The nationwide gym chain 24 Hour Fitness has filed for bankruptcy and plans on closing 134 locations in 14 states.
The lockdowns existed at the pleasure of the politicians implementing them. And when the politicians found a lefty cause that they really liked, the rioters and looters were exempted from social distancing like kids told that they can leave algebra class early on Tuesday to go protest for the environment.Read more here.
...The difference between essential and non-essential was always a political fiction. The protesters who were told that their protest was non-essential were just protesting for the wrong cause. Going to church or synagogue, burying your dead, or protesting for your rights was non-essential in the same way that Pritzker’s mansion and family vacations were essential. What was essential was who was in charge.
...Ask New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham who told non-essential businesses they had to shut down and then had a non-essential business open up so she could get some expensive jewelry.
Ask Professor Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College Model who was caught sneaking out for an affair or Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot who got a haircut after shutting down salons and barbershops. Or ask Dr. Richard (Rachel) Levine whose policies at the Pennsylvania Department of Health introduced coronavirus patients into nursing homes, but made sure to remove his mother from her nursing home.
Michigan’s Governor Whitmer had issued orders banning just about everything. And then a marina operator got a call from her husband about getting their boat in the water for Memorial Day.
"I am the husband to the governor; will this make a difference?" Whitmer's husband asked.
Governor Whitmer claimed that her husband was joking and that he only traveled to a second home to rake leaves. That comes from the same tyrannical termagant whose bans had extended to yardwork.
We’re not all in this together. We never were.
...Lockdown culture was an elite scam. The politicians, the technocrats, and the ad geniuses who imposed and sold lockdown culture to the country weren’t living it.
..."We're All In This Together,” does not offer unity or togetherness. It demands compliance from us for our assigned roles. Like 1984’s slogans, it means the opposite of what it actually says. Freedom was slavery, ignorance was knowledge, and being in it together meant that none of us had any say in it.
The lockdowns weren’t driven by science, but by ideology. That’s why the rioters crowding in D.C. and NYC are immune from the coronavirus while the spring breakers in Florida were going to kill everyone.
...Togetherness, in our pandemic propaganda, is defined as being isolated members of an unseen collective, reinforced by slogans like #AloneTogether or “Stay Apart, Stay Together”. It means complying with directives, informing on the disobedient, and listening to the experts without asking any questions.
"We're All In This Together” manufactures mass consent. The “We”, “All”, and “Together” represent a conformist mass in whose ranks the individual is only valued for his or her willingness to obey.
..."We're All In This Together” is a state of mindless and unquestioning conformity. And it’s un-American.
...The lies keep changing.
Yesterday we were huddling in our homes in our togetherhood of apartness. Now we’re supposed to be rioting together and calling for the abolition of the police. Each false cause is replaced by another big lie. If you can see past the lies, you’re not “Together” with the “We”. You’re one of the last Americans.
OPEN BACK UP: Covid-19 is battering independent physician practices. They need help now. Hospitals and medical practices never should have been shut down for “nonessential” services. That’s possibly the biggest mistake of many in this pandemic — and especially continuing the shutdown for months after it was obvious hospitals weren’t going to be flooded.
...And as regards the “malignant” charge, while there are, obviously, good individuals who are atheist, atheism is morally worthless. It makes no moral demands, whereas Judaism and Christianity posit a God who demands people obey, for example, the Ten Commandments. Atheism demands nothing; it only destroys the Judeo-Christian bases of morality in Western civilization, the civilization that gave the world democracy, liberty, women’s equality and an end to slavery.Read more here.
In fact, evangelical Christians are the greatest defenders of Western civilization, while Pinker’s atheist colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere are the most active opponents of Western civilization. How does Pinker explain that? Which exactly is the “malignant delusion”?
...Evangelicals oppose the continuing of the lockdown because they, more than any other large community in America, continue to believe in freedom. Without the evangelical community, we will no longer have liberty. From before the birth of America, liberty has been the cornerstone belief because it was a cornerstone Christian value. The founders engraved a liberty-affirming verse from the Bible (Leviticus 25:10) in the Liberty Bell. At the same time, from Lenin to Soros and today’s Democratic Party, liberty has never been a left-wing value.
To Pinker and his colleagues, Patrick Henry’s famous plea, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” the foundational principle of our republic, must sound truly foolish. It must have been the product of a malignant delusion.
When the campaign for re-lockdown begins, political leaders and the public should respond: thank you, but we are not going to make that mistake again. The unintended (to give you the benefit of the doubt) consequences of lockdowns have dwarfed in their malignity anything that the coronavirus could have inflicted, whether measured by lost and stunted lives or by the crushing of hope and enterprise. The coming depression will reduce global life expectancy more than the coronavirus ever could have. The infirm elderly — our parents — deserve our love and respect. We will focus on protecting them, but we will not shut down the economy to do so, because without economic life there is no public health. There will be more deaths from the coronavirus, as from other things. We will carry on, having relearned the necessity of balancing the benefits of any course of action against its costs. And we will remove from our daily repartee the injunction to ‘stay safe’ as an insult to human striving.Read more here.
