proposals are bullshit for the consumption of the gullible,
            The action is in the Five Trillion dollars that the Fed will use to buy useless Corporate Debt (and equities this time around) and the little noticed reduction of reserve requirements to Zero.
            Infinite Leverage, that should get the bubbles inflated again.

        • Ris – and with the ‘borders’ locked down (but only to law-abiding White people) and all the gibs being promised, the dusky hordes are not running away afraid of civil unrest or the destruction of their small businesses. Gee, being on lockdown in American suburbia beats being on lockdown in Wuhan or Jakarta or Mumbai – who knew? They are going about business as usual and salivating about their bigger slice of grift that’s coming.

  40. There’s no doubt that the world is now a much stranger place than any of us could imagined just a few weeks ago. Who would have thought that the government of Sweden , of all people, would remain as the last bastion of sanity in all of the Western World. Or that the Tories would win a massive majority in Parliament then promptly implement all of Jeremy Corbyn’s nuttiest policies, wet their knickers and go hide under the bed, I never saw that coming.
    At this point predictions are probably useless, but I suspect that whatever’s coming over the hill won’t be nice.

    • SWEDEN ISN’T SANE. Muslim teens are “pranking” older swedes by coughing in their faces and posting it to social media, and none of those muslims have been punched in the face yet or forcibly deported. Not sane in my book.

    • Mikep – agree re the Tories, but not about Sweden. I’d argue the only reason that have not similarly panicked and tried to lock anyone down is because their country’s racial balance is so precarious that they realize it would show just how little power and control they have. They are about 30% vibrant and/or foreign born/first generation, massive demographic change crammed into the last 25 years or so, and they are the proverbial power keg.

      • Acknowledging that importing the dregs of the Middle East and Horn of Africa may have a downside! Yes, I can see that they may wish to avoid doing that

  41. We are off the horses and fighting on foot at this point. Was on a call with a German financial institution for two hours yesterday–an investor in one of our ventures. Germans are hard to read by phone, but interestingly one of the things they were intensely interested in was the potential for follow on civil unrest–particularly directed at the wealthy. These guys are pretty thoughtful in their thinking about second and third order effects. The only guidepost we have to use are the 2008 crisis, which was still only a 3% drop in nominal GDP and was a slower wind-up since it took a while for the lock up in financial markets to work through the general economy. Working with the firm’s chief economist to try and get a handle on what metrics might serve as leading indicators of where this is going. But frankly he’s dealing with data we’ve never seen before. Expect the unexpected. I’ll share anything we develop that might be of interest.

    • In one of the more interesting things in 2008-ish was OWS scheduling bus tours to show off the houses of the oligarchy. Probably wouldn’t take too much more for them to organize an actual mob this time.

      • Difference this time? Might not just consist of layabout modern day hippie types, but instead blue collar people with “skills”, many acquired while solving problems for Uncle Sam in faraway places.

  42. Dissidents are ahead of the herd because we’ve already embraced things like disconnecting from the cable news sheepdogs, anti-fragility, prepping, and forming our own networks.

    Many of us have also taken steps beyond the Tea Party base of 2010. We’re not just dissidents from the GOP, we’re dissidents from what even many paleo-cons still think of as “right-wing politics.”

    We’re in strange days when I basically agree with a soon-deleted David Brooks (aka Baruch) tweet to the effect that Republicans/conservatives will remember this as the time when everyone stopped listening to them and walked away, never to return.

    Reaganomics and “do not panic, all is well” do not sit well with a population in actual distress. It’s harder to embrace creative destruction that’s this creative and this destructive. Unemployment isn’t just for marginal layabouts losing jobs they barely worked at. It’s for everyone now.

    As Z recently noted, the 30-something hard-charging bulls of Reagan’s springtime for America are now in their 60’s-70’s, their bearish winter years, and competition red in tooth and claw means a dirt nap, not a setback.

    Many guys this age can’t even see their bootstraps anymore, much less pull anything up by them.

    I can hear my labor-Democrat grandfather & father chuckling “we told you so” as the Eternal Shill Larry Kudlow demands more trickle-down “solutions” from the owner’s box – again in my twilight as he did in America’s 1984 morning.

    Maybe those old guys weren’t as dumb as Reagan-era me thought they were.

      • I suspect Dad knew more about the kosher sandwich than he let on – he had no illusions about the venality and corruption of Democrat politics, but at least he had the sense to take his own side and demand a slice of the pie he paid for with his blood & sweat.

        To a young kid looking at everything through a moral-ideological lens, it seemed so obviously wrong. The “have a cigar” GOP looked like the good guys back then.

    • People are now in genuine distress, and the Lefties, with their AOC and their Antifa antics, and now, “Weekend at Biden’s”, have blown their legitimacy with Normie. All they had to do was lay low and act like adults. But, no.

      There is a big opportunity to walk the walk now, not just (secretly) talk the talk amongst ourselves. People need to be shown what to do, and we are in a fairly good position to do so, not having been out there the last few years, raising hell over nothingburgers. Not that we have all the answers, or even very many of them. But it is time to be nice but firm to those around us, in the obvious things that need to be done and not done. Anyone arguing the red-blue or showing the TDS is really a lost case, at this point. Normie knows that. Be there for him, that’s what we can do now. Better to get further along in where we need to get to, then to be really correct about everything and everyone, being efficient gatekeepers, and leaving Normie behind to be scooped up by the Leftie rear guard.

      • Exactly, Dutch. Now’s the time to remind some prospects whose narratives are more coherent with the flow of events and whose values and strategies are proving anti-fragile.

        Take a bow, bro.

    • “Unemployment isn’t just for marginal layabouts losing jobs they barely worked at. It’s for everyone now.”
      I do not know the situation where you live but here in the land of Massholes I have not heard of a single Government employee to have lost his/her/X “job”, not a single one.

  43. This crisis, real or manufactured, has exposed once again that a significant and vocal part of our guys on this side of the divide are lunatics and children. The vibrants are already ignoring the lockdown orders. Murders are up 21% in Philadelphia and the weather is just starting to warm up. They are used to living on government handouts so this is nothing new to them. The globalists and elitists in corporate America are going to be just fine. The people who are going to suffer are the regular working and middle class white people in America but when they are looking for political solutions, they run into people praising Chinese communists and laughing about older white people dying on social media. No wonder this movement can never move beyond sharing edgy memes on Twitter.

    • I’m not sure what political solution there is at this point…what will replacing one set of Globalists with a different set of Globalists accomplish for the guy whose job is gone, or about to be?

      • I seriously doubt any viable solution will be political. The system is broken. And anyone who cheers the death of older white people is scum. China is appealing probably mostly because it has a policy of protecting homogeneity and is not likely to change that policy. I like that that part of china though I don’t know much else about it, aside from much of our manufacturing having been relocated there. Communism does not exist. It’s impossible, people aren’t equal. Some are short, some are tall, some are smart, some are dumb, some are lazy, some are industrious. It doesn’t work. It’s a fantasy. China is an authoritarian bureaucracy.

