Cash on Hand

 

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr Instapundit reports on his recent experience in a market at a time when the computer network was down:

So, shopping at the fresh market tonight, we were among the very few to buy groceries, because their computer network was down and they couldn’t process credit or debit cards. They couldn’t even accept checks because those are run through an ACH payment system rather than deposited in the old way. We, however, were able to pay and get out, something only a couple of other customers could do. (One older guy, and a couple of teenaged girls who said “we rock it old school with cash,” which I thought was hilarious.) Most people didn’t carry enough cash for groceries.

Two lessons: (1) The “cashless society” is less robust than cash; and (2) Always carry enough cash to buy groceries, a meal out, and a tank of gas. Just in case.

Good advice.  But how will this work if/when the globalists impose a digital currency on us?

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Your weekend meme: First Ladies in Vogue

Seen on PowerLine’s The Week in Pictures (h/t Instapundit):

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Maybe there’s hope after all

 

Richard Fernandez, a/k/a Wretchard The Cat, has more optimism than some of us.  Mr. Instapundit posted this:

click to embiggen or click on the Instapundit link above

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January 6 propaganda

 

image of scary J6 mob via Substack

Glenn Greenwald’s article (The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes: As Kamala Harris compares 1/6 to 9/11 and Nancy Pelosi introduces the cast of Hamilton to sing about democracy, today’s inanity should not obscure its dangers.”) is extracted at Instapundit:

The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic . . . .

Full article is here via Instapundit.

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Ben Shapiro’s Hilarious Takedown of COVID Lies

 

Ben Shapiro’s Hilarious Takedown of COVID Lies
the Left Walked Back in 2021.

For New Year’s, correcting the record;  Mr. Shapiro initially posted these on a Twitter feed;  Instapundit has transcribed the postings for his readers:

1. Cloth masks are ineffective against omicron (Leanna Wen, CNN);

2. The vaccinated can spread and get covid;

3. The death rate is comparable to the flu (Chris Hayes);

4. Many people are entering hospitals with covid, not from covid (Fauci);

5. Natural immunity is a reason omicron hasn’t been as virulent (Fauci);

6. We have to take into account societal needs, not just spread prevention (CDC);

7. The asymptomatic should not be tested (NFL);

8. We should focus on hospitalizations and deaths, not case rate (Biden);

9. Children are not at risk and schools should remain open;

10. Covid is predominantly an illness affecting the immunocompromised and elderly and we should not shut down society.

Source here.

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Roger Simon: Do you trust your doctor anymore?

ROGER SIMON: Do You Trust Your Doctor Anymore?  (h/t/ Instapundit)

Do you trust your doctor anymore? Honestly?

I don’t mean Dr. Anthony Fauci. How can anybody trust him, with all the prevarications, constant shifts in policy and deceptions, not to mention hiding American taxpayer support for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Virology Lab and other aspects of the doctor’s dark past revealed in great detail in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book?

I’m talking about your own personal doctor, the man or woman who has been your friend and trusted counselor for years, maybe decades. How do you feel about that person? Has it changed?

What many are perceiving as a growing mistrust of physicians is one, among many, of the tragic fallouts of the pandemic.

How that happened is not that difficult to trace.

* * * * * * * *

I was not talking about all doctors, obviously. Many are brave, not just the well known signers of the Great Barrington Declaration and other eminent physicians interviewed here at The Epoch Times, quite a few local doctors as well, including some who practice something known as “functional medicine.”

But the great masses of doctors have melted under the pressure of the government, following the party line on the pandemic. If you mention hydroxychlorquine and ivermectin or some other therapeutic or even, in some cases, the apparent superiority of natural immunity, they either don’t hear you or respond condescendingly, then point to the necessity of the vaccine.

At that moment, they are thinking of themselves, of their families, their incomes, their medical licenses, their relationship to their hospital or clinic, medical systems entirely dependent on cooperation, financially and legally, with the ever-changing diktats of the CDC and FDA.

. . .

Full story is here (free, but you have to sign up).

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Brandon

Via Instapundit:

###

Irish Democracy = healthy non-compliance

 

Over at the NY Post, Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr. Instapundit, expands on non-compliance:

If regular democracy isn’t doing so well, maybe it’s time to fall back on “Irish Democracy.”

