The Lock Down Blues

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Since the pandemic crackdown started, the question was when would people start to realize that this was a huge blunder. In the first weeks, people were both scared and excited about what they were being told was coming. On the one hand you had the rush for supplies in order to camp at home for weeks. On the other hand, you had the excitement for an unplanned holiday at home. A month ago, most everyone was ready for a couple of weeks of curve bending and movie watching at home.

We are at the other end of this thing now. People have done all of the fun stuff they can do at home. It’s just tedium now. For many the fear of not having an income is beginning to take center stage. Small business is getting to the point where many will have to close up shop for good. Fear of the virus has now subsided for all but the most hysterical and fear of ruination is now beginning to fill the void. People are getting antsy and want to go back to their lives now. This is not fun anymore.

The streets are starting to get more crowded now. A week ago, you could ride around Lagos and not see a soul walking or driving. The weather has improved, so many more people are outside. More cars are on the streets. Most business is now thinking hard about going back to near-normal in the near-term. They don’t want to be too far ahead of the government’s crackdown orders, for fear of lawsuits, but they are pushing to end the madness and return to something close to normal.

That’s the thing that no one has considered. There will be real economic hardship this summer due to the crackdown. People will also be sharing their crackdown stories with friends and co-workers over the coming months. People will certainly notice that they don’t know anyone who knows anyone that got the virus. As these antibody tests confirm that the fatality rate was much lower than advertised, people will begin to wonder if this was worth the consequences.

Adolf Hitler said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” We are seeing a real-time test of that aphorism. For a while now, our rulers have fooled most everyone with the virus panic. Some people, like the curve-benders, will remain convinced the virus panic was necessary. They have no choice now. The question is will the bulk of the public conclude they were fooled into the Great Flu Panic?

This is where the aphorism breaks down. People seem to be quite happy being fooled on a regular basis. The rulers and the media have to mix things up, but being fooled into believing in some great threat to “who we are” is a feature, not a bug. Then again, prior hoaxes and panics have been cost free. People could enjoy them from the comfort of home and still go outside and keep their job. This time, there will be a real cost to this elaborate morality tale. Maybe this time is different.

Either way, we are about to move into a new phase of this madness. What will be the short- and long-term consequences of the crackdown? The stock market seems to think the V-shaped recession is the way to bet. The political class is hoping for devastation, as they think they will rid them of Trump. Economist can’t seem to agree on what comes next, as this has never been tried. There’s lots of red lights flashing in the debt markets and the supply chain. The next months will be interesting.

Maybe that will be how everyone forgets about this month of living like lepers and treating everyone like they stink. Before people can start to think about why they were locked in their homes, they will be directed to the next drama, the financial and economic panic of 2020. Perhaps the lesson here is the circus part of our bread and circuses is the government creating increasingly reckless panics seeing if they can blow it all up. Maybe this is all for their entertainment.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Rich Get Richer (Link) (Link)
  • 12:00: The Debt Bomb (Link) (Link)
  • 22:00: The Food Chain (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: We Don’t Know Nothin’ (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 42:00: Rule By Corporate Pirate (Link)
  • 47:00: Paranoid Weirdos (Link)
  • 52:00: A Post From The Others (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/mcCG0b9HlQw

282 thoughts on “The Lock Down Blues”

  1. Freak’n awesome post ! Love the dripping sarcasm. ” Then there’s this post / Here’s some of that . . . 🙂 ” Old military base turned town park full of people . Some with masks, but most without. Same with the local grocery store. Unfortunately the NYC Invasion remains unabated. Not only are they opening up their summer places early they seem to be bringing their extended family with them as well. Like locust they strip the shelves bare.

    Hopefully the Panic will end soon.

  2. Z, I read your Gab blab earlier today concerning gassing up the truck and the face mask requirement. I suggest you do what I have done in view of the mask mandate: buy a new pair of cheap BVD-style mens briefs. Wear these with the leg holes positioned for seeing out the eyes. It’s so ridiculous that I routinely make folks burst into laughter going out this way and yet I am complying with the “letter of the law.” Peace brother.

  3. This covid insanity is a media event, with the intention of getting everybody talking about it and “tuning in”. Then everyone on social media (again, “media”) can try to out-do each other with who loves people the most. This whole morality play is obnoxious and pretentious … these people don’t “love” anyone but themselves and their self-righteousness.

  4. Eh, I’ve decided I can’t go to the rally. It’s too dangerous when you’ve got a kid at home.

    • Down vote, then. But people are starting to go insane with this (it’s not the virus I’m nervous about). Of course I hate what’s happening, but the time of mercy is long gone, and the time for resistance has long passed. There may come a day when we are actively oppressed. Maybe someday soon.

      I sense the approach of a vicious era.

  5. First, thanks for your consistency, Z. Those of us who simply followed the CDC numbers, which themselves likely are wildly inflated, knew several days into this nonsense it was a fraud, an opportunistic exploitation of an actual, relatively concerning virus. Self-proclaimed dissident thought leaders who bought into the insanity are forever tainted, but of much more import, seeing how easily the public was manipulated illustrates how much of a slog we have ahead.

  6. The right and the center will learn from this hoax. The left will not because they believe it is stupid, immoral and unscientific to learn from experience; if you are a smart, good person you are supposed to listen to approved experts. That is why the left obediently moves from one climate change hoax after the other, listening to the same experts who made inaccurate predictions on the last hoax

  7. Zman. I go hot and cold on you. This was a great podcast. Kudos.

    The grocery store you spoke of? That was empty? Was this a neighborhood store, or chain? I didn’t have a problem with my grocery store, but it was a Pic N Save.

    I have to take issue with your characterization of men like Mercer, but I hope to spark a discussion. They’re not engaged in some conspiracy to keep things the same.

    They want change sure. These are very clear minded intelligent and successful guys, right. But….when they spend their money? They want measurable realtime results – pragmatists first ideologues second. So they pour it thru the Republican Party. Its a calculated, I mean for real calculated like let’s do the math, move.

    Now that Trump has shown the way to populist electoral victory, perhaps the next anti-invasion candidate will be the recipient of a generous Mercer shot-in-the-arm. This someone will be better than Trump. He’ll be a True Believer.

    That’s what I think is going to happen. These are how Great Powers work right. Read your Roman history.

  8. Z Man said: ” 47:00: Paranoid Weirdos.”

    This artical is just another example of the pot complaining about the kittle. Left wing right wing, it doesn’t matter. If one of these “grassroots movements” starts getting serious national exposure you know automatically there’s some cash behind it. Nothing new there.
    P S Thanx for changing the intro music. 😀

  9. Sorry – typo:

    @KMGVictoria

    Hey Oliver, Hey Hun – since you seem to need the guidance, give that a try.

  11. So the Zman has joined the ‘WuFlu ain’t no big thing’ crew. Weird. I keep trying to figure out if the WuFlu Ain’t Nuthin’ crew actually believes there’s an illness at all or if it’s all a simulation or they think the Powers That Be actually need an excuse to mess with their subjects? They don’t. They can slow-roll just about any kind of madness they want and — if they package it right — about 60% of the American public will go for it. Mostly because they live in cities and have a dependent mind-set. Does any serious person really think New York was faking it? And so were the Chinese? The ‘WuFlu Panic’ was all just an elaborate scheme set up to get people to hang out at home for month?

    What WuFlu exposed is just how dangerous interdependency is and how valuable autarky and autonomy. People gotta work to eat and I think quarantine measures have to end because the cost/benefit ratio has been exceeded. But to deny there was no benefit to those measures or that removing the quarantine measures will not come at a price (at least for ‘vulnerable populations’) is absurd.

    What we’re seeing is the classic condundrum of democracy. Most people do not seem to be seriously affected by infection with WuFlu, therefore all the people who could be are irrelevant.

    • Why don’t you give this a read, and that might give you a clue to what some of us here believe. Don’t think that we all have the same beliefs, but I bet most would agree with most of Sardi’s conclusions based on the data put out by the major organizations.

      “According To CDC Data, It’s NOT COVID-19 Coronavirus That Is Causing All The Severe Lung Deaths” By Bill Sardi

      https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/no_author/according-to-cdc-data-its-not-covid-19-coronavirus-that-is-causing-all-the-severe-lung-deaths/

    • Z has been speaking against mass hysteria for about a month now.