    • I largely agree. I’m trying to hold my tongue, but there are more than a few of “our guys” who need to be punched in the face.

      • Z, who specifically is saying these things? Is it a has-been like Spencer?

        All the Dissident Right thinkers I still follow have stayed more or less sane. Z and Ramzpaul are the clear beacons of sanity, and Anglin has consistently said “it’s just the flu.”

        Greg Johnson accepts the premise of the big bad virus more than I’d like, but he’s not gone completely off the rails. Nick Fuentes is a little too focused on Trump cheerleading for my taste, but he’s not gone completely off the deep end.

        Who are these alleged Dissident Right thinkers pushing for full Communism?

        • Are we going to start posting “Comrades” and “Enemies” lists, Meme? Let’s derail the thread with e-personality gossip, by all means.

          • Exile – I keep hearing this whole “The DR wants Communism!” line, but I personally have never heard it, that’s the motive for my question.

            Certainly whomever is saying this stands behind it, and doesn’t mind having their name attached to it.

            PS – I didn’t (and don’t ever) downvote your posts.

          • Same. The downvotes prove my point that a lot of pretend dissidents are just Breibarts who don’t like spooks. Touch their cheese and they cry out.

            And no, I’m not going to “name the Commies.” It’s an in-fighting trap. We both know who we’re talking about.

          • Exile:

            You’re useless as teats on a boar hog. Yip-yap, yip-yap, but when someone asks about info you supposedly have, to support assertions you & others are making, you got bupkis.

          • Rooster, does the message matter or the messenger? I’m not taking in-fighting bait, stop trying to matador me. If Z wants to name the Commie, that’s his call.

        • I’m working my way through Greg Johnson’s “White Nationalist Manifesto.” One of his dreams is that non-whites can be peacefully persuaded to leave the USA and return to their (or ancestors’) homelands, without any coercion or violence. If this is an representative example of his thinking, it doesn’t inspire confidence in any other utterance he might make 🙁

          • Ben, this is where I’ll weigh in for optics – a gospel of armed struggle is neither mass-appealing or anything to be discussed online.

            I still look at Greg’s “slow cleanse” as the ideal solution, but one for a core of White Nationalist separatists, not the American nation as a whole or even all American Whites.

        • MemeWarVet,
          They’re not what you would call Dissident Right but smart guys who contradict the narrative, Steve Sailer and Greg Cochran, have lost their minds over this. I can’t even listen to the FTN guys anymore.

      • Tucker Carlson, for a start. Though i’m not sure how much he was ever ‘our guy’.

        • I believe Tucker’s overreaction is due to him being right early about this being a problem, and his confirmation bias is causing him to exaggerate. Otherwise, his show is a daily hatefest toward China, which is how it should be.

          • The thing is it’s wasn’t (and would not be) a problem (we’ve dealt with flus like this many times before), if it weren’t for him and his ilk in the media setting up the panic.

      • there are more than a few of “our guys” who need to be punched in the face.

        You should be mending fences instead, regardless of how the epidemic goes. Unless you want to set back dissident politics 10 yrs or more. Just sayin’….

          • Okay that’s fair. I don’t just mean you, same goes for Cochran, Sailor and the others, they should be too. It would be such a d*mn shame if this leads to permanent fractures among us who can see the insanity of multiculturalism, population replacements and insane elites. I didn’t mean to pick on you.

          • I find it interesting that “house arrest” has clarified and amplified the factionalization of the DR. It’s almost like the pressure to adopt gang-affiliation in prisons. Of course, you hate the guards because they represent institutional power; but it’s those dicks on the other side of the yard who make your day-to-day life truly miserable. Everything comes down to the Law of the Shiv. From TPTB’s perspective, prison is communism: all prisoners are equal and the government provides everything (setting aside the black market in contraband); but from the individual prisoner’s perspective, it’s every man for himself and all relations are transactional.

    • Recognizing that China has handled this better than muh West doesn’t make you a Commie. One of our biggest themes here is the problem of democracy. This situation is Exhibit A.

      Z’s been vindicated by America’s shambolic, anarcho-tyrannical, pseudo-libertarian sh*tshow of a response. Read the last 2 years of material in particular & listen to pods like “Right-wing economics” and “Democracy.”

      This is exactly the kind of scenario where authoritarian societies are at an advantage, but don’t you dare say so, or you’re with the Reds?

      As for who’s laughing about what, I’ll devil’s advocate for the “snowflakes” who’ve taken crap from our generations for thirty years without anyone on the Right yelling “stop.”

      Now we cry out “why do you hate us” from our comparative ease as we strike them. We’re sharing the same future – let’s we and them not fight for a change.

      Dissident politics is harder than posting edgy racist slurs. Sometimes it even means your life changes, sometimes in ways you don’t like. Without dissatisfaction there is no social change.

      A supposed movement afraid to level just criticism and speak uncomfortable truth is irrelevant. This is the time to push forward, not retreat.

      We’re right, for God’s sake – sound and act like it.

      • haha this guy believes what china says! holy shit talk about an impenetrable brain. hey, your picture is in the dictionary; go look up gullible (or maybe it was naive). wait wait, i remember now, it’s next to “stupid”.

          • Exile, does he have a point? Rudely said, but does he? If China is bullshitting us wrt pandemic, should we simply bypass and form discussion around other, reasonably truthful countries?

          • Ignoring China when it’s Patient Zero would be unwise. We’ve somehow managed to have (far too) cozy trade and diplomatic relations with China for decades while “re-normalizing” our information to account for Han “truthiness.”

            Our governments can’t trumpet the benefits of Chinese engagement b/c metrics on the one hand then be tactically skeptical of Chinese metrics for political convenience when the batsh*t hits the fan.

          • Screw the Chinese. I’m with you there. But believing what they say about the virus, or patient one or whatever… If we are just ragging on them for being the shits they are known for, great. If their virus “gift” can be weaponized against them all the better.

        • I know what you’re saying, that nothing coming out of China is trustworthy, and I agree with you. Still, the fact is that the PRC has in many respects come out of this looking like less of a shit show than our several states. That doesn’t mean that it’s true that they’ve handled things better, but think like a 60 year old who still watches the network news or even the local news (which relies on the networks for anything non-local). They’re being fed a diet of “American panic, Chinese competence.” Much of that is due to the timing of the respective outbreaks in each country, but there it is.

          Ultimately there’s so much yet to come that I think it’s much too early to declare who has handled this better. That the CCP has the illusion of winning the war during our darkest days of infection won’t mean much down the road. Myriad opportunities still present themselves to us. But believing that our elites will grasp them is reserved for those living in a fool’s paradise.

      • Exile – Genuinely curious, in what way do you find China’s response to be ‘better’? I’m not afraid of commies under the bed, and I do believe in authoritarianism to a degree, but I don’t see their lockdown and panic as being any more effective than ours, and all of it in response to a virus with a death rate (in overall numbers and %) that is just not that frightening to me. I guess what I have a real problem with is everyone expecting something, anything, from the ‘government.’ What ever happened to taking care of oneself and one’s own? My family’s well being and health is my responsibility and that of my husband. I don’t look to the ‘government’ for anything but unnecessary meddling and trouble. Legacy of FDR is everyone expecting help from on high, instead of hoping what happens in the DC bubble stays in the DC bubble.

        • I think the main problem with that line of thinking is that the middle class has the largest tax burden by far. The gov’t cheese is handed out freely to the top and bottom, elites and the POC, and the gov’t acquires the bulk of that cheese from white people in the middle. I don’t like seeing good white people with honorable attitudes like yours get taken advantage of, that’s how my parents think too and the maker pool is shrinking and the taker pool is growing. The problem is what goes on in the DC bubble will never stay there. The amount of wealth distribution that goes on in this country is staggering, you can’t just look at income taxes, there are so many little ways they rob peter to pay tyrone and shlomo. I want that system of theft to burn down. What the fed is doing right now is infuriating. Same as 2008 but 10 times worse. Elite, mainly small hatted fools who acted with reckless usurious abandon and got in trouble because of their carelessness and greed get their mistakes covered for by the taxpayer again. I don’t want us to be their beasts of burden.

          • Fash – Oh, I agree 100% re the beatdown of the middle and working White people. I also agree the wealth distribution is totally skewed and most of us are totally screwed. I also agree the country is dead and Whites should get what they can from the dying carcass of what their ancestors built while it’s scavenged by everyone else. What really irritates me, though, is everyone calling for ‘guidance’ or help from on high (in DC). Does no one have agency or determination anymore? Please don’t confuse my criticism with boomer ‘bootstraps’ crap; I don’t think that way at all – and my sons are facing just what every other young White man is. I just don’t like whiny wahmen, and the entire nation right now is whining.

          • Oh no, most people are helpless children now that lack the capacity to plan a week in advance. 40% of people don’t have even $400 saved in the bank. That’s why I kinda hope things get rough. We’ve gotten way too soft. And that softness is the root of what has led to the problems we currently face. Bootstraps ideology would be appealing if things weren’t so rigged and clownish and degenerate. Things weren’t so messed up when boomers grew up and formed their worldviews so I kinda get why they think that way, it’s just frustrating that most don’t seem to be willing and/or capable adapt their views based on how things have changed. I think that’s the root of the anti-boomerism sentiment in my age cohort. For example houses in my area run at average 500k for a 2 bd. That is nuts. My folks paid around 15% of that in the early 90s.

          • My current thinking about boomers is that they’re ultra competitive— definitely not something that’s natural to us younger folk. Use your leverage as a younger person (we have tons of it) to establish dominance. In other words, outcompete. Boomers seem to respect that. I believe they aren’t letting go because they don’t think we have what it takes. After all, this is a generation raised to worry about America’s overthrow by communists.

          • Painter, that’s a valid take for a lot of Olds. I spoke with 2 different clients in that cohort yesterday who said much the same thing. These aren’t bad guys or Zio-cucks or whatever, wealthy but not “elite.” Not sure how much relates to the Cold War so much as ageless concern for the fate of what they’ve spent their lives building and the fate of their progeny.

            These are the good guys, of course. The majority of Olds I know (sample skewed for SoCal narcissism) are burger-nat greedheads worthy of the stereotypes.

          • Fair enough. Guess I’m looking at the cold war as an economic conflict. Capitalism vs communism. Get rich or the soviets will nuke us. Also liberalism vs totalitarianism. We were less successful on that front. I think boomers were raised to fight that war, but that’s my own theory so who knows.

    • We cannot talk our way out of the mess we are in, so looking at the problem as being in the bottom of the social pyramid is a waste of time. The good news is that the real problem is at the top of the power pyramid, and the number of these psychopaths is actually quite small. This is not an insurmountable problem to solve. There are over 200,000 skilled middle-class hunters in Wisconsin alone.

    • “Hard times create…” Yea, it’s a cliche but how else did anyone think we were going to eventually cross the Rubicon. Shop ’til you drop then revolution?

      Hard times will bring into sharp focus hard differences. I naively thought that would be whites vs anti-whites. Instead we’re getting as Exile put it:

      “Dissident politics is harder than posting edgy racist slurs. Sometimes it even means your life changes, sometimes in ways you don’t like. Without dissatisfaction there is no social change. ” Absolutely. This should be our second principle.

      Our enemies have been feeding us the poison for decades. We’re all walled up in Fort I-Me-Mine. We react to it with dissatisfaction but never to the point of it boiling over. Now it’s going to boil over but we should take a rain check because even the little we have left may get burned up? Why not simply darn a Kippah.

      As badly as things may get if we can come out of this as the masters of our own future freed from all of the foreign influences and from the traitorous greed of the worst of our kind…then it will be a great victory.

      Things can be rebuilt, this time to our liking. We are very good at building things. If we’re ever going to engage in barn raising we need to get to the bridge burning first. I, apparently mistakenly, had always assumed most of the serious people on his side of things understood that. Victory always comes at a cost.

  44. The system is far more resilient than we give it credit for.

    Small businesses are probably gone, which means massive corporations stepping in. Which has been a very long trend. My local lumber yards have all shut down, so Lowes is a nightmare.

    The Left will get more of the things they want. The Anglo sphere doesn’t do fascism or any of its cousins. Hispanics do, but foreigners don’t. Neoliberalism has no answer for this type of crisis, but it does have a leash on the socialists. Expect more expansion of the welfare state under the aegis of “democratic socialism”. Bernie Bros are preaching their prepared sermons and they have a captive audience right now.

    Finally, Trump probably loses. Biden is a great candidate, until you see him in the flesh. The Wu-flu let’s him hide. Trump the Man must run against Biden the Ideal.

    • “Finally, Trump probably loses.” I’m not sure about that. War-time presidents don’t generally lose unless their own party turns against them (LBJ). Trump is on TV for an hour each day, while Biden mumbles in his basement. With the Dems exaggerating the perils more than Trump is, he is absolved of any blame for the economy, up to a point. I believe in 1-2 months either the curve flattens, or so many people have it that quarantines make no sense.

      • All Trump really needs to do at this point is not listen to his more whammenly advisers and keep a cool head. The trends* suggest that the virus will peak in the US in a couple weeks to a month. After that Trump just keeps saying “I told you so” until November and he’s in. He might even pull some surprise upsets and take some solid blue states where people are mad as hell at their Dem governors for the shutdowns. Republican challengers to those governors also have their campaign ads already made for them. Just show unedited clips of these guys saying stupid doomsday shit at the height of the panic.

