Monday, November 7, 2022

THIS & THAT XXII

           On the internet, I am a sucker for the “23 Life Hacks That Will Save You Hours Every Day” variety of clickbait.  And, of course, they are always disappointing.  Typical of the advice you get is to “Save cabinet space by hanging your pots and pans on hooks!!!”

          However, I recently saw one life-hack that struck me as brilliant, and which might literally save my life someday.  When disposing of a body, the site advised, bury it vertically.  Since all of the imaging tools cops use, from helicopters and such, are designed to find objects underground that are six feet long and two feet wide, your victim will never be flagged.

          For additional safety, once you bury the human body, put a dead dog on top of it so that even if the cops decide to dig, they will find the canine and dismiss the search as a “false positive.”

 

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          There are two things that bother me about tomorrow’s mid-term election.

          First, I wanted (and expected), this election would be a referendum on COVID policy over the last two years.  I understand people care about crime, and the reversal of Roe, and the miserable condition of the economy, and the sexualization of schoolchildren, but I also hoped the COVID madness of lockdowns and mandates would be addressed.  I would like candidates to be asked, among other thing, “Would you authorize a mask mandate under any circumstances, and if so, what are those circumstances?”  Yet the horrible damage inflicted on all of us by leftwing politicians and authoritarian bureaucrats has never been addressed.

 

          The other concern is the level of cheating we will see from the Democrats.  I think we can expect the Dems to get crushed across the country, but there will inevitably be some close contests decided by a few thousand votes.  In a big Democratic city, with an entrenched Democratic machine (Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Philly, Detroit, for example), any close race where a Republican gets more votes is likely to be stolen.   

 

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          One of the ways LGBT/Trans activists teach the youngest schoolchildren their philosophy is with the Gender Unicorn, a purple Barney-like figure.  The five aspects of “gender” are listed as Gender Identity, Gender Expression, Sex Assigned at Birth, Sexually Attracted To, and Romantically/Emotionally Attracted To.  Each of these has its own symbol, which appears on the cartoon unicorn.  For example, the Gender Identity symbol is located in the unicorn’s head, and the Sexually Attracted To symbol appears on the unicorn’s heart.  The overall effect of the image is to stress that Sex Assigned At Birth is of very minor importance in determining your Gender.

          This is what is used to teach five- and six-year-olds.

 

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          A new taste treat I discovered on Halloween this year is the combination of a dry red zinfandel with a cherry Tootsie Roll Pop.  Since the Tootsie Roll Pop takes a while to consume, you might need two or even three glasses of the wine, so make sure you have plenty on hand.

 

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          Trivia: the standard Tootsie Roll Pops are chocolate, grape, cherry, raspberry, orange and lemon, though the company makes many other flavors, including pomegranate.

 

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          “One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument.  They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans---anything except reason.”  ---Thomas Sowell

 

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          Call it a “conspiracy theory,” but I am slightly concerned that the government’s politicized DOJ will be mobilized in tomorrow’s election to arrest people and seize election materials on the grounds that Republicans are “suppressing” votes.  It may not be that likely, but I also didn’t think the federal government would censor social media sites or raid the home of a former president.  And then they did.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki   

Saturday, August 27, 2022

COVID---The Players

 

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

                                            --- Edmund Burke 

 

          Now that the first push for the COVID security state is in “pause” mode, there has been a good bit of commentary, at least among cranks like me, about varying reactions to the---what shall I call it?  The Covidian takeover?  The Great Reset?  It would be nice if there were a neutral term I could find that would describe the attempt to impose an authoritarian supra-national government regime by the globo-capitalists at the World Economic Forum and their friends in governments and businesses around the world.

 

          The most accurate term would be something like “The World Fascist Movement,” but the problem is that no one remembers the economic and political system that was fascism a hundred years ago.  Today “fascism” just means “something I don’t like.”  Ask one person, and Trump is fascism.  Ask another person and Obama is fascism.  Ask Amber Heard and she’ll tell you Johnny Depp is fascism.  The word has been drained of all meaning, and that’s unfortunate because the real fascists of the1920’s would recognize the WEF and Klaus Schwab and President Xi and Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and Big Pharma instantly.  This would be a healthier world if we remembered and recognized the fascism of that era.  Rule by “experts?”  Check.  Obsession with identity politics?  Check.  Melding of government and business (a.k.a. corporatism)?  Oh yeah.  A rapidly expanding nanny state?  Yup.  But use the term “fascism” today and a lot of people think it’s when you call Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce.”