That’s what Yale political scientist James Scott calls the passive resistance of a society that doesn’t like what its rulers are doing to it. In his book “Two Cheers for ­Anarchy,” he writes, “One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish Democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

Irish Democracy is when the populace simply doesn’t cooperate with the agenda. Sometimes there is active sabotage, sometimes surreptitious monkey-wrenching, sometimes foot-dragging and sometimes outright noncompliance. Sometimes it’s all of those at once.

Right now, we are seeing some of that in response to vaccine mandates, mask rules and various other forms of population control that have been adopted since the pandemic struck. Go almost anywhere with a mask mandate, and you will see some people not wearing masks at all, daring anyone to do anything about it (often, they don’t).

You will also see a lot more with the mask pulled down below their noses, providing the vague suggestion of compliance without ­actually going along. These people will usually pull the mask up if asked, but then pull it right back down again as soon as the asker leaves the vicinity. (Hey, why take it seriously when our elites have made clear that the mask rules don’t apply to them and their gatherings?)

. . .

More of Instapundit’s article is here.

RELATED:  JD Rucker’s “Resistance Is Not Futile” at FreedomFirstNetwork. 

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Breaking the Progressive Narrative on Campus

 

Collin Pruett at The American Conservative sums it up (h/t Instapundit):

At college football games across the country the past two weekends, student sections erupted in “F— Joe Biden” chants. Thousands of unruly fans expressing their discontent with the president packed Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, and dozens of other football stadiums. Many conservatives I know found it impossibly crude. Others found it amusing. They all missed the point: The chanting did more to break the progressive narrative on campus than God and Man at Yale ever did.

Well-funded think tanks and decades of conservative activism failed to yield results. But two weekends of college football anarchy and a social media trend popularized by Barstool subsidiary “Old Row” has normalized conservatism on campus again. College administrators accustomed to threatening, brainwashing, and harassing their students finally met their match: ticked-off football fans. 

If these chants can start to break the stranglehold of progressive propaganda and indoctrination on campuses, it’s a good thing.  More on this and "Barstool Sports" here.

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Ike or Gen Mark Milley

 Via Instapundit:

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The lockdowns simply didn’t work

 

Brad Palumbo at FEE (Foundation for Economic Education - h/t Instapundit) confirms what many of us figured out maybe a month into the lockdowns:

We Just Got Even More Proof that
Stay-At-Home Orders Lethally Backfired

A new study finds that lockdown orders didn’t reduce overall mortality, and may have even increased it.

Life under lockdown was hard for all of us. From economic destruction to social isolation, the costs of restrictive government policies intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have been steep. But now, yet another study suggests that the benefits wrought by our collective sacrifice were negligible at best—and that stay-at-home orders may even have increased overall mortality.  

In a new paper, economists from the University of Southern California and the RAND Corporation examined the effectiveness of “shelter-in-place” (SIP) mandates, aka stay-at-home orders, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states. The experts analyze not just deaths from COVID-19, but “excess deaths,” a measure that compares overall deaths from all causes to a historical baseline. 

The authors explain that lockdown orders may have had lethal unintended consequences in their own right, such as increased drug overdoses, worsened mental health problems, increased child abuse, deadly delays in non-COVID medical care, and more. So, to find out whether stay-at-home orders truly helped more than they hurt, examining excess deaths, not just pandemic outcomes, is key. 

The results aren’t pretty. 

“We fail to find that shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report. Indeed, they conclude that in the weeks following the implementation of these policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been declining before the orders took effect. And across all countries, the study finds that a one-week increase in the length of stay-at-home policies corresponds with 2.7 more excess deaths per 100,000 people.

 

. . .

Read more here.

Flashback:  In July 2020. this blog linked to Heather Mac Donald’s Imprimis article “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance”;  click here.

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Sometimes you just have to laugh

Seen at Instapundit:  

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Media losing power?

 

Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr. Instapundit, makes a good case:

Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad —
because they’re losing power

With Donald Trump out of office and de-platformed, you’d think mainstream media gatekeepers would be happy. You’d think wrong.

Though the media-Big Tech regime is doing its best to silence opponents and seize control of the high ground, the news from within is grim. They aren’t happy with how things are going. 

That’s because they know they’re losing. Some are losing audiences and revenues. But more important, they’re losing control of the narrative.

And since control of the narrative, and the power and self-importance that accompany that control, is the most important thing in their lives, they can’t be happy.

Consider the cri de coeur of Washington Post public editor Hamilton Nolan, inspired by Tesla’s decision to scrap its media-relations department. How could that happen?

Nolan knows how, and that’s what bothers him: Tesla scrapped its media-relations department because the media don’t much matter to it. Tesla has plenty of ways to get its story out without relying on the media, and that makes the media much less important — and much less powerful. And it’s the power part that hurts the most.

. . .

I hope it’s true.  Read the rest here.

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Mr. Flip-Flop-Flip Fauci

 

Click to embiggen or click here for the image on Instapundit.

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The Lie That Was COVID

 

Robert Zimmerman blogs at BehindTheBlack.  Yesterday, he posted “The Lie That Was COVID” (h/t Instapundit), and he highlights the government's perpetually moving goal posts. Since there was a “share” option and it's short, I am posting the entire thing:

The lie that was COVID

This humor story at the Babylon Bee on February 8th is sadly 100% accurate and illustrates the utter lie that is at the foundation of everything we have been told about COVID-19:

Nation Prepares To Celebrate 1st Anniversary Of Two Weeks To Flatten The Curve

“This time of year we like to come together to remember the historic day one year ago when we put on masks and locked ourselves down, trusting that the lockdown would be over in just two weeks,” said local man Paul Christof as he stared out his window longingly, his three masks securely in place. “This year, I’m going all out with a Zoom party with no more than five of my closest friends — I mean, closest, figuratively speaking, of course. We’ll be literally far apart, because I want to stay home and stay safe, and I don’t want grandma to die.”

From day one, nothing we have been told by government health officials has been reliable or trustworthy. First we were only to lock-down for two weeks in order to slow the spread of the virus slightly so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. We were also told that we shouldn’t wear masks, because a century of research clearly showed them useless and possibly counter-productive if used improperly, and proper use was unlikely if used all the time.

Then we were told we needed to lockdown for months, because we wanted to stop the spread, a goal that was utterly impossible to meet. At that same time, suddenly health officials decided that the previous half century of research about masks was all wrong, and that we must wear them all the time.

These new rules were only going to be necessary until a vaccine was available.

Now, a year later, a vaccine is suddenly not enough to allow us to be free humans again. We must wear masks, with two masks being even better, and normal activities such as attending parties, sports events, shows, and concerts must still be forbidden.

Along the way, a lot of evidence raised legitimate questions about the way coronavirus deaths and cases were tracked, with much of it suggesting the numbers were being manipulated for political purposes.

The result today is that a very very large percentage of the population no longer trusts anything said by these health officials. And for good reason. They have lied, repeatedly, and liars should never be trusted, ever.

Not that it makes much different. These liars are firmly ensconced in power, and can say and do anything, including fines and punishments for not obeying their commands.

America is no longer a nation dedicated to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is now a place of lies, edicts, petty dictators, blacklists, and increasing oppression. All largely prompted by an irrational over-reaction to a virus that is really nothing more than a variation of the flu.

Our household is split; one will get the vaccine, the other won’t.  And Mr. Zimmerman’s blog is here.

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Election 2020 "will never be resolved"

 

Roger L. Simon’s “ The Disastrous 2020 Election Will Never Be Resolved” is behind a paywall at The Epoch Times,  but Instapundit has posted this extract:

It all began with mail-in voting—that scandal-ready procedure that was the electoral equivalent of flying over American states in B-52s as if they were behind enemy lines and dropping ballots at random.

If one were to design a system by which a democracy could be subverted, even destroyed, universal mail-in voting (not, of course, normal absentee voting that requires the citizen to request a ballot) would be at or near the top of a list.

What could go wrong?

