Posse Incitatus

Pandemic without End

Perhaps the most demoralizing aspect of the COVID pandemic is the way public health officials and political leaders have not just botched the science, but taken it out, beaten it, run over it, beaten it some more and then paraded the disintegrating corpse in an Iron Maiden.

The whole point of science is learning from observation, yet here we are, eight months into the outbreak and most public health figures are still acting like there is zero progress in treatment for the disease and instead we have to resort to medieval tactics like quarantine and societal shut down.

Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of people are dying from other causes.  Just last week we learned that the several hundred thousand Americans receiving chemotherapy had their treatment interrupted, which will likely prove lethal for many of them who otherwise might have beaten the disease.

The same is true for those with heart conditions, depression, addiction, and a host of other maladies.

The notion that society can 'wait out' an easily communicable disease is completely without any scientific basis, and yet health department officials and their political masters have the gall to accuse anyone who questions their bizarre (and often contradictory) pronouncements as being "anti-science."

Another aspect is the constant fear-mongering by medical officials, who keep warning of "cases rising."  This is a monumental deception.  The increase in positive tests is the inevitable result of increased testing, not disease spread.  It's like anything else - if you look for something you have a better chance of finding than if you don't look at all.

The tests are imprecise, and don't always indicate whether one is still contagious or even suffering any ill effects. 

Last week Michigan was rocked by the news that hospitalizations are up 80 percent.  Oh no!  Lock it down!!!!

But wait, 80 percent of what?  If there were only five patients and you get four more, that is in fact an 80 percent increase but not enough to justify massive societal disruption.

None of the hospitals are even close to capacity.  Ingham County, for example, has been locking down dorms and frat houses with wild abandon, yet as I write this there is a single patient in hospital.

I'm sure some wag will say:  "SEE, the lockdowns are working!" but far from containing the spread of the disease, these tactics virtually ensure everyone in the confined area will get it. 

The president is right - COVID is something we have to live with, just we humanity lived with smallpox, cholera, and influenza.  Hiding in one's basement until it goes away is a recipe for far greater harm.

It will conclude by noting that the stout resistance of the governors who allowed the disease to spread through nursing homes is also profoundly anti-science.  Essentially they want to protect themselves from political embarrassment - and the also protect the professional reputations of their medical advisors.

This is also a blatant assault on good medical practices and it should not be allowed to stand.  I'm sure they hope that such inquiry as does eventually happen will be soft-pedaled and reduced to "things were done, events happened" and be quietly ignored by an incurious media.

That's how 'science' works these days.

There can be no discussion about race because progressives are dishonest

Recently I had to banish our remaining troll (who I strongly suspect was a sock-puppet of another troll) because the cartoonish parodies of actual insight it offered had become tedious.

Such nonsense is sadly all too common on the left these days.

The troll's last act of defiant stupidity was to insist that Antifa does not actually exist, and also to ask for specific links of minority-owned businesses damaged by Democrat-sponsored riots.

This willful dishonesty is what precludes any kind of intelligent politics.

Antifa is of course real, it has adherents, "liberated zones," and a number of partisans who boast of their strength.  It cannot be "legitimate protest" and also "a bugbear of the right."

Similarly, one can't keep going on about "mostly peaceful protests" and ignore the massive physical destruction they caused.

The media is now openly into Goebbels mode, pushing Big Lie after Big Lie, completely indifferent to the contradictions in their statements.  Similarly, Democrat politicians and their corrupt public health allies want to simultaneously emphasize the need for eternal lockdowns, but then make bogus exceptions ("racism is woth the risk").

Right now there is chatter hyping the growing number of "cases," by which they mean people who test positive for the Wuhan Virus.  This is meaningless.  There are a number of viruses that have almost universal spread, such as the herpes variant that gives one "cold sores."  None of these would justify an economic shutdown of indefinite length.

The reason for the shutdown was to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed by sick patients.  That risk has disappeared.  Not only has the case load dropped, capacity has been increased in case there is a surge.  Responsible, non-partisan scientists would point this out.

But science also must serve The Party, so whatever The Party requires is now the new science.

All of this renders normal politics impossible.  I don't think the left understands that what comes next will be beyond the ability of their twitter accounts to control.

The Wuhan Plague

We've gotten used to a level of safety and security that is without precedent.

Two generations have grown to mature middle age without lasting privation or the experience of widespread disaster.

Perhaps this is why there have been so imaginary panics over the intervening decades.  Humans are hard-wired to detect danger and when non materializes, they invent it.

But now there is something very real to fear.  Pestilence rides the land once again.

Naturally, the remnant main stream media is worse than useless.  Their pathetic partisan plays are self-refuting and whatever political capital they hoped to make for the Democrats from large-scale loss of life was destroyed by their premature gloating about it.

PRO-TIP:  You can pretend to mourn thousands of dead if you're openly talking about how you'll profit from their demise before they even die.

They've also decided to go all-in on parroting Chi-Com propaganda regarding the spread of the Wuhan virus, which is never a good look.

Given the current dilapidated state of the US administrative state, the Trump administration's actions have been timely and appropriate.  I will also give a nod to Michigan's Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose decision to close schools statewide was also correct.

The only way to get ahead of this thing is to shut things down early.  A single infected individual in a school building could immediately generate hundreds of additional cases.

Our ancestors understood this.  When travel was difficult, diseases could be contained with less disruption.  Closing the city gates and patrolling the countryside would often stop the outbreak.

The advent of steamships and railroads rendered this approach inadequate, hence the massive public measures taken in 1918.  Put simply, we cannot test or isolate individual cases to stop this thing.

This is why the Democrat howling about cutting travel routes is not only stupid but dangerous.  The only sure way to stop infection is to stop infected people from moving about, and to hell with the economic consequences.

Economies exist to serve people, not vice-versa.  This short-sighted and callous fixation on the bottom line is what hollowed out American industry, destroyed its working families and left us crippled and unable to meet our own pharmaceutical and medical needs.

The Quisling Never Trumpers have much to answer for in this regard.  Is it a "blessing of liberty" that Communist China can hold us hostage by refusing to provide the vital medications our own scientists developed? 

What dystopian author of years gone by could imagine that people we be so feckless, so stupid to allow the crowning glory of science to be sold off to a hostile and ambitious foreign power for stacks of paper - no, not even paper - electronic money?

In a just society, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would be driven from public life, forced into overseas exile while a People's Tribunal would even now by rounding up the Obama administration officials who allowed this weakening to take place.

A nation that can't even provide medical masks for its own doctors is not even an independent state, let alone a superpower.

 

If California is worried about carbon, why isn't it managing its forests better?

The top story this week is the urgent, immediate never-before-considered possibility that President Trump may be impeached.

Which is weird, since that's been the top story for three years.

Of more interest to me is the cold snap that plunged Michigan into deep snow very early in the season.  The usual suspect insist that this has to do with "climate change," and for once, they're right.

Because the climate is always changing.

The very spot where I sit right now was under a mile-thick sheet of ice 10,000 years ago.  Thank God for global warming!

Supporters of Climate Change Inc. will argue that carbon emissions are introducing a new and volatile element that could DESTROY THE PLANET.

That being the case, one would think the top priority of places like California would be to see that forest debris is quickly, efficiently and regularly removed to limit the impact of forest fires. 

This would involve the time-tested tools of using logging to create fire breaks and limit fuel for the fires as well as controlled burns during wet parts of the years to remove underbrush.

Strangely, none of that is happening.

Apparently the idiots who run California seem utterly unaware that when a forest catches fire, not only does it pump far more CO2 into the sky than would otherwise happen, it also destroys the "carbon sinks" that can help absorb existing CO2.

It is literally the worst possible thing to happen for people who claim to worry about carbon emissions.

Apparently the reason for this that logging and forest management is super-bad, worse even than climate change.

This lunacy is beyond parody.  Plastic straw bans accomplish nothing, and all the solar and wind arrays in the world won't do jack if they are melted or burned by rampant wildfires.

But that's California for you: the world's largest open-air insane asylum.

Demented Medicine

One of the most profound signs of our civilizational decay is the politicization of medicine.  For a century, western medical science brought a series of miracles, dramatically reducing disease and extending both the length and quality of human life.

That formidable achievement now seems to be inverting as fact-based science yields to politically correct imperatives.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the transgender hysteria.

Even a cursory knowledge of childhood development would rule out allowing young children to make life-altering decisions.  Indeed, the age of consent exists precisely because children cannot make informed decisions.  It should be obvious that they lack the judgement and experience to do so.

Happily, nature provides parents to fulfill this role.  This brings us to the Big Lie that “trans kids” are expressing their true selves and good, responsible parents have a responsibility to cater to these self-destructive whims.

As one wag remarked, when you see a vegan cat or a trans kid, understand that neither of them are ones making that decision.

Not long ago, the medical establishment would highlight these actions as child abuse, but now a whole industry has emerged (backed of course by Big Pharma) to support it.

What’s interesting is that none of the new “treatment protocols” have any data behind them.  It’s all based on hunches, supposition and of course intense lobbying by interested parties.

The Daily Wire lays it out very clearly: the “therapeutic” drugs are being used off-label and are highly dangerous. 

Moreover, “blocking” puberty is an inherently toxic event.  Puberty unfolds differently in each individual and it is a time-sensitive process.  One can’t simply hit a “pause” button and expect it to resume if the patient has a change of heart.

The awful truth – which I have noted repeatedly on this site – is that even “successful” transitions are sterile.  They do not become the opposite sex, but instead a facsimile sustained by dangerous concoctions of hormones and chemicals.  It’s biological cosplay with real-world effects.

It is no more compassionate to help a mentally disturbed person persist in their illusion that they can change sexes than it is to buy a drink for an alcoholic or buy a hit for a drug addict.

At some point – hopefully soon – there will be a dreadful reckoning on what these twisted people have done to innocent children.

Trump ratchets up the trade war with China

This week President Trump announced yet more tariffs in his ongoing trade dispute with China.

The result will be further economic difficulty for the ChiComs and greater prosperity in the United States.

We've written about this many times, but one of the interesting aspects in Trump's approach is how he's created the mirror image of the "free trade ratchet" that seemed to only go one way.

Once NAFTA was passed and then when China became a member of the World Trade Organization, the decline of American manufacturing was taken as a given.  Powerful market forces, we were told, were the culprit, not government policies.  One may as well rage against the tide.

Ironically, many of the same people who insisted globalism was like a force of nature also claim that massive state control can change the global climate, but I digress.

Donald Trump has proven all of that false, and the stunning rebound of manufacturing jobs and the resulting prosperity are going to make it very hard for his successors to reverse his policies. 

This is clearly what the ChiComs hope for, and why the media howls incessantly about RUSSIA while ignoring massive Chinese political influence.  RUSSIA is economically weak, militarily overstretched and remains a world power solely on the basis of its nuclear weapons. 

Ask yourself a simple question: If RUSSIA is such a serious threat, why can't it fix it's only aircraft carrier?

China, on the other hand, continues to expand its blue-water fleet.  In terms of force projection, there is no comparison.

I suspect Trump knows this, which is why he's pushed harder on the economy than anything else.  The media refuses to give him much credit for the booming economy, but its effects are undeniable.  Like Ronald Reagan, he is rightfully asking the key question:  Are you better off now than four years ago?

Unless you're a fake journalist, the answer is unquestionably "yes."

The Rule of Law returns to Massachusetts

It's fascinating to see how our political parties are returning to their historical roots.

Trump's GOP is once again in favor of raising the wages of American workers and protecting American industry.  This goes back to the foundation of the party.  When Quisling Never Trumpers whine about Trump being unprecedented, they're lying.  What was unprecedented was the GOP deciding to support endless immigration and de-industrialization.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are once again embracing nullification as a response to federal laws they don't like.  The most egregious case is the Massachusetts state judge who actually smuggled a federal fugitive out of her court room to avoid his arrest by a waiting federal agent.

Naturally, the usual suspects (ACLU, other state officials) are outraged that a JUDGE is being held accountable for violating federal law.  What is the world coming to!  Judges are supposed to be part of the aristocracy and therefore immune from legal consequences for their actions.

This article has a link to the indictment, which spells out just how duplicitous the judge and her court officers were.  They even went to the extreme of shutting off the court recording camera so they could hatch their criminal conspiracy in privacy.

I've seen some deluded souls argue that helping a repeat offender escape is somehow like helping Anne Frank escape the Nazis.

Uh, no.

In the first case, they guy had already been deported twice.  For the analogy to hold, the Frank family would have had to repeatedly invade Nazi-occupied territory - the exact opposite of what is happening here.

The modern left has convinced itself that the purity of their intentions should shield them from any negative consequences of their actions.

Not only is this morally abhorrent, in practice it will destroy civilization because it breaks the crucial link between cause and effect.

Happily, there are still a few adults who understand this.  Strange that for all the venom directed at Trump, he's the most adult person in Washington.

Some transgender thought experiments

One of the Hated Instapundit's co-bloggers had a link to a formerly transgender military veteran who has decided to embrace his body as it is and this got me thinking:

What if Big Pharma developed a revolutionary new drug to treat individuals suffering from mental illness?

It's being touted as a miraculous breakthrough that will cure some of the most difficult cases. 

However, it does have some considerable side effects.

For one thing, a single dose renders the patient sterile.  The sterility is irreversible, so once you start the treatment, you can never have children. 

Another issue is the high doses that need to be administered during the first two years of treatment.  The drug is so potent at these levels that patients need to be hospitalized before taking it.  Heavy bleeding, tissue infections and debilitating pain are common during this period.  Even after these symptoms go away (and they have presented in 100 percent of the cases to date), the patient will be dependent on low doses of the drug for life.

Most alarmingly, people who complete the first intense cycle of treatment have a greatly elevated likelihood of death.  After that, the long-term health effects aren't known.  Surviving patients claim to be happier, but others are deeply unhappy and regret ever beginning the treatment.  How many feel that way isn't known, likely because Big Pharma is threatening them with lawsuits.

Here's another thought experiment:

Let us say that in the run-up to 2020, Donald Trump goes all-in on cracking down on crime by illegal immigrants.  He get so carried away that he issues an executive order requiring that any non-citizen sex offenders that come into ICE's custody will have their genitalia physically cut off before they are released.

To even write that is to laugh at it.  It's utterly absurd and not only would ICE agents refuse to obey it, the courts would immediately strike it down as being cruel and unusual punishment.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

A century ago, people who believed themselves to be the brightest and most compassionate minds in the country decided that forced sterilization of "undesirables" was a moral imperative, and they set about their work with gusto.  We now look back on horror at eugenics, but it was once a highly-respected field.

There is no doubt in my mind that people will look back on the mutilation of these helpless mentally ill people the same way.  They needed healing and in the name of compassion they were cut apart.

 

Some optimism on a Sunny Sunday Morning

For a long time, it seems as though we've gone from one awful event to another.  The culture has been remorselessly coarsened and our politics is utterly dysfunctional.

But outside the narrow confines of the increasingly out-of-touch media bubble, there are a number of encouraging signs for our society.

The fact is that left's endless war on everything is finally wearing people out.  It's like the old joke:

Q:  How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A:  That's not funny!

That joke is older than I am and it's still funny because it's still true.  Happily, a lot of people are checking out of the culture wars and getting on with their lives. 

The other day I heard a song on the radio - some alternative station, I forget which - but it was a happy little tune sung by a honey-voiced woman with sparse accompaniment.  It's central theme was the once universal dream of young women to settle down with a good man and live happily ever after.

The imagery stuck with me because unlike contemporary popular music, it was so normal.

There was no call for hedonistic sex, the female vocalist didn't proclaim herself an emotional wreck or party animal out on the prowl.  Thinking it over, the basic sentiment was really just a throwback to the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it be Nice?"

Actually, the sentiment goes back much farther because it is a universal one - an idea rooting in culture, tradition and evolution.

As I listened to the song, I was reminded of the fact that my college-town parish has put out yet another urgent call for volunteers to help manage the growing flood of converts.  This has been going on for a while, but apparently the tide is still rising.

Now if one surrendered to the defeatist views of Quisling Never Trumpers like Rod Dreher, these happy events would be dismissed as impossible or at best a local phenomenon, but in fact there is a ground swell taking place.

Far from the sexual harassment hot spots located in legacy media newsrooms, young people are deciding that maybe grandma and grandpa were on to something.  Finding a mate, raising children and having a meaningful life are hard enough without the added difficulty of trying to create an entirely new culture on the fly with nothing else to guide you than resentment at the world.

The angry left is angry because it is so miserable, and its only satisfaction is spreading that misery to others.  As the MeToo movement is showing, they are now to the point where they don't care who they destroy, so long as they destroy someone.

It is hard to imaging going through life perpetually enraged about something, waking up each day wondering whose life needs to be ruined for an innocuous remark, a clumsy attempt at a come-on, or something they did that was socially acceptable 20 years ago but now must be called out as an unforgivable sin.

A much more attractive option is to hang out with people who are comfortable with who they are and live by time-tested truths.  No wonder people are lining up to get in.

The real housewives of the deadliest catch

I spent the better part of last week roaming about, exploring this vast nation.  Between sorties, we rested and refueled in our hotel room and made a point of not watching news.  Instead, we amused ourselves by watching reality television.

There was a moment on The Real Housewives of Someplace Rich where one super-rich chick got upset about something another super-rich chick said about her and whether the subsequent apology was sufficiently sincere.  All the other super-rich chicks then picked sides and argued amongst themselves.

This, my wife informed me, was a great episode for that show.

In the course of this obviously staged catfight, one of the women announced that whatever people saw before was irrelevant because "her truth" was that she has been insulted.  She kept coming back to "her truth" and demanding that other people honor it because their failure to do so really hurt her feelings. 

And everyone else on the show took this at least somewhat seriously, even the ones who knew she was full of shit.  In fact, the producers helpfully rolled the tape of the earlier episode with the previous catfight, so we could see for ourselves just how contrived and stupid this whole affair truly was.  But no matter.  Super-rich chicks have their own individual truths and we should honor them or they will be sad and retreat inside their mansions.

There was another show on at some point that I was more familiar with:  Deadliest Catch.  It's a reality show about Alaskan fishermen.  Not "fisherpersons," fishermen.

I don't watch the show, but I remember seeing it when it was new and it was kind of fun to watch monster waves toss the boats around while the crewmen get their limbs broken and the skippers suffer heart attacks.

That is to say:  These guys get a few extra bucks to let bored viewers watch them get crippling injuries while trying to make a living.

If everything goes well and they don't get maimed or killed, they'll still be worth a fraction of what the super-rich chicks are, but at least they have Male Privilege.

That to me is where we are in terms of feminism and the culture.  Men live shorter, harder lives but some of them do very well in certain fields that convey a lot of prestige. 

Women clearly prefer social drama to actual life-taking risk, and yet they demand that they be treated the same.  I'm sure you saw that the World Champion Women's Soccer Team got destroyed by a bunch of under-15 teenage boys the other day, and yet the girls demand the same pay as the men because fairness.

My position is this:  If women should be given preference and extra bonuses to go into STEM fields, I think it only fair that some of them be consigned to work the Alaskan fishing fleet as well. 

I mean, women are terribly underrepresented there.  Fairness demands that half the crews of the crab boats swinging massive steel cages around a rolling deck be female.

Anything else is sexist.