As I have covered in my last two posts, Mexico has consistently failed to meet its water treaty obligations since they were established in 1948. Several times a year, every year since 1948, politicians in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) speak out about this injustice to coax more federal relief dollars for our farmers and sugar mill operators. Check that our last sugar mill closed last year, a victim of South Texas drought and Mexican perfidy. This year it was State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa’s (D-McAllen) turn to bitch about the missing Mexican water, which he did last week. Then, out of the blue, the President of the United States stopped American water shipments to Tijuana, citing Mexican recalcitrance over fulfilling their obligations under the 1944 International Boundary and Water Commission as the reason.
At this point, Valley locals who travel to Mexico often to visit with family and friends began to worry. Mexico had just installed (elected isn’t the proper word) its first female President, Claudia Sheinbaum. In a male-dominated, masculine society like Mexico, when you see a woman ascend to the president’s office, it means the office is ceremonial and disconnected from power, or the woman has serious, powerful, hard-to-explain power behind her. This morning, as curanderas throughout the Rio Grande Valley cleaned up behind receding flood waters, they were all saying the same thing: “I told you this would happen”.
Curanderas are practitioners of herbal medicine, home remedies, and witchcraft. There are two types of Curanderas: Brujas Blancas (white witches) and Brujas Negras (black witches). The difference between white and black brujas is that one removes the spells and the other casts spells, but in practice, good curanderas can do both, causing as much peace or mischief as you can afford to pay for. It is easy to recognize the work of Mexican curanderas by timing and irony. Yesterday, the most powerful curandera in Mexico sent a little black magic to Chuy Hinojosa in the form of a biblical three-hour rainstorm that came out of nowhere to dump over 21 inches of rain on McAllen.
Stranded vehicles left on the frontage road in front of the McAllen Convention Center during a downpour on Thursday, March 26, 2025, in McAllen. (Joel Martinez | jmartinez@themonitor.com)
Chuy Hinojosa bitches to the press about not having enough water in the Valley, and suddenly, a scattered line of thunderstorms forecasted to sporadically drop an inch or two of rain somewhere in the Valley turned into a Training Thunderstorm. Training means that as individual thunderstorm cells form and move downwind, another cell forms upwind and moves directly over the path of the previous cell. These storm cells form so fast that when viewed on radar, the thunderstorm looks stationary or moving backward against the upper-level wind. On the radar, they look like a train; on the ground, it feels like you’re being hit by a train.
At this point, I am sure most of my gringo readers who reside far from the border are skeptical of the supernatural angle to this story. Let me provide more evidence that the train rain was the work of curanderas: Nobody can agree on what happened. According to RGV.com, McAllen received 4.96 inches of rain yesterday. The local Fox News station said McAllen was hit with 8 inches of rain. My SanAntonio.com claimed yesterday’s rain totals for McAllen were between 13-21 inches. Good Morning America claimed we got 14 inches of rain. Do you see the trend here? That’s how you know this wasn’t some innocent weather phenomenon. My neighbor on the corner, after saying, “I told you this would happen,” added that in 48 years, she had never seen this much rain or flooding.
The view from my front porch as the flood waters continued to rise. The rain stopped just before the water reached my top step
As usual, the poorest were hardest hit by this storm of spite, with many spending this morning recovering abandoned vehicles or cleaning out flooded homes. Many more are lined up outside various homes or apartments as the faithful consult their trusted curanderas about what the hell is going on with the weather. But I know what’s going on; I’ve seen this shit before in the Hindu Kush with the Mountain Pashtun and their Jinn. If I were an advisor for Senator Hinojosa, I’d tell him to stop bitching about the 1944 water treaty before we end up with 350 acre-feet of water being dumped on our heads.
State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen) has introduced a resolution to encourage the U.S. State Department to ensure Mexico starts delivery of water to Texas as outlined in the 1944 International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC). Mexico is supposed to provide at least 350,000 acre-feet of water per year, but they are currently about five years in arrears. It’s not like the government of Mexico can do much about the shortfall; they don’t control the border area or the water flowing into the Rio Grande River, and Texas won’t negotiate with drug cartels. Chuy warned: “The reality is that even commercially, the growth of the Valley is being stunted because we cannot issue any more builder’s permits because there’s no water.”
