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Apocalypse Now: They are Coming for the Tiki Bars

Texas historian T.R. Ferhenbach wrote that the Texans considered the United States “A  country grown so great even fools cannot destroy it“. That was then (back when Texas agreed to join the United States on terms most favorable to Texas). This is now, and now has serious, unsolvable, structural, problems inside our social order that will manifest themselves in ways none of us can anticipate. It is possible the fools of today may well be able to destroy the country.

We are being asked two believe, as John Hinderaker wrote in this post, that:

“… Joe Biden, a mentally impaired senior citizen who didn’t campaign, who rarely left his basement, about whose candidacy virtually no one was enthusiastic outside his immediate family, smashed all records by getting 81 million Americans to vote for him, 12 million more than voted for Barack Obama in 2008? Actual live Americans, voting legally, and only once? While millions of those same voters didn’t vote down-ballot, so that, apart from the presidential race, it was a good year for Republicans? I don’t believe it”.

Add to this the continuing attempt to avoid any admission of guilt by our ruling classes for ignoring the obvious fact that COVID 19, although lethal for 0.03% of the population, is no threat to the rest of us.  Our ruling class know this which is why they routinely flout the laws they shove down our throats. This is a worldwide phenomenon that is impossible for any rational human being alive today to explain. Why have we ruined so much of our capacity and wealth for a disease that is lethal to less than 1% of the population?  Reasons. What reasons I know not, but it is gratifying to find yourself being that guy in this picture.

Those of us who refuse to be bullied by experts or the crowd have earned a special pride of place in the pantheon of remarkable everyday heroes you never hear about.

Now another shoe has dropped that may force me over the edge of reason and  into armed, open, revolt. They (the media in general, NYT specifically) have declared Tiki Bars are racist.

I have owned and ran one bar in my lifetime; a Tiki Bar in Jalalabad, Afghanistan that was the friendliest place in the world for people of all colors, gender and creeds (except Afghans). It was a friendly place because everyone was armed or came with armed guards. Armed societies are polite societies. In Afghanistan foreigners were allowed to consume alcohol but not Afghans which is why we had a giant screen TV room with WWE DVD’s. for the drivers and guards to use.

A proper Tiki Bar has no racial creed or stringent rules about firearms or mandatory mask wearing

According to this article in the New York Times:

[A] new generation of beverage-industry professionals are shining a light on the genre’s history of racial inequity and cultural appropriation, which has long been ignored because it clashes with the carefree aesthetic. . . A new wave of industry professionals is reimagining these delicious contributions to cocktail culture, looking to shed the appropriation and racism that have accompanied tiki since its inception. . .  A recent movement aims to shift from the word “tiki” to “tropical.”

I know what you are thinking; the NYT is starting to suffer from TWS (Trump Withdrawal Syndrome) so they cook up some snarky bullshit about hipster bars, and then add that Richard Nixon liked Tiki Bars to dogwhistle the proles. You think this only about the people who runTiki Bars, but you’re wrong. First they came for the Tiki Bars and now they are coming after…..Coffee drinkers.

We just had an interesting year featuring a mass formation psychosis, stolen election, and the complete collapse of confidence in the main stream media. Now we move into the next phase of our destruction from within by identifying every touchstone of the America we love and labeling it racist. Woke ideology festers in ignorant minds where it reduces the ability to understand reality. Rational people understand the graph below, woke people feel the graph threatens their physical safety and that they need protection from the information it depicts.

SCIENCE does not have political opinions nor does it bend to the will of self important credentialed scumbags. The truth is the truth – the narrative is the narrative and one is not related to the other. The truth is the virus will do what the virus was destined to do and go away when it wants to go away. Nothing we do impacts the virus.

As observable reality and the main stream media narrative drift further and further apart it will be interesting to see how the Normals of the fly-over muscular classes (VDH coined that term) react. Will the incubators of freedom in America (Tiki Bars) end up as my incubator of freedom ended up? Alone, abandoned, cold and lonely; labeled a racist by the New York Times, who never even sent a reporter to look into the coolest Tiki Bar there ever was? Check that, Matt Rosenberg stayed at the Taj when he was with the Times but he never wrote about it.

Does this look like the remnants of a racist institution to you? These photos are from Nathan Hodge who visited the Taj in 2013 long after we had abandoned the place

Tiki Bars represent freedom for all men because they are simple to erect, cost almost nothing, and are universally identifiable. My Tiki Bar was not only an oasis of freedom but it was also representing Australia, the MIT FabLab, Burning Man, Synergy Strike Force, the Golden Triangle Rotary Club from La Jolla,  and the United States Marine Corps according to the stickers and art work plastered on the coolers.

The assault on Tiki Bars is not the only assault on common sense there is also the mask problem. Not only are masks incapable of filtering out virus’s they are probably adding to the carnage as revealed by more “Science”. The results of a nationwide survey on the utility of masks was released yesterday and it contains bad news which means you’ll never read about it in the legacy media. It appears that mask wearing increases the likelihood of infection.

When comparing states with mandates vs. those without, or periods of times within a state with a mandate vs. without, there is absolutely no evidence the mask mandate worked to slow the spread one iota. In total, in the states that had a mandate in effect, there were 9,605,256 confirmed COVID cases over 5,907 total days, an average of 27 cases per 100,000 per day. When states did not have a statewide order (which includes the states that never had them and the period of time masking states did not have the mandate in place) there were 5,781,716 cases over 5,772 total days, averaging 17 cases per 100,000 people per day.

The reverse correlation between periods of masking and non-masking is remarkable.

The American people are finally catching on. With proper medical treatment a cold virus will last for only 7 days; left untreated a cold will clear up in a week. Seems like, for most who have been infected, COVID is acting like the other pathogenetic Corona viruses. As democratic controlled states head towards another full lockdown the proles are revolting. You can click here for an interactive map from Heritage.org showing 43 reported instances of local, state, and federal officials who violate their own coronavirus mandates, policies, or other restrictions.

Shenanigans like this are becoming depressingly common and they fool nobody.

We are now hearing about small business owners opening in defiance of ridiculous lockdown orders and being arrested for it.  In New York City bar owner Daniel Presti hit a sheriff deputy with his car breaking both of the deputies legs while resisting his second arrest for the crime of opening his business.  I support law enforcement 100% but not the members of law enforcement who bully citizens while enforcing edicts from on high while ignoring the laws of the land. The ” I was just following orders ” defense was used by Nazi’s to proclaim their innocence for crimes they supervised during WW II. That defense should stay in Nuremberg, it has no place in the culture of  American law enforcement.

When police start enforcing laws they know damn well are unenforceable, unconstitutional, arbitrary, and backed by woke ideology, are they still police? I’m not sure, I live in Texas where the police are not prone to  interfere with people out in public going about their business. I do know the most law abiding segment of society in the United States are concealed carry permit holders. It will take some serious abuse of our freedoms and liberties to get the gun owning public enraged to the point of using them; I can’t see how that happens at any scale in our large country.

The bars, restaurants, and small businesses in my town are open but struggling. The only arrest in McAllen related to COVID or BLM was a local man (that is code for Hispanic) who chased some BLM demonstrators (that is code for skinny white kids who do not live in the Valley) down Main Street with a chainsaw. He was screaming at them in Spanish, as you do in McAllen, but he then regrettably  provided an English translation that included the dreaded N word. Normally the chainsaw and N word combo would have caused a Twitter meltdown and maybe protests too. But this is South Texas, we don’t play those kinds of games down here.

The South Texas Chain Saw man in action

Power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals the true character of those who hold it. The power lavished upon Joe Biden during his decades in the senate has revealed his character to be weak, flaccid, and corrupt. The power currently concentrated in democratic governors and congressmen has revealed them to be petty tyrants. Now they have access to more power with which to do…..I’m not sure, but whatever they do it will benefit them and their families more than it benefits you and yours.

We will never be able to vote these tyrants out of office because we no longer enjoy free, fair, elections in the United States. The progressives, knowing they do not have to compete at the ballot box, may well try to disarm us to take our attention away from the plunging numbers on Wall Street. It will never happen, anyone who thinks it is even possible is beyond deluded. As long as we remain armed the progressives will never be able to enforce too much of their anti-American, woke dogma on the rest of us. A man has to draw the line somewhere and defending needless slander against Tiki Bars is as good a place to start as any.

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Apocalypse Not # 15 Inside the Hot Zone

Medical treatment is, for the first time in our history, political. But before I rant on that topic I need to admit my theory about SARS-CoV-2 has been proven wrong. My theory was based on the conviction that it was impossible for our government, regardless of who was president, to react with enough speed and decisiveness to get ahead of a virus. I went onto speculate that the reason the virus seemed to be growing less lethal was it’s points of attachment were being forced into their original configuration by Mother Nature.

Ultimately I could still be proven right, but I lost confidence in my theories because SARS-CoV-2 is no longer acting in the way I predicted it would. For three months the pandemic conformed to my predictions almost to the letter, but it isn’t now, so I was wrong.

So what now? It’s time to new set of facts and here they are copied from a post I can’t find at the moment so I can’t credit the author. It is now time to come to terms with the fact that;

a) I am probably going to get COVID-19 at some point,

b), I am almost certainly going to survive it, and

c), I might very well give it to someone else.

My new assumption is that this is a year-round virus that’s eventually going to infect 100 million people and kill roughly 1/4 of one percent of those infected. I’ve accepted those numbers. Unfortunately, millions of others have not. Many people have no sense of where this is headed, and I understand why. They’ve been betrayed by a hysterical media that insists on covering each new reported case as if it were the first case.

The McAllen/Edinburg area of South Texas has been experiencing an outbreak of SAR-CoV-2 which has filled the hospitals, filled the morgues and has resulted in the deployment of U.S. Army medical teams to help us cope. I now know several COVID 19 patients all of whom were OCD about mask wearing and hand washing. As we can see from Hollands example masks are not the answer; avoiding the three C’s: (confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact) seems to be much more important. We have known that since the start of the pandemic but only Japan has codified the 3 C’s into social policy.

You cannot see a virus with a microscope, you need an electron microscope but the point being made here is sort of true so……Truth over Facts!

The increase in cases comes from mass mobile testing at various sights around the Rio Grande Valley. The sudden increase in deaths is not a mystery because we now know morbid obesity is a real problem with COVID-19. McAllen and Edinburg combined to win the dubious distinction of  the fattest metro area in the country in 2019. When it comes to comorbidity we are number 1!

Added to the mix is the fact this area is tightly controlled by democrats and the hospital systems rely of federal funding because they are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI’s) which means they get access to cash the rest of the country kicks in because reasons.  The majority of doctors here follow The “Fauci Strategy” which is “to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they developed a shortness of breath and had to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would they be given hydroxychloroquine. The Food and Drug Administration cluelessly agreed to this doctrine and it stated in its hydroxychloroquine Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that “hospitalized patients were likely to have a greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness).”

The results of the Fauci Strategy

The other problem with the South Texas outbreak is we are told nothing about it. We hear how many test positive, and we get a daily COVID 19 related death count. There is no context, no explanations about why we are experiencing deaths at much higher rate than the rest of the country. There is also zero coverage of the false positive problem just as there is zero coverage of the inflated death count problem. But this is Texas so the one thing we do get news about is the state going after unemployment fraud which is rampant in the age of COVID-19.

Richard Cortez, an elected Hidalgo County judge who was (reportedly) a great CPA before he went on the bench has issued back to back shelter in place orders that not one person in this county is following. The gyms remain open as do the few restaurant that have not gone under yet. My friends at the (veteran owned and operated) 5×5 brewery are watching four years of hard work and every penny they ever earned slip away because the town of Mission, TX decided they were not an essential business.

We the people are no longer listening to the “experts” who have impinged on our lives and destroyed our economy. But ignoring them is all we can do, for those of us who have lost our businesses and livelihoods there is always the ballot but down here if you’re not voting democrat your vote counts for nothing.

Adding fuel to the fire is our controlled media who labels the Sturgis motorcycle rally a “super spreader” event while ignoring the tens of thousands of BLM protesters who assemble nightly to burn, loot, rage, and attack police officers. Completing our new circle of misery we have the Biden campaign. Joe Biden is obviously experiencing a severe mental decline and that process appears to be accelerating rapidly.

I remain concerned that the controlled media narrative is so far removed from observable reality that it cannot be sustained. Yet here we are, August of 2020 and we are still in semi lockdown over a disease that 99.9% of the population has no problem beating, especially if they are fortunate enough to have a doctor who prescribes HCL, zinc, Z-packs and steroid inhalers.

This is worse than a bad twilight zone episode, but how does it end? The elites have been unmasked as petty partisan scum with inaccurate models. When questioned they respond with petulant arguments from authority (a well known logical fallacy). They and the media have forfeited any trust we had in them and at some point there will be a reckoning. Inshallah that reckoning will take the form of the rule of law being applied to elites in the same way it is being applied to small business men and women who are trying to make a living despite arbitrary, politically motivated tyranny from elected democrats across the land.

