After the Saudi attacks on the World Trade Center buildings, we had a week of panic and confusion, mostly in the ruling class. Whether it was true or not, they carried on as if they were caught completely unawares by the attack. They shut down the airlines and closed the stock market for a week. Many people stayed home to watch the news and get their heads around what was happening. Most of America got back to normal within a few days and everyone waited for the ruling class response.
More than a few people have noted that the vibe in certain parts of the country has the same feel as the days after 9/11. Then and now, the northeast was most affected by the aftermath of the event. New Jersey shutdown after 9/11, but North Carolina carried on pretty much without interruption. We see a similar pattern now. The mad scramble by the rulers is also similar. Even the propaganda organs have been disrupted, having to depart from their normal barrage of hatred for the rest of us.
The important thing about this comparison between this event and the days after 9/11 is what followed it. Twenty years ago, the first step was to increase the importation of Muslims into the country. Immigration across the board increased in the aftermath of the Saudi attacks. Then, of course, we launched a never-ending crusade against concepts like terror and extremism. This necessitated a roll-out of the surveillance state and the expansion of domestic spy agencies and domestic spying.
This trip down memory lane is a useful corrective to the claim that this panic is just a two-week lock-down in response to the flu. The one-week shutdown that followed 9/11 brought with it a massive reordering of American society. In 1999, we did not have secret courts and warrantless surveillance. Before that event, no one thought they would ever see the FBI and CIA conducting domestic espionage against politicians, much less trying to overturn an election.
This month-long lock-down, and that is what they are planning, by the way, will bring with it a massive re-ordering of society. Think about what is happening. The government is willy-nilly telling businesses to shut down. People are being locked into their homes on the orders of local officials. In the fullness of time, what we see happening will make Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon river in January 49 BC look tentative. In a decade, the world of just a few weeks ago will be a foreign country to us.
If this sounds alarmist to you, consider this. When Bush launched the forever wars, there were two camps opposed to it. The Left suddenly discovered its anti-war attitudes and responded with parades and puppet shows in major cities. It was an extended holiday for their freaks to go wild in the streets. The leadership, however, chanted absurd slogans about multinationals like Halliburton, but otherwise went along with it. The bipartisan uniparty always hangs tough during tough times.
The other opposition came from the paleocons. They correctly pointed out that this was worse than folly, as it would take generations to fix. The roll out of the surveillance state would probably require a revolution to overturn. The wars themselves would end in tears, as the people in those countries were incapable of sustaining modern liberal democracy, even if they had an interest in it. Then, of course, there was the price to paid for handing over foreign policy to our greatest ally.
It should be noted, the same people mocking skeptics about this current panic, the people derisively chanting “It’s the flu bro”, could not wrap their heads around why the paleocons were so upset with Bush. Back then it was “better to fight them over there than over here.” It was not an answer to the skeptics, but a signal for the herd to come closer together in mutual defense against a threat. Then as now it is the sound that sheep make as they are being herded into a new pen.
Barring a collapse or revolution, no one reading this will see an unwinding of the changes that resulted from the panic of 9/11. This panic is orders of magnitude worse than what followed 9/11. The one-week shutdown of the economy gave us a nice recession that required lots of government intervention. A month long shut down of the economy will change the world forever. Just look at what is planned after a few days of this panic. The Republicans are now devotees of Andrew Yang.
The crusade Bush launched against concepts like terrorism and extremism is still with us, because you can never beat an imaginary enemy. The war against unapproved microscopic life forms will also never end, How can it? Just as every snow storm brings demands for people to shelter in place, every flu season will result in school closures and demands for people to self-isolate. Just as corporations harvesting your personal information has been normalized, what we are seeing now will be too.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. We have no way to know what comes from stopping a 20 Trillion-dollar economy in its tracks. It’s never been tried, because no one has ever been so insane as to contemplate it. Then you have the corresponding global shutdown. Maybe everything fire back up like new starting in May, but that means everything the experts have been telling us about the economy was wrong. There will be massive government intervention in the economy.
We are back to the point the paleocons unsuccessfully made back in the Bush years regarding the war or concepts. The trade-offs involved were monstrous and unacceptable. In order to keep the free flow of Muslims into the West and protect Israel from her neighbors, the American Empire would become a police state. Whatever benefit could possibly be gained from the war on concepts was dwarfed by the cost of it. 9/11 was terrible, it was not worth destroying the country over it.
Today we are seeing the same argument. In order to “flatten the curve” we need to obliterate what’s left of civil life. We have to hand to the state the power to shutter businesses, lock people in their homes and reorganizes society as they see fit. The price of flattening the curve will be a never-ending war on civil life by a thoroughly corrupt ruling class. So no, it is not just the flu bro. It is not about the stock market or the economy either. It is about what comes after the flu decades after it is gone.
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“ The Republicans are now devotees of Andrew Yang.”
This is why i love and read The Z Blog. In a nutshell.
Laughable. Look at all the cowards and whiners bitching about this pandemic and the response which is shaking the hold of the elites to breaking point!
If you want a reality check, those of us who have been following the virus from week one have noted that the MSM has downplayed it constantly. EVEN NOW they’re trying play down the full danger, not hype it up like they would if they wanted to scare the normies into submission. The elites are more terrified of this thing than anyone. Those seeking to dislodge them from their positions of power will never have a better opportunity.
But whiners only ever find something to whine about, as if bitching about the government enough will eventually make it go away.
Now is the time to sack up or shut up, honestly. How many years have you guys been writing the same damned article over and over and over again? But as I’ve begun to understand, when God hands us an opportunity to cross no-man’s land before the trenches fill back up, the cowards will always find a reason to huddle and complain instead!
We see now who the frauds are, don’t we? All the agitators and RESIST types who are suddenly screaming in fits of agony over their precious economy and their precious “civil life”! For them the virus ought to be seen as sent from God himself to destroy the hives and their war-chests, but they whimper now in their corners about forced vaccinations and being microchipped if they want their social security.
As the Joker said, “you get what you f**king deserve.”
I wish I could have these kinds of insights.
This week is the week which historians, if they are allowed to exist or exist at all in the future, will point to as the official end of Western Civilization. If you haven’t prepped by now, get into accelerated mode. I was going to wait until this summer to close on my bugout, but I did it last fall, which was my wisest decision ever. My jeep is loaded and ready to roll, and once the checkpoints are about to be put in place, I’m outta here.
I’m beginning to believe this is virus is contrived idiocy. The panic has been worse than the symptoms. More people will die of staph infections from hospitals or medical mistakes or car wrecks.
Bullshit! America went to war to protect Saudi Arabia and the petro dollar, which made the dollar the reserve currency. gotta have some Jew baiting to keep a crowd eh Z.
You have tested positive for the retardovirus. Please self-isolate from the internet.
LOL I don’t need to fund a half ass blog, pretending to be a poor boy intellectual. I think I’ll stick around. Send ya a quarter
There’s a great deal of sense in this piece.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/03/no_author/quarantines-may-backfire/
That is one of his best articles and I have read most of his posts. The modern ideas on how disease spreads is simplistic and it is nice to see a little fact and reason enter the public sphere.
You, Zman, called the coronavirus “the flu” eight days ago, in your March 10 post titled The Stupid Tax. Here is what you said about it then:
“If the flu numbers get much worse, it is possible the public starts to embrace the genuinely crazy ideas flying around the internet.”
Now you give us a column that informs us “It’s not the flu, bro.” The only thing consistent in your work is the smug tone.
LoL, the DR high priest thinks he is the smartest person on Earth and is an expert on everything from economics to medicine. Point is the Kung Flu is a nasty one, as proven in Italy. Mortality may be low but hospitals get swamped leaving little room for other critical patients. Taiwan avoided the worst by testing extensively and early. That is what the USA is trying to avoid now.
Apparently the virus results in a reading disability.
While world is crumbling down, while a flue is erasing the remnants of a long forgotten glory I just want to see the herd going completely crazy in its fear and stupidity all the way to the final and irrevocable extinction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qu7KOXu_V4
What we are seeing is the total take over of the feminine over all segments of society
Hysteria and emotions taking completely over the rational male world
It is too late now, started 200 years ago and we children of 21st century will see and live through all its disastrous consequences
Nice, Balkan. Exotic, and enticing.
After the Saudi attacks on the World Trade Center buildings…. THANK YOU for that seldom spoken truth. We need to say that often. It needs to be a meme, like “Epstein didn’t kill himself.”
It’s not all bad news. The government has been trying for years to get us all worked up about some threat from Iran. What they are seeing now is that folks are a lot more concerned about having a good supply of toilet paper.
“9/11 was terrible, it was not worth destroying the country over it.”
To each their own.
Sure you don’t mean the Israeli attacks on the WTC buildings? Bin Laden was the next Lee Harvey for a whole new generation of TV watching simpletons.
Well, it’s official here in San Antonio.
How the flaming hell does a city mayor have the power to freaking ORDER private business to close? Ask them to close; that I can see. And what sort of club could could a mayor possibly have to enable him/her/it/zer/etc.to enFORCE such an order?
Shit’s getting deep, folks. Shit’s getting WWWWAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYY DEEP!!!!!
Just got word from a friend at national guard. 30 day lockdown ttristate
After 911, the logical thing to do was kick out the Muslims and not let them back in. Instead we open the doors to them Muslims while creating a monstrous new federal agency and forever war.
With Corona virus, the logical thing to do is lock down all the retirement homes. Instead they want everything else locked down.
“99% of Those Who Died From Virus Had Other Illness, Italy Says”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says
After 911. the logical thing to do was to find out who did it.
Here’s a clue: It wasn’t a bunch of Saudis who were still strolling around a month later.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm
Where can I find a site that has the comprehensive data on covid-19?
This has been pretty accurate as far as the numbers go…
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Some good explanation of science and stat’s:
https://youtu.be/AToF8O5T86s
I love the deep blue zone real life beginning of “The Purge”.
Interesting how the blue zones found out they were “gun free”.
“The real “pandemic” is a pandemic of lies by government “health officials.” After I blogged this morning about a ludicrous Florida TV “news” story of a 95-year-old man in a nursing home with heart disease, lung disease, and diabetes dying of “Covid-19” a friend from Texas writes of a report of “the first Texan” to supposedly die of this — another 99-year-old with already-severe health problems.” — Thomas DiLorenzo
His earlier post explained how the local news screamed about a man dying of coronavirus there in south Florida. After the break they told that he died of pneumonia. So they knew they lied before the break. Then knew that coronavirus had precious little to do with it.
The headline speaks for itself:
“Baltimore Mayor Begs Residents To Stop Shooting Each Other So Hospital Beds Can Be Used For Coronavirus Patients”
But have the whole piece anyway.
https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2020/03/18/we-need-those-beds-baltimore-mayor-urges-people-to-put-down-guns-after-violence-continues-during-covid-19-pandemic/
Stay safe Z-man.
Oh, it’s a lot worse since 9/11. When 2 muslim yahoos with a pressure cooker can shut down a whole city it’s bad. Now they don’t even need that. Thanks to all the disaster movies and tv-shows shows america has DOOM burned into their psyche.
And yet the gas stations, supermarkets, post office, etc all open and doing business as usual. You called it Z. This is a giant nothing burgher. However sadly the damage is already done. They got away with their test run for martial law.
Like the liberty’s stripped from us after 9/11 it will only get worse. That’s the way normie wants it . . . . . . good and hard !!!
It’s like global warming. People fixate so much on the only solution to it being a mass reorganization of society. This leads to conservatives denying that it exists at all. Second order questions of “okay X exists so what is the next prudent move given our values and the other hard realities that we must navigate around?” get skipped over completely. Coronavirus is a problem. But we’ve skipped over the second order questions of how do you deal with it without wrecking the economy? Is the economic damage worth it? How about our civil liberties?
This is the problem I have with the technocratic scientism of the elites. I like science. But science only tells us what is in front of us. It’s a flashlight in a darkened hedgemaze, showing us what is there without telling us where to go. An epidemiologist may be a smart person who knows more about infectious disease but his solutions are delimited and biased by his narrow field of expertise. He isn’t an economist or moral philosopher. That duty falls to competent “big picture” leadership, which we don’t have anymore.
People rightly make comparisons between the current hysteria and that of 9/11. Another contributor mentioned that Republicans now support Andrew Yang’s guaranteed annual income scheme. Interesting.
Another comparison might be that to AOC’s “Green New Deal”. That was criticized for collectivizing and destroying our economy in order to deal with the global warming existential threat. Are we more similar to our political enemies than we would like to think or admit?
Another thought is whether hysterias are a constant of human nature. Remember the nonsense that led the European powers into WWI and the near destruction of European civilization? The leaders at the time thought that they were doing the right thing.