It’s not just the obvious—dead people voting, people who left the state voting, illegal aliens voting, signatures no one could possibly recognize being authenticated, signatures with no record, envelopes being back-dated, ballots found in gullies, ballots dumped in gullies, ballot harvesting, foreign agents voting surreptitiously en masse, deadlines that keep moving like the proverbial goal posts, and who knows what.

It’s an actual guarantee of chaos—and that’s what we had and have.

No one will ever really know what happened.

The pandemic was the excuse, but I strongly suspect it was more than that. I suspect, in fact I’m sure, that the intention of some was to utilize the pandemic to institute mail-in voting because they knew it would create this chaos, almost like an Antifa for the electoral system.

How do we know it was in some ways intentional?

There was plenty of warning. Just this June, 223,000 ballots in Nevada’s Clark County—17 percent of that county’s electorate that includes Las Vegas—were sent willy-nilly to the wrong addresses for their primary, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

No evidence has been forthcoming that this was corrected. PILF president and general legal counsel J. Christian Adams calls mail-in voting “chaos that lends itself to fraud.”

PILF has posted a rather droll video—if it weren’t so depressing—of their investigators going to some of these registration addresses that turn out to be commercial businesses, not homes, where the putative voter may or may not have once been employed (in some cases no one seems to have heard of them). These include an abandoned mine, of all things.

If you have access to The Epoch Times, the full article is here.

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Journalism: RIP. Again.

 Instapundit published this today:

#JOURNALISM:

Or click here.

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COVID-19 stats and moving goal posts

 

Katie Adams reports at Hospital Review:

The Atlantic's COVID tracking project compiles data directly from the websites of local or state public health authorities. When data is missing from the websites, it supplements available numbers with information from official news conferences. Data was last updated Oct. 18 or 19, depending on the state.

Hospital bed capacity counts are based on 2018 data from the American Hospital Association.

And here are the stats for COVID-19 patients now hospitalized in Ohio:

Ohio: 1,154
State's hospital bed capacity: 33,157

And here’s Matt Walsh at Instapundit on the moving goal posts:

We need to stay locked down for 15 days

Actually a month

Actually two months

Actually three months

Actually until there's a vaccine
Never mind actually we can't trust the vaccine

All political power games.

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Voting Alone

 

Howard Husock explains why he will be voting on Election Day.  In a column at City Journal,  Mr. Husock's column starts off (h/t Stephen Green at Instapundit):

Voting Alone : Why I won’t be casting my ballot early—and why you shouldn’t, either.

Even as the presidential campaign continues, an estimated 6 million Americans in 27 states have already voted. Early voting is now a fact of electoral life. I will not be joining in the habit, however—and I urge you not to do so, either.

Voting early is akin to boxing referees declaring one fighter the winner on points halfway through the bout—not knowing that a knockout punch was on its way. It may be hard to imagine what revelation about the candidates, at this point, would make much of a difference. But history has demonstrated such possibilities. 

Even before the Hunter Biden laptop made its way into the headlines.  The rest of Mr. Husock’s column is here.

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Democrat Projection

 

A.F. Branco cartoons at Legal Insurrection

I first came across Caroline Glick ‘s columns at The Jerusalem Post. Over the weekend, Instapundit linked to her post at her own website.  It’s an excellent essay, and it concludes:

And this brings us to Democrat projection. Since the impeachment hearings last January, Democrat lawmakers and aligned media have been pushing the claim that Trump will refuse to accept the election results if he loses. Just as Trump is repeatedly asked whether he condemns white supremacists, he and his campaign advisors have been asked repeatedly by reporters whether he intends to concede if the results of the election are not in his favor. At Tuesday’s debate, Wallace continued the practice. He asked the candidates to pledge to accept the election results.

Biden quickly agreed. Trump refused to play the sucker’s game.

The President noted that the Democrats still haven’t accepted the results of the 2016 elections and tried to oust him from power through false allegations of collusion with Russia that Clinton invented while working with Russia. He also pointed out the ease with which mail-in votes can be, and allegedly already are being falsified by Democrats.

It is impossible to know how the election will pan out or when, if ever, the true results will be known. What is clear however is that if you want to understand who the Democrats are and what they are doing, all you need to do is look at what they are accusing Trump and his colleagues of being and of doing.

Read the rest here.

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