Pres. Biden in his CVOID speech from the White House on 3/11/2021.
Did you tune into Pres. Biden’s COVID speech last night (3/11/2021)? I did, and bunkum works as its chief characteristic.
The first part of the pitch was devoted to empathy for the lives cut short, the businesses ruined, the miseducation of the young, and the demolition of a country’s social life. He said this as if it occurred by magic. It didn’t. These were outcomes of deliberate government actions that were most enthusiastically implemented by Democrat overlords, and are still clutched by them with a death grip. It’s extremely odd to express empathy for fallout that people like him caused. It’s absolutely mindboggling to watch.
The middle part of the truncated harangue could be summed up as vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. Not mentioned was the fact that the vaccines were Trump vaccines with a Trump rollout that was cut aborted by a semi-election of mail-in ballots.
Also, to be sure, getting vaccinated is a good thing, but getting our lives back is equally, if not more, important. We have known since the middle of last year who is vulnerable and how to treat the bug with a host of therapeutics, with or without a vaccine. It’s clear that the most stringent measures should have been targeted on the vulnerable rather than a strangulation of the lives of everyone. To be honest, I could do without Biden’s cries of empathy as he promises to prolong the agony.
We now know that the straitjacket didn’t do much good. Federalism provided a live experiment, and it showed that cemeteries didn’t get any fuller in the more open states in comparison to the ones in perpetual lockdown.
The worst was saved for last: The Threat. If we don’t follow the mindless decrees of his power-hungry appointees and bureaucrats-as-“experts”, we may as well shred what remains of our Constitution. There will be no back to “normal”, and we’ll be forever stuck under the thumb of our new autocracy.
The spiel would have made more sense if Biden was Dorothy and he/she was tripping down the yellow brick road.
When we look back on today, will we view it as our crazy time? Or will we see this time, and the history before the virus, through the eyes of a broadly neurotic people publicly nurtured into the obsessive cleanliness variant of the obsessive-compulsive disorder? With the new administration, I’m beginning to wonder. I’m starting to doubt whether we will be ever allowed to be fully human again.
If so, say goodbye to a free republic and hello to a nanny state on meth.
Jake Tapper and Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director, from Sunday, Feb. 14, 2021.
Hints of the omnipresent and muscular nanny state have been arising out of the Biden administration. Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s CDC Director, announced earlier this month the need to get back to some sense of normality by reopening the schools even without a complete vaccination of all teachers. She walked back the statement a week later. On “Face the Nation”, she worried about a new variant, the UK variant (B.1.1.7), and the likelihood of more. Later, Jake Tapper of CNN pressed her on reopening the schools, and that means in-person instruction. She back-peddled. She stated that over 90% of children live in “red zones” of high infection rates and thus limited classrooms to K-5 with the mandatory butchering of the classroom experience behind desk and face shields, compulsive cleansing, and the scattering of kids behind 6-foot DMZ’s. She tied any return to something resembling normal to infection rates. In other words, with the perceived threat of variants and the persistence of the outbreaks, we might be hovering in a forever state of totalitarian controls and shutdowns. Is that any way to live?
That’s not all. Clearly, totalitarianism lurks at the core of the policy. Any return to a normal human life will hinge on “universal” – meaning perfect – obedience to the state’s edicts.
If “universal” masking is ordered, it had better be followed by everyone to the letter at all times. But that’s impossible. Remember, in the case of the schools, these are kids. In the case of adults, people slip. Absolute compliance is an impossible standard. Or maybe I should amend my account by saying that it might be possible with the kind of police state that would make the Castros envious. The same would have to be true throughout the regime on everything from perfect compliance on 6-foot social distancing to stay-at-home orders to the banishment of social and economic life. Perfect, compete obedience with the long arm of the state . . . forever.
Police arrest parishioners in Moscow, Idaho, as they participated in a public psalm sing in defiance of mask and social distancing mandates, September 23, 2020.
It’ll have to be forever because the virus may not, probably will not, completely disappear. If it hangs around like the lazy, obnoxious relative after Christmas, it’s 2020 forever, there being no limiting principle. What was sanctioned in March of 2020 is the precedent for an unending contortion of existence – if not for this bug, for any pathogen of mysterious origin. After all, mother nature is infinitely creative.
And this will be true in spite of a vaccine. Any new variant and new pathogen will incite the suffocation of society. If history is any indication, and given our knowledge of nature, new threats will appear. The acts of simple living could be forcibly ended nearly at the beginning of each flu season, till another herculean effort to create a vaccine succeeds. We may spend more time in lockdown than out of it.
