Category Archive 'COVID-19'
01 Aug 2021

Imagine!

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Kurt Schichter has a terrific rant.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s imagine our ruling class was not as utterly corrupt, dishonest, incompetent and downright stupid as it manifestly is. I know that’s hard, but go with me.

This weird new virus appears and starts spreading. Instead of leveraging it to take down Trump, the Democrats appear with the Republican president and GOP leadership to announce they are working together to solve the problem. Imagine that instead of shaming people, first about wearing masks, then about not wearing masks, then about not wearing two masks, then no masks, then masks again, they went with transparency.

“We are not sure how much, if at all, masks work. We’re running test trials to see and we’ll tell you what we find as soon as we have the data. In the meantime, let’s all wear them just in case.” And then, when they ran the studies, they would tell us the answer.

Have you seen any studies about masks? We get a lot of that fascist gnome and others telling us to wear masks (after initially telling us they were useless – remember that memory-holed narrative?) but where’s the actual science?

See, you have to believe the science, and believe them when they tell you what it is yet won’t show you. Obey!

But trust is earned, and these people act like it is their right to have our trust, that we owe them to take it on faith that whatever these people say is the Gospel. Except they are wrong all the time, and instead of owning up to it, they treat you like some sort of idiot for noticing. When you don’t trust people who are perpetually wrong, that’s not denying science. That is science – you are making observations, and drawing reasonable conclusions. In this case, the observation is that our establishment sucks, and that it can’t be trusted.

How far would a little humility gone? Very far. Imagine, and this will be hard, these masterminds getting up and saying, “America, we were wrong about something. We thought it was right, but we tested it and we found we were not right. Here is the data, and now that we have better information, we are changing our recommendation.”

What would we say? “Oh, okay. They were doing the best they can and being straight with us. People make mistakes. We need to learn from them. After all, it’s been a century since the last pandemic so we have a lot of lessons to re-learn. Let’s move forward.”

But no. No, there’s no humility. They make a mistake and they don’t stand up and admit it. Instead, they just change the narrative and act as if the narrative du jour was always the narrative. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. But we’re not blind or stupid for noticing.

They tell us the vaccine is going to make us immune from COVID. Then it turns out you can still get it, just not as bad. Yet when people notice this 180-degree spin, the smart set shrieks like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Just imagine if they had been honest and forthright. But that was not in the cards. The ruling caste’s conceit is that we are idiots, unable and unworthy to make simple decisions for ourselves. We must be guided, nudged, or intimidated, if necessary, into making the right choice. And we do not deserve explanations, because the last thing our elite wants is accountability.

Instead, they want unlimited power. Look at their arbitrary emergency rules and regulations. You could go to a strip club but not a church. Huh? And the courts, again, let us down initially by not enforcing the Constitution. It was an emergency, after all, and as we all know, in an emergency you need to rule by decree, say our betters. So, we got to watch idiots walking around in the sunshine with mouth thongs on while cops busted mommies for letting little Billy play on the slide. At no time did most of the establishment reconsider or change. No, it doubled down on failure. Yet we’re supposed to trust it?

RTWT

18 Apr 2021

COVID Sent Bay Area Techies Fleeing to Tahoe

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Outside reports that the COVID epidemic had terrible consequences for the Lake Tahoe resort community:

They just kept coming. The day-trippers, Airbnbers, second-home owners, and unmasked revelers. Unleashed after California’s first statewide COVID-19 lockdown ended in late June of last year, they swarmed Lake Tahoe in numbers never before seen, even for a tourist region accustomed to the masses. “It was a full-blown takeover,” says Josh Lease, a tree specialist and longtime Tahoe local.

July Fourth fireworks were canceled, but that stopped no one. August was a continuation of what Lease called a “shit show.”

The standstill traffic was one thing; the locals were used to that. But the trash—strewn across the sand, floating along the shore, piled around dumpsters—was too much. Capri Sun straws, plastic water-bottle caps, busted flip-flops, empty beer cans. One day in early August, Lease picked up a dirty diaper on a south shore beach and dangled it before a crowd. “This anyone’s?” he asked.

Lease was pissed. He couldn’t believe the lack of respect people had for this beautiful area, his home for two decades. Plus, they’d invaded during a pandemic, bringing their COVID with them.

That day, after the diaper incident, Lease went back to his long-term rental in Meyers, California, a few miles south of the lake at the juncture of Highways 89 and 50, where he could see the endless stream of cars. An otherwise even-keeled guy, he logged on to Facebook and vented. “Let’s rally,” he posted on his page, adding that he wanted to put together a “non welcoming committee.” He was joking—sort of. But word spread like the wildfires that would soon rage uncontrollably around the state. Before long someone had designed a flyer of a kid wearing a gas mask, with a speech bubble that read “Stay Out of Tahoe.” It went viral.

On Friday, August 14, at four o’clock, over 100 locals from around the lake began to gather. They commandeered the roundabouts leading into the Tahoe Basin’s major towns—Truckee, Tahoe City, Kings Beach, and Meyers in California, and Incline Village in Nevada—to greet the weekend hordes. Young women in bikini tops, elderly couples in floppy hats, and bearded dads bouncing babies in Björns held up hand-painted signs: “Respect Tahoe Life,” “Your Entitlement Sucks!,” and “Go Back to the Bay.” One old-timer plastered his truck with a banner that read “Go Away” and drove around and around a traffic circle.

But summer turned to fall, which turned to winter, which became spring, and the newcomers are still here. It’s not just the tourists anymore, whose numbers have ebbed and flowed with lockdown restrictions and the weather and whose trash has gone from wet towels twisted in the sand to plastic sleds split in the snow. There’s another population of people who came and never left: those freed by COVID from cubicles and work commutes. They migrated, laptops in tow, to mountain towns all over the West, transforming them into modern-day boomtowns: “Zoom-towns.”

In Lake Tahoe, the unwelcoming party was hardly a deterrence. The outsiders have settled in.

RTWT

05 Apr 2021

“Roman Authorities Investigating Jesus For Violating Stay-In-Tomb Order”

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Babylon Bee:

JERUSALEM—Roman authorities are investigating controversial religious leader Jesus of Nazareth for violating the Empire’s clear “stay in tomb” order. After crucifying him and laying him in the tomb, Roman guards put Him under strict orders to stay there and not come back, rising victorious over sin and death.

But Jesus, answering to a higher authority, refused to stay dead and busted out of the tomb, establishing a kingdom that would never end — again, in clear violation of the government’s orders.

“Jesus is a dangerous rebel, refusing to bend the knee to Caesar and not abiding by the law of sin and death,” said one Roman official. “He clearly broke the law by leaving the tomb, and we’re going to be issuing a citation and placing him under mandatory quarantine for these crimes.”

RTWT

20 Feb 2021

The Ted Cruz-Went-to-Cancun Flap

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27 Jan 2021

Oxford’s Lamb and Flag Pub to Close

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A sign for The Lamb and Flag is seen as the Grade-II listed pub is forced to close, after more than 400 years of business, following outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in central Oxford, Britain, January 25, 2021. REUTERS/Eddie Keogh – RC21FL975VBS

Not the famous pub where the Inklings, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and others, regularly met back during the 1930s and 1940s. That was the Eagle and Child. But still a 450-Year-Old Oxford institution, owned by St. John College abd much frequented by Tolkien, Lewis, Thomas Hardy, and many other famous Oxonians, it has been announced is another casualty of COVID-19 lockdowns.

Yahoo

28 Dec 2020

“Quam Parva Sapientia Regitur Mundus” (The Latest Moldbug Screed)

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Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) clocked in this morning with his latest emailed rant. This one’s on the Coronavirus and is apparently to be the last that we subscriber readers are encouraged to share, for at least a while.

(Occasional emphasis on the really good lines added by me. JDZ)

2020, the year of everything fake

“The only question left to ask was what would happen after everything familiar collapsed.”

Dec 28

I keep thinking there is some German word, like Schadenfreude or Gemütlichkeit but different, for the inability to take the world you live in seriously. If so, I can’t find it. We live in the future where everything is wrong, but at least you can’t google ideas.

In some worlds, the inability to take the world seriously is a mental disorder. In other worlds, it is normal and universal. And in some, it is a sign of superb mental health.

All of us old sufferers from this old itch, certain as we were, were never quite certain that we didn’t live in that first world. As 2020 ends, there is a certain Schadenfreude in seeing tout le monde heading toward the second—a tragedy, but a hopeful tragedy.

There are probably still people who take the world seriously—or at least, take America seriously. (Since the world still takes America seriously, it’s the same thing.) Even if the tables are starting to turn, we still have a deep moral duty to berate these people. And tables rarely turn—though they often feel like they’re starting to.

2020, for America, was a disaster. For instance, 1/4 of all small businesses are dead. Now, a serious country would try to understand that disaster, the way it understands each and every airplane crash. Who loaded the live oxygen generators into the hull? Why was the passenger permitted to board with her “emotional-support viper?Read the rest of this entry »

27 Dec 2020

Prediction!

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23 Dec 2020

Irritating, Isn’t It?

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23 Dec 2020

Don’t You Feel Better Now?

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23 Dec 2020

“Don’t Spend It All In One Place!”

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22 Dec 2020

“The Peasants Are Suffering From the Shutdown.”

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19 Dec 2020

The Plague

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“Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest—health, integrity, purity (if you like)—is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.”

—-Albert Camus, The Plague

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