The Deep State Wants Trump Dead

The desperation of the deep state has been exposed by the latest assassination attempt on President Trump. Our esteemed guardians of democracy have decided the slow grind of the justice system isn’t quite cutting it when it comes to stopping the Orange Menace. In a move that would make the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover crack a smile, we’ve witnessed another half-assed attempt to remove Donald J. Trump permanently from the political chessboard. Let’s dive into this cesspool of incompetence and desperation.

First off, let’s address the elephant in the room – or should I say the donkey? The timing of this “assassination attempt” hits with all the subtlety of a freight train crashing through your living room at 3 AM. With the 2024 election looming and Trump leading in polls despite our illustrious DOJ’s best efforts to bury him under a mountain of indictments, the powers that be seem to have decided to take a page out of a bad spy novel. They found a radical old coot with an annual income of only $32,000 who could somehow travel internationally to garden spots like Ukraine.

Without any visible means of support, the hyper partisan stooge traveled to Miami. There he acquired a car, body armor, a go-pro camera, food, lodging, and a crappy old SKS rifle with some type of optic. How did he know which golf course President Trump would play? Who told him when President Trump would hit the links so he could set up 12 hours before the President arrived? These are questions the media will never ask. The FBI might if they had professionals investigating the attempt, but they don’t have any of those. Instead, Jeffrey Veltri, the FBI senior agent in charge of the Miami office is a certified never-partisan hack. I wouldn’t believe a word he has to say about the incident. FBI agents, like four-star general officers, “respect the office, not the man” only when Democrats hold the White House.

I’ve seen my share of covert operations during my time with the Marine Corps and later dealings with our alphabet soup agencies. I’ve even felt their ire when our little “private spy ring” in Afghanistan out performed their multibillion-dollar intelligence apparatus. The alleged shooter’s status as a patsy, given inside information along with the funds to act on that information, couldn’t be more obvious.

This amateur-hour operation exemplifies what we’ve come to expect from our intelligence agencies. They can’t conduct meaningful work like the Israeli Stuxnet computer virus or their impressive mass pager bomb operation. Israeli intelligence targets the enemies of Israel; our intelligence agencies target domestic opposition to the Regime. Our 20-year, multi-billion dollar effort to replace the Taliban with the Taliban attests to that.

Now, let’s talk about the reaction. At first the mainstream media outlets ignored it. They didn’t interrupt their sports ball broadcasts because assassination attempts directed at Trump are no longer news. Then they ran identical stories about the dangers of “MAGA extremism”. Within hours the media and Biden White House were back on the “Trump is a threat to our democracy” bandwagon placing the blame for this attempt on his shoulders, not theirs.

But here’s where the Regime media’s narrative derails faster than a drunk conductor. They peddle this laughable idea that if Trump gets back in the Oval Office, he’ll unleash the dogs of war on his political enemies. Talk about projection, folks. It serves up the ultimate red pill on a silver platter of hypocrisy.

Trump is as welcomed in D.C. as a skunk at a garden party. He’s got 99% of the federal bureaucracy gunning for him, the big banks treating him like radioactive waste, and Silicon Valley tech bros breaking out in hives at the mere mention of his name. His few powerful allies? They face treatment like they’ve contracted the political equivalent of leprosy. Just look at Elon Musk and RFK Jr. – suddenly, they’ve become persona non grata in the corridors of power.

And speaking of RFK Jr., doesn’t it seem just a tad convenient that the moment he throws his support behind Trump, some two-decade-old whale skull story resurfaces? Suddenly, the National Marine Fisheries Service got all hot and bothered, launching a formal investigation. Why aren’t they investigating all the dead whales washing up on shores adjacent to useless wind farms? We already know why. The Regime media doesn’t report news; it produces propaganda.

As usual the Regime media is in overtime finding “experts” who claim the dead whales have nothing to do with wind farms. Check the link above for the heterodox view that surprisingly loud, high-decibel sonar emitted by wind industry vessels and their increased boat traffic is correlated directly with specific whale deaths.

The idea that Trump would increase the state’s power stretches credibility. He plans to do the exact opposite. Every three-letter agency you can name and a few you can’t have put the man through the wringer. If – and it’s a big if given the deep state’s determination to keep him out – he survives this election season you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll take a wrecking ball to the bloated bureaucracy faster than you can say “drain the swamp.”

Picture this: thousands of useless, overpaid paper pushers from the federal managerial class suddenly find themselves out of a cushy government job. No more work-from-home in your pajamas or bloated salaries for pushing pixels. They’ll face the real world, having to show up at an actual office, doing actual work, for a fraction of the pay and none of the gold-plated federal perks. It’ll look like watching a herd of pampered house cats suddenly dropped in the middle of the Serengeti.

