The Ongoing Panic

Depending upon when you mark the start of the Covid mass hysteria, we are either coming up on the one year anniversary or have just past it. Panic was setting in as early as January, but that was mostly with people who saw a profit in it. It was in February when the mass media started picking up on it. For example, no one was wearing a mask at CPAC 2020, which was in February. By March you could not buy a mask anywhere, along with toiletries and paper products.

A year on, we are getting a better picture of what happened in what may go down as one of the great mass panics in human history. Given that the panic is still with us, the picture that is emerging is blurry and incomplete. In parts of the US and Europe, Covid has turned into a weird religion. It is not just a public health issue to be managed and navigated, but a stand-in for Old Scratch. The faithful are not only vigilant, they are Covid vigilantes, minding everyone’s business about it.

One thing we are seeing is a collapse in the number of confirmed cases. This is in line with what we know about past pandemics. The number of cases is slow at first, often because we have no way of testing for the new bug. Then the number of cases rises quickly, partly due to awareness and partly due to panic. In the mass media age, the need for attention surely drove the case count. Contrary to media narratives, the drop in cases has nothing to do with government efforts.

In fact, there is no evidence that any of the measures, public or private, had any impact on the spread of Covid. The fact is the only way to slow the spread of a virus like this is what the Chinese did and that is lock everyone in their homes. Even the Chinese found this to be close to impossible. What the West could do and is doing is theater. It is about protecting the political health of the ruling class, by convincing enough people that the government is doing something about the virus.

Political theater is an essential element of liberal democracy. We live in the modern version of a Dionysian age. All public acts are public performances, and all public performances are part of the larger morality play of politics. Facts and the discourse upon facts is purely a private affair. It is why everything about Covid has been politicized and only came to our attention when it could be politicized. For a year we have been watching Covid theater, rather than a public health response.

Once the drama runs its course on the big stage, and it seems to be reaching that point now that Mumbly Joe is staggering around the White House, it will go off-Broadway and then close up shop entirely. The mass roll out of vaccines with highly questionable claims to effectiveness looks like the way out for government. Once the old people are vaccinated, they can then claim herd immunity has been reached and the rest of the public can get the jab at their leisure.

One caveat to that prediction is that the Covidians are getting worked up over the new strain of Covid. This is the super-Covid that the oracles prophesied back in the before times when this all started. This one is “armed with enhanced capabilities.” Apparently it has infrared vision and portable drones. Additionally, the Nth wave people will be with us forever, it seems. Then you have the Covid industrial complex that has invested heavily in lockdowns and all that surrounds it.

Assuming that the panic does end, and this drama moves off the stage this year, we will also start to get a sense of the degree of madness we have witnesses. For example, we are already getting a hint in the annual flu numbers. In Britain, the number of influenza cases was zero this flu season. Maybe we have witnessed a miracle or maybe Covid kills the influenza virus. Most likely, the flu numbers have been re-classed as Covid, which appears to be the case in the US.

The truth is most cases we call the flu are caused by unknown pathogens. In fact, only about 20% of flu cases treated by the medical system are known to be the flu. The rest are from something else. Since the medicines for treating the symptoms do the job, no one really cares what caused the symptoms. It is why we do not mandate testing for the flu or the common cold. Up until the past year, we just accepted the fact that people get sick in winter and sometimes need to be treated for it.

Once the dust settles and the sober minded can begin to look at the data, what we will find is that the number of deaths was wildly exaggerated. Similarly, the number of people needing hospitalization was also exaggerated. This is common to all pandemics in the modern age. Even the Spanish Flu was exaggerated. A lot of the deaths attributed to it were from other factors, like poor hospital conditions, poorly trained doctors, bad nutrition, and other pathogens.

Another lesson will be that modern government is not capable of managing a genuine crisis, even a mild one like Covid. The story emerging from New York shows that the people making the decisions not only lacked the basic skills to manage a crisis, but they were obsessed with the politics of the moment. Like everything about partisan politics, everyone chose sides. The left-wing states chose first, so the right-wing states were left with the right answer by default. That is no way to run a country.

It is not just a partisan political problem. It is a systemic one. This paper examining the political economy of this panic looks at the role of mass media. The initial reality of the virus was amplified by the mass media, which the decision makers in government rely upon as their primary information source. They acted on the exaggerated claims, which had the effect of confirming those claims to the public. This was picked up and magnified by the media and we had a vicious cycle.

The interesting bit in that paper is the parallel between how a virus spreading faster in a dense population and how panic spreads in a media dense population. Before the mass media age, most people were outside the media environment, in the same way most people were outside urban areas in agrarian times. Just as a pathogen needs a network of people, bad information needs a way to pass from person to person. Our connected age is now a breeding ground for informational pandemics.

Another aspect to this is a growing number of people seem to need the emotional energy that comes from crisis. We saw this in the early days of Covid. The auxiliary volunteer army of scolds were suddenly swarming the public square. That energy eventually transferred to fighting the virus that they call Trump supporters and insurrectionists but is now looking for a new host. They will need another panic this spring and you can be sure one will be supplied.


A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


172 thoughts on “The Ongoing Panic

  1. It is percolating in Germany at this very moment that the vast majority of hospitalizations due to COVID infections are from a certain small minority, many of which just recently arrived.

    The reasons for this overrepresentation are said to be the lacking integration of this minority into society, and a general unwillingness to follow its customs.

    It is of course ironic that the German people have been squeezed harder and harder by lockdown measures, to save a minority that obviously could not care less about any measures the hosting society deems necessary:

    https://www.tichyseinblick.de/kolumnen/alexander-wallasch-heute/50-prozent-der-corona-intensivpatienten-bundesweit-mit-migrationshintergrund/

  2. “Re: getting scolded by Karen, I’m dead serious, y’all. Just say: “I can’t wear one, I have a disability.” It’s your 100% guaranteed get-out-of-COVID-free card. Since all the Karens…”

    Saw a young Karen at a Home Depot demand to know what a guy’s disability was. Hectored him, mocking… then calling after him. He walked off, did not escalate the confrontation. These days a Karen of that mentally ill stripe could make all kinds of claims, best to not engage. Like a dog, make no eye contact.

    What I suggest is when I see an obvious masked to the nines Karen heading my way when outdoors maskless is give THEM an ostentation wide berth.

  3. Re: getting scolded by Karen, I’m dead serious, y’all. Just say: “I can’t wear one, I have a disability.” It’s your 100% guaranteed get-out-of-COVID-free card. Since all the Karens are on SSRI, convinced they’re allergic to “gluten,” are “lactose intolerant,” the word “disability” is magic. It’s like “diversity” to them — it must not be questioned, ever, on pain of social death. (The great thing is, you’re not even lying. Trust me, in this ridiculous sideshow carny world in which we find ourselves, not being able to take idiots seriously is a major f*cking handicap).