        * https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

    • Small businesses provide most of the jobs, not big box stores, nor Amazon. They kill jobs. But more importantly, small business allows those on the lower end to at least buy a job and work toward a better life outside of minimum wage.

  45. will the dem party survive this pandemic? they were foolish to stir up all the fear because it opened the door for Trump to “solve” the crisis; which, because this isn’t a real pandemic (like plaque, ebola, etc) means it is solved when things burn out. it also makes their previous statements on how the virus wasn’t serious look damning in the extreme — not to mention hypocritical and opportunistic.

    then after scaring everyone, they go out and hinder efforts to cope.

    the media and dems made a fatal mistake by allying with china against Americans. And their demise will be the biggest change to come out of all this.

  46. That’s a lot of perhaps, maybes, and what ifs. There are also any number of ‘could bes’.
    Will be interesting to see what the ZMan commentariat has to offer.
    For now, I too am staring into the Great Unknown.
    Perhaps frivolous, but hopefully soon, and very soon, it will be a crime to utter the following:
    flatten the curve
    shelter in place
    social distancing

    • Gosh I hope you are correct. As the shelter-in-place rules were going into effect I had a number of face-to-face meetings and every single person thought it was ridiculous. Granted, I was working with financial types, examining cash flows, costs, and running spreadsheet projections for a 4 week shutdown.

      Now that I am at home, I have more interaction with extended family and friends, and certain neighbors. I am absolutely shocked at the number off people that would gladly accept another 18 months of shelter-in-place.

      • Sure, at this point no one has felt the pain—not really. Here in my State, by Governor’s edict, folks can *not* have utilities cut off, nor be evicted from homes/apartments for 90 days (not even sure this is legal). That plus unemployment/free money stimulus and stores reasonably stocked (expensive entertainment items and restaurants are close) and you have a pretty good life.

        It obviously can’t last. In the bad old days of rent control in the city of my birth, landlords abandoned apartments by the 10’s of thousands. NYC at one time was the largest property owner in the city. What are people still working, or those with minor SSI, going to do when they are faced with paying their own utilities, plus a surcharge to keep others in gas, sewer, water?

        • Here in FL our lockdown begins April 3. One of the allowed exceptions is to attend a religious service. Why we’re arresting ministers for doing exactly that perhaps requires Doublethink! Great the we have the right to “peaceably assemble,” provided that we don’t actually assemble.

          • “allowed exceptions is to attend a religious service”

            All of a sudden I miss those “Get Ordained” ads in the back of the Rolling Stone. (Haven’t thought about that in decades. Back then Taiwan did not allow regular people into places such as Ali Shan (a mountain), but an exception was made for missionaries. I plotted to get ordained somehow just to climb the mountain….)

            Perhaps I can claim to be a Druid, and that being out among the trees in the open air is a sacrament in my faith?

          • Already tried using my Church of Dudeism certificate and all the Wiccan BS I learned from my gf’s. Nada. No bueno, even in SoCal.

      • I think a lot of people will welcome a respite from the rat race.

        Who I’m not being shown are all the poor bast*rds and bast*rdettes who had no money to start with. We middle aged types are scared, worried, and counting our pennies and scraps.

    • “Shelter in place” has been fingernails on a blackboard ever since those two Muslim brothers set off that bomb in Boston. Who would have dreamed it would get worse?

  47. The local paper where I live has an article today on how the extended shutdown is killing tax revenue. State governments will not be able to provide the services they have been providing after an extended shutdown. In our society which increasingly encourages dependence on the state how are people who want no agency in their lives going to react when services are reduced or cut off?

    • Along with new “temporary” sales taxes and huge real estate tax increases “think of the children!”, the fedgov will gladly step in with fiat to force ornery states and cities to bow down. Look what they were able to do with highway funding.

      The people of cities and states will have an opportunity to finally put their (lack of) money where their mouth is.

      There will be a myriad of creeping situations in which we the people will be confronted with meaningful trade-offs between embracing a different standard of living brought on by fewer government services OR the comforts and convenience of more gov’t but with more strings directly to the DC swamp.

      Will the people insource their needs via community managed programs or will they outsource to fedgov? The battle over these trade-offs is the civil war people talk about. The gov’t doesnt need more guns or to take our guns, it just needs us to believe we need them.

    • The states will get federally guaranteed loans and grants. More debt will be created to fund it all. Remember me when you’re reading articles a couple years from now about the U.S.’s $100 trillion national debt.

  48. It truly is uncharted territory. I cannot help but believe we are about to get anarcho-tyranny times a thousand. The specter of citizens reporting citizens for walking their dogs in ways deemed unacceptable is the thing that bodes most ominous for the long term; in the meantime, armies of penniless, hungry people is an immediate danger to anyone who has anything not nailed down and gets caught in a mob.

    • Jack, and the post-Corona status jockeying has begun. I just saw the first “I am a COVID-19 Survivor!” claim by a woman who was going apeshit about too many people in the local park on a nice spring day. Soon there will be 6 million survivors all demanding a bigger slice of someone else’s cake. This Corona bug has nothing on the leftist mind virus.

      • Who is surprised, though? If you have no problems whatsoever with you own being targeted for genocide, the next logical step is to assist in it. I misread you initially and thought it was “I Am A COVID-19 Survivor” t-shirt, although that’s coming if not already here.

        • The normies in the parks are called “covidiots” and “covid deniers”. Probably more being cooked up.

          Where Is meme war vet? This is really his area lol.

          • Right here homey!

            Re: “Covidiot” and other slurs, let’s remember that we are fighting a 4th Generation War and that the moral high ground is essential.

            Anytime someone trots one of these insults out, you accuse them of bullying. And your refutation to anyone defending this insane lockdown should be “guess you like homeless kids.”

            People agree with us, but they fear to speak up.

          • Ha! I have been doing just that. Turning “shaming“ and “bullying“ back on them. Hysterics ensue. I also forgot perhaps the best one, “spreaders”. Kind of reminds me of the gay-op malthusian-inspired “breeders” slur that was popular back when, coincidentally, AIDS was all the rage and apparently we didn’t need future programmers or lettuce pickers so babies were bad.

        • In the future people’s Wikipedia entries will proudly state that their ancestors were Covid-19 survivors. Haters will skip to the “Early Life” section and say, “Ah hah! I knew it! Every. Single. Time. Hah!”

          Or we’ll be huddled in the ruins of skycrapers, shiv-ing each other with rusty screwdrivers over a scrap of rotting pigeon flesh.

          • My ancestors have an unbroken record of surviving to breed that goes back millions of years. War, famine, pestilence, plague. You name it, we beat it.

