REPEATING THE PAST

 

          From the beginning, the most disturbing aspect of the COVIDian dystopia was the ease with which citizens in free countries accepted the edicts and mandates of government bureaucrats and public health officials.  Public gathering in theaters and arenas ended overnight, restaurants and bars were closed, schools emptied, churches were locked, millions of businesses got shut down, many of which would never reopen.  Here and there, a few rebels appeared---a gym in New Jersey that defied the government, a pastor in California who wouldn’t shut his church, a few restaurants that tried to stay open, under the radar.  Almost all were crushed by the authorities.

          And as we now know, there was never much justification for any of the mandates or the crushing of our traditional civil liberties.  When Anthony Fauci decided, in April 2020, that we all had to wear masks, there was zero scientific basis for believing that mask-wearing could prevent the spread of respiratory viruses.  Later, a number of pharma-funded and government-funded studies (none of which were peer-reviewed), were published in order to support the mask mandates, but there was never a time when the weight of the evidence could be read to support masking.

          Social distancing?  Well, it’s true that if you are far enough away from a sick person (a mile?), you won’t catch their cooties.  But “six feet” was purely arbitrary.  In other countries, it was one meter, or two meters, or 1.5 meters.

          Then, of course, there were the vaccines, and the vaccine mandates.  Here, “effectiveness” was the mask behind which all the lies and half-truths were told.  We all thought “effectiveness” meant that if you got the shot, you wouldn’t get the disease, or even if you did, you couldn’t pass it on to somebody else.  We were told that repeatedly on TV, on the internet, in newspapers---everywhere.  We are still being told that.  Rachel Walensky, CDC boss, told both these lies to Congress one week ago, on June 13.  But she knew in November 2020 that the vax would not stop anybody from getting COVID or transmitting it because that’s what Pfizer told the CDC.  Those pre-vaccine Pfizer documents are public now, released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, but Walensky saw those documents before the first shots were authorized.

          Still, you were forced to get the shot.  People were fired from their jobs for not getting the shot.  Soldiers (all volunteers, remember, who chose to serve their country), were kicked out of the service.  The unvaxxed were ostracized, demonized, scorned by their friends and family, and scolded by the president and other government officials.  “It’s YOUR fault,” they said.  (And that’s just here in the U.S.; in other countries, the unvaxxed were treated much worse.)      

          Finally, there was “asymptomatic spread,” which made all the restrictions on perfectly healthy individuals necessary.  Fauci was undoubtedly correct when he said in February 2020 that asymptomatic spread was so unlikely it was not worth worrying about.  But two months later, after several apocryphal anecdotes were circulated (remember the woman who unknowingly carried the virus on a flight from Seoul to Frankfurt?), it became the basis for all the mandates.  Healthy people were dangerous!  Stay in your bubble, goddammit!!

 

*

 

          Some people are primarily remembered for a single quotation.  That is the case with George Santayana and his famous gag: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

          And that is what we have done with the public health establishment and the public health rationale.  We have failed to remember.  The history of “public health” over the past century is primarily a story of abuse, the abolition of liberty, mutilation, and mass murder.  And yet, we all did what we were told to do when COVID came along, and we did it without question.

          The public health rationale has always been a popular tool for tyrants since it can be used to justify virtually any suppression of fundamental human rights.  In the Soviet Union, political dissenters were put in mental hospitals on the theory that their sick ideas about freedom might infect other people’s minds and undermine the communist state.  In other words, this was a public health policy.

          For the Third Reich, the Jews represented a public health crisis because of the possibility their “blood” might mix with the blood of white Aryans and pollute the superior racial purity of the German people.  Again, the extermination of the Jews was an explicit public health campaign.        

          Ah, but we’re not like Stalin and Hitler, are we?  Sure there might be occasional excesses or mistakes in America, but we’re not monsters, right?

          But much of the intellectual underpinning for the extermination of the Jews came from the American eugenics movement of the 1919s, 20s, and 30s, which championed the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” and of “moral defectives.”  The movement, also called Scientific Racism, was based at Harvard where its most enthusiastic proponent was the highly-respected Charles William Eliot, president emeritus of the college.  Other prominent names were Stanford President David Starr Jordan, Yale economist Irving Fischer, and Margaret Sanger, who later founded Planned Parenthood and was primarily concerned with finding ways to prevent black people from reproducing so much.  There was little dissent in academia to the basic concept of eugenics, which was that we must prevent our DNA from being polluted by idiots and people of undesirable racial and ethnic ancestry.

