382 thoughts on “The Great Retreat”

1. “ The one guy consistently right about this “ ….

   Thankfully it appears there’s more than one guy who has been right about this consistently Because Andrew Anglin has been getting it right for weeks, calling out the lies and posting predictions, About the death rate for example, that came true within days

2. (when you see “364 answers”, it’s discouraging, because you feel nobody will read what you write^^)

   anyway : at this stage, nobody can predict what will be the result of next November (nor even if there will be an election in November) (or worse: if the totalitarians impose full-electronic voting, which is the literal end of the democracy)

   But if Trump loses, pandemic or not, it will be largely his fault.
   On the pandemic, he did not CHOOSE between the courageous attitude of Sweden and the cautious attitude of us, French. He hesitated between the two. Total, it will not collect any profit, whatever the outcome. Recession ? : the media will say that it was his fault because he imposed the lockdown. The dead ? The media will say that it was his fault because he did not impose the lockdown early enough.

   On its non-COVID policy? He held an openly nationalist speech, provoking an unprecedented mobilization of the left, not at all in PLS, because seeing in him his favorite enemy: literally Hitler, while adopting a plutocratic Bush-style policy, and thus causing no recognition on the part of its electoral base, the poor whites.
   -Healthcare: he had promised to delete AND REPLACE Obamacare (a montage, seen from France, completely incomprehensible, and that, I admit, I don’t understand) with something better (from my European point of view) nationalist and social democratic, the Nordic model, free care for all, financed by the tax, which lowers the cost of drugs, operating costs, by removing the effect of capital gains from private insurance, is obviously the only one that holds up, especially since we have the right to change doctors whenever we want. This not only saves money, but also less stress – an underestimated cause of illness – and the decline stress is the most important thing demanded by the working class. The working class does not wish to “get rich at all costs”, but PEACE OF MIND. A job considered with little respect? OK. A low salary? OK. But at least, the assurance that the next day will be less i In terms of health, unemployment, old age. Isn’t that very glorious? Without a doubt. But this prudence of the spirit of the popular classes assured society a healthy conservatism. (which must be balanced by the need for success that characterizes the bourgeois class. A healthy society must take account of BOTH.)
   – “Remember, folks”, Trump did not present himself as a fucking Conservarteur but as a nationalist. We wanted Tucker Carlson, not fucking Mike Pence.

   -Jobs? Trump had promised reindustrialization. Tariffs are very far from McKinley levels. Instead, we continued on the obamist voice of declining unemployment thanks to the poorly paid, shitty tertiary sector jobs. And DJT kept tweeting about his fucking “lowest unemployment rate in the history of black Americans”)

   -Immigration: I pass on the joke of the wall-that-the-Mexicans-will-pay-for-it “. It doesn’t matter the walls if you
   -tax or put in jail the bastards of employers who employ illegal immigrants.
   -Remove all economic, social and political rights of illegal immigrants
   – Deport massively ALL illegal immigrants.
   -Create a new policy for the US Census, which, for the electoral map, only takes into account American citizens and not the total population (and stops, finally, placing Jews in the category “Whites”, which is unbearable and unfathomable with hypocrisy, so much do they choose, when it suits them, to side with the “oppressed minorities” or the Whites)
   -Effectively suppress federal donations for sanctuarized places)
   -Appoint Trumpians to government. By December 2016, it was obvious that the Ryanists had regained control.

   -Republican party: (by the way, I never understood its name of GOP. Isn’t the Democratic party more “old” than the Republican party? How is it less “big”? All that stinks the automatic thought denounced by Orwell. Saying hackneyed things without thinking about it (which is the essence of propaganda journalism.). DJT did he try to take control of the party, by naming civic nationalists anti-open borders, even for the professionally qualified people (hello Charlie Kirk!).
   Did DJT support anti-immigration candidate Brooke in Alabama? No ! First, he supported the stupid fundamentalist Christian redneck whose name escapes me, then he supported the corporate republican Luther Strange).

   -free speech: DJT did NOTHING for that. Literally nothing, except twitter that he remained “vigilant” and “attentive”. And now he brags that MAGA = GAFA, while GAFA is ALWAYS hostile to him. What an art of the deal!

   -Supreme Court: Here, I would like to place a European parenthesis: I find it monstrous that the supreme organ of power (there is only one power, that of making the law. Louis XV and the best anti-thinkers 1789 had analyzed it well The executive vs legislative distinction is pure bullshit The only power that counts is the legislative.
   Thus, appointing CONSERVATIVES-chamber of commerce à la Kavanaugh à la Gorsuch has absolutely no interest. We can feel the guys ready to defend the “freedom of big business to censor who they want”.

   -And I must have forgot a lot of DJT’s policies, I’m just a frenchman, not expert in all subtilities of american politics.

   (oh, yeas, I forgotten the transformation of electoral college of key-state Florida, by putting out of jail and allowing vote to ex-prisoners. Good Job, Don! And nothing made about suppress of

   postal vote, identity card fraud, and all these little details that the MAGtards will cry about next November, rejecting as usual, all the fault on the devilish democrats)

   (Dear Z-Man, I guess you litteraly no have time to read all the comments, but, please, if you read this one, let me know. Even if you think this comment is a pure POS, at last, I will not get this frustrating feeling of vox clamentis in deserto. Thanks for your interesting blog, cheers from France)

   • Obamacare was never socialized medicine. It was and is neoliberal medicine, with the chumps playing the hapless 3d world debtor nations to the American Hedge funds who became the insurance underwriters. There was no medicine – just “insurance” with LIEN in the small print. If you want a reason; I can give you $89T reasons; Aggregate Household wealth in 2009.

     Or in 2 words; Heist Film.

3. Ahem. Whoops. Sorry about the mess.

4. Sailer for me has been the biggest disappointment. How could someone who has such a clear understanding of how much the press lies and experts mislead buy into such obvious misleading data analysis. This probably goes back to the idea that people usually make emotional decisions and use their analytic ability to justify them.

   The few voices of sanity during this Virusageddon that I have found are:
   Zman
   Andrew Anglin
   Alex Berenson and Michael Burry (both on Twitter)

   • You may have not intended to be amusing, bu to see Z and Anglin in the same list is a knee slapper. I’m pretty sure Z is not amused.

5. Dingbat Daughter? until the internet harpies and the twitter trolls got busy and destroyed her business she had a clothing business worth many many millions of dollars.

   Daughter of a Billionaire, Married to a Billionaire, and a Multi-Millionaire in her own right does not a dingbat make..

6. They got what they wanted, an excuse to shitcan their Ponzi scheme, fuck small business , and remind the gerbils to stay in their cage and obey orders.

   • Yup.

     We are heading for life on prison planet unless we take to the streets en masse and are prepared to use force to stay there.

7. Nick Fotiu , I mean Zman shoots, SCORE !!!!!!

8. Bad as it is, worse as it is going to be, man has no choice but to gather his strengths
   and move forward
   I have always liked this song not so much because of feel good lyrics but because of that guitar that spoke to me as a faraway friend I have never known

   These things have always been the same
   So why worry now

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im2SoltmZEc

9. Here is the Time scare story about Sweden’s corona response:

   https://time.com/5817412/sweden-coronavirus/

   Of course, the first and main interviewee is a young Asian woman immivader from the US.

   The NYT has had a scare story about a couple Bronx hospitals up for a few days now, describing them as part of the, “…Hot Zone.” Of course, we already know that the Bronx is a Third World sh*thole.

   OOGA-BOOGA!!!

10. Have been appreciative of your blog Z and have also been that lone voice in the wilderness speaking out against the hype.

    People are dirty little animals. Dealing with the public is a constant reminder. Taking the necessary precautions will keep you safe even during the Great Pandemic of 2020 !!!

    Fortunately being a half-ass prepper saved me from any toilet paper or cleaning product shortages. The real tragedy from this latest government psych-ops was watching my friends and neighbors roll over for the local politicians. Of course these elected cretins ignored the ghettos and came down hard on the white areas as per usual.

    Have seen bit of backlash from the white suburbs as of late. Lots of families out walking around despite the local golf courses , parks and beaches being roped off.

    Here’s to a healthy and happy spring for all my fellow dissidents.

    Vote Trump 2020 ! 😁

11. “Nicky Taleb threw his dress over his head and ran around squealing like a girl.”
    I wasn’t too surprised to see Taleb in fear-monger mode because that fits with his brand: tail risk. He has similarly alarmist views about global warming. But Greg Cochran and the rest of the hbd folks jumped on the bandwagon too. That was surprising. Ramzpaul and Zman were the exceptions. Styx did okay too.

12. There’s an interesting lesson in this crisis that helps illustrate how the right will need to decisively dump Conservative Inc while at the same time avoid turning into the unhinged greenie left.

    If with further research the abnormally high death rate in China is linked to their phenomenally bad air pollution, then Conservative Inc’s “muh business friendly” push these last few decades to get rid of the EPA and to loosen air and water quality regulations will be proven as anti-white garbage: why should we sacrifice our health to feed the GDP? Look what it did to China! Mask-wearing was common there even before the wu-flu because so many people wanted to shield themselves from air pollution.

    So this is one example where we can learn from the original left: yes, maybe it’s worth making some sacrifices to GDP to shore up our health and safety. We can drive a stake through globohomo’s heart by mandating the reshoring of all Product sold in the US at the same time as we mandate said Product is manufactured domestically in a way that doesn’t kill us all. If it means iPhones will be more expensive and we’ll have to make do with older models for 10 years instead of getting a new one every other year, that may be a tradeoff the right will need to accept to bring the Rust Belt back.

    The danger is swinging the pendulum too hard to the left that environmental stewardship just ends up getting pozzed worse than it currently is: the woke left isn’t really interested in real environmental protection anymore, they’re fully preoccupied with “environmental justice” and other gibs that have nothing to do with environmental protection.

    Some parts of the right have realized the opportunity to snatch environmental protection and economic protection for the working class away from the left and to start merging the two: there are stirrings of “ecofascism” in northern Europe and in the western US.

    • Ecofascism. Your posting is pure bullshit. When you can show that our level of pollution even resembles China’s, then you can state why we need to reduce further to avoid health problems. But to use China as a warning to a country that far excels China in environmental protection as the USA is duplicity at its best, stupidity at its worse.

13. I took a trip to normieville today. Stopped at the house of my daughter-in-law, widow of my late son. She and her boyfriend are shut at home watching the governor’s briefing and Trump’s briefing and the media clown show surrounding each one every day and just completely buying into the whole thing. They aren’t mad. They aren’t feeling betrayed, they’re just quietly doing what they’re told. She was actually wondering if all this will be resolved by the time my one-and-a-half-year-old grandson is old enough for school, and doesn’t think such a timeframe is batshit insane. She doesn’t know a lot about politics or economics, she’s just along for the ride and assumes there is someone competent steering.

    She thinks Trump is stupid, because that’s how she has been coached, but doesn’t really have any actual facts to back up that impression. She watches the press briefings like a reality show drama.

    People like that are a long goddamn way from waking up.

    • Holy Shit! She thinks YEARS of this are even possible? GD moron.

      • Gentle with my DiL. She’s not a rocket scientist, but she’s a nice girl.

        The point is that she’s just a typical girl. Hairdresser. Probably IQ in the high 90s or so, Maybe even 100.

        A line I use a lot is “more than half the population is 100 IQ or below, and 100 ain’t all that smart.”

        The sort of people who hang out on sites like thezman.com aren’t normal. Normal people don’t really think things through. For the kids of mine whose IQs I know, they range from 115 to 135, and the 115 girl, being a stddev higher than 100, seems smart as a whip compared to a truly average kid. The 135 girl is a comparative genius (although not truly genius level, technically), frustrated with most people around her. Me, I’m 145 and it’s like the mental world of a 100 runs in slomo. I’m not one of those who has difficulty talking to people like that, but I can’t have deep friendships with them, because we’re not fascinated by the same sorts of things. I don’t try to instruct them if I encounter resistance, because most stuff of worth seems like trying to teach a dog to make fire.

        But we’re their prisoners because there are a lot more of them, and they vote.

        Once upon a time even a sub-100 person had to have a certain amount of horse sense, because life was hard and unforgiving. It no longer is, so becoming a hard-nosed realist isn’t a survival requirement.

        This is the root of why “owning the libs with facts and reason” never works.

        A thiought: Who would have though *years* of Soviet or Castro communism were possible? People will put up with a lot of crap for a very long time. Bread lines, gulags, famines and all.

        • Sorry about the moron comment. Mother had 4 boys. One by my dad and three by my step-dad. Mother was very brilliant and my father was too, only he struggled to control a violent temper.

          Long story short — I have found it hard to understand all the morons in my family. Damn, they like to think they are smart even as they believe the damnedest BS. One of them especially worships that Dr. 2million Fauci and believes every new prediction no matter how many times he is wrong.

          Sometimes I think being able to see reality easily is a curse. Much like the Sufi teaching story “When the Waters Were Changed” I might drink the changed water myself.

          https://parablesmythslegends.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/when-the-waters-were-changed-why-we-are-here-perception/

          • No problem, no offense taken.

        • Vizzini – Thank you for true words of wisdom and compassion. I have always had trouble dealing with the fact that I think and reason so much faster than others (even when I’m often wrong, which is a different issue entirely!). Having one kid with an IQ >145 and another who’s somewhere between 90-100 has taught me there’s only so much a loving and ‘enriched’ home environment/parents can do. And, as you noted, not-particularly-bright people can certainly be nice as well as productive. It’s up to the smarter fraction to tailor not merely hopes but also expectations to reality. It’s the lack of horse sense, as you so well note, that is really the killer these days, and there’s no way to instill that (that I’m aware of) other than the school of hard knocks.

      • Is she?

        • Is she what? Nice? Yes. Typical in intelligence. In my experience, yes.

          Murray was right in Coming Apart.

          We have a lot of self-assortation in US culture. In my normal day job, I didn’t interact closely or have friendships with a lot of people down at 100 IQ. In the high-end tech field, almost everyone you interact with is 115+. It starts to seem normal. Even in college classes you sort with people in your major, who are typically in the same intellectual league as you.

          As a rule, professionals don’t really hang out much around hairdressers, bartenders and waitresses except when getting their hair cut, ordering food or drinking. So one group doesn’t really know how the other half lives. They assume “they’re just like us,” and they’re not. And when a professional strikes up a friendship with a working class buddy, that buddy tends to be exceptional, because people of radically different intellects don’t communicate well.

          My daughter at 115 IQ is a great example. I know for sure since she was just tested for grade acceleration. She’s in a really depressed, rural Appalachian school district with, to use a euphemism “poor human capital.” So she really stands out even at what is only a modestly high IQ. She’s one of the best two or three in her grade. In a very competitive upper middle class neighborhood full of kidsof people who work as engineers and managers at IBM or Battelle or whatever, she’d be solidly among the “normal” unexceptional kids.

          As an engineer, a rancher, and a landlord in a lower-class urban area, I see the gamut. I see and deal with the rural and urban poor all the time. My wife and I were just marveling yesterday that so many of our tenants lack basic analytical skills. One of them texted my wife yesterday: he couldn’t understand why the garbage truck wasn’t picking up his garbage. We drive by. Every garbage can in the alley is lined up along one side of the alley. His is on the other side of the alley. Is that maybe a clue? You might say “GD moron,” but this, trust me, is pretty normal. Again, “100 ain’t all that smart.”

          Another example. I used to LARP with my kids. LARPing is a pretty nerdy hobby. Tends to attract people who are a bit above normal or higher in IQ. Also a lot who are pretty high in neuroticism, but that’s another story. Also, almost zero Black people. Anyway, one time, the youngest son brings along a Black friend of his, from a decent middle class neighborhood. Stereotypically, the kid is great at the physical aspect at the game. He can do the combat part great. Runs like the wind. Memorizing the rules, meh. But when I tried, more than once, to explain to him that he was intended to be playing a role in an Arthurian fantasy game, and no, there were no rappers there … bzzt. Does not compute. His brain didn’t work like that. Totally personable, very verbal kid. But that level of abstraction just went right over him. He was probably about 80 IQ or so, but you wouldn’t peg him as “dumb” if you were in a general conversation with him. He was very interested and engaged.

          My son was a 1SG in the army. In that role, he had to deal with “normal” IQ young men all the time. You don’t get anyone below about 85 in the military, because the ASVAB weeds out anyone below that, but my lord some of those boys could be dumb. My reasonably bright but not genius son was always shaking his head about it. Most of the population by far is somewhere between 85-110 (according to Audacious Epigone the mean IQ in the US is a tad below 100 right now). That just ain’t all that smart.

          It’s normal to assume that people have similar internal lives to our own — after all, our own head is the only one we ever get to live inside. But that’s wrong.

          You, as the guy who likes to come here and get in abstract discussions over social and political theory, you are the one who is not normal.

          • Vizzini—food for thought. Thanks. My only comment, keep relationships solid. Not everyone is/can be to one’s standards, but there may be a time you need such relationships—especially family.