          • >>> Haters will skip to the “Early Life” section and say, “Ah hah! I knew it! Every. Single. Time. Hah!”<<<

            You read my posts! I’m touched.

    • Yep, some guy slowed down his car and started screaming something about “being home” when a friend and I were walking. I have a good throwing arm, But no rock at hand. Would have hurled it at his car.

  49. Is it possible that the reason for the hysterical reaction to this crisis is a cynical attempt to destroy the economy on the part of Democrat governors and their friends in the permanent bureaucracy? What better way to take down Trump than to saddle him with 30% unemployment?

    In my state of South Carolina, our Good Ole Boy Governor, Henry McMaster, is fending off calls from the local press to implement a mandatory shut-in order. Right now, he’s been calling for people to voluntarily stay home. How long will he hold out though? As a refugee of Montgomery County, MD, or as I like to say, “El Salvador Norte,” I’m glad to be in a state headed by a sane person. Let’s hope it lasts.

      • Never fear, WhereAreTheVikings – we have legalized Medical Marijuana and “dispensaries” on every other street corner now. Full employment for everyone! Growing, transporting, distributing, writing prescriptions, etc. And we can fully fund the schools for the first time in Oklahoma’s formerly ‘tight ass’ history t’boot. It’s all good! Deal with that, corona-cold!

        • Here the “dispensaries” still have no access to banking. Cash and carry. One I pass by always has a nasty looking armed guard at the door, whereas my bank has never needed one. 😉

    • I just watched a whiny news segment last night about how frustrated the governors (meaning mostly libshit ones) have become with Trump’s refusal to issue national level orders. He’s not providing “guidance” for them you see. As if anyone in the media or their political allies was willing to take “guidance” from Literally Hitler even a month ago.

      What they’re doing of course is trying to set Trump up to issue national shut down orders that gives governors and mayors political cover for what they’ve done and are doing. So far he’s letting them twist in the wind and I hope he keeps that up.

      • Clown world laments how Literally Orange Hitler failed to lock down the country, restrict all movement, incite panic against an invisible enemy, and close the borders sooner and now those tasks are left to their own team blue elected officials who demand Literally Orange Hitler Not My Presidente share his final solution to the virus threat otherwise we are all gonna die. Ps, please send money.

        • No worries. Some Wall Street guy, Steve Munchkin, said “everyone is getting a dollar”.

          Wait for your dollar.

    • Greetings from Upstate SC.
      Our neighbors down the road on I-85 just being ordered to shut down GA.
      Doubt Henry will hold out much longer.
      Oh yeah – latest news from a rather significant employer in SC:
      Boeing is offering employees (161,000) buyouts as its CEO said it will take years for the airlines and aerospace industry to recover from the coronavirus crisis.

    • That Mad Doctor Fausto, er Fauci is bleating for a “nationwide” shut down. He forgot there were States. With Rights.

      And Citizens.

      The geek king, Mad Doctor Fausto.

  50. So…what if they never let us out of lockdown?

    Perhaps their logic is that if they keep us focused on the virus, we won’t notice the Depression?

    I’m getting more and more suspicious that this simply never ends.

  51. Not to worry. The 32% unemployed people are “not essential”, unlike the bureaucrats, politicians and the media.

    • Not far off NJ. One of the only fake metrics of our modern info economy that makes sense to me is how they have been cooking employment numbers for over a decade.

      They have been trying to figure out how to bury a segment of the labor force that was decoupled from the economy a good while back.

      That segment of idle and abandoned rail cars is still sitting in the switching yard. Even during the 4% unemployment heyday.

      Then conveniently they brand the ‘gig’ economy – and the financialization of private leveraged assets as mini-businesses like air bnb to prop up the delta between asset inflation and real incomes. I.e. the leased cars for taxi cabs and grocery deliveries are not the kind of “jobs” that lift people out of a recession; they are the recession lump under the rug.

      Labor becomes a kind of off-balance sheet resource, a synthetic feedbag of hyper elastic soylent oats that can be consumed by paper horse enterprises without the burden of managing human capital or investing in labor supply in any meaningful way.

      That bag is full of people who are not unemployed but are all types of unemployed or “self-employed” or part-time employed that are a flat tire away from poverty yet won’t show up in muh numbers.

      Unless something drastically reorients, the largest growth in the labor market will continue to be in the effectively unemployable.

      The Corona Bucks from the clouds is unlikely to alter this. Perhaps a restart of some manufacturing and infrastructure, but based on past practice I see this being more of a rationale for importing labor than for a bottom-up solution to the abuse and abandonment of the American worker.

  52. there is already talk of a massive $2T infrastructure plan. With Trump handling it, the US will actually get something useful for that money. Not to mention tons of high paying jobs.

    Here is what I think is going to happen:
    1. The US will repudiate all debt to China to pay for virus harm
    2. Chinese products will be banned here
    3. Chinese people will not be allowed into the country (the ones here will go back)
    4. China will lash out an attack the US militarily
    5. goodbye China

    • You flag-waving neocons are always fantasizing about starting wars. Give it a rest, gramps.

      • POZmerica isn’t beating anyone in a full on street brawl anymore. Just look at how quickly Trump backed down after the Persians launched a couple of pinpoint strikes.

        • Come on Meme! haven’t you heard of how our trans-Navy rams ships 20x larger without hesitating one bit? Those are the kind of brass ball inserts that set us apart.

        • Do you have any fresh insight or honest question to offer, or are you just here to fling Red Team monkey-sh*t, Karl?

          Your contribution is “non-essential.” Quarantine your takes for two weeks.

    • A US-China war would be as destructive to both as WWI was to its participants. I wouldn’t be cavalier about the prospect of such a conflict.

      In a conventional war, the US would not be the arsenal of democracy this time. China probably has significant advantages in terms of personnel and materiel for making war. And the war would be fought in their theater not ours.

      Regarding “goodbye China:” The US Could not invade and occupy China so I am assuming you believe we will nuke them. And them us.

      No thanks.

      • China also has an excess of young men it would love to get rid of.

        OTOH, they are also suffering the delusions of equality as much or more than we are. But that is during peace time. China’s equality problem is only between men and women.
        There was an all black squad of fighters and bombers during WW2. They had the lowest kill rate and the highest death rate. That happened when they actually had standards that were only slightly lowered. We could afford to lose some planes then.

      • IDK, according to all the recruiting commercials, we’ve some real ass-kicking wymns. I’m sure they’ll be fine.

    • I can see 1 being threatened and then a yuge announcement of a bigly good trade deal to jump start economy. Then it’ll be forgotten like epstein. And supposing 1 through 3 happens, i see china not attacking us, but instead completing their annexation of south china sea.

      • Good one, Just, they get the Sea Belt and we open Land Belt access to the Mideast, priced in petrodollar Treasuries- with a plucky little middleman representing both sides.

