THIS & THAT XXIII

People wearing masks as they shop in my big-box store don’t bother me much, but when I see one with a two-year-old in their cart and the child is wearing a mask too, I want to grab the parent by the shoulders and set them straight.  And when they are Asian, as they often are, I want to scream at them, “Aren’t you people supposed to be smart?”

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Wikipedia Humor (from the article on Richard Gere):

“Despite not being a vegetarian, Gere has often been erroneously included on lists of famous vegetarians.”

I guess that’s what happens when you study Buddhism and tell people you want to free Tibet.

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The Biden Administration is still fighting in federal court to reinstate the mask mandate in airplanes.

The US is also the largest (among a dwindling number) of countries requiring foreign visitors to show proof of a COVID vaccination. 

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In 1933, the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag (the German Parliament building), and framed communists for the blaze.  The next day, by decree, almost all civil liberties in Germany were suspended, including free speech, freedom of the press, public assembly, and the privacy of mail and telephone communications.  None of these freedoms returned until after WWII.

Though the evidence is only slowly emerging, history will record that the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021were our own American Reichstag Fire, orchestrated by leftists embedded in our government agencies in order to criminalize and silence dissent from conservatives who oppose them.

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I was invited to a Christmas Eve party where a condition of attendance was a negative COVID test.  I would have liked to attend the party, which was hosted by a friend, but I declined.

I won’t be polite about this anymore.  If you have the power to fire me from my job or grab me off the street and throw me in a quarantine camp, I will probably bend.  But I won’t wear a mask in your house and I won’t take a COVID test to attend your party.  And if you try to wear a mask in my house, I will ask you to take your crazy home with you.

I have tried to be the “nice guy” about this, and tried to avoid any bitterness, but I have failed.  I had friends and neighbors who no longer speak to me.  My extended family has no use for me and I expect I will never see any of them again.  Doctors I liked, and whom I need, have dumped me.  I’ve been banned from a social club I loved because I was not vaccinated.

Most of my social life at this point is on-line.  Sandy and I often talk about moving.

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2023 New Year’s Resolutions:

1) Juggle regularly and improve my skills.

2) Learn about the field of artificial intelligence and stay current with developments.

3) Don’t offend anyone unintentionally.

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A new term, TERF, comes to us from the culture wars at Cambridge University, where Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists have been physically attacked by trans-activists and gender enthusiasts because the TERFs believe treating trans women as women (and allowing them to join radical feminist groups) only hurts their cause and undercuts the battle for female equality.  The trans activists want TERFs not just canceled, but arrested for hate speech under the UK’s Equality Act.

Recently, a judge-led panel held a trial on the position of the radical feminists, and ruled that “gender-critical” speech is not a crime within the meaning of the Equality Act.  In other words, you cannot be jailed in the UK for saying there are two sexes.  Yet.

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In Philadelphia, retail theft under the value of $2100 has been a misdemeanor since 2018.  Then, in 2020, Police Commissioner Outlaw and DA Krasner decided retail theft would be included in a list of offenses (drug crimes, car theft, prostitution, and others), for which the police will no longer arrest people.  Someone may be detained for these offences long enough for the person to be identified and a warrant issued, but they are then released.  As a practical matter, this means no warrants are issued either and no one is punished for shoplifting unless they brandish a gun or commit other criminal acts.  Shoplifting is not a crime anymore, either in Philly or in any number of other American cities run by the Left.

Two weeks ago, the third-quarter earnings of a major retailer made headlines in the business press for revealing a loss of $400 million to shoplifting, a shocking number that affected the company’s bottom line.  Other national retailers face the same forces to a greater or lesser extent.

At my big-box store, we are all familiar with the professional gangs as well as the family units (e.g., grandma working with her grandson), and many other variations.  Store security forces are basically helpless.  About the only deterrent that appears to have any effect is placing a uniformed policeman at the front door, with a police car parked outside on the sidewalk where no one can miss it.  Renting these police and cars from the city, however, costs about $100 per hour and the store is open fourteen hours a day.  Also, the city is currently short of police (it seems nobody wants to be a policeman in Philly anymore), so the store often can’t get these overtime officers.

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Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University who has written a number of comments on COVID and the pandemic response over the past 2 ½ years.  On October 31, 2022, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” was published in The Atlantic and started a vigorous debate.

The point of her brief article was that calls for punishment of those government and public health officials who had engineered our disastrous pandemic response were unjust and should be ignored.  Acknowledging the bitterness of those who had had their lives disrupted by the lockdowns and mandates, Ms. Oster seemed to characterize the mistakes of the powerful as honest errors, and suggested it would be unfair to punish anyone for policies enacted in (what she presumed to be) good faith.  In other words, “mistakes were made.”  As an example of the “mistakes,” she cited the early uncertainty about whether traditional vaccines (like Johnson & Johnson’s) or the mRNA vaccines (like Pfizer’s), would be more effective.

Her article touched off an explosion of responses from other pundits, websites, magazines, and other sources, and what surprised me about them were the number of people who agreed with her, some of whom I would never have expected.