          • Oh, of course. As I said, she’s a nice girl and she’s the mother of my grandson. No strained relationship.

            She’s not some ugly SJW, she’s just a normie muddling along.

          • No. Is she really a dingbat for thinking this will go on for years?

            I don’t think so.

          • As I said in a previous post, it’s surprising what people will put up with for long periods, so on that score I agree with you, but I don’t actually think this will go oon for years because I don’t think doing so will ultimately benefit the people in charge.

            There’s is a chance that this will be a tool they trot out again when they need it.

            There is also a chance that people will just try to sweep this whole thing under the rug and it won’t become a template for the future.

            I don’t think our ruling class is smart enough or far-seeing enough to guarantee any particular outcome, and we’ve seen both outcomes historically.

            But I see the years and years scenario as dangerous to the ruling class in a timeframe that even they can appreciate.

            They accomplished their goal of having the government buy up all the junk debt and rain cash on the financial sector. Now they can tuck this away for later.

    • With no disrespect for anyone’s family (I have my own KoolAide drinkers) we cannot wake them, and they are of no use for what it will take to throw off the yoke of the mad elites.

      This is nothing new. This is man’s eternal fate and Men’s eternal duty.

      The truth is most people Are Serfs.
      They are nothing without leaders.
      Nothing.

      There simply has always been a small number of men willing to act either to protect and “free” or at least check oppression or to oppress and take what they want. At present we have the rule of the mad, elites who live out a series of Heist Films. They get away with it and all their many taunts and degradations because we let them.

      Should we ever bring them to Bay and ask “why did you do this?” the present rich and shameless will say “why did you let us”? As they often do when bayed.

      As for waking the normies? To what end? So they can burden us?
      Let them burden the enemy.
      Take care of family, but the great masses of men are *useless* except as either free peasant serfs or as we see unfree serfs.

      Forget them, and we do our duty.
      Or we don’t.

      • The idea that the masses don’t matter is just wrong. They represent a tremendous amount of gravity in the course of a nation. Sure, they’re sheep, but they’re fucking dangerous sheep, more like a panicky herd of 1500 lb. water buffalo that destroys everything in its path. Whoever successfully sets themselves up as their shepherd wins. You can’t simply disregard them.

        • Its why they are always happy to run massive loss making media for decades.

          Huxley alluded to this in his interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alasBxZsb40 interview. Where he pointed out whoever could control the 20-25% of the population that are the almost effortlessly hypnotized and suggestible would essentially control the direction of the nation.

          The battle for those is lost I fear without regaining control in some form of the dominant broadcast mechanisms.

          • re “broadcast mechanisms”

            Agreed — I think, if I am understanding you correctly. If you mean official newsmedia, frankly those are mostly irrelevant. But if you also include popular entertainment (infotainment) and pop culture, then yes, absolutely. Which also means we are in a very very deep hole indeed, considering the aggressively vapid ignorance of the average “star” and more importantly, what sorts of people control the manufacture of our popular culture.

            Thanks for the Huxley link. Haven’t listened to it yet, but have to admit I twitched hearing the dulcet tones of Mike Wallace. I had the, er, privilege of hearing the man speak at a college commencement once, and went from being mildly positive about Mike Wallace to despising him as a smug egotistical elitist. (And if MemeWarVet is wondering, yes, of course he is, from the Russian branch.)

          • Thankfully the interviewer is mostly silent.
            One of the things that stood out was Huxley using the word “we” a lot in places about control that sort of didn’t make sense as if he was talking about humanity in general. But more a smaller set of “we”.

            Yes I mean the entertainment media which essentially controls this part of the population entirely in most western countries. they have been doing it for decades. Even looking back at pretty old films now I start to see the patterns that have been placed, managed and moved forwards.overtime.

            I do not think there is a way out of it, baring a major collapse as it is saturating in nearly all the west.

        • You cannot wait for them.
          You cannot make them stand erect.
          To see Men stand instead of talk is 1% and really they are following 0.1%. Its 1 Man in a thousand at best.

          To see it in women is to see a unicorn, I’ve been in combat zones.
          A few can follow and point the gun and follow orders. Lead? Never.

          12 years ago we came back from Iraq and shrugged; I’ll protect the nice people but I’m not listening to them anymore.

          The commons are slaves by choice, they will not have liberty if it means risk. All you can do is protect them, guide them, perhaps the light yoke of ordered liberties, the necessary farce of democracy. That’s it.

          Even now nearly all reading my words are thinking mainly of one thing; their PROPERTY. As if money is yours without power; a lesson our elites learned well from 2016. This is their true answer to us.

          This entire COVID scheme is the elites regaining power – and they have gained it all back exponentially.
          We gulag from home, we’ve nationalized the economy, the Kulaks (small biz, self employed) are suppressed. There’s been more “Progress” in the last month than in 100 years.

          As for “the People’s” answer- you have it from your own.
          As long as Corn and Netflix flow the “herd” is we all see “immune” to being in self imposed detention.

          Education and informing “The Herd” is animal psychological abuse.

          Spare them the anxiety and find men.

          • Slow down the impassioned rhetoric a bit. I didn’t say educate them, I said shepherd them. You’re not doing that right now, and you have no means of doing so.

      • ‘the present rich and shameless will say “why did you let us”?’

        Pretty sure a substantial subset of the shameless will scold us that they are The Real Victims.

        The problem is that the The Real Victim thing is not exactly a scam. They actually believe it. They (and some of us) know it’s weaponized, but they still deeply and truly believe they are victims. Or are imminently about to become victims if they let up on the paranoid aggression for even an instant.

14. Retreat Hell! We just got here!

    Don Cuomo rides for State’s Rights

    An unexpected Champion of State’s Rights has taken the field.

    Is it Rand Paul?

    Is it Ron Paul, suited up for another Tilt at the Windmill?

    Is it the Ghosts of Southern Gentlemen of the past?

    Is it the Sainted Robert E. Lee descending from Heaven?

    Why No, no it’s…it’s…

    https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/cuomo-says-if-trump-tries-reopen-new-york-then-we-n1183341

    Who with his faithful Retainer Sancho DeBalasio goes forth to battle the Demon of our Day..Federal Tyranny.

    • Andrew Guono wants the 2020 D presidential nomination. He knows how senile Biden is, as everybody does, and so that Biden is not really a viable candidate. Guono wants to be the guy, and so Guono self-scripts everything he says and does to (in his calculation) best serve his goal. What the rest of us must understand is that every, absolutely everything, Guono says and does is calculated and intended to further this goal he has set for himself.

      • The problem with this is that Cuomo has so many skeletons in his closet that he had an addition built on to accommodate them.
        Albany is a complete sewer of pay for play and backroom deals, more so than even DC.
        Trump knows this, and Cuomo knows Trump knows this. It would be best for Cuomo to wait for 2024, than risk a major blowout going toe to toe with Trump now.

15. Obama, endorsing Biden says; “It should now be clear to everyone that the Republicans…are interested in Power, not Progress.”

    Comrade Obama; we’ve gotten more Progress in the last month then you did in a century. We’ve Nationalized the Economy, suppressing the Kulaks and everyone is Gulag-ing from Home.
    The Revolution is..completed Comrade.

    • These people are always projecting.

      I wonder if humans are ever going to develop an immunity to this hegelian trick?

      • Obongo the unsurpassed master of platitudes

16. Trump now claims total authority to reopen the nation.
    Governors object.
    Let them defy his order to reopen.

    A maneuver worthy of Koba.
    That is exactly who we need now.

    https://apnews.com/ba9578acf23bdb03fd51a2b81f640560

    • Let Trump declare a national emergency and marshal law. Then have the army arrest every governor who does not release people from these their bondage and sent them to getmo.

      • If only Trump could become Koba (Stalin) we would be free of the Communists at last.

        That actually is in a way what Stalin did.

17. Social Distancing didn’t help. You would expect to see a HUGE spike in cases/deaths in the population of essential workers, who for the first 2-3 weeks couldn’t find masks and gloves but worked elbow to elbow with co-workers and the public. What we’re seeing is NO SPIKE and a lowering of cases – even among this exposed population.

    • Its a mystery how very few normal people ever question this. With all the essential workers (often working in close proximity with each other and coming into contact with lots of people in sequence) why are the dead bodies not piling up?

      If you bring it up you just get a blank stare, or maybe in their head being classified as essential confers some magic immunity on them.

      Its like the video of 4 coppers grouping together and kicking in a guy’s door to check for social distancing in his own home. But why are they not at risk from their own behaviors?

      Where I am queues for the local shop are all mandated 2 meters apart, people in gloves and masks, plexiglass servers etc. then at break time 5 staff wander outside the premises for a group smoke at normal distance from each other. I am sure this happens all over.

      • I think we need to start pushing this idea out there. Like you said, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody. Not mainstream, alt news, social media types even on the fringes. I haven’t heard one person ask the question “Where are all the essential workers getting sick?”. I’m going to start asking anyone that’ll talk to me and posting online. This one piece blows the whole social distancing thing to bits.

18. The Revolution is over.
    No shots were fired- because the Revolution WAS televised.

19. Z, how do you explain the _total number of dead_ in March in the heavily-hit parts of Northern Italy? This is not data that’s easily gamed. We’re talking 4x-10x the ordinary numbers of dead for the month in these areas, of whatever causes. On the plus side, it’s likely that they have herd immunity there by now, so these rates won’t continue. But even if April were to return to normal, 10x the mortality in March means double the dead for the year in that area. Even 4x is a noticeable increase for the year. Going back to the original question, did these Italians get stressed out by the bad news and start having heart attacks? What if _you_ are wrong on this issue?

    • For starters, we never have great medical data. People who have worked with medial data know this. It’s why it takes years to get useful data sets from the regular flu season. Researchers are still correcting data from the Spanish flu and that was a century ago. The point is, let’s not get to attached to the current data being reported. It will change and a lot.

      As far as variable infection and death rates, this is both normal and not always understood. There was a paper out of Italy a few weeks ago showing how *all* deaths are being coded as Covid-19 in some hospitals, even if the victim had other more serious diseases. Our government has instructed hospitals to record deaths with Covid as deaths from Covid.

      If you read the linked post by WM Briggs, the data is slowly conforming to past patterns, so I suspect in time we will see the Italian data adjusted downward, once researchers can look at the underlying cases.

      • I am struggling to understand why this is being accepted as not behaving similar to other virus strains in the same family. The assertions around super-contagious, or different action, or its somehow acquired the characteristics of pre-antibiotic plague, or the weird ventilator thing are all tells of a synthesized narrative.

        Nearly all human strains have a similar respiratory effect and nearly all strains only show high death rate and progression to pneumonia in patients with other co-morbidity (AIDS/Diabetes/Age related weakness).

        This time is different is bordering on the impossible, and at the very least highly improbable. You would not have the doctors fudge the death certs if the cause effect was stronger.

      • We agree regarding the quality of medical data. That’s why total number of dead _of all causes_ is a good check. That total number doesn’t rely on any medical data, just on counting dead bodies. If 100 people died in March 2019, and 400 died in March 2020 (of all causes, in the town), no medical conclusions are involved in the two counts. Yes, perhaps Italians are older and friendlier, etc., but that doesn’t explain the magnitude of the numbers. To be clear, I think the total lockdown is a hysterical reaction. But that’s because we should be weighing the cost and because we have better/finer alternatives, not because WuFlu is just a slightly nastier flu that would lead to only 100k deaths if we just acted normally.

        • H I. But that reasoning still does not bring us to a satisfactory political consensus as it fundamentally assumes all deaths, or lives saved, are of equal value. Nor does it attempt to compute the lives that will be lost in a future economic scenario where a vibrant economy turns into a Great Depression, i.e., “deaths of despair”.

      • The way we handle those “all deaths now are from Corona” anomalies is to go back a year and compute the normal expected deaths from disease, such a heart failure, stroke, pneumonia, Flu, etc., and subtract those.

        I’ve heard a similar report from NYC where there has been a strange downtick in deaths from more common causes during this pandemic. But again, I’ve not confirmed any of these reports.

    • No one denies there’s a viral pneumonia traveling through the population.
      The question becomes what the best course of action was in response.
      Normally, quarantine means isolating the sick and elderly. This time, we isolated the whole population, causing an enormous number of downstream effects, most of which haven’t played out yet.
      We know why Italy suffered more, and that’s due to specific demographic and cultural differences in relation to other countries, even countries geographically connected to Italy. Those demographic and cultural differences are well known and have been discussed at length elsewhere, but the least you could do is to stop pretending they don’t exist at all in order to act like you’re scoring a point against ZMan.
      Beyond all that, it’s getting tiresome to see people come here and act like the original estimates of a million deaths are somehow still in play.
      They aren’t and you can calm down now.

      • Dave, the million deaths estimate must remain in play for those logically challenged folk as it is the only thing they have to hang onto to justify their precipitous actions wrt our society and economy. They see the damage all around them and can only scream, “it would be worse”, “I was right”.

    • You people keep saying the same shit.

      Fantastical claims require fantastical evidence. Your numbers were certainly fantastical, and yet, how many times have you revised your figures and moved the goal posts?

      What if he’s wrong? Uh, buddy, we were already proven right. We predicted that their numbers would be hilariously overstated, and what do you know? Your head is so far up your ass that you’re injecting shit directly into your brain. Do you honestly deny that your side was reardedly off the mark?

    • Compsci, we generally agree. I don’t get why you read my reasoning to assume all lives saved are of equal value.
      Dave, we agree on total lockdown being overkill. I don’t get where you saw that I’m pretending demographic and cultural differences don’t exist.
      Lawdog, your comment is content-free so normally I wouldn’t reply, but I have some true empathy for you so I’ll just say: take a deep breath and get out of the house for a stroll or exercise. Humble, good faith advice, not trolling.
      I’m noticing a surprising rush to assign bad faith, bad facts or bad reasoning to people perceived to be “on the other side” on this specific issue, whatever that “other side” is in this context. It’s almost like the lockdown is driving people crazy.

      • H I. I hear ya. If I’ve misunderstood, I apologize. Your comments are not taken badly. If I’ve replied abruptly, it is my fault for reading too fast.

      • You know, you’re right. the comment was tasteless and I apologize for it. My thinking has been polarized quite badly, and I shouldn’t be so strident about this.

20. Here’s the link to the archived version of the article about states coordinating their plans to reopen:
    https://archive.vn/n6si4
    Pierce the paywall.

21. Viruses are transmitted by contact between carriers and non carriers. If contact between everybody and everybody else is drastically reduced, the rate of transmission will be drastically reduced as well.

    It’s been said that people of limited intelligence can’t follow conditional statements:

    “If contact is not reduced, we will have something on the order of X number of cases by date Y.

    “However, *IF* we do reduce contact by a large amount, the number of cases will be reduced.”

    The only part you understood came after the comma in the first paragraph.

    I wrote a trivial script on March 4 which started at 111 cases (at the time, you could pick your guess), and doubled that number every 2.4 days (the best guess at the rate of doubling as of 3/4/2020). The numbers were roughly on track with the reported numbers (never more than a couple days off) until about a week after social distancing really caught on. The incubation period is now believed to be about five days. Given the shitty quality of my initial data and the data I compared it to, and the noisy, chaotic nature of reality, that ain’t bad for x *= 2 every 24*2.4 hours. Go write it yourself. Use Excel, it’s the back of the 21st century envelope. If anybody here knows what “back of the envelope” means (hint: google it).

    But it’s been said that people of low intelligence can’t understand how doubling works, either.

    Nothing personal, Z, but you’re a man of average intelligence. You’re fine with the folksy common sense stuff, but you’re in over your head with anything grandpa didn’t know the answer to off the top of his head. What we’re seeing here is bluster and bullshit from a man who won’t do simple arithmetic when the answer scares him.

    Or have you monetized this thing somehow, and you’re bullshitting the marks like David French does? I can’t imagine there’s that much money in this thing for you, but what do I know? I don’t have any useful intuition about this business (pro tip: Know what you don’t know).

    This is why we need intelligent, responsible rulers who give a shit about the nation they rule. People like you and your readers need somebody halfway trustworthy to do their thinking for them.

    What we’ve got for leaders instead, for the most part, are hostile, reckless foreigners scarcely brighter than you are. Trump is bright enough to get it, and to some degree he gives a shit, but he’s reckless, narcissistic, and glib. Well, god help us, he’s the best we’ve got.

    • I’ve learned never to trust anyone who tries to shoehorn the real world into Excel models. You may put others down as “low intelligence” or “average intelligence” but the uncomfortable reality is that you’re even lower on the totem pole: a brainless quant.

      Regions that have refused to take social distancing seriously have not collapsed. Even NYC, which didn’t take social distancing seriously until it was too late, didn’t collapse. Yeah, maybe one or two hospitals were filled to capacity with old, sick people (incidentally, these were Africanized hospitals that were poorly managed and overwhelmed even before the wu-flu), but that was the extent of the “pandemic.”

