Delusion as a foundation for political beliefs

Matthew Dowd: We Have an ‘Active Domestic Terrorism Problem’ Facilitated by Trump

Trump’s great power is to cause people to self destruct.

Related:

Nolte: Media Hide Fact More People Questioned Trump’s Legitimacy than Biden’s

Ana Navarro: Donald Trump Was Not Legitimately Elected in 2016

Media use anti-Trump former Republicans like the useful idiots they are. As their usefulness wanes, they will be discarded like so much garbage.

American media is garbage, with few exceptions.

Democracy is in peril because the media recognize the Democrats are about to loose big in an election.

The latest ‘Big Lie’ comes from a corporate media that desperately wants us to believe democracy is in ‘peril’

The latest 'Big Lie' comes from a corporate media that desperately wants us to believe democracy is in 'peril'

The mental gymnastics of the habitually compliant…

The decision to unleash violent crime against citizens is a deliberate act…

Related:

Soros-linked Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg: No Incarceration Except for Homicide and a Few Other Cases

“Journalism.” (Was there a before?)

Image

Escalation of commitment…

lefty analysis on the I95 issue in Virginia

Democrats in Chicago at all levels of government are unable to govern effectively

Chicago Public Schools cancel classes Wednesday over teachers’ union demand to work remotely

Biden on Covid

The consequences of negligent leadership

Do masks work? The short answer is no.

Talk, just talk. A lot of Americans believe it.

More Words That Will Haunt Joe Biden Forever

“…We’ve mocked Joe Biden plenty of times before for his repeatedly claiming he would “shut down the virus.”  But he’s said quite a few things about COVID and the vaccines that have been just horribly wrong.

“This is a simple, basic proposition,” Biden told Don Lemon during a CNN town hall last July. “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you are not going to die.”

“You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” Biden added…”

My strange addiction…

Leftist Who Keeps Taking COVID Tests Says He Can Quit Anytime

“…ARLINGTON, VA—A local family held an impromptu intervention for their son, Eric Chag, 35, who has been taking up to 24 COVID tests a day.

“I can quit anytime I want!” screeched Eric. “I’m not out of control! You’re all out of control! I’m going to cancel you from my room!”

The family first became concerned after Eric’s nose fell off.

“He said it was just a drug problem,” informed his mother, Olivia Chag. “But then I started to notice Q-Tips piling up in the trash. [My husband] never cleans his ears so I was immediately suspicious.”

“I just don’t understand it,” admitted Eric’s father, George Chag. “I’m a proud Democrat. I sat him down to explain ‘the Covid and the bees,’ but I just wanted him to wear a mask when he drives—not go insane!”

Though the initial intervention proved unsuccessful, his loving family isn’t giving up on him.

“We’re trying to explain to him that this is an incredibly deadly virus and his life is never going to be the same again,” said his mother, Olivia Chag. “But then—I don’t know where I was going with this. Mask up, I guess.”

“Right, mask up,” agreed his father, George Chag. “With at least three masks.”

At publishing time, Eric Chag was rejected by a local rehab center due to a fever…”

Headlines of the day…

Biden Decries the Evils of Big Meat in Bizarre, Senile Performance

Ted Cruz: Payback Is Hell For Dems Who ‘Weaponized Impeachment’

Memphis College Pays Professors $3,000 To Favor Black Men

Covid is endemic. Current policy is folly.

We must accept COVID-19 as an endemic disease

DAN HANNAN:

“…Perhaps it will become milder over time, perhaps it won’t. Obviously, we must hope that it does, that it follows the same trajectory as other viruses, becoming less lethal but more transmissible until it joins that sprawling family of rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, and, indeed, coronaviruses that we collectively call “colds.”

But as far as public policy goes, the lethality of COVID-19 is a second-order issue. The more immediate question is whether it is feasible to slow its spread and, if it is, whether there are advantages in doing so.

If we think, for example, that widespread vaccination might heap high a protective rampart, then there are arguments for vaccine passports, possibly even for compulsory inoculation. If we think that the disease can be eliminated, then there are arguments for stringent suppression measures. If we think that dangerous new mutations can be kept out, then there are arguments for border restrictions and quarantines.

But what if none of these things is true? What if COVID-19 is as ineradicable and endemic as influenza? What if it comes and goes seasonally, leaving its victims with a dollop of immunity that wanes over time? What if, like the flu, it regularly mutates, meaning that recovery from one version bestows only partial protection against others? What if it is checked rather than halted by vaccines — again, like flu rather than, say, polio?

If we are dealing with such a disease, a recurrent respiratory virus, then almost all the measures that we have put in place around the world are pointless.

Let me repeat that: Almost all of them are pointless.

Restrictions designed for an epidemic make no sense when applied to an endemic disease. Why test people at airports when the virus is everywhere? Why require masks when almost all of us going to be infected, probably several times during our lifetimes? Why try to slow things up by closing schools or banning large gatherings?

The argument for lockdowns, all along, was that COVID-19 risked overwhelming our hospitals. Lockdowns were a way to spread things out, to flatten the curve, to (in British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s phrase) “squash the sombrero.” We can argue about whether the lockdowns were proportionate or effective even on their own terms. Having backed the Swedish approach throughout, I can’t resist pointing out that Sweden had the lowest excess mortality rate in 2021 of any country in Europe. But there was at least an argument for buying time — especially while we were rolling out the vaccines. What are we buying time for now?

The omicron strain makes pitilessly clear that the virus will carry on mutating and that no country can keep new variants at bay. So let’s put the question starkly. Are we going to respond to each mutation by scrambling to reerect the defenses that we put in place for the alpha version? Travel bans that we know don’t work? Preemptive lockdowns, sold as a way to prevent future lockdowns? (How has that been working out?)

Or should we not now accept that the disease, like the poor, will be always with us? Its worst effects are mitigated by past infections or by vaccination, but it can still be nasty and, in a small minority of cases, fatal. It will, in other words, be like an especially brutal kind of flu, coming back each winter, sometimes milder, sometimes harsher.

How do we respond to the flu? Most of us pick up a dose of immunity when we are relatively young and healthy. As we get older, we can avail ourselves of vaccines, which are updated annually to take account of the latest strains. I’m not saying it will be easy or cost-free. COVID-19 is, at least in its present form, a more serious killer than the flu. But even if it does not evolve to lower virulence, even if we are left to rely on vaccines, treatments, and other medical interventions, we know that we can get by.

The alternative, as is now clear, is to shut down in response to each new variant. Had that been the proposal two years ago, had we been told that we were facing a lifetime of chronic closures, we would not have countenanced it. But, bit by bit, we have been lulled, habituated, anesthetized — to the point where a permanent diminution of our liberties seems almost natural. For, make no mistake, these shutdowns will be a permanent feature of life. Like a postwar people subjected to price controls, we shall be left with supposedly contingent measures long after the emergency passed. If we don’t ditch them now, I fear we never will…”

Social media is garbage…

Trump calls Twitter, Facebook ‘disgrace to our Nation,’ urges Americans to abandon platforms

I do not consider this wise commentary from a Republican leader…

No. 3 House Republican on impeaching Biden: ‘Anything is on the table when we are in the majority’

That Democrats are the most undisciplined, hypocritical, lying, power hungry maniacs willing to do or say anything to further their political fortunes is not an excuse for normal people to act that way.

Sometimes it is necessary to fight fire with fire. I say let Trump do that. He knows how to handle that kind of situation. Downstream politicians should focus on issues important to their constituencies.

Thomas Harrington on the dishonesty that underlies our government and media’s treatment of Covid

The Reality They Invent to Feed the Power They Crave

“…It is clear that nothing resembling the dual-track process I have just sketched out took place among those directing the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. And when we consider recently published in-depth accounts of the behaviors of the people involved in these efforts, such as those of Dr. Scott Atlas and Robert Kennedy Jr., there is every reason to believe that the imposition of what could be called “policy-making autism” was carried out by design.