  4. “Our connected age is now a breeding ground for informational pandemics.“

    A great post and a very well-put thought – I would recommend only a slight change – “misinformational”

  5. So Abbott finally decided his popularity was dipping too low and has lifted Texas’ mask and other mandates effective 10 March. Big question is whether all the private companies will still try to enforce masks without government force behind them. Will be very interesting to see if I’m no longer the only dissident shopper.

    • Some lawyer should file a discrimination suit against those woke corporate bastards. They are much more fearful of the Left than rest of us.

  6. “ Another aspect to this is a growing number of people seem to need the emotional energy that comes from crisis. We saw this in the early days of Covid. The auxiliary volunteer army of scolds were suddenly swarming the public square. That energy eventually transferred to fighting the virus that they call Trump supporters and insurrectionists but is now looking for a new host. They will need another panic this spring and you can be sure one will be supplied.”

    The kind of brilliance that Z delivers.

  7. The collapse in the number of “cases” . predicted by myself and many, many others in the months before the election was due to two things; both February actions by the World Health Organization.
    1. They advised that “Asymptomatic cases” should not be “confirmed” as cases on the basis of a single test.
    2. The advised that the RT-PCR cycle limit should be 35 or less rather than the 40 almost universally used before then.

    The drop in “cases” is purely a function of a drop in knowingly fraudulent test results.

    • There’s a lot going on here

      1. The elite got their baked potato in the WH and a lot of the intensity of the Covid panic was due to the need to find a way to unseat a sitting President with a great economy and no new wars. To that end they needed a way to both wreck the economy and get mail-in voting accepted so that fake ballots could be created and deployed. Done and done.

      2. Case numbers can be manipulated at will by encouraging people to get tested, the high false positive rate, and the positive feedback loop of “rise in cases (possibly just due to random fluctuations) –> media reporting said rise –> stupid people panic and get tested en masse –> bigger “case” numbers –> media reporting of that –> ad infinitum. All you need to do to produce a drop in cases is to tell the media flunkies to stop performing their part of the act.

      3. VERY dubious methodology in reporting deaths means that said methodology can be tightened up or loosened as needed. Sloppier methodology (i.e. those drug dealers who get shot 14 times and then “die of Covid”) == bigger death counts, tighter methods like, say, not lumping flu deaths in == smaller death counts.

      4. Springtime. Everyone who knows about respiratory viruses could have predicted the numbers would fall as spring approached just as they do for colds and flu.

  8. I grew up hearing about how “Americans would never let…”

    We owe many apologies to Madame Defarge, the good people of Salem, Mass., and those living in Europe during the first half of the 20th century.

  9. I got COVID about a month ago. It was an odd experience, definitely not a routine cold but not nearly as bad as the flu. If there had not been something called “COVID” I likely would have just said I had the flu and taken a few days off work.

    The COVID panic is sustained by upper middle class folks who enjoy the work-from-home and the virtue signaling. So I’m skeptical that they are ever going to allow the panic to subside. For this group, tele-school really isn’t that big of a deal, because for them school’s primary role is its sorting function, which can be sustained by standardized testing. So, continued COVID panic means for them work from home and poor people bringing them stuff. What’s the down side? I would like like to think that people will grow tired of the COVID nonsense, but I expected that in Summer 2020 and instead, we got massive compliance. So I have little faith that our sheep population will ever push back on the panic.

    10
    • I probably had Covid last year. I rarely get colds or the flu, so when I had symptoms, I contacted my doctor. She said it was possible, but as long as the symptoms were mild I should just stay home and check back at the end of the week. By midweek I was feeling well again and by the end of the week I was fine. It was a weird mix of the cold and the flu. I had what felt like the beginning of a chest cold, but not quite there. I had a mild fever and no energy like you get with the flu.

      Frankly, if not for Covid I probably would have toughed it and not thought much of it, other than I so rarely get a cold or the flu.

      • Same thing happened to me, Z.

        In late Jan I had a regular cold, and got over it in a few days, as usual. Then a week later i got another cold /flu. This one was much tougher than normal, lasted longer, and I felt it in my lungs and chest. killed my energy too, I felt like crap. Also odd to get two colds one after the other (has never happened before).

        Anyways I never got tested because at that early stages they were still locking people in their homes in china and I didn’t want to get involved.

    • As I’ve posted. I got a “cold” Jan 1 or so. Most strange since it was the most mild cold as can ever remember having. A day of aches or so, followed by a runny nose like a Spring allergy for a couple days. Perhaps a bit of fever. I did not even change my routine of daily chores. Everything cleared up within a week.

      Since relatives visiting are in health care, everyone yelled at me to be tested—for their sake—since they catch hell if they are caught spreading it. I declined. Then good friends whom we had visited in neighborhood, were tested and found positive. Daughter works in hospital, but who knows who gave what to whom. So I and wife tested reluctantly.

      Results were positive. I still believe it was all crap, but the PSR test was positive 5 times in this small group of 5 people. Oh, and did I mention that we were all co-morbid oldsters, and were all hospitalized, and then put on ventilation, and died horrible deaths? Well, except for the hospitalization and death bullshit drama, we had little to no symptoms as a group and faired quite well. Sorry, JEB. 😉

  10. I still believe that a lot of the deaths can be attributed to the atmosphere and conditions of Covid, not Covid itself. For instance, how many people age 60 and above have put off timely check-ups for pre-Covid conditions? Heart issues, high blood pressure, cancer screenings, et all? All of a sudden, that light cough turns into Pneumonia, trouble breathing, then into the hospital with no return home, but they test positive for Covid so it is fully attributed as the cause of death. Unregulated Diabetes manifests as a heart attack, stroke, renal failure.

    Some in my family have bought the entire narrative and disregard their own health to allegedly stay safe. My 80 year old mother has not been to the doctor in a year. Her usual schedule included regular monthly trips to assuage her health issues that she takes medication for. How many people in our country in that age bracket have done the same?

  11. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Ongoing Panic

  12. Z – does this sort of remind you of the Alar panic of 1989 or the movie popcorn panic of the mid 90s? The difference is that those scares weren’t as destructive.

  13. Last April I posted this comment:

    Z, if a year from now, despite all our panicked social distancing, there are 250,000 dead from Covid-19, will you acknowledge you were talking like a fool in comparing it to the Swine flu? Or will you just stuff it down the memory hole and move on? Because I’m going to remember.

    Now that deaths have topped 500,000, I’m wondering if you have an answer for me.

