The Reopening Moo

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Will you Moooo like a good Corona Cow when the ranchers who are “the government” decree that businesses may reopen provided the workers – and customers – mask up?

The ranchers have already decreed masks mandatory in several states and – weirdly – more people seem to be wearing masks even though not yet mandated in other areas. Which is weird given that by now it is obvious – or ought to be – that WuFlu is a much greater threat to our liberty than our health.

Except for a few concentrated areas of population – and stupidity – such as New York, where Rancher Cuomo ordered oldsters with WuFlu to be housed with other oldsters (already weak) in nursing homes, assuring lots of oldsters would die from WuFlu – the number of people who’ve died from WuFlu is so low it would have gone unnoticed in normal times.

In Virginia, for instance, fewer than 500 over the past four months. This in a state with a population of nearly nine million people. The hospitals in Virginia and many other states are dying  . . . for customers. They are going broke from lack of patients – and billing. See, for example, this plea to Rancher Coonman from the Virginia Hospital and Health Care Association, which speaks for 125,000 people employed by Virginia hospitals. They beg the Coonman to allow – such servile, despicable verbiage – hospitals to resume treating other than the Corona’d, of which there are far too few.

Beds are empty; thousands of surplus respirators collecting dust – while people without Corona wait to get a date for their knee surgeries and so on, which have been put on indefinite hold by the Coonman.

A thoughtful brain might ask: If the hospitals aren’t “overwhelmed” with the Corona’d – as was promised in the direst manner imaginable by the Coonman and the “experts,” including the Billy Kristol of epidemiology, Dr. Fauci – then why are more people joining the masked herd?

People not wearing masks a month ago are now wearing them – even though they haven’t yet been ordered to wear them.

Why?

In part, because more and more businesses appear to be anticipating the order to insist on mask-wearing as a condition of being allowed to “reopen” – oh, thank you, massa! – and are being “proactive.” They understandably do not want to go broke, though that is probably already inevitable for the majority of them. And they intuit that “reopening” will be conditional on their compliance with Sickness Pantomime . . . in the form of must-wear-masking.

This, in turn, applies pressure on customers to mask-wear, in order to be allowed – that vile word, again – to shop. To get food.

This is how the ranchers are conditioning the head-bowed, mooing servility of the cattle – who after all, need to eat.

Most people will do as they are told, even when they shouldn’t – out of mortal terror of . . . raising a stink. Americans have been conditioned to such a state of passive poltroonery that is almost impossible to accept it as fact. And yet, look around.

If authority – even just the authority of the door minder at a big box store – says boo, most of them say mooo! 

Stand there! Wait here! Walk in between the taped lines!

What degradation imposed as a condition of being allowed to live will they not accept?

Mask wearing means accepting the lie that WuFlu means death – as Rancher Cuomo says it does. Except it doesn’t – even in the hottest of WuFlu spots. Most – more than 99.5 percent – of the nearly 10 million people who live there haven’t died, although their lives have been taken away.

Accepting the lie that WuFlu equals death rather than a bad cold for some and not even symptoms for most (85 percent of “cases” are asymptomatic, according to Rancher Fauci himself) means accepting that dressing up like Michael Jackson is reasonable, sane – and vitally necessary.

For WuFlu – for any flu.

Forever, probably.

Well, until a vaccine is available – courtesy of Rancher Gates – which everyone will be forced to submit to as a condition of being allowed to live – allowed to buy food – on the same basis as mandatory mask-wearing.

Which is why – if it is allowed to get any traction – mask wearing will be the death of the mask-wearers’ freedom to say no to anything the ranchers demand of them in order to be allowed to live. But not just their freedom – which would be ok, if that’s the way they like it.

In a free country, people have the right to live as quavering poltroons – as gimps in old crates, if they wish. They have every right to be free to submit to mask-wearing, ear tagging and anything else that eases their anxieties.

BDSM – golden showers, even – is every free person’s right.

The outrage – which must be fought, ferociously, before it becomes the “new normal” – is permitting these poltroons, addled by Sickness Psychosis – to rescind our freedom for the sake of their anxieties.

To force us, via the rip-tide effect, to play Sickness Kabuki, too.

At all costs – fines, arrest even – do not wear the Fear Mask. And thank every person you see who isn’t wearing one, for not wearing one.

Unless you don’t mind being required to wear one – and more to come.

. . .

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199 COMMENTS

  1. To pour salt on the wound, masks are not only ineffective; they also provide perfect breeding grounds for bacteria, thus exacerbating the problem.

    Another thing to point out is the now widespread use of “one-way” aisles in the stores because forcing everyone to wear masks is not enough. Gee, wonder if they’ll start implementing speed limits as well? Can’t wait until people get “pulled over” for walking faster than a snail’s pace. lol

  2. the problem with the people whom are wearing masks is we can still hear the air that escapes from their cowardly mouths

  3. “One unused prophylactic…one SOILED…” At least Jake’s ride from the joint, though it’d done most of its useful life for “The Man” (The City of Mt. Prospect, IL, Police Department), had “a ‘cop’ motor, ‘cop’ tires, ‘cop’ shocks’, a 440 ‘plant’ made before catalytic converters, so it’d run ‘good’ on regular i.e., leaded gasoline”. Back when a car that you could see, in various trims (like the comparable Chrysler Newport or New Yorker, or Plymouth Gran Fury), in any driveway, not only in Greater Chicagoland, but AMERICA, and when it fired up, it just bellowed, “FUCK YOU!”

  4. Living in Canada, we’ve been mooing for quite a while now.

    That said, mandatory or not, I’m working up some kind of dystopian look to strap on during Seniors Hour (pathetic) shopping excursions. Throw on goggles, black Bears cap, hoodie, light duty tactical gloves, fix-the-car jeans and my old biker boots. We’ll then see how look Old Ma’ chooses to block the aisle and linger over the broccoli in the produce section . . .

  5. Masks are now mandatory for shopping excursions in Harris County, Texas, but neither I nor anyone in my family will wear one. On the first day the mask order went into effect, April 27, our regular grocer turned away my son for lack of a mask. We shopped in an adjacent, less-tyrannical county that day. Since then, for reasons unknown, both of the major grocers in our town have decided that customers are a good thing, with or without masks. We have shopped mask-less at both stores without incident since. I would estimate that about 80% of the human cattle at these stores comply with the rancher’s mask order. We just assume that they’ve been complying with government orders their entire lives, beginning with “stay in line” orders in government schools, and the poor souls never found their spines.

    • I have not and will not wear one of those “face diapers”. I stole that term from another post here and that’s my new name for these abominations. I am not a Dr., nor do I play one on TV but I saw an article a while back by an M.D. whose name escapes me. His opinion was that the masks worn long term could actually be harmful to healthy folks. We all have dormant viruses in us (shingles is caused by the chicken pox virus that re-activates). When we exhale, we exhale co2 and the mask traps that and we re-breath some of the co2 . Excess co2 has been shown to re-activate dormant viruses….Makes sense to me.

      • Thanks, Bluesman,
        Spread the lingo. 🙂
        See if we can get it in some online slang dictionaries.

        I’ll stand by my opinion that pols (a.k.a. parasites) are the one and only population for which their use should be mandatory, for (obviously chronic) verbal diarrhea.

        WHO does NOT recommend their use for us “normals,” a.k.a. sentient human beings.

    • Yes, and reading news stories about what happened they have already started to blame the protesters for “spreading the virus.” This is the plan for phase two of coronaphobia according to some sources. Blame the protesters, the non-compliers, for causing the second wave. Watch it develop.

    • Guys, my point is that these authoritarian politicians are playing with FIRE, and if they’re not careful, they WILL get burned! Increasing numbers of people on the verge of losing everything; the situation simply can’t go on like this. If our “leaders” don’t relent, then they may see WHY the Founders put the 2A in the COTUS…

    • I have chosen to go with the Abu Nidal look.
      Black cotton balaclava, long sleeved black tee shirt.
      The cotton balaclava can be had for as little as $0.99.
      The ones I chose say they were intended for use under a motorcycle helmet.
      Available in many colors. Top of head is covered; only the eyes are visible.
      I bought a dozen, in black, not knowing how long this hysteria might last.

      I’ll see your “doctor costume,” and raise you an Islamic terrorist.
      I do have two more black tee shirts on order, with white Arabic script which supposedly says “God is great” (I don’t read Arabic).
      We’ll see what happens.
      So far, no problems.
      I’ll bet if anyone walked into a store in the USA two months ago dressed like that, the police would have been called.

  6. I choose to wear a mask when I shop for groceries, just to be polite. Yes, the fears of the paranoid aren’t really my problem, but it’s an easy enough gesture. When I go hiking, I’m maskless (I DON’T need anything restricting my breathing, thank you very much), though many hikers, probably over half, are wearing masks.

    • Hi Jdl,

      I appreciate the sentiment (because I know it’s coming from you, from the right place) but – please – don’t help to legitimize this Sickness Psychosis. The stakes are extremely high. If this insanity is normalized, it will be legalized – and enforced. And then we live inside the psycho ward, forever.

      • What utterly gets me is seeing people wearing a mask while driving THEIR cars (not a shared vehicle, where at least wearing gloves might be prudent), ALONE, and especially a late model vehicle, WINDOWS UP, where the cabin air filter has a sieve pore diameter about 100x smaller than that paper mask they’re wearing. And BTW, I do at times wear a RESPIRATOR, with different types of cartridge filters in my work, and per OSHA guidelines have to do a “fit test” (once I’ve put it on, the tester opens up a cartridge of a very foul-smelling but otherwise harmless odorant, which, if the fit isn’t tight, would cause me to at least get very queasy, and often vomit), and I’ll gauren-damn-tee their masks aren’t anywhere near as effective!

        Methinks it’s gotten all too easy to bullshit the herd into stampeding right over a cliff.

        • Wish I’d had one last night. Don’t know what CJ ate but his farts would peel wallpaper…..all night.

    • Greetings from Corona CA 92882.
      Here in western Riverside County, the propaganda broadcasts are starting to call these abominations “face coverings” instead of masks. Guess they are afraid the Lone Ranger might show up. At the very least, they will be exposed as being nearly worthless as PPE.* I have been thrown out of a Rite Aid, and told not to come back, for not wearing one. Fine. They can put it where the sun doesn’t shine.
      I suggest we change the terminology once more.
      How does “face diaper” sound to you?
      Now, if we could just require all pols to wear one at all times…
      (I say, council member, doesn’t your face diaper need changing? Sure smells like it to me.)

      *I’ve worked in the petrochemical industry, and have 40 hr HAZWOPER training, which means I know what is involved with various levels of respiratory protection in that environment, up to and including SCBA.
      Even a dust mask respirator (N95) requires a tight fit to be of any use.
      Anything less is a farce.
      A tight fit is not possible for males with facial hair below the upper lip.
      See here for details:
      https://youtu.be/4JyIKxFl7QE
      More from the same qualified professional on masks in medical situations:
      https://youtu.be/1apfZ0uC-Fs
      Bottom line: WHO does NOT recommend routine wearing of masks by the general public.
      More of Dr. Hansen’s vids here:
      https://doctormikehansen.com/videos/
      (FWIW, he rides a Harley. 🙂

      This would be hilarious if it were not evil.
      It is all about docility training, i.e. unquestioned submission to a-thor-i-tay.

      End the masquerade, NOW.

      • (Charges by on horse back yelling)
        The Maskies are coming! The Maskies are coming! Oops, here come the nice young men, in their clean white coats… ^^
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnzHtm1jhL4

        Look guys, I totally understand how serious the situation is, but pointing and laughing at people who have been terrified out of their minds, is counter productive. Anyone who has studied how the States “educational” system was set up, knows that it isn’t broken. Its doing exactly what the Monsters at the start of the 20th century designed it to do. It has produced generations of Obedient,Docile, Ignorant, Indoctrinated, Consumerist Sheep. To expect those sheep to suddenly act like wolves, is not only foolish, but unrealistic.

        John Taylor Gatto spoke at length on the subject. Education is both our Bane as well as the only salvation we are likely to see. Here are his words. I’m posting this here, to avoid the word press moderation for non white listed URLs. Sorry for the length, but he deals with the subject far better than I ever could.

        Why Schools Don’t Educate
        by John Taylor Gatto

        I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I’ve known over the years who’ve struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word “education” should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

        We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom. The world’s narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn’t buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse – and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

        Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent – nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

        I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching – that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic – it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

        Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

        Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy’s office released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990. I hope that interests you.

        Here is another curiosity to think about. The homeschooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and a half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents. Last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

        I don’t think we’ll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we’re going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution “schools” very well, but it does not “educate” – that’s inherent in the design of the thing. It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

        Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

        To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this. But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic – because the community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead. The products of schooling are, as I’ve said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

        The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that – as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago – we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.

        It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.

        It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.

        It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its “homework”.

        “How will they learn to read?” you say and my answer is “Remember the lessons of Massachusetts.” When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

        But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers, we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the “basics” anymore because they really aren’t basic to the society we’ve made.

        Two institutions at present control our children’s lives – television and schooling, in that order. Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stopping abstraction. In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to become a whole man or woman.

        But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:

        Out of the 168 hours in each week, my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.

        My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

        My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework – a total of 45 hours. During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time – not much, because they’ve lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.

        It’s not enough. It’s not enough, is it? The richer the kid, or course, the less television he watches but the rich kid’s time is just as narrowly proscribed by a somewhat broader catalog of commercial entertainments and his inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his actual choice.

        And these things are oddly enough just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It’s a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons – the entire Chautauqua idea – has a lot to do with it.

        Think of the things that are killing us as a nation – narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all – lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy – all of them are addictions of dependent personalities, and that is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.

        I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them – time they need to grow up – and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this, because no reform that doesn’t attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.

        The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
        The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
        The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
        The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
        The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

        • Hi BJ,

          I understand what you (and Gatto) are saying but at the same time, I think it is wildly dangerous to let mask-wearing establish itself by allowing it to be taken seriously; in other words, mask-wearing must be opposed – and mocked. Learn from Alinsky. The SOB wasn’t stupid. Mocking authority is one of the most effective ways to undermine it.

          • I’ve not found mocking, nor anything else, to be effective – even with non-authority (such as the maskies you bump into in the grocery store).

            But I do find it to be good clean fun – when context appropriate.

            When not appropriate, it is nothing but symbolic excess – the wrong tool – wasteful.

        • Gatto’s good stuff.

          But…the Prussian model & all that jazz attenuated what was already there.

          Massmannishness is normal. Following orders is normal. Belief in authority is normal.

          Attenuation sought, as it always does, as it is doing now, to wring out more than before. That’s all.

          The freaks & the *already terrified* fooks what love ‘em can never have enough, get enough – until they have, at least in their own febrile minds, it all.

          There is nothing out there to scapegoat. Responsibilities are in individual – that are terrified of being that, too – mirrors.

          Education? Just another deity. Which is to say wizoz strawman.

      • Next Part. Word press has other limitations…

        The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I’ve known in this respect – they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
        The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically “grade” everything – and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
        The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

        I could name a few other conditions that school reform would have to tackle if our national decline is to be arrested, but by now you will have grasped my thesis, whether you agree with it or not. Either schools have caused these pathologies, or television, or both. It’s a simple matter [of] arithmetic, between schooling and television all the time the children have is eaten away. That’s what has destroyed the American family, it is no longer a factor in the education of its own children. Television and schooling, in those things the fault must lie.

        What can be done? First we need a ferocious national debate that doesn’t quit, day after day, year after year. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair, one or the other. If we can fix it, fine; if we cannot, then the success of homeschooling shows a different road to take that has great promise. Pouring the money we now pour into family education might kill two birds with one stone, repairing families as it repairs children.

        Genuine reform is possible but it shouldn’t cost anything. We need to rethink the fundamental premises of schooling and decide what it is we want all children to learn and why. For 140 years this nation has tried to impose objectives downward from the lofty command center made up of “experts”, a central elite of social engineers. It hasn’t worked. It won’t work. And it is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment. The Russian attempt to create Plato’s republic in Eastern Europe has exploded before [our] eyes, our own attempt to impose the same sort of central orthodoxy using the schools as an instrument is also coming apart at the seams, albeit more slowly and painfully. It doesn’t work because its fundamental premises are mechanical, anti-human, and hostile to family life. Lives can be controlled by machine education but they will always fight back with weapons of social pathology – drugs, violence, self-destruction, indifference, and the symptoms I see in the children I teach.

        It’s high time we looked backwards to regain an educational philosophy that works. One I like particularly well has been a favorite of the ruling classes of Europe for thousands of years. I use as much of it as I can manage in my own teaching, as much, that is, as I can get away with given the present institution of compulsory schooling. I think it works just as well for poor children as for rich ones.

        At the core of this elite system of education is the belief that self-knowledge is the only basis of true knowledge. Everywhere in this system, at every age, you will find arrangements to place the child alone in an unguided setting with a problem to solve. Sometimes the problem is fraught with great risks, such as the problem of galloping a horse or making it jump, but that, of course, is a problem successfully solved by thousands of elite children before the age of ten. Can you imagine anyone who had mastered such a challenge ever lacking confidence in his ability to do anything? Sometimes the problem is the problem of mastering solitude, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or Einstein did in the Swiss customs house.

        One of my former students, Roland Legiardi-Lura, though both his parents were dead and he had no inheritance, took a bicycle across the United States alone when he was hardly out of boyhood. Is it any wonder then that in manhood when he decided to make a film about Nicaragua, although he had no money and no prior experience with film-making, that it was an international award-winner – even though his regular work was as a carpenter.

        Right now we are taking all the time from our children that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back, we need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curriculum where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.

        A short time ago I took seventy dollars and sent a twelve-year-old girl from my class with her non-English speaking mother on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of Sea Bright to lunch and apologize for polluting [his] beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in a small town police procedures. A few days later, two more of my twelve-year-old kids traveled alone to West First Street from Harlem where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor, next week three of my kids will find themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at 6 A.M., studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatches 18-wheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

        Are these “special” children in a “special” program? Well, in one sense, yes, but nobody knows about this program but the kids and myself. They’re just nice kids from Central Harlem, bright and alert, but so badly schooled when they came to me that most of them can’t add or subtract with any fluency. And not a single one knew the population of New York City or how far it is from New York to California.

        Does that worry me? Of course, but I am confident that as they gain self-knowledge they’ll also become self-teachers – and only self-teaching has any lasting value.

        We’ve got to give kids independent time right away because that is the key to self-knowledge, and we must re-involve them with the real world as fast as possible so that the independent time can be spent on something other than more abstraction. This is an emergency, it requires drastic action to correct – our children are dying like flies in schooling, good schooling or bad schooling, it’s all the same. Irrelevant.

        What else does a restructured school system need? It needs to stop being a parasite on the working community. Of all the pages in the human ledger, only our tortured entry has warehoused children and asked nothing of them in service to the general good. For a while I think we need to make community service a required part of schooling. Besides the experience in acting unselfishly that will teach, it is the quickest way to give young children real responsibility in the mainstream of life.

        For five years I ran a guerilla program where I had every kid, rich and poor, smart and dipsy, give 320 hours a year of hard community service. Dozens of those kids came back to me years later, grown up, and told me that one experience of helping someone else changed their lives. It taught them to see in new ways, to rethink goals and values. It happened when they were thirteen, in my Lab School program – only made possible because my rich school district was in chaos. When “stability” returned the Lab was closed. It was too successful with a wildly mixed group of kids, at too small of a cost, to be allowed to continue. We made the expensive elite programs look bad.

        There is no shortage of real problems in the city. Kids can be asked to help solve them in exchange for the respect and attention of the total adult world. Good for kids, good for all the rest of us. That’s curriculum that teaches Justice, one of the four cardinal virtues in every system of elite education. What’s sauce for the rich and powerful is surely sauce for the rest of us – what is more, the idea is absolutely free as are all other genuine reform ideas in education. Extra money and extra people put into this sick institution will only make it sicker.

        Independent study, community service, adventures in experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships, the one day variety or longer – these are all powerful, cheap and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force the idea of “school” open – to include family as the main engine of education. The Swedes realized that in 1976 when they effectively abandoned the system of adopting unwanted children and instead spent national time and treasure on reinforcing the original family so that children born to Swedes were wanted. They didn’t succeed completely but they did succeed in reducing the number of unwanted Swedish children from 6000 in l976 to 15 in 1986. So it can be done. The Swedes just got tired of paying for the social wreckage caused by children not raised by their natural parents so they did something about it. We can, too.

        Family is the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents – and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 – we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now. The curriculum of family is at the heart of any good life, we’ve gotten away from that curriculum, time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during school time confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds. That was my real purpose in sending the girl and her mother down the Jersey coast to meet the police chief. I have many ideas to make a family curriculum and my guess is that a lot of you will have many ideas, too, once you begin to think about it. Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grass-roots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests pre-emptying all the air time and profiting from schooling just exactly as it is despite rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing, my ideas and yours. We’ve all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press – a decade long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more “expert” opinions. Experts in education have never been right, their “solutions” are expensive, self-serving, and always involve further centralization. Enough. Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I’ve said my piece. Thank you.

        © John Taylor Gatto. All rights reserved.

        This article is the text of a speech by John Taylor Gatto accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990. It is reprinted with permission of the author

        • Hi BJ,

          Gatto is an exceptional man – and his observations and prescriptions are dead on. I was lucky enough to have been given an “elite” education in that my parents provided me with access to books of all kinds from my earliest memory as well as freedom to explore on my own; the woods, the neighborhood, museums and other interesting things. The childhood I had is effectively outlawed today; has been for at least the past 25 years = long enough to rear an entire generation of damaged people; the passive/fractured people Gatto mentions.

          It may sound silly, but I firmly believe that such things as “safety” seats and helicopter parenting have caused at least as much damage as TeeVee and government schools.

          • eric, I expect you’re correct. I wonder how many kids would freak out if you just told them to sit in the seat one day out of the blue. Some would be thrilled I’m sure but some would be freaked out. They’d probably start with “but mother said”. Bureaucracy has destroyed this country. Some evil person like Fauci ordering others to do illegal and immoral things and threatening with loss of their job gets everyone in line in short order, all but a few who can think for themselve.

          • Hi Eric, that describes my childhood exactly, we could go all over the place (and far too on bikes) as long as we were back for dinner. Took lots of trips to the library too, and still have a collection of Hardy Boys books purchased with my paper route earnings. Never realized how lucky we were to grow up in that era seeing how kids today are basically prisoners.

            • Amen, Mike –

              I often regret not having a kid of my own to pass that experience to. But then, he’d be a pariah in today’s world and I’d probably be in jail.

              • It’s not linear. Nothing is. Which is good to realize. Oreo cookies are bad for ya’ unless they’re good for ya’ (or somewhere in between good-bad for ya’):

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLgEs6hjbGg

                So regret couched in linearity is bad for one’s back, not to mention the rest of the pieces & parts, no matter how comfy that furniture may seem. Ergo…egonomics? ha.

                Parental control – parental surrogate control, too — of how the kid turns is mythically overblown Bastiat glass ashtrays & smoke-blown orifices.

                Illusion of control is diffusion of responsibility to admit, to tell true. Diversification’s diversity is strength! Nobody in the Ox Bow Incident paid a centavo for their corporate crime of murder by lynching.

                First step addicts despise-cringe is admission of the problem…dog’s got plenty of hairs, have tweezers will travail, & so just keep on pluckin’.

                Or like some “trader” put it: “You never have to be wrong if you have enough money to meet the margin calls.”

                Speed (denial…speed dial denial?) costs, sonny – how fast (far down that effluent river) do you wanna go?

          • Eric, first I’m terribly sorry to hear about your mother. At this point, your only real option is either get some politicians to intercede (a few are still relatively decent) or the legal route, but thats going to be really expensive. Anything else is just going to give the AGW’s an excuse to kill you, and the corporate media to paint you as an extremist/terrorist. Keep in mind, that you aren’t going to be able to help your mom, if you are locked up or dead.

            The focus on “safety” is part and parcel, of the entire risk adverse nature of the modern world. Part of that is the nature of the mass media (for generations) and their motto of; “If it bleeds it leads”. The other is the Progs infiltration and subversion of the major institutions of modern society.

            By taking the universities first, that gave them control of the Journalism schools, the Education schools, and the Law schools.
            Thats the mass media, the educational system, and the courts and much of politics. As I’ve mentioned, its known as the Long March through the Institutions.

            Once they had control of those, it was all down hill as we’ve seen.
            Prog ideology is inherently risk adverse. One of the reasons (out of many) is their focus on groups, rather than individuals. In their twisted perspective, only group action is “legitimate”, and anything thats not explicitly allowed, is forbidden. Of course their Dear Leaders are the ones who determine what is allowed. The Cult of “expert” worship ties into this.

            Couple that with the so called “educational” system, and the results are to be seen all around us. Entire generations of our people, have had their potential and futures destroyed, in the service of an inherently corrupt, evil and insane system.

            The sad reality of that is, that even good people like Gatto, bought into the system, until he started to think for himself. At which point the System turned on him.

            I very much suspect that the current nonsense was just a test run. An experiment, if you will. One of its objectives, was to see just how far they could push, before effective resistance started. No doubt it will be used to create some new government programs, like Home Land Security, which came out of 9/11.

            That will tie into various programs like ID2020, and the on going hysteria over vaccines. Keep in mind how enormously evil, and power mad those behind these globalist schemes are. Not to mention that they have uncounted trillions to work with.

            As the global economy crumbles, watch for a move to first national, and then global digital currencies. All backed by first app IDs, and then later microchip implants. The next few years wi9ll tell tale, of what future we leave for those who come after us. Lets hope that enough react firmly and wisely enough, to deflect the worst, and make the
            future better for everyone.

            • He’s already locked up. All are. All that varies is cell dimensions.

              Death is inevitable, & so is irrelevant…but doing good work, the best job possible, is not inevitable, & so most relevant.

              Politicians “option”…really? *Still?* Fire with fire when yours is a zippo & theirs is the sun is crazy…not to mention codependent enabling. But sun gods have always been popular.

              Bleeds leads isn’t about safety. It’s about titillation, prurience, fascination with carnage, schadenfreude, entertainment…pandering to what’s already there in the readers/viewers.

              Otherwise, 4th branch of the rule of thumb wife-beater club has always been about psyops for already operational psy. Always. “News,” rhymes bruise…& makes those contusions manifest, too.

              No. It is – obviously – the long march *of* institutions.

              Like science, touched on & guilt establishing prints left all over the elephant in the blind wiseguize of Indostan room before, institutions are just the dopes & mopes filling the ranks doing all that shuffling along.

              As We Go Marching has been the 96% from the get-go.

              Institutional wo/man projects institutionalized wo/man – the mythead notion that institutions digest people & shits them out into “progressive” form is nonsense. Blind nonsense. Congenitally blind nonsense.

              And there’s not a spittle lick of difference between those angling for “control” of institutions…or them angling for this or that flavor of being controlled.

              Law(d) of conservative punchbowl partier conservation…how many denominations in that Church Warren o’committees what confirmed the lone gun rubber stamp?

              COG is that lot’s copilot…& its wife, too. (But when 96% are sexing salt shakers, they’re absolutely certain they ain’t perverted….)

              If you meet “the” Buddha on the roman road on his way to rome, even if his middle moniker is libertarian & his caboose moniker is AnCap, the best possible thing you can do is kill him.

              Brooks knew that, had the sense to kill himself.

              Most brooks, however, got nothing more going on than the urge to converge & merge in the low sumps & basins that are the sightless seas, oceans, & swampanopticons.

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kotNxb2YApk

              “Medical science,” focuses on “the group.” “Insurance” ditto. “Citizen” ditto. Nationality (often enough hyphenated, or tryphenated, or mottled muddle-mutted,), ethnicity, religion, tribe, gang, family, ditto-yadda-etc. 96% dittoheads out there.

              That’s that cult•ure – including all the variously claimed experts – of schooled – biologically snook’d – groupers, with those gaping gulping maws.

              “Our people?” See focus on groups…see it more clearly (some sort of ophthalmology, as yet not invented…& will be inaccessible to you, if it ever is invented).

              Which is what “the globalists” actually have to work with: the very well counted, weighed, measured billions – of people, not pieces of monopoly money – that float the scum up (& if the scum’s atop, it’s stagnant below…the dank tank, where all that “think” goes on).

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4APbwb3meU

              What would constitute “reacting firmly & wisely enough” to this standard techno-dystopian prognostication-regurgitation? If begging politicians about your imprisoned mother fills bill, does it also repay Wimpy’s bild yer burgher debt next Tuesday?

              And “hope” is the fall back fail forward in place? Again?

              How many times can the same failed prescription be written the same pining boring beetle way? Infinitely, apparently.

              Slippery hope, dangles on a rope, shower scenes & dopes, brooksoap stains sluicing into drains, flowing chain-chain-chains…chains o’ fools.

              Fools rush in where angels fear to be spread-eagle has landed.

              That’s one small step for “man,” one giant leap into manhind.

              But fellowship, that ring o’ com•promised betrothed links, they got.

      • One wonders if this is pure selfish desperation on Elon’s part. I’m guessing that Tesla sales are in the basement right now, and given his overall dismal financial situation, he can’t afford to have the nonsense continue. Otherwise, if he wasn’t suffering because of the scamdemic, he’d be cheerleading it. Fucking hypocrite.

    • Good luck with that.
      They will put a gun to your head, one way or another.
      If you don’t know the history, read up on what was done to force the German Empire to sign the Treaty of Versailles. In short, the British naval blockade, an act of war, was still in force, which threatened the German people with mass starvation if their delegates did not sign the Treaty.
      in Los Angeles, the “mayor” has threatened to cut water and power to the cages of any who do not “comply” with his orders.
      All they have to do is give you the slave tattoo if you take the death needle, and withhold it if you do not. Those without a tattoo will not be allowed in grocery stores. Do you, or can you, produce 100% of your own food? I thought not.

      • Guns can be pointed both ways. A black market will soon follow for groceries and other sundry needs. The question is whether to live and/or die on your feet or grovel on your knees.

          • Black market, the reason so many of the proletariat fear Cody Wildon. $250 for a machine that will turn a block of aluminum into an AR 15 lower sends chills up the authoritarian spine….or at least where a spine should be.

      • ” Do you, or can you, produce 100% of your own food ? I thought not.” Actually, you ASSUME that I can’t. One should never ASSUME as it makes an “ASS outta “U” and “ME”. I grew up in rural TX on Catfish, squirrel n’ dumplins, rabbit and venison. We grew our vegatables and canned or bartered ’em for whatever else we needed. I currently overlook one of the largest lakes in the country surrounded by acres of woods, so yes, I can, and have produced everything I need. As for the vaccine form, it is a “conditional” release that would require the givers of the vaccine and their masters to accept any damage the vaccine would cause, which of course they will not sign. Will it work ? I don’t know, but it will be the last ditch effort before the final step. That being “Shoot ’em in the haid.”

        • Good job, and bully for you!
          But even if you produce all your own food, you will still need to buy some things, as I am sure you know all too well.
          Saw chain. gasoline, bar oil, mix oil, propane, kerosene, powder & primers, etc.
          Correct?
          How about salt, baking powder, cooking oil?

          Never eaten squirrel, but the ones in my pine trees are looking more like dinner every day. If I elect to harvest a few, I’ll have to take them silently, because I live in a suburban city, which means either trap or crossbow. AFAIK. No problem.

          >of course they will not sign.
          You got that right.
          If itg come to that , you could demand thatg the fat sweat hog wielding the death needle show you ID, as in, “I need to see your driver’s license.”
          “But why, sir?”
          “Because if this make me sick, you better hope it kills me. Otherwise. I will hunt you down, kill you, butcher your corpse, and eat it for dinner. I love long pig.”

          • Most of those fat sweat hogs that would be wielding the needle would turn my stomach. I’ll stick with catfish and squirrel for nutrition. However, in regard to the fat sweat hog with the needle, I am sure they could be rendered down and would yield enough fat to burn the oil furnace and lanterns for years !

            • Bluesman, I guess we have a lot in common, both being from rural Texas. Yesterday we re=stocked the tank. While we were doing so, a deer walked into it from the spillway, swam to the end where we were, walked out and laid down on green grass under some big cottonwoods.
              It was fairly amazing but maybe not. They hear us talk all the time since we mostly live with open windows. They see us constantly and my feeder still delivers twice a day. I try to get the cats in at night and see at least 3 deer getting a snack of corn.

              I was sick the entirety of hunting season except the last two days. I was washing dishes and didn’t have that headache that had been plaguing me for months. A bunch of doe were in the side yard so I stepped out and looked around the corner, shot one and went back inside.

              I was surprised to see the rest still standing there so I went back for another and they had dissipated. She’s mighty good eating. We have a lot of hogs that come through so now and then we have one of the best meats you can get to help fill the freezer.

              Lately, there’s been one lone skinny turkey comes by every day. I wish she’d bring some of the big boys with her and I could add to the freezer with whatever was left after a good mesquite cooking. If things get too tough we’ll slaughter a calf when the weather turns cold, and that will last a long time. Now I’ve made myself hungry and remember I have some hot venison breakfast sausage in the fridge. Throw some bacon grease in when you get it cooked and have some good gravy and biscuits. I watch Cowboy Kent Rollins on YT and get ideas for recipes. He rarely makes something I haven’t but may make it a bit differently and that sticks in my mind. A cast iron dutch oven and a couple size cast iron skillets and you can have the finest dining to be had….straight out of the pasture.

          • Turtle,
            When it comes to taking the squirrels silently, just put a bird feeder filled with wild bird seed at the best place close to your hacienda that is out of site. I’ve never known a squirrel that could resist one. B.B. rifles and pellet guns are virtually silent ! Great target practice as well !! They are great fried like chicken or stewed in a variety of ways. Damn, now I’m starvin’….

            • Thanks for the tip, B-man.
              I am leaning towards live trap, at this point, being as that is the cheapest option.

              Do you recommend aging the meat before consumption, or not?
              I saw one vid which recommended 4-5 days aging in fridge, but others just cooked it down.
              I do like fresh rabbit.

              • Aye, squirrel pole for the win. They love to run along the top of chain link fences…
                Grandma used to soak them in vinegar for a few hours before cooking.

                • Absolutely, Turtle and Dirty…either vinegar or milk. Milk will take the gaminess out ( which some “cultured” folks don’t like). They are actually a very “clean” meat. I,too am a rabbit fan. They used to sell frozen rabbit in the Safeway when I was in OR. but the mellinials freaked out so they pulled it.
                  I’m thinkin’ we need to all git together for dinner and figure the rest of this sh*t out….
                  Should we invite Eric ??

  7. Here in Riverside County, CA, the “corona virus” scam means:
    1. CA Gov, Gabbin’ Nuisance, has decreed that large numbers of citizens are PROHIBITED from earning a living. As a result, we now have >30% unemployment, where a few months ago the number was just over 3%. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that people with no income cannot pay their bills. Residential real estate sales are WAY off, and builders are deferring any new projects.
    I expect that this time next year we will see hundreds of thousands of homeless in this county alone, and a wave of foreclosures which will make 2008 look like prosperity. I dare not hazard a guess as to how many homeless, including children, will die of disease (NOT COVID-19), exposure, and malnutrition.
    2. Meanwhile, our local “health” czar. whose name, ironically, is Kaiser, has decided it is his prerogative to order people to not leave their houses, and not engage in productive economic activity, meanwhile drawing his (no doubt fat) government paycheck. There is a word for scum like him. The word is parasite.

    Wer leben will, der kämpfe also.
    Es lebe die freiheit.

  8. I walk to work, yes I’ve been working the entire time, and some people scurry like rats in to building alcoves and out into the street to maintain that magical distance of solace and safety of 6ft. I love the ones driving by themselves with a mask on, very amusing.

    If you live in Ohio check out https://ohioconstitution.org/constitutional-rights-during-the-quarantine/
    These “orders”are extralegal and do not have the force and effect of law.
    If you have been fined or arrested for violation of these Stay at Home orders contact them.

  9. It’s not about your health.

    When the State tells you it’s safe to go to Home Depot to buy a sponge but dangerous to go and buy a flower, it’s not about your health.

    When the State shuts down millions of private businesses but doesn’t lay off a single government employee, it’s not about your health.

    When the State bans dentists because its unsafe, but deems an abortion visit is safe, it’s not about your health.

    When the State prevents you from buying cucumber seeds because it’s dangerous, but allows personal lottery ticket sales, it’s not about your health.

    When the State tells you it’s dangerous to go golf alone, fish alone or be in a motor boat alone, but the Governor can get his stage make-up done & hair done for 5 TV appearances a week, it’s not about your health.

    When the state puts you IN a jail cell for walking in a park with your child because it’s too dangerous but lets criminals OUT of jail cells for their health – it’s not about your health.

    When the state tells you it’s too dangerous to get treated by a doctor for chiropractic or physical therapy treatments yet deems a liquor store essential – it’s not about your health.

    When the State lets you go to the grocery store or hardware store but is demanding mail-in voting – it’s not about your health.

    WAKE UP PEOPLE… If you think any of this BS is about your health, you’re
    a fool!! Please open your eyes & stop being lead like blind sheep.

    • No one with half a brain, after a month of seeing various idiots and would-be tyrants flail about with their, as Eric would put it, “Fatwas”, would think it’s in the best interests of public health. IDK which is worse…that the various ding-dongs, like the “Evil Mary Poppins” mis-governing the Badger State (MI), don’t know what the hell they’re doing, or that at least a few of them, or, more likely, those that BACKED these morons, DO indeed know what they’re doing…

  10. Here in North Conway NH I’ve noticed that the mask wearing didn’t take hold right away. It was less than 1/2 wearing masks most of the time when going to Walmart or the grocery store. Then it seemed to be that over 1/2 or more were wearing them about 2-3 weeks ago. My wife and I certainly felt uneasy since we haven’t worn masks and still don’t. It wasn’t so much the virus but the snarls and weird looks that the other patrons would give us for not wearing one. I have gone out of my way to say hello to people wearing and not wearing masks to try and break the ice. Some people are so miserable that you cant break thru. Others seem to welcome the interaction. Its also funny that most of the employees working at the grocery store are not wearing masks either. Do they know something we don’t? It seems now that the mask wearing is declining, at least in this area. I hope the trend continues and I will continue to resist as well.

    I’ve also noticed that people that seemed rational and on top of things are completely brainwashed and crazy about what has happened. People that I thought were strong seem to have gone into wimp mode. Imagine if something bad were to happen? Like an invasion or real supply break down. Are people just going to roll over? Wow, it seems worse than I had imagined.

    I am going to keep trudging along and look forward to getting the fox body out of the garage and taking a ride. I wonder if the stasi will pull me over for not being on an essential trip? Isn’t every trip essential if you want it to be? Please all be strong and stick up for what you believe. We cant let them jab us without our consent but I’m sure there will be the Karens out there that will insist that we all get it. Can’t we co-opt the slogan,” Its my body, my choice”? The same ones using this for one issue will say it doesn’t apply for the other.
    We’ll see 🙂 Stay Strong

    • Hudson, NH here. We have a few more people than you, but similar pattern. It’s social pressure I guess. I happen to be a Scientist so watching this is very sad. Not just the loss of personal liberty, but the fact that lockdown is bad Science as well. In fact, it is idiotic, absurd, and counter-productive. We plan to join a protest in Concord on Saturday. Organization is ReOpenNH.com . I know there has just been an order by Sununu to extend the lockdown, but still worth protesting, as I expect there could be another ‘2-week extension’.

        • Exactly.
          But why, exactly?
          Purely psychopathic would be “rulers?
          Perhaps.
          But I would say, as always, follow the money.
          IMO, this “operation” is, or at least involves, the CONTROLLED DEMOLITION of the greatest economy the world has yet known, the USA, for the benefit of a small group of ultra wealthy individuals and giant corporations.
          Tens of thousands, at least, maybe hundreds of thousands of small to medium size businesses will go under, and their owners will be left destitute. Meanwhile, I read that Jeff Bezos is personally up $23 billion, year to date.
          Expect property values to crash, and vast amounts of real estate to be bought up on the cheap by those with hard currency.
          U.S. currency (Federal Reserve notes, backed by nothing) will become worthless, as in Weimar Germany.

          Just my opinion, you understand.

          • Hi Turtle,

            There is another factor that is rarely discussed: politicians, bureaucrats and official health experts have an incentive to overreact. This insight becomes obvious if one applies Public Choice theory (a branch of economics that assumes that government players respond to incentives and act in their perceived self interest, just like everyone else) to this situation. Whether consciously or not, these players know that the likely consequences to themselves for inadequate action will be significantly greater than an overreaction. When it becomes obvious to many that the reaction was unjustifiably draconian, caused predictable and extreme harm and was, perhaps counter productive in protecting us from the virus, they will simply say, “it would have been much worse had we not acted” (they are already saying this). No such built-in, counter-factual narrative exists for the opposite case.

            Most will accept this counter-factual narrative and use it to dismiss any legitimate criticism of the, heretofore unprecedented, response (guaranteeing a similar, and escalated, response in the future). It is very important to challenge this claim. First, a counter-factual claim is, by definition non falsifiable, thus unprovable. It is impossible to determine to what degree the lock-down measures reduced Covid-19 deaths. Second, the claim is factually false. The vast majority of the lives supposedly “saved” by the lock-down would never have died. These “saved” lives are imaginary, built on model predictions that should have been understood as invalid from the start.

            The lock-down hysteria began in earnest, and received seeming scientific justification, with the release of Neal Ferguson’s Imperial College report that claimed, without preventative measures, there would be 2.2 million deaths in the US and over 500,000 in the UK. Since then, the estimates have dropped dramatically. Still, Ferguson and his apologists, claim that the dramatic drop is due to social distancing, business closures, bans on gathering, etc… In short, they are making the counter-factual claim described above. This claim is factually false, which Neal Ferguson must know.

            To understand why it is false, it is necessary to understand how he arrived at the original estimates. The predictive power of any model depends on the accuracy of the assumptions built into that model. The assumptions embedded in the Imperial College study are absurd. First, it was assumed that, absent draconian measures, NOBODY would have altered their behavior. Apparently avoiding preventable death is an insufficient incentive for people to adopt voluntary, adaptive behavior. This alone should have made every economist worth his salt dismiss the study as ludicrous. Second, he assumed an RO (the number of people infected by a single infected person) of 2.4 which which would lead to 81% of those in the US and GB to become infected. Finally, he assumed a CFR (case fatality rate) of 0.9%, 9 times that of the seasonal flu.

            The first assumption is just absurd, and has no place in a model supposedly designed to predict likely or possible outcomes. The only reason to include it that makes sense to me is to provide after the fact cover for the “effectiveness” of the lock-down. The other two assumptions could have been accurate but, even at the time, should have been treated with great skepticism, as the data did not exist to justify such extreme assumptions. The assumed 81% infection rate (over three times that of the Spanish flu and almost 4 times that of the “swine flu”) are hard to reconcile with reality, even given the data available at the time. The authors arrived at a CFR of 0.9% by assuming that confirmed cases represented half of “actual” cases. This is astonishing (it is assumed with the seasonal flu that confirmed cases make up 1/100th of actual cases), and makes sense, to me at least, only as a measure to artificially inflate the CFR.

            Sorry for the long winded rant, but it is very important to be able to rebut the inevitable, “it would have been worse” claim with data and facts because most people will not be swayed, by pointing out that this is an unprovable counter-factual narrative, to change their views because pointing this out does not disprove the claim. Every government official pushing this nonsense needs this claim to be true; every “regular” person who embraced the hysteria has a psychological need that it to be true.

            Accepting for now, the absurd assumptions that NOBODY would have altered their behavior and that 81% of the population would become infected, let’s run some numbers. Altering only the CFR (as more data is available, the CFR will likely prove to be 0.005% – 0.1%), and assuming the high end, we have 330,000,000 X .81 X .001 = 267, 300. This is a terribly high number but, put in perspective, it is about the same number that die each year due to medical mistakes, which does not cause “us” to crater the economy. Now, let’s alter the 81% assumption to a more reasonable, but still probably very high, 35%. Now we have 330,000,000 X .35 X .001 = 115,500 deaths; still a very high number, but comparable to a very bad flu season.