Indeed, this intentional bad faith was clear to me as early as March of 2020, not because I then knew anything about the serial treacheries of characters like Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield and Christian Drosten—I didn’t—but because I had spent much of the last quarter-century studying the pedagogy of nationhood; that is, the processes and mechanisms by which society’s sign-making elites seek to create and deploy new and embracing notions of “reality” among the general populaces nominally beholden to their power.

The first dead giveaway, as it usually is with such culture-planning operations, was the rigid lexical uniformity, and uncanny simultaneity of media messaging, especially in regard to the long-term historical significance of what is taking place.

No one with a modicum of proper intellectual restraint, or insight into the often serpentine routes of history, would ever deign to make prognostications about the dawn of a “new normal” in the midst of a crisis. That is, of course, unless he or she had a clear interest in establishing a narrative that through its early and frequent repetition, would effectively foreclose in all but the most hardy and self-confident thinkers the desire to pursue other interpretive possibilities.

The second was the absurdly open-ended nature of the new “war” in which—whether we agreed to it or not—we were now all said to be immersed…

And

…In the matter of rising Covid “cases,” it is similarly implied that a really negative process is underway. But the exact extent of the threat, who is most likely to suffer from it, and how severely are all left unsaid. This is the malign genius of making so-called “cases,” deprived of any worthwhile context, the fulcrum of the Covid discourse.

Responsible policy-making and policy implementation in a democratic society rely heavily on public pedagogy, which in turn, can only work in a context of respect for those to be taught.

Those tasked with leading the government effort to combat Covid (Drs. Birx, Fauci and Redfield) had ample opportunity to demonstrate that respect by carefully and frequently providing the public with the context needed to make precise sense of those vaunted case numbers. If we are to believe Scott Atlas, he effectively implored them to do so in each of his personal encounters with them.

However, they resolutely refused to do so.

There are only two possible explanations for this. a) these people are much dumber than they seem and honestly did not comprehend the grave semantic deficiencies and spiritually-damaging effects of the term “cases” in the manner they were deploying it, or b) they were quite happy to repeatedly, indeed obsessively use this floating signifier with its clearly foreboding connotations, but near complete lack of articulated relation to what most people would want to know about palpable risks, as a means of training the public to effectively detach public discourse from its empirical moorings. For me, at least, there is little doubt as to which explanation rings more true.

Once this “mini-course” in fear-tinged mental disjunction was offered to the public and accepted by it with little visible pushback in the first weeks and months of the crisis, Fauci, Birx and Redfield, along with their chosen spokespeople at the CDC and in the media, were in effect, “off to the races.”

With the basic template we rely on to make reasoned risk assessments about our lives effectively shattered, millions lapsed into the mental state that has always been the programmatic end goal of those, like Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who design torture programs for the US government: “Learned helplessness.”

When an individual enters this regressed mental space, the stature of all those presented to him as authority figures—no matter their actual level of competence or coherence—rises dramatically.

Indeed, considerable research suggests that a lack of coherence or predictability in such authority figures only enhances the now psychically helpless person or group of persons’ estimation of the “authority figure’s” irreplaceability and excellence. This suggests that there may have been more than a little “method” in the apparent “madness” of Fauci’s notorious flip-flops on key policy issues.

For a certain part of the population, perhaps bereft of rituals and practices designed to help them transcend the crude, cruel and ambiguity-generating rhythms of our now largely transactional culture, the surrendering the self to authority can take on an almost religious allure.

In this state such people find a certain sort of peace and meaning, and in homage to it, they begin to gleefully spout, and enforce the sanctity of, the very disjunctive logic previously used by the leaders of the cult to render inert their normal critical faculties…”

Satire, or the next Green thing?

Doug Santo