 

          Sorry.  I guess I wandered off there.  There really is no neutral term for the nightmarish political battle of the last two years.  There’s no nice way to describe the efforts to terrify the world with a virus, undermine human rights, destroy national sovereignty, forcefully medicate the population with experimental vaccines, elevate unelected bureaucrats to positions of absolute authority, and redistribute wealth from the middle classes to the richest individuals and companies on the planet.  So let’s just call it the COVIDIAN security state.  And the question is:  who is doing it, who is helping them, and who is fighting them?

 

          Others have divided the players into a dozen or more categories, but the techniques by which totalitarian regimes come to power and maintain control over their subjects have been studied and written about for centuries, and there are basically five groups that appear time after time, in whatever communist or fascist or monarchic or theocratic takeover is sought.  The countries are different, and the languages, and the culture, and the history, and the specific lies that are told, but the evil is the same, and the people who impose it do so for the same reasons.

 

          My groups, and the percentages of the population they represent, are similar to those that appear in historical analyses of other totalitarian takeovers.

 

          1)  People Who Believe Tupoc is Alive.  (My guess: about 9% of the population)

 

          My guess is 9% because this percentage never changes.  There are always 9% of the people who think Tupoc is alive, or Elvis is alive, or that Donald Trump will be restored to the presidency on some random date next week.  The clueless 9% are, for our purposes, and most purposes, irrelevant. 

 

          2) The Architects.  (My guess: less than 1% of the population)

 

          There is a small group of people and organizations that want different things but which all stand to benefit from the establishment of a COVID security state.  At the heart of this movement are the UN and the World Economic Forum, which was established in 1971 and is led by billionaire Klaus Schwab.  These two groups and countless NGOs are united in support of The Great Reset, an agenda of environmental, social and economic plans to reshape the world and place it under the control of benevolent experts like Schwab, Bill Gates, and others like them.  Fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers will be abolished.  The world population will be cut to a “sustainable” number.  Traditional money and property ownership will disappear.  “We have to redefine the social contract,” Schwab said recently.  A recent article described the WEF philosophy as follows: “Welcome to 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life Has Never Been Happier.”  The organization is not secretive about its goals, or its efforts.

 

          (The WEF’s most recent accomplishment is the implosion of Sri Lanka’s economy. After President Rajapaksa banned chemical fertilizers and severely restricted the use of fossil fuels in 2021, the country’s agricultural sector collapsed and the country went from being an exporter of rice to an importer of rice in a few months.  After Rajapaksa fled to Singapore, he was replaced by new President Wickremesinghe who, like Rajapaksa, is also a member of the WEF.  The country is experiencing a severe food crisis, which is something it had never seen before.  In addition, gasoline stations now have armed guards.)

 

          Other groups and individuals have slightly different motives but also see advantages in the COVID security state.  In America, leftists instantly perceived that the pandemic could be used to crash Trump’s booming economy and ultimately defeat him in November 2020.  (It does not appear that Trump himself ever figured this out.)  As early as March 2020, it was obvious that red states and blue states were going in different directions in their COVID responses, with blue states eagerly locking people down and shutting down schools and businesses

 

          Pharma?  Well, duh.  Vaccine makers had no objections to a public health regimen that allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars while being legally shielded from liability to anyone they might kill or injure.  Similarly, the pandemic was a means for people in the public health or medical-services bureaucracies to achieve previously unimagined power over their society.

 

          Climate change activists, eugenicists, and zero-population-growth Malthusians---all these activists were obvious allies for the COVIDians.  OF COURSE there are too many people.  OF COURSE, we have to eliminate the inferior ones.  OF COURSE, the new, better, smaller world must be sustainable.  And the only way to accomplish these goals is through a top-down international rule by experts---Gates, Schwab, Fauci, Kerry, Gore, and other extremely smart people.

 

          3) The Believers.  (My guess: 30%)

 

          What shocked me in mid-March of 2020 was the overwhelming public acceptance of lockdowns and mask mandates, and the cancellation of large public events.  The NCAA basketball Tournament, the NBA season, the opening of Major League Baseball, the closing of movies and theaters and resorts and theme parks---it all seemed to happen instantly, with no resistance and no public discussion.  Bars and restaurants shut their doors.  Shops closed.  You couldn’t get a haircut.  The edicts came down from above and were obeyed.  Legislatures and other elected officials rarely objected, or even asked “Why?”