            Even this, probably worst case scenario, is misleading because it ignores the effect of voluntary, adaptive behavior, and the excess deaths caused by the “lock-down”, which must be taken into account for any rational cost/benefit analysis. I can make no estimates here, but it is likely to be substantial. Just a few of the factors to consider are: an increase in depression and suicide rates, lack of medical care due to diversion of medical resources and fear of seeking needed medical help, and the rise in unemployment, which strongly correlates to excess mortality.

            Finally, I have ignored the long term consequences of the loss of liberty, and the normalization of dictatorial powers that will almost certainly become more common. These concerns, considered trivial by some, cannot be quantified, but are vitally important nevertheless.

            Riffing on Franklin and Mark 8:36, “what does it profit a Country to gain the illusion of security, but lose it’s soul?”

            Jeremy

            • Right on, Jeremy.
              Agree with everything you said.
              James Corbett has made similar observations RE: self-justifying behavior by bureaucrats.
              Always remember the first law of bureaucrats: CYA.
              If you’ve had the misfortune to encounter one of these sorry S.O.B.s, you know you can just about smell the fear on them. Many of them live in fear their entire lives. Doesn’t mean we free humans wish to join them in their sorry existence.

            • Remote-control hovercraft goalposts…gilligans take multiple mulligans per ratchet-effect step of the ‘fare’way…& 3-hour tours consume multiple lifetimes.

              Glue fumes muddle modelers minds, which whips modeler-followers’ behinds…serially.

              Sovereign+appendages immunity has its own incentive “structure”: “cuz I’m the daddy, that’s why!”

              But the big lie is rational. Or at least rotational (some authors like to count the turns). Cuz irrational – framin’ father knows best — is the original antigenic sin. & ‘counterfactual’ on down will not rebut the but-but-buttered.

              Club Nouveau’s Bill Withers cover. Lean on Weus! unto atrophy, the better for weus to lean into you. “Jammin’” certainly works, but mentally substitute framin’ as you listen:

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

        • The science of control.

          Not that science, but for possible minimal rule-proving exceptions, itself isn’t about control…well, the compulsive desire for control…& the patents…mein gotcha’, the patents!

  11. I have not nor will I play the role of the Lone Ranger. Masking, except perhaps in hospitals or enclosed conditions with much sickness, it counterproductive. You actually want to be exposed to viruses and other germs so that you can build a natural immunity to them. Getting the flu prick is like getting the flu, or being exposed to it, only in a more forced and direct way. Sorry, Billy Boy, none of your prickiness for me.

    So we will have stupid restrictions on our movements and actions outside of our private jails and it won’t keep you healthier. Boost your own immune system and let it work its magic. It has been doing so since you were born and doesn’t need the help of do-gooding socialists. If they won’t let me in, then they don’t really want or need my business.

    We are no longer treating the virus, but treating fear…fully induced by the utterly irresponsible media and those in the world who seek to control us. I refuse to participate in this concocted crock of crapola.

  12. Its sad. Not so much the tyranny we are currently forced into, but the willing compliance. Tyrants don’t impose tyranny, submission to it does. It’s becoming readily apparent that the people of the US deserve exactly what they’re getting. As I paraphrase Frederick Douglass, “however much tyranny you are willing to accept is exactly how much you will get”. There are, and always have been tyrants who are only restrained by resistance from their intended victims. Any such resistance is glaringly absent. I will not comply, whether from the Sociopaths In Charge, or from any business in partnership with them. I will walk into any business I please that doesn’t have a physical barrier ,without a mask, without social distancing, and force them to throw me out. I will not be tested, nor vaccinated. I may end up in a body bag, but prefer such to submission. “Give me liberty or give me death” isn’t a mental exercise, its a plan of action.

  13. A true pandemic cannot be stopped and 30% of the population dies. Socrates survived a plague in Athens that killed 1/3 of the population, but somehow life carried on and it barely made a footnote in history books.

    Wuflu is not a pandemic and the people who have allegedly died from it, even if we believe the number, would have died from the flu anyway like in any normal year.

    People have always been willing sheep, not sure if becoming cattle is an upgrade or a downgrade.

    • Hi Ross,

      As Orwell put it, for everyone there is something unendurable. For me, it is being ordered to wear a got-damned mask. Not because I am “infectious” but because I might be. Because someone – anyone – might be. And it’s not even because of that. Rather, it’s done to assert – in the most degrading manner imaginable without actually putting a bit in my mouth – that I am a slave and they can do as they like with me.

      No.

      Bring it on.

  14. And then way 2 many folks just wonder “why o why did u ever leave the ussa, 4 ever”? in the first place, the so called “death,”health””system” darn near killed me. Thanks 2 my briliant, Phillipina professor of chemical engineering better half, off to H.K. to get completely cured of copd, mersa, & assorted other life killers!, We never went back, & will never go back to “the land of the fee, home of the slave” “gestapo state ussa. EVER! Expat tom

    • Hi Tom,

      I should have listened; I still may. I cling like a desperate man to the home I love and the place I love. But I’m slipping. I’ve already lost several friends over Coronamania; people I’ve known for a long time but am just now getting to really know. It breaks my heart.

      • Eric – has happened to me also, even family members who don’t want to hear any criticism of their government. In my humble opinion it’s a result of the take over of the government schools where they taught the kids from age 5 to obey and fear anything that came along. So those kids have grown up and you can see them wearing their loose fitting masks that are ineffective as they signal See me I’m compliant. I’m a good little Comrade.

      • We’re actually considering returning–much earlier than we’d like to, given current conditions there– to my wife’s native Venezuela. We see things getting just as desperate and dysfunctional here very quickly, and figure that, hey, we own property there and have extensive family connections, so why not? At least the government there is overt and honest about what it is (a corrupt and murderous dictatorship waging war on its own people), unlike the one here that insults everyone’s intelligence by pretending to be otherwise.

  15. I am flying to Florida May 18. This trip was planned way before the panic-demic arrived here. My travel companion is determined to go and we are thinking beaches will likely be open at least partially. One piece of bad news is the possibility that these masks will be required on airplanes.
    While I am boycotting businesses that require them, there’s not much consumer power when dealing with an airline and the feds.
    Any ideas for a short phrase or symbol to write on the mask? I was thinking the anarchy symbol, the circled A. That’s how I used to sign my paper tax return every year, subbing it for the first letter of my name. I don’t want to get arrested, at least not until after I enjoy my trip, or get a free proctology exam from TSA.
    Maybe I’ll draw one of Eric’s cattle tags on it.

    • I gave up flying when the Sociopaths In Charge insisted on groping and irradiating their cattle at the loading chute. Since readily available air travel is largely a product of theft by those sociopaths, and distribution of the product of such to the airline industry, I have no problem not participating. Airlines don’t build airports, tax collectors do. Airlines don’t do air traffic control, tax collectors do. If airlines did provide just these two tax collector services, there would be no “law” requiring such groping and irradiating, as such would be in the purview of the airlines involved. I’m sure at least one of them would be smart enough to realize such is neither cost effective, nor useful. Of course it may matter little now, since the industry is fading fast because of the fear porn we are being forced to participate in, at gunpoint.

  16. (health.com)
    The official toll of the 2019-2020 influenza season won’t be known for months—not that anyone is really fretting about that right now. Worries over the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, have eclipsed many people’s concerns about coming down with a case of the flu.

    Not that you ought to take influenza lightly. Flu season in the US, which runs from October through May, claims tens of thousands of lives every year. This season CDC estimates that, as of mid-March, between 29,000 and 59,000 have died due to influenza illnesses. Add to that the misery of hundreds of thousands of flu-related hospitalizations and millions of medical visits for flu symptoms this season.

    BUT
    Number of con-o-virus deaths? 228,251 (4/29/2020). Over 1/2 are from congested nursing homes. 90% of the rest are victims who had one to three pre-existing life threatening conditions.

    It has never happened in history, but Americans are locked up for not having the flu. And 30 million of them are thrown out of work with no money or hope by some politicians. Who then throw some variable alms coins at them so they don’t take their pitchforks to DC.
    As the Chinese pilot said – some ting wong.

    • 228,251 world wide that is. USA is listed as 61,669. But that includes drunk drivers, suicides, slip and fall, heart attacks and any and all victims who may have carried the flu.

  17. Eric,

    Here is some disheartening news from the classic car world. The Minnesota Street Rod Association (MSRA) is canceling their Back to the 50’s show at Minnesota State Fair Grounds for our safety. It is held in June on the third weekend of the month and over 10,000 cars park on the fair grounds. 47 years it has been held until this plandemic.

    This is nutz. It is held outside and the weather is in the 70 degree range or above.

    Here is the link so you can read their cowering press release https://msrabacktothe50s.com/

    I can’t take this Orwellian crap anymore.

    • The Des Moines Registered has cancelled their RAGBRAI (Registers Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa) bike ride this summer, which has thousands of riders each year.

      God forbid anyone catch the flu while riding their bicycle across Iowa during the heat and sun of an Iowa July.

      • Hi Guerrero,

        The riders – the ones with balls – ought to organize their own damned ride. And do it. If not, they and everyone else who plays Sickness Kabuki deserves the utter contempt of those who value our self respect and our freedom.

  18. So if “moron masks” become mandatory, does anyone have any ideas for how to stage a mass resistance in public? It’s gonna require numbers to make any impact…

    • Oh, that’s not going to happen. All the bank around here closed their lobbies to protect their employees and customers.

    • There are protests scheduled state-wide here in NYS tomorrow, May 1. But, as elsewhere, I doubt they will have much impact. King Kuomo said he will ignore them.

      So far, none of them in the country are big enough. I hate to say it, but peaceful protests are no more effective than cattle nudging their fences. When they become some multiple larger than they are, with widespread violence, then MAYBE they will matter. And that probably won’t happen unless or until there ISN’T ENOUGH FOOD and people are have nothing to lose by being violent. So far we aren’t even close to that.

      At that point, the question will be: How many police chiefs, sheriffs, National Guard, etc. will refuse to follow orders? These events sometimes turn the right way though. Read the story of how Romanian Communist leader Ceausescu was overthrown and killed in 1989 — although the Romanian people suffered far, far worse and for years on end compared to us. We Americans cannot even comprehend what they went through.

      So, I am not optimistic.

  19. I heard via the local know you rights group here in Ozzy, or Shitsville, that in the first 3 weeks this month, while 20 MM Amuricans were out of work, that the super elite increased their wealth by $283 billions in just 3 weeks. I’v no doubt some of that filtered into comrade Xi’s pockets. Definitely this was an engineered pandemic that required the cooperation of all countries to happen.

    • It’s too obvious to ignore, yet it’s absolutely amazing, the rectal-cranial inversion gymnastics the sheeple-cattle will engage in to keep from acknowledging obvious reality and truth. Maybe it’s because they know that recognizing reality will require them to wake up, pull their heads out of their asses, and start living like responsible adults. The very thought of such a future probably would prompt most of them to commit suicide.

    • I’m rapidly reaching the conclusion that something approaching a majority of the world’s population is addicted to something infinitely more potent and unshakeable than alcohol, nicotine, and heroin combined: panic porn.

