SF Chronicle.

Evidence that COVID-19 poses virtually no threat to children and young adults continues to pile up, but it’s being completely ignored.  From what I’ve gathered from reading the news, as well as seeing with my own eyes when I go out, hysteria over the virus appears to be increasing in many respects. This is a very dangerous situation, when even facts can’t shake the public from their fear. Almost as if their participation in collective mass hysteria gives them a sense of tribal communion, and a primitive meaning to their lives.

Shelley Luther, the Texas salon owner who reopened her business in defiance of the shut down order, has a strength of character that the drones that comprise larger society rarely encounter. Luther, also a mother of young children, was arrested, and then given the option to either apologize for her actions in return for no jail time, or have the book thrown at her. She refused to apologize without hesitation, and stated the reasons for her refusal to the judge. He tossed her in jail, but the ensuing uproar throughout Texas and the world forced the government’s hand. She was released early, and will now live out her life as a hero. She also has a damn good story to recount for the rest of her life, and there will be many thousands eager to hear it.

Let’s ponder for a moment the character of a person with the courage to stare down the State in the midst of the rapid rise of pandemic totalitarianism, as our fiat liberty, as phony as our money, burns. Government at every level immediately arrogated to itself complete control over the economic and personal lives of its citizens, the greatest coup by the State against its own people in history. There are very few people that could do what she had done, vanishingly so. And yet we owe what liberty we’ve enjoyed up to now thanks to people just like her who refused to yield before galloping authoritarianism. There are endless writers and commentators for liberty: there are very few who put their necks on the line when liberty is actually at stake. Luther is one of those few. This is a significant point, and her defiance of the State is a significant event. A decisive battle, one of many, was fought and won. Luther fought it alone and emerged the victor. Something else is significant here. An apology for her actions was asked of her. Throughout history, the State has always demanded a recantation from its victims. Some type of confession, or conversion, the imprisoned is always compelled to make, under threat of punishment. This is a harbinger of government’s final transformation into the total State; one of its abiding characteristics. In the midst of our confused, morally decayed, and rapidly rotting modern age, Luther faced off against this ancient evil. Few others could do the same.

The self-inflicted healthcare apocalypse proceeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgAnfKj0S_8

We’re about to find out just how much authoritarianism can be imposed under the guise of a “public health emergency”. Job postings are popping up across the country for “contact tracers”: their mission? To discover who is COVID-19 positive, isolate them, forcibly if need be, and then ‘trace’ all the people that this person has been in contact with.  This has to be the very definition of a Sisyphean task. These “tracers” are going to make a list of hundreds of individuals to locate, each of whom will produce another list of hundreds to trace, and so on? Insanity. We’ll have reached natural herd immunity long before the COVID Stasi even begin to trace COVID origins.

Imagine the abuse and invasion of privacy that will occur during the occupation by this domestic medical army. They won’t come close to their goal of tracing COVID, but they will ruin plenty of lives in the process.

A visit to the grocery store always makes for an interesting experience. The arrows on the floor, directing me which way to travel down the aisles, the big red dots placed six feet apart to remind me to “socially distance”, et cetera. But the age of the people that appear to be most deeply mired in their own paranoia is always the same: the old. I’ve seen a man in his 70’s strapped with an N95 mask, complete with Scotch tape sealing any gaps in between his skin and the mask itself, elderly couples with cloth bags that envelope their entire head, mask-wearing vigilantes in paroxysms of indignation at the sight of the unmasked young people in their vicinity. There have been others, all choking themselves on their own carbon dioxide, secure in the belief that they are risking their lives by venturing beyond their homes in order to buy groceries. This is the power of propaganda, and I believe that the age groups most susceptable to it are the ones who still watch cable TV. If CNN is playing non-stop in your home, you’ll be subjected to a constant barrage of COVID-19 fearmongering. You’ll likely be palsied by fear, and unable to function. The age group most likely to still watch that garbage is, well, the old. They’re soaked in it, and in turn demand that the world shut down, and we all suffer from this coalition of the fearful.

“Spot” patrols the city park and reminds people to keep their distance. How long until that innocent reminder becomes not so innocent? I wouldn’t put it past the Chinese Communist Party to strap a cattle prod, or worse, to the dog, to make the reminder a bit more persuasive.

If we accept this technofascism here, then we probably deserve our fate.

Two Texas women faces 180 days in jail for offering manicures in her home after neighbors rat her out.

H/t Liesl Schoonraad