        Europe, besieged by Turkey, will have to buy the Venezuelan, Brazilian, and Libyan oil and Qatari and Levantine natgas that will be supplied by US firms, since Russia will be unable to complete its Stream bypass projects.

        Edit: and lots more Chinese students and Pajeet programmers, since we need smart foreign labor to help rebuild our economy.

    • With what money? The USA is 20 trillion in debt and currently printing out 6 trillion more in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding. This is fantasy. This is Trump being full of hot air and tricking people again. Making more false promises.

      • Trump’s just (unintentionally) demonstrating how fake and gay lolbert economics are in the QE age. Like his unfiltered and indiscreet Zionism, it’s a window on the real, the unbridled Id of globalist uniparty politics.

    • to those who have so convincingly demonstrated their lack of reading comprehension: I was not advocating anything, just making a guess about what follows. No wonder you all have shit jobs and no life. suck a dick losers, god really does hate you (he refers to you as failed jokes).

      #1 is already in motion, Senator Blackburn is proposing we repudiate the debt china holds from us.

      #2 is inevitable as the PRC has revealed its plans to destroy the US any way it can — including purposefully sending tainted goods here.

      #3 is inevitable for the same reason as #2 — every chinese person is a slant eyed jihadi.

      #4 do you think they will sit back and take it, as we dismantle their economy and humiliate them before the world? maybe, but i wouldn’t bet that way.

      #5 only a retard thinks we would ever go in on the ground. so naturally the nimrods here latch onto that. maybe we just destroy their military and put the country under US monitoring like we did with Japan. but my hunch is enough Americans have a white hot rage at china — now — that will allow the US to present the Han with an extinction event.

      and to all the losers here who get a chubby shitting on America — fuck you, go live somewhere else. America didn’t give you a shitty life, your parents did, so blame them. Go join Zman’s Lost Boy Army…

      • The neocons et al had no option but to covid the masses, drastic measures must follow when we don’t listen and do as we’re told by our betters. I work in a job where I must deal with these “hair on fire” lunatics, and disseminated the gov’t narrative to those in full panic mode.
        My two favorite complaints so far are “I want any two people violating the 6ft directive, arrested. the other being a request that the gov’t take over grocery distribution, door-to-door delivery.
        All of that underscored by everyone calling to demand gov’t compensation for every inconvenience to their day.

        We’ve only just begun…(this is fine)

      • As I said, pure fantasy on your part, with no understanding of real world politics or finance. For example, repudiate any treasury debt is the death knell for any investment in US Treasuries. China is perhaps the biggest single entity holding Treasuries—outside the US, but not the largest holder overall. Start a stampede and destroy our ability to borrow.

      • I’d be happy with the result of your other post about the dem party not surviving the pandemic. Although the idea of repudiating the debt we owe to China is interesting.

      • It’s plausible as hell, Karl, if my opinion makes any difference, and it’s a fair comment. At this point, anything can happen. Who would have thought the assassination of a minor, obscure official would set off WW1 a year before it happened? Or that the war to end all wars would set the stage for the next global conflict?

        Consider our current situation, men. Right now, at this moment:

        Our youngest generation through no fault of their own, is locked out of the job and property markets and living in the cellar of their parents home. They can’t get jobs of their own or start their own families.

        Their elders don’t give a shite. Nancy Pelosi and the establishment donks are exporting their jobs to The turd world, China among them. They’d have crappy, low paying entry level jobs here, but elderly donks and repubs want to import smelly, violent and cheap vibrants for those jobs. We now have a generation with no place or purpose.

        Our rulers are literally nuts. Or suffering geriatric dementia. Those that aren’t hate us. At some point, things have to change. They can’t go on like this. We just shut the nation down – over a flu.

        When the wheels come off nations like this, the people face starvation and/or revolution. If that happens here, foreign and domestic interests will step in to try and use that to their own purposes.

        All this is going down in China too. 15 of the 20 dirtiest cities are in China. Because chink families value males over females, decades of female infanticide is about to leave an entire generation without wives. They’ve built entire ghost cities on speculation with nobody to live in them and have accrued insurmountable national debt themselves. When it pops over there – it’s going to be Mutiny On The Bounty.

        With all this chit hitting the fan… war is almost inevitable. It won’t be a minor sporting event like Iraq or Afghanistan either. Karl could easily be right on the numbers if things go sideways.

        Nasty things are headed our way, peaceniks and incels and dissidents. Regardless of how it happens… change is upon us. As some wank recently put it – “may the odds be forever in your favour”!😆👍

    • The Clouds have been hand-in-glove with China for a generation. This is double-dealing, we are on our own.

      This is a looting operation- a bust-out- and a power grab. The Clouds aren’t going to save us, no.

      Both the Clouds and China are going to take major gains from this, while we hold our breath. Sorry, but please prepare for just enough return to “normalcy” to keep us from questioning the rearranged furniture.

      Not the End. Only an Upset to counter the 2016 momentum, plus a bit more.
      A PNAC without the fireworks.

    • There’s no way in hell our (((leaders))) will ever bar nonwhites from flooding in here. Nothing can stand in the way of The Great Replacement.

        • Yes, exactly. The stompy foots about no Magic Money for the brown hordes was driven in part by the lack of incentives to jump the border. The way things are going, wetbacking today would be like illegally crossing from East Berlin into West Berlin back in the day.

          • News item today claims that Latin American, um, “immigration” into the USA has virtually ceased, due of course to the COVID-19 prohibitions of the USA (and points south, I assume). If only this could be the longest-lasting consequence of the pandemic, that alone might be worth several hundred thousand deaths?

        • Yes. The USA living conditions are still infinitely better than the mud hut living conditions of the 3rd world. The USA still has a more generous welfare system.

          Of course, there are many other ways that the country could be made less attractive to them. Perhaps that’s for an IRL discussion rather than online… but if life is actually difficult for them here they would go back.

    • I think there is a small risk that the depression, bitterness, blame games and all-round anger everywhere, this could lead to wars or clashes, including between China and the US. But I think this would be a VERY bad idea. I just see it as a bad complication that could happen down the line if everyone forgets to turn their heads on.

    • Karl,
      I suppose you’re just trolling but you do realize that China has nuclear weapons (including ICBMs)?

      • And so what if it is? There is a long tradition of getting into fights we don’t need to get into on behalf of certain people. (not sure how much /sarc tag to hang on this)

        Want to try on a tinfoil hat I’ve been playing with? How about this. The virus seems to have hit Iran and China especially hard (and of the “slaughter” in Italy, how many are Chinese textile workers in Lombardy?*). Who really really really has problems with Iran? And China must be stopped because unlike the West which has completely adopted Holocaustianity as its main religion, the Chinese are all like, “You got 6 million of yours slaughtered? Man, you must suck.” The Chinese are not a sentimental people and cannot be controlled through aggressive victimhood.That’s assuming a designed virus of course. I’m 99% sure it was just sloppiness on top of already shitty Chinese protocols, but if we go do the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, the above is my contribution.