      These people, most of whom live utterly meaningless, shallow lives devoid of any constructive purpose whatsoever, THRIVE on this artificially induced fear, panic, and crisis. It generates drama and excitement that could never otherwise have satisfied their meaningless, banal existences ante Coronascam. The thought of their lives returning to “normal” is unbearable, so they’re desperate to continue as principal actors in this stupid charade for as long as the “crisis” can be drawn out. They HOPE this thing morphs into the new bubonic plague that kills one third of the entire planet!

      • Fear porn works! I got my first job because during the First Gulf War (started by Bush the First), there was such a surge in CNN viewers that the advertising company had to hire on more production staff to keep up with demand. But then we got Waco, the OJ show trial, natural disasters, and all that led up to 9/11. Hollywood couldn’t keep up so they had to amp up their pablum with superhero and way over the top action films.

  20. I have gobs of masks from lame-o N95 to kickass N100s. I bought a shithouse full of them because an employee’s mama wanted to cash in on a lawsuit to get me for subjecting employees to hazards.
    OSHA came in with two to monitor their dorky equipment and I found them to be utterly incompetent, and disagreeable sorts.
    The crestfallens were looking for another law firm when the vaunted OSHA found nothing of note. I again went back to insistence on mask when grinding tungsten carbide as before. Too bad that he had removed my self designed particulate collector attachments for his convenience which was only a slightest difference in utility. The purchased items were inefficacious in my view.
    The wife is impervious to facts as most womyn are. My noting that the CDC stopped counting regular influenza statistics was stopped when the lockdown took place is “conspiracy theory”. To which I replied that one should look at the stats and the lousy tests and the rest of the stats that show a huge drop in usual flue and the number of medical malpractice deaths.
    This is a hose job even better than Y2k and 9/11 and the bailout of the banks of 2008. Orders of magnitude every stinking time.

  21. Makes me ill to see the enlightened ones termed as “ranchers”. Same as the word ‘cowboy’ now used in a modern catch-all derogatory meaning. I wonder if the next term to bite the dust is ‘stockgrower’, that being the case the cattle will look at me with unknowing eyes…..

  22. Masks are a manifestation of the idea that you and I are presumptively sick and that we do not have the right to risk passing our presumptive sickness onto others. These principles are now being cemented in place as governs our capacity to be out in public. It is shaping public opinion and perception in real time. This may be(come) an insurmountable obstacle to overcoming the psychosis. Abandon all hope, ye who venture out.

    • Excellently stated. I’m going to wear the got damned mask on my crotch. I have thought the same exact things as you eloquently stated. I’m going to venture out. They can arrest my ass.

      • I wonder if “de gubbimint” were to declare masks ineffective and issue a mandate that people put plastic bags over their heads, how many of the sheepletards would do it without a second’s hesitation?

  23. Every civilization that’s ever existed has had its gods and priesthoods.

    Today, in America, the false god we worship is called Science, and Experts are it’s priesthood.

    • Except that the garbage that the establishment (ie Fauci or a Greta Thundberg) isn’t practicing science, it’s nonsense

      • The priorities of science have always been mostly just as those being displayed now. Science is people & people, particularly when agglomerated, are mostly shite.

        Get a copy of Humphries Dissolving Illusions, just as an on the nose example. It goes way back in “history” that sounds like current day – cuz it is.

      • Well stated Swamp. Science is about critical thinking in application of the scientific method, to better understand the universe. Mixing it with politics/ideology taints both the results, and science itself. Yes Ozy, science is a VERY human activity, which makes it prone to all of the vices AND virtues that humans are prone to. But lets not forget all of the benefits that take place, when science is applied to problems, which produces technology that makes our lives better. As far a illusions/delusions, might I suggest Memories, dreams and reflections? Now that is an example of agendas in conflict, over basic principles…

        • Bj, it’s so prone it’s prostrate…& whilst genuflecting down there it may as well spit & polish the boots it grovels before – & so it does that, too.

          Tech, same as all else, is no unmitigated good.

          But in the hands of agglomerated prostrates, the net is negative. Steeply negative.

          Doesn’t take 20:20 to see that.

          Or to see that “yes, but…” followed by references to some non-existent ideal is just so much more religulousness. Moo is moo, no matter the drover/driven codependence.

          I have nothing but contempt for “smart” people who don’t care about what they do, so long as they get to do it, be remunerated for doing it.

          “Agendas in conflict…” who was telling what truth, & what were the liars saying, in that book you recommend?

          • Ozy, don’t throw out the baby with the bath water… ^^ There is QUITE a difference between respect, and worship. I have little but respect for those I consider to be real scientists. I have nothing but contempt, for those who twist and distort it for their political/ideological agenda. Yes, yes, everyone has agendas (wheels within wheels) but don’t mistake the pointing finger for the moon.

            Of course technology, (just like humanity itself) can be abused and misused. That goes without saying. But because of that technology we have lifted billions out of the grinding poverty that was the norm for most of man kinds tragic history. Yes, aspects of that technology could now be used to wipe out most life on our planet. But technology has always been duel use… What matters is who is still standing after wards. As for the book, its a fascinating look at aspects of his life, and aspects of his insights. The agendas involved, are those who objected to which aspects where to be revealed.

            • I wouldn’t do that, BJ. But neither do I throw yellow rationalization peels before me.

              Plenty of real scientists are gang affiliated. That’s what I refer to. Who one works for is one’s own responsibility.

              But humanimal’s irresponsibility is legion & legendary. And it has deployed science, & technologists, to kill millions as part of the gaseous foundation that you say has lifted billions out of grinding.

              Well, that lift was a temporary “end” that continues to be apologetically used justify any & all means.

              Reminds me of the Goring relation I once knew & who was wont to argue all the good things that come out of mass murder (“war”) – WW2 in particular, from his banana peel somersaulting “perspective.”

              Ben Johnson’s character in Shane was a real hired gun. So was Jack Palance’s character.

              No…that’s not the point at all. Where you stand now, not later, is what matters.

              Galt’s Gulch ain’t some ideal place camouflaged neath a cgi sky somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. It’s right where you stand.

              Jack Palance, et al…picture me dropping trou, & putting a finger on that moon.

  24. Although a political atheist the Libertarian comes closest to what I tend agree with. I read another article this morning from a site that I make a monthly donation. (used to) I won’t say the name of the pundit or site but he usually sticks to economics but apparently due to his age has written a couple articles on the Wu Flu. This morning he said
    ” Where one stands on the closedown depends on where one stands on other issues. If you are a libertarian, you oppose the closedown because it interferes with your freedom and keeps useless old people alive who cost you payroll tax dollars ”
    Now I disagree with the official libertarian stance on borders, and immigration but I am certain most libertarians, especially Eric, do not feel this way towards others. It was a nasty way of saying libertarians do not care for others especially old people.
    I was censored and barred from one site for disagreeing… I am now down to about two sites I can post on. lol.
    This is turning ugly. No matter the proof given that the hospitals are not full,,, hospitals have laid off 43,000 since this alleged virus hit,,, masks do not help contain any virus,,, that their fudging the numbers etc people simply look at you like you grew horns.
    A young nurse is saying hospitals are killing people with ventilators in New York. Better watch this Video before YouTube removes it as the CEO has said she will remove ANYTHING that does not concur with the WHO.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=BR05LEDo5nM&feature=emb_logo

    • The useless old people can stay home if they’re worried. Might actually improve traffic, less dottering old fools going 15MPH under the speed limit.

      • As opposed to the useless young people living in mama’s basement, playing video games, tagging themselves with smartphones, and tying up traffic/causing accidents because that text about the latest bullshit on facebook just can’t wait.

        • That’s the difference between the old fools and the young fools.

          The young fools need an electronic distraction to drive like idiots.

          For the old fools, no such help is needed. It comes naturally.

          • Perhaps in the fantasies of young skulls full of mush, addled by overexposure to video games and smartphones and other shiny objects. In the real world, inexperienced young fools on the road cause a huge amount of havoc, way out of proportion to their numbers. (In fact young drivers under the age of 30 are involved in significantly more accidents, proportionally, than people over the age the age of 80.)

            There is this thing called “experience” – perhaps you have heard of it. Or, more likely, you believe that high school kids should be put in charge while they still know everything.

            If you live long enough you will look back and marvel at just how stupid you were – idiocy comes naturally to youngsters.

            Sometimes I can really understand why some animals eat their young.

            • I suspect that 80 year olds, on average, don’t drive that much. I certainly don’t expect them to be commuting to a job every day, for example.

              This would be reflected in a lower accident rate. It’s pretty easy to drive 2k miles per year accident free. It’s 10 times more difficult to drive 20k miles per year accident free, especially when most of those miles are during peak traffic conditions (aka rush hour).

              Because someone’s got to go to work to pay into the Socialist Security, right? Especially when you have no kids to take care of you because you aborted them.

              • You will find that even excluding 80-plus drivers from consideration that youngsters are still involved in far more accidents than older people. The trend is even greater despite middle-aged through about age 70 being the demographic doing most of the driving.

                It’s an incontrovertible fact that older people are involved in far fewer accidents than yoots. Drivers under the age of 25 cause something like 85% of all serious injuries on the road.

                Why do you think insurance rates are so much higher for young drivers? Although most of us here detest the insurance mafia, to give the devil his due one thing they are good at is calculating risk. Young drivers on the whole due to inexperience as well as their predilection to distractions present an enormous risk.

                That’s just the way it is.

        • True, Jason, bad drivers come in ALL ages…

          However, at least Great-Grandpa and Great-Grandma EARNED their ‘ree-tahr-ment’, so if monies must be ‘mulcted’, do it to keep ’em home and see to their basic needs.

          As for the youngsters taking advantage of the unemployment payouts to Face-Chat, play endless video games, shoot selfies, I reply, what would Frank Murphy say? Likely…

          “Put down that god-damned video game controller, get off your lazy ass, suck on a Zicam, and get back to work, or so help me, I’ll put you through that FUCKING WALL!”. If the fictional family head of Bill Burr’s show were still with us, he’d be my Dad’s age, and I’d be the same as his eldest son, a stoner and general pain in the ass…

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F_Is_for_Family

          • One thing that I’ve noticed:

            Useless parents tend to have useless children.

            It’s almost like…you have to expend some time and effort into teaching them, raising them, for them to not be useless.

            Odd, isn’t it?

            • Still trying to blame others for your own failings. How typical of today’s yoots, it’s always someone elses fault. Odd, isn’t it?

            • Hi Idiocracy,

              To be fair, the system is contrived such that it is difficult for parents to raise their kids, which are largely raised by the system – for economic reasons, mainly. It is difficult to support a family on one income because of the tax burden, which effectively requires two incomes to make up for the one that goes to pay all the taxes. And because of the permanent cost of housing, due to endless taxes on real estate as well as the de facto taxes imposed by zoning codes. So both parents work, which means absent/tired parents – and kids molded by government schools.

              I understand it is possible to homeschool and to live below one’s means. But it is much harder than it was 50 years ago or even 25 years ago to do this and have a family.

              It hasn’t happened by accident.

              • I know single people who can’t live within their means, let alone below it.