Weary of more than two months of lockdowns, lost jobs, vanished income, and emotional distress, Americans are practicing a bit of Irish Democracy, shopping, dining out, gathering, and trying to carry on as before the pandemic arrived without approval from authorities. It was bound to happen.Read more here.
As has been widely noted, we were initially told that we needed to shut down and shelter in place so that we would “flatten the curve” of infection growth to prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed by people sick with COVID-19. That benchmark was met a little more than a month into the lockdowns. Time magazine reported in late April that “The U.S. Has Flattened the Curve.” This New York Times chart clearly shows that the flattening began early last month.
Yet many Americans are still under shelter-in-place orders, some of which have been extended. We hate to use a cliche, but politicians have been moving the goalposts. Flattening the curve isn’t good enough. They want to keep people home until there’s a vaccine; or science, which has sadly become a loose term that means whatever the user wants it to, has established an effective treatment; or maybe until there are zero coronavirus cases.
This has rankled more than a few. The masses are fed up with huddling in their homes and are yearning to breathe free.
the first in a series on America’s small businesses, their struggles under the shutdowns, and what they’re doing to survive. Names and locations below have been obscured to protect the people who spoke with us from government retaliation. Over two weeks, The Federalist is traveling the country to tell more stories like this one.
...We now know from a rich variety of statistics from many advanced countries that the number of people apt to die from the coronavirus is almost none beneath the age of 20, approximately 1 in 25,000 in their 20s, 1 in 14,000 in their 30s, 1 in 7,000 in their 40s, 1 in 1,000 in their 50s, and 1 in 200 in their 60s. Sweden, which never had a shut-down and has only approximately one-third more deaths per capita than the United States from the coronavirus, demonstrates that the continued shutdown only trades self-induced penury for a modest reduction in the incidence of the illness.Read more here.
There is only one possible solution: wait for a vaccine, and whether a vaccine eventually is developed or not, achieve what is rather crudely described as “herd immunity.” All the data indicate that the number of people infected by the coronavirus who have mild or no symptoms is over 90 percent (even with people in their 70s), and there is ample evidence that individuals who have recovered from the coronavirus may (rarely) be attacked again by it, though such attacks are considerably less effective and much more strenuously resisted. It is this development of antibodies among the great majority of coronavirus sufferers who recovered from the illness that provides the only certain route to defeating the illness, barring a vaccine.
...Those who are most vulnerable ultimately will have to be relied upon to act prudently. The stadiums, theatres, and immense restaurant, hospitality, travel, and pleasure cruise industries of America cannot be closed all summer and reduced to mendicancy from fear that a few vulnerable people will be incautious about their own condition.
Above all, the United States, as the world’s most important country, should lead our entire species out of an attitude of fear verging on cowardice and tainted with political opportunism, to a posture of prudent strength and determination. We must protect the vulnerable, restore the lives and livelihoods of those whose vulnerability is economic and not medical, and assert the human spirit of survival and progress over a demeaning and unfeasible culture of intimidation lest we live like furtive, fearful, moles.
U.S.—With many Americans eager to get back to work, state governors across the country are responding with their plans for giving everyone permission to be normal human beings again. One state governor is enjoying universal acclaim after unveiling his own innovative plan for getting his state reopened.
The new plan is called 'Our Vision for Health, Safety, Virtue, and Eternal Peace' and is a 37-step, 10-year plan for slowly opening up sections of the state economy. It reads as follows:
Form an exploratory committee to consult various experts on reopening things
Set date to hear recommendations from the exploratory committee
Create a panel of experts to explore the recommendations recommended by the exploratory committee
Build a brand new website to post exploratory committee recommendations for public comment
Discuss feedback from health experts over catered seafood lunch
Wait 4 weeks to see if catered seafood lunch led to any additional COVID infections
Hire commission to gauge the effectiveness of collaboration over catered seafood lunches
Take away all the guns
Announce a 12-phase reopening of the economy, starting with the businesses with the best lobbyists
Begin Phase 1
Form a new committee to review the effectiveness of Phase 1 before moving on to Phase 2
Order drones from China and post them in front of every hair salon
Draft new legislation to allow voting by show of hands over Facebook live
Announce reopening of all golf courses in close proximity to the statehouse
Hold public hearings on the effectiveness of the implementation of Phase 1
Repeat parts 1-15 until all 12 phases are completed
Form an exploratory committee to research alternate food sources now that catered seafood no longer available
Draft legislation allowing people to eat squirrels and possums
Overturn squirrels and possums legislation after animal rights groups protest
Hire animal rights groups to enforce the overturning of the legislation in order to protect squirrels and possums
Introduce tax bill to fund arming all police officers with harpoon guns and spears
Strengthen the security of governors mansion with sniper towers and tiger pits
...Maybe also a moat around the governor’s mansion
More drones from China, maybe bigger ones
Pass new legislation to fund hiring more enforcers to enforce things
Build checkpoints across the state to distribute milk and guzzoline
Create jobs by hiring welders to install armor plating on police cars
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(Super-secret surprise to be determined later)
Open the rest of the economy
Gladiator games anyone?
Other states have announced they will wait 10-15 years to judge the effectiveness of this 37 part plan before releasing their own plans. The only exception is Texas, whose governor simply said, "We're open, y'all!"