A summary of more than a few emails I’ve received on the topic:
“Kim, when you talked about disbanding the FDA, how about the CDC?”
An excellent point. Here’s a piece which catalogs the awfulness of the CDC, who while investigating “diseases” such as childhood obesity and gun violence, completely fucked up when it came to their actual mission.
Toss ’em all overboard, say I, and forget not the concrete boots.
Via somebody else, I see a couple of pleasing statistics at ZeroHedge (my emphasis):
Jurgen Brauer, chief economist at Small Arms Analytics, told Bloomberg News, that handgun sales increased 91.1% year-over-year, per Brauer’s analysis, and long-gun sales were up 73.6%.
Well, they’re pleasing statistics for me ; for some others, not so much:
Governor Ralph Northam (D) signed legislation Friday creating universal background checks in Virginia and limiting law-abiding Virginians to one handgun purchase per month.
Northam’s office announced his signature on Senate Bill 70 / House Bill 2, creating the universal checks and thereby outlawing private gun sales.
He signed Senate Bill 69 / House Bill 812 resurrecting Virginia’s “one-handgun-a-month rule to help curtail stockpiling of firearms and trafficking.”
So… let’s just say ad arguendum that this were to happen nationwide (I know, I know; but run with me on this one). Now we’d be faced with a situation where private gun sales are outlawed, you can’t buy more than one at a time, and if gun dealers were the only sales outlet, a simple order of mass denial at the poxy NICS would prevent any sales, at all.
But why Kim, you may ask, is government so afraid of all this? ZeroHedge gives this simple and succinct reason:
It’s only matter of time before this lockdown of American — leaving citizens jobless, broke, and without options — becomes the flashpoint that leads to an explosion of civil unrest and violent crime.
So as the title of this post suggests, it’s time to end this sanitation theater, and let Americans go back to work.
And it’s not just commerce I’m talking about. We also need to start dismantling the mechanisms that federal and state governments have installed (starting with this bunch of assholes) that have enabled them to deprive citizens of their liberty, their ability to work, and (in some places) their ability to gather the means of self-defense.
Here’s a quote from the late- and much-missed Joseph Sobran on just this topic:
“By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence…”
George III would never have contemplated arresting Americans for walking in parks, going out to dinner, selling the “wrong” merchandise or swimming alone in the ocean. Never in a million years would he have shut down fish markets, outlawed the sales of seed, or spied on our religious observances. Yet our post-Revolutionary government is doing all that to us — and, apparently, without much public resistance because “it’s for our own good”.
We need to get back to work, and tell the government to fuck off and leave us alone. Or else.
Hector Drummond (who is rapidly becoming my go-to guy in matters of Britishland Chinkflu stats) has some graphs*, and comes to this conclusion (my emphasis):
Even I am astonished by these graphs. I was expecting to see something in the graphs by week 13, even if I wasn’t expecting anything scary. But there’s just nothing. And you can’t say the lockdown caused this, because the UK lockdown had only been going for four days by this time. We’ve locked down the country for a supposed mass killer that still isn’t visible in the stats even after the lockdown was declared. We locked the country down for something that at the time only existed in Neil Ferguson’s dodgy computer models.
Our numbers may (repeat: may ) be better than the BritGov’s, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that our response to the Chinkvirus has been as overblown and pointless as theirs.
*I’m not sure, but I believe that “ONS” stands for Office of National Statistics. Maybe one of my Brit Readers can confirm.
From Insty (in response to this bullshit):
“People entrusted with guns and the power of arrest need to have good judgment, and the ones who judge poorly need to be punished or sacked.”
…or horsewhipped, or beaten with chains, or…
I’m thinking of those “no-knock” warrants served at the incorrect address, where someone gets killed by overzealous policemen acting like Imperial stormtroopers.
Very long; well worth the read. (Come on: you’re shut up indoors with fuck-all else to do; read the damn thing.)
If just about all the diseased are old-timers and/or people set with preexisting diseases, the entire response to the pandemic, by individual countries as well as by the global community, may very well be one huge overreaction.
…
According to the video of a Frenchman who claims to have lived 25 years in Hong Kong, one part of the world (and of China!) that is experiencing a low number of deaths in spite of all, or most of, its businesses remaining open. What is the secret? Every single person in the street is wearing a mask.
…
A nationwide scandal erupted in France a week or two ago when a Nice Matin journalist interviewed a woman on the town’s rocky beach. Christiane was tanning in a bikini, and declared that she wasn’t about to give up the sun rays. The next day, the written press picked up the story. They would quote her remarks, only to mention with disgust to what extent she was irresponsible, and selfish, and a shame to her community.
Truth to tell, Christiane may have come across as a bit snobbish and self-centered, but there was just one problem. Christiane was almost entirely alone on Nice’s long rocky beach near la Promenade des Anglais. The beach was virtually empty of people. There were perhaps 3 or 4 sunbathers or sunbathing couples in the background, perhaps 50 to 100 meters away, but otherwise it was deserted. (Indeed, the only time that Christiane was in potential danger or that she was a danger to others was when the Nice Matin journalist showed up!)
Makes sense to me. Instead of our local KrimPo (Kriminal-Polizei) arresting people for sunbathing on a deserted beach, or buying “non-essential” products to take home, why don’t they just arrest, detain or fine people for not wearing a mask in public?
Oh, but that would be too simple, you see; not enough incentive to bully and/or fine people or look into their shopping bags.
Fuck ’em. At some point, the history of this sad era will be written dispassionately, and the overarching conclusion is going to be that we overreacted, massively, our economy was shut down for no good reason, and governments needed to print trillions of non-existent dollars to “bail” people and businesses out of trouble — when all we needed was several hundred million cheap paper facemasks, and a temporary public order for everyone to wear the damn things outdoors.
I often disagree with columnist Peter Hitchens (brother of the late Christopher), but I have to say that his latest column does resonate with me, because he points out what I often say: that Gummint often uses apocalyptic messages to clamp down on our freedoms. And he does it using facts and history (always the most difficult argument to refute). Here’s an example:
The former editor of The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins, recently listed these unfulfilled scares: bird flu did not kill the predicted millions in 1997. In 1999 it was Mad Cow Disease and its human variant, vCJD, which was predicted to kill half a million. Fewer than 200 in fact died from it in the UK.
The first Sars outbreak of 2003 was reported as having ‘a 25 per cent chance of killing tens of millions’ and being ‘worse than Aids’. In 2006, another bout of bird flu was declared ‘the first pandemic of the 21st Century’.
There were similar warnings in 2009, that swine flu could kill 65,000. It did not. The Council of Europe described the hyping of the 2009 pandemic as ‘one of the great medical scandals of the century’.
And Hitchens’ devastating take:
In only one place – aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess – has an entire closed community been available for study. And the death rate there – just one per cent – is distorted because so many of those aboard were elderly. The real rate, adjusted for a wide age range, could be as low as 0.05 per cent and as high as one per cent.
…
About 1,600 people die every day in the UK for one reason or another. A similar figure applies in Italy and a much larger one in China. The coronavirus deaths, while distressing and shocking, are not so numerous as to require the civilised world to shut down transport and commerce, nor to surrender centuries-old liberties in an afternoon.
Fortunately, our government in the US is not as quite as panic-stricken as the BritGov, and while we’re being warned to be careful and take healthy precautions, we’re nowhere close to facing the governmental excesses that the Brits are.
This latest Wuhan-virus pandemic may be as terrible as we’re being told; but I agree with the above conclusions that it probably won’t be — and all our well-meaning precautions may end up costing us more than necessary: a lot more than necessary.
This means that we should continue to be vigilant — not just against disease, but against the loss of our freedoms — and Hitchens’ article serves as a very timely warning why we should always be on our guard against the doomsayers because very often, their motives are not altruistic.
For a much, much longer examination of the thing, go here. While the article is long, it’s definitely not too long to read — and its conclusion is even better than that of Hitchens (with my emphasis in red):
The COVID-19 hysteria is pushing aside our protections as individual citizens and permanently harming our free, tolerant, open civil society. Data is data. Facts are facts. We should be focused on resolving COVID-19 with continued testing, measuring, and be vigilant about protecting those with underlying conditions and the elderly from exposure. We are blessed in one way, there is an election in November. Never forget what happened and vote.
You may ask yourself. Who is this guy? Who is this author? I’m a nobody. That is also the point. The average American feels utterly powerless right now. I’m an individual American who sees his community and loved ones being decimated without given a choice, without empathy, and while the media cheers on with high ratings.
When this is all over, look for massive confirmation bias and pyrrhic celebration by elites. There will be vain cheering in the halls of power as Main Street sits in pieces. Expect no apology, that would be political suicide. Rather, expect to be given a Jedi mind trick of “I’m the government and I helped.”
The health of the State will be even stronger with more Americans dependent on welfare, another trillion stimulus filled with pork for powerful friends, and a bailout for companies that charged us $200 change fees for nearly a decade. Washington DC will be fine. New York will still have all of the money in the world. Our communities will be left with nothing but a shadow of the longest bull market in the history of our country.