      And no, it isn’t big enough to justify tanking the economy. Even with the cooked books and the old models — you know, before they were walked back a dozen or so times.

      The quality of data in this crisis is comically low, and that’s something you need to grasp to understand us.

      • That’s a big point. It’s panic. Whether there is a virus or not it’s almost irrelevant. No good decisions are made in a panic and it’s never good to be on the side of the mob. Where I live everyone is crazy and even though it all feels very feminine it’s not just the women the men are completely over the top too. I really don’t see how we’re going to get out of this with all these crazy people crying and screaming and carrying on.
        if Amazon shut down this would all be over tomorrow.

        • I’m mostly on the side of this being an overblown panic with our usual enemies doing what they do. I think there’s about a 25% chance they’re doing the right/prudent thing with sincere motives. I’m not a scientist or a statistician. One thing I do know is that it’s bizarre and idiotic to wear a mask simply walking down a suburban sidewalk. Yet almost everyone around me is doing it. If you think C19 is floating around in the air in contractable potency you’re worse than a moron. This country is making dickheads of us all.

          (not us)

    • It’s real but way over blown. Very few say this Covid 19 is not real and in New York it’s very real.
      But destroying a functioning economy is going to have huge impacts.
      We are witnessing a illogical panic
      And we will pay a price as a society for allowing it to happen.

  12. “Before people can start to think about why they were locked in their homes, they will be directed to the next drama, the financial and economic panic of 2020.” — Z-man

    It will be our job to remind people that the Greatest Depression in History was caused by the knowing misrepresentation of the mild cold causing Corona virus. We let known liars like the CDC and Dr. Death Fauci created a massive fraud. They destroyed the economy and there is no magic recovery coming.

    Perhaps the violence starts now.

    • Also the famine. They closed another meat plant in MN today. I think they are all closed now. Same is true for the Dakotas. Empty grocery stores in the summer time, combined with a few choice power outages, should be enough to ignite the summer of Rage.

      Whether you say MSM, UN, CIA, or CDC, they are all spelled CCP.

    • A possible reason for the $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan lab?

      It appears AIDS fraudster Fauci was in on an attempt to use the corona virus as an AIDS vaccine transport- an attempt that has gone disastrously wrong.

      There has never been a successful vaccine for any coronavirus, nor for AIDS.

      Thanks, Faggot-worshippers!

  13. I don’t trust anyone calling themselves an expert. It almost never fails that the people who either call themselves experts or who get called experts by the lugenpresse are just BS artists who are wrong most of the time. It’s a term of art because it really doesn’t mean anything. A chemist may be an expert in his field, but he doesn’t run around using expert as a quasi-title.
    None of these people have any actual experience fighting a worldwide pandemic. Their alleged expertise comes from “consensus” among other people calling themselves experts. When they say “listen to the experts” and “follow the science,” what they really mean is listen to the affirmative action political appointees working for inherently political and often corrupt agencies like the WHO and the woman currently bitching and moaning about racism on Twitter all day.

  14. Phil Murph appeared on TV today.

    My mom: (referencing his M.P.B)What’s that on his head, a twat?

    • Lawdog, what is M.P.B? A web search yielded:

      Maritime and Port Bureau, a bureau in Taiwan
      Media Prima Berhad, a Malaysian media corporation
      Música popular brasileira, Brazilian popular music
      Male pattern baldness
      Monthly Playboy, the Japanese edition of Playboy magazine
      Mountain pine beetle, a barkbeetle in the USA and Canada
      Mississippi Public Broadcasting, the public broadcasting network of Mississippi, United States
      Most Precious Blood (band), a New York City hardcore band

      etc. Jargon is just killing me, but there is not too much on this site. Still, I do many searches to attempt to relieve my cluelessness regarding contemporary slang or acronyms. Cheers, brother!

  15. I am beginning to suspect that the powers that be are aware that there is no avoiding the economic disaster they have created and are now looking for something to blame the destruction on.

  17. My Heart lies with freeing my people from the rule of the insane and evil, but my mind overwhelms with that not being possible. The willingly enserfed by the clearly corrupt and insane cannot be saved.

    I don’t even really care about the Constitution as much as getting out from under the insane, the priority is clear.

    But one cannot make men of cattle.

    Wait and watch then. Perhaps a quorum of men will appear.

    • What do we have right now besides the protests, contaminated and quasi castrated as they are?

      • Baby steps. The Right has been brainwashed for 50 years or more into thinking that cooperation for political goals is something only Leftists and Commies do.

        At least these gun marches and protests useless as they may be teach otherwise and lay the foundation for cooperation.

        Also as VXXC’s comment about a quorum of men. You are the foundation of that quorum. Its your job to learn to think in political terms and goals and learn to organize to get them.

        To paraphrase the late Sam Francis, the Right is mostly made of beautiful losers. Learn to stop losing and after to savor a victory.

  18. There are two meaningful political goals that the dissident right should pursue in this crisis. The first goal is that any bailout to states and/or local government should be allocated as block grants to the states, and that each state gets an equal amount. The second goal should be that any state which accepts a federal bailout must include a ballot in the 2020 election that allows individual counties to secede from the state to join a neighboring state.

    As to the first goal, this may have started as a genuine, manageable health crisis, but it has morphed into little more than the greatest raid on the US Treasury in history. Bailouts of state and local governments are now a certainty, and the blue states are going to seize this opportunity to raid the US Treasury to subsidize their underwater pension obligations accumulated through decades of corruption and mismanagement. If we’re going to raid the US Treasury, so be it. The small (overwhelmingly Red) state senators hold all the cards. If they demand equal block grants for every state and stand firm they can make their states rich. We should lean hard on them to do so.

    As to the second goal, this crisis has laid bare the divide between Red v Blue, rural v urban, and productive v administrative. People in exurban and rural counties of Blue states across America are watching their lives and livelihoods being destroyed by policies promulgated by urban Democrats in an effort to control a virus that has little impact in their counties. Secession movement have been gaining steam across the rural West, and this event has brought into stark relief that the Democratic state governments care not one whit about their rural Republican citizens. It is time to reconfigure the map of America.

    • “morphed into little more than the greatest raid on the US Treasury in history. Bailouts of state and local governments are now a certainty, and the blue states are going to seize this opportunity to raid the US Treasury to subsidize their underwater pension obligations”

      Hot dog. I think that nailed it. Major kudos.

  19. The “bailout” bill that was signed into law provided mostly funding of left-wing causes. All kinds of gibs programs were funded out to 2024!
    Guy searches the bill for 000,000 and finds endless million plus funding for left-wing and anti-white causes.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s3Gc00Dvrw&t=2s

    Indian affairs, “urban” renewal and the like, NPR, Planned Parenthood dot dot friggin dot!

    • Is anyone surprised? You can’t get a bailout through a divided Congress without handouts for the Left and their pet causes.

      The other options was to tell Pelosi and the others No and Hell No but this would have precluded bailing out any of the Republicans pet causes .

      A full No! to bailouts would have wiped out the US and possibly the global economy in its entirety and caused massive unrest as well.

      With some limited food support and such, a total redo debt jubilee, restrict trade and a lot more would have been the correct thing but this would destroy the entire US upper class and all its institutions and while that might happen as part of a hypothetical bugaloo , no one would chose it.

      The risk factor is far to high for low corruption societies much less high corruption ones like ours.

      This was the only reasonable option even if it is a turd.

  20. Zman, could you put the intro and ending songs up in the post? Been enjoying The Power Hour a lot. And some of the song choices you pick I don’t know what they are but think they’re great. Like the outro today

    • Lady in Black by Uriah Heep (a 70’s band that is primarily rock/metal/prog). They’re known for a few other hits as well. Sort of a off-brand Led Zepplin in an odd way. A lot of his others are classic Metal such as Iron Maiden (and Bruce Dickinson). Z’s taste in music is pretty good, imho.

  21. If the DR really wants to do something useful out in the real world — I know, I know, but let’s acknowledge the possibility, however remote — resurrect the word “coward.” They’re not being prudent, they’re not “flattening” anything, they’re just *scared*. They know they lack both brains and balls, so they’ll outsource their “thinking” to whichever wannabe-tyrant promises them a binky. If you have Photoshop skills, make a digital white feather and and hand it out with wild abandon – let *them* figure out what it means (Google will tell you, but the image itself will take a while for the usual suspects to flag as offensive).

  22. One point I’ve only seen mentioned briefly anywhere is the Long March of media pre-programming designed to plant the seeds of susceptibility to pandemic fear in the public’s mind.

    I’m specifically referring to the nearly continuous steam of zombie-focused popular entertainment over the last two decades.

    That media stream is understood to have begun with 28 Days Later, which was released in 2002. Since then we’ve had a nearly continuous flood of zombie-media across all formats, with World War Z and The Walking Dead as the most high-profile of hundreds, possibly thousands of different iterations of this concept.

    • I’m not sure there’s a cause-effect. Is pandemic media popular *because* of a change in the character of a people, or is a people’s character changed because of the media?

  24. A huge portion of state and county pensions are utterly screwed. Even with return assumptions of ~7%, they’re still underfunded. There’s zero chance that they earn 7% with the 10-year treasury at 0.6%. It. Will. Not. Happen.

    What’s funny is that everyone knows it won’t happen. They just assume that there will be a bailout. What’s more, they’re probably right.

      • Bailouts are power. Z’s right. We’re moving toward a palace economy where friends of the kind do well.

    • So, we (pensioners) get a bailout—with funny money. Sooner or later you pay the piper. Take a haircut now, or see your pension shrink in purchasing power later. No free lunch.

      • Maybe. But it’s all part of the growing palace economy that Z has noted. Everything – corporate bond market, munis, pensions, mortgages, ultimately the stock market – runs through Washington. We’re all beholden to DC to dole out what it feels we deserve.

        Will that hold? I don’t know. Will DC over promise and lose control of the money supply. Possible. But they’ll still hold the whip. Everything will still funnel through DC.

        • Lots of talk about SDR as new world reserve currency today. People should consider that the value of a currency derives from imposing taxes in said denomination. Who pay taxes in SDR? Nobody right now.

          Keep an eye out for for a new Global taxing authority that collects SDR’s from nation states. The IMF/BIS needs your nation state to do your part in the fight against invisible sequences of RNA!

      • I think we’re going to have a real life experiment in MMT. And it might last longer than we think as crazy as it sounds. What was it that Adam Smith said? “In the long run, we are all dead”.

        • I couldn’t believe that MMT was a real thing a few years back. But here we are.

          The fed and Congress are tightening their grip. The Treas Dept using the fed to be their banker is not a good thing. Treas deposits some $ in the fed which levers it up 10 times to buy anything and everything. That’s the technicality that allows the fed to buy securities not guaranteed by the gov’t. Technically, it’s the Treas Dept, i.e. Congress, not the fed.

          By the using the fed, Congress can 10X its money available for stimulus. In essence, the president gets access to the fed’s printing press. Not a good sign.

          At the moment, deflation is a much bigger danger than inflation, but imagine Pres. Stacy Abrams with that power. She’d be sending checks to black folk every week.

          I used to make fun of gold bugs, but now I think a bit of inflation insurance might not be a bad idea. Nothing crazy, maybe 5% to 10% of a portfolio, but I’d get some assets that hold their value in an inflationary environment. (Of course, we might need to go through deflation first, so you kind of need protection against both.)

      • Want to make it worse? Fail to have a stable pension system and your savings rate hits the paradox of thrift territory right away.

        The modern economy is at its fundamentals an efficiency trap. We can see this in this shutdown with 50% unemployment in L.A. and hefty underemployment on top of that and yet so long as some money is handed out, people survive.

        Essentially a great many workers are in every in every way unnecessary or a luxury.

        This kind of lopsided overly productive economy guarantees massive state spending and a palace economy. We become Saudi Arabia and buy peace via handouts.

      • History is littered with large groups of people accepting fiction as fact. The concept of retirement, once a benefit for elder Roman legionnaires, is one of those. At least the Roman heroes were rewarded with land in occupied territories rather than just increasingly valueless coinage. The current neo-Bismarckian retirement system isn’t about your golden years, it’s about turning as much as possible of your savings into the raw material of the banking system and its close cousin the world of business finance. Without your contribution corporate nabobs would actually be required to supply decent goods and services. Instead, they use the updated techniques of stock bubble capitalists like Jim Fisk. We laugh about things like the 17th century Dutch tulip mania or the early 20th century South African ostrich plume panic. Somebody will be laughing at us someday.

        • Adding insult to injury is the idea that others are more qualified to handle our money than we are. Maybe that’s true. Is there even a moment in basic education that’s devoted to balancing a checkbook or interpreting a balance sheet? Frat boys can explain an esoteric NFL quarterback rating to assemble their fantasy league teams but can’t explain how a mortgage works. It’s probably better if the government just doles out money/goods as needed, like they’re already doing for much of the population.

    • Maybe. If I may White Pill a bit Cocaine Mitch seems to be firmly in the no bailouts camp and instead wants States to be given the power to go bankrupt.

      That would be interesting….

  25. Had a video conference this morning with three lady coworkers. I’m in a state where I can still go into the office so I show up looking presentable.

    These ladies all hop the conference from home looking sweaty from their workouts or having just rolled out of bed, all of them wearing tank tops.

    For the next 40 minutes they snipe at each other and miss most of the important points the mtg was supposed to cover. NAWALT, but show some professional courtesy. They think the “pandemic” gives them an excuse to half-ass it everywhere. I’m junior to all three so had to sit there. Just contemplate having three shrieking hens above you in the pecking order… Going to go blow my brains out now.

    For the record, all three are absolutely hideous, like trolls from under the bridge.

  26. I haven’t picked a side, maybe I’m not so bright. However, it has been interesting to see guys who usually agree on many issues sharply disagree.

    On one side, we have Z and Ramzpaul who say this is a bad flu and that imposing an economic depression is far worse than the virus.

    On the other side, we have Richard Spencer and Michael Savage saying we haven’t done enough to flatten the curve.

    How will this all look in a few years?

    • In a few yrs it’ll probably be a thing people barely remember. Crises are so common and so hyped, and everyone is so involved, that there’s no energy to spare for reflection.

      • Assuming the coup succeeds, memory-holed immediately. Hard. Like Las Vegas shooter hard. If somehow it doesn’t, it can and will be resurrected every November until 2024.

    • @LineInTheSand –

      The idea behind a flat curve was to prevent hospital overloading. Except for NYC and New Orleans, maybe, we have been so successful at not overloading hospital capacity that hospitals are empty.

      None of which takes away from our heroic healthcare workers, whose heroism can no more be hidden in countless tiktok dance videos than Jeanne d’Arc’s grace could be hidden under chainmail.

    • I’ll tell you how it looks right now. This is what a feminized culture looks like. It’s still directed by a few thousand bad actors who are male but the women have made it easy for them. Only the dead generations could tell us what we look like. The future generations will only be more of the same except worse. Unless, events.

      • I would give up my vote in a minute if it would restore sanity to our country. Only 30-40 years ago, things were infinitely saner.

    • Michael Savage is also bemoaning our loss of liberty, our meek capitulation to authoritarians like Cuomo and Newsome. He has been for quarantining the vulnerable population not all of us. He’s been very critical of state government’s overreaction.

  27. The small manufacturing company dropped everyone’s hours from 40 to 32 to stave off furloughing employees. Fortunately we can use vacation and leave time to cover, along with sharing time with others. I spent yesterday scheduling everyone. Our business is down 75% from last year at this time. Prior to this, we were running record sales.

  28. Yesterday was warm and clear here in So Cal, a welcome relief after a few weeks of cold gray weather. I took the red bike out early for a long cruise. The red bike is my daily rider. It’s a fat tire cruiser, but it’s set up for doing serious mileage. I started out putting in some warm up time in the neighborhoods around home before taking it up into some hillier roads.
    There were few folks out walking the residential streets near my house. One of the streets was deserted except for a short, slight woman, probably in her mid to late sixties, same as me. She had her little dog on a leash.
    She didn’t hear me pedaling up until I was within about twenty five yards or so behind her. When she did hear me she snapped around. There was no one on the street, yet she was wearing a blue paper mask. I do not wear one. When she saw me cruising up all unmasked, she tried to bolt across the street to avoid me, but I was already too close. The poor woman was utterly terrified. She turned around and cowered, bent low with both hands to her cheeks pulling the mask tight around her face. She was hunched over as if I were standing there threatening to strike her. I felt an overwhelming flash of pity for this poor creature.
    This is the work of our media. I have no doubt whatsoever that her only source of information was her television set. The wedge has been driven deep. We are face to face with unmasked evil.