Water levels at the Falcon Dam in Starr County are dangerously low. Last week, a panel of Texas senators approved a resolution asking the U.S. State Department to force Mexico to send the state water it is owed. (Credit: Michael Gonzalez for The Texas Tribune)
Senator Hinojosa, who is quick to remind anyone who asks and many who don’t that he’s a former Marine, didn’t really mean the local municipalities are no longer issuing building permits; that would be crazy. He was using hyperbole to explain why Mexican real estate investments may experience anemic growth unless the cartels stop bogarting the water from the Rio Grande. It is an interesting sentiment that will have no impact on the current water woes of the Rio Grande Valley. A couple of large tropical storms would be useful in making up the backlog. But, hurricanes have decreased in intensity and frequency since the 1990s, so Mother Nature has little chance to make up for the Mexican water shortfall.
The real threat to financial prosperity for the constituents of State Senator Juan Hinojosa is men like Juan Hinojosa. Chuy was the quarterback for his Mission High School football team, did a stint in the Marine Corps, came home, got his bachelor’s degree from UTRGV (Pan Am University at the time), and then went to Georgetown, where he earned a law degree. It’s the law degree that makes him dangerous. To be fair to Chuy, he did not return to the Valley, obtain a vanity business phone number like (444) 444-4444, flood the television with ads making him look like a Top Gun pilot while promising anyone, anywhere, who was hurt in an accident that he will get them a large payday in court.
Chuy Hinojosa used his good looks and Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches story to get into South Texas Democratic machine politics, which is statistically much more lucrative than ambulance chasing. The Democratic machine endeavors to bring excessive amounts of federal tax money into the valley, so despite their many and manifest wealth-accumulating grifts, we view them as a net positive.
But tort lawyers cost Texans 38 Billion Dollars a year, which negatively impacts much more than insurance rates. The Lone Star Alliance, representing over 950 Texas job creators, citizens, and business associations, recently explained the costs of bogus lawsuits:
“Inflationary and litigation costs have decreased the availability of insurance for individuals and businesses in Texas and have forced some businesses to increase prices, lay off employees, or close. Small businesses are burdened with soaring insurance premiums that jeopardize their survival, while the constant wave of lawsuits drives up the costs of essential items like food and medical care.”
I became interested in this topic one year after my wife was hit while pulling out of a parking space at the local HEB. There was no damage to my truck, but considerable damage to her left rear quarter panel. The woman who hit her couldn’t speak English but waited patiently for the police to show up and issue a report blaming the other driver. A year later, my insurance company contacted me about a personal injury resulting from the collision. They instructed me to send any correspondence concerning the settlement to them, which caused me to call and ask them why they were using the word “settle.” They, in turn, informed me that the settlement amount is classified.
My insurance company was founded by former military officers who recognized that the new media is like artillery: it adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl. As is typical of military officers, they classify everything that might embarrass them, so I’ll never know how much the deadbeat who hit my wife got away with. But I’m doing my bit by raising the alarm about the costs of tolerating shifty border lawyers and their plague of nuisance lawsuits.
I started the Apocalypse Not series with this post on March 18, 2020 because I suspected the COVID 19 pandemic was total bullshit. The lack of bodies was the clue. If the disease had the IFR (infection fatality rate) that our “experts” said it had then our number one problem would have been the disposal of bodies, just like every other pandemic in history. Instead the homeless populations on the west coast were thriving while the main stream media focused on horror stories concocted byTony Fauci and Deborah Birx. My reward for alerting people to the COVID fraud was to loose friends, members of my family, and a book agent (I have yet to find another). I then doubled down and went on writing to point out the measures instituted to mitigate this non threat were in fact the threat. That resulted in the loss of more friends and family but I got to be this guy for a few months.
I’m re-posting the first post in preparation for revisiting the issue and the lessons learned from the disastrously incompetent reaction to the COVID 19 virus. My guess at the end of this post that there would be hell to pay when the public discovered they were duped has not happened yet but inshallah some day somebody will be held to account.
There is something about the current Wuhan virus response that is not adding up. The first case appeared in America on 17th of January, we then stopped direct flights from China on the 31st of January. From the time this pathogen surfaced in China last November until the end of January, there were daily flights from the Wuhan area to Seattle, LA, San Francisco, New York and Toledo, Ohio. This flu strain is unusually virulent and if that is true (which is not in doubt), by the time it surfaced in America it had already spread across the land.
Farr’s Law, named for British epidemiologist William Farr in 1840, states that epidemics, develop and recede according to a bell-shaped curve. This happens with or without human intervention. Farr’s Law undoubtedly is in play for the Wuhan virus.
Last Christmas my wife and several neighbors had a horrible flu bug that mimicked the Wuhan virus symptoms exactly. She was miserable and did not respond to a Z-pack or a course of Levaquin our family doctor prescribed. The bug she had was no joke, and when she mentioned my theory that the Wuhan had already washed through the population last Christmas her friends saw it immediately. She started hearing other stories about the Christmas bug that ravaged the Rio Grande Valley for a good four weeks. The stories all matched up to the symptoms for Wuhan virus.
The President’s early attempts to calm the situation were ridiculed as was his suspension of air travel to China. Then the narrative changed on a dime and the cancelations started with the Ivy League Universities cancelling their basketball seasons. Once they did that every other major sports league (with the exception of the UFC) did the same.
The Ivy League’s role in starting the current chain reaction of closing public venues is not a coincidence. The experts managing this crisis had just attended a Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, World Economic Forum and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation sponsored Virtual Exercise Called Event 201 described as:
“a 3.5-hour pandemic tabletop exercise that simulated a series of dramatic, scenario-based facilitated discussions, confronting difficult, true-to-life dilemmas associated with response to a hypothetical, but scientifically plausible, pandemic”.
The pathogen used for the exercise was a COVID virus with properties similar to COVID-19. The exercise predicted that the virus would overwhelm the medical systems in North America resulting in catastrophic loss of life. Tabletop exercises like Event 201 happen all the time, the fact that this one was played out a month before COVID-19 surfaced in Wuhan China is not that significant. What is significant is how different the current crisis is playing out compared to the one our experts war-gamed.
There were a seven recommendations made following the exercise (they can be found here). Every recommendation focused on the need for international cooperation with the free flow of information and people across national borders which is consistent with the ethos and vision of globalists like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other major donors, like Open Philanthropy .
But our response to the Wuhan virus has been the exact opposite of the “viruses know no borders” narrative of Event 201. Instead we (and the rest of the world) have closed the borders, rebuffed international offers of help and turned to the private sector to fight the virus ourselves.
The Centers for Disease Control was not up to the task of testing for or tracking the Wuhan virus and they were rapidly sidelined by the President. This was the exact opposite of Event 201 in which the CDC and every other similar international organization performed flawlessly. The ‘experts” may have been surprised the CDC failed so spectacularly but this is expected from those of us who know and understand government bureaucracies.
When the CDC failed the President went straight to the private sector, suspended regulations inhibiting the development and production of test kits and protective wear, and solved the testing problem rapidly. He then held a press conference with these Titans of industry and did a good job of calming frayed nerves. After his poor start briefing the nation last Wednesday night watching him get back into the grove was gratifying.
This is not playing out as the experts who ran Event 201 thought. Then, in another move a blatant dishonesty, on the same day that China launches an IO campaign to deflect criticism from them our legacy media decides the Wuhan virus is now to be called COVID-19. Any mention of the word Wuhan was now racist and news anchors were getting apoplectic about this new muh racism.
As events across the land started to close. Governors and DC mandarins ran to the TV cameras to announce the draconian measures they were going to take. These pronouncements have to moldy scent of Virtue Signalling. The men and women making these decisions have themselves, no skin in the game. Regardless of how long this lasts or how bad it gets the people running Ivy League institutions, the federal legislatures, state governors and the media infotainment complex insiders – all of them will weather the storm just fine. In fact, most of them will make millions off low interest rates while buying blue chip stock at a significant markdown.
You and your family? Not so much.