      LOL, like trivial scripts can actually explain the world.

    • Lawdog said it so succinctly in an earlier post it’s worth repeating:

      “Social distancing does not bring the projected death toll from 1.5 million to 60,000. That notion’s so stupid, it borders on comical.”

      Not to mention that every “model” accounted for mandatory social distancing anyway and still got it so wrong. Quants like yourself haven’t accurately projected anything since the 1960s. In every field, from epidemiology, to economics and the stock market, to traffic engineering and real estate, to taxation and lending, to business admin and education, to environmental analysis and climate change, the models and predictions and forecasting have been so embarrassingly wrong for decades now that people are actually losing faith in scientific and technological progress.
      And it’s not because they’re religious nuts or rubes as you smeared and dismissed them, it’s because you’ve transmitted your faith into abstractions (a new religion of econometrics, if you will) that have failed to materialize for a long time now.

      Quant forecasting and modeling has been SO bad in every field and every industry for decades now that we could very well get better results going to the palm readers. You guys are completely divorced from reality and have some serious self-examination to do if you ever want the rest of us to take you seriously again.

      • I would add that I think most, if not all models, start out with a predetermined conclusion or outcome. The model is then “proven.” The biggest example of this is climate change. The climate is changing so it must be humans causing it so we’re going to prove that it is humans causing it. Not very hard to do at this point is it? Humans are linear thinkers but the problem is that nothing in the world is linear and because of this we fail to see the cycles around us. There are business cycles, solar cycles, volcanic cycles, even virus cycles. Yet we tend to think things will last forever the way they are now. We forget there were dinosaurs roaming this great earth at one point. Who says that can’t happen again?

22. I don’t think people appreciate Trump’s Machiavellian ruthlessness; Jared is a HOSTAGE, because Jared is a member of shall we say the Extended Kushner Family.

    Which is why after Ivanka Kushner nee Trump got the SBA small business rescue we see the Fed stepping into the small business rescue business directly.

    This is Clarence coming to George Bailey’s rescue not as unwinged probie, but as St. Michael leading the hosts of heaven in Holy War.

    Sure helps to marry into the Angels Tribe.

23. Are you totally innumerate Z? Nearly 13,000 Americans died of COVID-19 in a single week from April 7 through April 13 (scroll down to “Daily New Deaths in the United States”). And this was with most of the population huddled in their homes, and everyone else walking around with masks and avoiding each other. And it’s still extremely early in the epidemic — the death count didn’t really start taking off until a month ago, and the vast majority of the population is still uninfected.

    So what do you think would have happened if we had continued “business as usual,” and treated this as “just the flu?” Seriously Z, this isn’t your beat. You’re making a fool of yourself, and damaging your credibility with anyone who knows how to count. You should just stop.

    • 13,000? That’s it. May as well be a statistic on bathtub drownings.

      • Currently we have 23,000 deaths attributed to the virus. We’ll probably hit ~40,000 by the time people stop caring enough to notice. Then that number will be whittled down as died with cornavirus is filtered out of the died from coronavirus.

        • While you are punching out libertarians during respites from your bicycling excursions, is it too much to ask that you make an exception for a certain Austrian school octogenarian libertarian who has been absolutely right from the start?

          Perhaps you now have more respect for him than you do for those who have soiled their underalls like Cochran and Sailer?

          • “a certain Austrian school octogenarian libertarian who has been absolutely right from the start?”

            …Hitler?

      • Wait…, you think 13,000 Americans drown in bathtubs every week? It takes four whole months to rack up that many auto fatalities!

        Moron. The mind just boggles…

        • JEB, you are an inspiration. We should lower the speed limit to 10 mph to eliminate auto fatalities. Social distancing for cars.

    • JEB, remember that there is a portion of the economy and workers still working, let’s call it 40%. So if the numbers of a million total deaths were right, then locking down us 60% would still create deaths of 400K from the people still running around, right? But that isn’t happening.

      Lockdown of old folks homes and at-risk people is a smart move that should happen. But the premise of locking up EVERYONE makes no sense because the people who are not locked down are clearly not dying in mass. The facts are right there.

      Right now people like you are causing more harm to more people from unemployment, poverty, hunger and long-term misery that will last years and years from those who lose everything. You only look at the virus side of the equation – with incorrect numbers – and not even consider the human misery the shut-in is creating.

      • This is not the Black Death. There were never going to be people dying in mass. The worst case anyone ever talked about was one or two million, once once the epidemic had run its course and worked it way through the entire population. But we are nowhere close to that point yet. Most people have not been infected, and there is no herd immunity. And the people going out to work are wearing masks and being careful, which has got to have an effect. Anyone with 3rd grade math can figure out that a disease that can kill 25,000 American in a month — over 12,000 in one week! — could potentially rack up some very large numbers.

        The answer here seems to be to engage in hand waving speculation. Oh we can’t be sure about anything! Maybe the reported numbers somehow aren’t right! It’s true that some people counted as dying of the virus may actually have died with it. But that’s true of the flu too, and people here seem to be willing to accept death counts for the flu from previous years. Remember, the same people are doing the counting! And there are also plausible reasons to think we might be undercounting. New York City just bumped its death toll to 10,000, adding 3,700 people who were never tested, but who had the symptoms. If you aren’t doing much testing and you don’t count people who weren’t tested you are going to miss a lot. So it can go both ways. I can’t rule out the possibility that the final numbers will be lower than what we are hearing, but I also see no particular reason to think that will be the case.

        Now if your argument is that we should be willing to accept 200,000 or 500,000 or a million dead to avoid destroying the economy, fine. That’s a different argument, and I am not taking either side. Just don’t pretend that the whole thing is an illusion, and that this is no worse than a bad flu season.

        • How do you know “most people have not yet been infected,” as many cases are asymptomatic and “most people” have not yet had an antibody test? Check your premises.

    • Extremely early in the epidemic?
      Many experts now believe this has been floating around in the States since December.
      Some believe the first wave of this was that nasty “flu” that many people, myself included, got in NYC in the first week of January, and matched most of the symptoms of COVID. Some experts believe what we are seeing now is the second wave of this viral event.
      Have you seen the research from Germany, where they tested an entire town, or the research from Iceland, where they have tested 10% of the whole population?
      That research clearly shows this virus is much less lethal and intense than initially reported by our “experts”.
      You are acting like a frightened child who just realized Santa Claus probably isn’t real, but just can’t let go of the belief yet.

      • Actually Dave, I’ve heard reports that people had it even as far back as November and, if that was the case, it has already been through the world’s population.

        And JEB, like others have said, including Z, every single respiratory death has been classified as a CV19 death regardless of underlying health conditions or even if CV19 was not the primary contributor to the death, the person merely tested positive for it. Z is right. The numbers are going to take a long time to really get sorted out, if they ever will.

    • Diabetes mellitus is a cause of death in over 270,000 persons yearly in the US. Over 90% of diabetes in the US is type 2 (“DM2” is the kind you get from being fat). Further diabetes is highly under-reported (like <40%) as a cause of death.

      But let's go with the 270k per annum death rate for DM, giving 5200 deaths each week. DM2 is VERY preventable. Control your food intake, get some damn exercise, don't get obese.

      That said, you don't see us chaining fat people to treadmills. Nor should we.

      • They’d be better off lifting weights, just twice a week, rather than doing cardio on a treadmill or on a bike.

      • Let us not forget that the ‘experts’ and medical food pyramid advice since the 1960s of low animal fat. high carb, is the very thing that has caused the diabetes pandemic in the US . Not only were they wrong. They were wrong to the tune of millions of deaths over this time.

      • Diabetes mellitus is not contagious. If it were I would be concerned.

    • Well, JEB, you’ve been wrong with all your posts so far. At least you’re consistent.

      • I have been wrong about nothing so far. All of my previous posts were about what would happen over the course of a year, and we aren’t there yet. The low projection when I posted was 100,000 dead, and we are already a quarter of the way there — after a single month!

        Let’s see what happens when they try to lift the lockdown though. That will be the key. If they can find a way to get large numbers of people back to work without reigniting the epidemic then the numbers really could come in quite low. At this point though nobody is clear how to do that.

        It’s still idiotic to compare this with previous flu years though, because the behavior of the population now is drastically different than it was then. Social distancing would have cut flu deaths sharply.

        (Hmm, I wonder if Z is practicing social distancing, or if he is wandering around in public places every day without a mask, because hey, it’s no worse than the flu!)

        • It is still idiotic to assume the modeling is correct and then claim victory when he projected death toll is less than the model projection. In that you are logically incorrect. And in that you still base all of your arguments. Let’s see who is correct and who will admit error when the facts will out. I doubt it will be you, given your doubling down every time you’ve been challenged.

          • You have a thing about models, but we aren’t talking about models any more. We are talking about over 25,000 dead in a single month. Nearly 13,000 in a single week. You don’t need models to see that a disease that is capable of doing that has the potential to be pretty goddamn bad if we don’t come down on it hard. All you need is a shred of common sense.

    • Did those 13,000 undergo autopsy, including viral cultures? How do you know what they died of?

24. >Trump now has a task force to re-open the economy. It even has his dingbat daughter on it.

    yeah just like that task force to look into tech censorship against conservatives. A task force is just another way to delay, defer, delegate. Trump needs to order state politician to reopen.

25. How soon do we get a Department of Health Security?

    (Rush: “We did this based on computer models…”)

    • Oh we turned the entire country into TSA ville, no doubt.

      Yes once kids we flew without being groped.

26. The people who joined in on this panic and berated the rest of us for not being as pious as them are going to hear from me. I’ll probably lose some friends on this, but I really don’t care. These people are insufferable gadflies whenever some “big event” appears on TV. The people who wore the pink pussy hats are pretty much the same ones wearing masks while out walking the dog. I’m just surprised they don’t wear pink masks.

    • Many in my neighborhood are wearing the masks, some pink or flashy, and although there is fear the majority are virtue signaling the trend. What almost none of these health-conscious dogwalkers is doing: removing the dog turds and nudging their canines onto the street for tinkle time. Our streets in my Chicago neighborhood are literally smeared with poo as nobody wants to risk picking up virus and bringing it home. But oh they ARE virtuous.

27. As for the tin pot tyrant Michigan guv: Ramadan starts on/about April 23. Watch for whatever restrictions that could impinge on any Muslim get togethers to vanish April 24. She might even be so benevolent as to allow other religious services recommence.

    As for the economy: assuming the lifeguards blow the whistle in the next few weeks to allow everyone to get back in the pool after the mandatory rest time to assure we didn’t all get a cramp and drown – an initial V shaped economic bounce is likely. Of course, the first order of business, will be a few weeks of singing hosannah to all the lifeguards for saving countless millions from drowning. However, once the novelty wears off and the economic dead cat bounce ends, the after effects of the new normal take hold with a vengence. This will not be pretty. If those after effects do not take hold till near / after the election – Trump wins and some kind of longer term recovery begins (Maybe). However, should the temporary fun end too soon, Trump loses, the Alzheimer patient gets elected. He manages to get through the inauguration, but immediately subsequent, he becomes a sock puppet propped up by Cloud People. And then….

    • Her subordinates will simply call the Dearbornistani area police departments and tell them not to enforce the executive orders if they want funding. They’ll then call the local press outfits and tell them there is no story if reporters want continued access to the executive branch. News of capacity mosque worship will leak out by citizen journalists but nothing will happen, except a local spike in covid 19 and flu, as Michiganders sigh and express adulation for the religiosity of the muslims then get about their daily business having forgotten this non-event.

      • That’s right, whitey. No more seeds for you!

        We must ALL pay for the blacks in Detroit, and Muslims in Dearborn.

28. Long time reader, first time commenter. The lack of deaths and illnesses from the virus is entirely related to the shut-downs across the country. The hospitals aren’t overrun because people have been holed up in their homes for weeks on end.

    As was said by many of the curve benders: “if we take drastic measures, it will look like we overreacted. If we don’t take drastic measures, we’ll have many more deaths and look like we didn’t do enough.”

    The initial models reflected what would happen without taking action. We took action and thus those old models are “wrong.”

    If someone is 50 years old, 300 lbs, and sedentary, a statistical model would predict them to have a heart attack in the near-term. If, upon learning of that prediction, that person goes on a diet, exercises four times a week, and drops 100 lbs in six months, then that old statistical model would be wrong…but only because their actions have altered their prior reality.

    Am I missing something here?

    • Entirely wrong. ALL the initial models had built-in mandatory social distancing assumptions. And they were still wrong. First it was a million dead even with everyone on lockdown, then half a million dead with everyone on lockdown, and now the latest “model” is 60,000 dead with everyone on lockdown and we probably won’t even hit that.

      Amazing that diversity-raped Sweden was the only country that had the balls to ride this out. Yeah, their per-capita deaths are higher than neighboring countries, but they KNEW that would be the case: they KNEW they’d have more deaths than neighboring countries, but not so much higher that it was worth crippling the country under lockdown. They made the rational decision, the same decision we make when we get into our cars every day: yeah, our risk of death goes up, but not so much that we’re willing to cripple ourselves hiding under our beds. We’re just going to accept and deal with the temporarily higher number of deaths among the elderly that would have died from the flu or pneumonia anyway.

      Yes, you are missing a lot BentCurve.

      • I appreciate the reply. I’m genuinely not trying to be a troll here and am open to criticism. Bummer to get negative points on my first comment on here.

        • All statistics aside, 30,000 or 300,000 or three million American deaths, mostly those over 70 years, from Covid 19 plus comorbidity is not acceptible only if 1933 is acceptable. Even 1933 could be good times are here again. It’s amazing how poorly this has been thought through. I’m over 70 and I’ll volunteer for Covid 19 if people will agree to testosterone suppluments.

        • I voted you up one. You have made a reasonable inquiry designed as I see it to increase your knowledge. There is no shame in that. People here need to rethink their down voting logic.

      • It’s mostly Somalians dying in Sweden anyways.

    • I have the strong feeling that I’m feeding a concern troll, but what the hell. Here goes:

      Yes. What you are missing (or ignoring) is that you are accepting axiomatically the premise that the initial models were valid to begin with.

      “The initial models reflected what would happen without taking action.”
      That is a statement of faith. It is not supported by anything other than your say so.

    • You missed everything, including the boat.
      You bought into a fiction constructed by experts like Fauci, a guy that used to go on national television in the early 80’s and claim that 25% of heterosexuals would have AIDS by the late 80’s.
      There have also been several dozen epidemiologists that have called BS on this from the beginning. They were roundly ignored by the MSM.
      Try not to believe everything you see on CNN.

      • I don’t watch CNN and detest the media at large. I guess I fall more in Sailer’s camp on this one.

        • Bent, it’s ok, welcome aboard. There are many layers of understanding around here. Jumping in will open you up to a few more of them, the hard way. It’s like we are assembling a puzzle, and there are quite a few pieces. Some of us are just further along in the process. Shutting in helped some people, no doubt, but playing the “might have been” alternate outcomes is a tough game to play in these parts.

          • I second Dutch, welcome aboard. We welcome discussions in good faith. Don’t let the down votes get you down.

      • There are climate change scientists not associated with the oil and gas industries that are skeptical of the “98% of climatologists agree” consensus (as if scientific inquiry is supposed to be about consensus anyway) that are silenced. And as you pointed out, people like Fauci have been “projecting” new plagues for decades while more sober epidemiologists have been ignored.

        I can understand normies plugged into the corrupt MSM falling for these tricks since that MSM has hidden the more nuanced reality from them, but the fact that so many guys on our side who claim to have the critical thinking skills and hard skepticism to read beyond the MSM artifice that still fell for this is embarrassing.

        It seems like right-wing Twitter losers were trying to meme a collapse, so their critical faculties went up in smoke: they wanted collapse to happen so much they were willing to believe anything to fuel their desire for collapse.

    • BentCurve, yes you are missing something.

      You make a logical fallacy by assuming that the modeling is correct. If you have read this group for a while as you claim, the main point underlying most of the arguments made was that the predictive model was wrong to begin with. Either the model or the data fed into that model.

      Now that the original model is shown to have predicted wrongly, you double down and say it was incorrect precisely because we implemented such stringent measures such as the current nationwide quarantine entail. What we have with your logic is a “heads you lose, tails I win” proposition. A fallacy at minimum of false choices.

      Further, the choice of plunging the world’s greatest economy into a depression entails its own risks wrt to quality of life and “deaths of despair”. None of which was taken into account by your medical epidemiologists “model”.

    • “Am I missing something here?”

      Yes (duh) – the fact that your theory is completely unfalsifiable. What circumstances would prove your theory is incorrect? If you can’t think any of any, your theory is unfalsifiable and hence unscientific.

29. “ Then there are the people who fell for the hype and then piously lectured the rest of us about how the virus was more important than the economy. Many of these people claimed to be on this side of the great divide. They had lectured for years about how the media can never be trusted. Then they swallowed the official line on the virus like good little boys and girls.”

    Yea. Anyone who has endlessly bleated out the nonsense terms stonks and money machine go brrrrrr should be publicly denounced.

30. The tens of millions of people who were grievously harmed, if not financially ruined by Coronageddon will not forget. Nor will those of us who were laughing at the absurdity of it all–and getting doxed for being right–from the get-go.

    • Ostei, “Coronageddon”, I like that. What we need is a derogatory and dismissive term to label/respond to those who called this pandemic wrong and put us in the current predicament. As we often use the term, “OK, Boomer”, to respond to such folk (I’m a Boomer and it cuts), we need such a term to refer to those virtue signaling, fear mongers we’ve been mentioning here today.

      Any ideas for such a short hand label?

      • Compsci – I’m no rhetorician, but one thing I have learned from Vox is that a good term is not that which appeals to the coiner, but cuts the listener. So nothing we think is clever, but whatever elicits the shame/embarrassment in the listener. My suggestions, such as they are, would be merely keep it simple – Chinese plague or Kung flu or Wuhan flu, and then Social Distance Warriors or Social Distance Scolds.

        • I like “Social Distance Warriors”.

31. And, the stock market seems to be optimistic. Do you think those quant guys know something we don’t?

    • Yeah they know the bond market is fucked, T-Bills are fucked, Europe’s economy is fucked, Property is fucked, Japan Stock Market is fucked etc. Feel free to add your own hollowed out asset class.

      The US stock Market is the only thing left standing as every other class has been sucked dry by the parasites. there is no where else for the big money to play.

    • Yes, they know how to manipulate the market, get handouts from their cronies in government, and get filthy rich. How to hunker and gloat in their mansions/yachts.

      While Ms. single mom waitress is eating store brand mac and cheese and behind on car and credit card payments.

      “What a wonderful world this would be…”

    • because only .0001% of the global population will die of this. The market knows this virus is mostly media hype that has already begun to subside.

    • They know that the Fed is buying to prop up the market. As a trader, you don’t fight the Fed. It’s as simple as that.

32. I’ve been in manufacturing for 40 years. I hope you are correct, but the damage to the supply chain is pretty substantial . hopefully you are correct, and the V shape occurs, but I doubt that it will be quick .

    • It will be L shaped. Followed by a WTF. We were slowly slipping into recession anyway, the credit market is contracted, banks won’t make loans unless they’re explicitly backed by the government or implicitly backed by the Fed.

    • I am also in mfg, a bit less years than you. I am not optimistic about some magical thinking known as a “Vee shaped recovery” and consider the entire notion just more political bullshit. Words for normies in cubicles.

      My supply chain has held thus far by a thread. I had to scramble to make that happen, with trusted, USA vendors. It was still by a thread and remains that way. One sick-out in a plant that serves me and poof! Shutdown for ‘x’ amount of time – throwing my entire production off.

      And for the adult kiddies at home that are playing hooky from their school marm jobs, and the DMV – that word, “production” – means the lifeblood of my business – $$$. Yeah, earned, created dinero. The means of emplyment. The wealth creation. The difference between insolvency and paying my creditors.

      Just to clarify.

      I do NOT see packed restaurants. Nor sporting arenas. Nor concerts. No time soon at least. Maybe they will stop arresting someone for walking alone on a PUBLIC beach. Or where MEN once stormed Omaha – badged non men stormed a Baptist church parking lot.

      I see companies realize they can run just fine with half the people – albeit working harder but that has been the reality for years, even in corporations carrying make-work, chubby, tatted women with attitudes in HR. Someone has to do the actual work.

      Whatever the intent of the “PPP” – surely the concept cannot be keeping people employed at restaurants that never see the customers come back. At least in any time frame that would be covered by the crumbs falling off the Wall Street trillions table.

      Buckle up, cut costs., No capital purchases. Cut staff. Renegotiate everything you can. Then do another round of the same. I cannot be the only business owner thinking that way. I fully understand that everyone from my own congress-critter, a glib front man for Wall Street – to the mega corp types – want to see the lights blink off – the ECONOMIC FREEDOM my small business gives me. Multi-generational. Children without college loan forever debt BLINK AND GO OUT FOR THE FINAL TIME.

      Then I end up being another sad 50 year old working at Walmart, while my kids kids are a light tan, buried in debt for life. Serfs. I doubt David Geffen cares, the fuck.

      I know where MY FIGHT is and it is here. Now. In my business. I never “shut down” for a second, could care less about your “Essential” – you can shove your essential. I did learn, actually saw OUTED, some of my male peers as gutless serfs. The cops turned out to be the oppressors we thought they would be. That I always knew they were.

      • Absolutely agree! Cops are pigs. This is exactly what’s going on. Right down to the Applebee’s franchisee who leveraged some loan to get his location next to the now empty Holiday Inn Express. My question is, will this spur even more of a migration of small business owners to states that operate at least coherently? And if so how much? You reach a point where the abuse just isn’t worth hanging out your shingle.

        • Does the average civnat understand that it is Five-0 arresting ministers conducting services, solitary surfers riding the waves, and the homeowner hosting an Easter dinner for 10?

          • I hope some get a clue. “Thin blue line” my ass.

            https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/santa-cruz-police-issue-citations-for-violations-of-stay-at-home-order/2271785/

            So tough! Of course the illegal alien is walking out of the store behind them with a slurpee in hand. You can bet no one will question him. These cops are scum. The first rule of talking to cops is never ever talk to a cop. Never indulge them.

33. The Chinese Reaper is approaching a milestone in its quest to be the Greatest Scourge of Mankind in History: global deaths from the inevitable and fatal illness are almost up to one-third of a ho-hum, no big deal, average mundane boring year for influenza deaths: 122 K / 389 K = 31 %.

    If you’re not dead yet, you soon will be.

34. Just one smidging issue: the economy was going to be on the ropes anyway, the virus mess just brought it to the fore sooner, and perhaps harsher. Trump will try to fix this by not fixing anything, not sure how that’s going to work out for him.

35. Z Man;
    Maybe everybody’s being a bit too hard on the Fed. Gov. for overreacting. I say this because of the theory (becoming more certain by the day) that the ChiComs knew that the virus was released (probably carelessly) from their BioWeapons labs in Wuhan, probably in Oct. or Nov. So they therefore might well have feared that it was indeed an engineered BioWeapon agent that had been accidentally loosed upon themselves. At least they *acted* consistent with having such fears in Jan. and Feb. regardless of what they said.

    They pretty completely trashed their *own* economy and suspended travel *inside* China. Their nothing-to-see-here propaganda push and open external travel combined with internal hard shutdown was/is pretty easy to square with a ‘if we’re going down, so is everybody else’ scenario that would preserve their relative power position. So, the ChiCom reaction is what concerned me, not some transparent BS about bat soup made from bats from at least 900 klicks away made by by people who don’t actually eat bats themselves.

    If it really was a finished, engineered Bioweapon, then domesday predictions form the usual suspects in the West might be right, for once. There were entirely too many ChiCom behavioral parallels with the USSR’s following the Red Army’s 1979 accidental release of weaponized Anthrax spores from a secret site manufacturing them in industrial quantities in Sverdlovsk Oblast (province) that killed thousands.

    https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB61/

    Don’t forget, our Intel networks in the PRC got rolled up pretty thoroughly in the early Obama years, likely using info scraped from Hillary’s unsecured bathroom server. So, although we knew the ChiComs were lying through their teeth about the Wuhan Virus’ time and place of origin, we likely had very little way to find out the truth about its provenience early on. That was because they arrested anybody in China contradicting the ‘wet market’ story and barred our epidemic disease investigators from going there for over a month.

    So, based on all that, you’d have been criminally negligent not to have started planning for the contingency that it indeed *was* an engineered BioWeapon and that you couldn’t tell anybody about it for fear of causing even more panic.

    On balance, the Wuhan Virus has most but not all of the desired characteristics of an ideal BioWeapon, namely, it’s a virus (so antibiotics won’t work – you need a vaccine and than takes a year); And, unlike the usual flu, it has very high transmissibility and a very long-lived transmissibility time before symptoms appear. Very fortunately, it only lacks the medium lethality that one would want (too high a lethality and it burns itself out right away – like Ebola). But nobody knew for sure about the low lethality early on. For reference, think of Smallpox as a near-ideal BioWeapon. Bottom Line: It’s *still* not entirely clear that it either is or isn’t an engineered BioWeapon that was work in progress.

    • Yeah, I get it. But I still believe that the media should be piked.

      • Lawdog;
        Couldn’t agree more about the media. They were and are clueless, hysterical school girls and PRC butt fluffers. If they were serious, somebody would be looking into the sort of open source info I was able to develop (see above) without a great deal of effort. Well, I have to except OAN and Epoch Times. They *were* on this aspect of the story early on.

        Not saying I’m right, BTW: ‘Don’t know for sure’ is the only honest answer. It’s just that there are a lot more moving parts hidden in the weeds and a lot more of them are sketchy in this outbreak’s origin than in the past few. So I was intrigued because of my WMD defense training from the Cold War days.

36. This is all a logical progession, beginning with the silly but expensive ban on flourocarbon refrigerants, moving on to anthropocentric climate change to governments doing whatever they wish to prevent the extinction of the human race by invisible forces. This is called religion.

    Post-moderns can’t accept a big guy in the sky taking notes on their misbehavior and promising eternal hellfire. That’s just too pre-industrial. Science is the deity now and its priests are at the University of East Anglia and Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Just as it was during the time of Galileo and Kepler, heretics are ostracized if not burnt at the stake. Not wearing your mask could cause many thousands to die. In the future other unapproved activities will be banned as well, for the good of everyone. Outside barbecue pits might have to go.

37. Good post – but disagree on 2 points.

    1) the biggest losers are small biz, after that non essential workers.

    2) Within days of Dingbat Daughter taking over the small biz recovery portfolio *Someone* had the actually competent to point of brilliance policy of connecting the Federal Reserve directly to the small businesses, small being smaller than big banks and airlines. If she’s a Dingbat she’s well advised. It doesn’t hurt her case that she admittedly runs a small biz, yes a sub-branch of Trump INC. If all The Dingbat did was nod her head to this (be like Elizabeth with Walsingham) then we are still well ahead, farther than any other bats male, female, Dem or GOP.

    Perhaps Dingbat even reads this blog, as I know it was suggested in the comments, more as rage and lament than Hope it was even possible.

    Recap; just moving to hook the Fed to small business relief is brilliant policy, and Dingbat just happened to be at the scene.

38. “Their clapping for the lay-offs and business closures revealed that they have no skin in the game.”

    But isn’t “having no skin in the game” a euphemistic way of saying that they have nothing?

    For guys with nothing, there’s no reason to hold back on rolling the dice. It’s not an “online game,” it’s a real push for revolution. I don’t much blame them.

    • It is not question of blaming them, but protecting yourself from them
      if you could of course
      If you analyze “dissident right” Karens you will easily see the most of them belong to that category
      Some of them 40+ years old parasites who saw in the crises a chance to get their UBI’s while pontificating about compassion or what not

    • To paraphrase Alinksky; the have a little wanted to work for more are ruined into having less than nothing i.e. Debts, and wanting their own back.

      Directly; the working class has their unemployment checks albeit less from uncle doctor Sam, but the small businesses and self employed have only ruin now or later staring at them.

      Well not just that; they have the Billionaires staring down from their bailed out, stock buybacked by Uncle Sugar yachts also staring at them.

      I think a noose shaped recovery is as likely as the V shaped recovery.

      • This will be a banker/rentier only recovery if that.

        https://prospect.org/coronavirus/banks-can-grab-stimulus-check-pay-debts/

        Congress did not exempt CARES Act payments from private debt collection, and the Treasury Department has been reluctant to exempt them through its rulemaking authority. This means that individuals could see their payments transferred from their hands into the hands of their creditors, potentially leaving them with nothing.

        The amount of trouble coming down the pipes is going to be enormous although the funny thing is the US baring it going big igloo , will be better off then a great many places.

        Between the city sized locust swarms , radioactive forest fire at Chernobyl , collapse of food exports, food shortages water crisis in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia damning the Nile and a hundred other things, well its going to be a huge mess everywhere

39. The novelty of the Coronachan lockout is starting to wear off for a lot of folks, myself included even though I’ve been working from the office four days per week and commuting on empty interstates. At one point, I decided to see the fastest time I could make it to work and I did 150 mph on the empty interstate that doubled as an Autobahn. Usually, traffic means it takes me about 40 minutes door to door, but on this day, it was a shade under 20 minutes. Got to love the Bavarians and their need for speed. It’s also been nice to not see as many roadside revenue collectors with their radar guns and lasers on the roads in our metro area.

    Several local restaurants in my area have been cleaned out, never to return. I think this will empower the chains, be they retail or food service, and the online retailers at the further expense of locally-owned businesses.

    At the end of the day, was this worth it? The economic effects will wreak havoc for years to come and our ruling class now realizes how docile we are as long as Netflix works and a crisis can be sold as the apocalypse. The only upside I can see is the tyrants have unmasked themselves. Vote accordingly.

    This also portends the end of globalism or at least I hope that is the conclusion to be drawn. No more “refugees” given permanent residence in our country. An end to outsourcing our manufacturing to hostile nations like China. And no more open borders or at least I hope.

    I wonder too if this is the end for sportsball. The leagues have to be burning through money with no end to this lockdown in sight. Disney has been burning through $30 million in losses each day and that warms my heart. I have no problem with sports since I was a college basketball player at a directional, commuter school in the South, but since it’s become a vehicle for ruling class dictates, I’m no longer interested in it as a pursuit.

    There’s this false dichotomy that you either are a heartless bastard who loves profits over life or a caring person who not only supports our overlords in their economic malfeasance, but rats on their friends and neighbors. There’s nothing wrong with taking individual measures to keep the virus under control, but having governments tell property owners that they can’t walk on their private beach, arresting churchgoers in one state and taking down tag numbers Stasi-style in another is pure evil.

    • “Several local restaurants in my area have been cleaned out, never to return. I think this will empower the chains, be they retail or food service, and the online retailers at the further expense of locally-owned businesses.”

      This is what pissed me off so much about the branch of the dissident right that fell for the hysteria. They concluded “Good riddance, the economy needs to die, it was just a shitty globohomo economy anyway.”

      Fools, this didn’t cripple globohomo at all. Local retailers took a punch in the gut, but Walmart and Amazon will be fine. Local restaurants may be wiped out, but Applebees will be just fine. Bill’s Hardware was destroyed, but Home Depot is thriving. Mill Valley Gardening may be dead, but Lowe’s is just fine. Amy’s Art and Office Supplies won’t survive, but Michael’s and Staple’s will do just fine.

      In one fell swoop we’ve concentrated economic power more tightly in the hands of globohomo by wiping out the last vestiges of local, community-based opposition (where dissidents could actually make a living!). And the dumb dissident right fucks that fell for this still don’t get it. Enjoy the upcoming globohomo #weareallinthistogether tweets and ads from Walmart, Amazon, Target, Lowe’s, and Olive Garden, you dumb fucks!

      • Yep. I am surprised more people don’t get this is one the intended outcomes. Also burning through people’s savings (Ala FDR’s Gold thing) and having a large unemployment pool for those newly-onshoring chains without needing more immigration.

        Wonder if that was the price for withdrawing from China?

40. Trumps weakness is that he wants to be seen as a great leader and President.
    The deplorables don’t care what the East and west coast puritan and jewish media elite think of Trump. And Trump doesn’t either at his rallies.
    Then Trump sits down with Ivanka and Jared and the Wall Street crowd and he ends up not doing what he should do for his working class supporters and not quick enough.
    Trump could be in trouble over this screw up
    More so than not building the wall.
    The deplorables don’t like being unemployed.
    Better really be a V recovery out there.

41. I think a lot of the blather from the un-numerate right was driven by late-onset TDS. This is a strange phenomenon that presents largely among sunshine ethno-nationalists under the age of 40 who managed to live decades without ever understanding real disappointment.

    From Trump, I expect a broad anti-China offensive that is both geopolitically and electorally justified, and I expect this to be combined with revelations of Chinese influence in the campaign finance and electoral processes of the Democrats.

    Trump may actually go to some place like Bakersfield, California and attack Feinstein’s own personal spy. It will all look less like a somber judicial proceeding and more like a reality television campaign.

    But I expect the latter to be tied to Durham’s ongoing and very judicial investigation, which will if they play it right will become newsworthy between the end of August and Labor Day.

    • No doubt, especially considering the fact that Oyvanka and Jared will lead the recovery lol

42. Kung Flu gone with spring. Who could have predicted that, jeez?

    As I said very first day, we do and will continue to pay very heavy price for the total effeminization of society, culture and state.
    Even blind man can see it now We entered “The age of Karen” and the age of screeching females of both genders will remain with us long after Corona hoax is gone
    I saw many many cowards these last 4 weeks and very few a Man.
    I will never forget that, no single future decision of mine will ever be taken without considering that fact

43. Now is the time! Don’t LET them forget. Hold fire against the “pundits;” instead, get in the faces of the Junior Volunteer Thought Police in your own circle. Remember: this was their Woodstock. This was the only time, in their entire lives, that they felt effective. Use that.

