. . . as posted on Facebook. . . .
Retirement, especially as guaranteed by government, is the secular replacement for heaven.
It is the funniest religion-buster we have. Social Security is also a great metaphor for one view of Christian salvation: half works, half grace. But I still have trouble seeing the State as Savior, which is the favored model of many people, left and right. Of course, in this analogy, it is on the left that the messianism is strongest, for leftists want (nay, demand!) at the very minimum something like a guaranteed income, which is all grace and no works. I snicker.
Yes, I find our world hilarious.
January 11, 2021, 3:14 PM PST
Just to re-state: Bill Barr did not disclose the FBI’s ongoing investigations into Hunter Biden even while Trump was being impeached for asking for an investigation into the Bidens. How could this be justified? Barr had what seems to me a clear obligation to the citizenry to explain what was really going on. Instead, he let every gullible person in America think Trump was likely engaged in a partisan, self-interested witch hunt, when he really had reasonable suspicion of deep crookery.
That strikes me as cause for Barr to be reviled for siding with the Deep State and against a sitting president for doing nothing wrong.
And now Ukraine has come out with its investigation results. The government says billions are missing and the Bidens engineered the theft.
Yet I notice little talk in the press. We hardly need to wonder why: the press in America is largely a propaganda mill for the Deep State.
January 11, 2021, 12:16 PM PST
The idea is to liken global warming skeptics to holocaust deniers. It’s a bit misleading because the skeptics/climate realists are the ones who always emphasize that climate never stops changing and has been changing for over four billion years, while the global warming catastrophists try to deny the reality of the Medieval Warm Period (when the Earth was hotter than today) and the Little Ice Age (from which we are still rebounding).
David Ramsay Steele, as quoted by Lee C. Waaks.
Now we skeptics can be called COVID deniers by the same crowd, on a different subject (but with eerily similar policy prescriptions), because we really do have this notion that science is about criticism, and requires considering more than one factor in a complex phenomenon.
January 11, 2016, 7:16 PM PST
The official timeline of the coronavirus outbreak is almost certainly wrong. Instances of the virus (in some form) appeared in the West in pockets starting in November 2019. I had it in February, and I was fairly late to the disease in the valley I live in. My brother had the same, odd illness in December and January, and he’s over a thousand miles to the east. Studies indicate that it was in Europe in December.
This could have huge implications for our understanding of what the virus is and why it has spread like it has. I have conjectures, but it would be mere fun to speculate much. The truth is unknown by me.
January 12, 2021, 4:47 PM PST
Operation Paperclip was a thing. It is a fact. Nazi scientists and technicians were imported into the United States to fill the ranks of NASA, military contractors, the academy, and intel agencies. We have good reason to believe that the disinformation skills of the National Socialists were absorbed into the intellectual culture of the Deep State in the 1950s and 1960s.
This is not a mere conspiracy theory, since while the secrecy was real the program has been acknowledged. And it was vast.
We might want to keep this in mind when considering current psychological operations and Internet speech suppression.
Now, some extrapolations we can make from this are indeed “conspiracy theories.” Joseph P. Farrell’s judgment — his “high octane speculation” that he floats as reasonable and likely — is that the Nazis basically took over America in a de facto if not de jure fashion with the JFK assassination. That seems a big stretch. I know. But it should be judged by the evidence, not our well-programmed “instincts.” Many of our prejudices have been programmed by psychological operations of the Deep State. For example, “conspiracy theory” was a term coined and pushed by the CIA for the media to use to marginalize anyone who questioned the “lone gunman” theory of the JFK assassination.
Don’t be good little boys and girls. You can be adults and question authority.
An afterthought on causation: A group that could incorporate Nazis into it is obviously nasty. A group incorporating Nazis into it, and in high places, offering special expense accounts and subsidies, is not going to be bettered by the inclusion. Indeed, it’s indicative of a direction. And that helps explain why America is such a messed-up place: it anathematizes Nazis but is run like a Fourth Reich, increasingly.