Don Boudreaux, for example, is an Austrian-school economist at George Mason University who publishes a syndicated column called Café Hayek.  During the COVID madness, he wrote regularly about the lockdowns, mandates, censorship, and government overreach, yet his response to the Emily Oster article was surprisingly mild.  He seemed to feel that holding people like Fauci, Cuomo, other politicians and public health officials responsible for their actions would be to “politicize” the issues, and that would lead only to more recriminations and counter-recriminations in the future.

Charles Eisenstein is an author and essayist, a hater of free markets and capitalism, and something of an oddball.  He’s a good writer who is capable of expressing complex ideas, but he is a leftie who truly believes we are all doomed by climate change, and one of his heroes is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (whom I regard as an idiot in the King Charles III class).

HOWEVER…Eisenstein has been positively brutal in his writings about the fascists behind the attempted creation of the Covid security state, its ugly effects on the third world (i.e., starvation), and the price we all have had to pay in the abuse of schoolchildren and the horrific vaccine injuries inflicted upon the innocent.  Yet he too argues that the authoritarian evil of the COVID madness should not be addressed by holding the obvious monsters responsible.  Instead, he claims, we must get to the root of their evil.  It’s complicated.  Try his essay entitled “Victory Will Not Solve the Problem” on Substack.

Maybe I’m just unforgiving, but I see nothing to forgive.  In particular, I see no innocent mistakes.  The lying, which was intentional, dates from the very beginning.

On April 3, 2020, Fauci, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and the CDC all decided that their prior position (which had been quite definitively expressed), on masks and respiratory viruses was incorrect.  Not only were cloth and paper masks NOT useless, they were now so important that everybody had to wear them.  There was no new study, no new “science” they could cite, but suddenly we all had to wear the damn things.

This was not even the beginning.  Two months earlier, American news media had shown us the absurd videos of Chinese COVID victims falling over in the streets and being whisked away instantly by medics in hazmat suits.  This is what is happening in Wuhan, we were told.  Sure it was.

Then there was the widely-circulated story about the apparently healthy German woman who flew home from Seoul to Hamburg and only developed symptoms of COVID a couple days after arriving in Germany.  Asymptomatic spread, you see, was the key to the construction of the entire apparatus of the security state.  In the past, if you had a cold or the flu, you stayed away from your elderly friends, but now that wasn’t good enough.  You might be sick anyway.  Hence the masks, hence the lockdowns, hence the social distancing. Though the story of the German woman was later debunked (very quietly), it was the justification for all the restrictions to follow even though Fauci himself had earlier told us that asymptomatic spread was a crock.

Need more items for the list?  How about the suppression of any investigation into the Wuhan lab origin of the virus, Fauci’s enthusiastic support of the research, and the U.S. government financial support for it?  Why, for more than two years, were all reports of vaccine injuries instantly deleted from all social media sites?  And why were doctors and epidemiologists and other scientists sanctioned, censored, defunded and de-platformed whenever they tried to publish anything that might conflict with the orthodox COVID narrative?

None of this was accidental.  None of it was “mistakes.”  The lies, the censorship, and the coercion were intentional, with the idea that the virus could be used by some for partisan political purposes and by others to create panic and pave the way for a totalitarian form of government.

Note that the people responsible for this have not changed their tune, and they have not apologized.  They still claim masks can stop respiratory viruses and they still are pushing the mRNA vaccines despite the growing body of evidence of their lethal dangers.  The architects here have simply loosened the screws a bit and backed off from the most vicious aspects of the enforcement program.  Totalitarian governments do not take control all at once because if they tried to, they would risk an armed revolt.  Instead they increase the pressure slowly, get the populace accustomed to the new restrictions, and then relax them slightly before cranking up the controls to an even higher level.

We cannot let Fauci and Trudeau and Trump and Biden and Cuomo and Klaus Schwab and Albert Bourlas and all the rest of them off the hook for the deaths and destruction they have brought to the world.  I will not forgive and move on.  I want them in prison actually, but I will settle for visiting the scorn of mankind upon them and removing them from public life.     

          

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Now that drag shows for little kids are a regular feature at libraries and schools, it’s probably time to bring in some minstrel shows for kids as well. Like drag shows, blackface comedy also makes fun of a group of people based on their mostly immutable characteristics.  On the one hand, it’s exaggerated boobs and butts and hips and high-pitched voices and hair-dos; on the other, it’s skin color, kinky hair, Southern accents and big lips.  

Both varieties have long traditions of delighting audiences.  And kids will enjoy blackface reading hour every bit as much as they have enjoyed drag queen story time.

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Where the hell is my Harriet Tubman 20-dollar bill?  Years ago, they promised me they would replace Andrew Jackson with my favorite God-fearin’, pistol-packing, abolitionist commando.  I mean, Harriet Tubman is truly a great American. And of all the DWMs on our bills, Andrew Jackson is the least likeable by a wide margin.

Also, and not to put too fine a point on it, but have you noticed there is now a Maya Angelou quarter?  Now, even granting that quarters have dozens of different images on them, how the hell did she make the cut?  Ms. Angelou seemed like a nice lady, but can we all acknowledge that she is a truly minor poet and that we are required to revere her only because she once wrote a poem for Bill Clinton?  And can we also acknowledge they slapped her on a quarter only because the people who decide such things believe we don’t have enough black faces on our money?

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki