The Time Of The Golden Agers

Major social events are often a lot like moving furniture around the house. Moving the bookcase from one side of the room to the other is a mundane task. What you find behind it, however, can be quite interesting. Sometimes you find something you searched high and low for at some point. Other times you find something that you never knew was missing. Maybe just moving things around a bit gives you a new perspective on your living space that leads to other changes in your environment.

That’s how big social events feel sometimes. The event itself is not as important as what it reveals. Maybe you find out your neighbor is a bit of kook, who quietly has been stocking the basement with dried food and ammunition. Maybe we learn that the local government is more useless than anyone imagined possible. The Chinese pandemic is one of those events that will be more important for what it reveals than for the impact of the virus itself, unless you die from it, of course.

For example, we are getting a glimpse of what the great Baby Boomer retirement is going to look like in the coming decade. If we execute all of the people, who like debating the precise dates of generational divisions, we can agree that the cohort in question is roughly those who came of age in the late 1960’s and the late 1970’s. Two waves of the post-war baby boom. Right now, the number of elderly people grows by an average of 2.8 percent annually. It will peak at about 80 million.

For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, Baby Boomers have driven American politics. In the 80’s, they wanted to make money, so we financialized the economy and gave everyone a 401K. In the 1990’s, better schools were all the rage then better access to college. Health care became an issue, first because Boomer parents were getting old then when the Boomers themselves got old. Cheap health insurance was the most important political issue until now.

Notice that Bernie Sanders promising free health care got no senior support. The reason is seniors have Medicare. Blacks have Medicaid. The only people who care about health insurance premiums are younger white people and no one cares about them anymore. In fact, Bernie’s Medicare for all probably scared the crap out of older people, who rightly assumed it would mean longer lines for them. Worse yet, it could mean taxing their retirement to pay for it.

This brings us back to the Chinese Flu. Otherwise sensible people like Greg Cochran and Steve Sailer are clanging the bell, trying to get people to declare a war on the Covid19 virus. What they are suggesting, short of some miracle cure or a vaccine, would require rearranging American society. It would need rounds of universal testing, mass quarantines and testing of every human crossing the border. North America would have to become something like North Korea, in terms of travel restrictions.

Keep in mind that polio is still around, despite generations of eradication efforts. We have vaccines for a lot of nasty viruses. For the most part, these have been eradicated in the West, but they still exist in the world. If stop vaccinating people, those viruses will reemerge in the West, which is why we remain vigilant. We have no vaccine for the Chinese Flu and no one is sure we can get one. In other words, eradicating this virus, without vaccine, will require a massive reorganization of society.

What we’re seeing is the first glimpse of what democracy looks like when 20% of the population is elderly. Baby Boomers have always voted for stuff they want and soon, they will want to be insulated from the dangers of old age. If it requires us to turn America into a hermit kingdom in order to prevent a Boomer Pox from getting loose, then that’s the price the younger generation must pay. The salient political issue of this decade will be how best to guard the old coots from the Grim Reaper.

Now, this is the part where angry oldsters stop reading and post a comment about how not all Boomers are like that. This is true. In fact, it is plausible that no Boomers are willing to crater society to get a few extra days. This is a variation on the Simpson’s paradox. That is, this trend is uncommon in small groups or individuals, but appears when looking at the cohort as a whole. This turned up with education, abortion and health care. The data says Boomers collectively vote their interest.

Now, there is another angle to this. The sorts of collective action proposed by people like Steve Sailer and Greg Cochran can only happen in a cohesive, high-trust country with lots of social capital. The sorts of communities where people like Cochran and Sailer grew up had those qualities. Modern America, in contrast, is a multicultural amalgamation of low-trust clusters. The store of social capital has been burned up a long time ago in order to have cheap stuff.

This raises the question as to whether this cohort will suddenly have a come to Jesus moment over demographics. Most of those Trump voters in comfort fit slacks, carrying over-sized constitutions to the rally, think we can get back to the way things were when they were kids. If you dispute this, look at the comment section of Breitbart or Conservative Treehouse. For those people, it is always 1985.

What happens when they find out that ain’t happening? Will it make any difference if the oldsters finally see their interest are threatened by the great brown wave that is washing over America? We’ll soon find out. This panic, and that what we are seeing, will change things far more than the virus. We’re about to learn just how much social capital is left and the answer is probably not going to be encouraging.

The fact is, all the snarky comments about the Boomers and the irreverent mocking of the Zoomers is not changing the reality on the ground. America has operated like a young country for a long time. It still does in many ways. It is an old country now, a country run by old people just coming to terms with their mortality. The psychological revolution in American culture that is upon us will make the past decade seem like golden age. Instead, it will be the prelude to the time of the Golden Agers.


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285 thoughts on “The Time Of The Golden Agers

  1. “For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, Baby Boomers have driven American politics.”

    Debatable, depends on how you define the squishy word “driven.” People forget that the so-called Greatest and Silent generations were in control of this country right up until the 1990s. Clinton was the first Boomer president. Same in the rest of the government, banking and industry.

  2. Just a really good post, making a series of really good points about the importance of community (thankfully I live in a very close and caring one), the BS about “Boomer Remover,” the necessity of ignoring the “mutants” who will inevitably reveal themselves, etc. Bonus points for “AWFL,” which is an expression I was not familiar with. How refreshing to read a sane, humorous take on the coming plague. Thanks Z-man, this brightened my day.

  3. [rant]
    Remember a couple of days back when ZMan wrote about “the stupid tax”? Well a whole bunch of us paid a huge penalty as a result of other people’s stupidity. After the Prez’s talk Wednesday evening a shed load of people around here (San Antonio, Tx) woke up scared shitless and promptly totally overloaded the system a regional Supermarket chain has to let people order groceries online and either pick it up themselves or have it delivered. I do such deliveries along with restaurant order-in similar to “Door Dash” or “Uber Eats”. Usually it’s a fairly easy 8 bucks (sometimes more with good tippers).The store person loads the groceries into my car and I just have to tote it to the customer’s front door. This morning the system was totally overloaded. Not enough store personnel to handle the backlog – by far! Normally I sit between 5 and 10 minutes then I’m on my way.

    This morning I hit the store parking lot and logged in as ready to load at 10:30. I FINALLY got loaded and was able to leave at 11:40 or ONE HOUR AND 10 MINUTES LATER!!! We’re all independent contractors so if we’re sitting waiting on a load were making zilch. The only reason I do it is because we need the money and I can’t can’t get a real job. It is only – marginally – profitable because I drive my wife’s Prius and get 55 – 60 mpg while being able to take the same mileage allowance from the IRS as the guy who parked beside me this morning who drives a V8 Ford F150 pickup. I spend less than $20/week on gasoline. But I make jack squat sitting in one place for over an hour.

    After the Prez’s speech apparently a whole lot of people around here decided to just throw up their hands and follow Vanderboegh’s Dictum

    When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!

    If the Dems and the MSM don’t get a grip soon they’re freaking well gonna bring down TEOTWAWKI on ALL our heads. And here I was kinda glad I probably wouldn’t live to vote in the 2028 or 2032 elections. Poxy bastards are trying so damned hard to bring down Trump they’re fekking well gonna bring the fekking ROOF down on ALL our heads. Dumbshites!! Dumber’n dried dog shit the lot of ’em! If brains were shit the lot of ’em TOGETHER couldn’t fertilize a single pinto bean.
    [/rant]

  4. Well folks, I just went to buy some fish for dinner. Holee f&*K. The lines are insane. People have two carts stuffed full of junk. Shelves cleared of flour, tuna, oatmeal, etc. We really don’t need anything, but if we do within the next few weeks it won’t be there. Just hope I can keep getting fresh fruits and vegetables. Like Zman, I think the panic is way over done. The problem is, of course, one of supply chain and hospital capacity. I only wish the problem was the mortality rate – the world needs a damned good culling.

    • 3g……The Wuhan panic has hit Cedar City. Yesterday a couple of the Utah Jazz tested up with the virus and the LDS Church has canceled General Conference beginning of next month. Well, not canceled. The conference talks will be staged with the 100,000 people audience canceled. Church all across the state canceled. Colleges, BYU and schools across Utah falling like dominoes.

      I get together with 5 gals for chick chat and games and my finger on the pulse of the Mormon world. Gotta keep an eye on these people. One of the gals just sent us a text that we should think about canceling the good times. I responded:

      “Am for continuing on with the get-together. If one of us is sick, we are responsible enough to stay home. Have lived through the polio scare of the 50s and multiple other mid-level pandemics. We had Ebola under Obama and barely a peep from the media. Something very snowflakey is happening with people and they are going nutty. And hoarding and starting to behave badly. Went to Smith’s today to pick up some yummy meat and it was packed with people standing in long lines all worried and grim. Paid for my yummy meat and thought…. Well crap.. I’m not gonna do this again. I’m more nervous about being near irrational people than I am the damn Wuhan coronavirus. So I am for marching on like a good Brit would have a century ago. (Politically incorrect today.) As for me, unless the Wuhan flu virus ravages Cedar City and people start dropping like flies, I’m going to continue to go out. Small groups. Keep a little distance. Use a little hand sanitizer. Spit twice and throw salt over my shoulder.  And keep a shrewd eye on my fellow citizens.”

  5. Z Man said: “Now, there is another angle to this. The sorts of collective action proposed by people like Steve Sailer and Greg Cochran can only happen in a cohesive, high-trust country with lots of social capital. The sorts of communities where people like Cochran and Sailer grew up had those qualities. Modern America, in contrast, is a multicultural amalgamation of low-trust clusters. The store of social capital has been burned up a long time ago in order to have cheap stuff.”
    This latest video by BlackPigeonSpeaks my not seem like it’s on topic, but it is. It’s entitled: ” The Broken INTERGENERATIONAL CONTRACT.”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh_s1pjFvMU

  6. God Market not pleased with the priesthood’s latest trillion dollar offering. If the cult fails completely it may be necessary to bring back inverted hanging as an appropriate reward.

  7. Question for Boomers:

    Does the average Boomer realize that their children disrespect and even hate them? Do they realize that the non-white hordes they let into their country also hate them? That being “nice” is not actually a positive attribute, but rather an admission of weakness?

    I just almost feel sad for them. But I think they’re oblivious. There is alot of venom for Boomers on here and in the world. Personally I think we’re all to blame, but I can see that Boomers do play an outsized role.