    • I don’t wear a mask when I am out and about in the neighborhood, getting my fresh air and Vitamin D. But I do wear one at the stores. And I try to maintain a bit of a distance always. Why? Because these pitiful people are really scared. They have bought in to all of this. To mock them to the point where it triggers them just seems needlessly cruel, at this point. They are terrified, and it is really a sad thing to see, but there it is.

      • The reason to wear a mask in the stores is to preclude the possibility you will get singled out by a snitch or security guard that wants to make the 6 o’clock news.

      • Dutch:
        I have one to wear in the grocery stores, because the grocery stores won’t let you in without one. That notwithstanding, I would do it, not because of the state, or because of “the rules”, but as a courtesy to the person standing at the register. That guy, or gal is all day indoors face to face with strangers. That’s a far different situation than being outdoors. Nonetheless, I see many many people wearing them when out alone without another soul within hundreds of yards. That is raw paranoia.

        JWM

    • I am also in SoCal and while out to pick up sushi from my favorite place on a sunny early evening this week I saw:
      – The 4 blocks from my house to the major blvd had over three dozen people walking or biking, mostly in couples of families. In normal times I would see one person out. Maybe one woman had a mask, but no one else. Seems the groups just veered away from one another if they got close, no one seemed to be freaking out
      – My favorite sushi joint is in an area I used to live, so had to take a major freeway for a few miles to get to my old neighborhood. Traffic was higher than I thought, maybe half of normal, but by no means empty.
      – Before hitting the restaurant I swung by a ocean access area that had a bike path. It was PACKED. Cars parked half a mile long, many grabbing bikes off the back or putting them back on, and crowds of people on the walking/bike access path. I had never seen it that crowded outside of July 4, and no way people were “socially distancing” with that kind of foot and bike traffic. One guy on a bike had a mask, but that was it. Lots of young, pretty, fit girls jogging in short spandex shorts without masks – I was enjoying that part particularly.

      Overall it made me hopeful. California may be shut in but a lot of people are ignoring it. Several counties opened golf courses this week.

  29. TPTB are simply taking it all down now, because the rubes refuse to stay in their lane and put up with things any more. It’s as simple as that.

    BTW, word on the street is that very little of the $450 billion(!) in “small business support” money actually is making it to small business. The sums actually being distributed are a tiny fraction of the overall amount. Where did it all go? Whose pockets did it line?

    • I can confirm one assertion you made. Small business we contract with called the very first day after noon and was told, sorry no money left. Perhaps the claim that banks prefer not to lend to their smaller customers is true?

      • Assume there are a million small businesses applying and each one is asking for $100k (the actual numbers appear to be fewer and at a smaller dollar amount per). That’s a hundred billion, out of the $450 billion with small business’ name all over it. It was so bad that another roughly $250 billion is being sent in that direction this weekend. Someone is making out like a bandit on all of this.

      • I’ve heard rumors that unemployment is doing the same for former 1099 employees in NJ. “Sorry, no money left.” *click*

    • In addition to it being designed that way (i.e. all the $ going to ‘non profits’ and colleges and big business) it came with a lot of strings. I don’t recall where I saw it first, but I shared with a friend the bit about these loans requiring “active” diversity measures for 5 years. She looked into it and all those requirements alone would ruin her. I’m all for getting what one can out of the ‘murrican carcass, but this really is poisoned bait.

  30. Sorry, ZMan, but it wasn’t Hitler who originated the “fool the people” aphorism. That saying can reliably be dated back to 1885 – too late for Lincoln but much too early for Hitler. The fact is you never have to fool all the people any of the time. The fact is you only have to fool enough of the people enough of the time to ensure that you STAY IN POWER! Because, in the final analysis, acquiring and keeping power is what it is really about. The state laws (at least in Texas) enabling the politicians to place us all on virtual house arrest are not new. The law in Texas dates back over FOURTY YEARS and I’d be surprised to find that the laws in other states are not equally old. The Texas law as passed before Texas went Republican. Now, I doubt that something like covid-19 was envisioned when those laws were passed. In fact I’d bet my house that what the legislators who voted for those laws were trying to prepare for was some sort of natural disaster such as a flood, tornado or hurricane. But I’d also bet my house that the legislatures which passed those laws were – one and all – dominated by DemonKKKRats. Tyranny and despotism has always been the domain of Democrats. Sure Republicans want power, as any politician does, but I believe that it is the nature of anyone who joins the Democrat party to seek ultimate power.

    Now let the tongue-clicking, castigation, name-calling and ad hominem attacks begin. I’m a big boy. Give me your best shot!

    • Yes, yes, we know. The DemonKKKrats have always been the REAL RACISTS, and the Republiturds the real FREEDOM LOVERS. Bam! Bam! BAM BAM BAM

        • I just hope he’ll take the hint and stop emasculating his comments with the underwhelming use of bold type, juvenile level references to “demonKKKrats,” and that sort of thing. Hell, I can read the comments under “Daily Signal/Heritage Foundation” articles and get that. In spades. I rightly expect better at the Z-Man.

          One can be right without appearing juvenile and stupid at the same time.

  31. It seems like our business leaders have learned a lot from the Chinese. Amazon stealing data to develop competing products isn’t quite the same thing as blatant IP theft, but it’s not far off. You didn’t mention this, Z, but here’s another bit of news related to corona that might interest everyone: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hunger-could-be-next-big-impact-of-coronavirus-pandemic
    I’ve been reading a lot of Africa-based news recently, and the supply chains there are stretched in the best of times. The 2010s migrant crisis in Europe was based on a few million migrants. Just imagine what could happen if 130 million Africans, Haitians, and Bangladeshis suddenly lose their food and some of them decide to start walking.

    • Hundreds of millions of Africans rolling into Europe all at once has been on the front page of the globalist agenda for a generation.
      There is nothing accidental about any of the economic destruction, and the consequences that will inevitably follow. The guys at the top wanted a total global reset, and they’re getting it.
      It’s Christmas time for GloboHomo, Inc.

  32. Got a phone call from my manager saying he was optimistic we would be back into the office on April 4 and could discontinue work from home.

    Came in this morning and The Wicked Witch of the North extended the stay at home order to April 15th. But we can use motorboats now, so it’s relaxed or something. The “Science!” is in, and the lockdowns are useless, but that doesn’t matter. It never did.

    This is the beginning of the 20 year rule by petty tyrants before the system begins to visibly collapse. All China has to do is stay relatively stable and wait it out, then buy everything. We will be a conquered people ruled by foreigners, while bragging we have the most expensive military in the world.

    • It is starting to look like China is the big winner here. Their leadership must be laughing their asses off at western stupidity.

      All the talk about the need to move production away from China is just that – talk. It’s not going to happen in any substantial way. At most, western capital/owners will be slowly removed from the equation.

  33. “ Adolf Hitler said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

    I don’t care how clever and insightful Hitler appears with this quote. Hitler was easily the most evil man who ever lived. A monster who led a brutal army to slaughter 6 million innocent Jews. I’m sure the author could have used a more appropriate quotation.

  34. “This is where the aphorism breaks down. People seem to be quite happy being fooled on a regular basis.”

    This is a sentiment conservatives, paleocons and libertarians have experienced for decades, captured best in the meme of the libertarian megaphoning a brick wall (“how libertarians see themselves.”)

    Viewed as a close-up selfie, it depicts the rationalist as a lone hero bravely speaking truth, frustrated by the very nature of his listeners. Do they just not want to understand, or are they unable to?

    Through a wider-angle lens, however, shouting at a brick wall isn’t brave, it’s just crazy – and a waste of time.

    If normies are truly a brick wall, impervious to rational or rhetorical persuasion, there’s not much use in yelling at them – or in actively participating in a society that grants their votes equal weight with those of the proud rational minority.

