REPUBLIC REBORN

That’s a wrap for Biden. No one, not even him, could ever recover from something like this:

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

From Reason:

“Ohio’s COVID-19 lockdown is illegal, a state judge ruled today, because it exceeds the powers granted by the statute under which it was imposed. Responding to a May 8 lawsuit filed by the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law on behalf of 35 gyms, Lake County Court of Common Pleas Judge Eugene Lucci enjoined Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton from penalizing the plaintiffs or similar businesses for violating the lockdown, provided “they operate in compliance with all applicable safety regulations.””

Thank god for the judges during this crisis, who have been serving as a forceful check on the authoritarian ambitions of many governors.

The Faithful patiently awaiting their salvation through Science should probably deposit their blind faith in something other than the Oxford coronavirus vaccine currently in development. Every rhesus monkey injected with the experimental vaccine still contracted COVID-19.

We’ll have achieved natural herd immunity long before a profitable treatment is rolled out, but that won’t stop many expensive treatments from being peddled to a frightened public. Just wait, once a vaccine hits the market, the Pharma televangelists will emerge from the woodwork by the thousands, preaching the gospel of their new product.

Utterly bizarre press conference by Nassau County, NY, executive Laura Curran, where she delivers the above quote. You’d never believe this was happening if you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes:

Bear witness to the power of propaganda, and it’s ability to drive a normally good person to murder.

Jennifer Rager-Kay, also a medical doctor: “As a concerned carry-permitted gun owner, if you refuse to wear a mask and try to come within 6 feet of me or my family, I will exercise the same constitutional rights to shoot you.”

I wonder how many of the people I’ve seen driving while wearing their N95 mask, dramatically lowering the oxygen level in their blood and thereby suffocating on their own carbon dioxide, have at one time or another ever chuckled at the people who participated in the mass hysteria over satanism in the 80’s? It would be ironic, considering what they’ve succumbed to now. Or even if they did believe the absurd claims of infant sacrifice at various daycare centers, surely they balked at the Heavens Gate cult and their subsequent mass suicide (Collective suicide seems hardwired into the cult phenomenon)? And yet, we appear to be living through a mass psychological event that in many ways combines the worst aspects of both historical episodes. The unhinged fear of a phantom threat moving silently and invisibly through the population, viral infection taking the place of demonic possession, a proliferation of End Times prophecies combined with prophecies of salvation through a soon-to-arrive Messiah who will vanquish the heretics and then establish Heaven on Earth, et cetera. It’s all there.

Cults need to keep their flock in a sustained state of fear. Cults require their flock to participate in various rituals that signal their total obedience. Cults separate their members from their family. Cults demand sacrifices, culminating in the ultimate sacrifice, either total enslavement or mass suicide.

It all sounds very familiar, but it’s also highly appealing to our more primitive nature, which is why we see various doomsday cults pop up occasionally among the inhabitants of “modern” society. Our minds evolved over a period of millions of years when we only had magical or mystical explanations for the inexplicable world around us. We are descended from fire eaters, snake worshipers, and virgin sacrificers. From the millions of years when our species saw both the sun and the State as gods.

My overriding fear amid virus hysteria is that extended periods of mass paranoia and hysteria could trigger a regression, a rebarbarization, away from the free and open society from which we’ve benefited so greatly.  Not much different than the way that Hitler rose to power out of the ashes of the most highly cultured and sophisticated open societies that Europe has ever produced.

Amid virus hysteria we are getting a front row seat to the clearest examples of what happens when government is let out of its cage. Case in point: Oregon salon owner Linsdey Graham reopened her business in defiance of her state’s increasingly ludicrous lock-down orders. Unlike goverment, she can’t print money. She has to go to work to make a living. In response, the state issued her a $14,000 citation and a visit from Child Protective Services. It will be interesting to see what becomes of her case now that a state judge has overturned Oregon’s lock-down.

Heroic. Judge Matthew Shirtcliff said that governor Kate Brown needed approval from the legislature to extend the total lock-down any further.

Hawaii sure didn’t miss the opportunity to go full authoritarian while crippling its tourism industry in the process amid coronavirus chaos. Visitors to the island state must submit to a 14-day quarantine once they arrive. Those that don’t get thrown in jail, as this tourist has discovered.

We now know that Hawaii will extend it’s lock-down and mandatory 14-day quarantines until the end of June. This has no basis in reality. Why do some states appear so eager to commit economic suicide? It’s almost like a competition among Democratic governors to see who can be most belligerently authoritarian. It’s been obvious for weeks that COVID-19 isn’t dangerous for the vast majority, and that we can predict who is at risk. Why this “stay the course” attitude on the part of certain governors and mayors in the face of mounting evidence that what they are doing is unnecessarily destroying the lives of millions?

Billions of taxpayer dollars are in the process of being spent to raise an army of contact tracers, the people who will be snooping around your neighbor to unmask who might be COVID positive, and then follow the chain of infection. But only a fool would believe that their only job will be “contact tracing”. Once these hundreds of thousands of jobs are filled, it will be politically impossible to get rid of them. Therefore, they’ll stay on, and be given a broader mission, and will transform into a true domestic Stasi, informing on citizens, ruining the lives of citizens. If they aren’t initially given a gun, they soon will. They’ll also be given a cop-like uniform, complete with a contact tracer badge, in order to more readily gain compliance. They will unionize. They will be a nightmare.