    That said we should still accept Boomers in our movement. One thing we need to do away with is artificial divisions between our people. Things like generations. I was moved by how united Muslim people were. Old and young communicate harmoniously; the young try to please their elders and the elders accept that some things have changed with time (but the core values have been passed on). We need to learn to accept that there will be differences between generations, but that young can learn from old, and old can learn from young, rather than bitching about Boomers or how bad the kids these days are. Same thing with urban vs. rural, white collar vs blue collar, rock fans vs country fans. It’s all bullshit and arbitrary.

    • UFO, I suspect you are a voice in the wind. This group to my perception seeks ideological purity and scapegoats more than inclusion and growth. There of course is a balance, but I’ve not sensed it here yet.

      PS, My children don’t hate me. If your’s do, I feel sorry for you. My children don’t necessarily agree with me, but they keep their mouths shut about it for the most part. The commandment is “Honor thy father and thy mother”, not “love” them. There is a reason for this. Children are a gift from God, there is often not much you can do but accept that which you are given.

      • I am the child, not the Boomer lol.

        As far as I can tell, the only members of my family worthy of respect are those born in the pre-war period. And the Zoomers have potential (sadly bluepilled for now). Just saying, if we do get our way we need to get rid of the generational bullshit and work as one large community like the Muslims do.

    • Muslim society is still held together primarily by religion, tradition, and tribal and family bonds. Ours is much more atomized and to the extent that anything holds it together at all, that thing is mass media, which has a decidedly (((divisive))) agenda. A lot of those things you mentioned such as generational divisions, sportsball, music preferences, etc.. are either entirely manufactured or exaggerated to keep people from seeing that the real divisions in society are what they always have been – between races and ethnic groups and between the sexes.

      The modern American is essentially a carefully manufactured standardized human commodity who has been well trained to ignore the evidence of his senses and suppress natural feelings of revulsion. When immigrant groups arrive they have the huge advantage that they usually still have basic human instincts such as loyalty to one’s race and kin. They also have unreconstructed and usually religious based views on things like gender and homosexuality that, while “unscientific”, are actually more consistent with reality than modern Western poz doctrine.

  8. As fun as it is to hate on Boomers, it was actually their parents’ generation who initiated most of the disastrous policies that will culminate in the ruination of this country. Boomers did nothing to reverse the rot. However, it doesn’t appear that any subsequent generation will reverse the rot either. Most people of every generation are sheep.

  9. The Wiki piece linked on Simpson perfectly encapsulates in this one sentence why the US is fucked beyond redemption:
    “The research paper by Bickel et al.[15] concluded that women tended to apply to competitive departments with low rates of admission even among qualified applicants (such as in the English Department), whereas men tended to apply to less-competitive departments with high rates of admission among the qualified applicants (such as in engineering and chemistry). ”

    STEM is perceived as “less-competitive” the English.

    Fucking Doomed.

    • I clicked that Wiki link too and rolled my eyes at the way they spun it. I had to translate that sentence on the Bickel paper – “women tended to apply to departments with giant pools of applicants who were all about equally ‘qualified’ to grind out gibberish whereas men tended to have studied real subjects that weeded out the stupid ones prior to graduation.”

  10. I’m beginning to think that this corona virus thingy could be quite serious, it’s completely driven St Greta off of the BBC. It’s certainly a godsend for the armies of “experts” who have cropped up all over the shop, but then it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Of course there is an argument that you want to get in early and catch the infection now before the rush and while the health care system is still functioning.

  11. As a Boomer, I want to absolutely agree with all those observing that this filthy cohort destroyed the world. A rigorous study of history clearly shows that life was pretty sweet before the arrival of the Boomers. Now it’s a hellscape. The Boomers destroyed paradise. Damn them to eternal fire.

    • If this is not sarcasm. Then you need to explain why certain paths were taken toward hell’s fire before the Boomer cohort reached the age of majority.

      • Of course it’s sarcasm. Seems the only way to combat this virulent slur (that even Z himself appears to support) is through sarcasm. Make the absurdity of the slur easier to appreciate.

  12. But but but….Steve Sailer and Greg Cochran are High IQ individuals and indeed ArchPriests of the IQ Fetish! They are smarter than us and our society must be shaped to their requirements!

  13. “The data says Boomers collectively vote their interest.”

    So what? What data says that there is any cohort that does not vote its interest?

    Also, the implication of the statement is demonstrably wrong. The Boomer cohort you speak about is overwhelmingly White. But the White vote is pretty evenly split between the parties as we’ve discussed in the past. One party, the Dem’s, has recently turned against Whites and now is becoming pretty much the “colored” party as it’s Boomers age/die or run off. However, in the recent past such Whites/Boomers in that party voted for all sorts of pernicious things via their party, such as Obama, open borders, increased regulation, ACA, etc. Rep’s were no saints either, but that’s not the point. The only thing that is the point is that the Boomers are not alone in this process of decline, nor have you shown such. It’s a people thing, not a generational thing.

    • It’s ironic that the wannabee founding fathers of Honkeytopia are hot for the dying off of the whitest population cohort they will ever see.

      The boomers even have paleface descendants whose future oppression-by-diversity the geezers would like to prevent.

  14. Totally true! I was thinking about this last night. The country is locking itself down to protect boomers from the grim reaper. The same boomers who were banging everything that moved without a condom in their hey day. Now that they feel vulnerability suddenly the world has to turn on a dime once again to suit their in the moment needs. I even saw an article yesterday that blames millennials for being super spreaders. Given the state in which the boomers have left the county, “Super spreader” is pretty much the highest status job many of these millennials can get. And I’m sure a good amount of them will relish being angels of death for old coots currently Clorox wiping their shopping carts. As far as the last month has gone it’s clear that God saw the Super Bowl half time show and decided to pull the plug on this shit show. The Trump-Bite-Me debate will be two deteriorating old men with capped teeth and bad hair fighting over a future that’s vaporizing before they country’s eyes. We’re reaping what we’ve sewn. Actually we didn’t sew at all, we sat in jacuzzis and financialized everything.

    • Funny thing is, many of the ones with the highest risk are set up to self isolate, yet expect the majority of society to do so. I’m prepared, but it’s going to hit the manufacturing and any sector that uses their hands pretty har.

  15. When it comes to altruism and community, the “me generations” who grew up in the 60’s-80’s are like the famous kids raised without language. They have little vocabulary or skills to cope with collective action, other than to damn it as socialist. It’s been months since I’ve seen a genuine socialist or commie – I don’t hang our on campus. I can’t find a true Marxist-collectivist hippie dirtbag. Even the true believer Bernie Bros have 401k’s and financial advisors.

    Forgive our fathers, for they really know not what they do.

    60’s vintage Boomer bootstraps didn’t come with instructions or a repair kit. Certainly not a warranty. Pull on them all you like – you’re still standing on the ground.

    Boomers and Xers were trained for cargo cult capitalism just in time for the planes to stop landing. They don’t know how else to bring them back but saying the magic phrases.

    But all those get you nowadays is “OK, Boomer” and “cringe” smack – not without justification, for the magic has run out. It turns out that global finance capital operates more like the magic “Dark Crystal” than the magic Star Trek economy. Parasitic abundance for me, unlimited hosting for thee.

    This is all new to us. We’re living OJT. Learning new stuff at 50 sucks, no doubt about it. But refusing to learn at 50 sucks more.

    For all the abuse we’ve justly heaped on Commies over the decades, it turns out there is something worse than an honest-to-God Commie. Living with 200 million fake ones.

    • Exile—a note from daughter of Commies. Commies shapeshift ad infinitum. Even during the Russian revolution they broke into different factions. Then an incomplete list: The Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky, Obama, The Hildabeast, Central/South American Marxism, African Marxism, Che/Castro Marxism, North Korea, Russia, Bernie (like Ruskie oligarchs he’s in it for the dacha, retirement, stuff, maybe even the 17 YO gymnast, the ones at the top put others in charge of takin’ it to the streets) and so on and on and on. The head of the hydra. Cut one off and three reappear and shapeshift.
      Delusional: True Socialism/Communism hasn’t been implemented correctly yet.

      • You could add Antonio Gramsci to your list. That is one Eye-talian whose ideas should have been quarantined.

        BTW, given the choice of Bernie’s ux or the 17 YO gymnast…………

      • The only consistent stable plank of the modern Leftist “platform” is power and wealth for Leftists. Specifically it’s power and wealth for some inner core group of them. There might even be an element of evolutionary psychology in this. It’s been noted that humans evolved to have a social group of about 150 people. This may explain, for instance, the chaos of the Russian Revolution with Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, etc… all violently contending for dominance.

        Viewed in this light, different Leftist factions are just trying to construct a political machine that funnels wealth from the productive to whatever little in-group of 150 people each individual Leftist is part of. Even the socialistic ideology may not be an essential component but is simply adopted because historically it has appealed to the sort of urban rabble and ethnic minorities that have the most to gain from some redistribution of society’s wealth. The different Leftist factions may not agree on who should rule after the revolution but they all understand that this rabble can be used as muscle to propel it to power.

        The “ideological differences” among various Leftist factions may be afterthoughts adopted to avoid admitting that all each one really cares about is making sure that they seize absolute power after the revolution.

      • All true, Range Front. And yet every single splinter faction in the Leftist/Marxist continuum struggled toward the same end: POWER OVER OTHER HUMAN BEINGS. For them, that’s the brass ring, the ultimate victory, the ne plus ultra. It is why all Leftists should be seen and dealt with as vicious, dangerous feral animals.

    • “Learning new stuff at 50 sucks, no doubt about it. But refusing to learn at 50 sucks more”

      Exactly, brilliantly put.

      There were a spare few who learned early, though. The Boomers who were subjected to busing got the biggest red pill ever delivered by the fedrul gubmint. The people they thought were just like the Jeffersons turned out to be more like the rapist in “Birth of a Nation;” it was Lagos comes to Mayberry, or, even worse, vice versa. Many of those later formed the backbone on the Buchanan Brigades and/or were Perot supporters. Some, even earlier, pushed back against gun confiscation in the Seventies and it would have happened then. Was that percentage ever above five -or, to be generous, 10 percent? No. Exceptions, rules. So the other 90-95 percent have to suck or learn.

      “For all the abuse we’ve justly heaped on Commies over the decades, it turns out there is something worse than an honest-to-God Commie. Living with 200 million fake ones.”

      Again, brilliant. Actual communism may prove to be the best cure for faux communism, if any of the latter survive to undergo reign of the former.

  16. I find it inconceivable that our replacements will vote for giving the government the power to confiscate my retirement savings.

    • I am sure AOC and her squad will look at those trillions just sitting there in the 401K’s of Whitey and magnanimously allow us to keep 5%.

