I stole this from Peter Grant

Because it's true.

Just so

This lockdown is absolute bullshit that does nothing but harm.

– Wash your hands.
– If you’re sick, stay home (unless you’re sick enough to need to go to the hospital).
– Isolate those who are most at risk (the elderly, those with significant heart or breathing problems). 

Really, you should be doing all of that anyway. If COVID19 gets people actually doing that then that’s a win. Not worth the other nonsense but, “it’s an ill wind” and all that. 

But the rest? Not only useless but actively harmful. First, from the way diseases work, you want the low risk people to get the disease. Get it, get over it, and stop being a risk to everyone else. You want it to spread quickly and thoroughly through the low-risk population. By slowing that, you delay when “herd immunity” is able to protect the higher risk people. And then there’s the other effects of all the restrictions, the effects on the economy. People keep trying to dismiss that as “millionaires profits” but economic damage extends far beyond some millionaire having to find a less expensive brand of champagne. It causes suffering and death for real people.

Poverty and depression kill people just as easily as a virus.  It might not be as fast, but they'll be just as dead.

I wholeheartedly agree

https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/1260721488241418240

Stop this bullshit lockdown.  Open up the economy.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Action, the temper-tantrum response, and other thoughts.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has basically told the state government that they still have to follow the Constitution.

n a 4-3 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down the Gov. Tony Evers’ administration’s stay-at-home order. 

The ruling “essentially reopens the state, lifting caps on the size of gatherings, allowing people to travel as they please and allowing shuttered businesses to reopen, including bars and restaurants,” the Associated Press reported. 

Health secretary Andrea Palm had issued the order, and the court found she didn’t have the authority to do so.

And of course, the little tinpot dictator Governor who appointed his little fascist-in-training wasn't so happy about this.

Evers, meanwhile, “reacted angrily” to the ruling, according to the AP. 

“Today, Republican legislators convinced four members of the state Supreme Court to throw the state into chaos,” Evers said. 

“They have provided no plan. There’s no question among anybody that people are going to get sick. Republicans own that chaos.” 

He added, “In the meantime, we’re going to have 72 counties doing their own thing.” 

“I can’t believe there’s a state in the nation with this type of chaos.”

The arrogance and condescension of a Democrat never ceases to amaze me.  Is there something about being a Marxist that makes you sneer and dismiss the abilities of normal people, or it is the ego and unearned sense of moral superiority that makes you a Marxist? 

And Marxists, because of their narcissistic mania and over-grown opinions of their capabilities, are literally incapable of learning from history.  For example, take this article (brought to my attention by Kim du Toit) that describes how Germany pulled itself out of the economic morass of post-WWII devastation.

The ensuing deregulation was dramatic and shocking to occupation forces. As Erhard notes, "It was strictly laid down by the British and American control authorities that permission had to be obtained before any definite price changes could be made. The Allies never seemed to have thought it possible that someone could have the idea, not to alter price controls, but simply to remove them."

The governmental controls didn't revive Germany's economy.  REMOVING THEM revived Germany's economy.

Every time the government steps in to "help", it hurts.  It destroys economies, it destroys health care systems, it destroys cities (see Detroit).  The only thing that can get these kinds of systems and places up and running again is the people, the individuals.  All the government has to do is GET THE HELL OUT OF THEIR WAY.

Democrats can't have that, because that would invalidate their entire political philosophy.  So we get the dipshits like Tony Evers in Wisconsin, who just can't believe that those counties are all going to do their own thing!  Why, I never!  Jeeves, my smelling salts!

What that rotten fart bubble refuses to accept is that THE GOVERNMENT is why things are so screwed up.  THE GOVERNMENT is why some states have higher death rates from the Kung Flu while others have lower (see:  New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania).  THE GOVERNMENT is why the economy was in shambles prior to Trump taking office, and it is the orders from THE GOVERNMENT that destroyed a raging economy in less than two months.

You want to know who can get it back online and humming?  Not The Government.  The Government is a collection of corrupt, stupid, venal, ego-maniacal, lazy shitbags and grifters, from top to bottom.  Oh, your local government might have less of those and more of people who actually are there to help you (my experiences with my county of residence have been quite pleasant in the majority) but once you move out of the realm where your politicians are rubbing elbows with YOU, then that means that they're rubbing elbows with someone else, and all they really care about from you is your vote.  And as long as they can keep the rabble from realizing just how badly fucked they're getting, they can keep getting voted in again and again and again on the same bullshit promises they make every election year.  Think John F'ing McCain or Paul "Backstabber" Ryan.

