Month: June 2020

I see a number of organizations are posting on FB about Juneteenth.

The thing is, before now, nobody ever seemed to really care about Juneteenth except folks in the South (and then, generally only black folks in the South) until suddenly it became chic to show your non-racist chops by talking about things you never talked about before because previously they were not important to you (or more to the point, to your fans/customers/etc).

My prediction is that by next year, Juneteenth will lapse once again into a holiday that only certain people celebrate or notice.

And I’m not trying to be a butthead, here.  I fully understand what Juneteenth is about and I’m all for people celebrating it.

But don’t turn it into a commercialized observance like so many other things.  I don’t want to see ads in the Sunday paper for the Juneteenth furniture and mattress sales.  Face it, I’m a Jew, and Passover is all about celebrating liberation from slavery.  But it’s a holiday for Jews, not for the general damn public (which is why you’ll never see an “ecumenical” Passover seder held by Jews on the first night of Passover — first night’s for Jews only).

And I don’t imagine the black community wants to see Juneteenth commercialized, either.  But I haven’t asked them, so I won’t presume to speak for them (and wouldn’t anyway; I’m not black, and I haven’t — as a former boss of mine often put it — walked in their shoes).

So I will say, simply, Happy Juneteenth to those who celebrate it, and who memorialize and commemorate their freedom from slavery.

Shared by a (left-wing) friend on Facebook, unironically of course:

Just to make a point, they do that shit in Asia because their usual social distance is a fuckload closer than the average American’s.  But that’s beside (and misses) the point.

The main problem with this Twat is that nobody in America is crying about being oppressed, or taking up arms and storming government buildings, over the wearing of masks in a time of ‘rona.  I mean, I’m flatly stating I won’t wear one, because I can’t breathe with one on (proved that the other night when I got my hair cut for the first time in two months, put a mask on to appease our friend who is also our stylist and things got so humid behind it that, even with dry mouth, I aspirated water and started coughing within five minutes, so go fuck yourself about masks).

But people in America aren’t crying, etc., about masks.  They’re crying about being oppressed and taking up arms and storming government (and other) buildings (and looting them) over the death of a Minneapolis perp who died from a shitty and oft-complained-about cop kneeling on his neck because he was struggling and resisting arrest.  This, of course, was cause for an uprising in many cities around the nation, where peaceful protests turned into armed riots, smashed storefronts, looted stores, and a call to abolish (or at least “defund”) the police.  Who in the event were worse than useless in stopping the rioting and looting, so maybe they have a point.  But it’s a limited point, because the police were typically handcuffed by their local mayors and other politicians, and weren’t allowed to do anything about the rioting and looting.  Like shoot rioters and looters.  Which is what people used to do, when this country still had a soul.

And now they’ve burned a Wendy’s — allegedly black-owned — in Atlanta because another dumb perp — drunk in this case — who managed to get a cop’s Taser away from him and was trying to use it on him and his fellow arresting officer, got shot dead by said arresting officers, who were in reasonable fear for their lives.

The best (or worst, depending on your outlook) part?  In both cases, the only reason anyone is upset is because the perps were black and the officers were white.

So to get back to the Twat posted above:  Foreigners who know nothing about America are self-centered idiots and should fuck off.

Mark Steyn on Facebook this morning:

Five years ago today, round about 11.05am Eastern June 16th 2015, a New York property developer and TV host with no experience of elected office announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States.

link

I’ve noted many times that I wasn’t initially a fan.  I agitated for and voted for Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary.  Immediately after which, Cruz capitulated and The Donald “cruised” to victory at the Republican National Convention, and of course, later in the Electoral College as well.

After the Indiana primary and Cruz’s withdrawal in May 2016, I changed my tune.  I didn’t get out and rabidly campaign for Trump, but I was at least amenable to his candidacy.  I could see what he was doing through my historian’s eyes; he was and is, of course, not the first populist in American history to turn out those who usually remain silent and often never bother to cast a ballot.  He brought excitement to a process that has had very little excitement since at least the days of Ronald Reagan, and probably before.  Sure, he’s no Jack Kennedy, but his First Lady is no Bill Clinton.  And for that we should all be grateful.

Certainly there was no way to predict the future and what sort of administration our billionaire bankruptcy-prone TV star “you’re fired” boss candidate would lead.  And I doubt that anyone really foresaw the resistance that would pop up on both the right and left to his presidency.  But quite a few rubes did self-identify, and a number of judges have marked themselves as unfit for the bench in the process.  The “never Trump” movement have made asses of themselves, and the left has found itself tied up in knots by Trump’s willingness — nay, even eagerness — to troll them incessantly.

His opponent, in the meantime, has done little to prove that she’d have been a better president — indeed, she’s done a lot to prove she’d have been a lot worse.  I’m certainly glad she wasn’t president when the ‘rona hit our shores.  I for one didn’t want to live in a John Ringo novel, and thanks to this president, we probably aren’t going to.  Though it’s still anyone’s guess if we’ll have enough food this winter, what with all the disruptions caused by what is increasingly looking like unnecessary state-level shutdowns whose rationale seemed to change by the day as they stretched on longer and longer and longer to little or no good effect (and plenty of bad effect).

The people who riot and complain about his presidency are little more than bad-tempered children who didn’t get their way.  They know as little about America as most of the rest of the world — mostly because Hilary Clinton’s generation of Gramscians brainwashed them from the day they hit the school doors in first grade into being good little socialists.  They have a blind spot about charging Trump with being a Nazi, a fascist, a tyrant, and a bigot — and that blind spot is in their own mirrors when they look at themselves.  There is no bigger fascist or bigot in this country today than those who are projecting their own proclivities on Donald John Trump, and by extension, on the rest of the normal half of this country.

As for me, I don’t give a shit if you’re black, white, brown, yellow, green, or purple.  If you’re a human being, that’s all that counts; as a friend of many years’ standing tends to quote in cases like that, “The thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a pea-wit. You take men one at a time.”*

But then we get down to beliefs and philosophies.  That’s where you can feel free to call me a bigot, because if you’re a socialist left-wing cocksucker who’s bound and determined to destroy this country so you can have Venezuela or Cuba on a grand scale, you can go fuck yourself.  Or if you’re a radical Islamic fundamentalist who wants Americans to kneel and submit to Sharia law, fuck you twice.  Damn straight I’m bigoted against that.

These attitudes, though, pre-date Trump.  They pre-date Obama.  They pre-date Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, and Ford.  They go back to the very formation of my political and moral philosophy.  And I suspect that most folks who will vote for Trump in 2020 hold the same sort of attitudes.

So you will find that we believe strongly in civil rights, and in the various Civil Rights Acts as passed over Democrat objections back in the day, at least up to the Civil Rights Act of 1968.  (The one passed in 1991 is weak and ought to be repealed.)  Likewise we believe strongly in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, even if it was passed and signed by Democrats.  (Democrats were different, back in the day.)

And I believe strongly that Donald Trump is also a big fan of civil rights.  Other than a couple of fumbles on 2A issues (the bump stock EO was not needed and made him look bad among 2A types, most of whom think bump stocks are stupid anyway), he is clearly a believer in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Whereas his opponents mostly give those documents lip service and ignore them unless they’re trying to expand the emanations and penumbras that are already total bullshit and inimical to the spirit and glory of the Constitution.

What Trump’s opponents either don’t realize or are hoping nobody else will notice is that if Trump were going to become a tyrant and start oppressing folks and shipping people he doesn’t like to concentration camps, he would already have started doing so.  But this is what they claim will be the result of a Trump presidency, even three and a half years into his term.  (Hey, Don, you’d better hurry up.  Where are those concentration camps I was promised?)

And they call the man a Nazi, even when his daughter is married to an Orthodox Jew (and converted herself and has brought her children up in the faith).  Fucking mind-boggling.

Anyway, it’s been an interesting half-decade.  I’m looking forward to the next half-decade, with Trump still large and in charge after the 2020 elections.  He’s convinced me that he’s worth the vote.

(You’ll note that nowhere in this post did I refer to him as the Intergalactic Grand Master of Trollery.  This is one of the most entertaining parts of the entire administration, and if the press would ever figure out that he’s trolling them unmercifully, they’d stop whinging about it and it would lose most of its effectiveness.  But by all means, left whingers, er, wingers, of the press, please, keep on complaining and looking like the crybabies you really are.)

_______________________

* “Pvt. Buster Kilrain”, in the film Gettysburg, when asked what he thinks of Negroes, by Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

And by “partial information,” I mean the people running around like Chicken Little, but screaming, “Reported cases are up!  Reported cases are up!”

Usually along with something that implies Orange Man Bad, or Republican Governor of My State Bad.

Of course reported cases are up.  Thanks to Orange Man, his sidekick Race Bannon, and their crew of intrepid People Who Get Things Done, COVID-19 testing numbers are way, way up from where they were even a month ago.  So naturally the number of reported cases is up.

What’s interesting is that even with states opening back up, they’re not up all that much.  And hospitalizations are not up.  Which implies that the vast, vast majority of cases are either asymptomatic, or so mild that all they require is bed rest and fluids.  Like a bad cold.  Which is also caused by coronaviruses.

Here’s the Indiana total reported cases table from the last time I enumerated them (April 29), updated with today’s ISDH numbers. I’ve also added the death count for May 28, but unfortunately I didn’t note the total positive cases or total tested for that date.  So the values there are starred, as I don’t trust them; they came off of ISDH’s page today, so ISDH has had plenty of time to diddle the numbers.