          The fruit of this poisoned tree was the forced sterilization of about 70,000 Americans in the 20^th Century.  The practice was even approved by our Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, a case decided in 1927, where Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  Twenty years later, Nazi defendants in the Nuremberg trials cited Buck v. Bell in defense of their actions.

          Is any of this so different from what we did to “slow the spread?”  Or what the Chinese did as part of their “no-COVID” approach, when doors of apartment houses were bolted so people were trapped and no one could violate lockdown orders?  In Australia, which was not previously thought of as a totalitarian state, citizens were plucked off the street by police for being unmasked or unvaxxed and stuck in “quarantine camps” for weeks, with no legal process.

          The allure of the public health rationale is irresistible for those who know what’s best for us and are extremely irritated by our traditional freedom to ignore their scolding. This is at least partly the reason for the intrusion of governments into the medical/hospital business over the last sixty years.  Public health used to be concerned primarily with trying to control the spread of deadly infectious diseases.  But now that we are all, to some extent, paying each other’s medical bills, the argument is that I’m on the hook if you eat too many potato chips, so I can use the law to make you stop.

          This is why buckling your seatbelt is now a “public health problem,” as is whether you are depressed, whether you have guns in the house (a question I am asked every time I go to the doctor), how much you drink, what sort of recreational drugs you take, whether you wear a helmet when you ride your bike or motorcycle, how much red meat you consume, whether you belong to a gym, whether you smoke, and how much you watch TV.  All these things used to be your business, remember?

          And don’t forget: have you had your COVID shots?  And your booster?  And your second booster? And your fifth?

          (I hear an objection in the back row---that vaccines are a traditional role of public health, and not some modern attempt to expand the definition.  However, that was when vaccines were designed to prevent you from getting a disease.  Now that we have COVID vaccines that don’t protect you from getting COVID and don’t stop you from transmitting it once you catch it, it’s not obvious what their purpose is, but it sure ain’t “public health.”)

          We are already being warned by the really, really smart guys at Davos, as well as our more-local totalitarians, that the next pandemic is coming and we have to be ready for it, or that climate change is going to create crises that will require new sacrifices from all of us.  They are counting on us to forget the recent past.

          And I worry that we will forget.  Fear will be used, again, to make us forget and secure our acquiescence.  Fear works.  It usually does.  The problem is, as my friend Yoda put it, “Fear is the path to the dark side.”

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki           

         

         

         

           

MICHAEL GRIECO—A Story for Memorial Day

       Now that Mike is somewhat advanced in years, a new career, or hobby, or something, has found him.  He’s a popular guy these days.  He is a WWII veteran, and there aren’t that many of them left.

          The calls started a couple years ago, from war museums, patriot groups, and the like.  Would Mike be willing to attend a banquet and a ceremony at our museum?  Would Mike like to join other veterans at a July 4^th celebration?  He agreed to do a couple of them, enjoyed himself, and now he gets called regularly. On his latest trip, a veterans’ organization brought him to Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

          I think one reason he has become a sort-of star of these events is that he doesn’t need a wheelchair, he doesn’t have to drag a care-giver along with him, and when he speaks, he makes about as much sense as he ever did. Mike is easy.  Give him a nice ride, a room at a 5-star hotel, three squares, and some recognition from grateful patriots, and he will come to your party.  As a bonus, he also gets to meet other ancient warriors and swap stories with them.  It’s not a bad deal.  He does have his limits, though.  A while ago, a group wanted to fly him to France for a WWII event and he turned them down.  He said he would have felt silly doing it because he spent his war in the Pacific.

          Mike joined the Marines in 1943 (with parental permission since he was only 17), and was promptly shipped to the Pacific theater.  He was a grunt in the 2^nd (and later the 4^th), Marine divisions, and his military career was “distinguished” primarily by the fact that he somehow survived it.  But though the armies of the Pacific were unable to kill Mike, or even seriously injure him, it was not for lack of trying.  He was involved in three horrific battles of the Pacific War, all of which killed and injured thousands of American soldiers.

          First was Saipan, an amphibious assault by 8,000 Marines on June 15, 1944 that was later called the D-Day of the Pacific.  The battle ended three weeks later with 3,100 Americans dead.  But not Mike.

          One week after Saipan was secured, on July 24, American forces moved on to the neighboring island of Tinian.  The two are so close that artillery on Saipan was fired across the strait between the islands to soften Japanese resistance.  Though the battle took only one week, the invasion involved 41,000 Marines, 368 of whom were killed along with 2000 other casualties.  But Mike survived.

          Mike’s third nightmare was Okinawa, which was the largest amphibious assault of the war.  (Fun fact: Mike couldn’t swim.  He still can’t.)   Beginning on April 1, 1945 and lasting almost three months, Okinawa took the lives of 12,000 Americans, including 7,500 Marines.  It is believed Japan lost over 100,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians.

          Even then, Mike was not done.  American forces remained in the Pacific preparing for the invasion of Japan itself, which some have estimated would have cost another half million American lives.  It was only after the Japanese surrender following the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that most of the Americans, including Mike, went home.

          After the war, Mike apprenticed and became a men’s tailor, and he was good at it, so that became his career until he retired in the 1990s.  Since then, he has spent much of his time pursuing his two hobbies, cycling and skiing, and his good health allowed him to do both until just a couple of years ago.  (There are no downhill competitions at his age, but I can state with no fear of contradiction that he was the best 95-year-old skier in America.) He has lived for many years in the Mayfair section of Philly, which used to be called a “working-class neighborhood.”  Maybe it still is. 

          Billionaires and neuro-surgeons tend to get a lot more ink, but Mike is what you need to keep a place like America going.  And you need a lot of them---guys who will do what has to be done when it has to be done, and not do a lot of bitching about it.  Then they move on with their lives and their families and their grandchildren.

          Mike was born in Philadelphia on May 26, 1926, so he is 97 years old today.

          Long may he wave.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

PHILLY MAYOR’S RACE---2023

 

          This Tuesday, May 16, Philadelphia will elect its next mayor.  It is actually a primary election, so the result will not be final until the general election in November, but with Philly’s 7-1 edge for Democrats in registration, the winner of the Democratic primary almost can’t lose.  The last time there was a Republican mayor was 1952, and Republicans long ago gave up the ghost on mounting some sort of opposition to Democratic rule.

          For most of my life, ethnicity and skin color was the primary concern of voters in Philadelphia.  Italians voted for Italians, Irish voted for Irish, and blacks voted for blacks.  In the 1970s, Judge William Marutani was elected to the Court of Common Pleas twice, pulling close to 100% of voters with Italian ancestry.  He was actually of Japanese descent, but he NEVER let his photograph be taken.

          Around 1990, the city became majority non-white, and it was assumed that Ed Rendell (1992-2000) would be the last white mayor Philly would ever have.  And in fact, for the next sixteen years, John Street and Michael Nutter, two black men who knew how to play the game, held the office.

          Then in 2016, an interesting thing happened.  Jim Kenney, a white leftist with a familiar ethnic name and experience in city government, rolled to victory.  At the time, there were plenty of crusty old wise guys in Philly politics who said Kenney could never be elected, but as often happens, the wise guys are often the last people to see that the old paradigm has crumbled and been replaced with something new.

          While identity politics is very much alive in Philadelphia, old-fashioned race hustling went out of style while nobody was watching.  John Street (2000-2008), was probably the last pure practitioner of it.  He had been a rabble-rouser in North Philly and had worked his way into the establishment as a City Councilman, but he was a product of the streets.  His successor, Michael Nutter, was also black, and he knew how to play the card, but he had been educated at prep schools and was something of a nerd.  Then came Kenney, the white radical.

          In its simplest terms, young black voters became ideological.  Increasing numbers of young black people went to college, and inhaled the leftist indoctrination that takes place there.  Also, the race politics of the past were embodied by men like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who were now geezers and increasingly viewed as an embarrassment.  It was no longer necessary to vote for someone with your skin color or ethnicity.  You could now vote for the most leftwing candidate no matter who he was.

          Which brings us to the election three days from now.

          Of the nine candidates, four of them are throwaways with 2% of the vote or less.  The other five, in a poll two weeks ago, were in a five-way tie.  The winner (and nobody knows that will be), will probably get 20% of the vote.  Nobody will get 25%.

          Of the five, three are white---two businessmen and a woman with experience in city government.  One is a woman of Asian descent.  And one is a middle-aged black woman, the “establishment” candidate, who has been involved in politics since she was a teenager and has held a number of elected offices.