                I’m not so sure that this is the result of economic factors as much as it is a sense of entitlement (gotta have the latest iphone, SUV, cable package,etc.etc.) combined with poor to nonexistent financial sense.

                For example, how many people:
                (1)Pay off the credit card every month
                (2)Pay extra principal on the mortgage
                (3)Conribute to their 401k at least to the minimum which still gives the maximum employer match
                (4)Have money in the bank for emergencies
                (5)Buy used cars for cash, no financing

                I do all of those. (I did buy one new car 14 years ago. I still have it. I paid it off in 3 years.)

                As a result, I do not live “paycheck-to-paycheck”. Oh, I also don’t go to Starbucks. Big waste of money right there.

                • Hi Idiocracy,

                  I don’t live paycheck to paycheck, either – but the burden of taxes is enormous and requires me to generate substantially more income than I need to live on. Thousands of dollars in taxes every year just to be allowed to live in the house I bought – and paid for – 15 years ago.

                  If I had a kid, I’d need to generate probably a third to twice as much as I do to support myself and the kid. That or my wife (if I had one) would also have to work. And I own my home, have no debt and live very modestly.

                  • Some local governments think their constituents are a piggy bank and continually jack up the property taxes. I lived in one place where the property taxes more than doubled over a 12-year span.

                    It doesn’t help that the average scummy local politician can often get away with this by confusing the average voter (the few of them that actually pay any attention to local politics) with talk about how they cut the tax RATE. Yea, sure, meanwhile the assessments went up and so did the city budget…which means the tax BILL went up.

                    They play games with the assessments too. They’re not supposed to, but they do.

                    • The wife and I go out to eat every year. It’s a good restaurant. We have a big plate of nachos. I have two Modelo’s and she has two margaritas. That’s splurging for us.

                • Speed, g-forces, can do funny things to perception. And to memory. But speed, gathering momentum, g-forces seeking for the threshold beyond which, yet again, the center will not hold, is the physics, has always been the physics, that defeats so many optics (on its way to defeating the rest of them, too), nerves.

                  Each is born into speed, momentum. As that comfortable enveloping baseline sense of pace picante gives way to ever-increasing velocity & heat – but less & less light — the “good old days” 50’s, say, pace-in-time blurring into a rearview mirror of gobbled up continuum, people pine for the days of oak that were always just trompe l’oeil perception & Ikea laminate.

                  But, for most, being Detective Defective, solving old previously solved cases, fighting the last war, Queeg’s strawberry triumph looped, is preferred, less disconcerting, than a trees make forests make trees perspective – and the fact that preference has nothing at all to do with one’s perspective allotment, which is given, not chosen, only stiffens “resolve” in “preferring” the given preference; cognitive dissonance makes that kind of going down elevator muzak.

                  So, some of the 70’s part of the acceleration:

                  Gold window Bastiat’d once & for all, & finally boarded up. Wet explanations out of Chicago’s meatpacking monetarist school for the inflation rate that sped up the necessity of “compensatory” second incomes into family larders. Kept Arab strongmen speeding up the queues at the pumps…& locking gas caps sales, too, since fuel siphoning in the night’s spinning reference mark was lining up under the pulsing light of the strobe.

                  Money was getting shorter even as it was getting spent faster to “compensate” for it being able to buy less next week than it bought today, right now.

                  This wasn’t entitlement.

                  This was the thrashing & gulping that precedes & telegraphs drowning…in red ink (& all the ever-concomitantly accelerating black ink of regulatory color of law, & tragedy of the commons common “precedent” law, too…). Drowning in place.

                  Economics? Under acceleration toward passing the rod-throwing redline, there are fewer & fewer economic actors, more & more economic acted upons. Incentives in Skinner’s box & arcing from Milgram’s electrodes do incentivize…with or without perspective. The knee is malleted, & it jerks.

                  In this hurtling surrounding environment, fundamentals, like your list of three, are overwhelmed. A 401k-car, funded by you & Iacocca Chrysler, can’t even pace it, let alone outrun it.

                  I know of countries, & billionaires that wield those countries, that don’t live within means other than the anything goes paper veneers over pressed sawdust (those econ acted upons) stacked to rafters in Ikea big boxes. Cuz, apparently, subversion of reality – insanity – is what puts the fun in fundamentals.

                  Coming up – back around, always – backwatered-to-desert once curved lip o’ the wave pyramids & shattered visage lies…cuz lies, lies, & more lies is the lyrics to that cogdis elevator to hell muzak.

                  Speed don’t necessarily kill…but mythamphetamine addiction sure do.

              • True, and having caused FIVE of ’em, Eric, might ‘splain part of my current relatively LOW standard of living, given my still quite-considerable income. Those divorces (yes, I’ve been ‘stoopid’ enough to have TWO, but it has made me leery of even taking the final plunge with my “Beloved Snips”, even though she’s 52, obviously “done birthin’ them babies”, and STILL has that nice dancer’s ass…) can be “EX-pensive”! And I gotta tell ya, even when the child support goes “poof”, it don’t end the negative cash flow. Still have my baby, my “little goil”, now serving her Mormon mission in the Southeast USA, and her upkeep, and recent shipments via Amazon in light of “shelter-in-place” and so on took a wee chunk, but, like lunching a gear box on the drag strip, it’s just part of the “game”.

                Of course, my kids and grandkids mean the whole world to me, and I’d pay THREE TIMES as much if that’s what it took. Hence the irrationality involved in responsible fatherhood. Not that I’m looking to just shovel out the cash, though. And yes, Eric, the system is terribly stacked AGAINST husbands and fathers, to the extent that many of your generation and younger have said, “screw that”, I saw what happened to my Dad/Uncle/Older Brother, NOT for me, pal!”, and in spite of the LDS teaching that admittedly I myself don’t always strictly follow, I have a hard time telling any young fellow smitten with some young lady that it’s gonna be all daisies and unicorns. It’s kinda like how Agent “Kay” (K, Tommy Lee Jones) described becoming part of MIB: “It’s worth it…IF you’re strong enough!”.

            • A one-time leader of mine faith, before I joined it back in ’79, one Harold B. Lee, is famed among Mormons for a saying during his brief tenure as “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” (legally, President of the Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints)…

              “No other work in your life is as important as that which you do in your own house.”

              For good OR bad, a true principle. But sometimes a kid turns out alright even if his parents are a waste of breathable atmosphere, while other times good parents, in spite of all they try to do, have put for a rotten egg. As Al Pacino, portraying “John Milton”, aka Beelzebub, put it in the 1997 movie “The Devil’s Advocate”…”Free Agency, it IS a BITCH!”

          • Douglas, the driving issue aside, the problem with a huge number of today’s youngsters (aside from the general inexperience of youth that we all go through) is that the tyrannical bullshit we have to put up with is normal to them. Being subject to sexual assault and/or irradiation by federal agents to board an airplane? Cameras following your every move? Smartphones feeding your movements into huge databases 24/7? Every transaction monitored and scrutinized? Perfectly natural and expected. They’ve grown up in this environment, have never experienced anything else, and even consider it the way things should be in the name of saaaaaafety. Now we have “shelter in place” and “social distancing” and “flatten the curve” – all part of one’s daily routine.

            Obviously this country was never a libertarian paradise (far from it), but the kind of general freedom we enjoyed in, for example, the 1950s in something as simple as kids going out to play on their own is a foreign concept; frightening. Heck, even in the 1980s one could go to an airport, buy an airline ticket for cash, and board a plane with no ID at all and no one would bat an eye. Inconceivable, right?

            To have a glorious revolution of the proletariat you need to marginalize, silence, and/or get rid of those who remember what it was like before the glorious revolution took place, while indoctrinating the youth. Gotta get them on board while they’re young and can be easily molded. (Some see through the B.S. but far too few.)

            https://youtu.be/K02X3jRxblU?t=46

            • Yes. Sadly the Progs have much in common with the Hitler Youth system of indoctrination. Most people do not know that the origins of the US “educational” system, came from the system established by Bismarck, back in the 19th century.
              With much of the same focus to this very day.

              • And Hitler praised both Bismarck (whom likely would have dismissed him as an empty-headed fool) and his ideological successor, Hindenburg, whom Hitler extolled lavishly AFTER he buried him in 1934. Much of the Nazi doctrines concerned “Das Volk” were dusted-off ideas from the two, after thirteen years of the discredited Weimar Republic had left most Germans divided and politically disillusioned. When there’s a moral vacuum in any nation, SOMETHING will fill it.

              • The Bismarck on the wall, or doorjamb, marks only growth, not a before-after turning point.

                The focus has *always* been: how best to systematically “educate” the hosts that keep the parasitoids propagated in the manner they have & would remain accustomed to.

                Failure, typically willful – as in hardwired (non-adjustable) – to embrace this fact about “social” humanimal has much to do with why “history” is indeed mostly bunk.

                And why memorization & regurgitation of names & dates historytellin’ is yet another province of bunko “artists.”

                Dice rolls are discrete. Rolling the diced isn’t. But dicing “history” is all the plausible deniability narrative it takes to keep the dice rolling.

                Santayana: Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

                Close. Those who cannot figure out what “the past” *is* are condemned. And since there are billions of ‘em, condemning of property, eminent domained earth, too.

    • I think I know who you’re talking about, and also the article in question.

      Yeah, my first thought after reading it was “they finally got to him, too? This is like something an MSM scribe would have written.”

      • I was disappointed too, if the person in question initials are PCR it seems he either drank the Kool-aid or the PTB has something on him.

  25. There is a worth reading article on Lew Rockwell today by Thierry Meyssan. It seems that the plan/groundwork for putting everybody under house arrest on the pretext of a bio attack came from the regime of Bush Yung 1. Like so many other evils brought from the diseased mind of Don Rumsfeld and company.

  26. Next frontier for our ranchers will be monitoring apps, which like all free apps these days, will consist of malevolent spyware that sucks up your contacts, your photos and your data along with your location, and sends it all to the police, Google and Facebook.

    Ranchers assume that cattle always carry their phones everywhere. After all, at any moment one could receive an urgent, life-altering text such as “Hey d00d, wassup??!”

    Resistance means going LoTek: leave the main phone at home; get a prepaid anonymous burner phone; monkeywrench the system with bad data; drive a good gray geezermobile with no always-on internet connection.

    Long after coronavirus has faded from top billing on the MSM disinfo feed, the new digital dystopia will be stronger than ever.

    Funny how stuff that benefits the cattle rather than the ranchers stays stubbornly low tech. Someone I know just had to communicate with the state unemployment office via fax machine.

    This particular state office is scrambling to fix the broken cooling pipes of their 1980 steam-powered mainframe with duct tape and epoxy chewing gum. Meanwhile the fusion center down the street has the latest in pre-crime geofencing tech, mass-loading ALPR surveillance data into the cloud. Go figure …

    • On Radio 4 here in the UK they were telling us how we’ll all enjoy staying in and communicating thru “zoom” or something and how face to face contact will become something we won’t “need” to do. They are insane and a direct threat to our liberty . I’m with Eric so i confront the mask wearers by staring at them intensely and making them feel awkward and saying to other people not wearing masks that it’s good to see normal people whom understand the mask won’t help out and about and isn’t it time to cut the whole shambles out?