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Apocalypse Not # 14 Something’s Happening Here

Texas is in the middle of a Sars-CoV2 assault as the number of cases skyrocket. Despite having low numbers during the first curve we now average over a 1000 new cases a day. Just look at how bad it is:

If you look at my previous posts on the Wuhan Bug you might think that I have been wrong all along. Yet reality always finds a way to sneak through the BS. The Legacy Media and their allies in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the Universities  have created a hysterical narrative that is now completely divorced from reality. They cannot continue this charade for much longer,  something has to give.

Here is why the case count forSars-CoV2 suddenly skyrocketed in Texas:

According to the new Texas guidance anyone who comes into contact with a person who tests positive is now also considered positive. That is called putting your thumb on the scale and it is not remotely honest or ethical. The new Clerisy class of scientists, academics, and assorted experts have been bludgeoned, once again, by what Solzhenitsyn called “the pitiless crowbar of events ‘. Yet the madness continues with government bureaucrats and county judges picking the winners and losers in our economy with decisions that are not based in science.

THE SCIENCE IS CLEAR AND UNEQUIVOCAL; MASKS DO NOT WORK TO ATTENUATE AEROSOL VIRAL TRANSMISSION.

What is the most frustrating aspect of this crisis is not one politician has acknowledged the human costs of locking down the economy. Legitimate Social Scientists (those who do not work in a ‘studies’ field) have calibrated the costs in human life for every percentage increase in unemployment rates. There is a literal cone of silence surrounding this topic unless you are a podcast fan. It is disgraceful that our political class is so callous about science and the human costs of their virtue signalling policies that are killing their constituents.

Even in Texas our governor has proven incapable of demonstrating leadership in the face of adversity. That is not a harsh read by the way, very few governors have demonstrated competence is balancing the dire prediction of “experts” and “scientist” with the economic costs of shutting down the economy for a bug that has a estimated IFR of (according to CDC data) less than 0.3%.

The continued lockdowns and re-definitions of what is or is not a “COVID-19 case” has nothing to do with a virus.  At this point it is all about keeping the economy throttled down until November. Every bit of these unconstitutional  “public health” power grabs are aimed at President Trump. The governor of Texas has ignored  input from hundreds of front line physicians who are trying to get him to see reason.

I have noted with interest that my fellow South Texans are catching on to the mask charade. A good 60% of the people I see with masks now wear them below the nose. They didn’t do this in April, so I am guessing either their masks smell bad or they are passive-aggressive protesting .

The hospitals in the Rio Grande Valley just got an infusion of FEMA  nurses to help them cope with the onslaught. However, Governor Abbott decreed there will be no elective surgeries in the Rio Grande Valley so one wonders why we need several hundred $950 a day nurses.  They have been put to instant use because every hospital in the valley was knocking out delayed “elective” surgeries at the cyclic rate last week. They have to start earning again or face ruin and it is important to note it is not often hospitals in the valley ignore the governor. I suspect they have little choice.

Here is the problem we all face. For every article I produce that says masks are useless for a virus you could produce two that said they work. Open up any browser and type in three random numbers followed by the words “new cases” (hat tip to No Agenda Show) and guess what you get? Hundreds of articles about COVID 19 hitting the exact number you typed in. Go ahead and see for yourself and I ask you what the hell is that all about?

You have to willingly suspend disbelief to believe the numbers being reported in the legacy media and our government concerning COVID. Just look at the CMS data and the real reported numbers; how do 14 reported deaths in a nursing home become 753 deaths on the government data base?

If this is not straight up fraud I don’t know what is.

Adding insult to injury is the muh hydroxychloroquine fake news scam. Yesterday the Henry Ford Health System published a large-scale analysis on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Infectious Diseases . The study examined 2,541 patients who had been hospitalized in six hospitals between March 10 and May 2, 2020. Here is what they found:

More than twenty-six percent (26.4%) of patients who did not receive hydroxychloroquine died.

But among those who received hydroxychloroquine, fewer than half that number — 13% — died.

More than 90% of the patients received hydroxychloroquine within 48 hours of admission to the hospital. Scientists say giving the drug early during illness may be a key to success.

Here in South Texas the hospitals maybe revolting by doing elective surgeries but they are not about to go against federal government guidelines so they are not (to the best of my knowledge) using hydroychloroquine. Trial lawyers are, no doubt, viewing this situation with interest. Anyone who believes Remdesivir is a good option to fight this bad bug is straight up crazy. 

It is not possible to reconcile the main stream media narrative from observable reality. We find ourselves, on this Independence Day, in uncharted waters. The establishment is fighting a losing rear guard battle between what they told us COVID was and what it really is. Just last week Joe Rogan had Bret Weinstein on his podcast. Bret took two hours of to explain that Sars-CoV2 is from a gain of function project and had manipulated points of attachment that prove it to be a chimera. He did not use the words point of attachment or chimera and although Joe treated it as a major revelation I’ve been talking about both in the blog and on All Marine Radio for months.

As my good friend Kerry Patton observed today:

I find it ironic that so many Americans are celebrating the 4th of July, a holiday built upon the principle of “Liberty”, and yet year after year, through local, state, and federal governance, we as a people continue to see our Liberties dissipate.

We’re going to need to tend to this problem…the sooner the better.

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Apocalypse Not #13 Mask Off Mask On

A few weeks back there was a Black Lives Matters protest in downtown McAllen, Texas. They did not get far before being confronted by a local man with a chain saw. The man was screaming racial slurs which he, uncharacteristically for these parts, helpfully translated into English for those who are a little rusty with the lingua franca.

The man was arrested after scattering the handful of over socialized, under educated, upper middle-class white kids who were protesting in support of Black Lives Matter. Black lives are not a thing in South Texas where blacks are less that 1% of the population and the vast majority are Hispanic.

The South Texas Chain Saw man in action

So, while the rest of you are dealing with riots and cancel culture  we are dealing with an outbreak of SARS CoV-2 that is threatening to overwhelm our hospitals. As is expected with democrat declared emergencies nobody actually knows any SARS CoV-2 patients, the local hospitals are still laying people off and hemorrhaging money. Despite a total lack of any evidence other than news people droning on about increased numbers Hildalgo County Judge Richard F. Cortez decreed that as of midnight tonight (19 June) masks must be worn in all businesses, at all times in the Rio Grande Valley. Even when you are working out in a gym.

I do not believe the new COVID numbers for the Rio Grande Valley and nor should you. Dellridge Health & Rehabilitation Center in Paramus New Jersey leads the nation in nursing home deaths according the Federal Center for Medical and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS reported that Dellridge had 753 deaths (in a 96 bed facility mind you). The facility had reported 16 deaths of patients who tested positive for COVID-19.

We know the media and the CDC have engaged in gross inflation of the COVID numbers and it is not a mystery why. Any attempt verify an increase in COVID numbers at local hospitals in McAllen are thwarted by armed guards and recalcitrant public affairs officers. There is no way to know what the hell is going on because trusting the government or media to tell us what is happening is for knaves or fools.

As is the case in every progressive district across the land our  judiciary is dangerously unaccountable and mostly a validation mechanism for the imposition of elite opinion. Elite opinion is Orange Man Bad and they have been engaged is a systematic campaign to undermine the President since before he was elected.

The SARS CoV 2 response will go down in history as the most blatant example of expert class arrogance and media malfeasance. Quoting from this piece by Stacey Lennox:

Economies across the world were shut down based on a model that was blatant panic porn built on shoddy code. Even more maddening is the fact expert Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College had a history of getting almost every prediction he ever made completely wrong.

What is now at stake are the reputations of the scientific expert class, the Federal bureaucracy, the media, and virtually every big money interest, from the pharmaceutical industry to Silicon Valley to Hollywood. If President Trump gets four more years those special interests are suddenly not  going to be so special.

Where is the first place you heard about hydroxychloroquine? President Trump’s COVID update where he mentioned it and stuck by his belief, based on reporting by front line physicians, that it worked. Just last week the authors of a study published in the medical journal The Lancet that said treating coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine could be fatal retracted their findings.

Hydroxychloroquine cost $3.00 per treatment. Remdesivier, which doesn’t even work well, costs $1,400 per treatment and it has a patent. Do you believe big Pharma was not behind the coordinated assault on the effectiveness of a drug that was proved to work on SARS CoV1, which has identical modes of attachment with SARS CoV2? Maybe it was all a coincidence, what do I know?

One thing I know is the doctors in the Rio Grande Valley are using (but have run out of) Remdesivir. Hospitals in the RGV are considered by our government to be  “Hispanic Serving Institutions” which entitles them to lots a federal grant monies. They are rule followers to the nth degree and despite knowing hydroxychloroquine and zinc will work they are not about to do anything to jeopardize grant monies. So they use Remdesivir, but have run out of the stuff and are now using Tylenol.

Welcome to the revolution. On one side are the American people who believe in our founding principals that guarantee every American has equal opportunity for success. We’ll call them the Ameri- cans . On the other side are Americans who believe in the French Revolutions concept of equal outcomes for all. We’ll call them Ameri-can’ts. The Ameri-cant’s are rioting, claiming the country is inherently racist and all the ” Four Olds” (old customs, old ideas, old habits and old culture) must go . Have you ever heard of the four Olds before? Here’s a quick reminder:

The campaign to destroy the Four Olds began in Beijing on August 19, 1966, shortly after the launch of the Cultural Revolution.

The last crew to use the four olds killed millions of their own citizens. In America that is not going to happen because the one thing that democrat progressives cannot do is export their organic lunacy and blatant anarchy outside the urban centers they control. Unlike China (or any other country) we have the 2nd Amendment, you want to defund the police and place the responsibility for my security on me? I have no problem with that at all.  I am one an Ameri-can’s and most of us are well armed.

My prediction is the President will win by a landslide this November. This country is still majority Ameri-can’s and we bend our knee to no man.  The remaining weeks running up to the election are going to be painful to watch given the media’s continuing encouragement of rioting. And we may face the painful prospect of no NCAA football this fall  (I don’t watch or care about the NFL or any other professional sport).

If my prediction is wrong then we get to experience what happens when you try to force “equality in outcomes” (Jacobinism to the historically literate) to a country founded on the principal equal opportunity for all. A country where the citizens are armed and where trampling on individual liberties is not tolerated. I don’t think that will work so I hope for the best while not fearing the worst.

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Apocalypse Not # 12 The SARS COV 2 Pandemic is Over

As COVID Anxiety is turning into COVID rage I am putting my streak of forecasting exactly how the SARS COVID 2 pandemic will play out on the line with another bold prediction. As this comes to pass remember you heard it here first (unless you listen to the No Agenda podcast). The SARS COVID 2 pandemic is over, the numbers of new infections may increase but the numbers of those patients requiring ICU treatment or dying from the virus will continue to plummet. This is because the virus was manipulated for gain of function experiments and once it got out of the lab and into nature; Mother Nature, recognizing a freak when she sees one, is forcing the virus back to its original state which is an annoyance to humans not a death dealing pathogen.

I am making this prediction from the work of Chris Howard, PhD (Biochemistry) and his wife Lynn Howard, MD (Pathogenic Microbiology and Infectious Disease Specialist). The paragraphs below are my notes from their presentation which can be found here. 

Lynn and Chris Howard are both experts on viruses and biology. And they coach Rugby (Dallas Reds and Atlantis). I prefer my experts to be  athletic as fitness is crucial to cognitive health as we age. I trust fit people over Fauci looking people because they demonstrate a fundamental  understanding of cause and effect.

Coronaviruses are found in most animal species in humans there are over 100 different variants of coronaviruses,  Historically they are nothing more than an annoyance, they cause  and viral sinus infections, or common colds. They have a distinct ability to penetrate epithelium cells, your first line of defense in the immune system, so when you find a virus that penetrates that epithelium and activates to enter a host cell then you pretty much have an annoyance and it’s usually a respiratory issue.

Coronaviruses have never been that virulent until the SARS 1 epidemic in 2001 -2002. We were originally told SARS 1 was found in bat caves  but if you look at the genetic sequence of SARS 1 RNA and compare it to SARS found in bats there are many similarities however they are not identical. The assumption is that it made a zoonotic leap from the bat to the human and in doing so mutated.  That sounds reasonable until you look at the sequence themselves and realize what has changed is not your typical zoonosis mutation. If  you dig deeper you’ll discover that many years ago (80’s and 90’s) we were manipulating viruses to learn more about them, and by manipulating them we made them more transmissible, more infectious, and more virulent. This supposedly teaches scientist and epidemiologist epidemiological behavior of potential pathogens and this type of study is called gain of function research.

When virus’s mutate and jump from to a different species or change hosts the main driver of those changes is evolutionary pressure to be able to bind better. Viruses themselves do not change; they are around for one thing; to make more viruses. When a virus finds a good mode of attachment, you will see less change in the virus. Both SARS 1 and the SARS 2 have identical modes of attachment from the ACE 2 inhibitor binding to S1. S1 splitting to the TMPRSS 2 binding site which opens the virus leading to exocytosis into the cell.  There’s no difference between SARS 1 and SARS 2 in that respect except for the internal dynamics of the virus’s which means it was man-made.

SARS COVID 2 (the etiological agent is for the disease state) is a chimera which by definition is made in a lab. Chimera’s take a target virus, incorporate other characteristics from other viruses to create something different.  A pertinent example of gain of function would be to use a COVID virus to create an HIV vaccine. HIV is a retrovirus and they don’t have that ability to penetrate epithelium. Vaccinating someone for HIV is not possible so scientists are trying to  find a way  to carry a vaccine (or antigen in this case) through the epithelium.

When the genome of SARS COVID 2 was uncoded there were four subsets that are identical to portions of the genome of HIV. That impossible in nature, it could not have happened to the COVID virus in a laboratory..

For viruses’ evolutionary pressure usually is based on the binding; it doesn’t change the internal RNA or DNA strands of viruses. With chimeras as they reproduce you get a shift back towards the original, natural type of virus. As a chimera goes through patient after patient and population after population mother nature recognizes it to be a freak. When you hear there are now 30 strains of CVOID 2 there are not really 30 different strains (they all have identical binding site) it’s same virus changing enough to revert back to the original wild virus which is, to humans, an annoyance, not a life or death threat.

Lynn and Chris Howard practice what is known as precision medicine. Precision medicine is a catch phrase for using your genetics and using epigenetics to take a very precise approach to optimizing your health. This is high end medicine targeting wealthy, high end clients like professional athletes and I imagine that is why their research is not receiving more attention from our know-nothing press.

If you look at how the SARS COVID 2 pandemic has progressed it is clear (to me at least) the Howard’s have articulated the Occam’s Razor solution. It is the simplest of competing theories and thus (most likely) the closest to the truth.  Mother Nature does not take kindly to the release of genetically manipulated organisms into the wild. She recognizes them and eliminates them with the same pitiless certainty she applies to all her creatures that are unable to respond to evolutionary pressures only she knows and understands.

With each passing day the evidence that the lockdowns were a massive waste of time and money accumulates. In South Texas where the wearing of face masks has been optional for a week I often am the only person in the local HEB not wearing a mask. Masks do not protect you from viruses nor do they prevent you from spreading a virus if you have one. Mask wearing is Kabuki theater just like TSA checkpoints in our airports. We have been victimized by politicians and medical “experts” who have been wrong about every aspect of this pandemic. When confronted with the conflicting facts from the ground they have doubled down with unreasonable, unconstitutional, ineffective actions that terrorize the uninformed and are destroying our economy. For this they will pay. Inshallah.

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Apocalypse Not #11 The Lockdowns are Ending: Common Sense Prevails Over Low T Tyranny

The lockdown is, for all intents and purposes, over. Here in Texas the gyms are finally open as is the rest of the local economy, and mask-wearing is optional. In states with restrictive lockdowns people are taking matters into their own hands and opening up their businesses despite orders to remain closed. Never has the difference between the political parties been so blatantly obvious and Mother Nature is going to determine which party is using “science” in their COVID-19 response.

If you believe that COVID-19 is a killer just waiting for us to drop our mask wearing, social distancing defense so it can kill millions, hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds (depending on model used) then the republicans are doomed as they will pay the price for opening their states too soon.

If you believe COVID-19 is not a killer, that most people infected by the virus remain asymptomatic, and only the older, vulnerable portion of the population need to be protected then the democrats are doomed by retribution for the destruction of our economy by over-reacting to suspect models.

There are encouraging signs from the blue states with repressive lock-down policies.  In New Jersey Atilis Gym opened yesterday in direct defiance of the governors orders. When the State Police showed up they told dozens of protesters standing outside the gym they were in violation of the governors COVID-19 orders and then bid them all a good day. The crowd erupted in applause, this is exactly the kind of discretion we expect from our fellow citizens working in law enforcement.

There are also too many stories about intolerable abuses against law abiding citizens being reported daily. There is an epidemic of poor judgement based on questionable science by what the editorial board of Free Range International has designated Low T Tyrants sweeping across the Blue states.

In Salem, Oregon Lindsey Graham, the owner of Glamour Salon opened on May 5th because she needed to feed her kids, pay her bills and save her business from bankruptcy. She was closed by the police and fined $14,000.  Two days later Child Protective Services showed up and I’ll let her describe the visit:

On May 7 child protective services showed up at my home. They questioned my husband and I. Questioned my child without me present. They searched our home,’ she said as tears welled up in her eyes during a press conference Friday.

‘And I never expected such a violent, aggressive, vindictive thing could ever be done to me or my family because I’m trying to earn a living. Because I’m trying to work,’ Graham added.

Graham is a mother to three kids: a six-year-old son, a three-year-old girl and an eight-week-old son.

Salon owner Lindsy Graham – does she look like an America first, strict constitutionalist to you? Not exactly your grandfathers Republican I would think and I’d bet she’s now a 2020 Trump voter – not that her vote would matter in Oregon.

Low T Tyranny is defined as a government official knowingly lying to your face and daring you to call them on it. If you do they immediately play their victim card making you (not their bullshit answer) the problem. There is a lot of Low T Tyranny going around these days even in once reasonable states like Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine

Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health Rachel Levine was on a phone-in press conference explaining why she moved her mother out of a nursing home the same day she ordered recovering COVID patients be to sent from local hospitals to local nursing homes. During the press conference a local newsman referred to Ms. Levine as “sir” several times. That is understandable, I’ve listened to the tape and Ms. Levine (a transgendered woman) has retained her masculine voice. She answered the question the reporter saying her mother asked to be moved because she’s a smart old gal who can figure stuff out. This implied that if your mother wasn’t smart enough to ask you to move her out of a nursing home that is about to receive convalescing COVID patients then that’s on you, or her, or whatever.

Then Ms Levine had a melt down over being addressed by the masculine pronoun as if one can intuit declared gender over the telephone. Her outrage became the story; not her obvious hypocrisy in moving her mother out of harms way. That is Low T Tyranny, thrown right in your face, by a person who knows decent law abiding citizens will give her a pass at risk of being branded a transphobe.

So what now? We let the virus play out and one side or the other is going to be proved wrong. At this point I must note my theory about how the virus would go appears to be wrong. I thought the Wuhan Virus was every bit as virulent as advertised and it had already passed through much of the population. This theory was based on my conviction that our federal government cannot possibly react fast enough to contain a virulent virus. Now that there has been more extensive anti-body testing it appears that COVID-19 has a long way to go before we can reach anything close to herd immunity. COVID-19  did not tear through the land last December as I thought it had.

What does that mean? Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of the Stanford Medical School, who recently concluded a study of every major league baseball employee (only 0.7% positive for the COVID-19 anti-body) said this:

“I think in the back of people’s heads there is this idea that somehow we can eradicate this disease if we just stay locked down. That is not possible. The serologic evidence, even the MLB study, suggest this. It suggests the epidemic is too widespread to eradicate. It spreads via asymptomatic contact. Like people who don’t have very many symptoms, even mild cold symptoms can spread the thing. They aren’t going to show up for testing. They aren’t going to show up at a hospital or a doctor.”

Last march I wrote about Farr’s Law, named for British epidemiologist William Farr in 1840. He stated that epidemics develop and recede according to a bell-shaped curve with or without human intervention. It appears that COVID-19 is receding, that once again Farr’s Law has proved valid. The democrat politicians who are threatening to keep their state, city, or county locked down well into summer are in for a rude awakening. As each week passes with less cases identified and a declining death count they will be forced to make decisions that the public has already made for them.

They are going pay this November for the incalculable damage they have done to our economy. The United States is (in the words of T.R. Fehrenbach) “a country grown so great even fools cannot destroy it.” That doesn’t mean we have to tolerate them in elected office.

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Apocalypse Not #10 Something is Happening Here

What it is ain’t exactly clear; and that’s an understatement. In the past national emergencies brought the country together, at least a for awhile. From the reaction to 9/11 to the legions of people conducting water rescues after Houston flooded a few years back, we have always come together as a people to face down a threat. When the COVID-19 virus was discovered it appeared to bean an existential threat. Based on modeling from epidemiological experts we expected millions, then hundreds of thousands, then tens of thousands of deaths and this with the extreme lock down measures included in the modeling.

The models were not just wrong they were not even close. We now know, based on COVID -19 antibody testing in California, Boston, and Iceland that the infection fatality rate (IFR) is somewhere between 0.1 and 0.3 percent. The more testing we do the lower the IFR drops as the number of positives (the denominator) increases.

Last week a trio of Silicon Valley legends (T.J. Rodgers, Joe Malchow, and Yinon Weiss) conducted a regression study to determine if the rate of lock down  in each state had a statistically significant effect on the number of reported cases. They found the correlation coefficient on early vs late (or no) lockdowns was 5.5%. That number is so low that it is essential no correlation. The lockdowns had no effect on the outcome in each of the 50 states.

One of the most eminent Professors of Epidemiology, Medicine, and Population Health, John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc  has again warned, we are making high-stakes decisions without reliable data. Yet the narrative marches on with the media and authorities using the case fatality rate (CFR), not the infection fatality rate (IFR) to justify their caution.

So what now?

Unfortunately there is no what now; instead there is a deeper polarizing division within the population. A good percentage of the population would agree with my timeline and assessment. But it is also apparent there is a large percentage of Americans who believe there is a deadly virus out there that will scythe through the population if we lift the various lockdowns affecting 43 of the 50 states.

There is no way forward if we cannot, as a nation, agree on or define the threat. The problem now is defining the threat becomes a threat to the reputations of the leading scientists running our public health system, powerful academic institutions like John Hopkins and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, as well as powerful philanthropists like Bill Gates and, of course, the legacy media.

The failure to adopt to the virus as it has presented itself is, according to physicians on the front line, costing lives. John Hinderocker from the Powerline blog explains the details in this post. He quotes from Dr. Paul Marik, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, Critical Care COVID Management Protocol

It is our collective opinion that the historically high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 is due to a single factor: the widespread and inappropriate reluctance amongst intensivists to employ anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant treatments, including corticosteroid therapy early in the course of a patient’s hospitalization. It is essential to recognize that it is not the virus that is killing the patient, rather it is the patient’s overactive immune system. The flames of the “cytokine fire” are out of control and need to be extinguished. Providing supportive care (with ventilators that themselves stoke the fire) and waiting for the cytokine fire to burn itself out simply does not work… this approach has FAILED and has led to the death of tens of thousands of patients.

As Powerline further notes:

The systematic failure of critical care systems to adopt corticosteroid therapy resulted from the published recommendations against corticosteroids use by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) amongst others.

It appears the most effective treatment for COVID-19 is a combination of very inexpensive, readily available drugs. This will prove catastrophic for reputations of those who continue to insist that mass testing and a proven vaccine or effective drug targeting the virus like remdesivir, the antiviral medicine from Gilead Sciences , are required before the lockdowns can end.

The lockdowns are going to end and they are going to end soon. Shelter in place  type orders have proved an incredibly destructive policy, and the harms have not been distributed evenly across the United States. Some people are suffering much, much more than others.

Yet the lockdown continues here in Texas with the Kabuki theater of partial openings. Restaurants cannot turn a profit when they are forced to run at 50% capacity. I’m not sure why you would open movie theaters but keep gyms closed given the co-morbidity associated with lifestyles of the large and lethargic.

Getting the population out into fresh air and sunshine to bolster their immune systems with some exercise would seem to be what public health officials should want to do. But what they are doing is pretending they can calibrate the economy to limit exposure to a nasty bug despite the fact that “science” in the form of epidemiologic  studies and regression analysis would tell you these steps are not helping – they are hurting.

As Texas and other states come out of lockdown there will be more positive tests because there will be more tests. What we will not see is a giant wave of critically ill patients needing ICU beds. That hasn’t happened yet and it is not going to happen now or in the future.  When what is not going to happen, happens, what are the elites and the press and all the politicians who have been crying wolf for months now going to do? Who know? Owning up and admitting their mistakes is not part of their DNA so we can rule being honest out.

The great and powerful Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach once wrote that America is a land so great that even fools cannot destroy it. We are in the middle of seeing his thesis tested. Let’s hope he was right.

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Apocalypse Not #9 What Happened to the Models?

It is now obvious the modeling driving the COVID-19 response was wrong. They caused the nation to overreact and now that we realize COVID-19 is not the threat we were told it was what do we do?  What theTrump Administration just did, right in front of you, was disappear the models, switch data sets, and start talking recovery. It was awesome to watch made more so by the fact that not many people realized what they were seeing.

During Thursday’s Corona Virus Task Force presser all mentions of modeling were gone, replaced with slides from the   US Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network. From the linked article:

Birx said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be relying on its existing surveillance practices for “influenza-like illnesses,” which will be attuned to look for coronavirus, and fielding more new tests even for asymptomatic people to get better fidelity about the pervasiveness of the virus.

It appears the death rate from this virus will not exceed the number of flu deaths from the 2018-2019 flu season. We are learning, through anti-body testing, that the China Flu bug arrived here earlier than thought and has already passed through a good percentage of the population.

This is fantastic news but we’re not celebrating, or relaxing the lockdown, or re-starting the economy.

In Texas our governor has just appointed a commission to look at how to open up the state. When he announced the members of the commission he included Ross Perot, who died a year ago, which is suspicious. We are weeks away from spring football practice and the governor, instead of acting on facts, is appointing dead people to commissions. That is not very Texan like and I wish we had a better leader like one of the seven governors who were not bullied into economic suicide by hysterical progressive elites.

Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota – An American hero for keeping her state up and running. Too bad she isn’t a Texan; we could have used her common sense down here last month.

On the very day Governor Abbot announced his strike force Governor Inslee of Washington State launched a tweet storm of unhinged ad hominem attacks on the President. He is convinced The Wuhan will mow down millions if we dare break the protocols established to flatten a curve that never came, predicted by models that were wrong.

The insistence of progressives politicians in believing the obviously flawed models of elite academics is going to, without question, kill Americans. And we don’t need models to know how many. Citizen Journalist Betsy McCaughey points out:

No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing and drinking. Researcher Michael French from the University of Miami points out the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job. It is obvious that the unwarranted and unnecessary lockdowns come with a butchers bill that is larger than the COVID-19 threat.

Why can’t our leaders see this? There are dozens of pieces coming out daily pointing out the same thing yet the narrative continues on as if the pandemic is performing as predicted. 

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11 our country went through a spasm of federal government action to “make us safe”. What came of that was the TSA. The TSA is in the business of ‘Security Theater‘; it fails, over 95% of the time, security tests. They routinely allow weapons and ammunition to be unintentionally carried onto aircraft, something I’ve done myself. No security professional mistakes the TSA as anything other than Kabuki Theater. If you want safe air travel screening you need to do it like the Israelis do, but we won’t do that because of Muh Racism.

The Kabuki theater being generated by this crisis is going to be continued  ‘social distancing’ and mask wearing. As Dr John Lee, joining hundreds of other reality based front line physicians like Keith Rose and Jonathan Greach, point out there is no direct evidence the lockdowns are working. The argument that social distancing and mask wearing slows the spread of the Wuhan virus makes sense, but then again so does the argument for developing  herd immunity.

It is impossible to evaluate scientific data when the credentialed experts working the data do not agree on what it is saying. Occam’s Razor is a solid approach and it was the reason I have said at the start of the Pandemic, that we were too slow and bug had long ago escaped into the population. I had no way of knowing it would prove mostly benign but it did and here we are.

The truth about the threat of COVID-19 is obvious. The reluctance of progressive democrats to accept that their academics, experts, and pundits were wrong is fascinating to watch, but this isn’t funny. Lives are now in jeopardy by continued forced unemployment and forced loss of assets on the part of local and state governments.  If this does not end quickly we are going to lose more than the 2020 NCAA football season.

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Apocalypse Not #8 South Texas Lockdown

The Rio Grande Valley consists of four counties Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Willacy. The population is almost 90% hispanic, and the majority of the folks born and raised here, whites included, speak fluent Spanish. Despite the prevalence of Spanish speaking It’s still an unmistakably American place. The infrastructure is new as the population has grown significantly over the last 20 years. The VA system here is excellent as military service is and always has been popular with South Texans.

The migration pressure on the border comes from Central Americans who muster at collection points on this side of the border for speedy processing. Once processed and released they are taken to Catholic Relief shelter, given food and a bus ticket to the interior and dropped off at the Greyhound station. Mexican citizens can cross the border and stay in the valley as long as they want but they can’t go inland without a visa. A significant percentage of the local economies in cities like McAllen comes from Mexican tourism, especially during Christmas and Easter.

The McAllen/Edinburg area has a serious public health problem; we are (according to a recent Grub Hub ranking) the fattest metro area in the United States.  Morbid obesity leads to type II diabetes and hypertension, and all three are the principal comorbidity factors contributing to fatal outcomes from COVID-19.

The counties have all issued shelter in place orders and masks must be worn in public except when exercising. Cameron County has issued the most draconian mandates which include prohibiting more than two in a vehicle, which will be a problem for lawn maintenance crews, and children under age 14 have been confined to quarters. These measures are exactly the wrong ones to take if we are concerned about the health and welfare of our fellow citizens.

One of the known characteristics of COVID-19 is that hypertension, diabetes and being overweight dramatically increase hospitalization and fatality rates. It seems to me the perfect vehicle for public health officials to attack the epidemic of obesity in the population. If there was ever a time to start messaging about the necessity of a balanced diet combined with regular outdoor exercise that time is now.

Instead local officials have done the exact opposite. When the schools and non-essential businesses closed the local parks and play grounds were active. They were not crowded, there were no social distancing issues, but you would see groups of half dozen cross-fit folks working out together, families using the picnic benches, and others running or using exercise stations.

I would think the city leader would be encouraging people to get out of the house and into the many city parks to let their kids burn up some energy. Instead the city placed barricades around all jungle gyms, removed every picnic bench, closed all the park parking lots, and made it clear it doesn’t want people exercising in the parks.

Remember the purpose of flattening the curve was not to shelter in place until the bug was gone, the assumption that we will all eventually be exposed remains in place. If we are all going to get the bug eventually should we not be strengthen our immune systems now when we have all this time on our hands? Getting people, especially children, outside and active strengthens immune systems. Being immobile and sedentary indoors, passively watching television while eating highly processed food decreases immune systems.

The Land Shark is a lock down essential. It’s flat here, the streets are empty and this old school custom bike can fly. Getting outside to exercise instead of using an indoor gym has been the surprise of the COVID quarantine. I had forgotten how good it felt to train outside – and its good for the immune system too.

The local hospitals are empty so the curve has flattened which was the purpose of social distancing and mask wearing. Now that we accomplished the goal of the shut down why are we continuing the shut down?

The reason to open the economy is it will save more lives than it will cost.  There is little question that the lives lost to the economic catastrophe following an extended shut down and collapse of the economy would dwarf the numbers of lives lost from  COVID-19.

The alternative to relaxing the quarantine and allowing the virus to run its course is to remain locked down until there is a vaccine or cure. This is why prominent health policy types like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel are talking about an 18 month lockdown. That is flat out insane. How can American look herself in the mirror and call herself the land of the free without NCAA football this fall? The question answers itself.

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Apocalypse Not # 6 Reality is Disrupting the Legacy Media Narrative

I started the Apocalypse Not series because I do not trust computer modeling nor do I trust any experts warning of apocalyptic doom based on computer modeling. As Richard Fernandez who writes the Belmont Club blog observed: “My dear old statistics teacher used to say that relying on any model however good but founded on past data was like driving by looking at the rearview mirror; fine as long as the future looked like the past“.

It is now clear the future does not look like the past. I knew a flu virus, that had the same symptomology as the Wuhan flu, swept through the Rio Grande Valley last December/January,  Given the reported virulence of the Wuhan strain, it made sense to conclude what had swept the valley was the Wuhan flu. This mild form of Wuhan was no picnic, my wife has never been so sick, for so long, as she was around Christmas.

I went on to note that on March 3rd scientist has identified two strains of the Wuhan virus, one that spreads quickly but is relatively mild, and one that spreads slowly that is dangerous. That explained to me what we experienced last Christmas, but my speculation was met with alarm by my liberal friends (and I have many who I value and respect) who responded with arguments from authority  that stressed I was no expert and should not be commenting on topics I do not understand.

But then I remembered I was an expert, one of the few people who has ever deployed ashore off naval shipping into a combat zone to hunt down a microscopic pathogen that was turning into a killer. I mentioned this tongue in cheek, I was a navy corpsman, trained as a advanced medical laboratory technician, sent ashore to obtain and process samples identified by environmental health officers who were the real experts.  It is on such thin gruel claims of expertise are often made.

HM2 Tim ‘Doc’ Lynch ashore in Beirut in February 1984 hunting down the source of a nasty typhoid outbreak at the Beirut Airport

Despite not being a real expert it now seems the rest of the world is catching up to me. This morning USA Today published an article saying there are 8 strains of the Wuhan circulating the globe. Plus the fatality numbers in the USA are not adding up (as I have been pointing out for a month now) with most of our cases being confined to New York City.

Existential  crises reveal the character of both our leaders and the people. The governors of Washington State, Michigan, and Nevada have been revealed to be not only incompetent, but cowardly. The Governor of New York and the mayor of New York City have been revealed as opportunistic. They are cooperating with the Trump administration to cover for their gross incompetence in emergency management preparation. It is no coincidence that New York City is getting slammed by the flu, they were completely unprepared.

Our country has unprecedented wealth, leisure, economic freedom, and security because men who are the antithesis of Mayor de Blasio  and Governor Cuomo have eradicated every existential  threat to the people of the United States. Those two men are directly responsible for the lack of preparation in New York.  As Julie Kelly, writing in American Greatness observed;

A public policy researcher in 2015 detailed long waits in New York City emergency rooms. The head of the emergency department for the Mount Sinai hospital system quit in 2018 after less than a year on the job.

“I had to follow my moral compass and leave and decide this is not an organization that cares for patients,” Dr. Eric Barton told the New York Post.

Last year, city nurses threatened to strike due to overcrowding at three major hospital systems. “Nurse Anthony Ciampa said he had to choose recently between feeding an elderly patient at New York Presbyterian and treating several acutely ill patients because there weren’t enough other nurses on duty,” according to a March 2019 report in the Daily News.

And the outcry about ventilators? State officials were informed several years ago that the stockpile of ventilators was woefully inadequate to handle a severe pandemic. But instead of preparing for a looming crisis and buying 16,000 ventilators, the state’s health commissioner formed a task force to develop a system to ration the life-saving equipment. The task force “came up with rules that will be imposed when ventilators run short,” the New York Post reported last week.

I expect gross incompetence from big city governments and democratic governors. They have been focused for years on ramming through their progressive agenda while painting all opponents as virulent racists or stupid hicks who don’t understand the need to eviscerate our traditional relationship with governmental organizations. What is alarming to me is the new intolerance of dissent on display in the chattering classes. As Brandon O’Neil observed;

…the implacable rage against anyone who deviates from the Covid-19 script and asks if shutting down society really is the right thing to do. Like medieval scolds, they brand such people dangerous, insane, a virus, accessories to manslaughter. ‘Shut them down!’, they cry, thinking they are signalling their concern for the public’s health when really they are advertising their profound contempt for freedom of thought and critical debate.

We do not know how badly the over-reaction to this virus will hurt our economy. We do not know how many citizens will be financially ruined by the heavy-handed response. What we can safely assume is that measures to control the public (smart phone tracking for one) will be part of our lives from this day forward. That is not good.

What is also not good is our crappy main stream media. Here is the perfect example of how crappy they can be (hat tip to the Mark Margolis at PJ media):

Here are the top six countries by confirmed cases (based on the case numbers from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University as of 2:30 pm ET March 27) in descending order:

  1. USA (94,238)
  2. Italy (86,498)
  3. Spain (64,059)
  4. Germany (49,344)
  5. Iran (32,332)
  6. France (29,593)

Now, here are the top six countries by confirmed cases per capita (based on population numbers from the CIA World Fact Book):

  1. Italy (1386.13)
  2. Spain (1280.78)
  3. Germany (615.57)
  4. France (436.17)
  5. Iran (380.72)
  6. USA (283.30)

The United States’ confirmed cases are the lowest of the top six countries affected by the virus. Yet the media and the shitbird democrats want you to believe we are far behind the curve because Orange Man Bad. This nightmare will end sooner than you think.  When it does, the public officials who displayed gross incompetence, who used this crisis for personal gain, and who refused to work with the federal government because Orange Man Bad, should be voted out of office. The politicians who loaded the stimulus bill with traditional DC pork should become social pariahs.

The MSM is  trying to make you believe that the coronavirus in the United States is spiraling out of control. They want you (you dumbasses) to understand Orange Man Bad when the majority of us think he’s doing a good job. But the most ergregious crime of this crisis is the destruction of our economy. For that the press, the alarmist governors, and the so-called “experts” who continue to cry wolf in the face of solid evidence they are wrong should pay a steep price.   

No matter what happens de Blasio, Schumer, Pelosi and that strange  looking woman who is now the governor of Michigan (wasn’t she a he before and a olympic decathlon winner)?  will do fine because they have no skin in the game. Destroying our economy will cause no disruption in their lives, they don’t stand in line for toilet paper, they know there will always be a respirator and hospital bed for them, they will always get a paycheck, and they will always have well compensated employment.

This crisis should spell the end of virtue signaling politicians. As this lockdown continues we shall see what the consequences are for shills who ruined millions of American families for their own vanity. If this lasts for months, without the massive numbers of deaths we are being told are inevitable; there will be blood.