          Twenty years ago, this would have been a no-brainer---the one black candidate (Cherelle Parker), would win since she would get a few white votes and ALL the black ones. That does not, however, appear to be what is going to happen.

          My prediction is that Philly will elect the most radical leftist who has at least some experience in government or elected office.  That is Helen Gym.  Bernie Sanders and AOC are coming to a rally for her tomorrow, and thousands of lefties from all over the country are knocking on doors for her this weekend.  For several years, under Mayor Kenney, Philly has been sliding into crime and drugs and homelessness.  Police get arrested for doing their jobs, so they don’t do their jobs as much as they used to, and many of them have retired.  All that will continue at an accelerated pace if Gym is elected.

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki    

NOTES ON JURIES

 

          In the 1980s, I would occasionally drop into Room 236 in City Hall, where my father plied his trade as a criminal court judge.  He was assigned all the “Career Criminal” cases in Philadelphia.  This was Pennsylvania’s variation on 3-strike laws, which require enhanced sentences for repeat violent offenders.

          There were not a lot of laughs in Room 236.  The victim and his family were often there, along with the defendant’s mother and any other relations.  The defendant himself was thinking about spending the rest of his life in prison.  Sherriff deputies stood at attention, watching everyone, waiting for a rumble to start.

          And sometimes it did.  Judge Kubacki had to seek cover more than once.  The one incident that stuck with him was a melee where a young woman with babe in arms waded into the fray and tried to use her infant as a bludgeon.  He told that story more than once.  I think he disapproved of her behavior.

          But this is about juries, and that is because most of the trials in Room 236 were jury trials.  Judge Kubacki, for about twenty years, presided over more jury trials than any other judge in the city.  Juries made up of random citizens from the voting rolls inject an element of chance into a contest, and the only hope for most defendants was to get lucky, so they all demanded juries.

          For the judge and his staff, jury trials are a LOT more work than non-jury trials.  Jurors must be separated from the participants at all times.  You don’t ever want a juror in the same elevator or restroom as the defendant’s sister, so you take steps to prevent that sort of random encounter.  It took work, constant attention to detail, and always knowing the location of everyone interested in the trial.

          Also, juries and jurors are mysterious and unpredictable.  The lawyers and the judge asked a few questions, and would typically find out what neighborhood the person lived in, what they did for a living and maybe where they went to school.  Then, just from looking at them, you get male/female, white/black, old/young---and that’s about it.  There are consultants who claim to be experts who will help lawyers pick jurors, but I always wondered whether they really know anything at all.

          Because of this, and because of all the jury trials in Room 236, my father and his staff developed a fascination with juries and jurors.  They all had theories on how to read jurors and the factors that might sway them.  They were convinced, for example, that a nasty-looking weapon in evidence (that the jury could look at and touch), would tend to lead to a conviction.  It doesn’t make any real sense, of course, since the only important question should be whether the defendant used the nasty looking weapon, but the court staff swore by it.  Prosecutors generally believe this as well.  Maybe it’s because a long sharp knife or a cold, gray semi-automatic are real.  Even the most uncynical jurors realize quickly that people lie at trial.  Witnesses lie, cops lie, the defendant lies---but a chain or a gun or an ax does not.

          Another topic they wondered about was the effect of a large contingent of supporters and family for the victim or the defendant.  I don’t remember what they concluded, but I know that a crowded courtroom full of on-edge, emotional people put everybody on a state of alert.

          All of them had their individual roles.  The Court Crier was Helen Wolf, a tiny, no-nonsense woman who worked in City Hall for forty years.  She was in charge of wrangling juries and moving them from place to place, but she never catered to them or let them dawdle.  They had a job to do.  She had several jury-deliberation rooms at her disposal, and if it were July and she felt a particular jury was taking too long to reach a verdict, she might move them to the room where the AC didn’t work so well.  There was also a drafty room where the radiator rattled constantly and didn’t kick out much heat in December, and Helen would move the jury in there in the colder months if she felt they needed a kick in the ass.

          Jack Woods, the Tipstaff (the judge’s general factotum and body-security man), had the job of taking lunch orders for the jury.  He saved them, correlated them against the verdict eventually rendered in the case, and theorized about them.  He was convinced that meat-eaters generally favored conviction, and that an order for twelve roast beef sandwiches basically guaranteed a guilty verdict.  Salads and tunafish were wild cards.  Three or four of them in a lunch order meant anything could happen---a hung jury, a wrongful acquittal, or screaming arguments in the jury room.