FWIW: If you’ve got kids, and the schools are closed, here are a couple of links for downloadable coloring pages from hundreds of museums of all kinds that you can incorporate into your home-school lessons. https://tinyurl.com/sraowv6, http://library.nyam.org/colorourcollections/ Get out your Crayolas and Prismacolors.
This is spot on. The masses are our worst enemy. Without them, the wealthy would have no one to enforce their will on everyone. The wealthy can be singled out and terminated. The masses cannot be singled out and terminated even with a Super Virus.
The masses need to be taught that there are evil people in charge and they are out to murder and enslave us.
The talk here is often about how the rulers, elite, or sky-people hate us. I must certainly agree with that idea.
But the real problem is that ANYONE who wants to rule should not EVER rule over us. And if you buy that then you see the problem. The system draws evil people and then the evil ones use the levers of power to inflict their evil upon us.
This crononavirus farce is a perfect example. The numbers tell us that this is a mild flu at best. And yet, the media and the politicians have scared most people into believing they will die of a mild cold. Three F’ing coughs and the grave calls out to us.
To my friends here, take some vitamin D and some C. Then sit with a gun and kill the dindus that come through the door.
This is the endgame of “safety” at the expense of all else.
If you want to see how flight travel is affected in Europe, you should go to Flightradar24 and pan across Europe. Italy is nearly dead, especially Milan. Oddly, despite the lockdown, Paris is still quite busy.
https://www.flightradar24.com/
What, now Macron is just flying the Turks’ “refugees” in?
Fuel for the acceleration debate:
If a Democrat was in office right now, quarantining 2A guys and talking about suspending elections, controlling travel, etc… the Right would be howling.
Instead, the American Right is mostly Trusting the Plan. It’s a Thatcher Effect (https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/08/04/trumps-thatcher-effect-obstacle-to-white-nationalism/)
DIssident Right fortunes correlate to the Democrats in America, inversely with the GOP on a more shallow curve. The GOP acts as a drag on us whether they’re in or out of power. But the more seats of power Dems hold, the more our ranks swell.
Ready to get downvoted to like -100?
But in all seriousness, you are of course dead-on as usual.
I regret that I have but 100 upcummies to give for my people. Oven me, lads.
The likelihood of me down-voting (well, anyone) is practically nil. The likelihood of me down-voting the account that gave us “The Powers that Reeeee?” (I still laugh about that.) Not happening. When all is lost we still have humor.
Ahh, upcummiez. How I miss the TRS Boards.
if it posted it it would probably be down-voted to whatever maximum the forum software will allow
Downvoting a well expressed, well intended opinion is unworthy (IMO) of the level of discourse usually found on this discussion section. Perhaps I’m misinformed, but if I don’t buy into Exile’s opinion, I respond or I ignore. If he made a good call, I upvote. If he made an excellent observation, I commend him directly.
Downvoting to me should be saved for obvious trolls in the hope of saving others time and effort in response. But that’s just me. To Exile’s credit, I don’t believe he’s ever been downvoted—I do recognize votes are averaged out.
Bravo, Compsci.
Just don’t every question the ZOG Emperor. That will bring the downvotes every time
#TrustThePlan WeAreQ
And what have your ranks accomplished with the Dems in power? Nothing other than choking on your black pills.
This is surreal. No other words. Grab some physical gold.
People sometimes ask me, as a historian, how stuff like the Salem Witch Trials happened. Now I have a clear example to give them. Puritanism was a great creed for survival in an incredibly harsh new land. But you can’t tell people they’re doomed to hell all day, every day without psychological repercussions. There was tremendous social tension by 1692, but nobody could really pinpoint just why…. the Witch Trials were a giant psychological pressure release valve, and when it was over, the old Puritan world was gone, and the new Yankee world was born.
We — anyone born after about 1960 — grew up hearing how horrible awful no good very bad terrible America is. We got it everywhere. All our cultural institutions hate us, because we’re incorrigible racist sexist homophobic bigots. Except…. we’re not. Life in America is pretty great. You can only ignore the hatred and neurosis directed at imaginary enemies for so long, before it takes a serious psychological toll. Our leaders are complete hysterics, and have been for going on 20 years now. It’s always 30 seconds to midnight according to our “leadership” in academia, the Media, the arts, the government… except it’s not. It’s actually still very materially nice, and since they also lecture us constantly that materialism is the only thing that matters, we’re under severe psychic strain.
The Wuhan Flu is our Witch Trial. It’s a great spiraling orgy of panic that discharges all the built-up angst… as it’s ushering in the new world that has been building up beneath the surface for some time. A few more people will die from coronavirus than died from “Satan” back in Salem… but not too many more. The point of the panic isn’t to do anything about the disease; the panic itself is the point.
“The point of the panic isn’t to do anything about the disease; the panic itself is the point.”
Damn fine analysis. There was a pent-up demand for panic. As a historian, and one obviously familiar with the Salem Witch Trial period, when did the colonists come to realize the panic was unwarranted and how did they react when it became obvious? Knowing people they probably just moved on, but maybe not?
The trials ended when the girls started accusing the wives of the colony leadership. Which is why I say this is over in a week or two,when Karen out in the suburbs realizes she’s stuck with her kids indefinitely.
We — anyone born after about 1960 — grew up hearing how horrible awful no good very bad terrible America is. We got it everywhere.
It’s weird, because I somehow missed out on all that. I was born in 1963. In all my many moves as a kid, we always seemed to land in some little suburban area where they were still preaching old fashioned American patriotism. My first exposure to “America Bad” was a pretty weak version in a largely Jewish neighborhood in central Jersey from 7th grade on, but by then my internal compass had been set, so what they said didn’t really take. And even there, it was pretty mild, nothing like you see nowadays.
Just the year before in Northern NJ, I was required to memorize and be able to recite the entirety of Paul Revere’s Ride among other patriotic indoctrination and activities. We were shown the film 1776 in school. We were taught to idolize the founding fathers.
For the civil war it was, of course, all very pro-Lincoln, but what was notable was that we weren’t taught to hate the South and Southern soldiers and Generals. Men like Jackson and Lee were presented as honorable foes, caught up in a very complicated situation. Slavery was bad, and it was good that it ended, but the people of the South weren’t evil incarnate.
I am an East TN hillbilly born in the early ’50s. We heard that the f’ing Yankees were evil. We rarely talked about America but rather “the south”.
I still think when it all comes apart and the SHTF; the Appalachian people will hold the mountains against all others. I think only nuclear annihilation could beat us.
It’s easier to be magnanimous in victory than in defeat.
It happened at different rates in different places. I grew up in a big city in the New New South; all my teachers were crusading Yankee transplants, so I probably got it faster.
In that video that Z linked to last week, Edward Dutton seems to argue that the Salem Witch Trials were a sign of a society protecting its collective fitness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_LxmuXukmk
Life is complex, so the phenomena could have multiple causes, including a release for guilt-induced religious zeal and social hygiene.
I never understood why nobody gives any weight to the idea that the reason the Trials ended was that they got all the witches. 200 accusations and only 30 convictions sounds pretty sober to me.
We’ll show you Dirt proles who’s boss.
Wretches. No soup for you!
Who exactly has the soup do you suppose? They got a lot of soup springs up there in cloud people land?
Well, on the hopeful side, we had a worse (so far) repressive state under W Wilson and the Proggies during our brief participation in WWI. The giant war state got shut down, immigration was halted and Commies from the Steppes got deported back to their Motherland.
You can say what you like about the old whyte yankee elite, but they’re the ones who stepped in and did this, starting with shutting down the proto-UN. Are the current Cloud Folk competent to do something like a ‘return to normalcy’_?
I’d say no, but I’d also say that they are likewise incapable of implementing the nightmare scenario nationwide. So something will give, possibly due to urban rioting.
If Corona is a chronic rather than acute thing, Z’s collapse scenario seems a pretty good guess at how They will spin this.
This is a time of testing for dissidents – can you watch the Empire spiral and burn and see it as an opportunity rather than just a disaster? Can you reach the point where you feel, deep down, that what’s bad for Them is good for Us and act on it?
If you’re anywhere near that power level, the Empire’s shambolic response in the face of nothingburger/armageddon (YMMV) is a net positive. They never let a crisis go to waste. Neither should We. For now, prep, dig in and keep your family and friends safe. Look to red pill where and when you can.
There’s a point in Atlas Shrugged where Galt’s “strikers” are mostly fighting against their own prospects who’re working to save the U.S. government from collapse. It’s a good dilemma to think about in the shadow of a real-life perfect storm.
If Corona-Chan DNR’s Weimerica, will you vote to pull the plug or keep her on life support?
For starters, I’d like to thank the Zman for giving us a heads-up: we’ve got to hang on for a month without pay or re-supply.
I was calculating how long, for myself.
If they pull a Meltdown and cut credit card limits to what you owe, that’s gonna hurt.
(It hurt a lot worse in 2009, disastrous.
My biz runs on cash flow and credit cards.)
Nonetheless, I hope like hades /ourguys/ can hold for 4 weeks. Or at least til April when the Sweet Meteor Of Death hits us.
I was thinking about the end of WWII when there was a massive pent-up demand for goods like cars and the economy boomed for years. The difference was that the economy had been repurposed for 4 years, not shut down. So as soon as the war was over, the factories making planes, guns, and tanks immediately switched back to cars and dishwashers (albeit 1940 models at first).
This economic pause is unprecedented and I doubt it will be peacefully tolerated more than a month. Once small business start to go under, anger is going to flare.
These things cascade. I was talking to the guy who owns the local feed store on Monday, and there were rumors that it was going to be shut down. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but imagine any break in the chain due to all this.
I depend on the feed store for my ranch.
The feed stores and feed mills depend on truckers.
I told the feed store owner that I’ll be coming to get grain whether he’s open or not. If someone tries to keep him closed, I will confront them. If he has no grain because truckers and distribution centers won’t ship to him, I’ll jump the chain straight to the statehouse, and I won’t come alone.
Most big ranchers already have all the grain they’ll need for the rest of the winter and early spring. I’m cursed with limited grain storage space, so I buy in smaller lots, but my cattle would survive from here on out on hay and pasture alone. At some point, though, breaks in the supply chain will start to cause serious effects. Not just grain but gas and diesel, tractor parts, lubricants, the many miscellaneous farm supplies. And the money to buy them.
You keep farmers and ranchers from doing their business, and the whole country starves.
Dagnab. One goal was to buy a grain trailer and actually take delivery of that commodity contract for 5000 bushels of #2 red durham wheat.
(And an oil tanker to take delivery of that 5000 gallons of winter blend diesel.
Gas stations pay COD.)
Curious- the packing house is the local exchange for farmers; is the auction lot the exchange for animals?
Who puts a paycheck in the rancher’s hand?
The auction house cuts me the check. But I also sell direct to people who want feeder calves and replacement heifers.
Bigger producers bypass the auction , I assume and have direct deals with meat packers. I don’t run in those circles.
A friend of mine runs his own feed lot and has direct deal with a slaughterhouse. So his cattle go pasture->feedlot->slaughter and he markets the beef himself as specialty organic, non-gmo beef, because people will pay a premium for that.
Best as one can tell, the most conservative parts of the empire that do actually approximate “it’s just a flu,” in attitude, are faring the best. It is, therefor, for all intents and purposes, just a flu.
I’m in So Cal, so the situation here is particularly sketchy. I’m keeping a finger on the local pulse through FB, and the Next Door app. Now I access both from a desktop, so my view is a little skewed. If there is anything remotely encouraging it’s this: both FB, and ND are full of people trying to stem panic, and spread common sense. Many people are offering help to those who need it. Many more are encouraging their neighbors to stay level headed, and not give in to fear. Most see the real danger is not from the virus, but from the media generated panic. A lot of folks are seeing that the only difference they can make is through these admittedly compromised outlets. But they are taking the time to do what they can.
JWM
I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen “Common Sense” and “NextDoor App” in the same sentence.
Interesting times we live in.
Ditto here. Rarely use FB, but keep an account for times like this. People are getting edgier. Next week will be interesting since the weather is improving and the “vibrants” in the municipalities around us will have been loose from school for two weeks.
I would submit for consideration that that this “crisis” is really something all of us here probably have hoped for.
A) It’s relatively benign. Even in Italy, which is being portrayed by the media as “horrific” and “a nightmare”, there are only 27,000 cases in a country of 60,000,000 which is (outside of Japan) perhaps the largest senior citizens home in the world. Therefore, any consequences in real numbers are quite low.
B) The media has lost whatever grips on reality it once had. Recall this all began during the fake impeachment, which greatly damaged media credibility. This “crisis” serves by furthering the public good…and it is an incontestable pubic good that the traditional, mainstream, media be viewed as not only an unreliable source of information, but an outright deceitful one. Every day that the number of cases stays in the thousands is a day the doomsdayers lose even more credibility. Also, if you watched the President’s news conference yesterday (I watch them daily and skip the news programs), you’ll see reporters largely whipped into compliance because they’re outright terrifying people. The questions yesterday? Practical. Calm. No recriminations. Devoid of “well, the Democrats said…” That’s a group of people who have been read the Riot Act.
C) The Government Party – particularly the bureaucracy – has shown itself to be of little more use than standing in front of a big blue wall to speak in calming tones. Pretty much everything ELSE in the response is a private sector endeavor. In fact, to speed care to people, wide swaths of the public sector bureaucracy are simply being mowed down. Whether it’s test kits, vaccine trials, whatever, if there’s something good being done right now, it’s being done by people who are not government employees and who are finally being allowed to work around the government. Gone also are the days of free-traders talking about the dangers of tariffs and border controls. Dead. Gone. Buried. I recognize these are not sane people, but there is no room at this point for people who want to run on open borders nonsense. Biden/Sanders, already barely possessing basic cognitive functions, sound like lunatics when you go back and listen to their racism-hysteria on 1/31/20.
D) China – This “crisis” represents the ignominious defeat of the Globalist cabal that has raped this country for 30 years. We’re going to see critical manufacturing compelled to move back to US soil. We’re going to see China further isolated economically, socially, politically, etc. And that’s before Pres. Trump decides to increase the tariffs even higher to recoup some of our losses from this “crisis”.
E) Stocks/Investing – we’ve all been predicting that this collapse would come to equity markets sooner or later. People are going to learn, just as they learned during the housing crisis – that they need to diversify their portfolios. They’re also learning a hard lesson about panic selling and the power of a deceitful media to drive public panic.
F) Education – we are all about to see that most of public education is a useless exercise in daycare and feeding poor people. Our local school is putting food in boxes which students can pick up during the day. EVERYTHING ELSE is being migrated to online E-learning. OK, awesome. The less time students are compelled to sit in a classroom being indoctrinated by a Leftist professor the better. Entire public schools can now be collapsed down to smaller number of teachers, and the buildings converted to cafeterias.
G) Nationalism – it is not going to be lost on people that the United States, despite being the 3rd largest population on the planet, is trailing in both cases and fatalities and has a very respectable survival rate of those diagnosed. (more than 98% last I checked) India seems to be benefiting from being an enemy of China and it has some natural geographic and cultural isolation. They were also one of the first countries to unapologetically close all their borders to foreigners. Which of course makes the obvious point that nationalist societies that act in their own self interest are doing markedly better than the “woke” societies which embrace all manners of Liberal lunacy at the expense of their own citizens. In fact, early on, the wokesters were bragging about it!
Although it won’t be couched in these terms, COVID-19 is accelerating the world away from globalism, towards nationalism, and (at least in the US) should drive quite a bit of public skepticism about the power of the government when they are being treated by people in the private sector. The government’s basic job during the last month? Finding all the retarded bullshit regulations they have erected over the last 25-30 years and ripping them down.
There is a LOT to be optimistic about.
And that is before it sinks in that we’re probably only talking about a surge of a few tens of thousands of cases (in a land of 340,000,000 souls) and deaths measured also in thousands not tens of thousands or millions as the “worst case” projections project.
Do you grasp what it means, politically, for President Trump to have only a few tens of thousands of victims in the short run (before cases peak and start to decline) and a thousand or two dead? When MILLIONS were in the initial projections?
How many Presidents can run on saving MILLIONS of lives?
“You’re not just richer today. You’re alive. I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message.”
Yes to optimism as the means to enhance your survival prospects. Cowering indoors and whining is not going to improve the species. Better to maximize your preparedness and harden whatever shelter you call home (or better yet, relocate to a more secure haven).
Those who can, will. I bought more ammunition, though every day is a good day for that, and made sure we were stocked with the right kinds of supplies. Not everyone has a bug-out location. I think we’ll see a couple of weeks of more-or-less voluntary cooperation by the public. Once the cases peak (probably early April) we’ll have a week or two of watching cases ramp down, and things should get back to normal by late April or early May.
That’s my guess as well. We’ve become so soft and hive-minded that people leap into exaggerated fear as a tonic for boredom and low self-esteem. When the final stats for 2020 are written, it will be shown that more people died of regular flu than COVID, and both will be less than automobile accident carnage.
TomA, Frustrating thing is (as has been noted) that being wrong and crashing the economy will bring no consequences. The same song and dance response they always give will be—if wrong, “See, our extreme measures stopped a catastrophic event”—if right, “You, should have listened to us sooner”.
Tails you win, heads you lose. And we accept such duplicitous positioning every damn time.
How many Presidents can run on saving MILLIONS of lives?
I’m pretty sure Trump has seen Ghostbusters.
Venkman was right.
I don’t think we’ll see victory on every one of these points, but we’ve got to push for as many as possible.
This moves the ball decidedly in our direction.
I subscribe to Z’s blackpillish outcome, but do acknowledge these also are a possible outcomes. In fact, if it doesn’t pan out like I expect it will, this polar opposite outcome is the most likely. The odds are something like 70/30 and that nearly one-third is not insignificant. There won’t be a splitting the baby result.
eta: Obviously the Ruling Class will have to yield on China. If they do not, then the odds change in the optimistic direction. I may be assuming more rationality on their part than is warranted.
China is done, whether they yield or not. It is already a foregone conclusion that national-security related manufacturing is going to be coming back to US soil. The Chinese cemented that when they threatened to withhold medicines a couple weeks back. You can see it in Trump’s eyes when he goes out of his way to call it “the Chinese virus”. They are so effed, and I’m going to love it.
We must be cautious as to avoid surrogates taking China’s place. I could care less if Vietnam makes my shirts or lawn ornaments, but moving essential industry there is another matter.
China 30 years ago made jack s*^t which we cared about. Already South East Asia has a large industry making our semiconductors and disk drives. They of course want more—that’s where the future is—Vietnam sells lots of plant pots in the local Costco. Keep it that way. They want first world manufacturer status, let them invent their own products.
Hok;
Outstanding survey. I agree that any and all of the positive developments you list is possible, even likely. We should all work to make them happen. I’d add one:
E.1 Leverage: Learn that it can be poisonous to your prosperity, particularly during a panic. The older you are the less leverage you should have in your life.
This means, aspire to have your home mortgage paid before you retire. Work to get your small biz to ‘cashflow’ (gozinta’s = gozouta’s). The old rule of thumb for investments was that the % of fixed assets in your portfolio should equal your calendar age, if not more. These days there are a lot of fixed income (Hi Yield, Foreign Bonds) and semi-fixed income asset classes (REITs & MLPs, for example)* on offer via low cost mutual funds. So use them too, not just bonds.
_________________
*REIT = Real Estate Investment Trusts. These hold diversified interests in multiple *commercial* RE projects, not residential. MLP = Master Limited Partnerships. These hold preferred payment rights to revenue streams from energy infrastructure, like pipelines. These latter you must diversify, either by owning small chunks of a number of them or, easier, via an MLP mutual fund.
Watch out, those MLP and REIT funds consist of highly leveraged assets; they get one into the same problem one does by carrying a lot of personal debt, it’s just invisible on that account statement.
Good detail, thanks much Al d’North.
Is an MLP like an oil conservatorship?
(fixed income on an established producer, versus a penny stock on a wildcatter drilling pilot holes)
Shoot. This year I was hoping to pay off the credit lines, my buffer and lifesaver, and get to gozinta. Next year, the nickel slots at last!
Same as every year, they pull another fast one.
Yep, I agree. Much like the housing crisis in 2008…people realized it’s not such a hot idea to use your house like an ATM machine and borrow far more than you can afford.
Hokkoda, I was thinking this might break their secret superpower, the power of Storytelling.
They’ve lied one too many times, and now are lost in the maze of their own lies.
Good, good stuff, H.
(Side note: “portfolios”-
Ha. Haha. Hahahahahaha.
Boomers, go figure)
Not a boomer, but a funny point!
Here in France you can’t leave your home without a certificat stating the reason why you’re out. Along the lines of these Z-man post, I doubt that the French authorities will want to give up that kind of “stop, question, and force citizens to show their papers” kind of authority. They’ve even closed the churches!
I suspect, however, that there will be very little enforcement of these requirements in African and Arab neighborhoods: these people are unlikely to submit meekly to interrogation and police probably don’t want violent confrontations, especially when they know the government is on the side of the Africans and Arabs.
If I were a younger man, I’d move to Russia. I lived there a few years ago and felt more free there than I did in the United States or France.
I forgot to add that they’re postponing the second round of municipal elections from late March until June.
And I haven’t see one sign that any of this is being debated in the National Assembly–we’re just living under the ukases of a drama-queen dictator.
I also suspect that there will be very little enforcement of these requirements in African and Arab neighborhoods – because the French secretly hope they all get sick and die.
As someone pointed out yesterday, oppression of the law-abiding and turning a blind eye to criminality is a hallmark of anarcho-tyranny. Many of us are rethinking where we chose to live.
How would you know if the churches are closed?
They closed the churches they didn’t burn down?
There sure have been a lot of grand old cathedrals spontaneously catching fire in the last two years.
500, 700, a 1000 years, then poof! for no reason at all. White people don’t build to last.
5.7 earthquake in Salt Lake, Wasatch fault system, depth 7 miles in loose unconsolidated old lake bed and alluvium waste from nearby Wasatch range. EQ waves slow down in unconsolidated soils and gain vertical acceleration. Lots of aftershocks. Gas and water main breaks, brick off buildings, damage at airport, trailers off foundations.
I’m 4 hours from Salt Lake and no effect here, and am experienced with years of California earthquakes.
The statue of the Angel Moroni on top of the Salt Lake Temple dropped his trumpet! Mormons in this state will lose their collective minds! Already talking about signs and portents on local Salt Lake TV. Plus earthquakes coupled with pandemics is Mormon mythology predictor of the second coming. Oh Boy!
the Angel Moroni
Always thought that name was a little too obvious.
Z…..you are sanity in the midst of the destruction of our culture and economy.
The earthquake will kill more people in the 801 area code than WuFlu will
Range, isn’t that like the Seventh Sign or something?
Preppers – what’s a good way to filter blood from water? Any good locust or frog repellents I can hoard?
Xtians – does bleach deconsecrate holy water?
Locust and frogs are good eatin’. Just scoop em up. Fry the locusts whole and just the legs for the frogs!
I love frog legs. Bullfrogs are invasive in CA, so no limits, no season.
Haven’t tried the grasshoppers. Les Stroud says they’re tasty.
I’ve had grasshoppers. Fried. Taste like potato chips to me. Little nutty. For a novelty, they are fine, but our normal salty snacks are vastly better.
Tarantula, anyone?
Taran…. oh no, Exile’s been shopping at the wet market again.
Suggestion, but no personal recommendation?
If Survivor Man says so . . . ( but I prefer to never find out.)
I don’t think I could get past the appearance or crunch. Even knowing they don’t bite or sting, they’ve always made me uneasy – like crickets. Sorry, I’d rather eat grass. When do we start hearing about everyone’s weight loss on the Corona diet?
Those damned crickets and grass would set my whole body to hurting. I’ll stick with large ruminants, thanks!
Some how all this talking of eating bugs leaves me cold, having actually seen how seriously some of the Lefty climate change folk actually talk about changing to this diet so we no longer eat beef products.
Scary part is they would use such as supplements/mixtures, rather than straight eating of crispy little things with visible wings and legs—and our capitalistic system will give it to us in a NY second when they sense a buck to be made.
Insects are not kosher, so some will be exempt from the Helot Diet.
It’s not humiliating, it’s liberating!
“Insects are not kosher”
You just have to cut their tiny throats with the appropriate tiny knives.
Let’s see…hmmm….oh, don’t forget famine, storms-crappy weather, fire, the Jews will rise to be a great nation and they will believe in Jesus. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
So it turns out Communism was inevitable after all…
On a lighter note, for those of us who were worried that Trump wasn’t going to become a dictator…. here’s his big chance! Really puts the Wuhan Flu in perspective, don’t it. How much of a police state are you willing to tolerate, if it means Nancy Pelosi et al get sent down to the countryside for reeducation? (Which will never happen, of course, but we can all write some fanfic while we’re in quarantine).
I still think God saw the Super Bowl halftime show and, seeing no redeeming value left, pulled the plug on us.
I see this month as us switching from a decades long slow motion decline to a rapid decline. The real decline will be in the purchasing power of the dollar over the next few years. Also, the people who have created this depression, and it will be a depression, are sheltered people who make good money and minimally have the ObamaCare gold plan. No American alive today has really had to deal with a real depression, sure some were kids back then, but few understand the consequences. My neighbors are skipping their housekeeping this month because they don’t want them giving them the virus. In a couple years it will be, “remember when we had housekeeping…and gardeners…and the pool guy?” This is the end result of a frivolous society. And don’t think we won’t need negro abatement soon. These politicians are acting on PowerPoints and Spreadsheets and Concepts (like the 737 Max Engineers) but forgetting the basics. A $1000 check isn’t going to help begin to compensate for what they did. Half of Americans have something like $400 to their name and most live in urban areas. Even during the 1930s half of America was still rural, canning their own food. The country is practically designed to implode based on what they’re doing.