    • The way it (confiscation 401k’s) has been proposed (by liberal economists) is for the government to step in and save you from the evil stock market, which has been shown to be too volatile to depend upon for retirement.

      What will happen is that congress will propose some sort of scheme where your 401K’s value is replaced by Treasury Notes—what could be safer than the full faith and credit of the US Treasury? 😉 Of course, once converted (401K to IOU’s) the government has your real assets and you have a promissory note for cash—which they will subject to inflation to steal your portfolio value over time.

      Given the present situation and a possibility of a Trump defeat, this could happen. On the other hand, it has to be much more clever than I describe or such a sale could dump the stock market pdf and any number of folk—like—me will attempt to withdraw their 401k savings, regardless of tax consequences—immediately.

  17. Once again Z is beating up on a bunch of old white duffers because it’s all their fault. Sure dude.

    The average Boomer had squat in terms of voting options all through the7-‘s until now. We had a choice between two organized crime groups. The GOP – the party of big business and the Democrats the party of moochers and criminals.

    There were no major pols opposing immigration, LBO’s or resisting the mega-mergers that created cartels . Wall Street was allowed to run amok and gut our corporations and decimate their work forces in the name of LBO’s. Later came NAFTA and Free Trade which ordinary people opposed but was supported by Wall Street and their puppets in Congress and the MSM. That gutted our industrial base and sent millions of to the poor house. All this time Big Business was importing foreign labor to replace American workers. We complained and no one cared.

    Then we get cluster bombed by Big Box stores that wiped out small town Americana. No one listened to our protests.

    Feminism, rampant homosexuality, abortion, gay marriage, All forced down our throts by a bunch of druids and ruling class.

    Meantime the Left completed it’s Long March through academia and gained control of public schooling and higher ed. So now our kids get mind fucked.

    You know why our birthrate has dropped? Because it’s too expensive to have kids especially when wages have been stagnant for 30+ years for the middle-class. And co0incided with off-shoring of our jobs.

    Then the icing on the cake. Big Pharma and China dump synthetic opioids by the truck loads in the Rust Belt and Mid-West to kill off white blue collars. All the white Congress and the President does nothing. This is tantamount to a war and conspiracy against Americans and all we get is silence. from the usual suspects.

      • I just saw where India and El Salvador are shutting down to foreign travel. True Quarantines.

    • The generally accepted year for the peak is 1970. The oldest boomer was then 25, They were not the ones making choices or decisions.
      The decline was done unto them, not by them.

  18. I feel like I should use this historic opportunity to take some sort of really intelligent, low-time preference type actions, but I barely have $500 to my name. I guess I’ll just buy a 50LB bag of oats and pat myself on the back.

  19. The sentiment I get from the comments at CTH feels like it came from the Bush2.0 era. I haven’t encountered anybody in real life with this sentiment in over a decade. I assume most of the comments are fake or paid for.

    I keep thinking that one limiting factor on the madness all around us is that everybody participating is going to have their hand out asking for a payment and soon or later the bosses run out of money to pay for it all. However, I also have a strange feeling that our overlords can just print up as much money as they need so they could potentially pay half the population to police the other half forever.

    • I know a fair number of people who are Red team v. Blue team types and are all in for Trump and would make similar arguments to those in the CTH comment section, so not sure about them being paid.
      My default assumption is that these are Red team folks who had been demoralized since the second Bush II term (and through the McCain/Romney/Ryan years), and they will believe anything and say anything to keep it 2016 forever.
      But I wouldn’t be stunned by learning that money had a lot to do with it…

      • If you think CTH and Breitbart commenters are GRUG, go check out the comment section at Citizen Free Press. I dared to say that CPAC is a con and call Charlie Kirk as a sellout fake conservative that just sells people Leftism and Antiwhite retardation from 10 years ago and got attacked by a posse of people I didn’t know still existed, it was like 30 Sean Hannitys hadn’t taken their blue pills that day and I had just killed their new puppy. How dare you challenge CPAC and the Kosher Conservatives?

    • I have commented a few times at CTH, super normie tier tame stuff and my comments don’t make it out of moderation and are deleted. TRS is the same, go make a comment on FTN’s site, if it’s not hair on fire black pills or JOO JOO JOO hate they will mod it, then delete it. My comment at FTN was along the lines of “why so much focus on the Demshevik shit show, why so much blackpills? I miss Halberstram”…they deleted the I miss Halberstram bit, then modded my comment, then finally deleted it completely. TRS is proving to be more and more controlled opps/shekel grubbing/black pills (acceleration is the new MAGA – Vote Democrat nonsense) and I don’t know anyone that consumes their content anymore. CTH is MURICA!!! Fan Club for Conservatard NeoCohens that love Jesus, Apple Pie and bleeding for Israel.

  20. ‘threatened by the great brown wave’
    It’s either that or brown shirts. It always comes down to that .

    • Heh. Without the one, you don’t get the other- but that’s too hard for a 115 IQ.

      Update, just now-
      New York radio: “they pour bleach on them, just like they used to”. Racists never quit.

  21. “It is an old country now, a country run by old people just coming to terms with their mortality.”

    Old atheist/materialist people. Nothing is scarier than death for those who do not follow a religion. Death is even worse for those who follow the religion of materialism. Boomers are realizing that their cheap stuff hasn’t brought satisfaction, or eternal life.

    They are now trapped in a corner, the inevitable corner of death without salvation. And when people are trapped in a corner they do crazy and stupid things. I wouldn’t be surprised to see increasingly erratic and panicked behavior from the Boomers, the wheels are falling off of their multi culti paradise AND they are close to death. Maybe they can contemplate the millions of unborn babies they slaughtered just for convenience. Somehow, I doubt it.

    A proper response to death is quiet acceptance, and acknowledgement that it is part of life. And satisfaction knowing you left something behind to your people, or did something useful, and knowing you are going to heaven (it may be a cope but it’s a very good one). I don’t want to die but if it happens, well that’s just the way it is.

    • “A proper response to death is quiet acceptance, and acknowledgement that it is part of life. And satisfaction knowing you left something behind to your people, or did something useful, and knowing you are going to heaven (it may be a cope but it’s a very good one). I don’t want to die but if it happens, well that’s just the way it is.”

      Nicely said.

      • I’m a “Rage, Rage against the dying of the light” type myself.
        Think of the loss to humanity!

        • Good point, Lorenzo!
          Religious atheist, here.

          Though, Wxtwxtr gave me a good chuckle.
          That’s the spirit, lad!
          A Bile in the making, although the entire world shall mourn. As they should.

    • Quiet acceptance? Someone should have told the poet Dylan Thomas about such acceptance, he’d have saved himself some rage.

      • Dylan Thomas was a natural born rager-alcoholic, serial infidelities, sponger, rude and provocative, drank himself to death. Pretty good poet, tho.

    • Even among those who have religious faith, I see this desperate, clawing, clinging at shreds of life that I cannot understand. I have no particular death wish, but death comes to all of us – I just don’t want to become helpless and dependent and suffer extreme pain for a long time. Yet I know people whose parents have spent the past five years in and out of hospitals, utilizing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of health care – and they are still essentially bed-ridden, limited to watching t.v. and taking pills, and burdening their own children with providing full-time care. And they want the full fanfare funeral with a fancy casket for their rotting corpse. And these are self-professed Christians.

      • Sooner or later, everyone dies.

        Well, not everyone all at the same time.

        So far.

    • My wife tells me that she feels a sense of panic in people at the office in a way she hasn’t seen before. Granted the office is in the heart of Portland, OR, possibly the most generally unhinged place in the country. This is where people rioted for weeks after Trump was elected. As for myself I almost never go into town and things around where we live in the suburbs don’t seem too crazy yet.

      I’m starting to wonder if this thing will ultimately turn out to be more scary for what it shows about how psychologically fragile people have become than from the actual effects of the virus.

  22. Modern America, in contrast, is a multicultural amalgamation of low-trust clusters.

    Shit, a lot of us ain’t even got a cluster.

  23. I expect to see a wide range of crimes against the elderly federalized, perhaps even a whole new agency dedicated to ensuring white baby boomers face none of the consequences of their actions and inactions.

  24. We have no vaccine for the Chinese Flu and no one is sure we can get one.

    Why? From what I have read, Covid-19’s genome is neither long nor especially complex. I also read that some biotech house in Kali had a vaccine (at least a preliminary version) ready within a day of the virus’arrival in North America. What is so different/challenging about THIS particular strain of coronavirus? Do I smell fish?

    eradicating this virus, without vaccine, will require a massive reorganization of society.

    Which anybody with more than one-and-a-half brain cells freaking well KNOWS isn’t gonna happen. That sort of total abrogation of fundamental liberties would easily be enough to spark AR/CW 2.0.

    it is plausible that no Boomers are willing to crater society to get a few extra days.

    THIS boomer for DAMNED sure isn’t. If something like ebola or hanta with a long incubation/contageous period and a 50%+ mortality rate appeared, sure. But a coronavirus? And why the HELL is a vaccine so all-fired challenging? This inquiring mind damned sure wants to know!

    Trump voters in comfort fit slacks, carrying over-sized constitutions to the rally, think we can get back to the way things were when they were kids.

    This Trump voter happens to be at a lower weight than when I separated from the USAF in 1983, thank you very much!

    The fact is, all the snarky comments about the Boomers and the irreverent mocking of the Zoomers is not changing the reality on the ground.

    Snarky comments and irreverent mocking – aimed at ANYBODY – accomplishes exactly zilch! Now will somebody please explain to this old man what about the Covid-19 strain of coronavirus makes constructing a vaccine especially difficult/challenging. We have the tools to literally construct a copy of the complete genome of (an admittedly simple) bacterium, insert said genome into a bacterial cell and have the damned thing function like a natural one. If we can do THAT why the hell can’t we construct a vaccine for Covid-19? And don’t try to tell me I’m doing an apples-to-kumquats type comparison. I know enough science to know better!

    • At least one previous Coronavirus vaccine resulted in a “cytokine storm” response in the vaccinated animals when exposed to the live virus. Creating a vaccine may or may not be “simple,” but the cure cannot be worse than the disease. This means it has to be tested and this takes time.
      It’s been 40 years and unprecedented amounts of money and effort (money and effort wasted, IMHO) have gone to fighting HIV and still we have nothing in the way of vaccines.
      They could probably significantly cut the time, but that also raises the risk. Even if they can cut the time in 1/2, a working vaccine is still quite a ways off.
      Taking radical steps now to curb the spread could avoid a future with Coronavirus being widespread and economic and health damage being much larger.