    2
    32
    • I can’t speak for Z Man, but for my part, I’d wonder why on earth you believe the 500K number, what with all the motorcycle crashes, guys falling down stairs, murder victims, etc. being reported as “COVID deaths.” The New York Times was very helpful in that regard — they published a big front-page article on “Those We’ve Lost” or some such, listing all the supposed COVID casualties. Some guy from Iowa was listed near the top – the town’s chief of police wrote in to the NYT and said no, that was a carjacking. Such things were commonplace. Whatever the real number was, it surely wasn’t 500K…

      21
      • Why would I not believe it that number? Seriously! Because some “experts” talk nonsense about ideologically loaded issues like race, does that gives me license to ignore all experts about any issue whenever it pleases me to do so, and put my trust instead in anonymous internet blowhards who dismiss anyone who disagrees with them as “fanatics”?

        The problem is that, unlike the official story about race, there is nothing even remotely implausible about the official story on Covid-19. We are told that there is a new disease that, while not civilization-ending, is substantially worse than the standard flu. Well we know for a fact that’s something that can happen — it happened in 1918, and much worse happens in the animal kingdom all the time. And… well… that’s really all you need. The rest of the story follows from there.

        So given that, why should I believe that the CDC and the mainstream media and everybody else have all just invented a number out of thin air? Because those institutions are riddled with ideologues? Even if that’s true, it doesn’t follow — at all! — that the number has to be wrong. I have to point out that even the Trump administration didn’t question the numbers. So give me one good reason why I should believe Z and his hand-waving internet groupies when they tell me it’s lies all lies.

        3
        18
        • Because they have re-classified all flu deaths as covid deaths, added deaths caused by lockdowns (there are plenty) and mixed in the occasional death from gunshot wound to the head or a car crash… Then they called everybody who asked “Is it from or with covid?” a right wing conspiracy theorist.

          Luckily for them, they have an army of midwits babbling about “muh experts” every time they spot dissent against the official narrative.

        • Why would I not believe it that number? Seriously!

          Because it has been explained here and other places a million times. You not knowing says you don’t want to know.

          12
          • You know, I read this blog because I am sympathetic to your WN viewpoint, and because you sometimes have interesting ideas. But much of the time you are just embarrassing.

            20
          • Most educated estimate I heard of “death by” Covid was to subtract 25% from he official number.

        • “Why would I not believe it that number?”

          For the same reason you don’t believe the “Prince of Nigeria” wants to share his fortune with you.

        • Apparently there are 2 trolls here today, you and the guy that up voted your dumb ass.

          4
          1
        • Why would I not believe it that number?

          Pathological deference to authority.
          One of the four deadly pathologies destroying white people.

        • The simplest answer to your query is: because shocking news sells. Truth is secondary. There are so many reasons to be skeptical of the official numbers. COVID tests have a high error rate. Health providers have a financial incentive to code an illnesss or death as Covid related. It gets eyeballs and clicks when the daily count shows X infections and Y dead from “COVID”!!! There’s a lot of data omitted from those headlines. Most of it would, or should, serve to greatly mute the end-of-the-world urgency that the news industry wants you to feel. Media, government, medical providers, there are way too many biased players in this.

          Now, I’m not a total denier. I think the virus is real. Yes, many have sickened and some died of it. But the apocalyse? Not quite. I’ve refuted the “1% case fataility rate” so many times I’ve forgotten. I think I already posted in today’s thread about the FL county that (appeared) to have > 3% fatality rate, but that drops to about 0.16% if the total population is considered. Bet you won’t hear such an analysis on the average news site or evening broadcast, yet you can derive those figures with the very data they provide.

        • “why should I believe that the CDC and the mainstream media and everybody else have all just invented a number out of thin air? Because those institutions are riddled with ideologues? Even if that’s true, it doesn’t follow — at all! — that the number has to be wrong.”

          Because its run by ideologues by your own admission should at least make you pause and think, gee maybe they are pushing an agenda? Not hard.

      • Most educated estimate I heard of “death by” Covid was to subtract 25% from he official number.

    • I was right all along. The 500,000 number is nonsense, but a good reminder why debating fanatics is pointless.

      24
    • You actually put “tell Zman I-told-you-so” on the calendar for an entire year later, and remembered? You have mental problems, man.

        • Most educated estimate I heard of “death by” Covid was to subtract 25% from the official number. JEB you’ve been repeatedly wrong in your Covid postings—even using *official* figures to love to cite. Go away, your postings elucidate no one.

          2
          1
          • It will take years before the CD settles on an official number and that will continue to be debated. The first step is the final total deaths and the demographics of those deaths. That has not been posted yet and probably will not be until this blows over. The CDC knows politics too. Then we get the analysis of the data to filter out the probably deaths from Covid from car accidents, cancer, etc.

            The fact is, we never had a way to determine Covid deaths. It was not until late in the game that a supplemental form was issued to provide lab tests for Covid along with the death certificate. I don’t think states have added Covid to their form yet. The “official number” at this point in time is a worthless as a long range weather forecast. It’s good from cheap media content, but useless for anything else.

    • Thanks for the laugh. Although it is terrifying at the same time, a selections of children’s favourites no longer fit for the ages. Apparently, the author, in his youth, portrayed Jewish characters as financially stingy. I concur that the author’s portrayal matches almost every single experience that I have had with those folk.

  14. Most likely, the flu numbers have been re-classed as Covid, which appears to be the case in the US.

    Zman, I just read the linked article and it claims (or implies) that the flu has been removed by virus “competition”. In other words, SARS-CoV-2 provides immunity against the flu.
    That is some interesting bullshit and I already see redditors and other retards using this to “debunk” any claim that the flu has been re-classed as Covid. Even though, Occams razor is pretty clear on this one.

  15. I fear the new, $10T-per-year vaccine-industrial complex will not go quietly into that dark night. New designer plagues will be created as needed… seeing as Wuhan Flu was itself engineered.

    Would like to be wrong.

    11
    • It is believed by many sober people that the mRNA shot can create a corona virus sensitivity in the recipient. One that can be activated to initiate a deadly auto-immune response.

      • I’m by no means an expert, but you’re probably talking about:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement
        A google of this term + “SARS” produces 72,800 results.

        Of course, none of this means that the COVID-19 jabs will cause such a problem. But the fact remains that none of those treatmens have had the traditional 2-5 (or more) years field experience, either. I’ll wait, thank you very much.

  16. I hope this is over soon. I rarely go out, and when I do, I’m always wary that some 50 year old female is going to loudly and publicly scold me for not wearing a mask. “Sir, excuse me, sir”, is what I brace myself for when buying broccoli.

    10
    1
    • Yeah, Branch Covidian is a great term. Let’s hope they all piss off into the jungle some time soon and top themselves.😉

    • I get most fruits and vegetables now from a mail order place. I mean I always hated shopping and regarded it as a nuisance but now I truly despise it and regard it as being forced to interact with a group of very unpleasant foreigners.