          Because of the expense, juries are rarely sequestered in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, but it does happen.  My father told me he would do it occasionally once the testimony was over and the case had been given to the jury to decide.  If it had been a lengthy trial, or the case had gotten a lot of press attention, he might put them in a hotel to keep them under the court’s control and maybe protect them from any outside influences.

          In one case, he told me, the jury had started deliberating that morning but it was getting late in the afternoon, so he decided to sequester them, and he had the staff start calling their homes to tell the families not to expect the juror home that night.

          On one of these calls, Jack Woods reached the husband of a juror and said, “Hello, Mr. Smith.  I’m from Judge Kubacki’s courtroom where your wife is on the jury, and I’m calling to tell you the jury is deliberating now and the judge has decided to put them up in a hotel overnight.  So you shouldn’t expect Mrs. Smith home tonight.”

          There was a pause, then the response:  “Tonight?  TONIGHT?  And exactly where the hell has she been for the last two weeks?”

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki   

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.

*

 

          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.

*

 

          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.

*

 

          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.

*

 

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

*

 

          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?

*

 

          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.)  

                     

HOBO---A Review

           If you’re like me, you tend to view Canada and Canadians as an embarrassment to the entire continent.  It’s fundamentally a degenerate place, the end product of centuries of incest and frostbite, and I think most Americans feel the most humane thing we could do would be to invade, take all their fresh water and baby seals, and shut the place down.  Anything worthwhile in Canada, like Gretsky or Monte Hall or Celine Dion, winds up in America anyway, so what’s really the point of allowing the country to lurch onward towards its ultimate oblivion?  I mean, do we really need to see who they choose as Prime Minister after Justin Trudeau?

          And then you stumble across an artifact of Canadian culture like “The Littlest Hobo.”  And you think: “Well, OK.  Maybe there’s some hope for these poor bastards after all.”

          Created by, and mostly written by Dorrell McGowan, 114 half-hour episodes of “Hobo” were produced between 1979 and 1985.  The star is a German shepherd (actually five different ones), named London in real life and referred to by various nicknames on the show.  He is the only continuing character.  All the humans are different in every episode.

          London’s character bears some resemblance to Kwai Chang Caine, David Carradine’s shaolin monk in “Kung Fu.”  Like Caine, the Hobo has no home.  He wanders around Canada helping the oppressed and having adventures, and then he wanders off down the road at the end, when he has solved everybody’s problems.  Caine prevailed because he was possessed of ancient spiritual wisdom and martial arts skills.  Hobo’s advantage is that he is considerably smarter than any of the human beings in the show (because of course, they are all Canadians).

          He foils terrorist plots, he transports life-saving medicine through forest fires, he helps a disabled child acquire self-esteem, he brings down drug-smugglers, and he saves dopey three-year-old kids lost in the woods.  (And I’ve only seen the first sixteen shows.)

          I am on a one-episode-per-day regimen, which will take me to the end of June, though I sometimes cheat and watch two, telling myself as I do that sometime in the next three months I may be knocked unconscious or get arrested and be unable to watch my daily dose so I should probably catch up in advance.  My session with the littlest Hobo is often one of the (many) highlights of my day.

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki         

St. Patty Reminiscence

 

          On March 16, 2020, the day before St. Patrick’s Day, Pennsylvania went into lockdown for COVID.   Most businesses, including bars and restaurants, were closed indefinitely by order of Governor Wolf.

 

          I remember it vividly.  The lockdown was to go into effect at 5 PM, so at 2 PM, I raced over to Billy Murphy’s Irish Saloon, at Conrad St. and Indian Queen Lane in Philly.  My plan was simple: get a drink before the world, or something, ended.  Nobody knew what was coming, but I didn’t like the look of it.

 

          The door was locked.

 

          I stood at the door and heard muffled voices inside.  I later learned they had closed early and were having a staff party, both to celebrate the Saint and to mourn the lockdown.  In a way, it was a perfect Irish moment, composed of equal parts laughter, melancholy, and alcohol.  Standing there, I thought about pounding on the door and trying to talk my way in, but I didn’t.  It was their bar.  It was their party.  I’m not even a little bit Irish, I don’t celebrate St. Patty’s Day, and it wasn’t even St. Patty’s Day yet.  Still, knowing they were there and wanting to join them but not being able to, I don’t think I ever felt more Irish.  And I don’t think I have ever wanted a drink more than I did at that moment.

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

(First published 3-20-22)

THIS & THAT XXIV

                     It is now possible to piss some people off by referring to “Chinese New Year” as “Lunar New Year,” and vice versa.

          Be careful.  If you are insufficiently woke, just keep your mouth shut.

*

 

           I don’t think “latinx” is ever going to catch on, do you?

          There’s a name for this kind of word.  It’s an exonym, meaning a name for a race or an ethnic group that does not come from the people themselves.  And since it does not come from the people themselves, there’s always the possibility that the people it refers to won’t like it.

          That is not always true, of course.  We call people from Germany “Germans.”  It’s an exonym because Germans call themselves Deutsche, but the term “German” has no pejorative subtext.  However, Germans are also called krauts, heinies, and huns.  These are all exonyms, and they are insulting.

          “Eskimo” is an exonym that was never complimentary (it comes from Algonquian languages, and it means “eaters of raw meat”), but nobody was much offended by it until recent decades when group identity became so politicized.  Now it is considered a racist term.

          That seems to be the direction latinx (pron. “la-tin-x”), is going.  The purpose of it appears to be to eliminate the gendered terms “latino” and “latina,” since in the woke universe, sex and gender are just social constructs with no immutable meaning.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be how most latinos feel about the matter.  Spanish is, after all, a gendered language.  There are male nouns and female nouns, and that is characteristic of romance languages.  Imposing the woke ideology of non-gendered language on Spanish speakers is not only an affront to their culture and traditions, it will be much more difficult than it would be for English speakers.

*

          Trump had some classified documents at his compound at Mar-a-Lago, Biden had some in his Corvette and in a closet at the U of Penn, Sandy Berger (remember him?) had some stuffed in his pants.  And don’t forget Hillary.

          What’s the problem here?

          Nobody knows how many classified documents there are, but one estimate is that there are 50 million new documents classified every year.  Maybe the problem is that the people who deal with classified documents, and are responsible for classifying new ones, don’t take the process seriously.  How could they?  The bureaucrats who mostly deal with these things know that 1) there is no cost or downside to having documents classified, 2) it makes people look important if they work with classified documents or cause them to be classified in the first place, and 3) having documents stamped Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret (the three “classifications”), is a good way to prevent them from embarrassing you later on.  In addition, the people in charge of the process know full well there is no justification for classifying the vast majority of documents.

          There’s an easy way to fix this.

          First, each agency that classifies documents must review the documents it has classified, and de-classify 99% of them.  Give them a year to do this and if they fail to do so, they lose the power to classify any further documents until the culling has been completed.

          Following the completion of this Phase One, mandatory criminal penalties will kick in for mishandling of classified documents.  The person responsible for allowing a classified document to wind up in a place where it shouldn’t be goes to a federal prison for six months (minimum).  This will solve the other problem---nobody takes them seriously because nobody ever has to pay a price for breaking the rules.  Sandy Berger never went to jail, and the feds had to fish some embarrassing Clinton-era papers out of his boxers.  Even Hillary paid no price, and her use of an insecure homemade email server to house classified documents almost certainly led to security breaches and the deaths of Americans.

 

*

“It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled."                                                                                                                                                                                                                 ---Mark Twain

          As one of those who resisted the COVID madness from the beginning, I grow increasingly optimistic that we are approaching a tipping point on the dangers of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.  Stories that were uniformly suppressed by governments, the press, NGOs, academia, social media, medical organizations, pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, and financial institutions are now seeping into the public consciousness on the internet and even in media outlets that spent the last three years reporting ONLY the accepted narrative.

          The stories bobbing to the surface come from everywhere.

          The COVID experience in India constitutes an accidental study in the effects of mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna), versus the Viral Vector products (like Johnson & Johnson) or the Protein Subunit types (like Novavax).

          India is a heavily vaccinated place, but unlike Europe and the U.S., none of the shots were mRNA shots.  India health minister Mansukh Mandaviya was the person responsible for negotiating with Pfizer and Moderna over the use of their products in India, and he reported the negotiations fell through because the companies demanded legal immunity for any injuries resulting from their vaccines.  While the U.S. and many other countries routinely grant this immunity to vaccine-makers, India never has, and Mandaviya refused to in this case.

          The significance of this arises from the near-absence of vaccine deaths in India.  These tend to be difficult to count anywhere, largely because in Europe and the US, the authorities have not wanted to count them, so the enormous numbers of vaccine-related deaths have been suppressed.  That does not mean the numbers cannot be teased out of the data, however.  In the United States (from the CDC’s VAERS database, for example), it appears the vaccines have killed about 350,000 people.  In the EU, there is a vaguely-similar website called EudraVigilance, run by the European Medicines Agency, with comparable numbers of reported vaccine deaths.

          India tracked vaccine injuries too, and their best data indicates there were about 1000 vaccine deaths among 100,000,000+ people vaccinated, or about one out of every 100,000.  Another measure published by the Indian government at the end of 2021 was vaccine injuries (“adverse events”).  Official counts of vaccine injuries were 0.2% of shots in the US, 0.7% in the UK, and 0.006 in India.

          India’s experience is powerful evidence that the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are the villains in the COVID vaccine death-toll.

          Another chink in the COVID-orthodoxy armor comes from the FOIA lawsuit filed by the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency against the FDA in September, 2021 over the FDA’s refusal to release documents submitted in support of vaccine authorizations.  Involved were 300,000+ documents, which Pfizer offered to release at a rate of 500 per month, stretching the process out to somewhere north of 2080.

          U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman (N.D. Texas), ruled against the FDA in January 2022, and all responsive documents have now been released.

          But what do you do with 300,000+ documents?  You need somebody to read them and analyze them and put the pieces together.  The on-line sites Daily Clout and The War Room took on that challenge and attracted 3500 volunteers, including medical professionals and lawyers, to the task.

          The result is “Pfizer Documents Analysis Reports,” an eBook featuring 50 essays on different aspects of Pfizer’s deception.  Pfizer knew (and suppressed), the dangers of its mRNA vaccine, and thus, there could be no informed consent among the hundreds of millions who took the shot and suffered the damage.  The collusion of the CDC, the FDA, and the media in the lies is also apparent from the Reports.

          At this point we have all heard of the heart injuries the vaccine has done to young men.  There has been less publicity, however, about the effect on young women in their reproductive years.  The results of vaxxing pregnant women were frightening.  Of the pregnant women in the Pfizer trial who took the shot, 270 reported injuries.  Of those 270, Pfizer followed only 32 of them, and of those, 28 lost their babies.  There is also ample evidence of vaccine-related changes to women’s menstrual cycles, though the seriousness of these alterations is not yet clear.

          Elsewhere, mandates are being quietly dropped (even in California!), and legislation is being introduced to ban mRNA vaccines.  Here and there, a few public health officials (minor ones), have publically apologized for pushing the COVID security state protocols upon us in spite of the absence of evidence supporting them.

          It all adds up, I hope.  Of course I would like to see Fauci and Klaus Schwab and Cuomo and Newsom and Bill Gates, and all the other architects of this attempted fascist takeover, in prison for their crimes against humanity.  But in this world where people are never held responsible for their crimes but only for the crimes of their ancestors, we cannot expect these monsters to pay any sort of price.  I would like to see them shamed from public life, however, and never again have the opportunity to pursue their totalitarian dreams at our expense.  I would like to see the three years from 2020 to 2022 viewed for what they were---a dystopian nightmare and fraud that killed millions and should never be repeated.     

 

                   

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki  

2023 NFL PLAYOFFS---Superbowl

 Philly (-1) vs. Kansas City

          This will be brief because there’s not much left to say.  The two #1 seeds, and what appear to be the two best teams in the NFL, are meeting for the Superbowl.  Aside from Tua Tagovailoa (and possibly Garoppolo), Hurts and Mahomes are the two best QBs in the NFL this season.  Both have been injured, but both are mostly recovered from their injuries.

          The Eagles have a slightly better AYP than KC (7.3 to 7.1), and Philly has the best defensive AYP in the league at 4.0, while KC’s pass defense is only slightly better than average at 5.2.

          Both of Philly’s playoff wins were blow-outs, while both of KC’s wins (by 7 points and 3 points), went down to the wire.  I think that means something.

          The better team does not always win the Superbowl, but Philly is the better team.  Take the birds and lay the point.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki