They think we don't see what's really going on....

[freyasman]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

 

[August West]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

 

[BasicHumanUnit]

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

Unfortunately, you have submitted fully to the Agenda21 Cult.
Your indoctrination is so complete, you will violently refuse to educate yourself.

That alone should set off warnings in your own head.....but it doesn't.

 

[BasicHumanUnit]

Thanks, but all I did was find it.

And shared it.

 

[freyasman]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

 

[BasicHumanUnit]

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

Well said.
as always, when confronted with common sense and facts, they run and hide.

They are fully indoctrinated into their Agenda21 Cult so badly that they cannot see.

 

[Montrovant]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

This virus is FAR more communicable than Ebola. Ebola is, thankfully, not as easy to spread.

I'm not sure why this virus has gotten the worldwide reaction it has. It's pretty odd, that's certainly true. I just don't buy into it being some sort of anti-Trump thing, as any person or group with the power to get the entire world to react as it has should certainly have the power to get Trump out of office (or keep him from getting elected or re-elected) without such extensive, over-the-top measures.

In a similar vein, such a person or group could probably find a much more effective means of bringing down the US if such is the goal.

I also don't like to ascribe any sort of masterminded plans, or even cleverness, to something when incompetence or greed will suffice as an explanation.

 

[BasicHumanUnit]

 

[BasicHumanUnit]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

This virus is FAR more communicable than Ebola. Ebola is, thankfully, not as easy to spread.

I'm not sure why this virus has gotten the worldwide reaction it has. It's pretty odd, that's certainly true. I just don't buy into it being some sort of anti-Trump thing, as any person or group with the power to get the entire world to react as it has should certainly have the power to get Trump out of office (or keep him from getting elected or re-elected) without such extensive, over-the-top measures.

In a similar vein, such a person or group could probably find a much more effective means of bringing down the US if such is the goal.

I also don't like to ascribe any sort of masterminded plans, or even cleverness, to something when incompetence or greed will suffice as an explanation.

Clueless in Seattle.

United Nations Agenda21

No organized group of people you say?.......

Ignorance is bliss, and rampant among Lefty Lemmings today

 

[BasicHumanUnit]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

I hope you never stop telling yourself that

 

[buttercup]

It's definitely a psyop. To me that is obvious. But I disagree that it's about getting Trump. Yes, it is being used by Democrats who hate Trump, for political purposes. But this whole scam is not about Trump, it's a hell of a lot bigger than that. It's a pretext for numerous different global agendas.

Btw, as I've posted before, the current scenario was written about 10 years ago by a think tank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and what they described in that paper is almost exactly what is happening today.

 

[freyasman]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

This virus is FAR more communicable than Ebola. Ebola is, thankfully, not as easy to spread.

I'm not sure why this virus has gotten the worldwide reaction it has. It's pretty odd, that's certainly true. I just don't buy into it being some sort of anti-Trump thing, as any person or group with the power to get the entire world to react as it has should certainly have the power to get Trump out of office (or keep him from getting elected or re-elected) without such extensive, over-the-top measures.

In a similar vein, such a person or group could probably find a much more effective means of bringing down the US if such is the goal.

I also don't like to ascribe any sort of masterminded plans, or even cleverness, to something when incompetence or greed will suffice as an explanation.

No it isn't, not even close..... the difference is ebola kills people really fast, so they die before they spread it too far. Of course, the 300 illegal immigrants from that region that were caught trying to cross the Rio Grande River a few hours to my SW that same month, had me feeling pretty damned nervous.
I think people jumped on this as an excuse to start pushing for more power, and also just to see what all they could get away with. They're like little kids looking for boundaries and they're going to keep on until they find them.
They're going to blame Trump because literally everything wrong in the universe is Trump's fault, but I think it was also an experiment in the effectiveness of propaganda spread via social media...…. and that has been shockingly effective, IMO.
If someone told me this time last year that a majority of the country could be convinced to wear a fucking muzzle in public, I'd have laughed myself sick...… it's simply ridiculous. But between FB, Instagram, Twatter, etc., this demented need to conform has spread faster than the clap in a brothel, and a whole hell of a lot faster than this virus.

And if they can convince people to do that, then why shouldn't they believe they should be able to convince people to vote a certain way too, right? And so they're going to try.

 

[Montrovant]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

This virus is FAR more communicable than Ebola. Ebola is, thankfully, not as easy to spread.

I'm not sure why this virus has gotten the worldwide reaction it has. It's pretty odd, that's certainly true. I just don't buy into it being some sort of anti-Trump thing, as any person or group with the power to get the entire world to react as it has should certainly have the power to get Trump out of office (or keep him from getting elected or re-elected) without such extensive, over-the-top measures.

In a similar vein, such a person or group could probably find a much more effective means of bringing down the US if such is the goal.

I also don't like to ascribe any sort of masterminded plans, or even cleverness, to something when incompetence or greed will suffice as an explanation.

No it isn't, not even close..... the difference is ebola kills people really fast, so they die before they spread it too far. Of course, the 300 illegal immigrants from that region that were caught trying to cross the Rio Grande River a few hours to my SW that same month, had me feeling pretty damned nervous.
I think people jumped on this as an excuse to start pushing for more power, and also just to see what all they could get away with. They're like little kids looking for boundaries and they're going to keep on until they find them.
They're going to blame Trump because literally everything wrong in the universe is Trump's fault, but I think it was also an experiment in the effectiveness of propaganda spread via social media...…. and that has been shockingly effective, IMO.
If someone told me this time last year that a majority of the country could be convinced to wear a fucking muzzle in public, I'd have laughed myself sick...… it's simply ridiculous. But between FB, Instagram, Twatter, etc., this demented need to conform has spread faster than the clap in a brothel, and a whole hell of a lot faster than this virus.

And if they can convince people to do that, then why shouldn't they believe they should be able to convince people to vote a certain way too, right? And so they're going to try.

Ebola is transmitted through direct contact. It is not airborne. Additionally, Ebola is not transmitted by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic carriers. The difference is not simply that Ebola kills people fast.

Presidents generally get the blame and the credit for what happens in the country, regardless of how much they actually have to do with it. That's nothing new. There just happens to be a lot of bad going on at the moment.

A face mask isn't a muzzle. You're being dramatic. And compared to stay at home orders, shuttered businesses, and quarantines, it's a damned minor inconvenience. I find it odd that whomever you believe is behind this would start at the extreme and work their way down to lesser restrictions; why wouldn't this have started with masks and social distancing, then worked it's way to more extreme measures like quarantines? It sounds counter-intuitive.

Of course there are some who are using the virus to try gaining/consolidating power or testing boundaries. That, unfortunately, is politics. Governments tend to look for more power and authority, not less (with exceptions). I don't think our representatives are all looking at this with altruism and selfless concern. I just don't find the idea of global conspiracies generally credible, as I don't have that much faith in the ability of people, especially those with that sort of power, to work together that broadly. Too many egos, too much possibility of competing or contradictory goals, and people are people regardless of position or money or influence.

 

[Dale Smith]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Don't leave out Event 201....

 

[Dale Smith]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

This virus is FAR more communicable than Ebola. Ebola is, thankfully, not as easy to spread.

I'm not sure why this virus has gotten the worldwide reaction it has. It's pretty odd, that's certainly true. I just don't buy into it being some sort of anti-Trump thing, as any person or group with the power to get the entire world to react as it has should certainly have the power to get Trump out of office (or keep him from getting elected or re-elected) without such extensive, over-the-top measures.

In a similar vein, such a person or group could probably find a much more effective means of bringing down the US if such is the goal.

I also don't like to ascribe any sort of masterminded plans, or even cleverness, to something when incompetence or greed will suffice as an explanation.

No it isn't, not even close..... the difference is ebola kills people really fast, so they die before they spread it too far. Of course, the 300 illegal immigrants from that region that were caught trying to cross the Rio Grande River a few hours to my SW that same month, had me feeling pretty damned nervous.
I think people jumped on this as an excuse to start pushing for more power, and also just to see what all they could get away with. They're like little kids looking for boundaries and they're going to keep on until they find them.
They're going to blame Trump because literally everything wrong in the universe is Trump's fault, but I think it was also an experiment in the effectiveness of propaganda spread via social media...…. and that has been shockingly effective, IMO.
If someone told me this time last year that a majority of the country could be convinced to wear a fucking muzzle in public, I'd have laughed myself sick...… it's simply ridiculous. But between FB, Instagram, Twatter, etc., this demented need to conform has spread faster than the clap in a brothel, and a whole hell of a lot faster than this virus.

And if they can convince people to do that, then why shouldn't they believe they should be able to convince people to vote a certain way too, right? And so they're going to try.

Ebola is transmitted through direct contact. It is not airborne. Additionally, Ebola is not transmitted by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic carriers. The difference is not simply that Ebola kills people fast.

Presidents generally get the blame and the credit for what happens in the country, regardless of how much they actually have to do with it. That's nothing new. There just happens to be a lot of bad going on at the moment.

A face mask isn't a muzzle. You're being dramatic. And compared to stay at home orders, shuttered businesses, and quarantines, it's a damned minor inconvenience. I find it odd that whomever you believe is behind this would start at the extreme and work their way down to lesser restrictions; why wouldn't this have started with masks and social distancing, then worked it's way to more extreme measures like quarantines? It sounds counter-intuitive.

Of course there are some who are using the virus to try gaining/consolidating power or testing boundaries. That, unfortunately, is politics. Governments tend to look for more power and authority, not less (with exceptions). I don't think our representatives are all looking at this with altruism and selfless concern. I just don't find the idea of global conspiracies generally credible, as I don't have that much faith in the ability of people, especially those with that sort of power, to work together that broadly. Too many egos, too much possibility of competing or contradictory goals, and people are people regardless of position or money or influence.

Covid 19 isn't any more lethal than the regular cold or flu and the #s are being artificially inflated.

 

[busybee01]

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

Unfortunately, you have submitted fully to the Agenda21 Cult.
Your indoctrination is so complete, you will violently refuse to educate yourself.

That alone should set off warnings in your own head.....but it doesn't.

You are the one who has been indoctrinated. You are nothing but a crazy loon. Your head needs to send you some warning signs. You are crazy.

 

[busybee01]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

This virus is FAR more communicable than Ebola. Ebola is, thankfully, not as easy to spread.

I'm not sure why this virus has gotten the worldwide reaction it has. It's pretty odd, that's certainly true. I just don't buy into it being some sort of anti-Trump thing, as any person or group with the power to get the entire world to react as it has should certainly have the power to get Trump out of office (or keep him from getting elected or re-elected) without such extensive, over-the-top measures.

In a similar vein, such a person or group could probably find a much more effective means of bringing down the US if such is the goal.

I also don't like to ascribe any sort of masterminded plans, or even cleverness, to something when incompetence or greed will suffice as an explanation.

No it isn't, not even close..... the difference is ebola kills people really fast, so they die before they spread it too far. Of course, the 300 illegal immigrants from that region that were caught trying to cross the Rio Grande River a few hours to my SW that same month, had me feeling pretty damned nervous.
I think people jumped on this as an excuse to start pushing for more power, and also just to see what all they could get away with. They're like little kids looking for boundaries and they're going to keep on until they find them.
They're going to blame Trump because literally everything wrong in the universe is Trump's fault, but I think it was also an experiment in the effectiveness of propaganda spread via social media...…. and that has been shockingly effective, IMO.
If someone told me this time last year that a majority of the country could be convinced to wear a fucking muzzle in public, I'd have laughed myself sick...… it's simply ridiculous. But between FB, Instagram, Twatter, etc., this demented need to conform has spread faster than the clap in a brothel, and a whole hell of a lot faster than this virus.

And if they can convince people to do that, then why shouldn't they believe they should be able to convince people to vote a certain way too, right? And so they're going to try.

Ebola is transmitted through direct contact. It is not airborne. Additionally, Ebola is not transmitted by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic carriers. The difference is not simply that Ebola kills people fast.

Presidents generally get the blame and the credit for what happens in the country, regardless of how much they actually have to do with it. That's nothing new. There just happens to be a lot of bad going on at the moment.

A face mask isn't a muzzle. You're being dramatic. And compared to stay at home orders, shuttered businesses, and quarantines, it's a damned minor inconvenience. I find it odd that whomever you believe is behind this would start at the extreme and work their way down to lesser restrictions; why wouldn't this have started with masks and social distancing, then worked it's way to more extreme measures like quarantines? It sounds counter-intuitive.

Of course there are some who are using the virus to try gaining/consolidating power or testing boundaries. That, unfortunately, is politics. Governments tend to look for more power and authority, not less (with exceptions). I don't think our representatives are all looking at this with altruism and selfless concern. I just don't find the idea of global conspiracies generally credible, as I don't have that much faith in the ability of people, especially those with that sort of power, to work together that broadly. Too many egos, too much possibility of competing or contradictory goals, and people are people regardless of position or money or influence.

Covid 19 isn't any more lethal than the regular cold or flu and the #s are being artificially inflated.

That is so much bullshit. Covid-!9 is worse than the flu.You are either a idiot or you enjoy playing one.

 

[esme]

More;

"All of the above served the ruling class’s overarching interest in its own power. Are there any categories of people who benefited from the shutdowns? Government gained. We know of no employee of federal, state or local government who was furloughed or had his or her pay reduced. On the contrary, all got additional power. The federal government created trillions of dollars, the distribution of which is enriching the usual suspects involved in administration. The teachers’ unions gained the power to extort concessions as a price for reopening schools. Among them, restrictions on or elimination of charter schools.

And as independent businesses were throttled, big ones grew. The biggest, Amazon, was the biggest winner. The news media, unrestricted and at the service of the powerful, themselves exercised unprecedented power. The social media platforms seconded the coup by censoring dissent from the “line” of their own most aggressive bureaucrats and officials. Try getting figures for COVID deaths and how they are counted from Google. YouTube deleted a video gone viral of two medical doctors who pointed out the truth about the COVID-19’s true lethality as dangerous disinformation, and Twitter appended a note to President Trump’s objection to voting by mail for facilitating fraud, accusing it of falsehood.

Prohibitions such as of playing in the park or swimming in the sea are mere devices to train the public to accept unlimited bureaucratic discretion. You may congregate at Costco, but not at church. Failure to obey regulations will land ordinary citizens in jail, while the jails release robbers and child molesters. You may not exceed limits on occupancy or fail to wear a mask. You may not even sing in church. But if you and friends loot and burn the neighborhood store, the police will just stand by. Yet all Democrat governors celebrated and some joined masses of “protests”—forget about masks and social distancing. They did this not for anybody’s health but to to secure another few percentage points of the black vote for their party and to leverage their seizure of power over police forces.

We are supposed to believe that all this is dictated by “Science.” In June, 1,200 “health experts” signed a letter approving the BLM protests because, it said, “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” But it cautioned that “this should not be confused with a permissive stance on…protests against stay-home orders.” In short, Coronavirus restrictions, like the rest of political correctness’s commandments, are pure political weaponry—nothing short of an inversion of the American people’s priorities, accomplished by nobody’s vote. Ruling class presumption. In short, we are living through a coup d’état.

. . .

It should be clear that the COVID event in America is only tangentially about health. It is essentially a political campaign based on the pretense of health. Mere perusal of news from abroad is enough to see that this is true as well throughout the Western world. Throughout, the campaign by governments and associated elites has essentially smothered social and economic activity. Not least—and by no means incidentally—it has smothered the overt political opposition which had increasingly beleaguered said governments and elites throughout the Western world."

Covid 19 is a worldwide pandemic that most likely started with a virus escaping a lab in China. It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with anyone wanting to keep Drumph from being re-elected. It is truly a crime against humanity that Drumph has politicized this pandemic and made people believe the nonsense posted in the OP. His politicizing this pandemic has resulted in untold loss of life.