      Because these masked freaks are also all over the neighborhood and will engage in a variety of ridiculous antics* if they see you coming without a mask, I no longer take my usual walks around the neighborhood and because the apartment complex has closed our gym I can’t walk on the treadmills either. Ironically, if you observed my lifestyle you would conclude that I’m another Covid recluse cowering in his basement. Actually, I have no fear of the Coof or any other germs. It’s my fellow humans I don’t want to be around. I can’t wait to get out of here (Oregon). We’re going to one of the remaining free states.

      • Ah, forgot to say what my asterisk was about and you can’t edit anymore.

        So I was walking back from the main road to my apartment one day. This maskie walking towards me walks out into the street. Initially, I just thought he was on his way to one of the parked cars. He kept going though – right down the middle of the (very busy) traffic lane. I marveled at the lack of mathematical (or common) sense in this. He’s risking something that actually happens on that road quite a lot (pedestrians being hit by cars) to avoid a tiny and largely imaginary risk posed by a guy walking towards him in the open air without a face daiper.

        10
        • I find the poster child for being worried about the wrong thing is all the motorscooter riders I see in Asia, buzzing down the crowded streets with no helmet but a mask on

    • While sitting in my vehicle waiting to pick up groceries since I can no longer enter the store, a stock boy asked me, “do you have a mask,” I was speechless with anger at the disrespect.

      • Yes, I hear you. Last Christmas, I was accosted by a teen employee at a nursery, outdoors, asking if I had a mask. I said no, then he said he could get me one. I said I don’t wear masks, please get the owner. He said the owner was not in today. So I said he could call the sheriff to remove me or leave me alone—loud and rude.

        Really, it was absolutely refreshing and surprised me (visiting family members sort of abandoned me, not wanting to admit they were with me). 😉 I surprised myself. I guess there was a lot of pent up frustration I did not realize I had. In any event, the rest of the *masked* employees were more than happy to wait on me. Win/win I got my way, they did $180 worth of business.

  17. “Once the old people are vaccinated, they can then claim herd immunity has been reached and the rest of the public can get the jab at their leisure.”

    Remember the boomer remover meme? I still wonder if there was something to it.

    • When the virus first appeared it looked like the answer to the impending pensions apocalypse. Unfortunately it turned out that it also targets the morbidly obese, the mentally retarded, diabetics, and persons of colour. A “disaster ” like this could have saved the Country billions if it were allowed to run it’s course. Good job our glorious leaders were able to act decisively before it got out of hand.

      • We’ve got to take care of our vulnerable (and expensive) citizens, right? For the good of society. That’s what caring people do!

      • It has already saved “billions”. Let’s say 400k really died of Covid—say at an average old age of 70 (typical estimates are 80+). Let’s estimate an average SSI of $10k per year. Further, let’s say we shorted life span by 10 years (life expectancy is or 80 for men and women currently).

        The rest is simple math and as a professor of mine said, “…is left to the student.”.

        • You are not wrong. Pfizer has announced work on a follow up “bolster” vaccine—no, not the second shot—a booster that they claim may needed every few months or so. To fight the variants of course.

  18. I don’t know how the Kung Flu panic is going to end, but I do know that watching the Left trying to force its various genies back into their bottles is going to be hilarious. Just as COVID has become the new religion for people who were finally getting disillusioned with Gaia worship, aka “climate change,” so too has BLM become a real secular cult. Watching Prezzydizzle Kamala curb-stomping this summer’s riots is going to be a hoot — turns out Black lives only matter when they’re looting and burning during a Republican administration. Have fun with that, gang.

    (My guess as to the new panic? Since Bill Gates et al seem determined to force us to eat plants and bugs, maybe something along the lines of “Mad Cow Disease.” Or, if that fails, there are still the murder hornets. Remember them? Unlike the “Africanized” bees of the mid-80s, who turned out to only have an Africanized work ethic, there might still be some good panic monger potential left in the hornets).

    11
    • The new panic will be whatever Joe and Mitch and all the other Washington whores are directed to unleash by their Chinese paymasters.

      After all, Beijing expects a return on their investment…

  19. My brother-in-law was a cop in a very violent city and is now retired and deathly afraid of Covid. I asked him how he could go to work every day not knowing if he would be killed by some lunatic, but now hides behind a mask in his house in fear of the Flu. I think of all these people who fought in foreign wars and now live in fear of the Covid monster.

    BTW – I finally heard a Karen lecturing that “she got the vaccine for her, but she wears the mask for you.” I just laughed like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas to piss her off.

    16
  20. One caveat to that prediction is that the Covidians are getting worked up over the new strain of Covid.

    That’d be my bet; viruses mutate constantly, so they can keep selling New and Improved Corona(tm) forever.

    It’s not going to end until enough people refuse to play ball, despots don’t give back toys once you’ve let them play with them. There’s is going to be four mandatory shots annually, and that’s just the beginning.

    2021: The year we realized Alex Jones was right all along.

    14
    • Just yesterday in an elevator I saw a brand new sign on the wall. The text creeped me out because it was the usual “wear a mask, stay home, stay away from people, be afraid” rhetoric we’ve all gotten used to. This time the message was subtly different though. It told us to do all these things to “protect against respiratory diseases LIKE Covid-19”.

      Talk about mutations. I realized I was watching the tyrants’ message mutate in front of me. This is going to be the way they extend the mask rules forever. You see if you don’t wear a mask and somebody gets the flu or a cold you’re a monster too. Of course, they’ve also got the “Covid is mutating” meme out there. I imagine this is a period where both narratives are going to compete to be the one that allows them to keep this shit going indefinitely.

      • Always have a pen/Sharpie on you and just right “No” under these admonitions. At the risk of repeating myself, this won’t end until people become comfortable bucking the prevailing trend.

      • “protect against respiratory diseases LIKE Covid-19”.

        Interesting.

        I haven’t seen anything like that yet, but I’m not surprised, since virtually every journalist on the planet can find it within themselves to write “died with Covid” without investigating what the hell that is supposed to mean.

      • Here in AZ, several weeks or so ago, the top public health official mused that since masks had been so effective as to contain *both* Covid and the flu, we should consider masks during the normal fall flu season from now on.

        Now aside from the obvious logical fallacy of equating the lack of flu cases to mask wearing (and the pathologies of social distancing and compulsive hand washing), we can see where this is going. But I’m less worried about the discredited public health officials than I am about the CEO’s of the large corporations mandating masks on their premises or to use their services.