      • Well said. A vaccine may not work if the virus is found to live outside of human infection and mutate accordingly. Then we’d need to track it and sample it for yearly updates as we do the flu.

    • We’ve had colds forever yet no vaccine for rhinovirus. Why not? Because it mutates a lot and we haven’t been able to identify a common part that we can vaccinate against. You can immunize someone using one variant and they’ll get something slightly different next year (if you want fancy language, there’s no cross-protection between serotypes/versions). I don’t know if coronavirus has the same problem, but that’s one possibility. Flu is somewhat more predictable so we have flu vaccines.

    • I only disagree with “enough to spark AR/CW 2.0.”

      No, I see this as a Reset.

      Like replacement migration, the knock-on effects will accomplish what occupation would look like after a war- except all the shooting and mess won’t be necessary.

      Deliberate or accidental, who will know?
      Hyped or real, who cares?
      Only Victory matters in the end.

  25. Yep. On Conservative Tree house I commented about Trump’s 2nd, I believe, State of the Union Address. He said that he wanted even more immigration but it had to be legal immigration.

    I pointed out that more immigration, of any type, legal or illegal meant more socialism and less freedom. I never make snarky comments and am always respectful. I was immediately attacked for criticizing Trump. I am a mid boomer and I have noticed that many of my generation just do not want to hear the truth. They lost or never had the ability to reexamine their beliefs.

    • I had a similar experience during the Ukrainegate hoax. I thought I was defending (for the last time!) Trump by commenting that he surely knew exactly what Guilianni was up to, rather than assuming he was stupid (maybe I was wrong!), and BOY did they hate me. I haven’t been back. Those folks are drowning in the their own sycophancy.

    • People figure out what they believe, and then go collect support for it from the places they visit, the things they read, and the people they talk to. The essence of figuring out the truth of things is to instead approach matters as a blank slate, observe carefully, and fill that slate up with the things you observe (and what someone tells you, that they say is the truth, is not one of those things).

  26. The ‘not all boomers are like that’ boomer-crowd never feels the need to say ‘not all blacks are like that’ or ‘not all browns are like that’ It’s always fun watching people’s identity crash with subjects like this. They assume it is obvious that NAXALT applies when talking about different identities, but not the one they identify with. Frankly, I never understood the generational identity. I’m glad I never had it and I’m glad nobody ever pushed it on my generational cohort.

    Whatever ends up happening, I really hope this event puts the brakes on all the magical thinking. 20 years ago when China joined the WTO, people understood that globalization comes with serious risks, especially for disease. I can remember spates of articles about the risks of pandemics in the modern globalized world. Most said it was when, not if. Magical thinking now permeates our culture. Globalism has no costs or risks, the mass movement of people has no downsides or costs and of course, our favorite, we are all exactly alike.

    • I’m starting to think it’s meta: every asshole is a boomer, every outcast an Xer, every pajama boy a millennial, every mope a zoomer. Or something like that, I’m not up on the lingo.

      And re: magical thinking, people overlook a lot when it’s profitable.

    • “Whatever ends up happening, I really hope this event puts the brakes on all the magical thinking. 20 years ago when China joined the WTO, people understood that globalization comes with serious risks, especially for disease.”

      Your hope may be fulfilled: It takes a pretty big shock to end magical thinking stupidity, but reality eventually gets the job done. The Wuhan virus may be just such a dose.

    • Generational cohorts are a natural consequence of factory-farm public schooling and mass-media culture. Like a store-bought laptop, they come pre-installed with whatever firmware Shlomo was programming with in those years. A scaled-up society requires a lot of template-generated NPC’s.

    • Not all Boomers are like that as compared to say Blacks or Browns is because we have stat’s which show evidence for the numbers of Blacks and Browns which are “like that”. No one here seems very concerned with producing any data wrt “all Boomers are like that”. They just spout the same old tired clinches. Evidence based inquiry need not apply.

      Basically, it’s class envy at its worse. Actually, just plain old envy, since it’s can be shown that Boomers as a whole are not that different in status and wealth from the general population.

      • Stereotypes don’t have to reflect a large segment of the stereotyped population. You just have to see a certain traits or behaviors that are more often (even if rarely) seen in one identifiable demographic than others. It ain’t for nothing that the meme of boomers waiting in line to take selfies with the based black guy is so popular. Diamond and Silk have cashed in on this trait that is so prevalent among boomercons. Go to any website with an older conservative demographic and you will find this.
        Even if only a very small % of Boomers do this, it is more prevalent among Boomers than younger generations.

  27. Sailer is spot on with his curves. If we can stretch out the infection over time and prevent the health system from being overwhelmed, we come out okay. Everyone gets sick at once – most of the serious cases die because they won’t get care. The race is over when there is an effective vaccine.

    • Let’s assume the bug is every bit as infectious as the common flu. That means 10% of the population gets infected this year. If the severity rate holds, that means about 1.3 million people needed hospital care to some degree. Over the course of a year, it means ~125K per month. That’s manageable.

      Now, awareness counts for a lot. We do nothing to combat the spread of the flu. We just accept it as a cost of doing civilization. Unless someone can show that this virus is massively more infectious than the flu, that 10% number is the worst case scenario. The more likely infection rate is much lower. In other words, prudence takes this from state of emergency to unpleasant period of inconvenience.

      I’ve read Cochran and Sailer for a long time. The reason for this post today is my observation of them during this crisis. They are usually the ones downplaying this stuff, using available data and past patterns. This time they are way out in front. The reason? Both are old men thinking a lot about their mortality.

      • …every bit of data I’ve seen suggests Wuhan virus is significantly more infectious than the common flu. R0 for influenza is ~1.4. R0 for coronavirus…with preventative measures (masks, social distancing) is apparently 2.5? I’ll let somebody else find the cites – withstanding that, I’m fairly sure your assumptions are badly off.

        • Unfortunately I agree – what’s going on in Italy is way beyond a flu outbreak in terms of transmission and severity of illness.

        • Have a look at this graph. The world is following the same pattern as China. This is how infections tend to work. They are *not* exponential.

          There may be a 3rd peak of new cases, depending on the spread, but this is not The Black Death.

          https://imgur.com/f8CaAhS

      • What would you do? Do you support the following:

        Cancel flights from Europe.
        Cancel spring semester at US universities, high schools.
        Cancel indoor sporting events.
        Techies work from home (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter).
        Federally mandate paid sick leave for people who can’t work from home.
        Quarantine cruise ships with a known COVID19 infection.
        Mandate deep cleaning of trains and buses every 72 hours.
        Mandate deep cleaning of buildings where infections have been detected.
        Trump’s $8 billion for detection kits, supplies, vaccine development, research.
        Trump’s $50 billion SBA loans and deferred taxes.

        • Well, Europe used to have a chamber in the train station where the entire car was dusted with Zyklon-B after the passengers got off, to kill the body lice and fight typhus.

          Americans dusted every Mexican who crossed our border.

          And look how that turned out, since white people are genocidal, murderous savages.

      • I don’t dispute your implication that mortality concentrates the mind. Hell, my own darkest thought is how this virus seems particularly fatal to diabetics, hypertensives and the obese. It’s almost like it was designed to eliminate a known population of people who place a heavier (pun intended) strain on future resources. But, your analysis is based on an as-yet unfounded assumption that infection rates for COVID-19 are roughly equal to influenza. It seems to me that it would be wiser to assume a higher rate and act accordingly to limit social interaction. I’d be happy to be proven wrong at a later date.

        • What would be the basis for assuming that this is more easily transmitted from person to person? That cruise ship was the best case study we have thus far. They all but forced all 3500 people to make out with one another. The infection rate was ~25% on the ship after two weeks. Maybe there is better data, but I can’t find anything to support the claim that this is a unique virus in terms of how easily it is spread.

          Again, I’m not dismissing the seriousness of it. The most likely result, assuming no action, is pretty bad. Of course, that assumption is wrong. We are taking action. Awareness is probably the most important tool. The massive reduction in human interaction over the next two weeks will make a big difference. Many small preventive steps has enormous impact. That’s the nature of dynamic systems.

        • EVERYTHING carries greater risk to the hypertensive, obese diabetic.

          It’s as Warren Zevon’s doctor is supposed to have said:
          Well, I went to the doctor
          I said, “I’m feeling kind of rough”
          “Let me break it to you, son:
          Your shit’s fucked up.”

          Medically speaking, if one is a fat diabetic, then one’s shit’s fucked up.

          Switching to the somewhat facetious (though not necessarily untrue): If a disease was designed to eliminate the bulk (in terms of number of bodies) of strains on society it would select for low IQ, low impulse control and lack of future time-orientation. (There may be a convenient proxy for this constellation of traits, but that’s above my pay grade.) On the other hand, if you wanted to eliminate a part of society based on the net harm done, you’d select for … Well, you can figure out the traits.

          • “…it would select for low IQ, low impulse control and lack of future time-orientation.”

            Sickle-cell for $500?

          • “You talk like a fag and your shit’s all retarded. Don’t worry scro, there lots of tards out there living kickass lives! My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.”

      • I’m an old man as well. But I accept my mortality. But as to “we do nothing for the flu”, perhaps correct, but there is also the fact we can do little wrt the flu—unless closing off the country and quarantining the population every winter is made de rigueur. If I had bouts of the flu seasonally, I’d quarantine myself. That would be my recommendation to Cochran.

        The flu has a life cycle which runs itself through animal species, so there is always a repository which mutates and emerges to spread. That’s why we have new vaccines each season, which hopefully reduce the incidence of infection. So far no one has shown this for COCID-19 (early however in the understanding).

        Smallpox was show to have no animal repository, so in the middle 70’s was finally eradicated. SARS-2-Cov might turn out to be the same. But in any event, I predict this initial wave might recur once or twice more and then burn out as it eliminates all the susceptible human hosts.

      • I’m a big fan of Zman but this is probably his most uniformed post and comment by far.

        I get the impression that his perception arises from all the previous disease scares that ended up as busts. Relying on past performance is no guarantee about the future as the financial legalese goes. To a certain extent, it is just like the guy playing Russian roulette saying that the last 5 trigger pulls didn’t kill himself, why should the next.

        But to specifics. He claims Osterholm in that Rogan interview is not based on any evidence whatsoever. Well, if you expect journal citations in such an interview, that’s true. OK Zman, where are yours? Most of your comments are based on no evidence as well and many have been demonstrated in the scientific literature as simply wrong.

        Question: did you watch the Bruce Alward press conference that Sailer linked to? If not, I recommend it, it might make you a tad bit more humble. This is not a flu, its effects are far more serious than the flu in general. The link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o0q1XMRKYM Watch it all, though it is long.

        The Chinese were way more prepared than we were and had far greater hospital facilities than we do (per capita). The most important item was ventilators. Roughly 20% of those infected needed hospitalization. A significant fraction of those needed ventilators.

        I don’t know about the specific Italian reference in the video, but the situation is dire and this posting has been validated: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/italy-doctor-cornona-not-flu/?collection-id=239966

        People are being left to die due to lack of hospital staff and equipment. Which leads me to your rough calculation, which happens to be wrong in every respect. The distribution of cases is not uniform. The number of hospitalizations is likely to be significantly larger, and concentrated more in time. And I don’t believe the current capacity can even handle the level you cite (e.g., the length of hospitalization is generally two weeks: see the journal cite below), that leads to roughly 60 thousand extra in hospitals at any given time, with over 10 thousand needing ventilators. Most of the existing ones are used already.

        The consequence is that the death rate could be much higher if hospitals are overwhelmed. Finally, Chinese mortality rates for those from 50-59 were 1.8%. But men have a higher rate so for you, probably more like 3%, maybe less if you don’t have medical complications already. Let’s say 1.5%. But you get it during the peak and only half of the patients can be treated. Back to 3%. Are 1 in 30 odds good enough for you, never mind the boomers you are happy to see go? (Many will still be left alive and some might be a touch vengeful about losing their spouse due to an uncaring public).

        The Spanish Flu was considered a disaster. This could be as bad. I sure hope not.

        Oh, and that journal citation: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30566-3/fulltext

        • If it gets in the homeless camps, starts mutating, and cleans up San Francisco, well, guess who’ll claim the credit.

          Won’t be us, but you knew that.

  28. For us Boomers, our parents’ and grandparents’ generations imposed on us legalized contraception, abortion and porn; and promoted feminism, homosexualism and going childless. The birth rate dropped from 4 in the 50s to below 2 in the 70s — 1.6 for whites. And it keeps dropping. Combine that with open borders and — whatever.

    • Good point: where does the buck stop?

      The wonder was not that the Boomers rebelled – all young people do – the wonder was that their parents – The Great Generation – didn’t call them to order.

    • “… imposed …” ??? Jan Irvin and Joe Atwill argue that it was a weaponized anthropology experiment – sub-project 58 of the mk-ultra program by our “friends” in the C_A. A guy named Besmenov claims the same credits for the KGB. Deliberate cultural destruction. Or was it conquest?

  29. If this is a preview it looks like the locust system is finished. So there’s that. I can deal with some poverty if it means something is left.

  30. Boomers’ options in voting were pretty limited in reality. There was no party, no politician who was against massive immigration — anyone who took that stand was quickly stuffed down the memory hole by our unseen Masters, with enthusiastic collusion from the MSM. (Owned, one presumes, by said Masters.) The choice at elections was pretty much “the same” or “a double helping of the same.” Add the lack of real choice to the endless stream of lies spewed by all the traditional media outlets, and the inevitable effects of the Bell Curve on democracy, and it’s not hard to understand how we got to where we are. I don’t blame any generation for the mess — we have all been led by the nose for many, many years by our Masters, and some of us are finally waking up to the fact. I hope and pray the upcoming generations can see it more clearly and do more about it than we Boomers. They have every ounce of my support until my road runs out.

    • It’s one thing to be hemmed in by a lack of voting options – it’s quite another thing to believe in a line of bullshit so wholeheartedly that you get into knock down drag-out arguments with your kids over the subject of immigration, never-ending wars, the selling out of the country, …… etc.

      The fact that there are so many people who believe in the globohomo bullshit and lies right down to their core – makes it impossible for those who don’t believe it – to have access to a better range of voting options.

      • Agreed. It is terrifying how many of my friends — good people, not dumb, not ill-educated, not all Boomers by any means — still believe the bullshit. It is very painful to take the red pill, and it runs counter to all our years of indoctrination. But slowly, slowly, more people are coming to see the truth. Whether we can do anything about it is another question.

        “Those who laugh have not yet heard the terrible news.”

    • Boomers are a easy target for every social critic who needs a patsy to blame for what went wrong.

      The problem is our country is run by money and insiders and if you don;’t have the money or access to those who are players you have no influence.

      The average voter has no real say so and the ruling class goes out of it’s way to make sure they never do. Theoretically the voters do have a say so as Karl Denninger points out but it’s impossible to get them unified enough to actually wield influence.

      We are not a Republic, we are a oligarchy full stop. But some people don’t want to admit it.

    • In my teens in the 60’s, I wanted to blame my parents. But I understood that they were powerless. And then the grandparents. And then … “Turtles All The Way Down”.

    • Boomers serve the function of a modern day, Emanuel Goldstein, for our all too common “two minutes of hate” we seem to love to engage in. Tiresome and unproductive.

      All that is wrong with society today has its roots in Boomer decisions of yesterday. Even worse, all Boomer decisions resulted in their achieving an unfair share of the economic pie, which still persists to this very day through corrupt institutions such as Medicare, SSI, 401K’s, stock market, and the like.

      It follows then, as night follows day, that Boomer deaths should be looked forward to as a just reward for their treachery and the dawning of a new day of a more fair and equitable American society.

      (Note: If one is having a hard time understanding the above, then perhaps substituting the word “Whites” for “Boomers” will help.)

    • Well said. People vote for Candidates, whose platforms dissolve like mist in the hot sun once they’re elected. Then policy pivots to what the Banksters, Donors, and MIC want. We fall for it every single time.

    • I think that’s a good point. Back then the only way to hear an opposing view was through talk radio or a regular booklet you received every month or so. The Boomers have fixed neurological pathways that are hard to change. I think the anger they show is that a different world view has to reset their entire mind. Something we have evolved to not do. Hence cognitive dissonance and anger when their brain is forced to accept a different reality. We have the luxury of the internet and the free trading of ideas between people we’d never interact with in any prior time. I say to friends that generation Z are the first generation in about 100 years that has the ability to easily avoid indoctrination. So, we now have the baton and we must move society forward. Looking at Boomers and blaming them, whilst they do need to hear it, doesn’t help. It’s the young that are the hope, and the future and we must think and act accordingly.

  31. Be careful of this and who you discuss it with. One day my elderly shitlib mother was rubbing my nose in her politics, and I made note of how her generation and political peers had taken the most prosperous nations on earth and run them into the ground – and the result was rage. Mom got personal and nasty like she always does and for the first time, I just laughed. Pop, though – pushed away from the table and stormed off, because he knew it was pretty much true. At that point I was sick of them both and I pushed away and left too… leaving my mother alone at the table and wondering what happened.

    But f*** them. Both of them are elderly retired snivel servants. Pop has a grade 10 education and is a journeyman mechanic that rose from the shop floor to the office on that alone. Mom was data entry/typing/clerical/admin. From that, they made enough to afford a 2000 sq.ft. home, with three car garage. They also own a big RV and vacation home in Arizona. They sailed off to a gold plated Freedom 55 retirement. When my mom started prattling about how we could have had everything they did if we weren’t so stupid and lazy I just lost my chit. I asked her about my nephews, both with university educations, who didn’t own homes or cars, or have families because they couldn’t afford them… and she said they were stupid and lazy too. For them it is still 1975.

    My folks are at that age where they will say mean and stupid things… but all their lives, they voted for free chit and stupid things and it was all good as long as they didn’t have to pay the consequences of it.

    I made the boomer demographic by a couple of months. If the young ones decide to mass murder my generation all I ask is that it be done in chronological order so that I can watch my elders die first! 😆👍

    • You make my point that the silents were just as bad. To everyone younger all old people are Boomers. Zman makes many good points but I also wonder what kind of world when succeeding generations are at the top. Actually, many are now.

      • The majority of people of all ages who haven’t crossed over to our side believe the same lies. The key to understanding is to identify who it is who is making up these lies.

        • Cuo Bono. Of course, but I sadly note that our younger generations are neither taught to think, nor have any historical knowledge to figure it all out on their own. If one has to wait as long as I did to catch wise, you have a perpetrating situation.

    • “Pop, though – pushed away from the table and stormed off, because he knew it was pretty much true.”

      Don’t know your pop, obviously, don’t mean it personally, but his reaction is telling in an archetypal way, right? Maybe not so much trouble today if more men were willing to check the ladies.

      • My Tea Party Boomer friends seem most prone to the “if mama ain’t happy, no one’s happy” mindset. The same Boomer who just told the room how Churchill was right about appeasement in WWII hands the Sudetenland to Momma Hitler every time she raises her voice.

        Boomerhate podcast sometime soon, Z?

        • Problem is it carries risk today. Do you want be married? I do, but not at the expense of my dignity. Not easy these days.

          Both of my grandfathers would take charge when the women were getting hysterical. Looked at them and said ‘That’s how I want to be.’ Oh well, you take your lumps for the cause.

          • Painter, I think almost all of us want marriage, but finding a woman you can trust is hard and training a gf/wife from scratch can’t even be publicly mentioned, much less taught. You have to find a “natural” or one who’s already been broken.

            Free-range wahmenism is too feral and too well-subsidized for most women to resist the temptation. We’re going to be fishing from a small pond for the foreseeable future.

          • It’s all about choosing your battles and realizing she won’t be happy with any decision at first. So, don’t be a petty tyrant. It can’t always be having everything your way. Actually leadership is looking out for the best interest of the family. Now that means standing up to the wife and sometime saying “We’re doing it this way because I think it’s best for all of us.” She’ll pout, yell, cry, or whatever fits her nature. Eventually she’ll be happy as a lark telling her friends how “We’re doing X because hubby thought it was a good idea.” What virtually any woman wants is a man who will make decisions and stand by them. If you can’t stand up to her, deep down she believes you won’t stand up for her.

            I do agree though, you have to be careful in picking a wife. There are a lot of bad apples out there.

            When I was young and dumb, I once mentioned to someone in the HR area that I thought women were happier at home with the kids. The rage was swift. Later, one of the younger ladies told me she was impressed that I said that.

          • They are happier when someone calls their sh*t-test but a lot of them would rather be miserable than admit it, particularly in the cohort that’s mid-30’s-60’s now, whatever wave(s) of feminentropy they represent.

          • It’s not about being a tyrant. Many women don’t have the self awareness to know when they’ve crossed the line, or the understanding of men to read the cues. Likewise for men. Intersex communication was a casualty of women’s lib. Not that it wasn’t a challenge but it seems like gender roles at least provided a foundation to build on.

            Edit: there’s more to your comment! Agreed.

          • I sympathize with your longing for a public marriage to a loyal woman.

            I was divorced by my wife and I wish we were still married.

            I’m hanging with a younger male buddy who longs to be married, but the young women are such insufferable, feminist bitches.

            We are living in a famine of tolerable, non-cVntish marriageable women.

        • When I was young I was a most magnificent bastard. I pushed back hard against this idea that being henpecked is cool. in retrospect, probably overdid it at times. I do advise men to set the tone on early in their marriage. Certainly, women are like water and they will eventually we’re down the hardest of rocks. I’ve smoothed and softened considerably. Hehe.

        • Boomerhate fest podcast seems honest at least. Perhaps it is time to lay it out. I really have no interest in pursuing a group affiliation where such exists and is glorified. Peace is always better maintained through separation. Isn’t that a recurring theme here?

        • Just so, fellas. The women from that generation to this slipped their leashes in the 70’s and age has only made them worse. I dunno about you guys, but I am sick and tired of the crap coming off them and won’t put up with it anymore. I tell them so too. When I do so, the response is (in order) shock, confusion, and then rage.

          If I were to intrude into the Manosphere – I figure yu could prevent 95% of the frivolous divorces by giving a hard pass to any woman with a neoliberal mindset. I would even disagree with Chateau Heartiste – I wouldn’t game them or pump n’ dump them. If I were to be cast back into the dating game that would be the first question out of my face before going a step further with a relationship: what are your politics. If they’re leftists… see ya later chickee.

    • John Smith,

      You sound like my brother from another mother. Approximately 10-12 years ago, my father got on this kick of saying, “You don’t know where I’ve been, but I know where you’ve been.” The second time he said that I absolutely lost it, and started ticking-off the advantages they had . . . the conversation ended with me repeatedly asking, “Do you know how good you had it?”

      He stopped saying that nonsense.

      A few years later, my parents and in-laws were talking one evening and they all made the comment, “I never thought things would change.”

      I am not sure when they were hit with 2×4 of truth, but you could see the recognition of a sad reality.

      • Yep.

        When my grandparents passed from this world, they did so thinking that I would see wonders and worlds they could not imagine.

        If I were to have grandkids, I would fear their future is going to resemble the Planet Of The Apes.

  32. Help me think this through:

    Let’s say the USA goes into nearly complete lock-down. Everyone is forced to remain at home or within a small neighborhood until the pandemic is “over”. You can only travel if you’re all covered up in a hazmat suit. That limits the ability of the virus to spread beyond that household or neighborhood. Within a few months, Covid-19 is eradicated from the USA.

    What should the USA do next? Should it end the lock-down? Resume air flights to and from countries that say they have also eradicated Covid-19? What if just one of those countries has fibbed? What if someone from Lower Slobovia flies into the USA just hours after being infected with Covid-19 back home, has no symptoms, and starts infecting many Americans? Doesn’t the whole process just start over again?

    • Governments are not attempting to eradicate the virus, only to slow it down so our hospitals and businesses are not overwhelmed. By spreading out the time frame, we avoid a total societal collapse. That’s the strategy. The virus cannot be stopped. You will eventually be exposed to it.

  33. Social capital is what we could once exchange through the various institutions of our once robust public commons, both the tangible and intangible which we inherited from eons of civilization building. It involved give and take that operated through rights and duties. Rights and duties within families & extended families & neighborhoods (the core); towns & villages(the polis); cities & regions(A cultural subculture); nations & civilizations(The general common culture). Destroy the core and everything else in the common culture will rot away with no additional effort required. Social capital was the lubricant of culture. Weaken all of those cultural bonds and rights and duties decay into grab and go.

    Getting the majority of people in their 60s and 70s to even understand the problems of the past 70 years would be difficult enough. Getting the majority of them to act in productive ways would be impossible.

    • Excellent comment. The social bonds you describe are based an an ethical system centered around duty, especially one’s public duty. The Romans had a nice formulation of this: “do ut des” (I give so that you give). I would suggest that Roman Republican ethics are very much worth adopting as model.

    • The state of our social capital is best summed up by that video of that big black guy yelling at an Asian guy on a New York subway to move away from him and then spraying him with Fabreze air freshener to “protect himself” from the virus.
      Absolute clown world, brought to you by those who converted our social capital into personal wealth.

      • SSI is not insolvent, or at least it will not be a drain unless Pol’s vote for such. The current law states that payments must equal revenue in any particular period. The haircut at this time is about a 23% cut when the trust fund dies at the end of the 20’s. Trust fund of course is BS as it is simply Treasury bonds.

    • Ah, this boomer is just trying to accept, to get past denial, that he is a kook. I mean, doesn’t everybody just have a basement full of, well, whatever?

    • The Corona virus is a blatant Trump machination to destroy the Democratic candidacy of Bernie.

      1, The Xer’s get their student debt wiped out by the inheritance from grandma.
      2, The housing crisis is solved, they move from Mom’s basement to the newly vacant retirement village.
      3, No new Guatemalans will be needed to change all the adult diapers no more of this immigration for jobs Americans won’t do bullshit,
      4. The Medicare and Social Security savings negate any need to raise taxes on “The Rich”, i.e. Me and you.

      As a bonus. it takes care of the Yellow Peril till well past his second term.

      I don’t know why he didn’t engineer this thing from day one.

      He’s got a plan to destroy the candidacy of Biden too.
      It’s called Biden.

      • My thought today as I received a message from my alma mater (former Seven Sister college, aka Ivy League for women back a few years) that they would be closing next week until mid April, b/c Corona virus. Remote learning was to substitute for live classrooms in the interim.

        Well, that means that everyone packs up and LEAVES stat and goes home. Got it? Well about 30% of the students in a lot of these schools are from Asia, b/c they are pretty smart and got in with good grades, and most importantly, they pay the full price of admission, i.e. they don’t count toward Diversity credits. I don’t think they will get a rebate or refund for this pause in the instruction that they’ve paid for. Right now the diverse kids are freaking out b/c, as one girl said, “Go home? Home is here.” She was talking about her fully paid-for room and board at Harvard!

        Perhaps when classes resume there will be some empty seats b/c the Asian kids will take their bodies and brains elsewhere, same s#%t, less$$. There also might be fewer Brazilian-Sociology majors on campus as well! It will be verrry interesting to see what happens when this blows over. June reunion fund-raisers will be screwed, too.

        • I hadn’t given this aspect of WuFlu much thought but now that you mention it, this could actually turn into a nice convenient way to shut down the more useless parts of “higher education” (i.e. anything that’s not a science or trade). Think of it, millions of young Wammen freed from the burdens of cam-whoring, pole-dancing, and gold-digging their way through school to get that degree in Latin American Feminist History. No more need for this – https://trends.gab.com/item/5e50d9e590e9c2347656cc8e

    • The Conservative Treehouse guys are, sadly, just a far gone. The lead today is about Trump’s campaign platform. According to them:

      1) Control the border and stop illegal immigration
      2) Bring a manufacturing back to the US
      3) Decouple with China

      First, Trump ran on limiting legal immigration as well, though he gave up on that REAL fast. Second, #2 and #3 above are two parts of the same problem. Trump’s real #3 was ending the forever wars in the Middle East, but our greatest ally (and their fellow travelers in this country) have made sure that this plant was memory holed long ago.

      Trump shivving Sessions was probably a deal breaker for me. I don’t think I can hold my nose and vote for Trump again.

      • Assuming you vote at all, yes/no is a principled position IMHO. Then you’d vote for a demonstrably demented alternative?

        • Compsci, Right now I believe that if someone on the anti Wall St. Right and the anti Wars-of-Choice left paired up on a populist platform they’d win in a landslide.

      • How many wars has Trump started? How many US soldiers have been lost in combat in his first term? Far few than any president since Carter. Not as much on immigration but better than HRC amnesty in the first one hundred days of her administration.

        Trump is a horrible candidate. You have a better option?

        • He actually was a GREAT candidate, but he’s been a horrible president. And he’s not funny anymore. Biden can do nothing but be funny, so on that score he’d be a WAY better option!

          • There’s just no pleasing some people. Doesn’t matter what Trump does or doesn’t do, I’m sure you’d find something to bitch about.

        • If Trump wins 2020 he will do a massive amnesty. If you make all illegals legal you solved illegal immigration.

          • Really? Because MY crystal ball says he’s going to deport all you black pill, defeatist faggots.

  34. Ok, I’m one of those old coots. But my health has always been so robust I never bothered to buy health insurance until I was forced into it by the goddamn government. I always figured my biggest risk was an auto accident, so I made sure I was covered. I broke my leg about 20 years ago, hobbled into the nearest hospital and paid for it all on a credit card. (And they gave me a discount!)

    You’re right about feeling mortality, Zman. It comes upon you by stealth as you approach 70. You can see the pavement running out further down the valley. It’s an odd, bittersweet feeling. I often ask myself what I could have done to make things different today. I can’t think of anything. But I can promise you and the other younger folks on this board one thing: I have no plans to retire. I’ll be paying into social security until I die, because I love what I do. And I have confidence in the generations behind me. You fine people are smart and full of anger. Good! Keep that fire in your belly going. You’ll need it.

    • hobbled into the nearest hospital and paid for it all on a credit card. (And they gave me a discount!)

      Jim Goad (I believe it is) doesn’t have a health insurance either, he pays up front too, and he also notes that it is a helluva lot cheaper than if you’d been insured, and you weren’t billed an obscene list of extra “services” or given superfluous x-rays – the hospitals know you’re much more likely to check each item if you pay out of your own pocket.

      • My crappy and high deductible health insurance years ago did me no good. Needed an mri on my head and was billed $3500. Insurance paid $700. Ok , no surprise knowing the plans details. If I had no insurance I could have gotten discounts and some relief. It would have been negotiable.
        That said, right after that I found independent labs charging a cash price around $1400

      • There are at minimum, two sets of costs: inflated for insurance purposes, which they don’t pay anyway, and out of pocket cash costs. Here where I live, I write a check out to my doctor yearly. He accepts no insurance. For that, I see him as often as needed, or he comes to me. But mainly, he is “my” gate keeper to all medical services/specialists I desire for treatment which are paid by insurance (I am, like others have said, required to sign up for Medicare) or out of pocket.

        There are a growing number of concierge medical practices like his growing in my area. MRI’s costing less than $300, CAT scans a bit more. My last CAT scan at a major institution was billed at $5,500 for the insurance company. They are shameless in this game.

        Problem in the US is not medical care, it’s spineless politicians not grappling with the real issues. When I had a bad diagnosis awhile back, I was in one of the best hospitals in two weeks for treatment/diagnosis. For my last CAT scan (follow up stuff), I scheduled locally on Thursday and the response was, can you be here Monday afternoon? Results were to my doctor on Friday. That’s the kind of service only the elite get elsewhere. Dirt people get shit everywhere else. Don’t fool yourself.

    • It was interesting to read your note about mortality. I’m not quite your age, but I lived a wild life when young. Had children late by most standards, and it was only then that I began to contemplate my mortality, and it hit me like lightening. It also made me have skin in the game of society, because as a bachelor, I gave zero thoughts of anything related to but hoping to live long enough to play like Nero. Always interesting to see/read how we walk different paths but end up at same destination.

      • …as a bachelor, I gave zero thoughts of anything related to but hoping to live long enough to play like Nero.

        My eldest son and I often repeat the phrase when subjects like this come up, “You know what the Mormons say, right? ‘Any unmarried man under the age of 25 is a menace to society.'”

        • yeah, if 40 year old bachelors / divorced dads could stop dating all of our 20 something women, it would be greatly appreciated by men of my age.

          • UFO, will do, as soon as your 40 year old wine aunties stop being so AWFL.

            You’re asking me to live and sleep with ladies you guys hate to see for four hours a year over Christmas dinner. i’d rather stuff a rabid weasel down my pants.

            I’m not specifically fishing for 20-somethings but if I hook one, I’m not throwing her back.

          • Rabid weasel down knickers….way visual. Does it have tats and face fishing tackle too?
            “I’m not specifically fishing for 20-somethings but if I hook one, I’m not throwing her back.” Never say “Whoa!” at a horse race.

          • Ferret legging! Saw that in the WSJ, in the glorious 80s. Showed it to the Big Boss, who snorted.

    • It’s an odd, bittersweet feeling.

      Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the pit from pole to pole,
      I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul.

      In the fell clutch of circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud.
      Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

      Beyond this place of wrath and tears
      Looms but the horror of the shade,
      And yet the menace of the years
      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

      It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
      I am the master of my fate,
      I am the captain of my soul.

      – William Ernest Henley

      • Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
        Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
        To the last syllable of recorded time,
        And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
        The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
        Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
        That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
        And then is heard no more. It is a tale
        Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
        Signifying nothing.

        Act 5, Scene 5: Macbeth

        • People are queer, they’re always crowing, scrambling and rushing about
          Why don’t they stop someday, address themselves this way?
          Why are we here? Where are we going? It’s time that we found out
          We’re not here to stay; we’re on a short holiday

          Life is just a bowl of cherries
          Don’t take it serious; it’s too mysterious
          You work, you save, you worry so
          But you can’t take your dough when you go, go, go

          So keep repeating it’s the berries
          The strongest oak must fall
          The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned
          So how can you lose what you’ve never owned?
          Life is just a bowl of cherries
          So live and laugh at it all

          https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=emb_title&time_continue=11&v=0hEDxxWPJ0A

        • Yeah, I feel that way every time I leave my polling place after I vote in the current farce (election).

      • If you can make one heap of all your winnings
        And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
        And lose, and start again at your beginnings
        And never breathe a word about your loss;
        If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
        To serve your turn long after they are gone,
        And so hold on when there is nothing in you
        Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

        https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=emb_title&v=m78cSts3tJw

      • “I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”
        – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean Dominique Bauby

    • “Rage against the dying of the light?” I like it.

      Always been a Aubade kinda guy…”Being brave kept no one from the grave.”

      • Nah….maybe a guy way..Old Scratch was showing up at the end of my driveway due to late stage Lyme. Once I CHOSE to move past the Ahhh Shit stage, I decided to go with a ton of grace-dignity and a minimum of arm waving. Then…the Lyme was gone. And I am now resurrected. Am carefully crafting a new life….and pinch myself in gratitude. The new car smell of my new life never goes away.

    • Amen about insurance. You can get a cash eye-exam at the nearest Wal-Mart for around $100-150. There are plenty of dentists around that will do preventive teeth cleanings and inspections for cash. You can get that price down quite a bit if you can find a good dental school in your area. No need to carry expensive insruance coverage for these items if you go this route. Doctors that work in cash, particularly specialists, seem a bit harder to find. I think there will be more in the years to come.

  35. Now, this is the part where angry oldsters stop reading and post a comment about how not all Boomers are like that.

    Not all Boomers are like that. Italy is full of Boomers, and they’ve shut down medical services to old coots since they’re going to die soon anyway.

    • One glaring error Tucker made was to call China “the most racist nation in the world.” I’m not sure where China actually fits on this list, but it definitely no higher than number 2. The top spot is well and truly taken.

    • Italy panicked. All the deaths are in the 80 and above category. But they are Italians so what do you expect.

      Same thing here. The latest death in CA was a older woman 60+ with a underlying medical condition.

      That’s the virus target audience.

    • Such triage/rationing is everywhere there is universal health care—unless perhaps where you can opt out or buy your own supplemental health care. Medicare is basically the same here, except it’s rationing for a subset of the population, the elderly.

      The rationing has heretofore been done by restricting payments for certain procedures, while requiring “by law” that those payments be accepted as payment in full, if you accept Medicare patients. Rationing also is done by long waits for procedures or doctor appointments. Many physicians have stopped seeing such patients. Billings are a joke and little more than a Kabuki Dance. Nothing you will ever see on paper *ever* represents the true cost.

      For example, I was billed directly for a simple blood test due to an incorrect insurance number entered. The bill, $1,100. I called and gave the correct Medicare info to the blood draw/analysis company. They billed Medicare, who paid $110. About 10%. That was the end of it.

      Another example. First born offspring was kept in hospital after birth for a malfunctioning liver. This was a birth complication not uncommon in early births—however, the insurance company did not pay the hospital extra for such complications, they pay a set rate for a “normal” delivery. The solution for the hospital was to release the sick child to us and then send a home health care provider two days later to check the child and magically diagnose a liver malfunction. Back to the hospital for a week’s treatment—after a two day delay/interruption. But the hospital was able to charge the “new” insurer full boat.

      The ACA, still in effect here, has panels to determine “standard of care” for any given procedure. What of course follows in that—as in Italy—the panel could decide that patients over a certain age should not be provided respirator therapy for a COVID-19 infection— so they won’t pay for it—not necessarily you can’t have it. But the effect is the same, you’ll be denied, as you would for a heart transplant if you were indigent. This is why Trump last night claimed he was dickering with insurance companies to pick up *all* costs related to the treatment of COVID-19 infection.

      The trick here is not to decide the economic worth of treating a sick individual and denying expensive treatments for the betterment of the whole—that shit is Communist Manifesto stuff—and I don’t care what your socialist paradise calls it where you reside. Nor to denigrate any particular generational cohort for not abandoning themselves upon an ice flow when they turn 70 or so.

      The path foreword is to allow those with means to supplement their care via insurance, or just their own funds, if they so desire at any age. The way I see it, our elites will never be denied care, the best care as well, at any age when they so desire. I just ask for the same ability.

      • Yup, Obamacare is death by attrition.
        Too slow to notice.

        At least the NHS has the decency to take away their water, so one can know they’re being murdered- and that one can’t do jack about it.

  36. About the “War on Coronavirus”

    This is just more empty boomer talk like the “Convention of States” and stupid secessionist movements like counties switching from Virginia to West Virginia.

    Just hot air that never goes anywhere. Boomers love to talk about all the things they’d like to do, but there is never any follow through.

    • Well if there’s one thing Boomers care about, it’s “our greatest ally.” And none of the things you mention benefit said ally.

      • Yes MemeWarVet. I once posted on CTH that I did not think it wise to go to war for Israel. I also asked why Israel is considered an ally when they have committed serious espionage activities against us many times and actually attempted to sink a U.S. Navy ship, killing many sailors.

        You would have thought I had murdered Mother Teresa judging from the responses.

        • I’ve posted pretty much the same thing on a number of forums – and like you – have gotten the “Why did you kill the kitten?!” response as well.

          But here’s the thing: I’ve been doing that for years. And I do definitely detect less Israeli dick-licking behavior now – than there was 10 or 17 years ago.

          The USS Liberty incident is always a good one to bring up – because you FORCE people to start defending an attack against a US military ship – which killed multiple sailors. Because the Israel dick-lickers are usually the same people who reflexively say ” Thanks for your Service!!” to anybody wearing a uniform – you’re putting them into a really bad position. They’ll usually try to pass it off as an accident – so that’s when you get to bring up the specifics of the attack – which make it pretty clear that it was not. At that point you also get to bring up the perfidy of the US government in just covering up the whole incident.

          In my experience you’ll never convince the loudest complainers when you bring up stuff like the USS Liberty. But what you do accomplish – is to enlighten and then split off the not so committed who are following the conversation (this is why forums are good). Once you get people to realize that the USS Liberty was intentionally attacked – a whole world of possibilities opens up.

          • Yes Carlsdad. They can claim accident till the cows come home but I will take the word of not one but two Israeli pilots who were on scene and came forward to report that the Liberty was positively identified as a US ship and still attacked. It was not an accident.

        • CTH posters – Israel or Donald Trump can do no wrong. SD is better, more nuanced than his commenters. In fact, just before the Iranian general was murdered, he wrote a post about how Pompeo and the neonuts started the whole thing and essentially backed Trump into a corner.

      • Excellent clip — thanks for link. It would be nice to think we would learn from this, but greed and stupidity are very powerful forces.

        • I’m sorry, but that is just rank scare mongering. That’s not based in any evidence whatsoever. Further, that e-mail he claims to have received from Milan has been posted all over the internet from hundreds of people claiming it is from a friend.

          • Thanks Z! I only watched the first 90 seconds (damn wagecucking) and that was my gut reaction, but I figured I’d send this to the board in case I’d missed something.

            “I know a guy who knows a guy in Italy who says….”

          • Here is a good site for hard data on progress and outcomes of the disease vs. time, by country

            https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/

            The site is a little slow — probably from high traffic.

            I think the data from Japan are interesting.

          • One thing that annoys me is tucker calls out a lethality rate , which we do not know and cannot know. the lethality rate is the percentage who die divided by the total number of cases .
            The ” number of cases” is actually the number of confirmed tested cases. that number leave out the number of people not tested because they have no symptoms ,r that have no test kits available . that would raise the number infected and lower the lethality significantly.

          • Don’t forget that medical tests are never 100% accurate. Massive # of false positives if we test everyone.

          • This is a great point. There are potentially tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people out there that have this virus that do not know it because the symptoms are so mild, or they are misattributing their illness to the common cold or seasonal flu. To me, this seems to indicate that the true lethality rate probably is not far off the South Korean data, and not the, “10x worse than the flu,” or, “4%,” number the hysterical media is trying to push.

          • The data from Taiwan is impressive, given the high volume of cross-Strait movement during normal times. Only one death. The government has been completely transparent too, so those are reliable numbers. Arrivals from China, Korea, Japan, Italy and elsewhere are subject to 14 days quarantine. Furthermore, the government stepped in and stopped the hording and price gouging associated with face masks. It has also worked with several factories to produce millions of protective uniforms for hospitals and health care providers.

            An interesting stat from the John’s Hopkin site is Zhejiang province. One death vs. 1200 recovered? If it’s not CCP data tampering, what’s going on there?

      • Also Twitter:

        “The American response to a viral pandemic is yet another mass media campaign about racism and complaining about the stock market. I challenge anyone to find a country with a worse ruling class.”

    • “Boomers love to talk about all the things they’d like to do, but there is never any follow through.”

      That’s not a Boomer thing, it’s a human-nature thing. The problem with Boomers (my generation BTW) is hubris. Boomers like to play King Canute, seeking to orchestrate planetary forces in accordance with postmodern whimsy. But Boomers aren’t the first generation of American buffoonery … nor the last.

      Boomer lessons-learned for young folk: Know the limits of human intervention; know what you don’t know; know what man quickly descends to when civilization is removed.

      • “Man’s got to know his limitations.” – – – The Great Philosopher, Dirty Harry

    • I’m not sure what is peculiarly “boomer” about secessionist movements. I seem to recall a big one in the 19th century well before any boomers existed and I’m a GenXer myself. Wanting to leave a failed polity is perfectly understandable. Granted there does need to be follow through.

    • Use this as an opportunity to buy some high quality utility stocks. Some are now yielding an annual dividend of over 4%, and share prices are down over 20%. In less than two months, those stocks will be right back where they were before. And good utility stocks are like having gold in the vault.

      • Not countering, just an addendum. It’s also the right season to invest in $2.95 seed packets; properly cared for this investment will provide well over $100 of chow over the course of 3-4 months. It’s times like this where it’s better to have food in the larder than gold in the vault.

      • they are not safe from the looters. to wit:
        On January 14, 2019, following the departure of CEO Geisha Williams, who had led the company since 2017; PG&E announced that it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in response to the financial challenges associated with catastrophic wildfires that had occurred in Northern California, in 2017 and 2018.

        shareholders lose everything.

        • miforest—chapter 11 is a reorganization, not a sale of the creditors assets. It is unknown what the haircut will be for stock owners, but I doubt if they will lose everything. Negotiations will need to be conducted after all the suits against PG&E are tabulated. Most likely all will be forced into so class action. But I agree, lawyers come first, PG&E second, people a distant third—if anything. Suit will take years.

          • Compsci – while a loss of equity ifs not Guaranteed, but usually that’s how it works.
            the lawyers negotiate and plan and then at the 11th hour 59th min they issue new stock to the “creditors” and lawyers.

            The common stock shareholders get nothing , bondholders take a big haircut, suppliers go bankrupt because they don’t get paid, and the bankers walk away with a debt free company.

            I work in the auto industry, and the common stock shareholder is usually completely destroyed. talk to the GM and Chrysler shareholders. they got nothing .

          • Much of what happened to the auto industry—I assume recent recession under Obama—was arguably illegally mandated by the administration. But PG&E is a utility, so there is concern for its future outside of producing a commodity like a car. I hope for the best. But it’s difficult to predict since the liability claims are not even all tabulated. For one thing, that a utility company, regulated by the State can be made bankrupt for such an accident needs to be thought through carefully. Of course, CA is insane, so thought may not be in the cards.

          • Under the supposed logic of the system, there is no reason to treat power company employees any differently than government employees. It’s a very heavily regulated industry with managed competition at best. Almost all of its operations are intertwined with local and state government as well as the feds.

            It’s a double-edged sword.

            Opting for tort liability as a private company theoretically holds the negligent party responsible but the taxpayer ultimately foots that bill even though it’s a “private” company because it’s a functional monopoly that passes its costs straight to the customer (with rubber-stamp CPUC approval).

            If you treat them as a government entity, their lowest-common-denominator work habits fall even further, with punitive damages for epic fails no longer available and you’re paying into the SEIU grift as well.

            Sh*t-sandwich no matter which end you bite.

          • Well done, miforest, that’s a classic attack, a hallmark of disruption economics or disaster capitalism.

            Boomer economics think in terms of high- trust, stable “growth” or “progress”.
            They don’t recognize the boom-bust cycle of raiders razing territory.

            Fatten the sheep, then shear them.
            The ‘block-bust, then gentrify’ model.

            For instance, blow a China bubble-
            buying up weakening American assets-
            Use a panic to pop the bubble, collecting on the shorts-
            Now use those short profits to ride up again as everything moves back to the U.S.

            What we can’t see are the very large short spreads being laid out in the dark exchanges, the private pools of sovereign wealth funds, multinat institutionals, and central banks.

            Something roiled the markets, “necessitating” Fed action.
            The central bank tier was seeing something we can’t- those short positions prepared ahead of the media panic.

            If actual deaths remain low, we’ll still be dealing with this for years.

            These are players that routinely deal in 30 year infrastructure and 75 year pension deals. 10 year plays are common in the commodity space. The long separation of setup and payout makes the harvest seem like a “crisis” of social stupids.

            Not conspiracy, but preplacement, ready to take advantage of potential opportunities.

            When PG&E placed a female CEO, we should’ve known they saw a potential problem and were getting ready to burn the bar down.
            Get those golden parachutes ready, gentlemen!

          • Sorry, tl;dr:

            La Corona-chan is the cover for another planned Meltdown.

            This crap happens about every 10 years, right on schedule.
            Ya think you might finally get ahead, and then the sheep get sheared.

          • Have to look carefully at the risk profile of the geography the utility operates in. In PG&E’s case, same for SoCal Edison they are locked in subrogation litigation with insurers who have deeper pockets and longer time horizons than individuals.

          • (Thx, Saml, I’ve forgotten the very long-term thinking of the actuaries, and of insurance as a capital pool. You must be a busy lad right about now.

            King Cuomo the First has quarantined New Rochelle, the upper City, and I was thinking of our Saml and Ris, may they stay, and stay safe and well. Near the hot zone myself today.)

          • Yep, we can outlast almost anyone in litigation. But,yes early in this game our CFO (and actuary) and I were looking at the data plots coming out of China and concluded these were managed numbers and this thing was worse than people thought. I’m a parabolic rifle shot from the edge of the containment. NYC is turning into a ghost town. National Guard has now taken over an island one the shorefront as a testing and logistics center. It is also easily isolated from the general public. Suspect we’re getting closer to spicy time. Things are moving fast.

        • You’re both correct. Utility stock possibly a good buy EXCEPT if the BOD is run by enviro tyrants. Enviros control the BOD of PG&E, hells bells they’re on the BOD of every Mexifornia company. PG&E board damage is great…..”you can’t trim those trees..bushes…cut the grass to protect your property from fire. Release massive water pulses down rivers but don’t wash your face! Life of the wee doodlewiggly is more important than you.” PG&E=Corruption +Enviro Marxists=You’re Screwed!

          • Utility assets won’t be busted up and sold off.
            That sheep is immortal, too big to fail.

          • Jerry’s ‘drought’ and the ‘green’ policies- that fake spotted owl crap- left millions of tons of deadwood fuel waiting for a spark. I listened to several Western state governors complaining.

            PGE execs knew their 100 year old substations lacked maintenance because they were stealing the maint. budget for themselves.

            This sounds like Soviet commissars stealing all the heating oil in a Russian winter to sell on the black market at inflated prices.

            It took Jerry’s friends, a J**ish Hollywood couple, 20 years to bust out Lost Hills and grab the land and water rights to the Kern aquifer, the main storage source of the entire L.A. basin. Now their new orchards supply the new, giant Halo’s orange packing plant, largest in CA and maybe the world, too. They funded the “PCB’s in Lost Hills water!” scam, bankrupting the old farmers, and brought Jerry back to repeat his 1970’s water theft.

            1970s: “If it’s yellow, it’s mellow- if it’s brown flush it down”
            2010s: “Don’t water the lawn, yellow is the new green!” And your water taxes are never going back down, either.

            (PG&E: Pacific Gas & Electric in California.
            A behemoth similar to Chicago’s Con-Edison, now Commonwealth, owned by Bill Ayer’s dad. Yes, that (((Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dhorn))) of the Weather Underground. Con-Ed was playing similar games in the coal/nuclear sector under Obama.)

      • Stocks of streaming services (Disney) and the backbone tech (5G) as the Hive cells isolate.

  37. Great essay. Makes sense as to what happened to Bernie Sanders in the democratic primaries.
    I could see perhaps in an election cycle or two a young leftist willing to attack the established Democratic Party pulling it off.
    In truth Bernie is not the revolutionary the young generation thinks that he is.
    As for Trump it has been an effort to live in 1985. That is very true.
    Reality sets in.

    • Someone elsewhere argued that Bernie is a fascist, because although he relentlessly attacks “millionaires and billionaires”, he had no criticism for Big Corps – big tech, big pharma, big med, big edu, big agra, or any others.
      Bernie is Hitler!

  38. Due to the fact that social capital has been converted into profits for multi-national corporations, the social capital required to enforce an effective quarantine does not exist. What we can expect if the panicked population prevails, is the use of local state and federal law enforcement and suspension of liberties we thought we had to enforce quarantines.

    Welcome to the low social trust multi-ethnic American Empire.

    • And this is where the demographic fractures are showing up. So it is a good thing. This can’t be hidden much longer.

      • Not all areas of the country will be equally susceptible or equally low-trust and unable to cope. I can’t wait until the white privilege stories for the wuflu start showing up.

    • Government of course had nothing to do with looting the social capital.
      The government flat out burnt it to the ground and planted feral wogs domestic and imported wherever it went.

      Frankly the dissident right are white leftists who discovered that whites are written out of the script. Like Liberals moving into conservative, healthy communities you bring your envious and covetous viruses with you.

      As if the corporations just didn’t cut a deal, as if those left out aren’t simply envious.

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