JR, it’s bi-partisan. No matter which party loses any given election, the winners are always the same: Wall Street/MIC/Bankers. http://archive.ph/zJLAs
Z predicts a “massive re-ordering of society” and offers two specifics:
1. The state will have the power to “shutter businesses, lock people in their homes” and “every flu season will result in school closures and demands for people to self-isolate.”
2. “massive government intervention in the economy.”
Commenter Chet predicts “the main fallout for this is Big Tech will gain more moral authority to expunge resources deemed a threat to public safety.”
Any other specific predictions? Can we sharpen Z’s “massive government intervention in the economy?”
We will all be tracked, 24/7, and will be told when we can go to work and when we can’t leave the house.
Big tech derives $ from ads. Econ collapse = less ad spend =weaker tech companies
If only we had listened to “it’s just the flu, bro” people at the beginning we wouldn’t be in the mess that is coming.
we can consider a scenario in which cases are never diagnosed and reported, so what are covid19 deaths would be attributed to the flu or some other mystery ailment that disproportionaly kills old people, Italians, Iranians, and Chinese . At some point, some people would demand an explanation as to why a bunch of people in a nursing home suddenly died of repository failure. Suppressing the truth can help stave off panic and form a consequentialist perspective justified, yet people want to know the truth too,and eventually it gets out in one form or another.You would have to somehow prevent doctors from publishing their findings too.
Perfect.
It is easy to describe the current moment as “dangerous,” and that grossly understates things. This is past an inflection point and now permanently dangerous. Remember the world prior to this month because you never again will live in it.
The whole last four years has been a buildup to imposition of a totalitarian state. Multiply what we have seen by a thousand and that’s what the former West will resemble in the next year or two. It’s a solid bet we won’t be able to exchange ideas even here before the end of year; “our” Congress just reauthorized the Patriot Act while panic ensues. Look for more of it. While the schadenfreude will be tremendous, even Twitter will be suspended as a public safety measure.
The ruling class has achieved what it has always wanted, the imposition of serfdom. The pathetic Hollywood types soon will realize they, too, were just puppets and not part of the club. Ditto the idiotic followers of Bernie, and even Bernie and the rest of the mandarins. Real power now will rest in the police state apparatus and that will intensify.
The few public Paleocons who remain should be calling for an actual revolution, but they know it is too late.
The biggest idiots are those who say it will be over in a month , using China and SK as examples. As if anyone has any way of knowing. This could crest in a few days at 10-15k US cases or at 100-300|+ million. who the hell knows. The stock market is acting like this is gonna be worse than a one-month affair.
Ah yes, as everyone knows Wall Street has an impeccable record when it comes to eschewing unfounded panic.
All due respect, but your column might be on a bit higher level than lots of people out there can grasp. When I say “It’s just the flu, bro” — and I do, a lot, when speaking with people — I’m fully aware that the freakout will have horrible consequences. It’s a good, short, pithy way of putting the dilemma to them, of highlighting the freaky nature of the freakout: Do you really want tanks rolling down Main Street to “fight” the 97%-of-people-completely-recover-virus?
Sadly, as it turns out, a lot of people really, really do, because they somehow think that the government, somehow, someway, can prevent the sniffles. A few weeks ago, I had a pretty good friend who was a staunch conservative. He’s a lot less of a friend now, because he actually, literally said that if rolling tanks down Main Street is what’s needed to enforce a nationwide curfew, then roll the tanks.
“It was just the flu, bro” is going to be a great reminder to that kind of person. “Hey, remember when a tiny fraction of really old people with bad lungs kicked the bucket? The mandatory Alexa in your house and the Kommissar down the street say hi. Totally worth it, wasn’t it?”
I was thinking more about the people who mock the critics of this panic. “It’s just the flu bro” is the all-purpose dismissal, as if only morons think we are over reacting.
I know, and I agree. Those people kill me. But those people are unreachable anyway. The brave new police state will come as a complete shock to them, like it will to my former buddy.
Severian, the police state will not come as a shock—it will come with applause. That’s have it always happens. But your sentiment is right on.
To quote from that tremendous Berger column linked here yesterday, people crave totalitarianism. “It’s just the flu, bro” simply means submission. And many if not most are ready to submit.
People of a certain age need to come to terms with the fact that they will die one day. To risk impoverishing millions of families with young children by possibly throwing the World into a depression in an attempt to give the Grim Reaper the slip for a few more years is unconscionable. I am in my 50s by the way so I am getting up there.
The grocery stores are still being emptied here in the high desert of Los Angeles county, even the local AF bases are having the same problem.
Trump and those “doctors” managed to created this mass panic/ and have managed to destroy the economy in the process.
The stupidity on parade is just astounding.
you mean that CDC speech last week or so and travel ban? That was bad optics in retrospect. The ban did nothing but make ppl scared. Too late for bans. The window was in feb.,
AZ grocery store update—shelves even more empty than on Sunday. Good news, oldsters get to shop at 5 in the morning and be disappointed before everyone else. 😉
So what is gone—all paper products, all noodle products (like for spaghetti), can goods like beans and such pretty much gone, no rice, no hand soap, bleach, or other disinfectants.
So what is newly gone—milk, eggs, lots of bread products (the kind from commercial bakery, loaded with preservative), chicken, and now hot dogs.
Cuts of beef stocked as most markets have butcher shops. Milk gone is particularly disheartening as today there are mothers with children all standing around the empty fridges asking about deliveries. I would not have bought any if here was some after that.
Thoughts…numbers of shoppers seemed down, folks on the cell phones were checking in with home discussing what to buy and breaking the bad news of shortages, people were subdued, but seemingly anxious—but that could be me projecting, store personnel were not as apparent as normal—I expect they were lightly staffed with folks home with children and such.
My strategy was to paint a stupid joker-like smile on my face as I moved through the aisles and then the check out line. People don’t need anymore crap these days to elevate tension. As I’ve said before, I’ve been here a looong time, decades, and never experienced such a scenario. This is the crap you see on the news from failed, third word countries.
I scored some bananas at Wal Mart yesterday afternoon, showed them to my wife, calling them “victory bananas”. Then mentioned that this was all so third-world. Will we get to go back, or is the really spectacular grocery store thing with full shelves and nice presentations permanently over?
As you noted, what ties all of these boogeymen together is that they are unseen and, often, not even defined.
Terrorism, extremism, racism, white privilege and, now, a virus.
There’s a mystical quality to it all. When your enemy is nowhere but everywhere, you can demand any authority to fight it. Even better, the enemy can never be defeated so TPTB will never lose their jobs or their power.
Brilliantly put and very true. After all, the war on poverty, the first of the ineffables, marches on, 55 years later. And thus the war on microbes shall never end. When there is no more blood in that turnip, the war on… fnord?
Exactly. I am waiting for TPTB to tie in Climate Change. These pandemics, like hurricanes, “are happening more often and are more severe…”. So its time to change everything!
Of course the cogdis of overpopulation and human impact on climate coupled with a natural eh hem, “solution”, to too many old (white) people, is awkward, but certainly manageable to those who celebrate abortion as the most sacred human right.
I expect you won’t have to wait very long on the Climate Change tie in. Afterall, the science is settled, just like it is for CV19 – dontchaknow.
I think it’s done already. Been hearing about diseases once thought eradicated returning due to warmer climate—Global Warming. For example, malaria and West Nile virus in Southern US. How difficult will it be to extend to CoronaChan?
And now for the bad news. After witnessing what the FBI/CIA are capable of, does anyone doubt our overlords’ capacity to introduce viruses into the general population in order to maintain their control?
DLS, the number of biosafety level 4 labs has near doubled after 9-11, from 30 to 57.
Bernie “No refunds” Sanders is now reassessing his campaign after his miserable defeat last night. Even with the pandemic going on, Democrats have soundly rejected Medicare For All and other far left bromides. Puts a crimp in the nazbol narratives on the right too.
The results in the primary were never a referendum on policy. That’s nonsense popular with the chattering skulls.
Precisely. Pretending that most people vote based on policies is the same as pretending they vote based on facts. It’s emotion and media-driven and racially-based, all the way down.
There are no meaningful policy differences between any of the Democratic candidates.
Tulsi Gabbard is for ending the ME wars, for which she’s been ghosted by her own party and every media outlet except Tu-Ca. That’s one meaningful difference that neither party will tolerate.
Bernie “No refunds” Sanders is now reassessing his primary campaign. Seems interesting that despite the cries from Reddit and hipster coffee shops everywhere, Medicare for all was soundly rejected by the Democrats.
“Bernie “No refunds” Sanders” *snicker*
“despite the cries from Reddit and hipster coffee shops everywhere” *guffaw*
Bruthas already get free health care. Bernie giving free shit to wipipo means us niggaz get less.
“ After the Saudi attacks on the World Trade Center buildings…”
Stopped right there.
Hi Z man:
I was curious about this as well. I always felt the Saudi 19 were a bunch of pigeons recruited by Iran, the real villain behind the attacks. For 15 years I blamed Saudi Arabia. Now, not so much.
Fuck off back to whichever Yidz r uz site you came from.
what the hell was that? I am genuinely curious. What did I say to elicit such venom?
vmax, that “recruited by Iran, the real villain” had to be satire.
Sh*tposter level 4 unlocked!
That, or we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
the Iran thing was a joke…the jist of the post was the 19 saudi pigeons….
Iran recruiting Saudis.
You wicked, wicked thing!
Yet, that’s what they’re trying with the whole “Iran is the #1 state sponsor of terror!” claptrap, wasn’t it.
Let it slide – it’s tangential to the point of the post. We can’t do a two-page “Dancing Shlomos” primer for every post. A lot of guys haven’t reached that level yet.
Exile, that comment killed me. I’m wiping tears as I type this.
I need to staple Exile’s comment to my forehead.
Most of the people ruling us have never progressed past the High School phase of intellectual and emotional maturity. At best they remain the scolding pompous ass pedantic parent with all the good intentions they need to totally f¥€£ us all up. Bless their filthy stinking rotten hearts. Bastards.
Completely and totally not related to today’s topic in any way, shape, or form…
Anyone know a good book about the Salem Witch Trials?
I don’t know of any. But if you can find one, it would be interesting to pair it with a reading/viewing of The Crucible.
Oh yes, “The Crucible” by Arthur Miller. I wonder what his background was? Let’s see:
“Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in Harlem, in the New York City borough of Manhattan, the second of three children of Augusta (Barnett) and Isidore Miller. Miller was Jewish,[4][5][6] and of Polish Jewish descent.“
Really makes you think
Miller’s Crucible was an attack on Joe McCarthy’s observations about communists in our government. Miller was protecting his tribe.
I recall way back in college, a discussion of that play in class. Play is really about the Communist hunts in the 50s, blah blah. I said, “But it turns out the State Department really was crawling’ with commies, though, right?”
Hilarity ensued.
Probably the last period in American history where being wrong and anti-American had some consequences. The elites and their Hollywood cadre will never let that happen again.
McCarthy came close to ripping the covers back. I’ve thought for a while that you could argue that the last third or so of the century in the U.S. was a uniparty determination to never let anybody get that close again.
I’ll be frank, not bashing anybody. The majority who will obey this are not long for this world. In a decade, the sheep will be in the decided minority. This will not endure. It is the last desperate attempt to maintain control by a ruling class that’s on the outs.
So stay optimistic, don’t panic, get prepared, and take note of who is panicking. That’s who you have to worry about.
It’s going to be a bumpy ride. You might as well get excited about it because it’s coming whether or not you want it to.
Absolutely agree. Monitor those around you. Panicky folk should be noted. In a pinch they will pull you down like a drowning man. Reach out to those who complement you.
Now that I’m thinking, it might not be the last attempt. Things could get a lot darker, but let’s hope sanity prevails and the guilty parties are brought to justice. It’s time for perp walks. Getting sick of this.
I was warning that the government should stock up on two months’ masks and quarantine all foreign travelers for three weeks. But that would be disruptive, you see. We sewed the wind, and now we shall reap the whirlwind.
**sowed, damn it
Sown?
I don’t knew.
Freudian slip. We “sewed it” too. 🙂
“The whirlwind” being the 19th Amendment?
As far as masks are concerned, the military just announced they are releasing 5M from their emergency stocks. It’s what I said a couple days ago. The military has tremendous reserve wrt medical facility. All are being directed back to US immediate needs. We just need to stay out of hot conflict for awhile.
Unfortunately, I think this is a wildly optimistic take. They fully intend to extend the lockdown all the way ’til November and the election. If they can’t panic enough people into realizing Orange Man Bad and voting him out of office, then they’ll close polling stations in certain areas and/or call for “online” voting or some such that will allow them to cheat.
Cancel the elections months early?
I fear you’re right, you may be right.
Then the Revolution is already accomplished.
“Defense Production Act”?
Are they kicking in the NDAA?
This will not happen. This is Q stuff.
Totally rigging a US election is much easier than all this. If this started as some kind of false-flag op, it’s gone wrong for Them as well as Us.
All those ballots found in car trunks weeks after the election. . . . You’ll notice neither party ever challenges the “chain of custody” of said ballots. No one is ever called to account, let alone prosecuted. It’s theater.
It is sort of a “false flag,” although that isn’t a perfect description for what has been done. It’s far more than simple exploitation of a crisis since the virus is quite real albeit not the killer or threat claimed. But there was and is extraordinary coordination among the propaganda outlets, the Chinese, and the Cloud People’s political apparatchiks. People avoid the word “conspiracy” for obvious reasons, but sometimes it is a conspiracy, straight up. My guess is the Empire’s vaunted 17 intelligence services have known of the virus since late November/early December, kept that tight to the vest, consulted with the Chinese and the propagandists, and have planned for this moment. All the squealing about the obvious origins of the disease is likely for this reason. As for your rest, my assumption is this will result in more oppression. I easily can see the other side of that argument, too.
Events over the next few days will be decisive.
We’re already seeing breadlines…if this goes beyond 30 days, look out for riots.
The frightening aspect of the surveillance state is that few remember that it arose after 9/11. Perhaps if more did, they could ask if we still need this intrusion, not that our uniparty in Washington would listen. Much the same with endless war. Weren’t we fighting in the Middle East and Afghanistan because we always fought there? Certainly we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
As for death rates from the coronavirus, we simply do not have enough deaths and recoveries to make a valid estimate. This is why there are range estimates all over the map. When all is done and we crawl out of our hovels, the true number will be there.
Once our ruling classes decided that being nice to minorities was more important than freedom of association, the handwriting was on the wall. Welcome to your new statist utopia.
So true. From that point on “community” meant white submission to Progress.
If this thing drags on and the noose tightens, the urban blue bugs are going to see the ROI of all those years of nice white lady routine. They will get to see, finally, “who we are”.
Remember, white mans rules are for whites. White man’s nice things and dead presidents on the other hand…
Ironic that with all of Trump’s battle with the deep state that they probably will be empowered even more now.
Now we also have to endure the schooling and guiding hands of our betters like Ivanka showing mothers how to reacquaint themselves with their children. Mostly people who will be financially unaffected by all of this.
Good interview with Tucker if you can stand the weasel who is interviewing him :
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/tucker-carlson-on-how-he-brought-coronavirus-message-to-mar-a-lago
The argument that “if you battle with the king, be sure you kill the king” is often applied to Trump. It can also be applied to Trump’s battle against “king” deep state. Trump has not come close to killing the king (not for lack of trying).
Great interview. Thanks for linking it.
All of this is accurate and non-trivial. The best analogy is an addict embarking on a terminal bender. If he’s fortunate, he hits a high bottom and rebounds. But more likely, he plunges into the abyss and removes himself from the gene pool. You only need to look at the makeup of Congress to see where we are headed. Fully half of our representatives are functionally morons or covert criminal grifters. There are no adults in the room any longer. Observe, analyze, predict, and prepare. Then Simple, Secret, Solo, and Spontaneous. It’s the only way to be sure.
I grew up near DC. One of my childhood friend’s dad was a typical government consultant. By the 1980s, I was in my 20s, befriended the Dad and rented a room at his house. He was quite eccentric himself, but somebody with a Masters in EE from MIT is no dummy either. He once said something like “Half of the staff [at EPA, where he’d consulted] are certifiably mentally ill.” That was 35 years ago! Does this reflect the entire Federal workforce? Maybe. I doubt it’s gotten any better.
If they do just start handing out money, those who can should hand some of it to people who can put it to uses that do not involve drama, stupidity or mere shitposting.
I am accepting shitposting donations. Will super-troll your selected targets for Bitcoin. Special anti-Semitic discounts available – enter the coupon code SHTETL for 20% off.
Our culture has been taught to subjectively judge, based on emotions, rather than objectively observe, based on logic. Such a way of thinking will take us to bad places we can’t even imagine now. C-virus is simply the catalyst, we were heading there quickly already, wherever it is that we end up. Buckle up.
I’m reminded of a phrase I first heard in the YUK during the Thatcher regime.
“The action is in the reaction” relating to IRA terrorism. Very little action is needed to achieve a great deal of reaction.
So, the proposal to send out $1,000 checks to everyone has Politico interviewing Andrew Yang. “Woo! UBI! You were right!” And bemoaning that it is, so far, a one-time payment.
https://www.politico.com/amp/news/magazine/2020/03/17/coronavirus-universal-basic-income-andrew-yang-13492
A one-time payment would cost about $330 billion. It is an imperfect solution to a government-caused problem — forcefully putting people out of work. I agree that it is better to give the money to the people than to the banks, but they’ve already done that too, to the tune of $1.5 trillion, if I heard correctly.
People understand that the government doesn’t have $1.5 trillion or $330 billion just sitting around, right? That the federal government’s expenditures already exceed revenues by about 3 to 1?
The one-time payment would metaphorically eat up the wealth of the top four richest Americans. A year of it would consume the wealth of all billionaires and a good deal of the millionaires, and destroy the incentive for wealth creation, meaning that after the first year or two the theoretical gravy train would be gone
There’s already no more money. It is perfectly reasonable to say that a government can engage in moderate deficit spending indefinitely. It is another thing to just say “Fuck it” and start printing money wholesale. If government would mandate a perpetual UBI you might as well tell people to break open their Monopoly boxes, that that money is now real.
The one reason that a few naive dupes thought that UBI was cool was that it was supposed to replace the current social welfare industrial complex, but look around. Nobody is talking about repealing anything. It’s just more gibs, all the way.
Hardcore welfare users already receive more than $1k per family member per month in benefits. If you told people everything else was going away, including Social Security and Medicare (where by far the bulk of social welfare money is spent), the pitchforks would be out immediately.
How can a guy who is as intelligent as Yang appears to be on the surface think this will work? Is this really his sneaky plan to burn it all down?
Students of the French Revolution will recall that socially, people were turning a bit all-against-all, driven by rumors and accusations. Then the government ran out of (real) money (but not the printed paper stuff), as a recession hit and tax revenues fell. They tried to tax everything that moved, and fund everything they could think of, and then the Revolution was off to the races.
Yup. I asked on another forum recently “In the US 2020 replay of the French revolution, who gets to play Marie Antoinette and who gets to play Robespierre?”
“Let them eat takeout!”
Sort of OT, but does anyone know teapartydoc , who used to post quite frequently on the FRev?
teapartydoc was one of the Greats here in the early Z-days.
We are now in the golden age of MMT. They’ve wanted to do this for years. Never let a crisis go to waste – make it your own crisis.
All this money is pure fiat, so none is really real. All is based on faith in .gub and its iron fist. Take our dollar for your oil or get liberated. Decoupling dollar from gold to pure fiat needed something tangible, so we promised to be besties with Saud if they made sure everyone used dollar for oil purchases. The petro dollar was born, and politicians we freed from the shackles of basing the dollar on a barbaric relic (no, I’m not a gold bug).
Yang’s UBI appeared to me as a soft landing for the jobs lost to automation. It definitely had a pie in the sky approach … we will live amongst plenty provided by automation so here is free money to pursue your interests. Reading some of the other dissident sites there was some support on this side likely as part accelerationist, part crytpo-gibs.
so here is free money to pursue your interests
There is no such thing.
A task for each of us: Get out, away from the city, away from the news, and the people, and the traffic, and the internet. Surround yourself with silence, punctuated by the clicking, chirping, whirring sounds of nature. Look up at the sky, and off to the horizon. Take deep breaths. Before they lock you in.
And think about what is really necessary, and what you really need to enjoy another day. Stock up on what you need, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Get rid of what holds you back or takes you away from what really matters.
Turn your back on the manufactured troubles, foolish responses, and crazy ideas. Trust not in what man will do for you, or to you, and get yourself clear. Save up and collect what you really need to live another day, and another year. You get one life, one family, and one community. Nurture them, look out for them, take care of them and expect them to take care of you. Do not depend on great men and grand plans, which will always fail you.
In the end, you get one life. It is what you make of it, and most of it is lived in your own head. Your own attitude is all, and will color every aspect of how you live your life, and how you enjoy the life you are living. Do what you need to do to get your head on straight, and the rest follows from there.
We are all now embarking on a journey into uncharted waters, no doubt filled with whirlpools and temptations. Getting to the other side in one piece appears to be a significant challenge now.
We are a community here, so be sure to treat the others here like the allies and friends that they are. We need each other for as long as these clouds hang overhead, and for as long as we are allowed to freely post. We also need to save something for those who follow us, years later. Think about what we can leave them with, that they can use to make things better, and so they can better understand the amazing things we have seen and done.
We all know that, one day, we will attempt to make our visit here and this place will be gone. That’s how things work in these times, and we are the enemy of many, simply by our presence in this virtual room. In the meantime, keep pushing to get your head and heart squared away. This is a great place to do just that, and it feeds my own head and heart daily.
Carry on, rant over 🙂
Hardly a rant, Dutch. More like the greatest sort of poetry: evocative and inspiring. Thanks. I’ve pencilled a drive into the outback for our next sunny day. Be well.
Three Dog Night expressed the same sentiment in the 1970 song “Out in the Country.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3gGn6t8Bog
Three Dog Night posting. I love it.
I love it. I’m trying to impress this very same notion on my family. Today, after work, I’ll take them down to the shores of Lake Erie to hunt for beach glass.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I think there are real opportunities to open people’s eyes. Everyone here needs to ponder how to exploit them, how to make your voices heard beyond this small community. If people want to make demands, fine. Let us make ours.
Whole Earth Nationalism?
Take that, Pine Gang.
I’d also add that this things really seems to even further accentuate (as if that was possible) the difference between Flyover Country and Shitlibstan. The craziest news stories are all coming from the coasts and Illinois. Girl Governor Barbie Pompom declares Total Double Super Lockdown, Mayor Skylar Genderbend of Hippytown, CA declares town a “gun and ammunition free zone”. And of course there’s always CA Governor Nuisance himself providing comic relief almost every day.
Personally, I was already committed to moving away from the PNW to a saner area before anyone had heard of this virus. Then again I’m an evil hater who reads too many hatefacts on websites like VDare and Sailer. I think the short to midterm effect (1 – 6 months) of this is going to be many complete normies, who’ve never heard of HBD, this blog, demographic replacement or the rest of our ideas will start noticing that things are just far less crazy once you get away from the NE and West Coast. It won’t be so much people thinking in racial or cultural terms but rather in terms of just wanting a return to normal life. This will hasten the geographic divide even more. I know it’s too early to tell but I’d be interested to hear if people are starting to see an uptick in white migration out of the Blue Hives in a few months.
Biggest problem there is that the machines do the work and guess what happens? The State fill in and the best people stop having kids.
US TFR sans immigration has been below replacement for 48 years and while divorce plays a large part, its more likely to be lack of well remunerated work.
High urban costs, finance based economics and a 50% decline in wages along with all the economies of scale mean inevitable population decline.
Eventually the Gods of the Copybook heading’s will indeed have their day but they’ll take modernity down with them.
Go long on buggy whips.
Trumpbuxx, beeches
Recommendations from the Taiwanese government today included limiting the use of currency, especially coinage, and promoting the use of electronic payments. How long until the banks and big tech get our government to wag that dog?
Oh yeah, KGB, I try not to touch cash now.
(I disinfect what I use for tolls and tips.)
All chip card. Even the $1.56 coffee.
Turns out the cashiers cringe at handling the dirty cash too, they thanked me.
too many mouths. not enough productive people . this is the problem with any govt program for large populations, be it food, UBI, healthcare, etc.
Most people have an IQ of 100 or so, maybe slightly less for Mestizos and Blacks.
This isn’t enough to be useful enough in modernity for us to be willing to pay them enough to live on. That takes 120+ IQ
And sure some will take trades, we don’t need than many tradesman if we build stuff correctly in the first place.
Even after an immigration freeze and/or repatriation none of the options you have are good for anybody.
You can
#1 Pay people not to breed and allow your population to decline by half or more.
#2 Go for eugenic genocide and hope they aren’t lead against you by a rival elite.
#3 Have heavy handed interventions in the way we do business to ensure people who work have enough to live on and an incentive to live a dignified life
#4 Have a rebellion to smash complexity in the new tire shocks for techies program lead by some Leftists nutter
#5 Have a permanent ever growing prole class who live shabby lives and take drugs.
#6 Redistribute wealth on a massive scale.
We’ve chosen the path of least resistance which is #6 since #1 guts the economy, #2 risks war, #3 will engender massive cultural resistance as many Americans regard cheap labor as a national birthright #4 is war and we are already deep into 5 and 6
Ultimately if we want complexity we must start with an end to immigration, massive repatriation and go from there to figure out how people are going to afford to live and have kids in a mostly urban society.
Or we could just piss away our country collapse like the USSR intro a bunch of less developed but more homogeneous nations.
Choose wisely.
Yang was clever marketing, planting the seed in the popular vernacular.
Broke: you break it, you buy it.
Woke: you break it, you OWN it.
I never believed UBI was a sustainable economic system.
I just want to normalize politicians bribing voters directly for their votes, auction-style. Cut out the party middlemen.
A lot of praetorians retired on the proceeds of succession. Whitey deserves his share of bust-out America (since he paid for all of it) before the dindus loot the last shelves at Uncle Sucker’s Gibs Warehouse.
I cannot even begin with how many whites I’ve encouraged to enroll on government programs. Future applicants may have to provide a picture, of course.
$1,000? If they have $1,000 to hand out. You know they have 10x that they are not giving us!
Say, Mr. Fed, it would be a shame if something were to happen to that nice economy of yours. While yous at work all day printing money I will be just sittin here minding my own business with my fellas here. Have a nice day now.
The Feds can mint near unlimited money and right now the risk of inflation is very low.
Normally all that extra cash sluicing through the system would risk heavy inflation but the global trend is to massive massive deflation so minting a few trillion is nothing.
It still won’t work. More than a month of two of this means the entire economy is tits up probably for many years to decades and when it does recover , consumerism is DOA other than prepping.
The lies will fly of course but trust your eyes.
Lots and lots of meetings and calls the past few days. The small ray of hope I have is that if you actually discuss any of this in a one-on-one setting, in total privacy, everyone agrees the measures taken are pointless.
I have had the same experience. People here think the official and public response is way overblown. My hope is that many people treat the shelter in place/social isolation thing the same way that 2A people treat any gun-grabbing legislation…with righteous disregard.
Much like a Trump 2016, anyone who questions the official narrative has gone quiet on social media.
Silent Majority indeed.
And their wives are probably all-in on the hysteria. At least that’s the pattern I’m seeing.
The more working-class the woman, the less she buys into the panic. This, like so much else wrong in our society, is a result of the AWFL (aka the Nice White Lady).
Talking with working class white women I know, they are all mad about how this is affecting both themselves and their sons & daughters. Most Nice White Ladies don’t know *anybody* that works as a waitress or a short order cook.
I went to the store last night. Aside from not being restocked on a few items (ground beef, paper products), they had milk, eggs, fresh bread, baking supplies, etc. Lots of produce and bakery cookies and cakes as well. What is going on is madness. My current boss is super happy that the Ohio governor is closing everything down because he thinks it will ‘flatten the curve’. I’ve never lost my respect for someone that I thought I knew and respected faster.
Opposite here – I popped in two stores to check for bread (I have plenty, just not the particular type my son prefers). Still totally cleaned out. Even all the pallets of water and other drinks that usually make the entrance of the store a maze were entirely gone. Saw a Han with a cart brim full of cans of veggies. I need nothing so bought nothing, but the stores’ shelves here in DFW are bare.
I’ve had pretty much the opposite. Otherwise sensible people thinking we have to do everything to stop the flu. I pointed out to someone that a disruption in insulin would lead to a million deaths. It clearly did not register.
Well, you live in the shadow of the imperial capital where all the brain-damaged geniuses flock.
So far, the majority of people I interact with are either up in the air or are bewildered at the insanity of everything. I’ve not talked to anyone who thinks this is the big one. Then again I’m not on Facebook, nor do I live in Lagos.
I’m on defcom 3 now as far as Lagos is concerned. I’m seeing tribes of young males loitering about in more menacing ways than typical. All those youths home from school will have a consequence.
Newsome is talking martial law in California. He’s finally rounding up the homeless now that they are a threat to him, Tom Hanks, and Kevin Durant. Important people.
Now Trump is part of the Yang Gang.
We need political judo. The powers that be have been unleashing the vibrant upon us. Let’s start rumors that unleash the vibrant upon them. Make that alliance unsustainable.
Imagine a horde of vibrants raiding Malibu. Beautiful man beautiful. We can make that happen.
Whiskey – “I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. Pleasure-barges on fire off the shore of Malibu, bright as tiki torches… I rode on the back decks of a wignat longship and watched Rob Reiner’s house glitter in the dark as its embers ignited Cher’s shake-shingle roof…”
We’re all ‘dreamers’ now 🙂
Newsome had been planning that round up for month and decided not to let a good catastrophe go to waste I guess.
Good riddance. People who can’t function at all, not “can’t work” but are utterly useless piles of refuse infested with typhus or worse need to be wards of the state.
It would be nice if we could hang our way free of drug dealers and thus reduce the number of addicts but its not doable and this is at least a full measure.
The lesson here is power when used works.
We probably don’t have to start rumors. Newsome and company know bank robbers go where the money is. This part is delicious although my expectation is a rapid descent into totalitarianism.
Cabin fever brings out the wild in the dindu.
Coming from a land with a distinct lack of cabins will do that.
Related! If you lock a forest Pygmy in a room for a week, he will die. Just curl up in a corner and expire.
A week in jail for a misdemeanor is a death sentence to them.
All cities are at risk of becoming cauldrons of chaos, but Lagos could well become a war zone in the blink of an eye. When the first few shots are fired, stupid hormonal males will go ape in no time. It’s hardwired in the genes.
Lagos is an interesting case. I doubt the whites living there have many firearms and that those who do will feel emboldened to use them, given the likelihood that the state will lock them up. That could get interesting.
Offer to buy them a Kindle copy of the Harvard Classics. That should occupy their time and keep them out of trouble.
Zman, hope this doesn’t unnecessarily delay your departure from Lagos. Keep safe from the real threat, not the imaginary petri dish one.
I am wondering if this is a manifestation of the Flyover Country v. Imperial Capital divide. It could also be bias selection on my part because I tend to avoid the crazy. That said, if you actually have a job in Flyover Country and are in the business of “doing something,” you have to regularly consider the unintended consequences.
It’s not influenza—it’s a coronavirus.
Lol
All this scaremongering about the flu is ridiculous! Why, don’t you realise that if we cancel concerts and close schools, literally millions of people will die! The fields will be as though sewn with salt! When the aliens land, the smoking ruins of America will serve as testament to our folly!
It’s just a depression, bro
Keeping people in their neighborhoods under these conditions is giving them the time and need to interact with their neighbors. Add to that the decay in general trust in our leadership and the increased sense that we have been on the wrong track for some time. On top of all that we have the decline in the quality of the people who are now going to be given the task of organizing and selling these new arrangements. They will light more fuses than they put out.
Plus, we have 156 plants in the US making toilet paper, over 90% of our supply. At least we’ll be well stocked!
My wife waited in line at Wal-Mart yesterday and got one large pack of toilet paper and one roll of paper towels. I now know what true inner peace feels like.
I am seeing the same splitting maul amygdala effect as all the other media-leftoid initiative: a dimensional split where two opposing realities exist in close proximity.
Half the people are annoyed with the reaction and shutdown.
The other half are still screeching that orange man didn’t shut things down soon enough. And we will become italy. Bodies will be everywhere. People who leave their homes are a threat to us all. Its actually scary to see how quickly the swollen amygdalae of the leftist hivemind becomes agitated and disorientated.
Which makes sense given the threat detection function of the hindbrain. In fact more sense than the abstract threats of Russian collusion and other Orange Man Bad derivatives.
This virus is piggybacking on the leftist mind virus resulting in escalating fevers of TDS and demands for more gov’t control.
This mind virus was a huge threat before the lung aids thing came around. After this, there will be people who will simply not be able to function on the most basic levels without full time gov’t keepers. Perhaps thats the point. But the army of stasi citizens is growing. Like any weapon, if it exists it will get used.
This helps us sort the Stasi from the normies from the prospects. For anyone not invested in the status quo, this is a year of opportunity. This is well beyond “Change we can believe in.” This is “Change we can’t stop that doesn’t give a sh*t about what you believe.”
This is real. This is happening. And if it started as glowbug false flaggotry, it’s slipped the leash.
Today is the day the shit gets real. People are freaking out today, even as they held it together through yesterday.
Similar experience. The enforced conformity only occurs in public (I don’t do social media and assume it is the same there). If the Cloud People impose the uber police state I fully expect, they will be ruling people who know they are monsters and liars. They have been ruling people who had doubts.
Good lord.
No, the Saudis were not behind 911. Saying that Bin Laden represents Saudi Arabia, is like saying Hillary Clinton represents and speaks for you. Or Bernie Sanders. What followed 911 was just geopolitics of empire, managed with the usual competency of the idiots in charge. The mudflaps learned that our trappings of civilization are remarkably vulnerable. Bush’s hands were tied – massive numbers of muzzies had to die, lest they get the idea to do it again. It’s that simple. Judging by the lack of similar attacks – they got the message.
And – if you fear a gov’t that can spy on you and lock you in your house, you should be also dubious of one that can attack you because you are in the wrong demographic. Hey – I’d LOVE to see every single rat bastard moslem deported in chains, and dropped back on their shit hole of origin from 30,000 ft. Some of us would love to do the same with joos. There’s a healthy majority that wouldn’t mind doing the same for inconvenient dissidents too. We have to be mindful – we share a country where 50% of the citizens are violent, stupid and corrupt morons.
There is truly some sloppy thinking going on here, and is one of the few blind spots I have seen among the dissidents…. and we have to be better than this. For the record, I don’t like any of it either.
It’s not that an immediate response was wrong, It is the massive reordering of American Life and the perpetual wars that went along with it. Smacking down Afghanistan was fine. The 20 years of occupation since are pointless, as are the abridgments of civil liberties
Correct. That occupation allowed for juicy “reconstruction contracts” that allowed the usual suspects to make out like bandits.
The proper response would be to bomb them FORWARD into the Stone Age … and walk away…
Killing Muslims, specifically in that piece of dung Iraq had nothing to do with no more attacks on us. We diidnt even kill that many. Most of them died at the hands of their fell Muz. Bush’s hands weren’t tied. That ignorant dry drunk little smudge of a president put us into a war that cost trillions and did nothing for our security otherwise. He shoul have been impeached and tried criminally. I voted for him once so bad on me.
The Taliban are Pashtun. Pashto didn’t plan 9-11 either. Bin Laden was living with his uncle Omar, a puppet of Pakistan, because the Sudanese had fleeced him penniless.
What for? Because they “hate our freedoms”? As if the bandit clans of the Northwest Frontier are not free, and freely defying any government that tries to muzzle them.
(PS- the very next day, a panicked bin Laden stated he had nothing to do with it.
He wasn’t lying- it was organized in Hamburg, Brooklyn, San Diego, Florida- and planned in D.C., Tel Aviv, New York, and Jackson Hole.)
Reading your comment is like stepping back in time for me. This big brained appeal to a status quo that no longer exists, can only happen when youre standing on the precipice of the full and final red pilled realization of exactly the kind of shit we are in.
The fact is, all of the stuff you fear and more will happen anyway. The reality is that we are now in a struggle over who is going to hokd the levers of power or what theyll be capable of when the time comes. This is according to dissidents, which I am not saying I am.
I know that sounds condescending, but its the internet so whatever.
When dissidents talk about deporting a demographic, to the extent they do, its with the understanding that the ruling elite which is alien, hostile, and actively hates legacy Americans, has been thoroughly purged or otherwise subdued or maybe even converted. In such a case, selected deportations would be no danger to dissidents.
If you think Bush set out just murder muslims out of some patriotic need to punish America’s enemies, or at least because his hand was forced, then you just have the facts wrong. No terrorist attacks were done after our war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Im sure the thousands of people shot, stabbed, beheaded, and blown up for years by Isis across the west, including the usa, and the middle east and so on will be relieved to know they didnt actually get maimed or killed.
As far as Bush’s reasoning for invading after 911, the evidence we have leans towards him being manipulated into it because he was either too complicite or too stupid to understand the plan. Look up the project for a new american century and read “a clean break” or whatever the policy paper is which lays out all of the regimes we eventually would try and often succeed in toppling over the last decade or so.
This wasnt a reactionary retaliation, it was meticulously planned and executed across multinational and bipartisan lines over the course of years. 911 was just a convenient excuse to get the ball rolling.
Rather than being sophisticated schemers laying out their evil plans, the PNAC document and the ensuing invasions was just a bunch of myopic Jews doing what they do. They more or less fell into it with Bush’s election and their incompetence was immediately apparent for anyone paying attention. The type of guys who write documents like PNAC, are the “big idea” guys who aren’t even aware of details let alone being able to consider what the details may be.
The whole lot of them should have been arrested and tried in a tribunal for launching wars of aggression and crimes against the peace. There were a lot of people who thought it was possible that Bush’s successor would do that. But we got Obama instead. Obama was more front man than president. That is one of the reasons, if not the major reason the progressive left became so powerful under Obama.
Nonsense. All empires rise and fall. Historically this is nothing new. The empires that preceded ours defended their interests until they grew too fat and lazy or incompetent to do so. This is merely history repeating.
The dissidents are seriously delusional on geopolitics and will need to address this if they hope to have a hand in what follows. Yes, you WILL need some modicum of international trade. Yes, you WILL need to defend your business, your interests and your allies to achieve security and prosperity. Yes, you will need to kill mud flaps in their chit hole countries or you will be fighting them here.
Organisms that won’t fight for their prosperity and survival die. It’s as simple as that.
Bush’s hands were tied – massive numbers of muzzies had to die
— Except for the additional ones that he let in on student visas to prove a point. Also, WTC7.
Saying that Bin Laden represents Saudi Arabia, is like saying Hillary Clinton represents and speaks for you.
Yet, because Hillary and Obama destroyed Libya, it’s perfectly fair to say “The US destroyed Libya.” Doesn’t matter that I disagreed with everything they did.
The vast majority of 911 attackers were Saudis. They were Wahabists — the extremist Muslim sect that Saudi Arabia protects, funds and exports. It doesn’t matter one bit that Bin Laden wasn’t carrying official Saudi diplomatic credentials.
When a non-government US actor does massive damage elsewhere in the world, be it Google, Blackwater, Merck or Halliburton, that generates animosity against the US. It goes both ways. There’s nothing out of place with blaming Saudi Arabia for being the cradle that birthed Bin Laden and most of the rest of the attackers.
And there’s plenty of blame left over for other actors — the CIA, Israel, whatever your preferred flavor is. Complicated events don’t have just one cause.
I was just being a little snarky. It’s funny to me how the Saudis never got much blame for it.
It’s ok, it is funny. The hound that didn’t bark.
Few know that the Saudi royals aren’t Arab.
They’re Donmeh Jew conversos from Thessalonia. Protected.
That’s why ibn Wahhab was such a mad, psychotic f**k, his followers took over both Arabia and Mesopotamian Iraq. Roth’s man in the Mideast, like Sassoon was in India’s Raj (where they grew the opium for China, the foundation of HSBC, world’s largest bank.)
Everybody’s Jews. Including the Arabs.
Both the House of Saud and Ibn Wahhab himself are Arabs Arabs from long established Arab tribes.
I think you’re confusing Jews with the devil at this point.
No, gentlemen, your history is deficient.
Also, I disagree with the random walk theory of empire, and that “we” need to murder the wrong people in their home.*
But, the fault was mine. I was falling asleep, and foolishly distracted from Vizzini and the Zman’s point that the hijackers were Arab, with two Arabs from Egypt. (Copts are Egyptian.)
Other comments by me, in similar vein, are also a distraction. I’m trying to encompass a recurring pattern in disjointed soundbites, and that doesn’t respect the reader or our host.
*The Mideast used to be open. American and European teenagers used to work in the bazaars, hijabs were something granma wore, jihadis were despised.
Riyadh, Tehran, Beirut were a combination of Paris and Las Vegas.
Damascus sheltered European refugees in camps during WWll.
I’ve been entirely confident I could smell sarcasm from a 100 yards. But this went straight past me.
Correct. They are double standards that go both ways…
It didn’t dawn on me immediately that Z was referring to 9/11…I initially thought of the 1993 attack. Light bulb went off a few lines in.
When we hit a wall like we just hit we should go back in time in the political mainstream.
Who was the Jeremiah 30 or 40 years ago warning us of this and who are the false prophets since?
Paleocon candidate Buchanan was that Jeremiah.
So was Ross Perot. “ the giant sucking sound”.
The false prophets have been Clinton who gave us NAFTA and fellatio in the White House.
But it’s “ only sex”
Bush who gave us forever wars for our best buds in the Middle East and a spy state back here.
Obama who gave us racial division not seen since the 1960’s.
Now we got Trump who up until now wanted to recreate Reagan’s “Morning in America”
Well it ain’t morning.
Once this is done to us it will be done again and again.
The Z is right.
Trump is trying to lead a revival of old America.
But it’s like a whore house owner trying to lead a tent revival.
Not sure it can work?
Incidentally, the Trump fortune started in the Yukon- Grandad Trump opened up a lodging and bordello for the loggers.
Not sure which one drew the customer traffic.
Not sure it will work, either…but you were on a he11 of a roll. Why’d you stop?
So what time is Tom Hanks’ Funeral?
Will CNN stagger their coverage to make sure they can fit in the Kevin Durant memorial as well?
Lol the twitter/insta vids of celebrity infection reeks of PR spin. Modern pravda.
Interesting too, how they seem to have all been tested even though they were either asymptomatic or showed low-end symptoms that under normal circumstance would not warrant an appointment with the doc, let alone expedited testing.
I know two people who have gone in with flu symptoms and have been denied testing by their docs because it would be a “waste of a test” because they were not in the “danger zone”.
So cue Kenny Loggins and hopes and prayers that these American treasures of cinema beat the odds and survive long enough to make PSA’s on how to wash your hands and walk your dog without talking to your neighbor.
Same goes for the basketball Americans. May they pull thru this death sentence and resume spreading herpes (its just a cold sore! Just because its ‘down there’ doesn’t make it worse!) to coeds after road games like the good old days.
We are a low trust society that will require authoritarian solutions to manage.
I suggest we stop carrying on about the lost opportunity for consumerism, and adjust to the reality of scaling up Singapore to a continental level.
The problem with that is Singapore is essentially an ethnostate, and the people trust their rulers to represent them. Do an authoritarian state here, and you could end up the best of MSNBC running things.
I may be confusing the islands, but I’m pretty sure Singapore is anything but an ethnostate and that the founder said “in a multi-ethnic society, all politics is identity politics”
Without looking up the history, my recollection is Singapore split from Malaysia about 60 years ago. It’s essentially Chinese. They had one very smart, very tough leader, Lee Kwan something, who was very frank about race. Your statement is correct, In a multiethnic state, you vote your skin.
The Indian and Malay populations in Singapore are not insignificant. English, Malay, Tamil, and Chinese (Mandarin and Min Nan) are widely spoken.
Apparently Chinese are 76% and Malays 15%
Sounds about right. Noted should be the lack of Blacks and Browns.
To Han Chinese, Malays ARE vibrant browns. Not to mention mostly Muslim.
Then again, to most of Southeast Asia, the “Overseas Chinese” (theoretically Han, but often mixed with local stock) serve the same role as Jews in Europe circa 1800-1940.
Not insignificant, but they do not have any real power. The Han run things and they carefully control immigration to ensure Singapore stays that way. Of course, that’s assuming today’s leaders have the smarts and understanding and balls that Lee Kwan Yew had – he resented the British but also admired them and consciously modeled certain changes in Singapore to civilize the Han population.
Singapore is full of competent bureaucrats paired with a Confucian society. American bureaucracy is not uniformly competent, and we have to deal with random diversity hires (like our Surgeon General). What makes up for the lack of competence is the police state. Do we want smart totalitarians or midwit totalitarians weilding police power? That’s the question.
I think the applicable autocracy would be the Soviet Union. Submit to rule by the nominally meritocratic, worship the State, deny your eyes and ears, espouse the orthodoxy, or the Black Marias will come in the wee hours and take you away.
Ummm, isn’t that where we’ve been the past forty years?
I feel like only very recently have I been unable to voice my once-uncontroversial opinion in public.
Want/have.
Philadelphia has stopped locking up thieves. Should provide a lot of fodder for a Law and Order campaign.
https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/philadelphia-police-coronavirus-covid-pandemic-arrests-jail-overcrowding-larry-krasner-20200317.html
Veg;
About to get a dose of wokeness, they are. Just another example of Z’s point about COVID Panic providing petty politicians with an excuse to do stuff they’ve always wanted to do but were politically constrained from doing. Endpoint for demanding consequence-free behavior for all, it is.
We’re about to see a realtime experiment re ‘broken windows policing policy’. Hypothesis: Hassling feral teens for small criminal infractions is/was rayyysiss oppression and it is completely unjustified and unnecessary. So no looting or rioting will result from abandoning even the pretense. *Maybe* it’s possible, and I’d like it to be, but I’d the ranch against it working.
That’s why Cuomo is essentially nutting himself every day. He’s got the power to do any damn thing he wants.
While it has several races Singapore has one family/business, the Lee’s in charge and they are of one ethnicity.
It can’t scale to the US .
As much as I admire the late Mr. Lees willpower and acumen, he isn’t us and what’s right for that island is wrong for us.
Is your freedom worth so little to you?
While the Dissident Right isn’t Libertarian or especially like the Liberty movement it also isn’t That authoritarian either. Its Traditional more than anything. Authority is used to restore traditional; values like family stability and work when when technology makes alternatives impossible.
Its not for making a multi-ethnic state work like Singapore and such a Dissident Right State won’t be formed from the current clay nor can you get an easy mode or a short cut.
Dissident Right USA will have a major decline in prosperity for a long period and a lot of unpleasantness to go around to restore a good place for the diaspora of Europe and our friends to raise children.
if muh money and muh 5G is more important to you , you are the wrong team.
Stanford professor says the flattening the curve strategy actually prolongs the draconian lockdown: https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2020/03/17/stanford-prof-coronavirus-may-less-deadly-think-mild-justify-aggressive-countermeasures/
WTF
Everyone who has run the math on it has come to the same conclusion: flattening the curve leads to economic ruin AND high infection rates. This whole exercise is increasingly stupid, and like the Paleocons before, level headed commentators like Z and Denninger remind me of the scene in Titanic where they shoot the flare in the air.
Tut-tut, Dirt Person, you say “economic ruin AND high infection rates” like they’re a *bad* thing.
You spend more money paying down a loan than you do paying cash, plus the financial constraint of making payments. Same principle. Less pain in the short term causes more pain in the long term.
Physician friend (normally clear headed and rational guy) as well as dissident website I read (ER Doc SoCal) totally in end-of-life-as-we-know-it mode. Panic is largely driven by panic among the medical types. Logical, I suppose, as they are the ones who have to deal with it daily, and in person, and so are likely to encounter positive CV-19 people, as well as those yet showing no symptoms who they see for non-flu reasons. But they seem to have become bleating sheep, rather than steady sheepdogs. 1.5 million plus dead?? How does this square with other, radically lower projections? My doc friend said every one of us would lose a close friend or family member ….. and that the shortage of ventilators would prove catastrophic. Doesn’t seem to line up with what we see from Diamond Princess.
As to what people are willing to accept from our ruling class and the clerisy ….. we’ll know very soon.
Good point. I’m seeing hysterics in the medical community as well. But the talking heads on radio are not far behind. Today’s opening commentary from one, “…we have to do this as no government can stand by while *millions* of its citizens die from disease…”.
That’s the talking points these days, all FUD, all the time.
Yes, of course, but the effort is not just to flatten it, but to shorten it too. Which, I guess I thought was a given, but here we are.
If you look at China, S.K., and now Italy, this virus seems to peak-out in 4-6 weeks from when they hit the panic button. China hit the panic button at the end of December, and by mid-Feb their total new cases was dropping off. People are going back to work there now, stores are opening, etc.
South Korea? Smaller country, better testing, earlier steps to get people to stay home. About a month.
Italy? If you look at their numbers today, you can see the bell curve forming around the newly reported cases. It’s declining. 7ish weeks.
Here in the US, we’re on the steep part of the curve still. I would expect that for another week or two, maybe three if people are morons. Even people who think this is all b.s. should be motivated to not spread this thing around unnecessarily. There are good reasons to do this economically and politically. The more the US comes in under the “worst case” fear mongering by the media, the more heroic the current Administration becomes.
I don’t agree with Pres. Trump on everything, but I watched the Democrat primaries. The line from Trump to any of the Democrats, much like the virus, follows a geometric curve, not a linear one. They wouldn’t just be worse. They would unleash terror on us all like we have never seen before if they get back into power.
We need them to suffer a horrible, gut wrenching, bloodbath of a defeat in November. Getting this mess over with quickly will put a bullet in Democrats before the conventions this summer.
It’s not just about flattening the curve. It’s about shortening it.
I can only speak of what I experience. The State of AZ is officially shutdown. School is planned to be cancelled for the rest of the year. No restaurants open to sit down traffic. Movie theaters, other events, closed. Grocery stores with empty shelves. You know the story…
Yep, we are winning the war against this plague—total cases recorded, 21. One death. Complete economic collapse, 21 cases of the virus. Tell me about the cost benefit again? Trump getting re-elected will have to be one hell of a benefit to offset our economic collapse.
It’s about the same in Louisiana. Six corona deaths in Louisiana – all in New Orleans, meanwhile 27 people were shot to death in New Orleans just in January and February. (A larger number were shot but survived).
And it is unlikely that this will cause influenza and pneumonia will crack the Top 6.
There are a lot of things we would all love to see get done in a Trump 2nd Term. A President who can credibly claim to have saved millions of lives is going to have a lot of power to get the right things done.
As if restructuring the ENTIRE global supply chain away from China wasn’t good enough.
Leading causes of death, 2019:
Heart disease: 647,457
Cancer: 599,108
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
Diabetes: 83,564
Influenza and pneumonia: 55,672
This is like a hurricane that hits the entire country. Very few, if any, Americans die in hurricanes. But, how President Trump responds to the hurricane matters quite a bit. I don’t like the hysteria either, but the best crisis response to hysteria is action. Telling people they’re stupid just pisses them off and makes the hysteria worse.
The economy isn’t going to collapse. There will be a weird 45-day “recession”.
“Let them die,” is not a viable strategy for a virus that is 100x more lethal than the flu and as much or more contagious. It’s only a viable strategy if we want open warfare over food, medicine, etc. in the streets.
hokkoda…The disease has *not* been shown to be 100x’s more lethal. That is scare mongering.
No where—even Italy, have such figures been compiled. Flu for this year has some 40k+ deaths and an estimated 1/10% fatality. If the COVID-19 disease were to be 100x’s more lethal, that would be a 10% fatality rate. No where in the world has any death compilation even approached that rate.
There is very good reason to assume that the official estimates of 1-2% TFR are high due to inexact estimates of the total prevalence of the disease among the populous. That is to say, the denominator used in computation is way too small. There is reason to believe most of those infected suffer no illness, or so mild they neither report it nor seek treatment.
Also, from an economic view point—not moral—almost all fatalities are in the most elderly of the population. In Italy, media age for the dead—80 yo—and even that fatality rate is never over 20% for any cohort! Are such resources as we are expending and economic chaos we create justified. No other safety aspect of our regulatory system values life to such an extent.
As to the contagiousness of the disease, that also is in dispute and unreliably estimated. The Princess Cruise Line quarantine—the best observed ”experiment” to date—produced less than 20% of passengers and crew infected after weeks of close quarter contact, with intermixing of passengers/crew, and breathing same air supply.
Make decisions/discussions on fact based evidence, not emotion and fear.
PS: I’m in a dangerous age cohort for the infection, but even I would never recommend the present course of governmental action.
Pardon the extra 0, I meant 10x. Of the people we know who get it, the TFR is between 3-4% globally. Italy (I haven’t checked it lately) is around 7%. The US is around 1.3% last I checked.
Let’s say there are 340,000,000 Americans and a 20% infection rate. Seems fair based on observable evidence and past pandemics. Of that 20%, assume half are sick enough to notice and report. And assume that the 1.3% TFR holds for cases we know about. That’s still 340,000 dead. The end times? Hardly.
10x the flu? About right. Estimates vary between 12-30K for seasonal flu.
The powers that be have decided those 340,000 are worth saving, and are not the Darwinian casualties of our throw away culture. Zman himself has written here many times that the primary responsibility of government is to protect its citizens. When the government fails to do this, the social contract is broken.
I’m not living in hysteria either. If we can save 90% of those people, the Government will have done its job and done it well.
TFR of 3-4% is 30 times more lethal than regular flu.
Just the crisis and the stock market crash (if it remains down) have greatly lessened Trump’s chances, alas.
Well of course it does. Flattening the curve makes perfect sense if you think there’s a simple and quick way to make a vaccine and deploy it widely. There isn’t though – https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237742-how-soon-will-we-have-a-coronavirus-vaccine-the-race-against-covid-19/. Notice how the even low estimate of 12-18 months relies on using “untested techniques”.
Shutting down the economy for even 12 months is basically economic Armageddon but I suppose we can console ourselves with the notion that we dragged out the suffering (physical and economic) for as long as possible and eventually the last potential victim, John B. Alzheimer, age 94, of Plainfield NJ, Sanders delegate, and perpetual write-in candidate for City Comptroller, was spared the Wuflu at a cost of a mere $1,235,572,982,231.72.
Well said. And I hope to outlive John Alzheimer myself. 😉
The main fallout for this is Big Tech will gain more moral authority to expunge resources deemed a threat to public safety. Facebook is ruthlessly purging any articles that do not fit the official narrative, even ones entirely fact-based. Once there is civil unrest, they will crack down based on even more nebulous criteria.
Google will soon crack down on bad-think even more with its search algorithms.
Surprisingly, Twitter is being most tolerant of dissident thoughts regarding the virus.
As much as people rag on Gab, Torba and company are one of the only people making products and services that are normie friendly and resilient enough to run to when we begin to get shut down entirely.
Indeed. Look how quickly orange man sidled up to the google for ‘help’ in organizing and communicating key information on an official level.
The convergence of private tech as a means for gov’t control and surveillance is only outpaced by the publics expeditious willingness to comply with the incremental creep toward house arrest.
A crack of lightning has most of the sheep walking themselves into the paddock. Its quite easy then to chain the gate shut behind them.
If there were ever a couple generations ready to self-isolate and rely solely on their phone and apps for instructions and entertainment, its the gen M/Z.
We have a perfect storm of invisible enemies that just may have snatched your neighbor’s body too too – and a centralized response of more restriction of basic freedoms.
The resulting isolation, erosion of social cohesion, and economic duress will only serve as its own justification for more government control.
And more government control must mean this is really quite serious, which begs for moar control, i.e. If its bad enough to crater the market and send us home, certainly a national lockdown and curfew is in order.
It is amusing to see that even under obvious blitzkreig of globalist power aggregation, borders are suddenly coming back en vogue.
Anyhow. Big daddy gov’t has to either keep tightening its grip or release us all back into the wild very soon. Yang bucks won’t buy enough time to matter.
A reason I’m stuck on disruption as a consistent tactic is because of a stock-picking site I follow.
They recommend “disruptors”- mostly large-cap corporations that are readying to disrupt a sector.
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Disney- now, what do their CEOs and policymakers have in common?
(Hint: potential dual citizenship- but, these tactics can be successfully copied by the ruthless of any persuasion. They work.)
Would national economies be considered sectors? I’m asking my fellow consumption units of Economic Zone 7.
Look for non-conformist tech like Gab and perhaps even Twitter to disappear within the next few months.
I don’t think Gab will be taken out. Even better is their commenting app, and now browser, Dissenter. That was a brilliant idea. It is too bad more people don’t use it.
lower stock price , virus, recession, panic, etc. is hurting them though.
Side note, Chet: just in time for the ubiquitous placement of 5G coverage.
5G, incidentally, may bathe us in 13 million- capital M- times the emag radiation we wash in now.
But the odd thing is, Wuhan, China is the world’s #1 hot sink for 5G radiation. That’s apparently where they test the tech.
Don’t free particles dislodge organic molecular chains, a cause of mutation?
I would need to see some evidence of this. 5G is basically the telecoms’ way of saying “millimeter band radio”. So basically radio waves that are on the order of 1mm from peak to peak. Current cell technologies use centimeter bands, basically the same as your microwave oven. What’s so great about tiny little waves? Well, essentially the data rate you can get using an electromagnetic wave varies inversely with its size. The problem is that as wavelengths get smaller, radio waves behave more like light than what we’re used to with radios. It didn’t matter that your walkie-talkie was in your pocket when your childhood friend called you because the low frequencies those old-fashioned devices used diffracted easily around things the size of clothing and even entire buildings. With millimeter bands you need to rely more on line-of-sight transmission. Since there’s no easy way to multiply the number of line-of-sight paths from your device to the tower the system will need to rely on having a lot more devices to relay signals and that probably will increase the total power consumption of the network.
I think you’re referring to free ions dislodged by ionizing radiation. Even 5G is well below those energy levels. Ionizing radiation starts at energy levels of 10eV. Now there are many different ways to impart this energy and knock electrons loose but what we’re concerned with here is using photons of electromagnetic radiation. The energy imparted that way is given by E = hc/λ where h is Planck’s constant, c is the speed of light and λ is the wavelength. Plugging in 1mm as our wavelength we get an energy of about 1.2 meV which is 1.2 milli eV, well below the threshold for ionization. 10eV corresponds to a 125nm wavelength. This is considered “hard-UV” light and is ironically a good way to destroy all the nasties you might find floating around a typical pestilential Chinese city.
Is 5G a vicious Chinese/tech company scam intended to fleece the dumbed down digital masses of their remaining money, privacy and dignity? Of course it is. Until they can crank the energy levels up about 10,000 fold though, it won’t be melting our genes. These “G” things are sort of logarithmic I think so what is that, like 10G?
All this talk about tech just got me wanting to watch this again – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTzO-_Yl4d0
Pozymandias, you are a treasure.
That is exactly the type of detail I need (for other purposes). Can’t thank you enough.
I wish we could talk. I must learn.
I need this.
What disciplines or sciences do I study?
(Ooh. That video. Bad doggy.
Bad, bad doggy!)
Glad to help. Well I studied physics and math in college. I got sucked into IT at one point and am trying to reinvent myself now. As for the tech scene I now watch in bemused horror as tech oligarchs, gibbering Pajeets, and other masters of the Engrish Ranguage butcher facts they barely understand themselves to regale teenagers from 5-105 about how “this changes everything”. Hint, whatever “this” is today, it changes nothing. The gibber-gabber and flim-flam people know this but they also know that their customer base has a stone age mentality and their uncle just died and left them a garage full of alien UFO technology. “Here, buy this! It’s magic!”
You don’t need a full sequence of calc based physics classes to sift through this stuff though. I’d probably say that the quickest way to learn the basic physics underlying almost everything today is pursuing a HAM licence. It can be quite satisfying to put things together and see how to implement things at a low level. It’s also useful for prepping/SHTF scenarios.
Tech’s power is having their hands on the kill switch and as the Lucky Pierre between the oligarchy and the hoi polloi. Anything beyond that is an illusion.
A year ago? Two? A 90 lbs Iranian female waif had the might gugoolag on lockdown for hours.
If the mighty tech giants ruffle enough feathers they will generate a lot more trouble than they are capable of handling. Even if you stick the national guard on their turf most of these people are so fragile that the stress would paralyze many if not most of them.
the two most dangerous types of people are
those with nothing to lose
and those with everything to lose.
Laughter vs panic. That’s how you’ll know them. And if there are heroes it’ll be the people laughing right now.
edit: genuine laughter, not machismo.
Norm Macdonald does standup about coronavirus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-skA4GhVX7k
Always liked that guy.
Other than Norm, I can’t think of a single stand up act/joke that I’ve laughed at for the past 30 years. The guy’s head and shoulders above every other comedian out there.
You may want to see a therapist.
Do you know of somewhere on the internet where we can have these discussions in an instant messenger sort of way?
Our enemy is quick; therefore, we too must be fast. Doesn’t our survival hinge on successful integration into their cybernetically fucked up reality anyway?
Hey! If it saves even one life, it’s worth it! LOL Seriously, though, I ask myself as an older at risk person, would I sacrifice my life for the sake of the economy? Hell no. But you’re saying, ” OK Boomer, why should we, who aren’t at risk, sacrifice anything for your sake?” Because you have it coming for being Godless cretins. St’ Aquinas pointed out, “A disordered mind is its own punishment.” The same is true of a disorder society. The hammer will fall. Now seems as good a time as any.
I have to wonder if the Wuhan flu is going to act as a pry bar, working itself into the fissures in our society, and springing the jammed together segments apart. One can hope, even knowing that it might get unpleasant in the extreme. This country can’t live together anymore.
Johnmark7. I hear ya, but assume you are a bit over the top to make a point. As an at risk oldster, I’d like to say that we run risks every single day and this one—CoronaChan—is not different, and it therefore should not be subject to such extensive government “prevention” methods.
Actually, I don’t believe in the general knock posted here that Boomers or “oldsters” are the cause of this chaos. I believe the general public, if polled, think it’s their ass on the line as well. They may even admit, old folks are heavily burdened, but the reality is they fear in their hindbrains, that they too might meet an early demise to the dreaded “Chinese Flu”—when in effect what they are asking for is an early demise to their jobs, 401k’s, and what ever is left of their freedoms.
What you wrote reminds me of a poem © Copyrighted by Colin Ryan (2010)
Interesting. Compare Ryan’s thoughts of 2010 to Macaulay of the early 20th century wrt Ancient Rome.
Lays of Ancient Rome
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Excerpt:
“…
For Romans in Rome’s quarrel
Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
In the brave days of old.
XXXII
Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great:
Then lands were fairly portioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold:
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.
…”
Sigh.