        *Lombardy. Anyone seen demographics on the deaths in Italy? There are a LOT of Chinamen working there. Plus there is the quality of care issue. A friend who has toured many Italian hospitals (an international health care quality survey thing) sneered that the average Italian hospital she saw was no better than some she saw in Bangladesh (admittedly the “top hospitals” in B’desh, but still). I’m not personally blaggarding Italian healthcare, BTW. I have no personal experience or knowledge one way or the other.

        • As far as Chinese sentimentalism, it should be clarified that they are, in fact, amenable to the concept of victimhood; theirs specifically.

          • Yes, you’re right of course. China certainly clutches its grudges against the British and The Dwarf Rapists* tightly to its chest. Not too fond of the Mongols and still pissed off at the Hsiung Nu, for that matter 🙂

            * for those playing at home: Dwarf Rapists = Japanese (i.e. dwarfs who are rapists, not rapists specializing in victimizing dwarfs)

  53. It is a truism that people get the govts they want and deserve. As a Canukistani looking south… you Yanks will do alright, or as good as can be expected. It’s also true tha Americans generally despise their rulers and have guns of their own if the rulers want to get stupid about who’s in charge. If things get stupid(er)… again, you Yanks are in a good position. It might be said that your founding fathers were the original preppers.

    You guys have what you need. For you, failure or success will be up to you the people, and not they the politicians. You may be about to discover the value of the 2A.

    Best of luck to ya. 😊👍

  54. It is a weird time. I was laid off a few months before this crap started. Once I saw the pandemic incoming, I enrolled in an online PMP prep class figuring I would ride it out studying for the certification, pass the test, and be ready when the economy gets turned back on. What’s strange is that I have recruiters calling and emailing about jobs to be filled asap. Just had a second-round interview via Skype on Tuesday.

    • The professional class is somewhat insulated from the hysteria, as a large percentage can work from home with minimal hassle. That being said, the cascade effect is going to start to hit us as well.

      My employer just notified me of a mandatory vacation next week. This is just the start, as I’m 90% sure the project I’m working on is going to get cancelled. Once the effects start to go up the food chain to the upper-middle class, popular conception of the lockdown is going to take a nastier turn.

        • Hanks is of that lucky strata of society that produces nothing that anybody needs and is, therefore, essential.
          The first ones made richer by the bounce,

      • We’ll see. Will they give up the social acceptance their virtue-signaling is rewarding them with? Seems like a mighty strong drug, getting the women’s and soy boys’ approval . . .

      • The Great Recession in 2008 basically wiped out the blue collar middle class (destroying the home equity which was their only real asset). The Greater Depression will do the same thing to the service economy middle class, as their positions become unnecessary or redundant.

        What will remain is a professional bourgeoisie comprising about 15 to 20% of the population: specialist physicians, white shoe lawyers, executives ( above director level) and government bureaucrats. The rest will essentially be a tenant class, or urban vote-serfs. The structure of society will look rather pre-industrial.

        • Thinning the herd, swelling the ranks of the discontented. Sounds like a very stupid plan. Who would come up with such a thing?

          “specialist physicians, white shoe lawyers, executives ( above director level) and government bureaucrats.”

          Yep.

    • Worth noting, and this is something lost in the Great Depression history, that with 32% unemployment that means that 68% of people who want a job have one.

      • Unfortunately the labor participation rate is only 62% so lose a third of that and that means only about 40% of able bodied working age people will have jobs. Also worth noting. On the bright side, before the 60s it was only 50%ish and we did fine then. But wages were a lot higher then too. Two income trap kinda throws some shade on it unfortunately. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a book about how they tricked the wahmens into wanting to be office drones and not raise their children because “empowering” to work for some company instead of being a mother. Which made is easier for them to lower wages since most families have two now. Great psi op for them. Sucks for everyone else, especially the kids.

        • Being at home with your children is slavery and sitting in a cubicle all day is freedom! “Freedom is slavery” and “Slavery is freedom”
          American women fell for this!

        • Then the feminists told them to get a divorce, that the idiot is only good for child support. All of this is exactly why we have such messed up kids.

          • It’s probably even worse than you think unfortunately. Throw in being raised by the degenerate media on top of it all.

    • We are leaning very heavily on that type of position right now as processes have to be rethought–staff is working remotely–and now–figuring out restart processes and unfortunately scenarios where operating expense may have to be dramatically re-adjusted.

      • Otherwise – I already have Six Sigma certifications, and a lot of experience. Was at the last place for 11 years and had all their internal certifications – which are meaningless to anyone else.

    • Careful not to get doxed- Project Management Institute has the power to yank your certification for not being fully on-board with GloboHomo.

  55. My resume is on the internet and in February I received a phone call from a recruiter I once met with a few years ago. We chatted and I asked how was the job market. “It’s a candidate’s market,” she replied. Not anymore.

    All this hysteria over a bad cold.

    • I was really lucky. Switched jobs just before they shut down everything. New job is having me work from home.

      • “Work?” Get with the program. Uncle Sam is going to pay for everything here on out. Hell, you don’t even have to pay your electric or water bills. In Europe some places, nobody has to pay rent! No word yet on how the economies will recover, but we can be sure the best experts are working on it right now! Trust your governments; they have only the citizen’s best interests at heart! 😀

        • Yep, same experts who just under-predicted the unemployment numbers by half. I could have told them the second week would show exponential growth. Problem is economists seem to fail up the ladder.

    • A cold doesn’t kill 1/3 or more of nursing home patients, put air craft carriers out of action, nor kill younger healthier people (even if old and frail still are the Reaper’s preferred.) Please consider that we are facing something more serious than a seasonal flu epidemic. It may not be the 1918 Pandemic, nor the superflu (Stephan King’s “The Stand”) or “Twelve Monkeys,” but it is a public health emergency and should be treated with some respect.

      • Voted down for advising not to underestimate a global pandemic that can cause extreme pneumonia even in healthy people. The anti-hysteria is almost as bad as the hysteria, it seems.

      • I think this Virus could solve our Medicare and Social Security problem…what better way to solve it than the Judges and Executioners be non-human….
        Then, who would get laid off is the blood sucking Health (Sickness) Care System workers
        Would you believe 1 (one) Outpatient Kidney Stone Removal (in and out in 3 hours with no complications) cost $72,000 ?? WTF are they smoking??

  56. It sounds like the plan for the masses who are going to find themselves hopelessly poor is to rev up the money machine as much as humanly possible with welfare and infrastructure projects.

    Whether this ends in runaway inflation remains to be seen. The doomsayers have been saying ‘any time now’ in the same way the virus doomsayers are saying ‘wait until next week’. It will probably operate like it always has for the last thirty years, with the official inflation numbers being low while the average Joe becomes poorer and poorer while not being able to point to a clear indication as to why.