    Those in Our Thing still seeking to play majoritarian politics to win – to co-opt the system rather than monkey-wrenching it – need to tell us what magic words they’ve recently discovered to finally blow the wall down and open the minds of the 70% we’ve designated as hopeless rubes b/c lockdown response.

    Absent those magic words, electoral politics = storming Lincoln’s Siegfried Line outnumbered 7 to 3.

    Ask any strategist what our odds are in that scenario.

    • Well, one has three basic choices. Try to change the thinking of the majority, throw sand in the works, or bail out and leave. Or some combination of the three. It goes back to the idea that sometimes there is no good answer, and only the least bad one.

      I suppose there is a fourth choice, which seems to be my choice, right now, by default. That is, to sit back, watch it all happen, and simply marvel at the insipidity of humans. They take a politically oriented opinion on something, beat it into the ground, and close off any input that might shift their thinking, even a bit, because being “correct” is more important than being right.

      I am now the guy on the far end barstool late at night, sleepy and half drunk, watching the clapped out dog-faced women turn into tens in the eyes of some of the remaining guys, while the rest of them fight it out, outside, over meaningless slights and small differences of opinion. Bartender, one more whisky, neat, as closing time is almost here. One last drink, before we all hit the road, sir.

      • Sitting back and not acting is not necessarily The same as doing nothing.

        It’s pretty clear we’ve lost the initial PR war on this thing, and if there is one thing people hate, it’s admitting they were wrong. The whitepill is that GloboHomo has overreacted so badly that the coming months and years will open up significant opportunities for us.

        To Exile’s point, the Siegfried Line of 1917 gave way to the maneuver warfare of 1918.

        • Great reference Meme…a return to mobility. Although I believe you’re referring to the Hindenburg line. Siegfried was circa WWII

      • Dutch I’m still up for peeling off some useful members of the majority with determined messaging. As for sitting back and watching things play out, Taleb has some good advice in “Anti-Fragile” about the virtues of procrastination, non-intervention and picking your battles patiently.

    • Ex – This is a critical point. Normies are sheep, and will follow whoever they feel is a winner. We have to play the smart, long game. Better to invest resources in our movement rather than throw everything into convincing people who will be re-convinced by something else tomorrow.

      Z has pointed out many good strategies – different conferences to attend, building communities, pushing for freedom of association, gun rights, getting involved in political campaigns to find like-minded insiders, etc.

      IMO the single biggest thing we can do is to create strong male friendships and spend time together away from women. Organizing flows naturally from there.

      • Chad, +1 on all of that. We have to cast a wide net, sort for quality over quantity and work a lot of side-angles while playing a long game. I’m sour on the 2016-take-back-America approach that a lot of us still sound like we’re invested in. Electoral politics is situationally useful, particularly on a local scale, more to throw sand in the Empire’s gears than to implement an overt agenda.

        • Yes, the culture wars are simply part of the cultural-political terrain to use to our advantage. Have to maintain the wide-lens frame…

        • It seems the Empire is dead-set on committing suicide in a titanic orgy of virtue-signaling.

          We never had the power to destroy it, but if they do the job for us…

      • “IMO the single biggest thing we can do is to create strong male friendships and spend time together away from women. Organizing flows naturally from there.”

        Maybe you should become a Freemason. If you don’t live way out in the boondocks, there’s probably a Mason’s lodge near you. The Masons are eager to recruit non-geriatric new members.

  35. The Elites and the Dems are not “hoping” for economic devastation, they’ve done it; and gotten immensely richer doing so.

    The message is clear; THEY HAVE THE POWER. They do, we complied.

    You don’t have to fool anyone if they comply. Its the difference between Trotsky and the Tudors; Trotsky demands you believe, the Tudors demand only loyalty.

    The child may say the Emperor has no clothes, it matters not if the adults comply. We did.

    I suspect we’ll comply in November as well, and it matters not as Trump now complies.

      • The globalists brought him to heel, didn’t they? To the point that he’s now criticizing that Georgia governor for showing some common sense by restoring some liberty.. No matter what Trump does from this point on, he caved and set a tyrannical precedent, confirming that the original purpose and spirit of this country is no more. The Chinese must be salivating over the prospect of releasing the next germ next winter.

        • Fauci, Birx, CDC talking head, Cuomo and Newsome are leading the country now. Trump backhands Governor Kemp over his plan to reopen small business with caution. Big part of that is obvious, Trump holds it against Kemp that he didn’t go with his choice for the vacant senate in Georgia. By doing that and continually quoting the discredited study of millions of deaths, Trump hurts the cause of Covid sanity.

    • My wife, not as red pilled as me – salmon pilled? But she gets it. Anyway, she said her biggest surprise in all this was how people were so eager to surrender their freedom, and attack her when she suggested, essentially, that tyranny is a bad thing, and freedom is worth defending. What could I tell her? America died some time ago. It took Coronaburger to make it undeniably obvious.

  36. Adolf Hitler said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

    Uh, no he did not say this.

    Abe Lincoln said it.
    And ZMAN knows that.
    So either he wished to see if anybody picked up on his “mistake,” or he is strongly suggesting Abe engaged in policies that were detrimental to individual liberties, like tossing political opponents of the Civil War into the pokey – which he did.

    And Woodrow Wilson did likewise during WWI.

    • Ah, Mr Tyler? There is absolutely ZERO evidence of Lincoln saying that. The earliest appearance of the saying dates to 1885 – TWO DECADES after Lincoln was assassinated.

    • The War of Northern Progression and Lincoln’s America as a Second Founding, the modern Empire vs. antebellum Republic are all pretty common themes here. Sam Francis & Pat Buchanan are good company to keep.

  37. “ Then again, prior hoaxes and panics have been cost free. People could enjoy them from the comfort of home and still go outside and keep their job. This time, there will be a real cost to this elaborate morality tale. Maybe this time is different.”

    ———-

    It absolutely is. In days past, the people had to get past the propaganda before they went after Hitler. Now that the mass media doesn’t work anymore, and Baghdad Bob has more credibility than CNN… anything can happen now that unsavoury dissidents and hate/crime thinkers can take centre stage right from their own homes. People forget that Hillary was supposed to win the last election.

    And…”this isn’t fun anymore”? Oh man… this thing hasn’t even started yet. When the foreclosures start, and the suicides… bankers and politicos will jump out the windows rather than take chances with the mob.

    Have a great day everyone!!!😉👍

  38. I can’t believe people don’t understand how bad this is. They thought it would be a 2 week vacation, now they think it’ll be a V shaped recession. Life in the abattoir, driven down the chute.

    Weirdest part is I’m optimistic about the other side of this, but more than a few in my small life still saying I’m crazy, pessimistic, etc. It’s like they want this misery so they can be put out of it. Twilight Zone!

    • If I was a cynic, I’d almost think the dirt people were being put in their place by the cloud people. I read awhile back before the “Panic” that real growth in wages for 2018 was looking to be 3.5%. Now that’s gone and as punishment for improper voting, their jobs are taken away as well.

      • I’ve never been more aware of narrative’s role in statecraft, because the movie isn’t convincing anymore. That’s how you know it’s going to end, if that makes any sense.

        When did it start? I want to say the first black president was too much. Some people took it to mean anything was possible, others called BS and checked out. Either way people were really saying they’d lost faith. It’s amazing how important that is. Maybe other people take the jackboot, but you need to capture white’s imaginations to keep us in line. Thousands of European winters made us too hard to subjugate by force but averse to boredom. At least that’s my working theory.

        • When the Lightbringer was first elected, I took the “OK, let’s see what you got” attitude. We got anger, petulance, a guy who couldn’t keep up and masked it with constant acts of self-congratulations, and a guy who couldn’t go off the TelePrompTer and utter a clear sentence. Which, in and of itself, didn’t indicate that it was over. The fact that people defended and ignored all of this stuff, and pretended everything was better than ever, that’s what told me it was all over.

          • I think it was the beginning of the end. Obama broke the American narrative, and he knew it. Hope and change and all of that. Dumbass thought he was an historical figure, really people didn’t know how to behave with a black guy having that much power. It broke the spell.

  39. “Adolf Hitler said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.””

    I not a historian of aphorisms, but I feel like I’m being trolled.

    • Pol Pot was never wiser than when he said, Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what every man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

    • It’s just assumed we sophisticates know it’s Yogi Berra although some crackpot historians have attributed it to Barnum.

      • Oh, no, I’m pretty sure it was Czar Nicholas II. Though admittedly I often confuse him and Scott Baio.

  40. Was having a discussion with someone yesterday. He said they would rather the “bad economy” (those are the actual words used) than catching the virus. Something about having underlying health conditions. Careful what you wish for I suppose.

    • It’s all about him and the heck with everyone else. So quarantine himself.

      Is he on Social Security?

        • I wondered if he might not care about massive layoffs because he had his Social Security. Still, quarantine himself if he has a medical condition.

    • Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. Let those people go. They’re getting what they want and deserve.

    • In a free country, somebody like that could stay home, social distance, blah, blah, blah.

      In an unfree country, everyone would be forced to do it.

    • It’s not a “bad economy.” Such ambiguity insulates people from reality. It’s bread lines, riots, supply chain collapse, hunger, etc. I hate this dichotomy that it’s either “save lives” or “make money.” For some reason, most people find it appealing.

    • This is amazing. A former governor (Christie) was pilloried because of some relatively minor antics by underlings on the George Washington Bridge. The current one (Murphy) struts about like a caudillo and seems not to get any pushback. What a mistake I made for not getting out of NJ earlier!

      • Murphy, while bad, can’t hold a candle to Cuomo or Newsom.
        Cuomo is acting like Mussolini, and loving every minute of it.
        He wants this lockdown to go on indefinitely. If it goes on another month, you will see a mass exodus out of NYC of thousands of small business owners, restaurant owners in particular.
        Newsom solemnly proclaimed yesterday was California’s worst day because little more than 100 people died of Covid, out of a total population of 40 million.
        Both of those clowns are pathetic. They hope if they can stretch this out as long as possible, the federal dollars will keep flowing and they can bail out their own cooked books.
        Rotten to the core.

        • subway ridership is only 5% of normal; the video feeds of major streets like Broadway show that they are still devoid of traffic. I had wanted to go into Manhattan for a look-see, but I don’t think I’ll do that anymore.

      • Well, there’s the rally on the 28th at Trenton. Doubt it’ll change much, but at this point, it’s the principle of the thing.

        Wife and I are moving to a red state as soon as we can. After a few years of working in our fields, we’d like to start a business. Not doing that here in NJ.

    • Are there any bad people (rapists, child predators, murderers, … misogynists, etc.) dying of COVID-19 in NJ? Or NY, for that matter? I ask because every time I watch one of these videos of your Guv (or the POTUS) giving the daily rundown on infections and deaths in the state, I note that, over and over and over again, the words “every life lost is a precious life lost” are uttered incessantly. I must therefore conclude that either the virus preys exclusively on good men and women, or, alternatively, NJ as a state has an uncommon (and inhuman) allotment of good men and women.

  42. One of the nice things about living out west is we don’t have a full lockdown. For example, as I’m in South Dakota at the moment I was able to get a very good haircut. The bars and restaurants are closed for eating inside but almost all are doing curbside.

    The only major breakout in SD is the Souix Falls Meat Packing 3rd world refugee camp.

    Few people vote but I can understant the frequent futility, but voting with your feet is effective.

    I remember the counter when people told Libertarians to move to stateless Somalia was statists should move to North Korea. They were often from NY or CA. They should move to NK so they could whine louder about statism.

    I’m so glad I’m not in Michigan…

      • When the CDC report on Smithfield in Sioux Falls was released yesterday, one of the first areas highlighted in the news was that the outbreak spread because over 40 languages are spoken by plant employees and many of them don’t understand any English. Reviewing local media this morning that has mostly been scrubbed from reports as it might lead some ordinary citizens to conclude diversity is not a strength. The link below comes the closest to still reporting it. The big surprise was that the second death among employees was a white American. His obit showed a picture of him with an American Flag shirt and said he loved throwing a big party every year for the 4th of July.

        Lack of social distancing among Horn of Africa refugee employees is spreading the virus outside the plant. The state of South Dakota is not releasing any racial breakdown on positive cases, which would be very interesting for those of us who live here. Although the active case count has been decreasing in the state for several days, it is starting to get into nursing homes which may cause another spike.

        https://www.dakotanewsnow.com/content/news/CDC-ISSUES-SMITHFIELD-FOODS-REPORT-569906911.html

        • I figured it was Smithfield, a Chinese-owned FDI conglomerate.

          Some would ban porn, some abortion-
          I’d ban foreign direct investment.

    • Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, and her handling of this entire mess have been hugely impressive to me.

      She has conducted herself as an honest-to-God leader in complete contrast to the simps and cucks in NY, MI, and DC.

      I grew up in Michigan, and I feel bad for my family and friends that are still there. I can tell you Whitmer is not that exceptional. Michigan has always been filled with crazy, unattractive, shrieking harpies.

      • She is only been impressive compared to others like Whitmer, I wouldn’t say she has been good. At least she has recognized there are limits to what the government should be doing to control people’s lives. Noem resisted calls to implement a shelter in place for the entire state, but if the case count had been much higher she would have done it. A dirt race track in the southeast corner of the state wanted to hold races with spectators tomorrow night, they limited sales to 700(capacity is over 4,000) and made the event cashless to ensure social distancing guidelines could be met. Noem told people not to go and put pressure on them behind the scenes to not allow the fans. They caved and are running it as a pay per view event only.

        She has been better at most through this event, but I still don’t trust her based on her time in Congress when she weak on immigration citing the needs of farmers getting temp labor. She also spent the 2016 Presidential Primary acting as a Rubio surrogate in Iowa. Better than most is probably the best we can do these days.

        • She is a victim (just as the rest of us are) of the legal community being able to personally and financially destroy her if she gets it wrong. We are all now prisoner to the liability of 20/20 hindsight, and to the nurturing of mercenaries who are able to make a living exploiting that. In a situation with fundamental and consequential unknowns, the decision-making process instinctively errs hard on the side of being careful rather than being bold.

  43. I wish I shared Z’s optimism, but I don’t think the lockdowns are going away anytime soon.

    People are convinced that enduring this makes them some sort of hero, and anyone who says otherwise is a heretic. They interpret the low death rate as evidence of the lives they’ve saved (flawed models be damned).

    The rule of the Karen and the Cuck isn’t done yet.

        • There’s a blogger out there by the name of Aesop currently defending the asshattery of this fake pandemic. Apparently he’s a male nurse in California and – he is the personification of the cuck.

          And the “Karens”… yesterday one of the wanks on Blab posted a link to an article where all the RN’s were sanctimoniously scolding lockdown protestors – and the fags in the media were praising them for all their courage in doing so. The people were about to lose their jobs, or homes and livlihoods – and the journalist painted them as mouth-breathing morons. Not once did he even think of asking how we are going to run our hospitals when half the tax payers are unemployed….

          • I used to read Aesop, because I found his direct experience in the military and front-line nursing to be credible. I also liked his attitude. But I just can’t handle his all-in fanaticism lately.

            1

    • The lockdowns end when enough states have passed mail-in-only voting to ensure the Dem win. The six state Blue Wall pact – MN, WI, MI, etc. should be enough,

      • This lines up with my contention that if the Dems manage to take the White House in November we’ll never hear from Corona-chan again.

        • Why not? 9/11 has been milked for years and that was nothing compared to this. No matter who wins the next election, they will keep using the virus to justify anything they want to push

      • I’m going to a protest in the next few days, but honestly, I suspect nothing will come of it. We need a [redacted], at this point.

        • And I don’t mean violence. Many people seem to think that’s a necessity, but violence is a losing proposition.

          • You just told the people who want to exterminate you that they can do anything they want to you, and you will never fight back.

            Don’t think they haven’t been listening.

            Part of the calculation that went into this planned takedown of society using the virus was that the sheep would never fight back.

            1

      • M.B. I think you nailed it. From all indications, the powers-that-be plan to drag out this lockdown mode as long as possible. As Michelle Obama has already championed an all mail in election. In 2018 my sister’s GOP absentee ballot was tossed out because “signatures didn’t match”. She has a very consistent signature but this was infamous Broward County, Florida. With the two major races very down to wire close, the officials in Broward did their best to steal it but failed this time. A mail-in election is rife for corruption.