 

[freyasman]

The American Mind

The Ideas That Drive American Political Life. A Publication of the Claremont Institute.

americanmind.org

From the link;
"The 2016 U.S. election confronted the U.S. ruling class with the possibility that the presidency’s enormous powers might be used to dismantle its network of prestige and privileges. The public is just beginning to understand the extent to which all manner of bureaucrats and allies used their powers to try defeating the challenge of 2016, and then instituted the socio-political equivalent of basketball’s “full court press,” treating anything and everything about the Trump administration as illegitimate, running official investigations not to gather information but as pretexts for feeding slander to their media associates. They tried to catch Trump in perjury traps. They toyed with the idea of leading him into statements that might be construed as bases for removal from office. But the U.S. economy boomed. Trump’s ratings rose. As 2020 dawned and Trump seemed a cinch for re-election, the Democratic Party et al. were grasping at straws for ways of getting at him.


By the time COVID came over the horizon, thought of using it had already crossed ruling class’s minds. No conspiracy was necessary or possible. The existing party sentiment and like-mindedness were enough to produce the unanimity and uniformity with which the ruling class has used the COVID-19 event to produce, stoke, and maintain fear, to energize its constituencies’ agendas in pursuit its power.


In January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at Georgetown University, said he had no doubt that the Trump administration would face a “surprise outbreak” of “infectious diseases.” A few days earlier, The Atlantic published an article titled “How a Pandemic Might Play Out Under Trump,” which wished out loud that Trump’s handling of such an event would undermine his presidency. Yet earlier, NYU professor Arthur Caplan had published an article along the same lines: “The End of Civilization and the Real Donald Trump.” In short, weaponizing a public health event had crossed eager minds.
The prospect of locking down the country, ostensibly to save it from COVID-19, offered a near monopoly of communications. Trump’s rallies were shut down. Above all, churches were shut down, as well as the countless meetings of clubs, businesses, friends, etc. that are the lifeblood of what one might call the country class. Nor may people congregate as they wish for political purposes: the strictures that North Carolina’s Democrat governor put on the Republican National Convention made it impossible to hold it in that state.


Without face-to-face contact, television became the chief means by which communication took place—but it was one-way communication, whose programming and corporate advertising—immediately—began telling the people the joys of obedience: “we are all in this together,” “ Alone, together.”


It reeks of Orwell. The companies whose advertising pays for this are household names: Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, Walmart, Warner Brothers and YouTube. The ruling class.


Driven by the politics of partisan identity, the ruling class used the COVID-19 event to collapse American life.


A glance is enough to reveal the perverse enormity of what it caused.
Because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels, where about half of the nation’s calories were consumed, demand for food shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly—especially as the government limited their operation and paid workers to call in sick. Millions of gallons of milk have been poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle have been destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit disked under. Vineyards have been ripped out. This scrambled allocation and waste of food resulted in shortages. Prices in the markets rose. In some places, meat and eggs were rationed. Persons deprived of work have less money with which to pay these prices, and struggle to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants at food banks.
Who could produce surplus and scarcity simultaneously except sorcerers’ apprentices wielding government power? That’s expertise for you. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.


But no sane person had ever imagined the near-shutdown of a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. The U.S. government did that, on the advice of its very best experts. Between mid-March to July hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Patients having been discouraged or forbidden to come in for other reasons, doctors and nurses were idled. Not a few were furloughed. Emergency rooms were closed to most of their customers—the poorer people who routinely get routine care there. Private clinics and practices—where most Americans get most medical care—practically shut down. Many will never reopen. Forget about dentistry. This has meant that most Americans have been left essentially without medical care for about a third of a year.
Tests missed, conditions not diagnosed, treatments forgone or delayed. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will yet cause—all while the U.S. government was making it happen. Officials who claim to be smarter than we ordered it—for our own good, they claim.


More than forty million Americans have filed claims for unemployment assistance since the shutdowns began. To this number one must add the as-yet unknown tens of millions owners of small businesses which were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. Add to that the uncountable millions not directly affected—farmers, professionals—whose products and activities the shutdowns de-valued. Imagine the millions of careers wrecked, the shattering of dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, and you search for words to describe it: Catastrophe? Tragedy? Man-made, for sure."


Much more at the link; go and read the whole thing.

Possibly Best Post of this SUMMER !!!

It`s the stupidest thing I`ll read today. People are dying of this thing all over the world as part of a big conspiracy?

Is that what you took from that?

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

How so?

Why do you think there has been such an unreasonable and extreme response to a virus that has a survival rate in excess of 99% then?
What's your explanation for all this?

There was an Ebola outbreak last year and there was nowhere near this level of panic and general fuckery, and that disease kills between 60% and 90% of everyone infected.

So can you give us any sort of reasonable explanation for this silly shit we're all being asked to submit to?

This virus is FAR more communicable than Ebola. Ebola is, thankfully, not as easy to spread.

I'm not sure why this virus has gotten the worldwide reaction it has. It's pretty odd, that's certainly true. I just don't buy into it being some sort of anti-Trump thing, as any person or group with the power to get the entire world to react as it has should certainly have the power to get Trump out of office (or keep him from getting elected or re-elected) without such extensive, over-the-top measures.

In a similar vein, such a person or group could probably find a much more effective means of bringing down the US if such is the goal.

I also don't like to ascribe any sort of masterminded plans, or even cleverness, to something when incompetence or greed will suffice as an explanation.

No it isn't, not even close..... the difference is ebola kills people really fast, so they die before they spread it too far. Of course, the 300 illegal immigrants from that region that were caught trying to cross the Rio Grande River a few hours to my SW that same month, had me feeling pretty damned nervous.
I think people jumped on this as an excuse to start pushing for more power, and also just to see what all they could get away with. They're like little kids looking for boundaries and they're going to keep on until they find them.
They're going to blame Trump because literally everything wrong in the universe is Trump's fault, but I think it was also an experiment in the effectiveness of propaganda spread via social media...…. and that has been shockingly effective, IMO.
If someone told me this time last year that a majority of the country could be convinced to wear a fucking muzzle in public, I'd have laughed myself sick...… it's simply ridiculous. But between FB, Instagram, Twatter, etc., this demented need to conform has spread faster than the clap in a brothel, and a whole hell of a lot faster than this virus.

And if they can convince people to do that, then why shouldn't they believe they should be able to convince people to vote a certain way too, right? And so they're going to try.

Ebola is transmitted through direct contact. It is not airborne. Additionally, Ebola is not transmitted by asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic carriers. The difference is not simply that Ebola kills people fast.

Presidents generally get the blame and the credit for what happens in the country, regardless of how much they actually have to do with it. That's nothing new. There just happens to be a lot of bad going on at the moment.

A face mask isn't a muzzle. You're being dramatic. And compared to stay at home orders, shuttered businesses, and quarantines, it's a damned minor inconvenience. I find it odd that whomever you believe is behind this would start at the extreme and work their way down to lesser restrictions; why wouldn't this have started with masks and social distancing, then worked it's way to more extreme measures like quarantines? It sounds counter-intuitive.

Of course there are some who are using the virus to try gaining/consolidating power or testing boundaries. That, unfortunately, is politics. Governments tend to look for more power and authority, not less (with exceptions). I don't think our representatives are all looking at this with altruism and selfless concern. I just don't find the idea of global conspiracies generally credible, as I don't have that much faith in the ability of people, especially those with that sort of power, to work together that broadly. Too many egos, too much possibility of competing or contradictory goals, and people are people regardless of position or money or influence.

I'm not demanding anyone stay home, close their churches, go into bankruptcy, and wear a western version of the hijab in public, all while destroying the entire US economy and putting almost every small business in the country out of business, while strengthening the big corporations...…. pretty sure that wasn't me doing all of that.

So maybe I'm not the one being dramatic.

 

[BasicHumanUnit]

Yes it is. It`s over the top tin foil hat craziness.

Unfortunately, you have submitted fully to the Agenda21 Cult.
Your indoctrination is so complete, you will violently refuse to educate yourself.

That alone should set off warnings in your own head.....but it doesn't.

You are the one who has been indoctrinated. You are nothing but a crazy loon. Your head needs to send you some warning signs. You are crazy.

Really?
You are leftist Lunatic lemming # 23,645 to go ballistic when I point out an actual UN (United Nations) plan that anyone can go to the UN and look it up for themselves.

since you think the rioting and destruction in Portland and Seattle is a good thing, I think level headed people would say YOU are the nut job TYVM