 

Statewide COVID-19 Totals from ISDH

Date	Total Positive Cases	Total Deaths	Total Tested
April 4	3,953	116	19,800
April 29	17,182	984	91,550
May 28	*32,943	1,871	*272,052
June 14	40,430	2,251	355,829

And here’s a cute chart to go along with that.

As you can see, the total deaths aren’t sufficient to raise very far off the baseline at all.  Yes, scale is everything, but I can’t show you the relationship between the number of deaths and the number of tests if I use a smaller scale.  OK, OK, fine.

Deaths are still statistical noise compared to the number of tests.  And to the number of reported cases, too.  And frankly, reported cases are statistical noise compared to the number of tests.  See that jump in tests that isn’t accompanied by a similar jump in reported cases?  That really ought to tell you something.

Apparently it tells ISDH that they need to protect their phoney baloney jobs, because they don’t show you a trend chart like this on their website.

In Indiana, there have been only 11 new deaths in the last month (May 13-June 14).  Total deaths counted by ISDH are still only 2,251.

Which is interesting, because when I last wrote about this on May 28, there had been only 1,871 deaths counted by ISDH.  380 does not equal 11.  Or let’s even be charitable, since it’s only been a half month since the last time I wrote, and say that 380 does not equal 5.5.

ISDH, you’re playing with the numbers again, and you’re not explaining what’s behind them.  And you’re still not showing recoveries.  You added a box that says “probable COVID-19 counts” and it contains a number labeled “Total Probable Deaths”, which is 182.  Which also doesn’t equal 380, but it’s your attempt to associate deaths where there was no test but the physician stated COVID-19 was a “contributing cause of death”.  Of course if there was no test, the patient could have died of the flu.  Or a really bad cold.  Or the dropsy.

Still…We could have had 2,251 deaths at my high school the year I graduated, and the whole senior class could still be alive.  And as I’ve been trying to point out constantly, that number of deaths is spread across the entire 7 million people who reside in the state of Indiana.  It’s about one in 3200.  So on average, it’s still around the equivalent of one student in my entire high school the year I was a senior.  We lost something like seven classmates before we graduated.  One more wouldn’t even tip the scale.

Oh, and hospitalizations.  If cases were really way, way up, you’d expect hospitalizations to be way, way, up, too.

Naw.  ISDH page today shows ICU bed usage at only 58.8% — and 46.1% are in use for non-COVID patients.  12.7% are in use for COVID.  But what about ventilators! you ask.  Yeah, what about ’em?  17% are in use, only 4.1% for COVID and 12.9% for other patients.  A whopping 83.1% aren’t even in use.

It’s time to open things up.  Time to open them all the way up.  And time to stop virtue-signaling with masks and social distancing and all that crap.

Because if you can demonstrate in huge crowds, you can go to church, and the store, and the museums, and everything else.

Governor, Mayor, let our people go.  Or we’re just going to go whether you like it or not.

EDIT TO ADD:  I just realized those testing numbers mean that more than 1/20 of the state’s population has been tested.

…they do it anyway.

NFL Pledges to Spend $250 Million on Social Justice Causes

Jeebus cripes.  Brother Kipling, what say you?

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

Yep.

I hope you, the Washington Township School Board, and the Metropolitan School District of Washington Township choke on your property tax increase.

The crazed Left weren’t able to topple Trump with WuFlu, aka the Chinese Plague, so all this news about the lockdowns/stay-at-home orders being ineffective and too late in most cases, and actual medical people saying wearing a mask outside of a medical facility “offers [you] little, if any, protection from infection”, is suddenly coming to light.

See many links at Legal Insurrection, courtesy Instapundit.  And if you don’t like that Sarah Hoyt posted it because “Sarah Hoyt has a political agenda”, then you can kindly fuck off and never darken my door again.

“Never mind. We’ll get the Orange Man another way, my pretties! Everybody downtown for the staged Antifa riots tonight!”

Oops. Might want to reconsider making that 8PM appointment for rioting and dancing.

Last word:

Apparently not anymore.  Apparently we’re just as welcoming of looters as we are homeless and other vagrants on our streets.  So instead of shooting a few looters pour encourager les autres and beating the hell out of the rest, we got to sit on our asses at home last night in yet another form of lockdown — the curfew.  (And we’ll get to do it again tonight, apparently.)

This needs to stop, and it needs to stop now.  But Indianapolis is becoming another Detroit as we watch — not a surprise given the abandonment of the city to the Democrats.

None of this crap brings George back to life, you know.  And it won’t stop the cops next time they run up against a “George”.

The America my father and his brothers fought to defend is gone.  What is left is merely the twitching carcass.  May it rest in peace.