“I don’t claim to know what’s motivating the media, but, my God, their reporting is absolutely reprehensible. They should be ashamed of themselves. They are creating a panic that is far worse than the viral outbreak. The bottom line, everybody, is to listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the CDC [Centers of Disease Control and Prevention]. Do what he tells you, and go about your business.… Stop listening to journalists! They don’t know what they are talking about!” Dr. Drew Pinsky commenting on the media yesterday (17 March 2020)
An anonymous source quoted in The Spectator points out the only salient (and obvious) fact now which is: “We know the numerator (the number of deaths), but we don’t know the denominator, which is the number of people who have been infected by COVID-19. And without the denominator, we have no way of estimating either the spread or the fatality rate of COVID-19.”
That bothers me and it should bother you too, but at the moment there is nothing to be done except hunker down, avoid panic shopping, and wait to see what happens. How long Americans will tolerate these measures will be interesting to see.
There is no reason to think that this time the experts warnings about a catastrophic event are correct. They have a perfect record of being wrong with every prediction in the past because their models are incapable of predicting complex events reliably.
When the people discover that once again, they were manipulated by a partisan press, compromised academic shills, and virtue signalling politicians there is going to be hell to pay. When the dust settles maybe we will de-couple science from politics and even dismantle the narrative driving legacy media.
It is time to keep your head down, and your powder dry. Courage and cowardice are contagions and few of our elected leaders seem to operate with an abundance of courage. Their default is finger pointing, name calling, and blame shifting. The rest of us should refrain from that behavior and focus on helping, not panicking our neighbors. When this emergency passes we may be able to hold incompetents to account but for now all we can do is what we do best; refuse to panic.
Super Bowl Sunday is a big day for dive bars across the land, but none are closer to the crisis at our southern border than the Junk Yard Bar in Granjeno, Texas. The hamlet of Granjeno is located south of the Military Highway just east of the Anzalduas Bridge, outside Mission in the Rio Grande Valley. It’s a one-road town with a population of 303 people pinned between a string of industrial parks to the north and the Rio Grande River to the south. On Super Bowl Sunday, as you drive into the village, you can see dozens of vehicles spilling out of the Junk Yard parking lot onto the shoulder of the road because the Junk Yard always has a full house on Super Bowl Sunday.
A portion of the Border Wall is right behind the bar and there is a gate in the border defenses just to the left which is now in constant use by the Border Patrol.
The Junk Yard Bar caters to two easily identifiable subsets of the Rio Grande Valley population: Winter Texans and old bikers. Both groups are from the tail end of the boomer generation; the bikers live here year-round, and the Winter Texans flock into the gated retiree trailer parks that dot the Rio Grande Valley every winter. They are the remnants of a generation that expected a steady job would deliver them into the American middle class. They expected to own a home with two cars in the garage, kids who went to college, and annual vacations, and they were satisfied. The system worked for the American worker in the 70s and 80s, but that changed when our industrial elite moved their manufacturing plants overseas.
These Rust Belt refugees are primarily white and married and like to party. The elites hate them because they own recreational vehicles and guns they don’t want to register, and they’re prone to cluttering up the wilderness with dirt bikes or snowmobiles. They all smoked cigarettes for years, too, so now they look hard, flinty, and mean in their old age.
You can see the border wall behind the Junk Yard and a Border Patrol truck sitting on the levee in the upper right of the picture
There isn’t just one border wall along the McAllen section of the border fence but several bands of wall that appear designed to protect the valuable farmland adjacent to the river. Thousands of acres are under cultivation in this valley area, and it is susceptible to large groups of migrants trampling through them. It’s essential to realize the border wall is an obstacle that forces friction into the equation for illegals crossing the Rio Grande. There is no such thing as a wall that cannot be climbed; humans can climb up and over anything if they want to, so the border wall is not a magical, impenetrable barrier. It’s a practical obstacle that forces illegals to take the path of least resistance to areas where they can be collected for processing before they can trample planted crops or wander onto private property.
The continued cost to local farmers from the massive influx of illegals may well explain why the RGV went from a dark blue democratic stronghold to riding the Trump Train during the last presidential election. And Trump will dominate the Rio Grande Valley this election cycle, too, in a landslide, which will trump the RGV democratic politiqueras who are paid big bucks to harvest Democratic votes.
Here is one of the white buses used to collect illegals and this one is heading for the gate behind the Junk Yard.
The Junk Yard Bar is not dangerous because of illegal immigrants; it’s risky because the clientele consists of old bikers and skinny, hard-drinking winter Texans. The locals mix well with the Winter Texans because everyone down here has a gun on them. An armed society is indeed a polite society, but the old boomers partying at the Junk Yard have a bigger nemesis—slips and falls.
Do you notice how clean and level the entrance is? It’s the same on the inside – craftily engineered to remove all slip and fall hazards that could cost one of these old coots a hip replacement. All of us Boomers know what happens once you get your hip replaced – you’re toast.
Do you notice how clean and level the entrance is? It’s the same on the inside – craftily engineered to remove all slip and fall hazards that could cost one of these old coots a hip replacement. All of us Boomers know what happens once you get your hip replaced – you’re toast.
The people filling this place hours before the Super Bowl don’t nurse their drinks because they’re afraid of all the law enforcement constantly driving by. They’re afraid of taking a hard spill and breaking a hip, so they watch the booze and tend not to get too rowdy. At their age, all the crazy bastards are long gone, and the survivors seem to prefer dive bars with level floors and packed full of people standing around, which reduces the chances of slipping and falling. And there is the added coolness of hanging in an outdoor dive bar right on the border with our friendly neighbors in Mexico.
Hanging out on the Mexican border was the original draw for the Winter Texans. They like to drink booze and smoke, and Mexico was a great place to do both on the cheap. Nobody crosses the border to party anymore, but the Junk Yard Bar remains open for the last of the boomers who love quirky, one-of-a-kind bars tucked in out-of-the-way places.
For the first time in our history, medical treatment is a political issue. However, before I rant on that topic, I need to admit that my theory about SARS-CoV-2 has been proven wrong. My theory was based on the conviction that our government couldn’t react quickly and decisively to get ahead of a virus, regardless of who was in office. The virus became less lethal because Mother Nature forced its attachment points to return to their original configuration.
Ultimately, I could still be proven right, but I lost confidence in my theories because SARS-CoV-2 is no longer acting as 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 for the 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;
1. I am probably going to get COVID-19 at some point,
2. I am almost certainly going to survive it, and
3. 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 SARS-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 Holland’s example, masks are not the answer; avoiding the three C’s — confined spaces, crowded places, and close contact —seems to be much more critical. We have known that since the pandemic began, only Japan has incorporated the 3 C’s into its 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 sites 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 that this area is tightly controlled by democrats and the hospital systems rely on federal funding because they are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), which means they get access to cash that the rest of the country kicks in because of reasons. Most doctors here follow the “Fauci Strategy,” which is “to keep early infected patients quarantined at home without treatment until they develop a shortness of breath and have to be admitted to a hospital. Then they would 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 that 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 a much higher rate than the rest of the country. There is also zero coverage of the false positive problem and zero coverage of the inflated death count problem. But this is Texas, so we get news about the state going after unemployment fraud, 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 restaurants that have not yet closed. My friends at the veteran-owned and operated 5×5 Brewery are watching four years of hard work. Every penny they’ve ever earned slips 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, which 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, along with the media, have forfeited our trust 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 businessmen and women who are trying to make a living despite arbitrary, politically motivated tyranny from elected democrats across the land.
A few weeks ago, a Black Lives Matter protest occurred in downtown McAllen, Texas. They did not get far before being confronted by a local man with a chainsaw. 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 a 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 than 1% of the population.
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 democratically declared emergencies, nobody 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, Hidalgo 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, nor should you. Dellridge Health & Rehabilitation Center in Paramus, New Jersey, leads the nation in nursing home deaths according to 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 that the media and the CDC have grossly inflated COVID-19 numbers, and it is not a mystery why. Any attempt to verify an increase in COVID numbers at local hospitals in McAllen is 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 in a systematic campaign to undermine the President since before he was elected.
The SARS-CoV-2 response is the most blatant example of expert class arrogance and media malfeasance in modern history. Quoting from this piece by Stacey Lennox:
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 will suddenly not be so special.
Where was the first place you heard about hydroxychloroquine? President Trump’s COVID-19 update, where he mentioned it, stood by his belief, based on reporting by frontline physicians, that it worked. Just last week, the authors of a study published in the medical journal The Lancet, which stated that treating coronavirus with hydroxychloroquine could be fatal, retracted their findings.
Hydroxychloroquine costs $3.00 per treatment. Remdesivir, 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 proven to work on SARS-CoV-1, which has identical modes of attachment with SARS-CoV-2? Maybe it was all a coincidence, what do I know?
I know that the doctors in the Rio Grande Valley are using (but have run out of) Remdesivir. Our government designates hospitals in the RGV as “Hispanic Serving Institutions,” which entitles them to numerous federal grant funds. They are rule followers to the nth degree, and despite knowing that hydroxychloroquine and zinc will work, they are not about to do anything that might 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 principles 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 Revolution’s concept of equal outcomes for all. We’ll call them Ameri-can’ts. The Ameri-cant are rioting, claiming the country is inherently racist and all the ” Four Olds” must go. Have you ever heard of the four Olds before? Here’s a quick reminder:
The last crew to use the four olds killed millions of their 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 an American, and most of us are well-armed.
My prediction is that 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.
If my prediction is wrong, then we will experience what happens when you try to force “equality in outcomes” (Jacobinism to the historically literate) in a country founded on the principle of 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.
As COVID Anxiety is turning into COVID rage, I am putting my streak of forecasting exactly how the SARS-CoV-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-CoV-2 pandemic is over; the number of new infections may increase, but the number 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 based on 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.
Coronaviruses are found in most animal species, including humans. There are over 100 different variants of coronaviruses. Historically, they are nothing more than an annoyance; they cause viral sinus infections or common colds. They have a distinct ability to penetrate epithelial 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 told initially 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.
What it is ain’t exactly clear; and that’s an understatement—in the past, national emergencies brought the country together, at least for a while. 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 to face a threat. When the COVID-19 virus was discovered, it appeared to be an existential threat. Based on modeling by epidemiological experts, we initially expected millions, then hundreds of thousands, and subsequently tens of thousands of deaths, with the extreme lockdown measures included in the modeling.
The models were not only wrong but also far from accurate. Based on COVID-19 antibody testing in California, Boston, and Iceland, the infection fatality rate (IFR) is approximately 0.1 to 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 lockdown 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 there is no correlation. The lockdowns did not affect 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 that 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, the population has a deeper, polarizing division. Most of the population would agree with my timeline and assessment. But it is also apparent that a large percentage of Americans 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 agree on or define the threat as a nation. The problem now is that limiting the threat threatens the reputations of the leading scientists running our public health system, powerful academic institutions such as Johns Hopkins and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, influential philanthropists like Bill Gates, and the legacy media.
According to physicians on the front line, the failure to adapt to the virus as it has presented itself is 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 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.
The most effective treatment for COVID-19 is a combination of very inexpensive, readily available drugs. This will prove catastrophic for the reputations of those who continue to insist that mass testing and a proven vaccine, or an effective drug targeting the virus, such as remdesivir, the antiviral medicine from Gilead Sciences, are required before lockdowns can end.
The lockdowns are going to end soon. Shelter-in-place orders have proved an incredibly destructive policy, and the harm has 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’s 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 comorbidity associated with the lifestyles of the large and lethargic.
Public health officials should encourage the population to get outdoors and enjoy fresh air and sunshine to bolster their immune systems through exercise. However, they are pretending they can calibrate the economy to limit exposure to a nasty bug, although science, in the form of epidemiological studies and regression analysis, would tell you these steps are not helping—they are hurting.
As Texas and other states emerge from lockdown, there will likely be an increase in positive test results, as more tests are conducted. What we will not see is a giant wave of critically ill patients needing ICU beds. That hasn’t happened yet and won’t happen now or in the future. When what is not going to happen, happens, what are the elites, the press, and all the politicians who have been crying wolf for months now going to do? Who knows? Owning up and admitting their mistakes is not part of their DNA, so we can rule out being honest.
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 currently testing his thesis. Let’s hope he was right.
It is now obvious that 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 the Trump 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.
The death rate from this virus is expected to be lower than the number of flu deaths from the 2018-2019 flu season. Through antibody testing, we are learning that the China Flu bug arrived earlier than thought and has already passed through a good percentage of the population.
This is fantastic news, but we’re not celebrating, relaxing the lockdown, or restarting the economy.
In Texas, our governor appointed a commission to examine how to reopen the state. When he announced the commission members, he included Ross Perot, who died a year ago, which is suspicious. We are weeks away from spring football practice, and instead of acting on facts, the governor is appointing deceased individuals 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.
On the day Governor Abbot announced his strike force, Governor Inslee of Washington State launched a tweetstorm of unhinged ad hominem attacks on the President. He is convinced that Wuhan will mow down millions if we dare break the protocols established to flatten a curve that never came, predicted by models that were never accurate.
The insistence of progressive 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 that the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job. The unwarranted and unnecessary lockdowns come with a price tag larger than the COVID-19 threat.
Why can’t our leaders see this? Dozens of pieces are coming out daily pointing out the same thing, yet the narrative continues 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 security tests over 95% of the time. 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 will continue to require social distancing and mask-wearing. As Dr John Lee, joining hundreds of other reality-based front-line physicians like Keith Rose and Jonathan Greach, points out, there is no direct evidence that the lockdowns are working. The argument that social distancing and mask wearing slow 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 with the data disagree on its meaning. Occam’s Razor is a solid approach, and it was the reason I said at the start of the Pandemic that we were too slow and the 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 COVID-19 threat is evident. Progressive Democrats’ reluctance to accept that their academics, experts, and pundits were wrong is fascinating to watch, but this isn’t funny. Lives are now in jeopardy due to continued forced unemployment and forced asset loss on the part of local and state governments. If this does not end quickly, we will lose more than the 2020 NCAA football season.
The Rio Grande Valley consists of four counties: Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr, and Willacy. The population is almost 90% Hispanic, and most people born and raised here, including whites, speak fluent Spanish. Despite the prevalence of Spanish speakers, it’s still an unmistakably American place. The infrastructure is new as the population has grown significantly over the last twenty years. The VA system here is excellent, as military service has long been popular among 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 the Catholic Relief shelter, where they receive food and a bus ticket to the interior, and then dropped off at the Greyhound station. Mexican citizens can cross the border and stay in the valley as long as they wish, but they must obtain a visa to travel inland. Many local economies in cities like McAllen rely heavily on Mexican tourism, particularly during Christmas and Easter.
The McAllen/Edinburg area has a serious public health problem; we are (according to a recent Grubhub 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 stringent mandates, including a prohibition on more than two people in a vehicle, which will pose a challenge for lawn maintenance crews. Children under age 14 have been confined to quarters. These measures are 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. The regional parks and playgrounds remained open when schools and non-essential businesses closed. They were not crowded, and there were no issues with social distancing. Still, you could see groups of six to eight cross-fit enthusiasts working out together, families using the picnic benches, and others running or using the 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 will all eventually get the bug, shouldn’t we strengthen our immune systems now that we have all this time on our hands? Getting people, especially children, outside and active helps boost their immune systems. Being immobile and sedentary indoors, passively watching television while consuming highly processed food, can decrease the immune system.
The Land Shark is a lockdown essential. It’s flat here, the streets are empty, and this old-school custom bike can fly. The surprise of the COVID quarantine has been being able to get outside to exercise instead of using an indoor gym. I had forgotten how good it felt to train outside—and it’s good for the immune system, too.
The local hospitals are empty, indicating that the curve has flattened, which was the purpose of social distancing and mask-wearing. Now that we have accomplished the goal of the shutdown, why are we continuing the shutdown?
The reason to open the economy is that it will save more lives than it will cost. There is little question that the lives lost to the economic catastrophe following an extended shutdown and collapse of the economy would dwarf the number 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 a vaccine or cure is found. This is why prominent health policy experts like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel are discussing an 18-month lockdown. That is flat out insane. How can Americans look themselves in the mirror and call themselves the land of the free without NCAA football this fall? The question answers itself.