    • MemeWarVet,
      The hero thing is worst. When a soldier jumps on a grenade to save the other men in his squad, he’s a hero. When a nurse fills out paperwork and takes people’s blood pressure, she’s not a hero. But our crazy society tells her she is.

      Then we have “frontline” workers which apparently even includes grocery store employees. So, the bag boy is the equivalent of a combat infantryman.

      • Every day I have to work with these nurses who are being told over and over again that they are heros. I’ll clue you folks in on something: they are not. I’ll grant an exception to NICU nurses, but the rest of them are just normal people doing their jobs–some well, some very well, some not so well. In other words, they’re just like the rest of us. But unlike the rest of us, they have (just like teachers) a huge PR machine behind them.

        • When you make everyone a hero, no one is a hero. And perhaps that’s really the reason for this dumbing down of “heroism”. Equality—first, last and always.

        • Note that the two most Female dominated professions have been placed on a pedestal. There is no end to the female quest for attention.

        • My wife is a nurse on the “frontlines”, and the amount of bitching I have seen behind the scenes about what they have to do dispelled me from the hero storyline.

      • As Syndrome said in that marvelous movie, “The Incredibles” . . . when everyone’s super, no one is.

        This is another aspect of our society’s feminization. We mothers squeal with delight when very small children do the most mundane things. It’s hardwired in us, and lays the groundwork for the child to have confidence in himself and taking on harder tasks. So here we are, both men and women squealing with that same maternal enthusiasm as people do their everyday jobs, turning them into “heroes” (another lovely word in the English language that has now lost all meaning). It would be laughed at in a sane, more-balanced-toward-the- masculine world. But we don’t live there anymore. I surely do miss it.

        • Eldest son sent me pictures a couple days ago of banners posted up all around the McAlester Regional Hospital bearing the words, “Heroes Work Here.” As I’m sure you know, McAlester is in Pittsburg Co. Pittsburg Co. (the whole county) has, as of yesterday, reported a grand total of twenty (20) “confirmed” cases of COVID-19.

          • Although I wish I could blame it on the Gene Stipe mafia, T, as I do everything else in Pittsburg Co. and a 100-mile radius, this one belongs to the globalists. But the Prince of Darkness would have gloried in the current raw exercise of state power, although he preferred to work his black magic behind the scenes.

          • My wife is an NP with 20 yrs experience in cardiology. She , along with a hundred others, was furloughed this past Wednesday.

            There are no patients in the hospital, no patients in the clinics, no revenue being generated however any available space that could be converted to an ICU has been – all for the surge in covid patients.

            Wait for surge patients but furlough direct patient care workers? …bit of a conundrum

            at least the director of marketing and his team wasn’t furloughed…

          • At my hospital they’ve begun to talk about how they are going to take care of the backlog of surgeries once they open up again. They think we’re going to be willing to give up our very brief Montana summer to work extra weekends.

          • Where you located in MT Brother you have probably told me before but I forgot? Anywhere close to the Bitterroot?

          • My husband was furloughed on Thursday from a major hospital here. He works in the budget, finance and supply department. But as you say, the hospitals are sitting empty, starved of revenue. They have invested 20 million dollars in preparation for Covid 19.

        • Vikings,

          “It would be laughed at in a sane, more-balanced-toward-the- masculine world”

          My crew of “essential” men simply kept working, albeit with cracked hands from excessive purell usage. Big whoop. Men work. The boss made sure to email all that the secretarial staff working from home were “heroes ™” all! (of course their titles don’t reflect secretarial work because yuck that’s demeaning.. their title is akin to “Operations Goddesses”).

          A few years ago I got hurt OTJ and while my stitches were healing I was assigned to help these gals so i got a peak behind the curtain. Look, they are all really nice, but it’s the usual spread of 10% getting 90% of the work done while the other 90% pad the clock to make their 10% of the work stretch 8 hours. So I imagine that 8 hour work day looks about like 1.5 hours during the time of the great telecommuting. But heroes all!

          So to add depth to your statement, my crew had a good laugh at the email, yes. But quietly, we know where we stand. As you said. “…we don’t live there anymore.”

          • “Heroes ™”. May I use that, PM? Yes, you real men will stoically keep on keepin’ on, and you have my sincerest admiration.

            The Hysteria has provided a splendid opportunity for even more dumbing down, this time of what a “hero” is. I am going to put the word in cold storage for awhile. My own little language cryogenics lab, if you will. Maybe it can be resuscitated later and returned to its former glory.

        • True but also not a recent development. For years now, we’ve had “heroic battles against cancer”, regardless of whether the patient recovers or not.

          Similarly, we have “sexual abuse SURVIVORS”. As if people die from being groped.

          It’s a pattern of hyperbolic language inflation. It may be partly driven by the desire to open up the purse strings but, for me, it is also symptomatic of a deeper need for real heroism in a world that has become safe, mundane and risk-averse.

      • Federalist-I’ve always been dismayed by the lack of public outrage by veterans toward all the frauds who compare their plight to that of someone who was blown apart in a war.
        Someone needs to tell these people to STFU.

      • Damn straight. I would feel embarrassed if I were a health care worker hearing this BS. Hell, I was on the receiving end of this adulation when I served in the Air Force. I was an REMF, POG, fobbit desk pilot and was very uncomfortable being labeled some sort of hero by strangers. Hated it to be honest.

    • It’s all very gloomy and tiring but there are some real positives coming out of this that I think we should all take a look at every now and then.

      Hollywood is being destroyed, as is professional sports, the University’s, newspapers and hopefully it will extend to all of the media. This is good.

      • I’m not so sure about sports.

        Normie cucks are utterly tumescent with regard to the upcoming NFL Draft and discussing which illiterate negro will be selected by their sportsball team.

    • Republican politicians need to open the economy up in a controlled way as soon as possible.

      There is no sense in waiting because the media will always be able to put some Branch Covidian on the 6 o’clock news to shriek about how gramma would still be alive if only we’d locked down another two weeks.

        • Actually, the software used to read the images is now pretty good. Even a mask won’t assure anonymity. Your walk (gate) has been shown to be a fairly accurate identifier for example. And then there are the number (most?) of individuals who carry around electronic signal markers in the form of a cell phone.

          • The Bezosians are collecting as much data about Earthlings as possible before they realize what has happened.

          • I agree about a person’s “gait” being unique to them, sort of like a fingerprint. That’s how you can recognize a friend walking on a crowded sidewalk ahead of you. Also, different groups, economic, racial etc. walk differently. I notice this in the bad parts of town. The people there aren’t in any hurry to get to work, it seems, so they sort of slog along in the middle of the deserted road. I actually observed this myself on James Brown Blvd in Augusta GA a couple of years ago, when I made a wrong turn. See? Scientific evidence can save your life!

    • I wish I shared Z’s optimism, but I don’t think the lockdowns are going away anytime soon.

      It seems to me the lockdown policy is deliberately designed to draw out this pandemic as long as possible. The sensible solution would have been the Swedish model: lock up the geezers and take the bullet face-first, get it over with.

      They want an excuse to prolong this until they’ve broken the economy irrevocably.

        • It’s not just about that. Most of the rest of the world couldn’t care less about Trump, but they’re on the Corona train as well. This is about crashing the world economy and consigning every country in the Western hemisphere to debt slavery.

          That way, they can “save” us by pulling the plug on the dollar hegemony, allowing a debt jubilee and replace the dollar with a digital currency, allowing them to monitor every single transaction.

          #AlexJonesWasWrong, he wasn’t paranoid enough.

    • Here in the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts – Baker the faker has already announced that schools are closed until June 29, and so are the daycares.

      So that means that anybody who has kids below an age when they can stay home by themselves – is “locked down” whether everything else is open or not.

      • All those mothers with young kids should be home with them. And another tiny point of light in the current darkness – it’s shown how utterly unimportant most ‘working’ women are to our economy. The lights are on and the water is still running. I know who’s behind that, and it ain’t wahmen.

        • “Should be” and “can” live in two different worlds.

          “Should be” will start gaining real power when we shitcan the empire and all of it’s costs, negroes on welfare, corporate bailouts for ((businesses)), foreign aid, importing massive amounts of H1B workers……. etc.

          Maybe when one person can support a family again – you can start seriously using the term “should be” – until then – it’s a pipedream for the vast majority of people.

          • C, you make excellent points that I, too, have made forever. The fact that the dollar is now worth 3 cents, as compared to its worth of a dollar in 1913 when the evil Fed came into being, is a big factor. And this latest infusion of billions and billions so that people can virtue-signal with face masks will send the dollars value even lower. However, staying at home can still can be done on one paycheck at a certain level of pay, if one is willing to eschew new cars, 3000 sq. ft. houses, vacations, and all the other trappings of keeping up with the Joneses. I know, because I did it. Lived in below par rent houses, drove old cars, made do with clothes I had had for many years and latched on to my husband’s sweatshirts he didn’t want anymore. I don’t want a medal. I’m just saying it can be done.

        • Amen, 3g. Do you suppose any of those moms will find it so wonderful that they will make staying home with their children permanent?

    • The lockdowns are a wet dream for the Karens and the Cucks (good phrase by the way). They combine hysteria, drama, listening to deceitful experts, scientism and virtue signaling.

  44. Adolf Hitler said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

    I thought that was Lincoln. Wait! On second thought Lincoln’s version was something along the lines of pleasing people all the time, some of the time, and whatnot, not of fooling. Yes, yes, it’s all coming back to me now. 🙂

    Well, anyway, I should imagine, as you say, that we’ll begin to feel the real effects of the shutdown during the summer months. The effects of these sorts of things are always delayed in coming, as with the shortest days of the year vs the coldest days/the longest days of the year vs the hottest. Etc.

    • It’ll all come down to how fast we can restart the economy.

      What blows me away is this: how did we get suckered by this? Hells bells, any self respecting dissident saw the scare for the pant load it was right from the beginning. It couldn’t have been more obvious. Our own esteemed blog host called it right on the money… and yet the herd thundered off in a panic, taking our economy and prosperity with it.

      Perhaps it is indicative of how much work we have to do in getting the normies and general public to take uthe dissidents more seriously…

      • If they comply who cares what they believe? We are ruled now by Progressive Tudors, not Trots.

        Trotsky demands your soul, the Tudor only your loyalty.

        We may think of 2016 as our Pilgrimage of Grace, we have the outcome.

        As I remain me I say this; The Price of Peace is Slavery.

        As we can see a price all paid without resistance.

        FIN.

      • You are correct. The Z man has been a rare consistent voice on this subject. I am amazed at alternate blogs who caved and even promoted the hoax and panic. No worries, the circus handlers have the tools ready for distraction, as we see with NFL virtual draft.

        • As has been noted before, those folk who have complied and promoted the hoax have revealed themselves and in such abdicated their claim to leadership of the movement. Distance yourself accordingly. Don’t fall for the Gell-Mann paradox.

        • And RamZPaul
          And Ann Coulter
          And Kevin Michael Grace ( support him @KMGVctoria )
          And Joseph Pual Watson
          And Roosh
          And – deep breath – VoxDay
          And – another deep breath – Cernovich
          And…

          • Am I the only one I am starting to wonder of Beijing is paying Ron Unz to promote the Washington-not China-hatched-the-plague party line?

            I have long wondered if Mr. Unz was wealthy enough to pay for unz.com forever out of his own pocket. Mr. Unz never asks for donations. Note that unz.com carries no advertising or products for sale. Compare Unz’s indifference to expenses to Z man, who continuously asks for $5 donations.

            One has to wonder if Ron Unz is operating unz.com solely because of his fondness for heterodox opinions. Other possibilities are possible: that unz.com is an outlet for Russian disinformation, or that the FBI or the Anti Defamation League uses unz.com to identify to gather a list of those deemed to be anti-Semites.

      • What do you mean “how did we get suckered by this”? I kid. But it is worth noting that 80% – 90% of the people in the comments were skeptical of the lockdowns the day they were announced.

        Outside of our bubble there was a very interesting dynamic, the smarter the individual, the more they believed the models. [Anecdote Alert] Early in the lockdown I had a discussion with an acquaintance (PHD in Biology, speaks three languages, credentialed out the wazoo . . .), and this person was completely and totally invested in the models and 3% mortality rate. When I pointed out that you could not trust the underlying data from China, Italy, the CDC, etc…, this person went into shutdown mode.

        I noticed a similar reaction from doctors, engineers, and other intelligent individuals, the model was all that mattered, questioning the underlying data was stupid, irrelevant, and dangerous.

        It’s been enlightening and blackpilling.

        • As stated many times here before, this crisis separated the sheep from the rams, and it turns out there are far fewer rams in the dissident right than I previously suspected.
          Sailer knows the gig is up but can’t quite bring himself to climb down the ladder back to earth.
          Many other lesser lights of the DR are still carrying the torch for the viral apocalypse.
          Sad!

          • Sailer is in a pinch because his boss is still on the, “tens of millions dead, bodies stacked like cordwood, just wait!” train.

            As a result, comment volumes at iSteve have dropped noticeably.

        • Uh, any supposedly intelligent person that doesn’t question the underlying data isn’t all that intelligent.

        • I’d bet you a dollar to a donut that not one of the folks you speak of could name the source of the “model”, nor write down the equation it subsumed. That I would call indicative of more belief in the realm of “faith” than “science”.

        • Back in early February my niece was going on a trip with her marine scout troop, and her mother asked another parent, who was a doctor, what to make of this Corona-thing. To her great surprise, he used exactly the same terms as Crazy Uncle Felix: “It’s a scam” – even employing the English term as I’d done.

          She’d expected “not as bad as all that” or “this is overblown” or “this is just the flu”, but no: he believed it was a scam.

        • The models discussed by the so-called Big Brains focus only on the coronavirus. I am unaware of any model that integrates the coronavirus models with any economic model. Basically, this appears to be a case of extreme coronavirus OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder).

          That being said, here is a simple equation to possibly give perspective.
          (Increased U.S. federal spending) divided by (saved lives) = (Cost per saved life)

          A very rough and low ball estimate is $3 trillion / 2 million lives = $1.5 million per life saved.

          Now $3 trillion is probably grossly understated since it does not consider additional state and local government spending, lost output, economic dislocations, financial instabilities and damaged personal lives. The 2 million lives saved comes from the Imperial College London Model (one source of the current panic) and is probably way overstated since it assumed zero public health measures and other questionable factors.

        • Aye.

          Spencer (with his Mcspencer group) and Hunter Wallace are dead to me now.

          The adds to the list of other fools like Vox Day I stopped reading two years ago for his increasing vapid cheerleading

          The 2016 alt right movement has been totally demolished during the Trump years.

          • The AltRight didn’t have to fall apart, even after Charlottesville.

            There were huge mistakes made after that (the TN cringe March, the Cuckbox, the doxing of St. Ricky) that really completed the self-immolation.

            Some of us learned from our mistakes, some didn’t. Opportunity is knocking again.

          • Some of us learned from our mistakes, some didn’t. Opportunity is knocking again.

            “Wise people learn when they can; fools learn when they must.”
            — The Duke of Wellington

        • You and Oliver and anyone else who gave this comment an upvote are fools. You obviously have no screening criteria for the blogs you are reading. Zman is not the only independent thinker out there.

          Why don’t you go write a cheque to Candace Owens?

    • Misattributing quotes can be a lot of fun. My favorite one recently was a guy got a bunch of progressive SJWs to cheer a bunch of Adolf Hitler quotes attributed to FDR and Obama.

        • Don’t feel bad. Even Rick Sanchez, the evil genius of the Rick and Morty animation (thinly veiled social commentary) combined the genes of Lincoln and Hitler to create Abradolf Linkler. So it’s not like the juxtaposition has no basis in reality. I mean, why suspend habeas corpus or build concentration camps when the sheeple will maintain their own house arrest?

          • All the politicians pretend to love Lincoln. He was clearly the worst president of the US ever and nobody else even comes close. The guy oversaw the slaughter of over 600,000 Americans at a time when the total us population was less than a 10th of what it is today, not to mention the wholesale destruction of the South. He financed the war by printing the money and suspended the Constitution! Hell, why wouldn’t he be a favorite?

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