    They’d rather die than admit they were wrong, so give them an out: they were **lied to.** By the Media. By China. By the Democrats. By the “experts.” Get them all worked up about that, so they have an opportunity to **do something** again. Then hashtag them: #CancelChina. #CutTheCord. The media lied, the economy died.

    If you do it right — if you never even hint that they were stupid — you can get them freaking out in OUR direction. They will always be idiots, but they will be OUR useful idiots. The Left conquered our entire culture this way. It’s mutha-f*ckin’ payback time.

    • I think you make a good point. Saving face is paramount to these people, so we should be solicitous of their egos even if it makes us cringe.

    • Severian, yours is an Exile type point. Don’t let your virtues be used against you. The enemy has set the rules, play the game. Use this crisis to your advantage, Absolutely agree with your point and strategy. It may feel good to tell Joe Normie he was wrong and a fool, but don’t play the short game. Play up to his ego, convert.

44. Well I certainly hope that Z-man is right on his predictions in this essay. Please God, let Z-man be on target with this one. Unfortunately I am afraid he is overly optimistic.

    I knew from the get-go this was a nothing-burger virus. Just the numbers of coronavirus deaths vs. the seasonal flu told me we had nothing going on here that was more dangerous than the flu last flu season. But look at the hysteria and fear out there. We were just told that we are doing ok here in central Florida so we need to do this another year or 18 months to eradicate the demon virus. My God, Americans are so GD stupid.

    The point of that last paragraph is that Z and most here know that the game is up since the hospitals are laying people off due to lack of business, BUT facts and reality don’t faze those suffering from mass hysteria and delusions. I think the President should declare marshal law and order everyone back to work. F#ck the old folks, the children deserve a future. (disclosure: I am an oldie with heart problems)

    If we ever get back to reality and people really do go back to work; perhaps it is time to acknowledge Big Pharma and the medical establishment are our adversaries. Damn few doctors want to help you keep your immune system healthy so that you don’t get the flu or flu like illness. Damn few want to help you stay healthy rather than treat a sickness. We have sick care, not health care.

45. I know one thing: After the end of the lockdown, I want to have a nice, big gathering.

    • Multiple small gatherings. But yeah.

      As to the “Stasi list” thing. As if that’s going to make a difference. We’re all in the shitter on that one, such as it is. The return is that you learn so much more about an individual face-to-face than electronically, much less in text only. (Unless you have some serious neuro/psychological deficit — not being snarky, just precise; a good friend is almost completely unable to read people and it is a source of tremendous pain and trouble for her.)

      • Right, we’re all in the shitter on that one. Might as well make the most of my status.

    • Why wait until then?

    • I’m interested in getting people from the upstate NY area together. I’m thinking that if we agree to meet somewhere in the Corning/Ithaca/Binghamton nexus we can accommodate most areas, as well as northern PA.

46. covid-19 is more flu than plague. there was lots of evidence that its infection fatality rate was going to be 0.2-0.5% a long time ago (age adjusted death rates + ascertainment estimates from repatriation data). had we been smarter about protecting nursing homes and reducing spread within hospitals, it would have ended up on the lower end of that range. long-term, it will probably still come in under 0.2%. it did cause excess mortality, but probably not as much as you might think from looking at the spikes for march/april (see https://www.euromomo.eu/). i have a feeling readers of vox.com are going to learn some new terms next year: displaced mortality and the harvesting effect.

    that’s one of the ironies of this: we didn’t even adopt policies that minimized expected deaths. we should have had nursing homes on lockdown and hospitals testing anyone who walked through the doors. as it turns out, Iceland is able to find more rational public health officials in their population of 350 thousand than the United States can muster from their 350 million. it makes you think!

47. Hate to say it, but I think the Zman underestimates the psychopathy of the media.

    Remember when the media asked us to whip ourselves up into an apocalyptic frenzy about Russian collusion, and then asked to instantly drop and memory-hole that, and whip ourselves into a frenzy about Ukranian misdeeds?

    Same thing here. The media is going to memory-hole this baby, pure and simple. “We have always been at war with Eastasia” stuff.

    There will be a new frenzy within weeks.

    • Zman mentioned we should start meeting up after the lockdown. Maybe it’ll be a little more difficult to ignore us as a group.

      • Meeting up ROI; your risk is moving up in the Stasi files index, what is your return?

        • Lawdog,

          The act of defiance invigorates. The warm handshake pales the cold keyboard. Knowing others are willing to take the first tentative steps alongside is fortifying. Looking your folk in the eye and seeing decent human beings and not wild-eyed lunatics makes it worth it. It’s a small thing with deep dividends.

          You will not live forever. Live wisely but live as if you mean it.

    • I’m already scanning the horizon for the next Panic of the Month. They should be rolling it out for early May at the latest. What’ll it be this time? There’s a comet out there you know. Comet Atlas! Supposedly it’ll be quite spectacular by mid May. Is it going to hit the earth!?!?! OMG!!! We’re doomed!! Maybe not that, maybe ALIENS! It’s for real this time. They’ve landed on the White House lawn. They’re in a meeting with Trump right now!! That’s it!! Trump is COLLUDING WITH ALIENS!!

    • Some say alternative media is the answer. But I think the best answer is abstaining from all media.

48. I remain “worse than Hitler” for suggesting an end to the lockdown. So the mood has not changed in my part of the world.

    • Who’s calling you “worse than Hitler”?
      May I suggest that that person is heartlessly ignoring the murders of six million innocents, and as such is clearly an anti-Semite of the worst sort? That said, if it’s your spouse then I got nothing.

      I didn’t get called worse than Hitler today, but a friend got in my face when I suggested the lockdowns will cost much much more than the lives putatively saved. She asked if I was “comfortable with 1500-2000 deaths each day?” So I had her pull up numbers on the average number of deaths daily in the US (about 7.5k). At which point she abruptly changed the subject.

      • >>>Who’s calling you “worse than Hitler”? <<<

        https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/karen

49. From zman’s blog post:

    “Then there are the people who fell for the hype and then piously lectured the rest of us about how the virus was more important than the economy. Many of these people claimed to be on this side of the great divide. They had lectured for years about how the media can never be trusted. Then they swallowed the official line on the virus like good little boys and girls. The internet never forgets, so they will be reminded of this for the remainder of their days, especially on this side of the divide.”

    This is the aspect of the “pandemic” (which doesn’t really exist) that is most upsetting to me. While the logistical, economic and other personal life disruptions are the most difficult to deal with on the ground in a practical manner, it’s seeing persons I believed to be awake falling for this crap that is most upsetting. It’s having to realize, and having to accept, these persons are not awake, and so never were, that gets to me. This is the facet of all this that is most upsetting to me, and actually deflating as well. There are too many of them for comfort. This aspect of the Great Panic of 2020, or society-wide psychotic break from reality, has been a very sobering eye opener.

    • Agree 100%. Sailer and Cochran were disappointing, to say the least.
      A whole slew of Dissident Right responded with hysteria.
      Even some minor players that I used to read shocked me. Dennis Dale, a guy Sailer occasionally linked to, has a livestream on YouTube, and only 3 days ago he spent 15 minutes talking about how to properly use a mask.
      He proudly announced he was an early adopter of mask wearing in public.
      When I chimed in to bring the revised stats into the conversation, he started swearing at me, and his “followers” accused me of spreading misinformation!!!
      Dennis is a solid, working class white guy in the Pacific North West, he has interviewed that LaFond guy form Baltimore about street fighting, and in the face of this pandemic, he revealed himself to be a complete bedwetter.
      Many other examples of this from this side of the aisle.

      • Real fear reveals people’s real character.

        • Pozy. Yep. And fear is contagious and deadly. Such folk as Z-man has observed do not belong in leadership ranks of the DR. We need to remember these people and remind ourselves of their actions in this matter. In a pinch, they will be the ones to sell us out when the going gets tough in future.

50. Latest #s

    • Veteran Testing:
    o We received 9 COVID-19 test results today; 9 negative and 0 positive. (the 1 positive was a retesting of a current known COVID-19 positive patient)
    Total tests sent: 200
    Positive: 6 (+1 repeat test)
    Negative: 188
    Pending: 5

    • 6 COVID-19 cases to date; 2 in inpatient/ED, 2 recovering at home, 2 deceased

    • Employee Testing:
    o We received 0 COVID-19 test results today; 0 negative and 0 positive.
    Total tests sent: 15*
    Positive: 0
    Negative: 15
    Pending: 0

51. Can anyone really know how bad the epidemic would have been, absent whatever protective measures were taken? No, of course not. And for the same reason that the epidemic models have (fortunately) been way too pessimistic: there are just too many unknowns. By all means let’s open up society again, we will eventually anyway. With luck we’ll do it in a way that best manages the disease. There will be a resurgences in new COVID-19 cases. This is just Epidemiology 101, a reasonable guess, knowing the general trends of “normal” seasonal disease (cold, flu) as well as some of history’s true pandemics (Spanish Flu of 1918).

    Yes, beyond all doubt the media has whipped COVID_19 into a panic, a frenzy. The tested-positive and deaths are listed like it was stock market index.
    Almost surely the total number of infected (and recovered) is far higher than the testing would indicate, due to limitations. Similarly, I’d guess the
    mortality is over-estimated. Even of those whose deaths are documented, there are issues: Um, do we count the 98-year-old woman who was bedridden with diabetes, COPD and cancer as having died from COVID-19? Perhaps. And yet, she very likely would have died in six months or a year from “regular” pneumonia or other cause.

    And worse, the standards vary from one State and Country to another. Perhaps it’s up to the coroner’s judgment.

    Guys, let us not under-estimate the risk that the virus poses to some of the population. It’s very macho to be able to claim that “It’s the the flu bro” or that it is just a cold that people are going apeshit over. As a counter argument, I submit that cold and flu do not normally kill 1/3 of a nursing home’s residents in a month (Kirkland WA), nor attack younger people with no known health risks at times killing them or leaving them with permanent lung, nerve or other issues? The point is we don’t know nearly everything about this virus, nor can anyone make a detailed prediction as to how many will eventually be injured or die from it. Nor can we predict when it will die out.

    Economic damage? Of course. And perhaps it will turn out to be worse than whatever the total number of covid-19 deaths turn out to be. If we do get a depression, or even just for the current damage, is it really fair to blame a tiny virus? Or would it be safer to say that the system was (still is!) rotten to the core and perhaps COVID-19 was the final straw on the camel, or my favorite metaphor, the fly that took a dump on the house of cards?

    • People are not used to massive near term uncertainty. They prefer their sports related uncertainties, which means speculation on what the final score might be, leavened with arguments about the strengths and weaknesses of each player and team. The idea that the uncertainties are existential in nature, and have no clear array of outcomes, are very troubling to a lot of people. They do and think about other things instead.

    • Can anyone really know how bad the epidemic would have been, absent whatever protective measures were taken? No, of course not.

      Of course we can. Sweden never had a lockdown, they’re the control group. While epidemiology isn’t exactly nuclear physics, it’s enough of a science to let us unravel the real numbers, once real info and real lab tests start trickling in.

      What is most worrying, is that the experts got it right from the start but buckled under political pressure.

      • We can also look at death stat’s, before and after, and listed causes. Trends can be computed and rates examined. These stat’s are well kept in most 1st world counties. This is an attempt to separate deaths during the pandemic from those normally experienced outside of pandemic in prior (and even proceeding years). We can regress confounding variables upon death/infection rates, such as population density to see if our quarantine measures as undertaken were as effective as claimed. Lots can be done, and I suspect will be done in future studies. But the truth will doubtfully come out in a timely fashion to have much near term political affect. Everything now depends on who can spin the best narrative.

        • Yes. This is not climate “science”, where you can make any dire prognostication without risking your job when they fail 30 years from now. By Christmas, a lot of those responsible will be out of a job, even if they’re just the stalking horses. The public has a short memory, but not THAT short, and the economic hangover will help them remember.

    • I assume this is a joke post to present the hysteria points as reasonable. But just for sake of playing along:

      The flu in 2018 season killed 80k in the USA alone, hospitalized 900k. In the UK 15k people died in the same flu season. WHO estimates put an average of 250k – 650k deaths each year during a regular season worldwide. It is far more than this nonsense.
      second: We do have data on non social distanced countries (Taiwan : 6 deaths etc) and the profile of the spread is the same, so we do have comparisons and they show the same pattern irrespective of lockdown

      https://wmbriggs.com/post/30300/

      Thirdly strains of these viruses never really die out. The HK flu in 1968 killed 1 million people and is still around and was a major contributor for 2018 season. H1N1 has been around for an estimated 100+ years. They never go away. vaccines are piss poor and in 2018 were an estimated 10% effective in the 65+ age range.

      The economic damage is currently 17 million unemployed and $8trillion and counting in the US alone. Who knows what the total figure is worldwide.

    • In late March, I heard a disease specialist interviewed on CNBC. I don’t remember his name but the host threw out the possibility of 1 million Americans dying from Wuhan Flu. He said the only way that could happen was if we let it run without any mitigation and even then was not a likely outcome. The host attempted to hide his disappointment.

      • 1 million would be a drop in the bucket in the US howsoever it would collapse the hospital system or so the experts thought.

        Frankly we just destroyed the economy to save the medical system, a system that basically had lupus anyway.

        Dumb as deadwood

        • “We just destroyed the economy to save the medical system.”

          That’s a great point and to me the lesson is that maybe we should have done exactly the opposite: destroy the medical system to save the economy!

          Given how corrupt and bloated the medical and pharma industries are, it would have made more sense to let them fail while keeping the other parts of the economy humming.

          By destroying a medical system that truly deserves to die, maybe we’d be one step closer to moving towards the veterinary model Z-Man has supported, or the medicare-for-all-model others have supported, or some other model that goes beyond the garbage we currently have.

    • Ben,

      Is this going to be another one of your gamma days? Well I guess yes, since it ends in a Y.

      I casually read Vox Day because I like unbending curmudgeons. I generally gloss over his personality types thing because I tend to think people are flexible and he seems obsessed with it, particularly gammas. I’m too busy a man to entertain other men’s fixations. Until now.

      After your performance yesterday, I am a convert. It’s like you took every gamma rant he ever had and told Mr. Demille you were ready for your closeup.

      Seriously. You came in with the Secret King thing with your “as the resident skeptic…” Um, since when?

      You dispensed your special knowledge, then frantically dumped more special inanity the more down votes you racked up. Though you completely missed the point of yesterday’s post, we just weren’t getting what a clever fellah you are! OT is one thing, totally acceptable. But reframing the conversation to be what you (incorrectly) thought it to be drips of narcissism.

      This place is one of the best for fleshing out ideas civilly and disagreeing can be a gentleman’s game. But planting annoying seeds of silly chaos to titillate and flatter yourself is straight unadulterated gamma.

      I mean, you even managed to irritate some of the ladies on this site. I could be wrong. Maybe they found your rebellious deep thinking particularly sexy and expressed irritation as a way to cope with their raging feelings of attraction for your bad boy mind.

      So okay. If I recognize that you are a Secret King, with super special hot takes, and most of us dont get how special you are but a select few of us secretly get you and admire your tenacity… will you give it a rest? We just can’t handle all these days in a row of your awesomeness.

      Sincerely (and a very, very recent convert to Vox’s personality trait thingy, at least regarding gammas) Yours,

      P.M.

      (p.s. I’ve don’t down vote anyone on this site, until yesterday with you. I’m secretly jealous of you. I want to be a Secret King too!)

      • Penitent – You read my mind. I am not a Vox acolyte but do stop by there to peruse things. I’m not much into the whole socio-sexual hierarchy thing, and up until now I’d always ignored most of his posts about the dreaded gammas. But from the first day Ben started posting here, he set off massive gamma alerts for me, and each subsequent comment has merely cemented the certainty.

    • Even assuming that we knew absolutely nothing about the virus (which isn’t the case) this isn’t the way a sane society deals with risk. On the one hand we’ve got the unknown risk of the supposedly unknown virus. On the other hand we knew, or should have known, that shutting down the world economy had an almost 100% chance of destroying trillions in wealth and 10s of millions of jobs, as in fact it did. Furthermore, anyone familiar with recent economic history would have anticipated that these massive losses would need to be dealt with by governments and that this would result in massive new debt that might well destroy major currencies including the US dollar. This in turn could lead to anything from, in the best case, a worldwide depression, and in the worst case, WWIII.

      In other words the world assumed that the virus would play out in the absolute least probable but most horrible way while discounting the virtual certainty of global economic disaster from the (entirely self-inflicted and avoidable) political response. It then placed all its hopes for recovery from this in some as yet to be determined and possibly unaffordable government bailout.