Imagine an entire existence of a people living in a constant state of pins and needles. This could be our future . . . until the peasants with pitchforks (the guns having been taken in prior decrees) rise up in rebellion and expel the commissars. A point of saturation will have to be reached at some point. The experience of peasant rebellions in history isn’t a pleasant one.
One question overhangs the entire episode: Why do the American people seem so docile? Have we bred citizens or sheep? There are good reasons to challenge our response to the virus, not the science about it. Why haven’t we rose up in broad acts of civil disobedience, as in MLK’s campaign against Jim Crow? At this juncture in our history, I can’t avoid the strong conjecture that the citizens of today aren’t citizens of the 19th-century settlement of the frontier. We are different, profoundly different.
Sheeple?
The change is palpable, and something to worry about. The truculent John Adams was more direct: “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
Or, how about this gem: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There [was] never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” Are we about to prove him right?
The current hysteria is anthropogenic, and could well spell doom to a free republic.
A British cartoon from the days of the French Revolution that portrayed the Sans-Culottes, “relaxing after the fatigues of their day”.The day after one of the Minneapolis riots, May 2020.
Right now, the Left from their newly acquired bastions in the executive branch and Congress are empowered to embark on their long-desired jihad against inequality. These campaigns seldom go well. Indulging in fantasies of the kind that seriously ignore reality leave a path of desolation. How many times must we embark on the same crusade with the same excuses using the same means (government) and producing the same disastrous results?
Weaponizing language is the real and last refuge of the scoundrel, not patriotism. The revolutionaries utilize rhetorically useful euphemisms and creative pejoratives to hide their intentions and provide cover for their actions, thus the Bolsheviks’ widespread application of the word “kulak” (Russian for “fist”) to landowning peasants before they enunciated their war on the peasants, or today’s demagogues who employ “rich”, “top one percent”, “pay their fair share”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, or just plain “racism”. Our modern scoundrels don’t a take a back seat to the Bolshevik rabble rousers stirring up Petrograd factory workers or the thousands of reservists milling around the capital in the months before the 1917 coup.
Russian army reserve conscripts, heavily influenced by Bolshevik agitators, march in Petrograd in opposition to the Provisional Government, October 1917.
Add to the euphemism list “equity”. “Equity” is resplendent in the proclamations coming out of the Biden administration in its first few weeks. It’s a classic example of word as sword. What are they really up to? “Equity” simply means “impartial” or “fair”. No, no, no, not for this crowd! That isn’t good enough for our Jacobins. “Equity” is the veneer for racial vengeance. Throughout the Biden Leviathan, “equity” will provide cover for a return of Jim Crow with a different cast for the winners and losers. Race and the rest of the fashionably oppressed labels will make their return as the basis for distributing public goodies. Of course, what goes to one group is withheld from another. They make no bones about it. Their rhetorical repertoire includes “patriarchy”, “social justice”, “white privilege”, “systemic racism”, “white fragility”, and “Uncle Tom/Tío Taco” to dismiss complaints.
Without a doubt, this isn’t your normal lofty aspiration for “equality”. If it is, it is of a form that seeks to repeal nature. People are born with so many different gifts and qualities that divergent outcomes can only be suppressed by force, thus the holy war for “equity”. The long arm of the state is employed to forcibly flatten things. Who gets hurt, for many will be? How will the public good be advanced, for in many ways it will be retarded? What happens to the personality of a people raised on a steady diet of envy and the receipt of earnings that once belonged to others, for there will be an inflation in the numbers of the entitled? Think of it; it won’t be pretty.
Biden sits with the executive orders that he signed to repeal the Trump era and set the U.S. on a path to a reverse racism called “equity”, January 26, 2021.
Edmund Burke in England and John Adams in America saw its vile corruptions in the late 18th-century streets of Paris with its rampaging mobs and their vicious agitators in the seats of power. For Adams and Burke, physical inequality was in the nature of things. Inequality resulted and quickly became the political whipping boy for the demagogue. A moral equality – as in the equality of all souls – gave way to an equality in all things material, or Adams’s “false Notions of equality”. As Adams correctly predicted at the beginning, it would end in despotism.
John Adams , 1785 Mather Brown Portrait
It’s the same idea that animates Antifa and its cousin, Black Lives Matter, lest we forget. The abyss that consumes us is evident in the burned-out hulks in the business district, the flight of refugees from the “paradise”, the occasional beatings and killings (47 killings in June, July, and August), and the escalation of violence as permissiveness for one side’s rampages leads to complimentary fury from the other side. It is happening before our eyes.
Get prepared for a hurricane. Jacobinism, whether in the streets of 1789 Paris or 1917 Petrograd or downtown Portland or Biden’s “equity” crusade, isn’t a recipe for paradise. It’s a calamity. Lest we forget.
Last night, I watched the first installment of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s an entirely fitting thing to do given what has happened to us in the general election and what is about to happen to us thereafter, whether you voted for the guy or not. Joe Biden and his coterie have the ring of power.
The movie opens with Galadriel’s haunting premonition of evil tidings and a recitation of the past that led to this new and ominous dark time.
“The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it. It began with the forging of the great rings [to the rulers of the three races of Middle Earth].
But they were all of them deceived for another ring was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a master ring, to control all others and into this ring, he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all.”
I can’t think of anything that better captures the awful sense of foreboding that dominates the mind of many Americans today. Nothing that Biden said in his speeches allayed those fears. He exacerbated them.
His inaugural speech was replete with calls for unity and an end to the “uncivil war”. Good, as far as it goes. But “a more perfect union” has a different ring coming out of the mouth of the leader of a party whose Overton window has lurched in the direction of Marx. “Racial justice” is tantamount to witch hunts against an ill-defined “white supremacy” which may mean a crusade against political opposition. “The cry of survival from the planet” is code for the enhanced central planning of the Green New Deal.
Back to “unity”. What kind of “unity” was it? “Unity” was the rhetorical device to express the portentous power of the ring. Biden used “unity” innumerable times to the point that it suffered from a Weimar level of value debasement. If anything, it was the “unity” of capitulation. “Shared values” meant their values.
Inauguration Day was more than the speech. Yesterday, something like the discovery of the ring of power was encapsulated in other parts of an otherwordly ceremony. Watching the COVID inaugural festivities was another one of those surreal experiences that goes right alongside the scenes from the COVID election, COVID anti-socialization in quarantined homes, the COVID anti-learning in COVID “distance learning”, the COVID shuttering of economic life, and COVID anti-romance for those seeking a mate – something hard to do with two-thirds of the face hiding behind a mask. COVID mangled life and now gave us an expensively-produced infomercial masquerading as an inaugural ceremony that could have come right out of the History Channel’s “Life After People”. There were few, very few hominids around, with the exception of the speech itself.
“Virtual reality” must be expanded to include “virtual inauguration”. Ceremonies and celebrations without people leave the impression that people aren’t necessary, and the first step toward inhumanity.
It was an inauguration signaling the rise of new power in the east. It had nothing to do with a transference of a ring of power since the losing party is less about power – therefore no need for the ring – than it is about the restraining and channeling of power to allow a free people to function freely. The winning party in its current manifestation is almost purely about power, the power to bring about an eschaton that is founded upon a set of fallacies. This end state has to be imposed by force since few in their right mind would freely accept it. It’s as if Sauron gained possession of the ring.
An inkling of where things are going is evident in Biden’s inaugural 17 executive orders. Globalism replaced nationalism as he will hogtie us back into the CCP-dominated World Health Organization and CCP-favored Paris Climate Accord. American health and economic policy will be laboring to breath under an UN and CCP wet blanket.
Uighur concentration camp in Xinjiang, Red China.
The chaos at the southern border is set to return. The first step in scotching the wall was made. Legislating from the Resolution desk was endorsed with a rechristening of DACA. It’s the very thing that helped sanction a new approach to gain illegal entry: grab a kid. The signal was sent that the possession of a kid necessitates favored treatment.
Making asylum really mean asylum and not just another means to make “poor” the unofficial-but-real criteria for access to the U.S. will be obliterated in present and future proclamations in Biden’s orders. Be prepared for the play-acting that countries who are known to germinate terrorists aren’t, and that vetting asylum-seekers from these places can actually occur. These countries don’t even have reliable birth certificates. How can anybody be traced from these places? I don’t think that Al Qaeda or ISIS operates on the principle of ID cards. Still, we’re going down this moral and rational dead-end.
Immigrants try to swarm the border wall near San Diego, April 2018.
Instead, we are going to be showered with announcements on the “real” threat of “domestic terrorism”. We will be told that the real danger does not lie with Islamic fanatics who would behead a teacher for showing Muhammed cartoons in a lesson on free speech, as what recently happened in France. No, Biden and company say that we’ve got to hunt down people who might have strong reservations about the donkey party’s socialist revolution. Will the rank and file of the FBI allow itself to be used as the Biden administration’s NKVD (Stalin’s secret police)? The worry is not out of the realm of possibility given the Comey/McCabe/Brennan/Clapper/Obama shenanigans of recent memory.
Biden ordered a return to the shackling of the US energy industry in a Don Quixote tilting at global greenhouse-gas windmills. No more Keystone/XL pipeline. Federal emissions standards will follow the lead of California’s eco-socialists. Federal taxpayer-owned lands and continental shelf will fall under the gaze of Biden’s own eco-socialist commissars. Thousands will be given their last paycheck and back to the union hall they will go seeking work from a vastly depleted list of opportunities.
Buttigieg’s comments on the repeal of the permits for the Keystone/XL pipeline at his Senate confirmation hearing had all the compassion of a NKVD requisition officer dispossessing a farmer and his family (“kulaks”) of their land, home, and last bit of food in the heady days of Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Chilling, absolutely chilling.
Buttigeig at his confirmation hearing for the post of Secretary of Transportation.The expropriation of a Ukrainian Farmer’s land and home by a NKVD requisition squad in the 1930’s as part of Stalin’s collectivization campaign.
If that’s not enough, out goes Trump’s 1776 Commission and in comes the dangerous and facetious 1619 Project. The former would instill a sense of thankfulness for our country while the latter is meant to foment disgust. The latter is about to be force-fed to the kiddies on a grander scale now that the federal Leviathan is gearing up to cram it into the schools. Our schools may come to mirror Red China’s Uighur reeducation camps or Cuba’s schoolhouses.
Cuban school kids, 2016.
The “be prepareds” are in order. Be prepared for a taxpayer-funded shaming campaign for owning a SUV. Be prepared for the whole graph of fuel-price gyrations to be shifted upward. Meaning, starting up the car might become a family budget-busting activity. Be prepared for an economy that’ll be expected to run on wind gusts and solar farms the size of a western state. Be prepared for the hosing of taxpayer dollars in the direction of any claque of eco rent-seekers with their snouts fully buried in the public trough. These people are bound and determined to make the impossible possible with your money.
More “be prepareds” are in order. Be prepared for the march of woke authoritarianism. Out goes the First Amendment amid the reclassification of unwelcome speech into hate speech. Racism will reappear as “equity”, “equity” being the official sanction of racial vengeance. The approved melanin count, genitalia, self-diagnosed gender, and any combination thereof will be the new privileged Boston Brahmins. The longstanding Boston Brahmins will continue their inside track to status and fame. The ones on the outs will be the children of Asians, blue collars and the working middle class of paler complexions.
Power is the necessary ingredient for this revolution. It must be forced. If Biden didn’t gain possession of the ring of power, he certainly is acting like it. The Lord of the Rings is the perfect accompaniment to his new revitalization of Mordor.
The totalitarian N.I.C.E. from CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.
Or maybe the more accurate parallel is the totalitarian N.I.C.E. in C.S. Lewis’s The Hideous Strength. It’s a tale of science without morality and in the service of totalitarian social engineering. Either way, “The Lord of the Rings” will do for now in getting you in the proper mood for what’s coming.
No, I’m not spewing out a call for armed resistance if you’re fixated on the “powder dry” reference. Just watch out because the Biden circus is coming to town. Obama was right. Indeed, elections have consequences. So, on January 20, it’s Trump out, Biden in. After January 20, much bad governance is waiting to slither from Biden’s cabinet meetings and through an executive branch workforce of preexisting and deeply left-wing disposition.
Don’t expect much from Congress. The country is almost evenly split. No question about it. So is Congress, even if the Dems use their time-honored tactics of showering poll workers with counterfeit ballots (mail-in = counterfeit) and succeed in installing leftist radicals to represent Georgia and seize control of the Senate. What Democrat from a competitive state or district would risk the loss of their cushy sinecure by proving their Bolshevik bonafides? Sure, they just might be crazy enough to take the poison, but my money is on more meaningless grandstanding, bombastic patronization, and other repellant behavior, much of it for show. Most of the damage will come from our now-monarchical executive branch.
What does Biden and company have in store for us? They’ll try to have more sociology majors in squad cars and fewer people with the martial requisites to bring thugs into custody and protect victims. Expect a Green New Deal, Jr., and the emasculation of many of us to have livelihoods. Government-as-nanny will hair-trigger lock us down the next flu season. On guns, confiscation will be dubbed “buy-back” and the fed’s firearm Instacheck system will morph into insta-refusal. Race hustling will reach new heights up and down the red-tape ministries under the banner of “disparate impact”. Beware that your young and aspiring and deserving Ivy Leaguer night have to matriculate to a community college or State U if he or she fails the skin color and last name tests. You’ll notice that inked agreements will try to paper over Red China’s largest navy on the planet, its takeover of NATO ports, its extortion of more high tech from our muddled-headed CEO’s, its Belt and Road becoming a new Axis, and Iran’s mullahs pursuing their dream of annihilating Israel and becoming the region’s second nuclear power. In other words, America will be domestically enfeebled and our enemies stronger and emboldened. All courtesy of executive action.
“Affirmative action” chained to “disparate impact”.
Funny thing, bolshevism and its distant cousin, progressivism, don’t work. The 2020 electorate will be reintroduced to the functional definition of insanity: repeat the excursion into central planning, social engineering, and pacifism but magically expect bliss this time around.
The lunatics have retaken the asylum. And just think, a majority of the pieces of paper (ballots) were votes for it.
If you have a hankerin’, go watch “The Plot Against the President” (trailer below) on Amazon Prime by Amanda Milius, daughter of legendary script writer, producer, and director John Milius. It lays out the scheme by Obama’s courtiers, and Obama himself, to undermine Trump from the moment he won the nomination to the failed impeachment on February 5, 2020. Trump had no traditional “honeymoon”, and neither is Biden deserving of one. There should be a peaceful transfer of power, but it doesn’t have to be a cooperative one.
The post-2016 Democrats were despicable in their embrace of reverse racism, a racial spoils system, turning a blind eye to rioters, and socialism here, there, and everywhere. Their behavior was disgraceful in almost all matters political. Biden’s people should be prohibited from executive branch offices till noon, January 20. A couple of briefings for Biden alone may be alright. Then, he can take the info back to his minions that are holed up in the Office of the President-elect.
Congressional Republicans, keep the heat on from day one. Senators, if you have the majority, take a few scalps, particularly those that belong to Democrats from the California snake pit. Protect Durham and anyone who might be appointed to investigate the Biden family’s influence peddling.
Is this merely a matter of “vengeance”? No. Consider it, to borrow from the romantic texts between the Strzok and Page love birds, an “insurance policy”. It’s insurance to keep the Democrats from turning America into Venezuela.
Will Biden be hampered from doing the people’s business? And what business is that? Going after your livelihood and your $45,000 SUV in your garage? Greasing the skids for the prosecution of police departments and individual officers? More lockdowns to make your kids dumber and dumber? Going after your suburban neighborhood because it is too middle class and too nice? Waking up to learn that tax-the-rich became tax-the-paycheck? More insults to Israel and fist bumps with the mullahs? Your children finding that their college application didn’t check the right genitalia and skin color boxes? Lefty ideology being taught to your kids as “equity”? DMV-style healthcare replacing your doctor? Making it more difficult for you to get a gun as they open the jails, budgetarily strangle your police, and refuse to prosecute the guy breaking into your home and car?
Considering all that the Biden regime plans to offer, gridlock sounds good to me. At least, we’ll be spared the woke and neo-socialist claptrap.
Hugh Hewitt’s radio program is a treasure. I savor his demeanor and interviews of all stripes of opinion-makers. However, his take on the two most important issues of today – the election and pandemic – drives me up the wall. He’s certainly not alone in his display of tunnel vision on these two matters.
Friday, while interviewing Steve Kornacki, NBC’s resident expert on polling, they both strayed into superficial comparisons of the 2020 election with previous ones. Right off the bat, it must be admitted that this election was like no other and hardly analogous. It’s the first election in my memory that a huge bulk, if not the majority, of the ballots cannot be assigned to particular living, breathing, and eligible voters with much certainty. Ballots were shot-gunned to buildings throughout the country, were taken inside, and nobody can legitimately vouch for each ballot’s treatment after that. It’s the exact opposite of the level of security when voting in-person. This election was strange, really strange. How is a comparison with previous elections even possible?
Kornacki blithely tries to do just that with Hewitt in tow. Kornacki cited the increasing urbanization of Georgia and the demographic dominance of the counties within the orbit of greater Atlanta, counties that Hillary won by 30% and Biden wins by 40%, to help explain Biden’s razor thin victory in the state. I’m not convinced the fact has much relevance. Demographic changes don’t occur at the speed of flipping a light switch, even though they are gradually happening in real time. Four years isn’t long enough for that factor to account for a change of 10%.
How can anyone brusquely brush off the possibility of a once-in-a-lifetime loosey-goosey election system accounting for the surge in Biden support? Kornacki and Hewitt might be suffering from glaucoma.