Now, my friends, that’s what I call making America great again.

The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: The United States of America

The United States has never been weaker or more vulnerable in my lifetime. The President is clearly incapacitated, yet he refuses to step down; our DEI-centric military lacks the manpower, weapons, or leadership to be a credible deterrent. I enlisted in the Navy in 1978, during the days of low morale, high drug use, and the “hollow force”. Back then, we had (literally) twice the number of ships, tanks, artillery pieces, amphibious vehicles, and infantry battalions, but the units were undermanned and poorly led. Marine officers carried loaded sidearms while on duty and had every expectation of needing them.

Ole Doc Lynch pulling liberty on Saint Patrick’s Day, 1984, in Haifa, Israel. Brawling in shady bars was an expectation back then but the Israelis were so damn nice to us that I don’t think anyone got into a ruckus. Hard men aren’t necessarily violent, just violent when necessary.

In the late 1970s, the military fell on hard times when full of hard men who, when they had their sailors at sea, or their Marines out in the field, established good order and discipline the old-fashioned way; with their fists. I did it myself because it was the only way to get your peers to stop blasting music after 2300 in the Bethesda Naval Hospital enlisted barracks. The modern military may still have a few hard men, but they would never receive tacit support or encouragement from their chain of command to use traditional old-school discipline to establish and maintain good order and discipline.

We live in soft times, more disconnected from nature than ever before, with a military full of soft men/women/undecided who are uninterested in and unfamiliar with interpersonal violence. The current military is incapable of repeating the miraculous transformation into a highly competent, well-funded, and drug-free force that occurred during President Reagan’s military revitalization in the early 80s. Public confidence in the military, extraordinarily high since the mid-1980s, is trending back down to where it was after Vietnam. Confidence in all the institutions that matter, the press, congress, the legal system, academia, “The Science™,” and Medicine are at historic lows. It’s so bad that regional law enforcement agencies will no longer share information with the FBI, which they do not trust.

Proving the FBI has IFF (identify friend or foe) issues, two FBI agents paid a visit to a friend of mine yesterday, who is the hardest Marine Corps infantry officer I’ve ever known. Asad Khan was a legend in the Marine Corps known for an impressive work ethic, exacting standards, and tactical savvy. I was a huge fan, and when I was suddenly bumped up to the 1/8 operations officer while still a young captain, Major Khan graciously gave me a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP), saving me untold hours of tedious staff work. He wasn’t a dick about it either despite knowing that I knew he would never take another battalion’s SOP knowing he could write a better one.

That’s as close to a smile as you’ll get from Asad when he’s wearing the uniform. Not that he smiles much on his podcast now that I think about it. . . .

Asad led the first Marines into Afghanistan, landing in Bagram, where they boarded rented buses to drive to Kabul and reclaim the American embassy. On the way there, they ran into a one-tank roadblock in a wadi crossing with a sign demanding payment to pass. LtCol Khan, a fluent Pashto speaker, walked over to the tank, knocked on the crew hatch, and asked the lone occupant inside what he needed. The old man said Shoes. Khan gave him chow and water and told him to wait there until he returned with shoes, and in the meantime, to put the main gun in neutral position and let the Americans coming behind him pass unmolested. The old man agreed and was inside the tank days later with Asad, who returned with shoes, clothes, a coat, and some money. Khan was both hard and smart – I don’t think any other Marine officer of our generation could have navigated that situation so well back in 2001.

I ran into Asad several times in Afghanistan. I met his son in Kabul when he showed up with then-Colonel (now retired LtGen) Dave Furness, who worked in the congressional liaison office then. Asad hosts the Sentinel podcast on YouTube, and you should listen to a few episodes to get a feel for what the FBI considers “anti-American” these days. You can listen to him describe the FBI visit here, and when you’re done, you tell me if you’d like to see Asad investigated by the Feds or moving into the house next door.

Some pictures are truly worth a thousand words

We are watching the government/media/academia axis of evil employ brute digital force to whitewash the disastrous incompetence of the Biden regime and its new leader, Kamala Harris, in real time. Already, the allegedly nonpartisan GovTrack has deleted her ranking as the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate. Axios spent years calling Kamala the Border Czar, now insists that they never said that, and she was never really the border czar. Amazon has suddenly banned an unflattering book on Kamala as the media’s Soviet style airbrushing of the most unpopular Vice President in history continues.

The Orange and Velvet revolutions foisted on various countries by the U.S. Department of State targeted regime legitimacy through incremental non-violent means to generate a preference cascade leading to regime collapse. It is useful to remember this when reviewing the mountain of disinformation, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories we have had to endure since Donald J Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015. A trendy acronym from the recent past explains the ramifications of gaslighting American citizens: POSIWID: The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. If the ends pursued by the Regime are functionally identical to the ends of warfare, then the Regime is waging war. Ask LtCol Asad Khan USMC (Ret) about it, I’m sure he has an interesting take.

The purpose of regime media propaganda is to demoralize to opposition

Years ago, progressive America declared war on biology with their refusal to accept the reality that gender is not a social construct and men and women are not interchangeable. Biology in this context is a synonym for nature, and it’s Mother Nature who determined that women would never be as physically capable as men because they are designed and built differently. The emotional difference between the sexes was demonstrated during the FBI/Secret Service congressional hearings. US Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle took such a beating that she resigned the next day, but she lost her job not because she’s a woman, but as a woman, she never had to learn how to fight at the apex predator level. Showing poor tactical awareness,s she allowed herself to be ambushed at the Republican convention when she arrogantly strode the floor, assuming she had the juice to do so unmolested. When confronted by her ridiculous prior statements concerning roof slopes, she was clearly embarrassed. When attacked by both sides of the aisle, she was unable to mask her emotions.

Mother Nature is tough on the small, the weak, the stupid, and the defenseless.

FBI Director Christopher Wray strode into the Capitol and not only obfuscated shamelessly, he also smirkingly added this poison pill to his testimony:

I think with respect to former President Trump, there’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that, you know, hit his ear.” 

Utter rubbish concocted out of thin air that was walked back the next day, but it wasn’t meant to be taken literally. That was Wray sending Congress a two-word message, the first word starts with F, and the second is You. He was telling Congress they didn’t intimidate him, and he would counterattack anyone who crossed him. That kind of naked bureaucratic power can only be wielded effectively by men who fought their way to the top of a meritocratic system. Women reach the top of federal agencies by other methods, not by consistently outperforming their male peers every step of the way for decades on end.

Regardless of who is in charge of our massive federal bureaucracies, they are not going to allow the Trump/Vance ticket to gain landslide-sized momentum unmolested. Their bizarre attempts to stop him have already surpassed the surreal, but have only made him stronger. The next four months are at the very least going to be weird, but I’m afraid the progressive establishment will reach for the last tool they have: political violence. Our country is leaderless, and the people are adrift in uncharted waters, with DEI hires at the helm and FBI agents at the door; this can’t possibly end well.

The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: President Trump Rallies  

All my life I assumed that one of the safest places in the world would be anywhere near an American President. I remember being mere feet away from President Regan once and felt totally intimidated by his secret service detail because of their size and demeanor. I’ve attended high speed shooting schools with FBI, DEA and Secret Service agents and always thought them to be great Americans. But time, experience, and the reality of last weekends gross incompetence has changed that. I left the FBI firearms instructor course with 2 cases of .45 cal golden saber rounds and level 3 body armor. Normally once bought I stay bought so when discussing the FBI on All Marine Radio years ago I was the only pro FBI voice. I’m no longer bought, I’ve unfriended the FBI and every other three letter agency.

I was given the armor because I was heading to the intermountain west on recruiting duty and the agents thought it best I carry body armor (and lots of guns) in the trunk of my government vehicle. That would have got me a court martial if caught but I appreciated the concern even though I figured (correctly) the people out west didn’t have any problems with the Marine Corps.

Here’s a picture of president Regan’s USSS detail in action in Augusta Georgia, I remember them being much larger and meaner looking in person.

What are we to make of the attempted assassination of President Trump? It’s hard to say because of the lack of trust Americans have in their institutions. Is there anyone in this country who believes the FBI will complete a competent, transparent, investigation and then share its finding with the American people? No, we expect the FBI to lie and cover up inconvenient facts that counter Government/Media Disinformation industry. The FBI claims that antifa is just an ideology  while (according to the head of the FBI) “the largest “chunk” of the FBI’s investigations involve white supremacist groups.

President Trump reacts to getting shot in the face. This is why he will win in a landslide, courage in contagious.
Congressional cowards react to the January 6th incursion and this is why America despises its congress. Cowardice is also contagious, unseemly and un fucking American.

What kind of white supremacists’ groups? The AGGAVE (other) groups I wrote about in my last post which is to say Trump Supporters. How the hell does an organization handle a real domestic terrorist when it had calibrated itself to see the victim (President Trump) and his supporters’ as domestic terrorists? It’s impossible to say or even imagine yet here we are.

It is also impossible to imagine how a gunman could low crawl on a roof to gain line of sight of the President from just 150 meters away. Or why President Trump’s secret service detail was stacked with obese women with poor gun handling skills who were too short to shield Trump which is their primary function. Actually the performance of the Secret Service last Saturday is easy to explain using Jerry Pournell’s  Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which states:

“In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.” 

Add to that the results of the Federal Government”s obsession with DEI which mandates when meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority. The results are a steady erosion of institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. The Secret Service performance on Saturday just another manifestation of the competence crisis collapsing yet another complex system. Why else would the head of the secret service make hiring women her priority when they are totally incapable of doing the job? And in case you thought the head of the USSS a remotely intelligent person her justification for ignoring a snipers perch just 130 meters away was the roof was slopped and therefore ‘dangerous‘. You cannot make this stuff up; American liberal elites are bat shit crazy.

Poor gun handling results from a training regime that failed to imprint muscle memory. Holstering a weapon under stress is simple for shooters who took their training seriously and continued to practice at home. There are thousands of Americans today who have extensive gunfighting experience and will recognize gross incompetence when they see it. Why is this woman even doing a job that calls for large aggressive men? I remember watching President Regan arrive in Bethesda when I was a corpsman and his secret service detail scared the shit out of me being all huge dudes with serious attitudes.

One consequence of this failed assassination is a subtle shift in the Overton Window of public discourse. Jack Black and his partner Kyle Gass (Tenacious D) have cancelled their tour and may be deported from Australia after Gass said “don’t miss Trump next time” on stage in Sydney over the weekend. Both John Deere and Microsoft have eliminated their DEI departments. The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart is a best selling book with the author making regular appearances on various podcasts without facing violent protests, personal assaults or 24/7 liberal media harassment. And in the utterly amazing department a democratic senator has been convicted on federal corruption and bribery charges in New Jersey of all places. Senator Menendez has escaped accountability for his blatant lawlessness for years but now he’s suddenly convicted just as the lawfare cases against President Trump collapse. Weird that.

As the Trump Train picks up momentum it is hard to anticipate how the permanent Washington bureaucracy and their handmaidens in the press will react. And things just got worse for our democratic/media/academic axis of evil; President Trump just picked a former Marine Corps Corporal as his running mate. It’s time to make America Great Again, if we can keep our candidate alive until election day, maybe then our federal institutions will be gutted of deadwood and once again exist to serve, not gas light, the people.

FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: South Padre Island

South Texas has been under a heat dome that is now moving out of the way as hurricane Beryl bears down us. In anticipation of heavy weather the sharks started attacking beach goers yesterday biting four people in under two hours of coastal mayhem. The weather may or may not be affecting the local shark population who normally hang out in coastal waters without biting people. As I write the Trump Train is rolling through formally deep blue McAllen, Texas and the 2024 South Padre Island Tumptilla is gathering off Port Isabel but they may a few boats light due to a sudden interest in shark fishing. There is no detectable organic support for Joe Biden anywhere in Texas or any other state judging from media reporting.

This lady was bit in the thigh which resulted in a beach rescue with immediate first aid to control the bleeding applied by fellow beachgoers. It is always good to see normal people filling the breach during an emergency.

The progressive left cannot ignore the spectacle of our severely impaired President any longer nor can they handle the fact that their obvious propaganda and spiteful lawfare has made President Trump’s election inevitable. I’m guessing the academic/media disinformation duopoly will now start hammering away with man made climate change alarmism because they suspect President Trump is not a true believer. They also believe us normies learned nothing from SARS CoV-2 computer modeling because they learned nothing from that debacle. Climate models and COVID models share the distinction of being dead ass wrong because viruses and the earth’s climate are too complex to be modeled . Look below at the magic of scaling the NASA GISS data set to temperatures humans can detect to understand the depth of the climate deception.

But we have bigger problems here in tropical Texas, Hurricane Beryl is heading straight for us allowing the cable news stations to start explaining why hurricanes are now worse due to ‘Climate change™. ‘ Then we’ll get all sorts of expert opinion about why the storm missed because hurricanes have an annoying habit of not doing what the “experts” think they will do. And to add to our misery we have tar balls washing up on the beach at South Padre Island forcing beach strollers to watch their step in between scanning the waves for sharks.

Aggressive sharks aren’t the only problem on South Padre Island; Tar Balls are washing ashore!

The tar balls come from rents in the ocean floor that leak oil and have always infested our beaches. The Karankawas, a coastal indigenous tribe known for cannibalism and large physiques, used  tar balls to seal baskets and make weapons. The Karankawas disappeared from history in 1858 when Mexican rancher Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, a.k.a the Red Robber of the Rio Grande crossed the river to wiped the last of the tribe out. The Karankawa had unfortunately backed Mexico during the Texan/Mexican War so the Texans rounded them up and shipped them to Tamaulipas so they could live with their buddies.  But the Mexicans claimed they were marauders who plundered the countryside so they chased them to our side of the border before sending the Red Robber over to finish them off.

The one tribe the Spanish could never conquer were the Apache who were ejected from their ancestral tribal lands by the Comanches just before Anglo settlers arrived on the scene. These important historical facts, like the natural occurrence of tar balls, are almost unknown in today’s America where all past wrongs are always attributed to Anglo Americans.

A Trump Supporter counterprotesting among the astro turfed (most came in buses with professional signage) democrat crowd when President Trump came to McAllen to inspect the border in 2019. There was no evident organic support for FJB in 2020 and there is even less now but you see Trump flags everywhere when you drive the interstates.

Speaking of Anglo Americans did you know some of the ‘intelligence experts’ behind the Muh Russia and Hunter Biden laptop hoaxes have been hired Homeland Security to form an “Experts Group” for combating “misinformation” on the internet? In order to accommodate the misinformation experts the FBI expanded their “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists” (AGAAVE) classification to include political and/or social agendas creating the AGAAVE (other) category. Indicators of being in the AGAAVE Other category are prior military service, actively attending religious services, or being in any way connected to the Trump MAGA movement. That covers about half the electorate but what does it mean?

I’m not sure, we can assume some of the weekly Trump Trains and Tumptilla’s include undercover federal agents and/or paid informants. But the Feds don’t need to be physically present to surveil potential domestic terrorists because they can hoover up everything in your phone, social media, and home computers with the new and improved PULSE Tactical Information Warfare Platform. The Pulse system was recently purchased by defense contractorTwo Six Technologies from the developers, IST Research, who emerged out of a secret DARPA project housed at the Taj.

The PULSE platform made its unclassified debut on 60 Minutes in 2015 with an interview of one of Taj vets who was marketing a system to monitor the “dark web” to catch human traffickers. That’s a ridiculous idea now, human traffickers are trafficking women and children across our southern border daily and nobody seems too upset about it. But when you’re selling concepts to the government 60 minutes is a good place to start.

Dr Dave Warner, Baba Ken Kraushaar and I on the night they arrived at the Taj in Jalalabad in early November, 2007. Dr. Dave and Ken are the original Synergy Strike Force team who would combine the Defense Intelligence Agencies Afghanistan Atmospherics program with DARPAs More Eyes program to create the forerunner of the PULSE platform running it out of the Taj
Dr Dave out and about with his Afghan crew in Dur Baba district near the Khyber Pass

 Two Six Technologies, then acquired the counter-disinformation company Thresher Ventures, for its main product the Media Manipulation Monitor (M3) which is based on the principle that advanced censorship regimes designed to control the flow of information convey a great deal about their governments and leaders. So does the flow of information for Trump Trains and Trumpilla’s which may explain the AGGAVE (other) category. When the government comes after you using lawfare the process is the punishment and not many Americans will be able to stand fast in the face of government intimidation.

Which brings us full circle back climate change because our Homeland Security ‘experts”are using their toys to wargame (in collaboration with social media companies) how to handle the droughts and power outages that will be caused by climate change. Those games involve censoring alternative views, manipulating the news, and (of course) lockdowns because the chaos of a changing climate is inevitable – unless we follow the example of Finland and Sweden and go back to nuclear power. But an energy independent America is not part of the big government progressive establishments playbook, only the bad Orange Man and the AGGAVE (others) think its a great idea.

I don’t think the elites media manipulation playbook will work for much longer but if you think they are going to re-think their determination to thwart the half of the electorate now deemed deplorables you have not been paying attention. The Biden regime will not go quietly into the night after an electoral landslide sends Trump back to DC. There is serious trouble brewing out their in the land of the free and one can only hope the will of the people is respected in this election and FJB sent back home wherever that is.

Apocalypse Not: The Fear of COVID-19 is Unwarranted

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.

The FRI Guide to Dangerous Places: The Junk Yard Bar Granjeno, Texas

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.

Apocalypse Not: 15 Inside the Hot Zone

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.

Apocalypse Not: Mask Off Mask On

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:

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 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.

Apocalypse Not: 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-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.

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 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.

Verified by MonsterInsights