      • No. Haven’t filled my tank since early January. But yesterday at the market, in the space of one week: beef up $2/lb.; chicken thighs from $2.49 to $3.49 a lb.; and a dozen medium eggs from $1.99 to $3.20. There were no fresh carrots to be had at any price. CPI excludes food and fuel; so the government “inflation” number is useless in the real world.

    • The money printing has to far outstrip debt destruction to cause hyper-inflation, no? (Seriously, the mechanics of this are a bit puzzling to me). So far it seems like the actions of the Fed, while huge, have just been used to move debt from one ledger to another.

      • Hyperinflation is a myth. It is structurally impossible in our system, unless it happens in capital assets. Then its just called the ‘greatest economy ever’.

        Well to be fair Sandmich, there will be a massive amount of theft and fraud so some of that gov’t money will slip between the ledgers onto the street.

        But unlike ATMs accidentally loaded with $100’s, they will never know where it went.

        Our gov “loses” billions during the best of times. Just wait until the era of the psychopath meets MMT head on. Medicaid fraud is gonna look quaint.

      • Essentially MMT boils down to a legitimacy question. So long as the serfs of today are willing to strap in and pull the plow for what grandpa already got paid, and their kids are willing to step up when their turn at the plow comes. the system keeps going. It’s a tarted up version of Keynesian economics – or Keynes was dumbed-down MMT.

        MMT works until the first generation that says “I’m not pulling that plow. I don’t believe any of this will ever be paid back. It’s fake – let me off this ride.”

      • Inflation is a function of expanding credit. As such, printing money to pay off debt simply maintains price levels since there is no write off of credit (ironically, printing our way out of debt is functionally a jubilee). Deflation happens if people make purchases with cash instead of credit. If credit markets contract, whether through bankruptcy, repayment, forced write downs etc. then prices drop because the money (read: credit) supply is contracting. In the modern American economy, credit is money, and the expansion of credit is inflation, therefore the only option left is deflation because the inflation has already occurred. Converting debt to currency does nothing except permanize the nominal price level. It’s essentially a jubilee and would effectively end the Fed.

        Printing enough money to settle all outstanding debts would be a good idea if it were coupled with bankruptcy reform, a gold exchange standard, and setting a ceiling on interest rates. This would essentially return America’s economy to how it was at the beginning of the 20th century, except that prices would be nominally higher, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The main downside is that the dollar would no longer be the world’s reserve economy. If you want a jubilee, though, nationalizing the Fed and printing out currency to cover all debts would be the easiest way to do it.

        • The merry-go-round won’t end until the present dollar system is completely scrapped. That would never happen until the existing powers have sapped it for all it’s worth. It’s very likely that the government will be replaced too. Probably with large losses of life; season the scenario to taste and simmer gently. One of the cruel ironies of the origin of the Fed is that it was sold as a way to prevent government manipulation of the money system!

          • “the Fed [..] was sold as a way to prevent government manipulation of the money system!”

            Perhaps they aren’t wrong to call us “muppets”. (h/t Dutch)
            Sigh.

          • JP Morgan basically saved the banking system in 1907. It was felt that that was too much power for one man to have, hence the creation of the Fed, which has failed every test since its founding.

      • The money printing here is basically giving the system CPR in hopes that it will recover. This is less out of care for the people mind you but stability since most people in office benefit from the system.

        The longer “no biz” goes on though, the less effective any means will be and the deeper into ,as our host put it, the Great Unknown we go.

        No doubt the powerful are enjoying pushing people around but its risky, There are serious riots in Wuhan and the West is less well equipped to handle those or worse.

  57. Re predictions about what comes next, on New Year’s I don’t think anyone could have imagined we’d be where we are now. It’s a little like in fluid mechanics. With laminar flow it is easy to calculate where a given particle flowing along will go next. With turbulence you can’t, like with chaos, infinitesimal differences in initial conditions can send any given particle in a completely different direction. I think this is the same. Some ppl have started saying ‘keep a diary, this is history happening’. That actually makes kinda sense to me.

  58. “there is a light at the end of the tunnel”

    yup, it’s an oncoming train.

    LOL haven’t heard that one since Carter was president.

    • Here’s one from the premiership of James Callaghan. Will the last one leaving the Country kindly turn out the light at the end of the tunnel.

      • Yes yes round-eyes, by all mean, prease reave your country now. Go hide somewhere safe! We be happy to wait this out, then scoop up whole nice country for cheap, sprit it with Jews.

        Prease reave now!

        • Hahaha!

          But the Chinese will not powershare with the Jews. (Or vice versa.) Two very old ethnocultural identities that have been maintained continually for literal millennia, each believing itself obviously and entirely superior to all other cultures — there is no possibility of a modus vivendi.

          One principal difference is that, although the Chinese are certainly committing their share of bribery, intimidation, and general skullduggery, they at least have not infiltrated our cultural institutions, murdered them from within, and worn them as a skinsuit while preaching the poison of open borders and multiculturalism.

    • How about an Ayn Rand reference? The light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be when the two trains collide head-on, an explosion results, and the tunnel is collapsed, because common sense had broken down and no one knew how to run the trains, resulting in the east-west commerce being halted. Rand pegged the capitalist/collectivist conflict well, but alas the real world doesn’t have smart people on the capitalist side and only dumb people on the Statist side… 🙁

  59. Today’s Unemployment Number is 6.6million for the week ending March 28. Consensus expectations were for 3.76 million claims. The prior week’s figure was 3.3 million.
    The previous all-time record was 695,000 claims on October 2, 1982.

      • Wow, I just did some calculations and this must mean that by the end of April there will be 105.6 million unemployed in the US. By the end of May we’ll have close to 3.4 billion people out of work right here in the USA. Stunning really, that’s roughly a 1000% unemployment rate. It must be true though. My computer said so.

        • My g-sh! The implications are staggering. Clearly at some point there will be six billion unemployed in the US. And it will be a crime to deny that.

    • October 2, 1982, updated.

      Well we’re living here in Allentown
      And they’re closing all the [cubicles] down,
      Out in Bethlehem, they’re killing time,
      [Wearing the masks],
      Standing in line……

    • We are OFF THE FEKKING MAP!!! We are SO FAR off the map we don’t even know where the map IS and we’re still heading pell mell further off the map! Hell! We’re still ACCELLERATING! Nobody has a clue what comes next. As the ZMan wrote

      We have no examples of a country turning itself off like this.

      Any predictions made by alleged experts don’t even qualify as WAGs. They’re pulling their predictions straight out of their ASSES!

      Oh, and do not mistake my emphasis above for panic. I am not panicking. I’m just pissed at the Left – fekking MIGHTILY!!!!!

Comments are closed.