Individuals, making individual choices without the jackboot of the government on their necks, can save this country from a decades-long economic depression.  The Individual has always been the answer, and everybody knows it.  That's why so many Democrats are doing their best to destroy the individual and their accomplishments; when America does well, the Democrat Party suffers.  When Americans do well, they don't need the gummint to swoop in and save them, which is the primary means that the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party uses to grab power.  The more America suffers, the happier the Democrat Party becomes, because then they can sell their toxic snake oil of socialism to the people under the guise of "helping" them.  But Marxism always leads to re-education camps and economic destruction.

The Individual, unfettered by government stupidity, is the only thing that can save this country. 

The lockdown was a huge mistake

The data was incomplete, then bad, and then completely made up bullshit.

Prof. Klaus Püschel, for instance, a respected pathologist and head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Hamburg University Hospital, argues that “in the end, COVID-19 is a viral disease like the flu, which in most cases is harmless and is only fatal in exceptional cases. 

“It is important to look at the aftermath of the epidemic to see if COVID-19 really was the cause of death,” Püschel observes. “Of the approximately 180 deceased with coronavirus that we have now examined, all suffered from severe pre-existing conditions and were not children or adolescents. The COVID-19 infection was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” 

University of Hanover Professor Stefan Homburg, a former adviser to the federal government, agrees official figures in Germany in no way justified the lockdown. 

“In Italy, the coronavirus epidemic was worse than a flu epidemic, in Germany it was less severe,” Homburg said. “With the lockdown, the federal and state governments have made a huge mistake.”

The two goons in charge of the response in NY, Nipples Cuomo and Blah-Blah DeBoshevik, have screwed the pooch so monumentally that NY state has the highest death rate from the Kung Flu at approximately 140 deaths per 100,000 people.  And that's if you believe the data coming out from that state, which I don't.  We already know that the New York officials are classifying anything and everything as a Kung Flu death, even if the people never tested positive for the Cantonese Cough.  But, let's just agree to use that number for the sake of argument.

New York is killing it's people off thanks to the incompetence and stupidity of Blah-Blah and Nipples.  Idaho is not.  Utah is not.  Hawaii, Montana, Alaska and Wyoming have one death per 100,000 people.  Why the hell are we treating those states as if they are NYC?  Why are we destroying the economy of this country over a virus that isn't even all that lethal unless you voted for incompetent corrupt morons to rule over you?

End the lockdown.  Stop this bullshit.  Let this country get back to work.

Folks, you don't wear an upside-down cross unless you mean it

Especially on National Tee-Vee.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist.  I think that most things in this life that are evil can be boiled down to simple greed.  But you don't push for a chip in people while wearing an upside-down cross.  You just don't.  Not unless you have ulterior motives.

Whereupon an author takes umbrage with one of my posts

Francis Porretto did not like my shopping cart post.  Luckily, he saves his anger for the person who wrote the original, not for me.

The miscreant who wrote the text of the image above isn’t just opinionated. He clearly feels justified to judge others according to his personal standards – and by “to judge” I mean to indict, try, convict, sentence, and execute. He wouldn’t be safe around me. I might let him pop off once without penalty. On the second incidence – which in the case of such persons usually occurs about five seconds after you’ve let the first one pass – I’d haul him up by the scruff of his neck. (Politely, of course; I never kill or cripple on first acquaintance. Well, hardly ever.)

One of the phrases I remember from when I was a wee bairn was my mother telling me that if you want to know what someone is like, observe them when they're driving or playing sports.  That's when they let the mask slip.  That's when you see who they are underneath any facade they might put up in other circumstances.

As I've grown older, I've found other indicators as well, but the sports and driving still hold true.

I'll be the first to admit that when I read that graphic about the shopping cart, it struck a personal bias with me.  When I was stuck in the City of Lost Angels, I was shocked at the number of shopping carts strewn about the public streets.  Not just one or two.  Dozens.  I was mentoring a couple of kids from my church at the time, and we made a game to see how many shopping carts we could see laying on the sidewalks while I drove from one place to another.  At one point, just driving around my block, I counted fourteen shopping carts.

Mr. Porretto points out that in some grocery stores, there are people whos job it is to retrieve the carts from the lot.  Therefore, by leaving the carts where they are, you are allowing someone to earn a paycheck.  This is true.

Were you aware that most supermarkets employ people to fetch the shopping carts from where they’ve been abandoned around the asphalt prairies? Were you aware that shoppers who personally return shopping carts inflict more damage, both to the carts and to shoppers’ cars, than those paid hirelings?

