THIS & THAT XXV

 

          Dummheit is one of my new favorite German words.  It is usually translated simply as “stupidity,” and that is probably its most common meaning.  But it also can mean collective stupidity or stupidity that affects an entire society.  In this sense it is not a matter of intelligence.  I have seen it used this way to refer to the German people in the era of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1943, a time when a large number of people succumbed to fear and political pressure and propaganda, and abandoned any ability to think critically or make decisions for themselves.

          It can also be applied to the three years of COVID madness, from March 2020 to the present, when most sensible people were so terrified by their governments that they accepted the most absurd and lethal policies without objection.

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          I have never heard the word “abolishment” until a month or two ago.  Now, for some reason, wherever the word “abolition” would be used, “abolishment” is used instead.  I don’t get this one.  A lot of word changes these days are about wokeness or political correctness, but I don’t see that angle here.

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          When I see people wearing masks these days, I think of those Japanese soldiers they found on isolated Pacific islands in the 1960s, the ones who thought WWII was still on and who were waiting further instructions from the Emperor.

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          You’re not allowed to use the word “retard” anymore, because we are told it is offensive to those people with Down Syndrome.  It was a very useful word, though, and I miss it.  The ban doesn’t really make much sense because I never use “retard” to refer to people with Down Syndrome.  In fact, the people who used “retard” to refer to people with Down Syndrome all died about fifty years ago.  I use it exclusively to refer to people like Kamala (”Assigned Retard at Birth”) Harris.

          According to Stanford University, “retard” is a slur against those who have a cognitive disability.  The correct term, according to “The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” is “neurodivergent,” but if you look up “neurodivergent,” it doesn’t mean the same thing.  Neurodivergent covers a wide range of brain variations, including OCD, autism, Asperger’s, Tourette’s, bi-polar disorder, dyslexia, ADHD, and Down Syndrome.  And that’s fine in the sense that we probably need a collective term for all the different types of brain weirdness out there, but neurodivergent is not what I mean when I say “retard.”

          There is, however, a possible loophole.  The document recognizes that some of the offensive words may actually be preferred by the people they refer to, and that’s OK.  Presumably, this is to exempt the phenomenon whereby black people routinely call each other nigger and it’s not offensive at all.  Stanford recognizes this exception as a general rule regarding offensive speech.

          In other words, if you are yourself a retard, you are allowed to call other people retards as well.  That will be my excuse from now on.

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          Name tag on a young lady cashier at the supermarket: Asma.

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          For a while now, my attitude about the 2024 presidential election has been that while I would prefer Ron DiSantis, I would reluctantly vote for Trump if he were to become the nominee.  As we roll on towards the primaries and the election, however, it is becoming more and more difficult to see anything in Trump I can support.

          If there were some sense in America that the COVID fascism of the past three years was a madness that must now be faced and condemned, and its architects jailed or shamed or at least sent packing from the public sphere, I might feel more sanguine about the prospects for “moving on” from COVID.  If that were to happen, I could perhaps forgive other aspects of Trump and vote for him.

           But there is little attempt, by anyone, to address what happened.  Trump himself not only won’t admit what happened, but in fact has doubled down on what he did during COVID.  He recently said the vaccinations “saved millions of lives,” though any research supporting such a statement is riddled with flawed assumptions and outright propaganda.

          And he is largely responsible for the nightmare we endured, with its mask mandates and forced mRNA vaccinations and shuttered churches and economic destruction and empty schools.  He was, after all, the president.  I guess I should not be surprised that he still has to support Operation Warp Speed and the Emergency Use Authorizations and the lockdowns and the pointless mandates.  Admitting one’s mistakes is not something any politician does well, but I don’t see how America can ever regain its footing as a free country and a representative republic unless ALL OF US face the truth, or are forced to.

          As for the question of how many people there are like me, I have no idea, but the 2024 election may turn on the answer to that question.  How many are there who would never vote for one of the totalitarians the Democrats will put forward, but can’t quite bring themselves to vote for Trump either?

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          It’s a common problem.  Older men pee more often than they used to, and often don’t zip up afterwards.  You don’t leave the house as often as you once did, and you’re probably going to pee again in a half hour or so, so what difference does it make if you walk around with your fly down?  It’s not even a conscious decision.  It just happens.

          The problem arises when you remember you have to stop at the bank, so you do leave the house, and it’s only as you are walking into the lobby at Wells Fargo that you realize the barn door is open.  Then you have to surreptitiously reach down and zip up, or try to.  It’s embarrassing.  It’s undignified. 

          And the solution?  “The Fly-Catcher!”

          There’s a sensor at waist level on the door you typically use to leave the house, and there’s a tiny chip you attach to your zipper.  As you walk out the door, there is a discreet “beep-beep” if you need to return your tray table to its upright and locked position.  If all is well, nothing happens and you proceed on your way with all your dignity intact.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki    

                      

WRONG WAY ZEYNEP---A PROUD TRADITION CONTINUES

           It has been 85 years, and a lot of us have forgotten Wrong Way Corrigan, the pilot who, in 1938, took off from Brooklyn for a flight to Long Beach, California and landed in Dublin 38 hours later.  When he got back from Ireland, he became famous as America’s favorite goofball, and he pretty much retained that title for the rest of his life. It was a silly story, and nobody really got hurt.  Not even Corrigan.

          But being a goofball is not as cute as it used to be.  Today, it seems, there are lots of people who have committed dreadful errors but, for political reasons, will never pay a price.  One of my favorites is a superstar D.C. lawyer named Jamie Gorelick.

          Important note.  There are lots of people in America who have committed horrible crimes but who, for political reasons, will never pay a price for them.  You know their names---Bill and Hillary, Fauci, Obama, the Bidens, etc. I’m not talking about them.  I don’t view Jamie Gorelick as a criminal though you may be able to find “crimes” in the U.S. Code that she has committed.  (We all commit two or three a day without even noticing.)  But I’m not charging Jamie with being a criminal.  She’s just an idiot who managed to remain an EXTREMELY important player in Washington no matter what she did.  For thirty years.

          Gorelick graduated from Harvard Law (of course!) in 1975, and then disappears from public view until 1994 when Bill Clinton appoints her Deputy US Attorney General.  She immediately flies into action by initiating procedures for the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  These included drafting the famous memo setting up a “wall” between criminal investigators and counterintelligence authorities.  According to Attorney General John Ashcroft (and many others), Gorelick’s memo is the reason the feds were never able to put the pieces together to stop the 9-11 attacks.  The 9-11 Commission itself, to which Gorelick had somehow managed to get herself appointed, never mentioned the “wall” memo in its report.

          In 1997, after her stint at the DOJ, Gorelick was appointed Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae, where she served until 2003 and collected $26.5 million in salary and bonuses.  In a 2002 interview, Gorelick assured Business Week that Fannie Mae was managed safely and that it was “among a handful of top-quality institutions.”  Shortly thereafter, the Fannie Mae accounting scandal erupted as regulators caught the company hiding $9 billion in unrecorded losses.

          Back in private practice in 2008, Gorelick represented Duke University in the infamous Duke lacrosse case, where the university and a prosecutor were found to have railroaded dozens of innocent athletes in order to support local activists and race-hustlers in a hoax accusing the white lacrosse players of crude and obscene behavior.

          You would think these incidents might be enough to tarnish Gorelick’s reputation, but no.  In Washington, if you are a leftist in good standing, no act of idiocy is sufficient to get you kicked off the gravy train.  Hey, man, she went to Harvard!  Sure, “mistakes were made,” but how can you blame Jamie?

          In March of 2022, Gorelick was appointed by Joe Biden as Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.  What could go wrong?

          But Jamie Gorelick is 72 years old.  There’s probably not much more damage she can do.  It seems unlikely she will ever have the pull she did in the 1990s when she single-handedly prevented us from seeing 9-11 was coming.

          That’s why we need Zeynep Tufekci.

          It’s a Turkish name, and she was born in Istanbul, but she is now a sociology professor at Columbia University whose work, and op-eds, often appear in the New York Times.  Let us note at the outset that she has no training in medicine or epidemiology or viruses.

          Until April 3, 2020, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the WHO, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams all advised against wearing masks as protection against a respiratory virus like COVID.  On that day, Fauci, the CDC, and Jerome Adams all changed their stories and demanded that we all start wearing the damn things.  There was no new “science” and no new medical study suggesting such a thing.  One of the great mysteries of the masking madness was how it got started in the first place.

          The reason was Tufekci.  She had actually accepted the decades of research indicating no benefit to masking and had said so in an article on February 27, 2020.  Then, in a March 17, 2020 op-ed in the New York Times, she told the world that masks were essential to prevent infection.  Supposedly, this was the only conclusion to be drawn from recent events in the Czech Republic where masking had prevented a COVID outbreak.  This was never true, but the tall tale about the Czech Republic became the rallying cry for the #Masks4All movement.  Less than three weeks later, the public health establishment in the U.S. did its about-face and universal masking became the norm.

          And now she’s at it again.

          On January 30, 2023, The Cochrane Review published its summary of 78 random control trial studies involving mask-wearing and its effect on the transmission of respiratory viruses, concluding that masking was worthless and probably harmful.  (Random control trials are often called the “gold standard” of medical research.)  This was basically the end of any rational basis for masking or mask mandates, though most of the support for masking was never rooted in science anyway.

          Tufekci, however, is not ready to let us take our masks off.  Armed with an ambiguous statement she had secured from Karla Soares-Weiser, Editor of the Cochrane Report, she wrote an op-ed for the NYT (3-10-23), entitled “Here’s Why the Science is Clear That Masks Work.”  And, at least in terms of how all the really, really smart people think, that was the end of the Cochrane Review and its 78 random control trial studies proving that mask-wearing is useless.  Tufekci forgot to mention in her op-ed that she was the person who put us on the path to universal masking in the first place, but I suppose that’s a minor point.

          It is mystifying, to me at least, how people like Jamie Gorelick and Zeynep Tufekci can be so catastrophically wrong and yet continue to be promoted, listened to, and even lauded by otherwise sensible people.  If there was one American official responsible for 9-11, it was Gorelick, and yet she is now at the pinnacle of D.C. power-brokers and influencers---nobody even checks her driver’s license anymore before putting her in charge of some critical government agency.  As for Tufekci, she wasn’t always a full professor at Columbia.  A few years ago, she was an assistant prof at North Carolina in the School of Library Science.  Then she wrote an article in Wired in support of censorship on social media (you know---all that “misinformation”), and now look at her.  She is the reason you had to tie that diaper to your face for two years, and there is no sign she is ever going away.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

 

(Note: Much of the factual information herein about Zeynep Tufekci comes from a 3-26-23 article entitled “How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Hoard Masked America,” by investigative reporter Michael Senger.  I am grateful for his work.)