 

          Because of the lack of public discussion, the edicts in state after state and country after country could not be viewed as a considered, rational response to a health crisis.  With no debate in the media or in our elected bodies, the only fair description of what occurred was a coup d’état, an authoritarian putsch that enveloped virtually all of civilized society.  Suddenly, the “experts” were running our world, though nobody had elected them.  There were opposing voices, we later learned, but they were silenced through conventional methods of censorship or through the sort of intimidation that has long been practiced on academic dissenters to the climate change orthodoxy.  With COVID, as with climate change, if you question the revealed truth, you don’t get funding, you don’t get tenure, you can never be published, and you eventually lose your job.  With all that at stake, most will go along with the program.

 

          But we learned about all that later.  At the time, what I could not understand was the widespread acceptance of the instant police state, the unquestioning belief that what was being done was correct.  In America, I believed, people spoke up.  They read things.  They talk to their friends.  They have a voice.  That was how the nation was supposed to work.  It had always worked that way.  Yes, it could be messy and raucous, and yes, some people are idiots, but the cacophony is what had always gotten the job done in the past.

 

          I did not foresee this phenomenon.  I was surrounded by people who instantly accepted the way the government had been taken over.  I knew them personally.  They were my friends and relations.  At the time, I described it as being caught in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”  It seemed that most of those I knew had been replaced by pod people. 

 

          Some even embraced the isolation.  I am the same age as a lot of old people I know, and many of them are winding down their careers or are completely retired, and they have a few bucks in the bank.   They were perfectly content to stay at home, have everything delivered, and stream the latest Netflix shows.  They discovered during COVID that they preferred to live their lives that way.

 

          And they still do.  They know the danger of COVID is vastly reduced, but as long as it is still “out there,” they would rather stay home and have most of their supplies delivered. They wear a mask when they emerge from their cells, and they wear it properly, over the nose.  If they are honest, they admit they wish everyone wore a mask when out in public.  (“It’s such a little thing to ask!”)  They want children to be masked in school.  

 

          Also, they have had all their vaccines and boosters and they are annoyed that others have not.  Though the knowledge is now widespread that the shots do not prevent catching the disease, or transmitting it to others, the true believers still view the unvaccinated as stupid and unclean because that has been the unrelenting message of the government, news media, and the COVID architects.  In fashioning an authoritarian system, there must always be an external enemy (in this case, the virus itself), but there must also be an internal group against which the rage of the believers can be directed.  The demonization of the unvaxxed is necessary for political reasons, though they pose no danger to anyone.  But that is always the case.  The Jews did not really poison all those wells in Europe, but it was necessary to persuade people they did. When things go wrong, or government lies are revealed, or the “science” turns out to be hooey, there must be a scapegoat.  That’s why the governments of many states and nations, including this one, are still trying to enforce vaccine mandates though no one even attempts to offer a justification for them.                 

 

           4) The Order-Followers.  (My guess: 35%)

 

           Historians have reported that Hitler himself never personally killed anybody.  He never pulled the trigger, he never slashed a throat, and he never switched on the gas.

 

          In our COVIDIAN world, when I wonder who is the more dangerous---the true believers or the order-followers, I always seem to return to this.  Hitler didn’t kill anybody; it was the ‘Good Germans” who spilled all the blood.  The true believers did some of the killing, of course, but their primary victims were themselves.  And so it is with the COVIDIAN security state.  The true believers lock themselves away from the world and isolate themselves.  When they go out, which is not often, no one sees their faces.  However, in my experience at least, they don’t try to persuade me to join them in their miserable existence.

 

          I work with both categories.  The true believers are not numerous.  They have jobs, after all, so they can’t isolate themselves at home full time.  At work, as believers, they wear their masks eight hours a day.  You have to be committed to do that voluntarily. 

 

          The order-followers are much more common.  It’s an easier path, for one thing.  Most of them will wear the mask pulled down below the nose so that, even if they believe masks work, they know what they are doing is pointless.  When even that becomes tiresome, they will pull the mask below their mouths.  Still, they won’t remove it.  By keeping it on in some fashion, they signal their obedience to the COVID regime.

 

          I have talked to some of them and urged them, gently, to lose the mask, but with no success.  And their explanations for it, six months removed from a city mask mandate, are thin.  “You know Jeannette, the cashier?  She gave me the mask and said I should wear it.”  “My sister said with all the people I work with, I should wear one.”  “Over in Home Decor, I saw somebody coughing yesterday.”

 

          I never accost the customers about it, but they too are easily distinguishable.  The believers always wear the mask over the nose and mouth, and it usually looks new or laundered.  Also, they wear whatever mask is currently in vogue.  For a while it was the basic N-95s; now the cool variety seems to be a new N-95 with the elongated dog-snout.

 

          Maybe in the long run, there is no difference in the level of danger we face from the true believers or the order-followers, but the latter are more frightening to me.  The believers have at least been persuaded of something (though it was through terror, repetition, and other propaganda techniques, and not through reason).  Perhaps they can be persuaded of the truth.  Perhaps they can be reached.  Perhaps there is a conscience somewhere in their souls that will someday make them pause. 

 

          But the ones who take the path of least resistance, the order-followers, the Good Germans?  They don’t seem to care about the virus or the politics or the COVIDIAN state that is being built.  They follow one mandate: they keep their heads down.  They are content to be the ones who are enslaved or killed last.

 

          And we have seen their work in the past.  These are the firemen who slow-walk their duties when the synagogue is being burned down.  These are the prison guards who must discipline the political captives.  These are the men in the East German Stasi who quietly interrogate your neighbors in order to assess your loyalty to the regime.  They were just following orders, and that is invariably their first defense when the communists or fascists fall and they are confronted with their deeds.  “I was just following orders.”

 

          And we have seen it with the COVIDIANs.  Police and military have been used all over the globe, even in nominally free countries like this one, to shut down churches and religious gatherings that violate whatever “emergency powers” are being invoked.  Occasionally, there would be a news story about a sheriff in some rural county who refused to enforce whatever edict was coming down from whatever bureaucrat, but those stories were rare, and they never involved a big-city police force.

 

          You may recall the near-riot that ensued when the NYPD broke up a Jewish funeral in the Williamsburg section of NYC.  Mayor de Blasio and the Police Commissioner even defended the use of force against a thousand grieving Jews.  What was shocking (aside from the video of uniformed cops attacking orthodox Jews in the streets of NYC), was that the police followed their orders without complaint.  Not a single officer refused to “do his duty” by crushing an (outdoor) religious observance.  Similar order-following occurred across America whenever a rebel pastor would attempt to hold a religious service contrary to the current decrees and mandates, but in accordance with the “free exercise of religion” we are all guaranteed by the First Amendment.

 

          But among the order-followers, no one is more frightening than the doctors who, on orders from their superiors and government bureaucrats, refused to treat patients who had just tested positive for COVID.  “Don’t come in to my office,” they told their patients.  “There is no treatment.  Stay home and if it gets worse, go to the hospital.”  Tens of thousands of people were told this by their trusted family docs, and they did stay home, and they did get worse, and then they went to the hospital and died.

 

          There were always possible treatments for early COVID cases, and many of them helped.  But there were only a few hundred doctors in the U.S. who defied the authorities and lived up to their oaths.  The rest?  Well, the rest were just following orders.

 

          5) The Dissenters (my guess: 25%)

 

          This is me, along with many virologists and epidemiologists and medical clinicians who are far more qualified than I am to condemn the COVIDIAN madness.

 

          When the virus hit the U.S. in mid-March of 2020, there was never a time when the public health measures seemed even remotely justified, partly because no one ever tried to justify them.  They were simply orders that came down from above, and it was often never exactly clear who issued them.  So when public life ended, and all manner of human gatherings, I knew it made no sense.  This is not how we do things, at least in America.  We have elected representatives, and they debate things, and there are loud, sometimes intelligent, people on both sides of major issues.  Pundits trumpet their opinions on TV and radio.  None of that happened.

 

          All we really knew at that point was that the Chinese were running some sort of disease-related operation, but the videos we got were the ridiculous ones of people keeling over dead in the streets (but somehow braking their falls with their hands at the last instant), before they were instantly whisked away by a squad of medical techs in hazmat suits who just happened to be there at that moment.  The bogeyman stuff out of China was weird enough to make you curious, but no rational person could actually be concerned without further data that made sense.