I can also attest to the fact that there are trucks that drive around Los Angeles picking up all those shopping carts that festoon the sidewalks like odd plants.  They would come by my neighborhood about once a week.  I would normally put the shopping carts on the boulevard just to get them off the sidewalk.  The truck would come by, load the carts into their stack, and drive on.

Guess who paid for that service?  Yes, of course the stores paid, but do you think the cost stopped there?  And after buying groceries in the LA area for three and a half years, I can say that our food budget dropped by half when we left.  There's a reason for that.  Having to retrieve shopping carts that are scattered about the city is part of it.  The massive amount of shoplifting is another.  People who will steal a shopping cart probably have no bias against stealing other things.

Let me talk about another part of LA for just a bit.  I may have already posted it years back, but I can't find it in the archives and my searching ability seems to have suffered.  So you get the short-short version.  My boss, a damn fine guy, was out for a jog.  Waiting at a crosswalk.  He gets the right-of-way and starts to jog across the intersection when a guy paying attention to either his phone or his radio makes the corner at about 35 MPH.  Luckily, my boss sees it coming and hops up, thereby ensuring that he only bounces off the hood rather than being run over.  Still does a lot of damage.  He didn't know it until later, but getting hit that hard had ruptured five disks in his back.  The car didn't stop.  Nobody stopped.  Nobody bothered to see if he was OK.  He was laying in the crosswalk, in excruciating pain, and the people in the cars around him starting honking at him.  He was in the way, you see.

The man had just been the victim of a hit-and-run accident, and nobody could even bother to call 911 for him.  They honked at him because he was just an irritation to them.

I submit to you that having to police up shopping carts around my house, and my boss getting honked at while he couldn't even stand up, are related.

The same kind of self-absorbed individual who takes the shopping cart home and dumps it on the sidewalk in front of someone else's house is the same kind of self-absorbed individual who won't call 911 for someone who just got hit by a car.  In both cases, they are only thinking of themselves.  To that self-absorbed individual, the other person is either an irritation to be avoided or a mark to be used.  One of the greatest culture shocks when we moved to LA is how people treated an invitation to dinner.  Their response was, in a multitude of ways, "What do you want from me?"  The vast majority of dinner invitations we received in the first year were an excuse for the person issuing the invitation to pitch us on some business scheme.  The concept of just having dinner and being friendly was rather foreign to them.

So, do I want to live in a world where people who don't return shopping carts are flogged?  No.  But I've lived in a place where people dump shopping carts on your front lawn as a matter of habit, and you couldn't pay me enough to go back.  Because the people who do such things are the kind of people who only care about themselves in the long run.

I am also perfectly willing to admit that having lived in a place where I had to pick up shopping carts from my yard and set them on the boulevard has given me quite a bit of personal bias regarding putting the shopping cart back.  But I didn't just live with random carts appearing in my yard as if placed there by aliens.  They were put there by my neighbors, who apparently thought so little of the people around them that they felt perfectly fine dumping shopping carts and other trash on the property I tried to keep clean.  My morning rituals prior to my run consisted of picking up trash, putting shopping carts in the boulevard and removing/covering up the graffiti that would appear on our wall.

One of the things that the Army tries to hammer into its Soldiers is the fact that Integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is watching.  In Lost Angeles, I would have been happy with people just leaving the shopping carts in the store parking lot.  That didn't happen.  Civilization runs on people who do the right thing when no one is watching.  When people begin to just ignore that, you get Lost Angeles.

Please go read Mr. Porretto's post, because he makes valid points, and as a Christian I have an obligation to forgive the people who harm me.  My question, then, is at what point is the harm less against me, and more against the civilization that I try to uphold?  Because a person who will not put a shopping cart back, and instead drags it and dumps it in to my yard, is a person who will sin against me in larger ways if they have the opportunity.

End the lockdown. Now.

It was started on a premise based on bad data, and the more we learn, the more we understand that it was a bad idea.

Based on a broad array of scientific data, Just Facts has computed that the anxiety created by reactions to Covid-19—such as stay-at-home orders, business shutdowns, media exaggerations, and legitimate concerns about the virus—will destroy at least seven times more years of human life than can possibly be saved by lockdowns to control the spread of the disease. This figure is a bare minimum, and the actual one is likely more than 90 times greater.

The lockdown has been been framed as a matter of life or death.  That is a false premise.  It is a matter between death, and death.  We have to pick the best of two bad options.  Don't blame the people who want to work, blame the Chinese Communist Party for allowing the Beijing Bubbleguts out of a lab.

Lux Aeterna

More truth than society knows how to handle