Hewitt would probably respond by saying that there’s no evidence of substantial fraud . . . but fraud is beside the point. He sees most issues as a lawyer would, which he is, in clinging to his conclusion that there isn’t sufficient evidence to throw aspersions on the result. He’s right if all matters must meet the standards of jurisprudence, but that’s a rarified environment involving unique standards. For real people living in the real word, we can’t conduct our lives by measuring all that we do to “beyond a reasonable doubt”. We must act on what is likely to be true.
Evidentiary norms of the courtroom are ill-suited for policy making, decisions about your child’s education, and assessing an election system that incorporated what would have been considered fraud just two years before. The system hid voting behind walls – addresses – and counting procedures that poured ballots into huge anonymous piles like a rain drop landing in a pond. The system legitimized fraud and made it next to impossible to uncover the misbehavior in “sufficient” quantities.
Indeed, this Rube Goldberg election system was a disgrace. Party activists, greased with wads of lefty billionaire cash, became the principle means for distributing the ballots as they scurried to deliver and gather absentee ballot applications from their favorite constituencies, and became the principle means for their collection in legal and “questionable” ballot harvesting operations. Vote-by-mail essentially codified scandalous conduct.
The election was a system with few, if any, authenticity checks. You can’t expect underpaid and overworked poll workers to instantly become forensic handwriting experts. This election became a race to garner the biggest pile of paper, not necessarily voters, because the system was set up to place a premium on paper, not bodies. Under these conditions, paper is made easier to pile than bodies.
Mail-in ballots being prepared for counting. (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File)
Simply put, you can’t correlate each piece of paper with a live body. A leap of faith is required to overcome that problem. Hewitt and Kornacki are unknowingly mired in something akin to a religious act.
And then there’s Hewitt’s stand on the pandemic. He announced that Gov. Newsom “is doing his best” and implored public officials like LA’s Mayor Garcetti to cordially ask the population “to endure just 3 more months of restrictions”. Au contraire, Newsom and Garcetti are deserving of condemnation not compliments and supplications to be nicer.
We’re in the midst of the much-anticipated second surge and many in power act as if they haven’t learned a darn thing. We now know that the truly vulnerable are a narrow slice of the population: the aged with serious health problems. Outside of that demographic sliver, almost all people would probably find influenza a more dangerous threat. And yet, we are told that nearly everyone’s entire way of life must be upended to protect this very small number of people, or protect ourselves from a threat that is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu. The hidden truth is, we can easily protect the vulnerable without making everyone else’s life a living hell.
If we do get it, we have proven therapeutics with vaccines on the way. We won’t die, unless we have the health issues that would imperil some of us every flu season. We had good reason to know this fact at the start but powerful officials got caught up in a hysteria that was incited by grossly inflated death rates. Remember those? But Garcetti, Cuomo in New York, and Whitmer in Michigan still act as if the embarrassingly faulty fatality numbers in March came from the burning bush on Mt. Horeb. They behave as if a spike in “positive” cases equates with a spike in deaths. Few things are further from the truth.
Jay Bhattacharya
Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford in his presentation in Hillsdale College’s October issue of “Imprimis” clears the medical fog of war. Most importantly, he addresses the confusion that paralyzes Whitmer’s and Newsom’s mind on that notorious death rate. The number that corrupts their brains muddles “cases” with “infections”. The former is a much smaller number than the latter, with the former producing a much higher death rate if used as the formula’s denominator. “Infections” is a bigger number because it refers to people with the virus or having had it. “Cases” are just the number of people with the virus that show up at a medical facility. Seroprevalence tests – an analysis of the presence of virus markers in the form of antibodies and proteins – in Santa Clara County, Ca., and replicated in 82 studies around the world, showed 50 times more infections over cases. Thus, the death rate properly calculated must drop behind the decimal point and not in front of it. Bottom line: the virus’s lethality was and is greatly overstated.
Targeted mask-wearing, quarantining and assisting the vulnerable, and an opening of life for 95% of our people should be the order of the day. Above all, get the kids back in school. Increases in positive cases should no longer paralyze us into ruination. If you get it, see your doctor, stay home, and drink plenty of fluids. Sound familiar?
The two issues are linked on account of the virus-panic being used to mutilate our elections, in addition to butchering our entire way of life. Hewitt wallows in misconceptions about the 2020 election and the virus. The school closings and lockdowns are destroying the path to meaningful lives. Our third world-style election system gave us a person of mental incontinence who will be left to populate the executive branch, and the courts, with delusionary leftists. We are going to be in for a rough ride, and the disfigurement of rational treatment of the two events is no good service.