 

          That data never appeared.  But then, suddenly, you couldn’t get a Guinness on St. Patty’s Day.

 

          Also, it was apparent from the beginning that public health orders being issued would make matters worse, and it was so obvious this was the case that it also became obvious these orders could not have been motivated by medical considerations.  We have known for decades that throwing people out of work has terrible and predictable consequences---increased addiction, sickness, bankruptcy, divorce, child abuse, and suicide---yet there was no attempt made to weigh these known horrors against the then-uncertain dangers of COVID.  Similarly, the weight of pre-pandemic evidence on the usefulness of masking to prevent the spread of respiratory infections was that masking made transmission more likely.  But then suddenly, on April 3, 2020, Fauci et al. said we should all slap diapers on our faces.  (The destructive nature of masking has been confirmed repeatedly over the past 2 ½ years.)

 

          Lockdowns, masking, and other measures were all part of the campaign to, “slow the spread,” and that was the central problem since the goal of slowing the spread defied any sort of epidemiological logic.  From the beginning, we knew 1) the elderly were particularly vulnerable, 2) the young were in almost no danger, and 3) only about 15% of the population were susceptible to catching COVID at all (this would later change).  This meant that attempting to “slow the spread” in the general population would only make the virus more deadly to old people since they would be exposed to it for a longer period of time.

 

          The only sensible strategy would have been to slow the spread among the threatened older people while letting the virus run and mutate through the general population, where it was almost entirely non-lethal.  Instead we did the opposite.  With lockdowns and distancing, we allowed the virus to overhang our entire society for two years but allowed it to race through nursing homes and other elderly communities.  In fact, some politicians (Governors Cuomo in New York, Murphy in New Jersey, and Wolf in Pennsylvania), actually put recovering COVID patients back into nursing homes and thus multiplied the slaughter.

 

          And what did I do about it?  I ranted in this blog about the COVIDIAN security state and the authoritarians behind it.  I tried to tell some people about longer-term goals of the WEF and the UN to reduce world population, eliminate cash, and institute a Chinese-style social credit system everywhere.  I tried to spread the word about the dangers of the mRNA vaccines and the terrible injuries and deaths they have caused.  Also, I defiantly walked into a few stores without a mask on when there was a mask mandate in Philadelphia.  In other words, I did nothing.  And I doubt I convinced anyone about the danger, though I did learn there were people I know who agreed with me but who were keeping their heads down.

 

          But at work, when I was required to wear a mask, I wore a mask.  And if I had ever been required to get a vaccination, I might have done it to keep my job.  Many Americans have lost their jobs because they refused the shot, and what good has it really done them?  Would I have had the courage to stand up to the authoritarians?  For what?  That’s the question you ask.  Would it do any good?  Or would I simply lose my income, my home and my semi-comfortable life-style, yet have no effect on the relentless march of the COVIDIAN security state?

 

          As a dissenter, you ask yourself these questions.  And even my quiet and polite rebellion has had a significant downside.  I do not corner people in bars and lecture them on the latest vaccine injuries reported in the CDC’s VAERS database.  All I do is write articles, and if asked, I tell people I have not been vaccinated.  But I have friends and neighbors who have dropped me, and avoid me on the street.  There are people Sandy and I used to dine with, at our home or in restaurants, who now will have nothing to do with me.  My family of nieces and nephews and cousins has ostracized me; I never see them or talk to them, and they never invite me to family events.  A doctor and a dentist have dropped me as a patient because I am unvaxxed.  I was kicked out of a weekly chess club I very much enjoyed, again because I never took the shot.

 

          Faced with evil, most people do nothing.  What good would it do?  And why should I put my neck on the line?  These are the questions that nag at me.  When I think about the COVIDIAN security state, my primary emotion is not anger, or helplessness.  It is guilt.  I see what is happening and I have done little more than bitch about it.  I don’t know exactly what I could do, but my failure to do more marks me in my own heart as a coward.

 

          In “They Thought They Were Free,” Milton Mayer in 1955 wrote about a year he spent in Kronenberg with ten men who had been Nazis from 1933 to 1945, and basically still were.  Some had joined the party and some had not, but all were solid lower- and middle-class German burghers who had lived under Hitler, supported him, and had few regrets about their actions.  Mayer didn’t just interview them.  He befriended them and their families.  He came to know them.