        I really can’t see them lifting their restrictions. We had them instituting/requiring mask wearing here *before* the governor issued an emergency proclamation wrt social distancing and mask wearing. Even the jab is no assurance of mask freedom, since all the pharmaceutical companies state that their “vaccine” does *not* prevent catching Covid no prevent spread from symptomless “carriers”—only that your chances for a bad hospitalization are minimized. (Yes, I actually read the disclaimer from Moderna to this effect.)

        Some airlines in Great Britain and now some cruise lines have stated/hinted they will demand proof of vaccination before allowing boarding. Looks like proof on vaccination will be used as an internal passport of sorts in the future.

        • and when cruise ship demand drops 50% (or more) because of the vaccination requirement?

  21. As far as the next crisis goes our rulers seem to be pushing hard to get us embroiled as a cat’s paw in a war with Iran. If that turns out to be the next crisis and it goes badly I wonder if it could provide the right circumstances for a counter-coup and round-up of traitors and aliens that are the true plague. There has to be some point at which the empire is overextended, morally and financially exhausted, and susceptible to a ‘regime change.’

    • I don’t expect a war with Iran to go well. Westerners tend to make the mistake of equating Persians with Arabs. Unlike Arabs, pershave a beautiful homeland and a rich history of conquest. We underestimate them at our peril.

      • what absolute twaddle. iran couldn’t handle iraq, and we kind of did? know what i mean? in a war. twice even i think.

    • Sadly, at this point, the elite have “the initiative” as they say in war. Basically, we’re all waiting to see what their next move is and that’s never a good place to be especially when fighting a competent opponent. Of course, an incompetent one will use initiative to increase the size of his blunders and the damage they cause – to his own side.

      Admittedly, I have a selfish hope that they will turn to finding some foreign scapegoat to attack instead of making further assaults on our liberty. The problem for us all, Americans and Iranians and everyone else on this planet – is exactly this gang of “traitors and aliens that are the true plague” as you point out.

      • Daydreaming: it’s interesting to conjecture, to what extents will the government’s idiocy grow to, to the point where increasing numbers of its functionaries begin to have ethical qualms, pangs of conscience, or whatever you’d like to call it? Those of us on the outside may envision the typical solider, officer, or career bureacrat as some monolithic automaton, who obeys orders without question, no matter how illogical. Yes, this must exist to some extent. But my curiousity is along these lines: For any given individual, there must be some point beyond which he will refuse to go, or at least become confused. Girls in combat units was recently mentioned. Even as junior enlisted we were taught that some orders could be disobeyed, recalling the horrors of the Third Reich. But that’s rare. But what about increasingly arbitrary, some even illegal, orders? Or for that matter, orders that are some combination of irrational or impossible to execute, even if the minion is willing? What happens if/when we get to the point where there is not just one, but a hundred Snowdens at the NSA or CIA? Or not just one, but several commanding officers begin to question insane orders from above? It doesn’t have to be outright rebellion or mutiny, of course. Already, the Libs are scared to death of all those Trumpsts or otherwise conservatives in the military ranks. There probably are a lot of our guys in there. At some point, some of these may start to be passive-aggressive, or find other ways to throw sand in the gears. If your enemy offers you a weakness, perhaps you should take him up on it. I’m not saying become a traitor to your country. But at some point, it’s no longer your country, so what have you got to lose?

        Perhaps the chance of this happening right now is very small, but going forward, it is certainly possible. And, as clown world continues its show, increasingly probable, I’d argue.

  22. With Trump out of the picture, and CV-19 on it’s way out, American and European politicians are going to start finding them selves much more interesting to the media.

  23. If anyone catches wind of a manner in which to get documents showing you’ve had the jab it would be helpful to share it here, exercising as much caution as you feel necessary. I assume it’ll come down to a little baksheesh with a vibrant “health care provider” but desperate times and all that.

    • The state of Wyoming health department has a very useful PDF posted on their site.

      There are tons of people sharing crystal clear pics of their jab cards on social media.

      You know what to do.

  24. The Road Back (cont)
    We’re all coders now.

    Who needs mechanics, plumbers, & electricians when you can earn a gazillion dollars learning to code (plus fame & status, just ask a nerd)? The Elites love to snarl that we don’t need no stinkin’ tradesman with dirt under their fingernails. The workingman of the future drinks a latte while tickling a keyboard in his custom cubicle adorned with sci-fantasy artwork. Well, it’s time to give them a taste of a world without construction workers and repairmen, and let that reality sink in for a while. Perhaps a coordinated two-week vacation can be arranged right before the next voter fraud exercise. That would be kind of interesting.

    14
    1
  25. That paper on the political economy is interesting but they also acknowledge that we are in uncharted territory because what stops these panics is private property on the borders of the panics and now that we’re turning this into a global Panic there are no borders to the panic, place to stop it and also course we’re destroying private property.
    I see more malevolence in this than the Z man. But I’m less of an optimist about this Earthly Realm

  26. One possible improvement: hospital sanitation. Talk to an old RN in her 80s, and it was way better back in the 1960s, before standards slackened. COVID has improved that, at least for a while.

    • The best place to acquire a disease is in a hospital. And like a pharmacy, you can choose from a wide array of disease variants, even some pretty exotic pathogens. Just sayin’.

      11
  27. Oh, and notice how any new versions of the kung fru are now being referred to as “variants” instead of old fashioned strains or mutations – makes it sound so much scarier. I swear, the perversion of the English language and addition of bull**** words into the lexicon – continuously repeated and amplified by the mad stream media is off the fricking charts.

    13
    • You should see all the word salad trash Covid research being pumped out by the universities.

  28. One part of this whole Covidian Wokeness we have been living through that really stuck with me revolves around the way that people will spitefully torture other people when given permission to do so, which I guess I hadn’t seen in real life up to now. Sort of like how the Red Guards enthusiastically attacked old teachers and business men in China as the cultural revolution unfolded. Or how poor people in Russia attacked the kulaks under Communism. We have millions and millions of crazy women, loney women, angry non-white guys, etc… a whole rainbow of people… who have felt so wronged by society that they are happy to torture their fellow citizens the first chance they get. Democracy will not last in this context. Nobody believes in other people’s rights anymore. It started with the War on Terror though. That was a theatrical event that imposed policing on every aspect of life and everyone went along with it because of… fear and loathing of muslim terrorists. What goes around comes around as they say. It’s all well and good for America to have spent decades imposing vicious regimes on the world for profit but you can’t sit around moaning when the world turns the tables. The CIA used to and probably still does run black site prisons. That same tech will be used against us someday.

    22
    • well, there was that famous study/test where they made people think they had control over giving another person an electrical shock when they answered a question incorrectly. the experiment (which was filmed) got more than one person to administer what they thought was extremely painful – or even fatal – shocks, under urging from the people running the experiment.

    • That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of the nagging, brainless compliance and attempted shaming as a form of torture of others but I believe that’s accurate. Besides levels of cowardice that shouldn’t even be possible what else could be motivating the Face Diaper Gang’s behavior?

      My husband and I met up with a couple friends for dinner over the weekend and while we were waiting for our table, all diapered up of course, we noticed another couple we all knew at the bar. They dutifully put on the diaper and joined us. It was overwhelming bizarre to be standing around in public having this mangled social interaction with people we’ve known for 20 years. Eyes without a face, embarrassed and frustrated. As soon as the table was ready I ran for it. This isn’t living. It’s free-range Gitmo.

      17
      1
      • “with people we’ve known for 20 years.”

        You’ll know them better now, my dear. I have had similar experiences and it has been an eye opener. I am dropping quite a lot of acquaintances. Sad, but not really worth the effort.

        14
    • Your comment is an almost perfect example of what Nietzsche discusses In The Genealogy of Morals. Man has a primitive desire to impose suffering upon others; to some extent he delights in sadism, you could say. Nietzsche is discussing early contract law and custom. When a debtor could not pay, the creditor obtained the right to injure him in some way, up to tortue and death in some cases. RELEVANT: in such a position,the creditor TEMPORARILY obtains the right to so dispense “justice,” to EXERT CONTROL OVER ANOTHER. He gets an ego boost. Usually this privelege was reserved to the ruler only. So at bottom it is the attraction of having the power of the strong over the weak, hapless victim. Barbaric cruelty was the norm, including in the West, until near-modern times (Enlightenment). It’s only a small generalization to move from one-on-one battle to a government that acts as the only legal dispenser of justice and punishment. Creepy stuff, but very logically argued. The Mask Karens or the grade school hallway monitors are just very mild modern examples of these human traits.

      So by all means shun the mask. In doing so, you are, to a tiny extent at least, getting the approval by Neitzsche’s ghost, if you will, for you are being an Ubermensch, living by your own principles, not those of the herd, the sheep people.

  29. The new hysteria will be a replay of the old hysteria of climate change. Same playbook with a dash of panic over white supremacist insurrection thrown in

    • It will actually be fascinating to watch how the new ‘Covid Industrial Complex’ emerges. I wonder if it’s path will parallel that of the ‘Climate Change Industrial Complex’. Indeed, new hysteria, old grifts.

  30. Zman, have you read any of Marshall Mcluhan’s writings? I only have a surface level understanding of his concepts (if that) but it does seem that his theories are in line with your post today.

    Here is an interesting theory. When we are dreaming (in REM sleep) our brain does not know it is a dream – and this is by design. A chemical is released to paralyze the voluntary muscles. a failure in this mechanism results in “sleep walking”; when you are walking in a dream, your brain is sending impulses to your legs to actually move.

    So we know there is one pathway into our consciousness, that bypasses direct experience. Maybe there is another such pathway, say, through the eyes in the form of high quality video. IMO there is a very strong likelihood that humans really are susceptible to being “programmed” by what they watch.

    Cronenberg’s “Videodrome” is a fun movie on this theme.

    16
    • Haven’t seen “Videodrome”, but a similar theme is in 1994’s “Brainscan” *. A video game disc (apparently) hypnotizes the player into doing real-world mayhem. The blurred border between dreams and waking reality is, of course, a classic in literature. In Spanish Lit we studied de la Barca’s 1635 “Life is a Dream” (English title):
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_a_Dream

      *A total bomb. I don’t recognize any of the names, except music by George Clinton, long washed-up leader of 70s funk groups Parliament and Funkadelic.

  31. If a female scold is a Karen, what is a male scold called.
    I had the pleasure of going to my favorite bakery in a short sleeve shirt and as usual, no mask. There was a guy in the corner when I entered who had on a stocking cap, parka and boots. The guy was ready to tackle Everest. In addition, he had a heavy duty mask on with not one, but two filter canisters.

    He started berating me about “where your mask? You wanna kill us all”? He then proceeded to motherf**k me up and down as he scrambled for the door. I ignored him as the staff diverted their eyes.

    I think the best way to deal with these dingbats is to ignore them.

    25
    • Julius Evola said that one cannot be free if one fears death. A non spiritual and economic man is just an easily manipulated little orc.

      28
      • I like the quote attributed to Woody Allen: “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” A variant, and I think more valid, observation: “I’m not afraid of death; it’s dying that scares the hell out of me.” Leaving aside any msytical claim to other worlds or life beyond death, that second statemnent is logicaly valid: when a person is dead, the self (presumably) no longer exists. There is no sense data, and no functioning brain to process the stumuli. In contrast, the process of dying can be — but doesn’t have to be — painful, panicky, etc. 🙁

        One thing we all can do, no matter our religious beliefs or lack thereof: We all get the chance to leave something behind, children, legacy, etc. We can therefore work to leave something good, or be careless, and leave a mess, behind.

    • imagine the horror show inside that guy’s head! next time tell the person you are a muslim and they are attacking allah, and could you please have their name and address for the imam.

      17
    • Always remember to laugh at them. It not only humiliates them, but it will signal to any witnesses that, yes, they’re the sane ones for questioning all this. They need to be reminded of that because on the flip side there’s the omnipresent firehose of propaganda telling them to question their instincts.

      I never wear a mask in my local Wally World, and I’m almost always the only one out of 200-300 people inside without one. Yet, I’ve not had a single person go Karen on me. That leads me to believe that there has to be a large cohort who would gladly strip their masks if they weren’t fearful of the disapprobation of others. On those rare occasions where I cross paths with another person minus the fag rag — and it’s always a white male — we instinctively give each other the knowing head nod.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_rvE_8naJI

      28
      • Yes. There are those who are mask fanatics. And there are those (us) who are probably anti-mask fanatics. And as with everything there is a middle ground occupied by large swathes of people. Perhaps some of these people just don’t know. Maybe some which they didn’t have to wear the mask, but go along anyway.

        The shamdemic has taught us all, as if we needed a reminder, of how easy it is to normalize something that yesteryear would have seen us laughing at.

        It should also serve as a reminder that rightists generally come up with better insults. For example, I have heard the term ‘CovIdiot’ used to define my non-mask compliance behaviour. I have used the excellent and peerless term ‘Branch Covidian’ to refer to the orthodox mask wearers. Whoever came up with that, good on you, laddy!

        10
        • Those able to think critically in evaluating the dogma, assertions and pronouncements of persons in positions of authority would benefit from adopting some of the tactics of the left. For example, the left refers to those who critically view holocaust, anthropogenic global warming and Covid dogma as ‘Deniers’. Well, from my perspective, at least ‘denier’ implies that the target of the epithet can at least think independently so why not own it. And therefore why not adopt the term ‘Believer’, in the sense of Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, in reference to those on the left?. The term implies naive, unquestioning acceptance and herdlike response to dogma as in a religion, which may be anathema to, and with luck, cause a recognition of their own cognitive dissonance in, at least some of those to whom it is applied.

          10
        • Yeah, Branch Covidian is a great term. Let’s hope they all piss off into the jungle some time soon and top themselves.😉

    • Several months ago I was in line at the grocery store. Sans Karen Kloth, naturally. Well, there was some dude behind me muttering. And some of the words were curse words. At first I assumed he was just yacking into an electronic device, but then it occurred to me that he was angry I wasn’t wearing a mask. So I turned around and the muttering stopped. I turned around a minute later and he was nowhere to be seen.

    • I’ve only been hassled about not wearing a mask outside three times and each time it’s been an older white male.

  32. Virtually everyone we know, family or friends, have either gotten their jabs or are scheduled to get them/it. No one even questions the efficacy or potential, unknown risks and consequences. I just shake my head and wonder if I’m the crazy one – not willing to get it for the sake of society or the elderly or whoever… One way or another, the (((powers))) that be are going do their damnedest to force it on everyone. “Be a good little sheeple comrade and roll up your sleeve – do your part to save your community, country and the world – we can’t get back to “normal” without your help”.

    30
    • It is amazing isn’t it. Everyone wants it. I do know a couple people against it. Two of us are not experiencing external pressure but the third is experiencing a lot. She’s offered to get a rapid covid test right before every family gathering. I don’t know if that will be enough

      15
      • A local high school a block down from my friend’s small business is apparently a COVID shot site. She repeatedly has trouble getting to work because the cars are lined up for over a mile each morning. The first time I saw it I thought it was some massive accident, but just yesterday on the way home from the gym I again passed a line of cars stretching around the corner and all the way up to the next main road, desperate to get their magic shots. Utter madness.

    • “Virtually everyone we know, family or friends, have either gotten their jabs or are scheduled to get them/it. No one even questions the efficacy or potential, unknown risks and consequences. I just shake my head and wonder if I’m the crazy one…”

      I’m in similar circumstances. Covid was yet another social-phenomena which made it harder for me to relate with my community and society in general. Its hard to stand by and “go along to get along” as everyone becomes hysterical. They start making demands and judgements upon you because you yourself are not joining in the hysteria. Like everything else, it makes you second guess yourself, its a form of gas-lighting.

      I saw my little sister over the weekend. She is supposed to have a wedding this summer, but the metro area where the wedding is to be held has a limit on gatherings and has even banned “dancing” all-together. She believes in the hysterics though, so I just have to nod along, “Aww shux, that’s too bad, hopefully this all clears up soon.” I’ve tried to politely provide more context, but it just won’t stick.

      17
      • If you’re not a Covid hysteric, you’re not part of the team. You’re a bad citizen. It’s kind of like refusing to watch the Super Bowl. But America’s team is Team Crazy.

    • Start writing down the vendors and lot numbers they post on their social media.

      Could be very handy later.

    • Definitely not crazy to want to avoid taking part in what amounts to a mass medical experiment. Looks like a potential Darwin award to me.

      16
  33. Heh. At one point the BBC was listing ‘deaths within 28 days of testing positive for Covid’. Make of that what you will.

    All the while, the Diamond Princess slowly gets memory-holed. Let’s face it, the chance of a virus so deadly that it wipes out 80% of Earth’s population seems pretty unlikely. Imagine how lucky you’d have to be to witness such an event? For one thing, it probably won’t happen as it will just be too damn exciting.

    14
    1
    • Just this morning I revisited an article from a year ago on the Diamond Princess from Anthony Watts’s website. The author overstated the IFR by quite a bit, figuring it at 1.2, and totally whiffed on the ultimate number of U.S. deaths, but the general numbers in terms of infection couldn’t have been laid out any clearer. And then they were calamitously ignored. Sieg Health!

      83% of the people on the ship didn’t get it, despite perfect conditions for transmission. If you get it, you have about a 50/50 chance of showing no symptoms at all. And the fatality rate is lower than the earlier estimates of 2% or above.

      https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/03/16/diamond-princess-mysteries/

      12
      • From memory, the Diamond Princess was carrying about 3,700 souls. Of these, 20% got infected, which is about 750 people. Of the infected, I think 12 died. And this in a cruise ship. A cruise which was locked down, and hence the occupants confined within it, for a fair while. The best chance the Chinese Virus had to do it’s thing, and it failed harder than a black diversity hire.

        And one more thing, those that died were in a certain age range. And it wasn’t 0-55. I think the youngest was 69, but who knows, maybe more have ‘died’ now.

        14
      • For a financial web site, I recently figured the casualties for nearby (to me) Sumter County FL (oldest average age in entire USA). 0.16% of the populace. And the population is nto just geezers, of course. We have our typical smokers, drunks, drug users, the morbidly obese, etc. I’m pretty sure those figures are cumulative since the pandemic started. Now granted, I’m not sure what the IFR, CFR definitions are, but a widespread killer, COVID-19 most certainly is NOT.

    • The Diamond Princess was the giveaway. It was the perfect experiment for the worst case scenario. Older people trapped on a ship where they’re repeatedly exposed.

      The fact only a tiny number died and, I think, ~20% caught the virus showed that this virus was nothing to worry about. We had proof.

      And just like that, nobody talked about the Diamond Princess.

      22
      • There was also that US aircraft carrier that was placed on quarantine because some sailers on board became infected. I waited around to hear how that turned out. Crickets. I’m guessing the infection rate among a young, healthy population of sailers was not very great.

        10
        • Sorry Mr. Epaminondas,

          All the sailors put on masks, so everyone was ok.
          As an added bonus, the masks also kept tigers away.
          Science!

          12
        • I forgot about the Theodore Roosevelt. Approximately 5000 sailors on board, all of whom were tested. Infections totaled 1156, with one death. With the Navy’s newfound love of obese hood rats, the deaths should have been much higher, no? The numbers are little different than on the Diamond Princess, with a ballpark figure of 20% infections. And with a younger group of people, the IFR was statistical insignificant at 0.0008.

    • Sorry, accidentally downvoted when I meant to reply. If it was a certain targeted 80% of the population that was wiped out, I’d be cheering and jumping with joy. I know, I know, I have an evil black heart. But I’m quite serious about how happy that would make me.

      • In my relatively rural area, we are blessed with at least two (!) Jehovah’s Witnesses “Kingdom Halls.” Now I have nothing against these people, other than they occasionally knock on my door and try and give me a copy of the Watchtower. But my point? Unless I’m mistaken, they refuse vaccination for religious reasons. I’d be curious how our Uber-Liberal government would treat that? Religious exemption is allowed for many things, including combat duty, so why not the jab?

  34. EU has agreed on a Vaccination passport. Another right-wing extremist conspiracy theory becoming reality.

    They will be pushing the jab every year. Just like the flu shot. Same scam, but much tougher consequences if you refuse. Still totally voluntary though.

    36
    • That’s also my take as a long-term consequence of the Covid panic: you’ll need a health passport/vaccination certificate to do just about anything. Year’s ago I remember having a WHO vaccination record (as a result of a trip to India) and I don’t mind required vaccinations for dreadful diseases such as yellow fever if you plan to enter an area in which such diseases are present. But an experimental vaccine against a fairly low-risk virus just to take the train?! But that’s clearly where we’re headed, courtesy of Big Pharma and their allies.

      • One day, we will be nostalgic for the good old days when we were only ruled by the bankers and the military-industrial complex.

    • That’s so funny: you will have to reintroduce border controls as a result, and the abolition of border controls was the main point to make the EU palatable to the people…

  35. As time goes by, I’m becoming more and more pro-Covid.

    You know you’ll miss it once it’s gone.
    I remember last March, when the TV’s local news was entirely about Corona Virus .. they hadn’t yet dreamed up the sexy name Covid; the news had no time to cover the usual car accidents, house fires, traffic jams, the human interest stories about some disdvantaged person trying to find their way in the world, weather and sports. No, it was non-stop Corona Virus.
    I miss those days.
    I remember the banging of pots and pans every evening at 7:00, to honor the front-line workers; The tearful stories about the survivors, the tik-tok nurses.
    It all was like a war, it gave us purpose and meaning for our lives. What ‘ave we got now? Back to our boring little cubbyholes, our vapid dumb jobs, our remaining friends and family, if we have any.
    No, not like a war. It was like being in one of those immersive Theater pieces, where the audience gets to be part of the play. We all had such Important roles!

    that might have been satire.
    but maybe not.

    posting anonymously this time.

    23
    1
  36. The few children I see outside playing are wearing masks, or at least more than half are. Where are the men stopping this nonsense? Probably inside playing video games. Whatever follows will be just as absurd and detrimental to our life now.

    Remember all the squawking and rebellious talk after the Patriot act , creation of Homeland security and the TSA.? Yeah, all part of life that most accept now.

    39
    • Agreed. The theatre will never end. The cloud people and their minions have the blueprint now on how to create and propagate hysteria whenever they want. And they will always want it as it gives them the power they crave, and with fixed elections now there is no longer any fear of looking bad or “owning” the crisis. They have no competition. There can be no dissent. Political resistance is futile.

      36
      • except, they are fukking over their own people at the same time they are fukking their opponents over. this is Götterdämmerung, pure and simple; the death of the system in its entirety.

        13
    • “Where are the men stopping this nonsense? Probably inside playing video games.”

      Western society is not an honor bound warrior society, meaning western men are sheep. It’s an either/or situation.

      18
      • The other day I got a compliment — from a woman, no less — about my outright refusal to wear the Karen Kloth. It was surreal, but it gives me hope.

        (My secret? Disability. “Could you put on a mask for me, sir?” “Nope, sorry, I’ve got a disability – I can’t wear one.” Let *them* figure out if it’s worth it to call the manager over for a little chat, and if he does come over, let *him* figure out if it’s worth the inevitable lawsuit to ask a “disabled” guy to either put on the mask or leave the store. And if he actually has the sand to ask you what your “disability” is, give him both barrels, Greta Thunberg-style: “You doubt I’m disabled? How dare you, sir? How DARE you!!!” It’s hilarious).

        33
        • It is an offense against Bush the Wrinkled’s American with Disabilities Act (of course they do). I believe it’s $40,000 per pop.
          It is also an offense against HIPAA. under a “Security Rule” imagined by Bush the Lesser in 2005,

      • Having recently acquired some heard animals I’ve begun thinking this characterization is unfair…to sheep. Sheep group together out of safety and know that they’re under constant threat and are alert to those who wish them harm. There’s not much they can do it about for sure, but still, that’s still an improvement over the current state.

        13
        • Yes. At least the threats facing sheep are real. What’s the Covidians’ excuse?

  37. They also need to maintain the panic a little longer to make it look like Biden saved us.

    24
    • You have to wonder what it will take for the public to lose its fear. Whose signal are they waiting on? Fauci? The Dept. of HHS? El Presidente? Some form of media consensus? The helplessness of our population in the face of this panic has been the most troubling aspect of it. I’ve never been so disappointed in my fellow citizens as I have in the past year.

      66
      • “You have to wonder what it will take for the public to lose its fear. Whose signal are they waiting on?”

        just as women are waiting for gay designers to set fashion trends, so is the overall feminized western population waiting for its social justice representatives to point in a general direction regarding viruses and any other faggoty topics.

        31
        • It’s also likely we’ll need to wait until the hero worship dies down, or our heroes get tired of the adulation, or until everyone (except white men) are acclaimed as heroes. Then we can move on to the next crisis and invent a new set of heroes.

      • I believe the scolders will react favorably only when the MSM tells them they can start to take the diapers off. Times I have been confronted for no mask I have always asked when or if they would ever feel “safe”. The answer I get is, “they’ll tell us”.

        13
        • These twits never thought a critical thought in their entire miserable lives.

      • I vacillate between what has shocked me most this past year: 1-the ease with which the public accepted and obeyed the most outrageous COVID restrictions, or 2-the almost complete capitulation of the public health and medical fields to the hysteria. That one had been a gut punch for me. I am a RN and it has shocked me at how silent people are at the hospital. Before COVID doctors at my hospital debated all sorts of things. What treatment approach they liked, what they didn’t, what they did or did not suspect about a particular drug. I hear none of that about COVID or the vaccines. When the vaccines rolled out all I heard was how excited everyone was. Not a peep about safety concerns. Now I have had doctors refuse to give some patients Tylenol because of certain health conditions but no – the vaccines are 100% safe for 100% of the population. I have had a couple of doctor admit they no longer feel they can just discuss certain things. It is like this all happened so slowly and then all at once.

        23
        • People pushing the ‘shots’ are the reason to avoid the ‘shots’ at all cost. The ‘shot’ pushers are part of the death cult.

        • Speculating: perhaps COVID-19 was treated differently because at least at first, it was unclear how dangerous a pathogen it was. I’m still of the opinion that SARS-CoV-2 is an escaped lab experiment. We don’t have to debate it here,but there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence. The risk of a relased bio-weapon alone would patially explain the early panic/caution as the virus spread. May I also emphasize that I’m a layman, retired, so my career etc. isn’t at risk, dare I broach such opinions? Millions of others are in the position of the famous Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

Comments are closed.