January 12, 2021, 5:05 PM PST
The mask mandate has been something of a puzzle. From the beginning, we were lied to about mask efficacy during a respiratory virus epidemic. At first, we all remember, we were told not to wear them, they wouldn’t be effective, people couldn’t wear them well, etc. And the studies (and yes, there were studies) did not show any utility in reducing the spread of an airborne viral contagion. But Fauci, whom everyone knows, deep down, is a liar, seemed to be lying when he told us they weren’t useful. He was just saving the masks for the professionals! So it sounded to normal people like they did work, but Fauci got almost no flak for fibbing.
Then came the lockdowns, the Fifteen Days to Flatten the Curve – to save the hospitals from over-flow and professional staff from being over-burdened. We were advised to wear makeshift masks in our few public appearances, and we were told that mask production was up. And well-meaning people chipped in, making and selling and giving away home-made masks. And most of us thought that a 15-day holiday was the least we could do.
And then came the greatest con job in world history. Most people did not blink, sucked it all in like an OnlyFans whore. The governors of the states – and officials around the world – kept the lockdowns past the 15 day limit. In American, the hospitals suffered chiefly from under-use, not over-use, so the whole rationale had evaporated. Yet the lockdowns continued, and Trump’s promise of a vaccine shifted the whole pandemic panic from a coping strategy, playing it as it comes, to an over-arching Salvation Strategy, wherein anyone dying was a tragedy for the world, and how dare anyone think anything about their rights when old people are dying. So we are still in this ambiguous realm of over-reaction in most places, but open society in some places, like South Dakota, Texas and Florida — the latter two where the COVID is not as disastrous as it is in the lockdown areas. Meanwhile, many of us are wearing masks. I find it stupid, and when I look at cross-regional stats, I can see absolutely no correlation between mask and lockdowns with better epidemic outcomes. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
So what is with these masks? They are crowd control. Their limited utility is keeping people from touching their faces, as a sort of muzzle — though even this minor effect has not been demonstrated statistically, and I am unaware of any study that demonstrates this effect clearly.
“It cannot hurt” is the best we can say for the policy. But that is not at all true. Look at children who have gotten infections because they are wearing masks all day, because of insane state mandates in public schools. Remember, masks are probably pretty effective in sealing in/out bacterial infections. But that sealing-in effect can be quite bad.
But most people don’t care about that, because they are sheep. We bleat, we do not reason.
Whereas the traditional way of categorizing the general government of these United States is to list the three constitutionally divided federal branches, with their respective designated powers; and whereas the even more traditional is to recognize the primacy of the states in the federation, nevertheless — I recognize that things have changed, and there exists a Leviathan of competing and cooperating powers, including:
1. constitutional government, as specified in written documents at the country’s origins, and as funded by a variety of taxes and loans;
2. the welfare state, as funded by income earners and spent in transfer payments in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and allied programs;
3. the Deep State, as constituting the Administrative State in its more secret realms, in the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, and, especially, in their semi-permanent “partners” in military and intelligence contractors (the “military-industrial complex,” as Ike put it);
4. the Wide State, as instantiated in the major players in the unions and plutocracy, and in the shallow end of the Deep State, and especially in the corporations and NGOs that gain power by contract and special relationships with the constitutional government, but sans secrecy; and
5. government by folkways, which remains the part I like the most, but which has proved itself recently of being captured by the governments above to quite bracing effects.
May 12, 2021, 1:45 PM
It is worth noting that “social justice” is in complete opposition to liberty in the realm of public policy. Social justice is a changeling philosophy, swapped out to “liberals” while they were barely paying attention in the government-run classes that were designed by advocates of social justice.
There is no compatibility between “social justice” and “liberty.” And when one waxes, the other must wane.
May 7, 2021, 5:14 PM
I received on my author’s page on Facebook a direct challenge to a recent post. I will respond to it here, as soon as my taxes are done. And I unbury myself from mowing the lawn, etc. So: maybe never?
Wirkman Comment 