Source and related blog post by Kent McManigal —– Three months ago, as the COVID-19 lockdowns entrapped us, a friend told me, “Claire, this is TEOTWAWKI.” I objected, “This is bad. This is petty dictatorship. This is totalitarian thinking. But it’s hardly the zombie apocalypse.” “I didn’t say zombie apocalypse,” he reminded me. “I said the end of the world as we know it. And it is. From now on, everything is changed: our relationship to government, the economy, society, our personal expectations, everything.” He was right. He just didn’t know how prescient he actually was. —– He became much…
Author: Claire
Okay, after months of madness and rants, time for some (mostly) upbeat news. So here we have positive political developments, scathingly rational commentary, and even a couple of charming monkeywrenches. Enjoy. “The Rebellion of America’s New Underclass” by Joel Kotkin. Sooooo very typically politically sneaky and snaky, if true: Money donated to Black Lives Matter, specifically earmarked to defund police, is going straight to the Joe Biden campaign. (I haven’t verified this.) Glenn Greenwald (who, along with Matt Taibbi is one of the few rational, liberty-respecting voices remaining on the left) excoriates the politicians and so-called medical experts who performed…
Many times over the last two weeks I’ve attempted to blog. Each time, useful thought gets blocked by the same perception: The crazy; it’s just too thick. Each day I think I’ve processed the latest craziness enough to blog something coherent. Useful even. But then new waves of craziness wash over the world. I don’t know what to say. I can’t write good sense against the onslaught of the crazy. I don’t know how civilization is holding together under tsunamis of crazy. But then, of course civilization isn’t holding together — and I’m not just talking about the one-two punch…
Been a while since we had a simple links post … Tomorrow is “Take Yourself to Work Day” in Michigan. 🙂 Eric Peters says reopen and reject. The great Paul Rosenberg: Nothing changes as long as we obey. Still waiting for that $125 Equifax was going to send you for sloppily letting your personal information be grabbed by identity thieves? You aren’t getting it, but banks are getting their share. Wearing a mask, are you? Not to worry; this company thinks it can help Big (and Little) Brother recognize and track you via your eyes and eyebrows alone. And this…
I’m fully aware that lots of people have bigger problems due to the current political lockdown. If you’re one of the suffering, you have my outraged sympathies. I’m not in a league with the impoverished, the busted, the ones in dire need of “elective” health care they’ve been forbidden to get, or the about-to-go-bankrupt entrepreneurs. But I reserve the right to be ticked off at the small stuff that keeps getting shoveled daily into all our faces and I’m presently irked because I can’t get away from the crazy. This is a small town. Other than the occasional village idiot…
Away from the constant drumbeat of scare stories about the new black plague … lies the real world. In case any of you remember last year’s laborious rock-wall project and wondered how the succulent plantings survived the winter: The pictures don’t do justice. While the yellow jumped out into the camera, there’s also quite a lot of dark red that doesn’t show well. I couldn’t get it to pop even with a color-balance and hue-saturation adjustment. Take my word for how colorful it really is. 🙂 The main thing is that the sedum not only survived the winter but is…
So two “very smart people” walk into a bar the Oval Office. Bear with me. This is the biggest joke ever. So in they walk and they say to the prez, “Hey, prez. There’s this guy in England with a long, long history of overblown and hilariously wrong predictions of health disasters. He says 2.2 million Americans are going to die of Covid-19 if we do nothing, and a million will still go even if we do. No better scientists have backed up his work. “What say you recommend shutting down the entire country, and especially its small-business economy, based…
Pardon the sappy subject line, but after last week’s angry rant it seems right to post some rays (even if they are just very little pinpoints) of good cheer. Life goes on despite every petty act of totalitarianism from every petty politician or bureaucrat — and both real rebellion and creative monkeywrenching appear and grow. —– On the personal front, shortly after I ranted last week, a longtime Commentariat member and friend-I’ve-never-met wrote to remind me, in the nicest way, to follow my own advice. That is: Not to let the bastards grind me (you, us) down. Stupid, evil bastards…
I dreamed last night that I was in Portland with a dozen or so blog friends when The Big One hit. We had gone to the city searching for Covid-19 supplies, which was tough enough. But now we were trapped by Mother Nature — in a world where people had been ordered to fear and avoid each other. In a world where natural instincts to help had been crushed. For some reason, I had a large collection of books with me, which two of my friends quickly “borrowed” without permission. I knew they immagined my collection would be loaded with…
Shamelessly stolen from Maggie’s Farm. Dunno who they may have stolen it from 😉 but it’s a good one.