 

          Most of us look back on Germany of the 1930’s and 40’s and find it easy to condemn the ordinary Germans who failed to rise up against the monstrous evils of the Nazi regime.  How could they not see what was happening?  How could they let it happen?  But you cannot read “They Thought They Were Free” without developing a troubling suspicion that these German people were no different from us, and probably not much different from anyone anywhere.

 

          At one point in the book, Mayer is discussing the American internment of Japanese in WWII with Hans Simon, a bill-collector:

          He asked me whether I had known anybody connected with the West Coast deportation.  When I said “No,” he asked me what I had done about it.  When I said “Nothing,” he said triumphantly, “There.  You learned all about these things openly, through your government and your press.  We did not learn through ours.  As in your case, nothing was required of us---in our case, not even knowledge.  You knew about things you thought were wrong---you did think it was wrong, didn’t you, Herr Professor?”  “Yes.”  “So.  You did nothing.  We heard, or guessed, and we did nothing.  So it is everywhere.”  When I protested that the Japanese-descended Americans had not been treated like the Jews, he said, “And if they had been?  What then?  Do you not see that the idea of doing something or doing nothing is in either case the same?”

 

          Yes, I am a dissenter and there are many others like me.  The assembling of the COVID security state grieves all of us, but I don’t know whether there are enough of us, with enough courage, to put a stop to it and restore freedom in America or anywhere else. 

 

* * * * *

 

          Because of the mutations in the virus, and the lowered danger, the disease itself is not as powerful a driver of the security state as it was even a few months ago.  But the virus was always just a means to an end for the architects of this coup.  That is why there are still vaccine mandates though they cannot be justified on public health grounds, and never could be.  Once these pieces of the authoritarian state are put into place, they will only be removed if the authoritarians are overthrown.  They haven’t been, and there is no sign they will be overthrown anytime soon.

 

          Masks are still required in healthcare settings (talk about irony!), and many schools.  Unvaccinated children cannot attend public school this fall in Washington D.C.  Unvaccinated people cannot enter the U.S., which is why Novak Djokovic, who may be the world’s best tennis player, cannot compete in the US Open this year.  And all the “emergency powers” are still in place.  They await a new COVID variant, or a twist in the monkeypox story, or maybe some new climate change terror campaign.

 

          Elsewhere, the situation is far worse.  In Germany, there has been no pause at all in the construction of the New Order.  Three days ago, the German Bundestag reauthorized the “Infection Protection Act,” featuring mandatory masking, the continued discrimination against the unvaccinated, and the banning of protests against any of the COVID rules.

 

          In America, there is an election in ten weeks, and while there are very few candidates urging a return to the worst COVID restrictions, there seems to be little pushback on what has already happened.  Where is the candidate who says, “I will NEVER authorize another mask mandate” or “I will ban the persecution of unvaxxed persons” or “I will prosecute Fauci for funding the Wuhan virus lab and repeatedly lying to Congress and the American people”?

 

          Still, there is hope.  Recently, with the news that there are large numbers of excess (non-COVID) deaths, Democrats who had claimed credit for vaccinating America and protecting us all have started trying to shift the responsibility for COVID restrictions to Trump.  As more evidence appears on vaccine injuries and deaths, and the horrible consequences of the COVID madness, we may reach a point where further public health measures become political poison and where no one will want to be linked to the COVID security state.

 

          As for a prediction on the ultimate outcome, I don’t have one.  Often the totalitarians succeed, but sometimes they don’t.  The architects of the coup will not stop trying, the believers are unlikely to stop believing, and the clueless will never get a clue.  But there are two factors that, historically, tip the balance: 1) the militancy of the dissenters, and 2) the willingness of the “good Germans” to be dissuaded from blindly following orders.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki  

Friday, July 22, 2022

MLB Embraces the Security State

 

          On March 16, 2020, Canada closed its border to international travelers, with very few exceptions, and even those who were permitted to enter had to undergo a 14-day quarantine. Throughout the 2020 and most of the 2021 baseball seasons, the Toronto Blue Jays played their home games in Dunedin, Florida or Buffalo, New York  because it was impossible for visiting teams to enter Canada.  On July 30, 2021, some of the restrictions had been lifted and the Blue Jays were finally permitted to host games at the Rogers Center in Toronto.

 

          This year, Major League Baseball is allowing the Blue Jays to play home games in Toronto though there are still border restrictions imposed by the Canadian government. In particular, unvaccinated people may not enter the country.  This means that when the Boston Red Sox went to Toronto, their leadoff hitter and closer had to stay home.  Recently the KC Royals had TEN players denied entry.  When the Phillies played a two-game series in Toronto, Alec Bohm and J.T. Realmuto could not make the trip, and the Phillies had to juggle their pitching rotation as well.  The Phils lost both games.

 

          MLB’s decision to allow Toronto to play home games in Canada grants them an enormous competitive advantage over every other team in baseball since the Jays face short-handed teams in almost all of their 81 home games.  And there is no reason for baseball to allow this.  The Jays’ AAA team has a perfectly serviceable ballpark in Buffalo that the Jays have been using for most of the last two years.  Playing there would provide a level playing field for everyone.

 

          The unfairness of MLB’s position will only get worse the deeper we get into the 2022 season.  Toronto currently is on the bubble for the last playoff spot in the American League.  If they make it, beating out a rival by a game or two in the final standings, their presence in the playoffs will be regarded by vast numbers of fans as grossly unfair.  And then what happens when the Jays have home playoff games where their opponent cannot field a full squad?  The position of MLB on Toronto and its home games really cannot be defended logically.  It jeopardizes the integrity and the fairness of the sport.

 

          And yet….  Though the competitive imbalance MLB has created is the biggest story of this baseball season, you have not really seen it discussed anywhere, by sportswriters or broadcasters.  That is because they view this solely as an opportunity to display their own virtue in having been vaccinated, and to create resentment against a few athletes they call “selfish” who, for whatever reason, have decided not to take the shot.

 

          There is no other reason for the gleeful reporting that J.T. Realmuto would be docked $260,000 in salary for missing the two games in Toronto.  The amount of money a player makes per game is rarely reported because it’s not really relevant to anything, but here it can be used to create hatred against Realmuto in those who don’t make $260,000 in a year, or two years, or five.  And it works.  The reaction to Realmuto on line, and in letters to the Inquirer, has been scathing.  Ah, resentment!  Ah, envy!  Such noble sentiments.

 

          And this is also the calculus behind MLB’s otherwise inexplicable decision to allow Toronto to play home games in Toronto.  Since the League cannot force players to be vaccinated, they are doing this solely to publicly identify unvaxxed players and invite scorn and abuse upon them.  MLB hopes that the outrage directed at some players will get them to roll up their sleeves.

 

          Of course, there is a different way of looking at the decisions of players across baseball who are losing salary because the Canadian government bars them entry.  They have examined their personal situation and have made a decision they believe is best for themselves and best for their families.  And if it costs them money, well, that’s a price they are willing to pay.  They are standing on a principle.  And in spite of enormous pressure from teams, from governments, and from public scolds who write articles in newspapers, they are not backing down.

 

          There was a time when standing up for one’s principles was regarded as noble.  We used to respect the person who bucked the crowd, or “marched to the beat of a different drummer.”  Maybe we even thought he was wrong, but we respected him anyway for his courage.

 

          But no more.  Instead, we get this strange “be a good-German” argument from the press.  Why won’t you knuckle under and go with the mob?  Why must you question the wisdom of your betters?  You can see what this is costing you and yet you insist on thinking your own thoughts and making your own decisions.  Really, Mrs. Parks, why can’t you go to the back of the bus with the other Negroes?  What the hell is wrong with you???

 

          Apparently, one aspect of our strange new COVID security state is that actual laws need not be enforced, but the pronouncements of unelected public health bureaucrats or mayors exercising previously-unknown “emergency powers” must be obeyed without question.  Otherwise, one is silenced, vilified in the press and called an “idiot” on sports radio.  Forget your silly principles.  Go along with the crowd or we will crush you.

 

          Well, I’m not buying it.  Do what you want, J.T.  Believe it or not, there are still some people who admire you for living your own life and doing what you think is best.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki        

 

Friday, July 15, 2022

SUPREME DISAPPOINTMENT

 

          The failure or refusal of the US Supreme Court to identify and punish the leaker of the Dobbs opinion on abortion makes it appear the SCOTUS is just another government institution that prefers to cover up its own scandals rather than do its duty by allowing some sunlight into its darker corners.

 

          Is the Supreme Court just another DOJ, another FBI, another CDC, another Secret Service, another FDA?  I hope not.  In the deep shade of the federal swamp, where no leftist law-breaker ever goes to jail or even loses his job, I had assumed the Supreme Court was different, but maybe I was wrong.

 

          The U.S. Supreme Court is a small, insular group of justices and clerks and administrators who all know each other.  Everyone at the Court knew who did this on May 2, the day the leak occurred.  A certain delay would be expected for the purpose of gathering evidence against the leaker, but after two and a half months, the honesty of the Court is now in question.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki   

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

THE END OF ROE v. WADE


           On May 2, a draft opinion by Justice Alito was leaked to the world by the news outlet known as POLITICO.  In the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the draft would overturn the 49-year-old opinion in Roe v. Wade and return control of abortion law to the individual state governments.  It was subsequently announced that the draft, though not final, was authentic, and that five justices (a majority), appeared ready to release it.  A leak like this, of a draft opinion in a major case, had never happened before in the history of the Supreme Court.

 

          In the two weeks since the leak occurred, there have been pro- and anti-abortion demonstrations, including at the homes of Supreme Court justices, and calls for prosecution of the person who leaked the draft opinion.  The political analysis about the meaning of the end of Roe v. Wade has been largely fevered and hysterical, with little basis in reality.  Contraception will be banned!  Gay kids will not be allowed in public school!  Gay marriage will end!

 

          I offer a few observations about the leak, the end of Roe v. Wade, and the future.

 

          Over the past 200 years or so, there have been a number of idiotic Supreme Court decisions.  Buck v. Bell (forced sterilization of “idiots” is fine, said Oliver Wendell Holmes), Korematsu  (internment of Japanese Americans totally kosher), Kelo,  Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson.  Eventually, they get reversed, or at least ignored (sometimes it’s too embarrassing to admit they were ever written in the first place, so modern justices just pretend they never happened).

 

          Roe v. Wade has always been in this category.  It was not based in the law or the Constitution, and the only “authority” supporting it was some pop sociology that seemed really smart at the time to Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote it.  Lawyers who read it, if they were honest, knew it would eventually be reversed.  The people who are now “shocked” that the Supreme Court would do this are either completely ignorant of Roe v. Wade and what it says or they are pretending to be shocked for political reasons.  Once it becomes widely understood that overturning Roe will simply return the issue to the voters and their elected representatives, the hysteria will end.

 

          As for the whodunit, the identity of the leaker should not be difficult to discover.  A Justice of the Court would not do this because, while they may have wildly different judicial philosophies and political views, they share a deep respect for the integrity of the Court and its processes.  That means the leaker is almost certainly one of the 36 judicial clerks (4 per justice) that are hired every year from the top ranks of the most-prestigious law schools in the country.

 

          Almost all of these clerks share the views of the justices they serve, at least in terms of upholding and protecting the Court’s procedures, including respect for the secrecy of unpublished draft opinions.  Among the clerks for the conservative justices, there would never be an individual who would care enough about abortion (or any other issue), to compromise the Court’s security.  The leaker therefore can only be a radical leftist from a radical leftwing law school (e.g., Yale).  Only such a person could believe that a political issue like abortion could be worth trashing the Court’s 220-year tradition of trust and collegiality.  Supporting this theory is the fact that the leak itself has been roundly condemned by conservatives but has met with almost no criticism from the Left.  A leak like this also fits with the Left’s recent attempts to undermine the Court and its traditions through court-packing, mounting smear campaigns against conservative justices, and the like.  Similarly, the politicized DOJ has shown zero interest in an investigation into the leak. 

 

          When (or if) the leaker is identified, it will be a leftwing clerk who works for Sotomayor, Kagan, Roberts, or Breyer (who does not officially retire until this summer).

 

          The field of suspects here is exceedingly small---two or three at the most.  And since the Supreme Court clerks and justices eat together, drink together, socialize with each other, and work out together, EVERYONE who works in the building knows who the suspects are.  In fact, they probably know who the leaker is, but currently lack the proof they feel is required to name the individual.

 

Copyright2022MichaelKubacki