      • Zoom is chock full of security holes and spyware, which is of course exactly why the ranchers are recommending it as the tool for the cows to moo through while in their corrals (as the IT Security Admin at my last gig, I made our company stop using it for virtual conferences with clients because of all the security issues that the vendor REFUSED to address).

    • Better yet, don’t just leave the “main phone” at home, where it can still be tracked even if its off, put it in a metal covering of some sort, such as a candy box or wrapped in Aluminum foil. “Where did he go?” Just take it out and turn it on when you “need” it. Contrary to current mythology, smart phones are not a nutritional requirement.

  27. Hi Eric,

    Was just reading the following last night on history.com about the Spanish flu pandemic at the end of World War I (to compare it to now):

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/topics/world-war-i/1918-flu-pandemic

    Under the section “Fighting the Spanish Flu” the article mentions mask requirements, fine, business closings, etc. in some of the U.S.

    Would you say this sets a legal precedent for the present day, or are circumstances too different (e.g. severity and deadliness of the disease, differences in scope of regulations, etc.) to relate it to now?

    Also of note: It appears from this article many of the 1918 flu deaths were related to misuse of aspirin, which was recommended as a treatment of symptoms by doctors of that era.

    • Hi Chris,

      America has been an unfree place in vague terms for at least the past 150 years; but it is becoming very specifically and explicitly so. This is an inflection moment. Either we fight – or we give in.

      I will fight – by any means necessary. I will not live as a goddamn cow.

    • The difference is that today, they are not putting an end date on the oppression. Back then, there was a pretty good track record of dialing things back when the BS was over.

      Look at what happened with 911. All the freedom taking occurred after the event. None of those former freedoms returned

  28. Costco has notices at the door as of late in various areas indicating that masks will be mandatory as of May 1.

    Of course, this means that Sam’s Club will enforce the same policy in anticipation of being forced to by local law when Costco’s lobbyists and lawyers get busy to stifle the competition.

    Those of you in WA State know the drill. Costco wrote the liquor deregulation that started almost a decade ago.

    • Hi Roscoe,

      This ought to cause thinking people – as opposed to Corona Cattle – to shun Costco and Sam’s and any other businesses that impose a mask policy. Fish heads! Cold and crunchy.

      • Oh lord! Did you HAVE to bring up fish heads?? Now I have that damn song stuck in my head again!… ^^ Though I must say that I do miss the good doctors radio program. I see that the Mask Crusade is off to a grand start. Have fun storming the castle!… ^^
        But seriously, did you really expect our Dear Leaders to pass up the opportunity, to increase their strangle hold on our peoples few remaining liberties? War Lords have to be true to their nature. As do AGW. Prepare accordingly.

      • The place I wanted to go get my hair cut when I’m “allowed” to do so May 1 posted a bunch of nonsense rules that make it impossible for me to visit with my dignity intact, so I guess I’ll live on with my caveman hair.
        Masks required of everyone.
        Wait in your car. Stylist will text when you can come in.
        No bathroom privileges.
        No hair dryers will be used.
        Wash hair before coming. No washes will be done.
        And oddest, you’re not allowed to talk about the wuflu, the lockdowns, the salon’s rules or your opinions on these with your stylist while she works. Stick to small talk, your hair or your kids.
        And don’t come if you have symptoms. This one, at least, actually makes sense.

        • I’ve been using a beard and moustache trimmer to keep myself from looking like a deranged hermit. Since I’ve been clean shaven at the wife’s insistence for the last two years, I no longer use the device for what it was originally designed and purchased for, so repurposing it has saved me $20.00 a month for the last two months. I’m seriously considering continuing to use it in this capacity even if/when this nonsense ends. In fact, I might just buy a cheap clipper set and continue to give myself home haircuts. If these barbershop owners don’t have the gumption or common sense to preserve their livelihoods and consider themselves “non-essential” businesses, then why the hell should I consider them essential and waste my money on them again? I’m starting to feel the same way about restaurants and certain other businesses that have capitulated to GovCo and declared themselves “non-essential” sheeple. I’ve been doing fine without their goods and services so far, so why would I need them again in the future?

          • Hi Lib,

            Indeed.

            The wheel is turning for me as well. They have become Satan’s Little Helpers – so to speak. Or – better – Lenin’s Useful Idiots.

      • Roscoe,

        I received an email stating this won’t go into effect until Monday, May 4th. Which I guess forces my hand to go this weekend if I want to go. If I do, on the way out I’ll be letting the manager know that I’ll not be shopping there until the mask requirement is lifted and that come renewal time, I’m going to have serious reservations about renewing my membership due to their actions/policies in the present. That should get their attention because Costco makes most of it’s profit from memberships.

    • I’m going to turn in my membership card then. Right in front of them. Not wearing a mask either. Same with Sam’s club or any other of these shitheads that requires that.

      • Hi Swamp,

        I am planning the same as regards my gym membership; I got inside dope that the owner plans to make mask-wearing a requirement. Bye-bye. And I have already been talking with several lifting buddies about the possibility of organizing our own underground gym. Yes, it has come to that.

        In America.

        Cancel the goddamn 4th of July now, please.

        • I think it is cancelled. I just don’t conceive of any way that it will be celebrated in the US anymore except by mask wearing retards

          • There are lots of such retards, and come the 4th, they will certainly celebrate how they are proud to be an American where at least they know they’re free. They’ll wear their masks to their social distance bbq and to their local fireworks display. Think about this: the damn Blue Angels flew down the east coast yesterday to celebrate the second responders (health care heroes) and these same muh freedumb mask-wearing retards creamed their jeans.

            • Too bad that they couldn’t get anyone in the air on 9/11, the big show prior to the bank bailouts of ’08. Now the FED is going to buy the busted CMBS crud, likely at par. The virus is the cover for bank bailouts yet again.
              Funny thing is that the CDC stopped recording seasonal influenza statistics just when the CCPvirus promo got rolling. They might have stopped recording malpractice deaths and hospital infectious deaths and carried them over to the deads on the CCPvirus chart.

        • Talked to the owner of my gym before this whole thing really ramped up. She told me she was going to stay open until they ordered her to close (this was when closing was “recommended”, but not ordered… yet.

          Well, sure enough about a week later they were closed due to our retarded mayor giving the unlawful order.

          I just received and paid the membership dues. Wondering if I should cancel and save up the money for a home gym. I will tell her that if they try to tell me I have to wear a mask, or only a few people are allowed to workout at once, I’m outta there.

          • “Recommended” in the same way The Godfather “recommends” you sign the contract.

            Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract

    • Wal-Mart has gone full retard as well. I’ve been avoiding it and other big box type stores but I needed a battery for my riding lawn mower and they had by far the best price. (Important right now since the government mafia has basically destroyed my business in order to protect me.) No entry without a useless mask, then shoppers are funneled through aisles set up like cattle chutes. Warnings about “social distancing” blare endlessly, reminiscent of the screeching announcer on 1984’s telescreens.

      Meanwhile, more and more information keeps coming out about how low the fatality rate really is but you won’t find it on the evening news.

      https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

        • Unfortunately mine doesn’t have a pull starter – electric start only. (It’s a one-lung Briggs engine of about 14 hp.) Might be possible to install one, I should probably look into that.

          • You can jump start it off your car. This will not fry the electrical system on the riding mower so long as you don’t do it with the car’s engine running. (The shunt regulator used in riding mowers and other small engine applications can be damaged if it’s trying to regulate the output of a 60+ amp alternator).

  29. I gave up sugar, fat, and salt over lent. I lost 40 pounds in 40 days. Not quite where I need to be, as another 10-15 pounds will put me back at my high school weight, but I can see the goalpost now (it was hiding behind my huge gut). Lots of root vegetables and fresh greens will do wonders for your disposition. When the restaurants open up again I won’t bother with going back, no matter how much sanitizer they use. Restaurant food is way too unhealthy.

    I have cable TV because I work for the cable company, but I can’t recall the last time I turned on the TV to watch regular television. OK I take that back, I’ve been watching this season’s Westworld on the HBO app. But other than having noise on in the office I don’t find anything about traditional television compelling in any way. Silence is preferable to the fear pr0n that’s been peddled by the MSM over the last few months. I won’t bother going back, no matter how beautiful the actresses are. Media is way too unhealthy

    If Apple goes though with their plans to broadcast my location and tattle on me for being around a Wuhan Flu “survivor” I will likely switch to Linux and break out my old Nokia. It will be hard to give up some of the niceties of the Apple universe, but I ran Linux exclusively for years and I’m sure will get back at it very quickly. And if/when that happens, I won’t be going back, no matter how good a product they release. Silly-Con valley is way to unhealthy.

    • Trisquel and Gentoo are great for security. Use libreswan also. I was using my old Nokia phone also until they killed 2G. By the way, you shouldn’t give up healthy fats as all the minerals and vitamins in your (hopefully) pastured farm animal are stored there and in the bones. Garbage fake fats thought should be avoided at all costs.

      • I have a Nokia N900 that runs Maemo and has a 4G radio There are N9-00 refurbished handsets on EBay too. I’ve been following Jola and SailfishOS too, but for whatever reason can’t get one in the states (probably because of the screwball patent office). Batteries are going to be tough but there’s ways around that too.

    • Been using Linux since 2005 when windows was corrupted by a ‘virus’ and I lost everything as I would not pay. I now use LinuxMint and have had no problems with Viruses for 15 years. It’s not impossible to infect a Linux system but it is much, much harder plus the audience is smaller.
      My son, a Windows idiot and he pays $50 fedbuxs a year for vaccination software. Personally I think Gates is involved with these machine viruses in order to sell the vaccination software. Actually the same thing he is trying to do with the Wu Flu and other human viruses which it looks like he will be successful in that as well.

      • “Original antigenic sin.”

        Vaccine sellers, whatever the domain, sell policies that don’t pay claims, *and* set up the immunized for lifelong ‘planned obsolescence’ – yours, obsoleting of you — “boosters.”

        Have been reading about the pertussis/whooping cough vaccine. It primes the immune system – permanently — to NOT be able to respond to ACT (adenylate cyclase toxin).

        “In natural immunity, the body responds very strongly to ACT, but because of original antigenic sin, & the absence of ACT in the vaccine, the vaccinated are not programmed to respond to it at all. Vaccines do not boost antibodies to this toxin, because as of yet, nobody has figured how to put the antigen into the vaccine. The naturally convalesced have more than 17 times the amount of antibody to ACT than DTaP recipients & more than 9 times than DTP vaccinated, as measured after pertussis infection. There is only a miniscule amount of ACT antibody in the vaccinated, which is the result of the immune system’s paralyzed effort to mount a response after programming by the vaccine.
        When a vaccinated person contracts pertussis again, the bacteria can get a good hold because there is little to stop them. The immune system will not respond to ACT in the future, because the programming has been set by the first contact (which was the needle, not the bacteria).”

    • its the sugar. you need fat and protein otherwise you never feel full. you can do that for a while i suppose but it wont last

      • Right. It was only for 40 days of lent, although I’ll probably make it an annual thing. Had a meat filled pizza on Easter Sunday and have since added back a reasonable amount of meat and fruit.

    • Nothing like once again being able to look down and see your….TOES! Yeah, dat’s it, I can see my TOES again!

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