      • I don’t know about you but I deal with driving risk by demanding everyone within theoretical driving distance of my route (even if they have to fly to get there) is imprisoned in their home so I do not have to deal with risk. If they disobey I have them shot for their own good.

        To counteract my own driving risk I also demand all the roads are lined with foam and I wear a full hazmat suit, drive at 3 miles an hour in a special car that does not have flammable fuel in it.

        I thought about having a guy with red flag walking in front as well, but TBH that seemed a little excessive.

        I can’t describe the feelings of virtue I have for keeping myself and everyone else safe. I even send pictures of the route to those poor people trapped in their homes to cheer them up.

        • Tristan, your driving hypothetical is something I have actually seen. Once on an Air Force base when they were moving nuclear weapons from ammo dump to plane loading. Absolutely amazing. A special armored vehicle, looking like one of those NAZI secret weapons one sees pictures of, spanning both lanes of the roadway, moving at single digit MPH with all sorts of personnel in up armored humvees looking mean and bad ass surrounding it—and ground troops walking 50 yards or so in the brush surrounding the roadway. 😉

          But that was in response to a highly valuable, and real target.

          • Seems we have all become nuclear warheads in the clownworld risk analysis.

            I expect to see this exact scene next week to transport Grandma from the nursing home to the shop and back.

52. For strident liberals, the root of virtue is righteous belief. If you believe that all races are cognitively, socially, and culturally equal, then you are a virtuous person; in contrast, if you reject this line of thinking, you are a wicked person. Just like you’re a wicked person for not “trust[ing] the plan.” Another magic-think display of morality.

    This display-centered approach to morality has been carefully paired with western consumerism, mostly through televised marketing campaigns. That way, when General Mills publicly partners with a sanctified liberal construct (like feminism), a consumer is led to believe they are promoting morality through purchasing Cheerios. We see the same thing happening with social distancing. It’s become a performance.

    Action-based morality is less lucrative, though; its existence can only be ascertained through candid observation and close proximity. It would be…inconvenient for us to have a candid perspective of these corporate entities. They’d rather take a sliver of their profits, donate it to a charity they already own, and televise it. They can choreograph their virtue and set an example for everybody else.

    Here’s another thing: liberals seem to believe in moral quotas. It’s as though once one has covered 30% of their car in social justice bumper stickers, they have transcended all human vice. I have read in multiple articles that liberals tip less — sometimes far less — than conservatives. This is due to two reasons: the first is that they can’t broadcast their tips in a socially appropriate manner, which takes the performance (fun) out of morality; the second is that liberals already believe they have done enough good. They’re backing Cheerios, for Christ’s sake. What more will you ask of them?

    • I would argue this is more generally true of people, than simply liberals, and far more common among women than men, though there is a majority of both sexes that act this way. The Churchlady has been a common trope for quite a long time.

      • Yeah, I’d say you’re right. But then again, don’t you think liberalism is less likely to consider “let not one hand know what the other has given”?

53. I for one will miss the lockdown. Never in my life have I been able to look people dead in the eye and tell them “keep the hell away from me” and not have others look at me askance. It’s been a boon for us anti-social types. Next thing you know some damn fool will want to hug me.

    That and wearing a bandana over my face when I go to the bank. I had to laugh.

54. Dollars to Donuts, if Texas normalizes and the plague doesn’t sweep the land, the good people’s climb-down will be premised on “population density.” The reason everyone in Texas or Arkansas (or Sweden) didn’t die when they told the lunatics to copulate with their mothers was because, unlike NYC, the people are more spread out. And the BS will sell so well that people who should be ashamed of how they behaved will actually run in re-elections on their histrionic response to Corona. In the same way that people supporting our invasion by Central and South Americans just kept saying, “Kids in cages” to shut down the logic centers in the brain, these people will shout, “Bodies stacked up in freezers” to chase out the demon Logic.

    • I have noticed that the truth has no bearing on the talking points any more. Arguing cases and data is pointless. The other side has its ideas, and will not be swayed from them. That’s how one gets straight-faced support for a guy such as Biden.

      • Dutch,

        The silver lining. People use to relate something they saw or read in the news as a fact. Now I always hear the preemptive caveat attached. “Well, they are saying on the news that…” or “Over on (X network) they are reporting…” or just plain “If you can believe them, they are reporting…”

        People’s trust in the media is decreasing daily and the dissonance grows. These are things we can work with.

        • PM, per trust in the media, here is a pertinent piece. I can’t link it directly, but go to http://www.threadreaderapp.com and reference Brian Cates. Click on the first item, and then the “82 tweets” recent item. All about how the media and the Left depend on shaping history and the past to dictate the present and the future. People are figuring it out. It really explains a lot of what is going on, and how Trump vexes them so. Also why talking to a Leftie is a complete waste of time.

          • And there you go, Chris Cuomo denying everything he said, on tape, yesterday. The other side just makes it all up, with a straight face. It’s how they roll.

      • That’s why I stopped “practicing” formulating my arguments into talking points. Useless. Unless you use the Z formula, i.e…..Walmart won’t sponsor your kids little league. Or as the hate whitey gas lighting grows…Maybe like the groups of other people, we should group up and advocate for our own…..Just drop those seeds. We are in the beginning of defining our own and expanding the circle.

        • “Just drop those seeds.”
          Not in Michigan you don’t!

    • Dollars to Donuts

      In a couple of months, a donut will be ten dollars, so be careful with your bets.

      • It’s ironic that after all the Left’s mewling about Weimar Germany, they actually shut up about it just as it became relevant, re: the economic damage that could be headed our way. Some not-stupid people have suggested what’s coming will be worse than 2008, which came close to toppling the whole house of cards. If it falls apart, it will be funny to see all those former feminists now with manacles around their throats in Slave Leia costumes complaining about being objectified by the warlords.

        • There is a meme that I can’t seem to find: ”

          What women think they’ll be doing after the Zombie Apocalypse: an image of Katniss Everdeen with her bow.

          What women will be doing after the Zombie Apocalypse: an image of an alley lined with a row of lo-rent hookers.

          • What’s up with women and bows? Sweetie, you have to be tough enough to take an acorn barefoot before you can shoot a leopard.

          • I think a noose shaped recovery is as likely as the V shaped recovery.

          • We can only hope

        • That’s what women want.

          I laugh when I see Manosphere types saying “You’ll be sorry when you’re in burkas!”

          No… that’s what they want. And since white men won’t do it they’ll find Arab men who will. Every woman wants to be dominated and put in her place by a man. It’s tens of thousands of years of evolution in action.

          • I suspect gingham dresses ala the F.L.D.S. or Amish not Burkas.

            Heck California is full of Middle Easterners but most of them are jack Muslims or Copts. The Sharia types are far from common.

          • That’s what women want.

            To be fair, raping, killing and plundering with divine sanction is what men really want.

            But before you sign up for the Jihad, I suggest you watch this video:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQzoiyZSYxM

            Islam is as gynocentric as the West, if not more.

          • It’s a virgin cult.

      • Shit, I should’ve been hoarding Krispy Kreme. Donuts from Dunkin are baked with Satan’s smegma and should be used as an alternative to artillery in the even of a domestic incursion.

55. Briggs did his Tuesday update this morning as well.

    https://wmbriggs.com/post/30300/

    “These numbers—forget the model—are available to every politician. They see them. They must at least suspect they can’t keep up the turmoil, fear, and paranoia for too much longer.

    The fear works. Probably not readers here, but a great deal of the public was, and still is, frightened out of their wits. One anecdote among many, but one citizen said lifting the lock down “I want to go back but only if we will be safe.””

    • They can be as safe as an Oakie in 1933.

56. The media will still win. Our enemies control all media, all cultural institutions and the entire bureaucracy.

    If things are going along smoothly by the summer’s end the narrative will be that Orange Man threw the world into a panic with his CDC speech. We recovered thanks to the leadership of the governors of NY, CA , TX…who got America going and back on track.

    If we’re in a depressed economy then Orange Man and racism are to blame.

    If Covid is still flaring up here and there then Orange Man will have killed 10x as many people as did the 9-11 hijackers.

    An attenuated outcome will not change the playbook of our enemies nor their mouthpieces and sycophants. Any ground they’ve lost will be aggressively countered with a multi front attack. Game of Virus Clones will be the summer Netflix blockbuster.

    We will open a few small pharm manufacturing plants here and declare victory. There will probably be a few more added symbolic victories. Fish tank cleaners will be investigated by a congressional committee. New large print warning labels will become mandatory on all chlorine based products.

    Most of the dissidents will be oblivious to most of this because they’ll be slinging insults at each other. I’m beginning to develop an affectation for the 1.0 guys. At least they never took their eyes off of the real enemy.

    • 1.0’s literally never stop flinging poo at each other. From the WigNat who murdered Commander Rockwell to when Nehlen/Cantwell doxed the most effective CounterSemite of the last 75 years, it has been so.

      These people deserve every bit of scorn and derision we can give them.

    • The 1.0 crew was all crabs in a bucket too. Politics always has personal rivalries and ego contests. The smaller the politics, the bigger the egos.

      • The lesser the stakes the more vicious the infighting.

      • The 1.0 crew always went into a death spiral and all of them accused the other ones of being Jews.

    • I’ll throw this Boston Glob headline at ya–“Trump’s veiled threat to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci spooks scientists, Democrats”. So confident yet so unaware.

    • Change is always slow and shifting from many many years of centralized media (newspapers, TV, radio) to a more distributed press is going to take time.

      Its already happening, Gen Y and Gen Z make much of the independent content and while maleducated are smart enough to know they are being lied to and to start questioning everything . The SJW’s are more or less relfgious zealots but they are by no means the majority.

      Hell Disney is losing 30 million or more a day and won’t recover very fast.

      Essentially all kids are now being home schooled and this too will have a profound effect of deinstitutionalizing them, more the longer it goes on.

      We certainly do need to reclaim the institutions especially the college but its far from hopeless and now would be a good time to think about how to get a shadow curriculum and a plan to what to do if you do get them and how to get them under your control.

      • I hope that at least some mothers will be so enchanted with the home school process that they quit their jobs to continue it. They have been preached to for so long that it is a drag to be home with the kids. Some of them have to be finding out different. Those years being home raising and home schooling my sons were the best years of my life.

57. Trump will have a problem maximizing any benefit from this because within a few weeks he threw up his arms and embraced the crisis. Had he firmly and boldly stayed in the #justtheflubro camp (like a good leader would have, see Brazil) while warning daily of dire economic consequences for what the governors were doing, he would be in a much stronger place. The economic weakness would be to his advantage. As it stands now, he can only pray that Biden has a 20 second moment in the debate where he literally thinks he’s in 1979 and it’s just too painful for most to watch. Given the last few videos of him, it could easily happen. Future historians, in the future countries that replace this one, will mock this hysteria and show old video to their pupils in their lectures about how mentally unbalanced the great, continent wide country became before it cracked up, causing a cascade of debt failure that was destined to happen anyway. This country will be held up as an example of what not to do.

    • They were going to crash the economy anyway, now he has a get out of jail free card.

      Record low post-corona black unemployment!

      • The crash started last fall, as Z has hinted at. No Z doesn’t say it.

        The basis points spread scam did cause a Fed bailout starting in Sept.
        However COVID caused a debt payments problem cuz you see most stock market activity the last few years has been stock buybacks, which were financed by Debt.
        COVID was financial cascade failure.

        The real COVID plague was the cascades of 1) interrupting supply chains from the new Detroit- Wuhan, 2) We now have a payments problem for the heavily leveraged 3) the supply chains most impacted immediately were airlines and travel 4) hysteria is pushed in media to get bailouts for above 5) Hysteria is a dangerous tool for panic really does spread exponentially 6) now the politicians have to Do Something 7) they start locking us down 8) the Fed steps in with $Trillions but it actually acts as sand not grease cuz banking starts to freeze up waiting on helicopter money 8) Operation Do Something pols say rent, mortgage and evictions freeze 9) mortgage shorts indexes begin to pay off for bond vigilantes including mortgage industry which shorts itself as hedge until 10) Fed steps in and buys $250B MBS mainly on LQD index saving LQD from shorts freefall ..except 11) that destroys the mortgage industry 12) which now needs its own bailout as both payments up from mortgage holders and hedges against defaults destroyed …
        Pause…
        13) now that the banking system is seized and SBA loans promised are like Luxembourg committing to defeating Hitler on its own 14) Operation Do Something PPP 15) except any bank not connected to Fed discount desk is you know George Bailey vs Potter, more like George Bailey vs JP Morgan 16) banks frozen awaiting orders from Moscow 17) Comrade Ivanka is given SBA rescue mission 18) Fed says they’re taking over SBA-PPP 19) This is like Comrade Zhukov taking over from Comrade Fuckup -Zhukov is a winner but also a butcher of all concerned …
        20) Today’s date April 14; Standby Comrades. Awaiting further instructions from Moscow/Potomac.

    • I predict that there will be no debates if Biden is truly the nominee.

      • Oh God I pray you’re wrong. Trump vs. Biden — there’s some quality entertainment.

58. Their clapping for the lay-offs and business closures revealed that they have no skin in the game. It is a good reminder to never take business advice from someone who has never signed the front of a paycheck and never take political advice from people without jobs.

    Bingo! As I’ve said a gazillion times before, if it were my intention and my goal to become a millionaire, say, I damn sure wouldn’t take advice on how to achieve it from some keyboard warrior who has likely never held down as much as menial job flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

59. oh man, this pandemic farce is going to be a goldmine for Trump in the Fall. all the dem pols and media turds praising china, etc. really, the only thing that is unknown at this point is by how large a margin the GOP will retake the house. who knows, might pick up a few senate seats too.

    Zman, are you planning any posts about the effect of the virus on china?

60. If the summer is a great recovery in the economy, will it go down the memory hole, or will the new narrative be that Trump engineered a pandemic so that the economy would recover just in time to hurt the Democratic nominee, and help himself by being hailed for pulling us out in the nick of time?

61. In the end, this was a great big insurance fire….you-know-who lightning.
    The clowns that inflated the bubble knew the jig was up and found the perfect excuse to pop it and burn down the evidence while socializing their losses with bailouts and laying off staff.
    Kill the remnants of small business and flex muscle to cow the populace. Effing brilliant.

    Of the folks that ‘had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel’, and there are many in the US and Europe, they got a good strong push, and an ‘old scratch’ to blame it on. Frontrunning for the grim reaper.

    • Yup, the real play was how TPTB used the virus to take some air out of the market and load piles of garbage on the Fed balance sheet.

      The virus precludes any chance of forming an Occupy Wall Street or similar grassroots movement.

62. Beware of people claiming to be “experts,” especially on TV. They are almost always manufacturing or exaggerating their alleged expertise. There are no sanctioning bodies for “experts” either.
    I can’t help but think that this is a new standard in the country now. It used to be if there was a snow storm, you would have to wait until the 5:00 news to see what was going on. At some point that all changed, though I’m not sure when. Now, if there is going to be snow or some other weather event, regularly scheduled programs on TV are cancelled and the governors put on a show and the news runs all day. Maybe the initial time it was warranted, but now it happens for everything. Is shutting the world down now going to be a regular thing? Are the “expert” bodies going to be permanent bureaucracies now? Any effort to scale down or eliminate these bodies will be met with howls and shrieks about our ability to react to the new scare. Of course, they will have to prove their relevance and justify their paychecks and budgets with occasional scare mongering. “Better close the schools just to be safe.” Will this be the new (ab)normal? Probably.

    • Anything that closes down schools is good. Just sayin’.

      • The really sad part is that all the browns were kvetching about little Tyrone’s free breakfast, lunch and dinner (what the hell are the food-stamps for?) he gets at school and now is gonna starve. So rather than going to school and pretending the learn, they are going to the rec centers (which they have opened for this purpose) for the free gibs.
        Where I live, most drinks have a $.02/oz tax, allegedly for the keeds. Of course, the second it passed, the money got rolled into the general fund, the keeds got nothing and they are still bitching about being short of money.

63. the curve benders. They will have the task of explaining why they are still smarter than the rest of us, but were ridiculously wrong about the biggest event in their lives.

    They are already claiming everything good is because they sacrificed virgins shut down the economy.

    I don’t see any counter-narrative getting a fair hearing. Nobody who is anybody benefits from that.

    • This. They are not giving up, only retrenching. The governors (all Democrats) are forming cartels to “manage” (delay) reopening the economy. They will apply pressure as necessary to force red states into compliance if they get ahead of the curve. Granted, this will be only somewhat effective until they get rid of Trump, but with a crippled economy and vote by mail, they should be able to drag even Slow Joe across the finish line.

      Then the shooting starts.

      • Fall resurgence: “Mail-in ballots for everyone!”

        Hey, it worked in 2000, dinnit?

64. If this incident had taught my anything, it’s that we live in a gynocracy; by Karens, for Karens, and of Karens.

    The whitepill in this is that we can still openly and publicly criticize these people on social media; and they can’t hide behind other hoaxes like the funny hat people do.

    Let’s go make that counter reaction happen.

    • karens are funny birds. First they shame you for even suggesting that young women spreading all over town on tinder, becoming a disease vector for all kinds of actual bugs, is maybe not good for our people.

      Then they shame you for not duck-and-cowering, gloved and masked, as you go for a bike ride, you spreader!

      I want to permanently social-distance from these feral prog females.

      Weakness dressed as strength is dangerous. The death of female shame and humility has caused a real problem that will require a firm hand to remedy. In the land of the limp-wrist, is this even possible?

      I don’t do the social media stuff but I look forward to the lolz memes holding these angry birds to account. Godspeed.

      • That’s what happens when wahmyn have wasted their lives chasing up the career ladder of business and politics only to find nothing can fill the hole in the heart, their soul is diseased and rotting, they have no family, evening is crap wine and kitty, and they uncomfortably watch their derangement growing…growing….growing.
        Imagine a nursing home full of these old ****s! Screaming and insulting and throwing their food on the floor. More then a few old wahmyn compounds in the future will go up in smoke.

        • Women generally have very poor introspection and insight into why things go wrong.

          Rather than advise young women to not do what they did, stay off the carousel, don’t pursue a career over everything else, etc. the aging cat ladies are just indoctrinating more young wahmen into their folds. No, women won’t be fixed until men fix them.

          A number of women are racking up huge n-counts even before they hit 20… it’s also hard on the men, I’ve seen alot of guys treating a lady right, spending money on her only to be dumped when she reveals she just wants a “fuckbuddy”. Sad state all around.

      • “Weakness dressed as strength is dangerous.”

        Very true. But I submit that power dressed as victimhood is even worse.

65. “Many of the curve benders will be able to recover their reputations, but some will not. In a better age, the curve benders would be packing their stuff and heading out of town right now, but in this age, they will probably be rehabilitated without much effort.”

    Yes, and they’ll probably indulge in some loud self-praise and pat themselves on the back in the process, for “saving” us in the nick of time.

    • Superbowl flybys of some sort.
      Marching medicos with an ambulance derby?

66. But but the lockdown worked! It flattened the curve! Good job everybody. Too bad about the whole job thing, but look: the dow is surging!

    Oh and its not a retreat, its a “tactical withdrawal”. Lol.

    • Relying on “tactical withdrawal” is exactly what got my girlfriend pregnant.

      • Congratulations!
        May you have many more, and raise them right.

        • He’d best better get his priorities right first. (Here is where we separate the men from the boys)

      • Ha. Ha. If you’re a man you’ll marry that girl and make a respectable woman of her. If not, … well…

        • It was planned, and I’d love to. Marriage will commence once I get my job back.

    • In any case Trump is a spent force at present. He’s Compliant. He is Expert Compliant, unlimited Fed money, 100% compliant. Or so it seems, and probably is. We could see good things anti-globalism wise, wall wise.

      However again the Deal is New; having failed to secure their position via globalism and immigration the Elites have secured it medically, and their media investments paid off at last.
      You don’t need Mexicans or Chinese in America when Americans are far more supine than either. Who needs Open Borders when you can Gulag from home?

      • Who needs Open Borders when you can Gulag from home?

    • Tactical withdrawal? Not even that. It’s a 180-degree advance.

      ¡Hasta la victoria, siempre!

    • big multinationals are money-printing machines. impervious to almost anything

67. And the RonaHoax should be a lesson to all the sane citizens that are fed up with the debacle of our political leadership. A majority of the cretins in Congress are either functionally retarded or covert criminal grifters of the worst sort. There are few (if any) adults in DC with moral integrity or a spine. And the system is broken because these barnacles always get reelected because the majority voting population in their districts is even stupider than the retard in office. God help us.

    • I’m in agreement with the commenter above who said the first order of business is to repeal the 19th Amendment. Running a close second is ending what R.L. Dabney called “the baby vote.”

    • The average Dem voter plays dumb cuz the bennies, pretends they don’t know FDR is dead, etc. its the bennies.
      Oh and they know the GOP is exactly fraud controlled oppo, in it for donorbux and would have them all on welfare, prison, dead faster than the Dems.

      See the Dems need at least most of their voters alive, legal and not in jail.
      I said most.
      So the exchange from WWC to Dems isn’t retarded as it looks.
      OTOH Trump is a 70s-90s Centrist Dem, so they vote for Trump.

      V shaped recovery; will not publicly be acknowledged nor any good news until after the election.

      As far as who wins the election, odds are Trump but Cuomo or Newsom *could* enter the race and possibly win.
      In any case Trump is a spent force at present. He’s Compliant. He is Expert Compliant, unlimited Fed money, 100% compliant. Or so it seems, and probably is. We could see good things anti-globalism wise, wall wise.

      However again the Deal is New; having failed to secure their position via globalism and immigration the Elites have secured it medically, and their media investments paid off at last.
      You don’t need Mexicans or Chinese in America when Americans are far more supine than either. Who needs Open Borders when you can Gulag from home?

68. I crashed old people hour at Target this morning by telling the virus police guarding the entrance that I had an underlying condition. The condition is disgust and it is a racking my nerves so I’m pretty sure it’s affecting my immune system. And I can tell you right now if this does not come back together and I have to live out of my car I am for sure going to start coughing on people on a regular basis just for the hell of it. I almost did this morning at Target when a woman stood 20 feet away from all the cashiers and yelled at them through her two masks telling them to spray everything down. I really wanted to cough on her.

    • The woman in question is a starry-eyed true believer in the bullshit. We’ll have to deal with a few of those going forward. Hopefully not too many of them.

      • I bet she reads Astrology, or maybe MBTI personality types if she’s more of an AWFL.

      • Judging by the 70% – 80% of people I see wearing masks, and neighbors sharing homemade mask recipes, the number of starry-eyed believers will be quite high for the foreseeable future.

        • Our society is so damned pathetic.

          • Yep. I guess it’s the contrarian in me, but yesterday I was depressed after going out and viewing the sheep. Hell, the grocery store now has “one way” aisles. So that two people can not pass each other in opposite directions—thereby breaking the shibboleth 6 foot rule. Of course, “no passing” is enforced and “security” men walk the aisles to keep everyone moving along. Grab and go is the order of the day. Heck, they only allow a limited number of people into the store at one time.

            This is all theater and psychological conditioning. In my grandfather’s time, the response would have been to burn the store down. Now we wait passively in lines to get in and pass the time waiting outside hoping they‘ll be some toilet paper left when we are allowed in.

          • 1st, High compliance during epidemics is normal whether its 1917 or 2020. Both Spanish Flu and Wuhan Virus are nasty, the later less lethal but highly unpleasant with lingering effects in some people. Its wise to avoid getting it

            2nd Politics here is among the more radical non violent strains in the US and yet its all complaining no action.

            I don’t even see DR people arsed to run for office much do anything else. If so called radicals aren’t lusting for power and scheming to get it B.A.M.N. than why would normies act out?

            3rd Nothing will happen till its over and if/when the economy stays moribund. Its not that different here than in China really, people will put up with a hell of a lot so long as the economy is working. When it fails, than things get dicey.

            4th Ultimately, if you want change you had best have some ideas and a clear view “how we do better.” No one has this and in such circumstances everyone me included defaults to the established system.

          • AB, I get our drift. But I’d honestly say that I could accept any 6 randomly drawn folk posting to this list to “rule” over me than the crowd now in Congress.

            So why are they not in office? It’s an odd conundrum, but basically I believe decent people are simply not cut out for the degrading effort needed to obtain such power.

          • I agree that our nations leadership is trash for the most part.

            I think our issue though is more about the extreme individualism of the DR movement combined with more than a little paranoia,

            The later is manageable with good lawyers and upright candidates but politics is a group activity built around organizing for common goals.

            No goals and no willingness to work with others to those goals means no way to get power.

            There is no easy mode , no way out but hard work and even if the US goes big igloo. that lack organization means that the WRSA crowd will end up a greasy stain to any band of crips or hell antifa with some guns and training who are organized .

            Its like that old revolutionary war flag, join or die.

            The smartest thing our guys could do is to go and meet some community organizers and the like and figure out how to emulate those tools to win.

            After all emulating Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals helped President Trump win and emulating other successful tactics might help us.

            If it doesn’t working with others to a common political goal in large numbers is a great skill.

            And yes it often fails, C.F Virginia and gun laws but ultimately it transfers to other methods if it all goes pear shaped.

            As for getting degraded, not yelling at the messenger here but what a puke ass excuse.

            of course you will but you just might win too and maybe start anew instead of trying to resuscitate the rotting corpse of the old nation

            Get dirty, win, shower later.

    • Hold it together, man. Just hold yourself together. I know you’re blowing off steam, but it ain’t worth getting vanned. Guaranty you, bro, you’re not the only person feeling immense frustration. For political reasons, I had to close down shop and let my people take a two-week (mostly paid) holiday, whilst seeing the local night clubs and bars remain open. Japanese politics being what they are, Shinzo Abe started what was supposed to be a stimulus package (which I wouldn’t have gotten) but that devolved into two masks per address and Abe tweeting “stay home” while holding his rat dog.

      • Whitney is a lady.

        But I agree Whitney. Calm. The female behind you is probably afraid that she’ll bring the virus home to her (multiple) cats. She doesn’t realize she can use her boxes of wine to disinfect the rest of her purchases.

        • Cat masks. They’re coming. You heard it here first.

        • A good laugh from Penitent today! Just a reminder….there are places in this country….Southern Utah for instance…that aren’t in full panic. Yes..a few blinkered Mormon sheep ladies. They aren’t like Carrie Nation because here it is bad manners for women to talk politics. Utah women got the vote 50 years before the nation, and yet they’re sheep…..I don’t get it. But the lack of masks on Main Street speaks for itself. Went to buy more yummy meat yesterday and few masks, including me. That says a lot. Gov didn’t shut us down. We are mostly small family businesses and ag. Look forward to watching many folks south of Salt Lake waking up to the gaslighting and scrambling to save what’s left of their businesses. Sure am glad to live here!

          • Ditto here in my little part of Okie land.

          • El Reno, OK: police will pull you over for not wearing a mask while driving. In your own car.
            $1000 fine if you’re not carrying a mask in that car.

        • I am a lady which means it’s personally embarrassing for me seeing all these crazy Karen’s

          • Me, too. But, given modern American femaledom, it is not unexpected. Big Harpy has conditioned women to act like a victim and want power exercised as per Genghis Kahn.

          • Do you really see it like that?
            As a man when I see a pathetic crazy male I think what a dickhead. Not I am personally embarrassed.

    • That’s my favorite joke these days. Stroll past a hazmat be-suited shitlib and invoke a sudden coughing fit. Bonus points if you make eye contact

      • This has become my new favorite game in the grocery store. I don’t have to cough, I just move towards someone, never looking at them, pretending I don’t see them but i can essentially make everyone move out of my path like I’m royalty . It’s pretty fun actually

      • No coughing, assholes.
        Euroniggas and dickheads do that.

        Don’t make your people look bad.

        • Exactly. The main job of the DR is to act like adults in or out of power,

    • This woman will join many others in the coming years wearing masks from November through April. And it would not surprise me to see the shields come back up during those same months at the grocery stores, too. No need to waste good virtue signaling implements that have already been paid for.

      • November thru April, eh. I’ll have to turn my wife onto that.

        • Honey, honey
          I know sweety but..
          This is the highest quality on the marke..
          I know I can’t hear you well but this is a serious health issue..

      • As soon as masks became an emblem of virtue, I predicted that it was only a matter of days before a niche market of fashion masks would appear.

        Once in a while I’m right. On my last two visits to a Trader Joe’s here in the leftist stronghold of northern Virginia, I began to see women wearing fashion-statement masks: gaudy colors, elaborate patterns, even a few “message” (like on T-shirts) designs.

        Not sure if it’s a fashionable style or not, but lots of guys are covering faces with bandannas that come to a point at the bottom, like stagecoach robbers in old black-and-white movies. (“Reach for the sky, pardner!”)

        Who says capitalism is dead?

    • There are times when the Knockout Game is quite appropriate…

69. What’s interesting is that Trump knew this was BS all the time – you can tell from his reaction, his demeanor, and his flippant comments at press conferences. But like an exasperated dad who wearily gives his neurotic teenage daughters a little leeway to blow off steam, he went along with this just to get it out of the way.

    At this point, future reactions could go one of two ways: the Fauci-like and Birx-like scum among us could turn shutdowns into a routine practice, or the bad memory and fallout from this farce will make future shutdowns impossible: people and businesses will just ignore them.

    • Trump’s instincts are sound, but then he take advice.

      • Triple Parentheses around “advice”

      • Dr. Fauci has not only not been fired, as he would have been in a large part of private industry, he remains at center stage in Trump’s press conferences.

        It’s real simple. Trump needs to walk out there and say, “Everybody go back to work.” It doesn’t take a goddamn committee. He knows better than that.

        • He knows better, and he also knows half the country is still scared shitless by the relentless fear mongering that the media engaged in.
          Half the country has to be taken by the hand, like a small child, and walked back into the daylight.
          Forming a committee helps the paralyzed feel safe.

          • Trump should keep sniping away at the fake news media. I’d start by assembling a list of lies told by the NYT WaPo LATimes etc and issue a one line, no explanation, executive order banning any Fedral reimbursement of subscriptions for them.

            Wait for the fire storm from the media scum and then, addressing Americans, not the (((Media))), as taxpayers if they should be paying for these lies,

            At press conference when NBC ask questions, simply say that he will not have any dealings with organizations that lie all the time . Roll out the Rechted Maddcow bullshit. Again to the American people as a whole: “Do you want me wasting time with these liars?”
            Rinse and repeat.- CBS with the fake American hospital chaos from Italy etc.
            He can nail the media as the enemy of the people.

          • How is the media still running as normal?

            Are they classed as essential business in all these executive orders?

        • Not to complicate matters, but the next Trump statement after “everybody back to work” ought to be: Dr. Fauci, in view of your serivce, please exit stage left where a free ride out of town has been arranged especially for you. You’ll find an escort equipped with tar, feathers, and a rail. You can’t miss ’em.

          • I’ prefer to see Farci catapulted smack dab into the middle of the Delaware River.

          • More like, “I have arranged a helicopter flight for you. I think the pilot is a grandson of Pinochet. Enjoy the ride. I know many Americans will, including myself.”

          • i would like to see him be infected. live by the sword…

    • His instincts are also likely right on the economic effects of this shut down, which is why he’s been pushing for re-opening for weeks. He senses how bad this could be if it goes on too long. (Might already be too late. We’ll see.)

    • Teenage daughters are not generally allowed to wield the political power to house arrest 1 billion people. Now somehow they do.
      Trump is entirely complicit in this and even continues his usual hyperbolic greatest this and that. To paraphrase his pressers:

      “Folks this is going to be the greatest pandemic America has seen. There are going to be deaths like you wouldn’t believe.”

      I, for one, am sick of his spineless bullshit.

      • The 20 k deaths attributed to CV, mostly in the NE would have been also attributed to Trump had he not played along. He was backed into a corner. A bigger disaster would have him being blamed and losing this fall.

        • A bigger disaster than what? 17 million unemployed. $8trillion in govt bailouts. House arrest for 300 million?

          Trump has stuffed the country and who cares if he loses. He is either in on it or a spineless coward. 4d fucking chess.

          • Trump did not close one single State, the governors of the respective States did. Now Trump has a bully pulpit as they say and might have given those spineless governors a bit of a backbone to refuse or modify, but you can bet the big States would have shut down. Hell, they don’t want to open today.

          • Hey Tris, suffer from TDS much?

          • Nope not really. He just helped push the country into effective martial law and a depression. Not sure where the derangement here is but I don’t think its me?

          • I stand corrected, you clearly are THAT stupid.

          • you can’t possibly be that stupid.

        • yeah cause New York and New Jersey are huge red states, as we know

        • Exactly. Never run against the crowd in a panic. You’ll just get trampled by the hysterical people. When it became inevitable he went with the “experts.” He’ll claim he saved X number of lives because the “experts” were so far of their predictions. And he’s first to the punch in calling for the re-opening of America.

          I’m about 50/50 on the economy actually doing a “V” shaped recovery. If it does, he’ll cruise to re-election. If it doesn’t, he’ll be in a serious dog fight. But he would’ve anyways.

70. Coming back to your When Prophecy Fails analogy, the clock is somewhere between 4:00 a.m. and 4:45 a.m.

    However, in that case, the Seekers insanity wasn’t hurting the general public. This time around, even with a V-shaped recovery – and that’s very much not a guarantee – you’re looking at a recession in the ball park of 2008-2009. That’s a lot of damage for people to ignore.

71. Quote: “It is unlikely that the skeptics will forget how Nicky Taleb threw his dress over his head and ran around squealing like a girl.”

    It’s one thing to think this was a huge deal in February, but any man who still didn’t see through the farce in April deserves relentless mockery and berating. Don’t talk the facts. Just laugh in their face, repeatedly.

    The ones who nod their head, humbly take their lumps, and admit overreaction we may be able to trust again. Those that don’t, rest assured, will gladly snitch on you if things go way south.

    • It’s one thing to think this was a huge deal in February, but any man who still didn’t see through the farce in April deserves relentless mockery and berating.

      The level of faith required merits the name Koranovirus.

      • Hahaha! Brilliant!
        Stolen (with attribution).

    • Taleb’s reaction is predictable. He’ll just claim he was right all along, and call anyone who disagrees with him an idiot as usual, because statistics.

    • So what about both Gregs and Steve? I guess everyone is wrong at least once.

      • They weren’t just wrong once, they were wrong all day, every day for the past 8 weeks.

        • Correct and Cochran refused to even acknowledge another point of view wrt this pandemic. A closed mind is not really worthy of a following. If he is proven wrong, then I will be reluctant to read his musings in future. It’s a shame for I freely acknowledge his contributions to the field as instrumental in my being here today.

    • Unfortunately, social media has made it taboo to ever admit you’re wrong. But I agree with you. Otherwise clear thinking writers, bloggers, talking heads, etc… that were wrong and can admit it, I really have no problem with. Everyone makes mistakes, and the good ones rack up way more in the “win” column than they do the mistake column. Tucker Carleson comes to mind for the tv talking-head category.

      But watch the ones that go through machinations to pretend like they were never wrong, or this whole big scare was legit but we escaped thanks to their twitter “warnings.” They are to be avoided at all cost.

72. First order of business, repeal the 19th amendment. Things will fall in line after that.
    Then, please anyone, get rid of this crazy Governor Karen here in Michigan. A recall has started.

    As for the future, may you live in interesting times.

    • Governor Karen is a great gift for Trump. Her actions on shutting down everything but food just adds more to the growing “Dems are insane” opinion..

    • Whitmer belong in casting for the evil stepmother in every one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The physiognomy is all there.

      Noticed after she banned the sale of seeds, the usual ‘stay at home’ crowd turned quiet in social media. There are avid gardeners on both the left and the right that she threw under the bus for nothing more than showboating.

      The best was yesterday when she tried to justify her actions, complete with a lady doing sign language in the background who looked like she was doing interpretive dance and misspellings on her slides.

      • I was pretty amazed that vegetable seeds in the spring were not considered “essential”. I’m sure farmers aren’t buying theirs at Walmart, but still just an blatant exercise in bossing people for no reason other than the pleasure of it.

      • The sign language thing is a particularly silly virtue signal. What deaf person doesn’t have access to Closed Captioning?

        • I think of it as performance art comedy, like having a mime next to the speaker unintentionally mocking the whole situation.

          • Can you read ASL? Maybe they are. That would be rich.

          • You have no idea just how far fucked up these people are.
            This, for example is not satire.
            https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/live/tori-51750354

            There are “races” who use this “language” as their main means of communication- it’s the best form of communication they have.
            Yet race is just a social construct and all humanity is an equal blank slate, right?

          • bilejones, I looked long and hard for the parody site in all of this, and I couldn’t find it. It really is the BBC?(!!!). Wow.

          • The BBC has been a parody site for at least the last 20 years.

        • Blind deaf people maybe…

          • I can see how sign language really helps in that case.

        • We have the sign language thing here in California too.

          Unlike Gov. Whitmer though and to his credit Gov, Newsom has actually done a decent enough job on the matter, doubly so considering how Left wing this State can be.

      • She didn’t ban the sale of seeds or car seats. That’s just the satan spawn of McCain’s histrionics. The governor is still a moron, but she didn’t specifically ban these things.

        • Read her E.O.

          https://www.michigan.gov/whitmer/0,9309,7-387-90499_90705-525182–,00.html

          She banned “Garden centers and plant nurseries.”, which stores took logically to include seeds.

          • No, she didn’t.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZDkGFp2soU

            She closed garden centers in department stores and home depot (at least 50k ft^2)
            You can still buy seeds. The lawyer I linked to went to Tractor Supply and bought some seeds in Michigan.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyKa4z14IQQ&amp;

            Do you guys remember who Megan McCain’s father is?

            When a Cuck or the Satan spawn of a Cuck says something, it is a probably a lie. Never believe a single word these people say!

          • What the hell does any of this have to do with McCain you sperg?

            You want me to post all the pics of seeds being taped off in countless stores?

            Where the hell do you think most regular people get seeds? Maybe garden centers and nurseries and not a Tractor supply store.

          • The Dollar Tree sells them. Tractor Supply sells them. Lots of stores sell seeds.
            This went viral because Megan McCain posted it on Twitter. She was concentrating more on the allegedly banned car seats and her being pregnant, but she mentioned the seeds as well.

            You’re the one who is sperging. Saying she banned seeds would imply farmers couldn’t buy seeds and commercial growers couldn’t buy seeds.

            The order is absolutely retarded and something only a female Democrat could come up with. I’m with you there. If you’re really feelin’ the need to exercise that green thumb, head over to dollar tree or tractor supply!

          • From the order:

            2. Close areas of the store—by cordoning them off, placing signs in aisles, posting prominent signs, removing goods from shelves, or other appropriate means—that are dedicated to the following classes of goods:

            a. Carpet or flooring.

            b.Furniture.

            c. Garden centers and plant nurseries.

            d. Paint.

            Not everything that gets planted this time of year is a seed. You have have to go get plants that are already started. Second, so unless you have a sub-50K sq/ft store nearby that sells seeds and plants, you’re out of luck getting anything. You can’t drive all over MI looking for those stores because that is illegal as well.

          • Aren’t the regular nurseries closed? That is what people should be pissed off about. The fact that they have been able to basically close all retail establishments not considered vital, not to mention churches, is what people should be mad about, not (just) the Walmart garden center. Or the madness of pulling over a car with a single person in it driving in the middle of the night and giving her a ticket. Or 10 cops dragging someone off the bus for not wearing a mask.

          • Or closing churches in Ireland- so they can be used as a mosque on a Friday.

          • My brother drove to Ohio to get fertilizer. Of course hiring a service us out of the question.

          • In Maryland the Mexicans mulching the Governor’s flower beds are performing an essential service.
            Churches are closed. Liquor stores open.
            Spiritual comfort banned. Spiritous comfort essential.

        • sorry Tars , i live ther e,and she did. but pot shops , liquior stores and the michigan lotto are still open. she also forbid going fishing or jet skiing, , even by yourself with nobody else in the boat on the lake you house sits on.

          • I agree that these rules are dumb. Churches are closed and abortion clinics are open. This is outright insane. I agree that is dumb beyond measure that Walmart is open, but the paint section and nursery are not. This is the perfect example of how gov screws stuff up.
            But she did not ban seeds.
            The partisan hackery and the lies that are always there under ordinary circumstances is one of the reasons this is clown world. Our media is completely dishonest and partisan hackery is one of the major reasons. Trump does not have blood on his hands and this stupid governor did not ban seeds. The truth is bad enough!

          • “But she did not ban seeds.”

            Who cares if she really did or didn’t ban sale of seeds? That is not the point at all. Either way, banning seeds is ridiculous, and as Chet alluded to, gardening has appeal to plenty of leftists and Karens. The seeds thing is a potential WEDGE among Whitmer’s suporters, yeah?

            As someone once said, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

            Seed-Banning Whitmer is a pretty good personal label.

      • Just watched some of that stream and that interpreter gave me a good laugh. Got scolded today for not setting aside my work to attend an emotional wellness seminar… It’s difficult to take farce seriously.

        • What goes on at these seminars. Is an AA meeting crossed with I’m not worthy, or more akin to a revivalist meeting with smatterings of magic incantations?

    • There is already a recall with 150k signatures for Governor Half-wit.

      Of course, she has nothing to worry about because she is back by deep, dark pools of Soros’ money.

      • see my reply above. the Michigan GOP is incompetent in the extreme, she’s safe.

      • If the US is to ever function correctly, the new guys will need to limit campaign contributions by Constitutional amendment (say 50x minimum wage per registered voter per candidate, 10x your own money frees limited) and if they are smart will limit personal wealth by some multiple of the minimum wage (25x seem fair) along with a whole host of bans of revolving door laws amended in.

        It will probably end up with no smarter a political system , hell it will be a racemic mix of AOC/Bernie and various Right sorts after this and they won’t be smarter they will be less corrupt which is at least something.

    • we have the unholy trinity of screeching karens here in michigan, gretchen Hitl-her, dana”nutso” nessel, and Haily “screeching “stevens.
      the state GOP is in the hands of the big AG and koch brothers donor suplicants from the grand rapids area. the Michigan farmers organization paid for Hillary ads in 2016. It’s the same group that produced Justin Amash , our own ed mcmullin.. So with the State GOP completely destroyed, there is nothing to keep the dems from running wild.. I still do not see any republican who could beat any one of the three. .

    • Repeal won’t do a thing. Why, because any number of States were already allowing female suffrage before the 19th. I suspect many States will continue such or fail to enact any laws restricting such voting rights now that they’ve been in effect for damn near a century.

73. Piece of cake, Z Man! I am seeing it already!

    The plague was prevented by the success of the lock downs! Don’t be at all surprised if longer, more intense lock downs are required in the future, either. Rights and freedoms come a distant second to safety, right?

    Pandora for President!!!!

    • The amount of self-flattery is disgusting. Our leadership was great, our medical professionals were great, our military was great, the American people were great, we all mitigated and self-isolated so hard! We can all feel good about ourselves and that’s what matters. And that’s how you get the people to believe.

      • Protesting waaaaay too much, I think.

      • If everybody is doing such a great job, how is everything so damn fucked up? ;-(

    • Don’t be at all surprised if longer, more intense lock downs are required in the future, either.

      Just so. The fact that the usual suspects are busy telling us that “nothing will be as before”, is basically leftie signalling his punch. Translation: prepare for the permanent police state.

      The joker here is Sweden. If they experience little or no greater mortality rates than the rest of the West, the gaslighting will become somewhat more difficult.

      • Sorry to be that guy but Time magazine has recently posted a scare story that tries to argue Sweden is going to pay a heavy price for not submitting to the lockdown holiness spiral.

        • Sorry to be that guy but Time magazine has recently posted a scare story that tries to argue Sweden is going to pay a heavy price for not submitting to the lockdown holiness spiral.

          Numbers are numbers. I know most politicians are unable to even calculate compound interest on their own mortgage, but some things you can’t talk away.

          • Unfortunately, the general American public is as innumerate as the MSM.

          • Call me naïve, but I don’t think you really need the general public for the lid to blow off. Every MD in the country will know the truth, if they don’t already.

          • Time magazine has recently posted a scare story that tries to argue Sweden is going to pay a heavy price for not submitting to the lockdown holiness spiral.

            Swedish authorities have welcomed African and Middle Eastern psychopaths looking to act out their violent urges against society. Sweden good!

            Swedish authorities have stopped short of totalitarianism. Sweden bad!

      • Not at all. “Sweden had good outcomes because of their diversity.” The take home message is that Scandinavia needs more diversity. And you Danes and those Norwegian fellas have some catching up to do. (And those coffee-swilling, puukko carrying Finns, from whose lands the poor refugees have been self-deporting because “too cold, too boring” — well, the less said the better.)

        Never mind what I said makes no sense. When has that stopped the spin?

        • That spiel doesn’t even work in Sweden any more.

    • Then we can just point to the data. Social distancing does not bring the projected death toll from 1.5 million to 60,000. That notion’s so stupid, it borders on comical.

      • Most people appear to be so numerically unaware of what goes on in the world that numbers blur into 1,2 many quite quickly.

        Even mentioning empirical data shuts down the brain so quickly in these types its almost like the exorcism films with the priest forcing the possessed to look at the crucifix as the demons writhes to escape and shouts obscenities.

        • Hahaha! Math, Masculinity and The Lord’s Image. What an unholy trinity.

      • What happens when people come out of their cages? Another wave of infections, or final confirmation that they got it wrong? It’s a tragicomedy of errors.

        • There will be more infections, which the media will pounce upon. But mortality rates and infection rates are likely higher now than they ever will be, and it still isn’t nearly enough to vindicate the media.

          • Yeah I’m figuring spring beats this thing back into hospitals and retirement homes. That’s why the continuing lockdown has me scratching my head. Everybody staying indoors where the thing can survive.

          • I think you answered your own question.

          • I’m wondering if there are carriers currently staying home who will reintroduce it. Not certain how that works, or if it’s possible. Sunlight being nature’s disinfectant. Does the lockdown become counterproductive after a point? Idk, it’s an idle thought.

          • The main thing about the season is temperature.

            Viruses like to breed at temps cooler than 98.6. Breathing cold air lowers the temp of the respiratory tract to less than the rest of the body, so viruses breed there.

            (Plus, being cold lowers bodily immunity response.)

      • And 60K is a high number. I predict slightly south of 40K.

        • I’d say that’s a pretty good prediction. But what the hell do I know? Not much, admittedly, but I’d still wager the price of a cup of coffee on it (as I would on Trump winning re-election). I’m perfectly willing, and in fact eager, to “pay up” too, should I lose the wager. But be forewarned that I absolutely will not sit inside a coffee shop sporting a COVID-19 approved mask. But if Trump loses (under any scenario), I’ll happily double the bet.

        • How many of the 40K or 60K or whatever actually died of Chinese Virus? A person could be terminally ill with cancer, test positive for the Virus and her eventual death will be attributed to Chinese Virus. There are plenty of reports on the shenanigans that hospitals are involved in to bolster the numbers.

    • Government from Trump all the way down to some tin-pot tyrant in Tolar, New Mexico took a big, greezy dump and wiped itself with the Constitution. The stain will prove indelible.

      • Legislatures, courts, laws, limits?
        Who needs ’em?

        The new normal will be ‘Papers, please’ for anything you do.
        They can command who keeps the lights on, who works, whose biz stays open;

        Where you can go, when you can go, who you can see;

        The Reset is: “Why pretend? Do what we tell you.” No mushroom clouds needed.
        How simple it was!

        You can still vote all you want though!

74. They’re blaming China to CYA. If you listen hard enough you can even detect the faint register of war drums. The things people do to protect their pride!

    • I sure as hell blame the filthy Communist Chinese. But that doesn’t mean that the streetlamps in Washington DC and New York City shouldn’t be festooned with Media propagandists, Deep State bureaucrats, politicians, “experts,” and Wall Street scum.

      Trump is going to order the country “open” and the Media/political firestorm will be epic. If Trump fails to win re-election this country is not worth saving.

      • Without American capital, manufacturing know-how, technology, STEM education, jobs, etc., China would be a minor player. I even hear they got this coronavirus from an American lab (haven’t confirmed for myself but who would be surprised?). Now those American interests are turning on the Chicom monster they created. There’s definitely a lot of CYA going on.

        The funny thing is they wouldn’t have had to open that can of worms if they didn’t have to justify overreacting, and they wouldn’t have to justify overreacting if they didn’t create the Chicom monster (Chinese century?) in the first place. It’s all unraveling. Incompetence on display!

        • The Chinese monster was created to do in the WWC for voting Reagan.
          That and they hate us.

          OTOH they’ve got us Gulag-ing from home, the Kulaks are wiped out and headed for bankruptcy and welfare, and they’ve nationalized the economy.

          Who needs China when you can do that? From a bluff and made for TV movie?

      • Hmmm…
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhrzisFfuEE&feature=youtu.be

      • Trump’s already got Cuomo defending states rights (to stay closed).

        • Yep, except State’s Rights will have nothing to do with the power Trump declares he possesses to order States to reopen. He will use the Commerce Clause in the Constitution which has already been ruled by the SCOTUS to take precedence over the States’ right of intrastate commerce regulation via a 1938 ruling.

          Trump wishes to avoid this Executive Order so as to avoid an immediate delaying appeal to the SCOTUS and to obviously appear benevolent to the States. But he holds all the “Trump” cards here.

      • Upvote for using “festooned”. One of my favorites.

      • Fear Carl,
        This county is not worth saving. Candidly, it can’t be saved. That ship has sailed.

    • Of course, the Wuhan bat virus lab was getting $3.7 million from the US government, so that dog won’t hunt for long….

      • The lab funding was from the Magic Negro Regime so the dog won’t get out of the kennel.

    • It is a mistake to dismiss the growing realization of what China actually did leading up to this pandemic as well as the policy decisions that were made by the US over the past 30+ years as mere CYA. The more Americans understand what precarious position we are in with regard to China, the better.

    • “The things people do to protect their pride!” Here is a probably incomplete list:

      Blame others (as you noted); worth noting: blame may be true or false, but in neither case will it do anything to solve a problem.

      Lie to others (deception);

      Lie to oneself (self-deception).

      In other words, everyday politics 😀

    • Asians have a relationship to lying that would make a NY Jew blush, and does.

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