While reading Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by Gordon S. Wood, I came across a conundrum that pervaded the thinking in the Revolutionary era. Namely, how do you distinguish a constitution from normal legislation? The British blurred the distinction by encompassing legislative acts into their conception of a constitution according to Blackstone and Paley in the 17th and 18th centuries. For them, a constitution included institutions, customs, and legislative acts. The colonists, different in their origins as a political entity, inhabited places that were founded upon colonial charters to establish their political order. From this, they got their view of a foundational document as special, something remarkably different from the normal legislative acts that arise out of a legislative body. To base their governments on something commanding allegiance without reliance on the crown and Parliament, they embraced the idea that constitutions were exceptional and could only command authority if approved and amended in an exceptional manner, such as special conventions requiring super-majorities. This is the origins of our Constitution and its supremacy clause, approval process, and amendment procedures.
The exceptional nature of constitutions coincided with the broad view of those present at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 regarding a national chief executive. He was to be an exceptional national personage with a broader basis of legitimacy than the simple majorities to pass bills as in the popularly-elected colonial assemblies. If the chief executive were chosen in like manner, by a popular vote majority, he wouldn’t command the same level of respect that would be expected of a truly national figure with truly national responsibilities.
Under Democrat demands to effectively dismantle the Electoral College, he would come to be seen as reflective of the areas that gave him his majority, which would be limited to a few populous states or highly concentrated urban locales. Areas not supportive would begin to see him as a foreign potentate. Instead of a constitution cementing the country into a “more perfect union”, the popularly-elected president would join the popularly-elected Congress in reshaping the courts to fit the impulsive and ephemeral majorities of the other two branches. Thus, the entire system of government would be seen as rigged against states and areas who would be effectively neutered, which would sow the seeds of rebellion.
Civil war is the probable result of Democrats’ efforts to transplant national power to their one-party fiefdoms. The Democrats are reckless and not deserving of the power if they choose to alienate most of the country. The Founders mean nothing to them, and wisdom to them is limited to their peculiar vision of the world. Everyone else – traditionalists mostly – will quickly come to realize that they are to be perennially excluded.
What’s the incentive of the excluded to remain in a union that was refashioned to fit a narrowly focused demographic with narrowly focused biases? Lincoln’s correct view of the union as inseparable, except under the same extraordinary measures that produced the Constitution, will be contradicted by the new facts on the ground that arise from a political order tailored to the self-interests of one party firmly entrenched in a few states and urban nodes.
Photograph shows a crowd celebrating the victory of the first battle of Manassas at the Confederate capitol in Richmond, Va., 1861. Photograph was taken by D.H. Anderson. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
The South was dreadfully wrong in the mid-19th century, but what of modern would-be separatists representing vast stretches between the coasts and outside the inner-cities? The South shamefully defended the hideousness of slavery and mistakenly thought that the acts of state assemblies were sufficient to dissolve the union. But what to make of Democrats using their control of the machinery of the national government to reshape the federal government to their permanent advantage and cutting out flyover country? It matters not if an election gave them majorities to manipulate the levers of government to erode the cement for a “more perfect union”. There are some things that are simply unwise and a popular-vote majority in one election can only paper over the foolishness.
Hiding behind the Democrats’ aggrandizement of power is the necessity for jack-booted power against any opposition that will arise. And opposition will flare up, and sadly some of it will be armed, because opponents will be left with no other option, their sovereign voice having been muzzled.
The Democrats are playing with fire. Does the public understand this? I don’t know. I kind of doubt it.
MILWAUKEE, WI – AUGUST 17: In this screenshot from the DNCC’s livestream of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, actress and activist Eva Longoria (L) introduces Former First Lady Michelle Obama to address the virtual convention on August 17, 2020. The convention, which was once expected to draw 50,000 people to the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is now taking place virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo by DNCC via Getty Images) (Photo by Handout/DNCC via Getty Images)
Have you watched any of the Democratic Convention? If, like the vast majority of America, you haven’t, I must confess to joining you in the legions of the “non-viewing”. You can’t “attend” so saying “non-attending” doesn’t apply. We are quickly learning the limits of distance [fill in the blank]. A convention without a crowd is like attempting to kiss your wife through Plexiglas. Blahhhh!
The little that I’ve seen though the lenses of CNN and Fox News was … borrrring! Everybody was “mailing” it in from remote locations, and it showed. It ain’t working.
The Republicans can learn from this debacle. Here’s my proposal for their convention in the era of COVID. Trump – like or hate him – is quite an interview and stage presence. Use him. Bookend the convention with 2 rallies in states that will allow large outdoor gatherings. The list could include Utah, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Missouri, Idaho, Alaska, and Alabama. The Republicans will bottle the crowd energy, and people who wouldn’t think of rubbing elbows with MAGA’ers get the energy of the moment. The first one opens the convention and sets the tone. The last one is the acceptance speech and thrills the warriors to rescue the land from the socialist revolutionary party (Democratic Party).
In between, scatter some Trump interviews, endorsements (short but sweet), and motion pics such as Larry Elder’s “Uncle Tom” and video pieces of urban life under one-party, decades-long Dem Party control. The idea is to keep it moving and hit the public with your campaign points like a sledge hammer. Avoid the snooze-a-thon currently on display from the donkey party.
The metaphor is apt when applied to recent pronouncements and actions of Democrat partisans. The campaign against the winner of the 2016 presidential election most recently descended into foolish impeachment, and may have insinuated promiscuous impeachment into our national political life. Previously, calls to shake up our constitutional order were fixated on the dismantlement of the Electoral College, all this to guarantee more Democrats win the presidency. It’s shameful and grossly irresponsible, like children lighting matches to ignite a cherry bomb.
Are they cognizant of the dangers that they are foisting on us? Trent England, vice president of the Oklahoma Public Affairs Council, lays out the jeopardy to all of us in his piece, “The Dangers of the Attacks on the Electoral College” in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis (June 2019). It’s a must-read.
The effects of foolishness seldom are limited to the offender when it is performed on a political stage, and on a national one at that. Many foolhardy ideas have their origin in ignorance of the past, or a terrible misreading of it. Not well-understood is the fact that the Founders rejected a national plebiscite for choosing the president because they were fearful of domination by areas with high concentrations of population and regions with a unity of purpose. It was a check on narrow interests seizing control of the executive machinery of government.
It worked as a restraint on one of our worst tendencies: to mistakenly see the world through the lens of our immediate neighborhood and the confines of our acquaintances as the ultimate arbiter of “truth”, as in the Jim Crow South or today’s ultra-left California. Indeed, there is a historical symmetry between the Jim Crow South of yesteryear and today’s populous and heavily urbanized states like California, Illinois, and New York. The post-Civil War South accounted for an average of 10.6 % of the vote and the California of 2016 was 10.4% of it.
In the elections of 1876, 1880, and 1888, the old South – the old South of real black voter suppression, not the phony kind falsely attributed to voter ID – was prevented from imposing their partisan choices on the rest of the country. After all, this was the South of region-wide block voting for the Democratic Party, no matter what. This is a region of “yellow dog Democrats” stretching from North Carolina to Texas who “would sooner vote for a Democrat yellow dog than a Republican”. Sounds like a typical faculty lounge, big city, or Manhattan/Hollywood soiree of today.
Four of the five ladies of The View are noticeably chagrined and incredulous at having to hear the occasional disagreements of Megan McCain. The four reflect the bubble of the new “yellow dog Democrat”.
Donald Trump, Jr., in the hot seat on The View.
To deal with their frustration, our deeply blue, and occasionally purple, states have contrived a scheme to repeal the Electoral College without an amendment. It’s called the National Popular Vote (NPV) initiative. The thing would try to impose a presidential popular vote by getting enough states to pass statewide measures to require the nationwide vote total to determine their state’s electors. The scammers’ goal is to win over enough states to equal a majority of the Electoral College total, 270. Thereby, the old fuddy-duddy Electoral College will be practically repealed without having to do it the right way: by amendment. The schemers are currently ready to surpass 200.
Robert Burns’ “best laid plans of mice and men [go wrong]” is about to be confirmed again. The ploy is anti-constitutional as well as unconstitutional. First, the gimmick violates the original intent of the Founders, but, then again, when did progressives/socialists ever concern themselves with original intent. The Founders stipulated that a state’s electors were chosen by the states, not a national statistic like the national vote total. The easy-out for progressives is for all troublesome law to be interpreted out of existence. That’s anti-constitutional.
Secondly, the subterfuge violates Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution. This troubling passage to progressives requires all interstate compacts to be approved by Congress, and this most assuredly is an interstate compact, whether they want to call it that or not. They’ll try to hide under the Constitutional power of each state to determine their method of choosing electors. But, as in all things, a limiting principle applies: a state can, if they don’t violate the Constitution in the process.
Like this latest round of impeachment, the gambit is a sham. Who in their right mind would want to live under the dictates of the lunatic cultural left? Remember, these states have some of the loosest election laws since troglodytes had to choose a tribal chief. They’ll run up the score with their usual shenanigans and the rest of us will be saddled with the result. Is this any way to run a republic?
