Falling Down and Falling Apart

 

On his blogsite, Robert Stacy McCain quoted part of Tucker Carlson’s Tuesday monologue yesterday.  Our household deleted Fox from our Favorites list some months ago, but Mr. Carlson made some good points.

The lessons of [the 1993 film] Falling Down were on my mind as I watched Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue for his Tuesday program:

There are a lot of unprecedented things happening, but not all of them are shocking. For example, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that, once they got their hands on real power, the same lunatics who don’t believe in human biology immediately made a serious mess of our economy. It took them less than six months to do it.

First, they acted like the U.S. dollar had no value. They spent money like they’d just printed it for the occasion, which, needless to say, they had. Predictably, we wound up with frightening levels of inflation, which for the record they still deny exists. But inflation does exist, as you well know if you live here.

Corn prices, to name just one example of a staple commodity that’s now out of control, have risen by 50 percent just since January. But that wasn’t bad enough. The lunatics decided to make it worse. They paid millions of Americans more than they make at work, to stay home and do nothing. To justify doing this, they used the word “COVID” quite a bit, but it had nothing to do with the pandemic. They just wanted to break the system. And so they did. And the rest of us immediately wound up with a bewildering combination of rising unemployment in the middle of a severe labor shortage.

So, at the very same time, we found ourselves with too many workers, and also too few workers. That doesn’t even make sense, but thanks to their policies, that’s now exactly what we have. And then, finally, in case 2021 didn’t remind you enough of a grimmer version of the 1970s, we now have serious gas shortages, in a country that just recently was energy independent. All along the east coast of the country today, people couldn’t fill up their cars. The footage looks like Venezuela.

And so forth. The real point — why it reminded me of Falling Down — is that ordinary citizens are powerless to fix this manmade disaster. The people in charge don’t give a damn about ordinary citizens, because if they did, they wouldn’t have done what they’ve done. We find ourselves in a broken system, where the incentives have gone haywire, and the world has stopped making sense. 

See – it’s not just you.  (Mr. McCain's full blog post is here.) 

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Available early treatment protocols?

 

Mark Wauck at Meaning in History has useful information just in case you are exposed to COVID-19; his post concludes:

The article--What is causing COVID-19 deaths to spike in India?--is highly informative and contains multiple graphs that illustrate the author's points in a useful way. Beyond that, however, the author points out another signal failure of our Covid response: the systemic failure to authorize a treatment regime for Covid. Indeed, we now know that the reason for this failure--this refusal--is closely linked to the push for vaxxing. Here is his conclusion:

This finding reinforces why an early treatment protocol is essential. However, my own doctor confirms there is no early treatment approved to treat COVID-19 in the U.S. (and probably most western countries) except quarantine with instructions to go to the hospital when symptoms worsen. This (perhaps criminal) omission is one more reason deaths got so high.  

A new anti-viral drug called Molupiravir is nearing completion of clinical trials.  It is intended as a five-day outpatient treatment similar to Tamiflu commonly prescribed to combat the effects of influenza. It would lack the unwarranted controversy surrounding the off-label use of HCQ making it ideal for an early treatment protocol.    

Until the CDC authorizes an early treatment protocol, we are on our own. However, there are several inexpensive, safe, common vitamins/drugs proven effective against COVID-19 that are available over the counter.  Examples include vitamin    D3,  Zinc, Glutathione, Quercetin, and even low-dose aspirin. There are others, and with some research you can be your own first responder. 

Full blog post is here.

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The Infernal Revenue Service

 

Here’s Cal Thomas at Newsbusters on torture at tax time:

Thanks to the beneficence of the Internal Revenue Service -- and the fallout from COVID-19 -- we half of Americans who pay federal income taxes have been given until May 17 to file.

Since I began earning enough to file Form 1040 and associated forms, I have only known one person who prepared his own taxes. That was Bill Archer, a Texas Republican who formerly headed the House Ways and Means Committee. I once asked Archer why he prepared his. His reply was that not only did he think it was fun, but because he helped write the tax code, he felt a responsibility to demonstrate competence in filling out the forms.

These days, the forms are so complicated, hardly anyone I know understands them. The instructions need instructions.

I have again filed jointly with my wife (more than 70 pages). She owns a business, so it is more complicated than if we filed separately. Still, the forms require translating a language I have never studied and wouldn't want to. If you call the IRS and ask for help, you are still responsible for interest and penalties if they give the wrong advice.

How complicated is it? Here are just a few examples. Right off the top, I am threatened with prison should I knowingly fudge information on the form. The federal government does threats very well, including those read by flight attendants. Refuse to wear a mask, even if vaccinated, and you risk arrest. Don't even think of tampering with the smoke detector. Even the post office is now spying on us.

How's this for clarity from the estimated tax worksheet: "Add lines 2a and 2b. Subtract line 2c from line 1. Figure your tax on the amount on line 3 by using the 2021 Tax Tables. Caution: If you will have qualified dividends or a net capital gain or expect to exclude or deduct foreign earned income or housing, see worksheets 2-5 and 2-6 in Pub. 505 to figure the tax."

Got that?

There are schedules and forms for everything. They are nearly as numerous as the growing list of gender identities. Under Schedule D, Profits and Losses, there is this gibberish: "Totals for all short-term transactions reported on Form 1099-B for which basis was reported to the IRS and for which you have no adjustments (see instructions). However, if you choose to report all these transactions on Form 8949, leave this line blank and go to line 1b."

Say what?

No civilized society should force its citizens to go through this annual torture.

. . .

The rest is here.

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David Horowitz: Divisions of our time

 

David Horowitz is a red-diaper baby who not only rejects communism but is an eloquent and prolific defender of the Constitution and freedom.  He is the proprietor of David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and its online presence at Front Page Mag.  His essay yesterday is my idea of a must-read.  It begins:

My Former Friends Have Joined the Fascists:

A personal tale of the divisions of our time.

The accusation that dissent is dangerous and must be suppressed mimics the fascist voice of the Democrat Party in its campaign to criminalize anyone who questions the 2020 election. Calling the break-in to the Capitol “an armed insurrection,” when there were no arms and no insurrections, ordering 25,000 troops to the Capitol to deal with a non-existent threat, calling Republicans “enemies of the state” (Pelosi), authorizing witch-hunts of (right wing) “extremists” in the military, the Capitol police and the Department of Homeland Security, seeking the expulsion of Senators Hawley and Cruz and the impeachment of the president for questioning the legitimacy of the electors are of a piece with Radosh and Stern’s malicious charge against me. The aim is to criminalize dissent and make it a high crime in the process.

The reality of course is that Democrats themselves have challenged the legitimacy of every Republican presidential victory this century, including the election of Trump, which they have never accepted. Their “resistance” has caused great damage to the republic, which they prefer not to notice.

The full essay is here. 

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Wokeness erasing America

 

Most excellent commentary from Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness:

If wokeness should continue and “win,” by now we all know where it will end up. After all, this is not a prairie-fire, peasants-with-pitchforks, spontaneous bottom-up revolution.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.

. . .

Full article is here.

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Absurdities Of The COVID Pandemic

A.F. Branco cartoons are published at Legal Insurrection.com

The Top 10 Absurdities Of The COVID Pandemic…So Far 

by Zero Hedge,posting at InfoWars

In countdown order:

#10 – One-way traffic rules in supermarket aisles –

#9 – COVID is Trump’s fault –

#8 – Teachers can’t go back to work, but everyone else can –

#7 – It was xenophobic for Trump to halt travel from China  –

#6 – Fifteen days to slow the spread  –

#5 – President Joe Biden: “Help is on the way” –

#4 – The response by The World Health Organization –

#3 – Blue states did it better –

#2 – Get the vaccine, but keep doing all of the other stuff  –

#1 – Wear two masks  –

The beginning of the pandemic was chaotic, and it would have been understandable if Dr. Anthony Fauci had simply made a mistake when he told us we didn’t need masks. But it wasn’t a mistake. He lied to us and admitted doing so. Fauci justified his deceit by claiming concern that masks might not be available for health care professionals. Then Fauci decided to stop lying to us and told us to wear masks, but wouldn’t even follow his own directive. Fauci threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals opening game last year, and forget that he threw the ball like a little girl; which, if anything, is insulting to little girls. He was wearing a mask despite the nearest person being sixty feet away. He then proceeded to sit in the stands directly next to a friend, at which point he removed his mask. Then late last year Fauci decided that it would be best if we wore two masks, without any evidence to support his notion. Like lockdowns, there’s still no evidence that mask-wearing had a significant impact on the pandemic. Dr. Fauci has zero credibility at this point, and if you’re following this recommendation by wearing two masks, then you are a moron.

More chapter-and-verse  here.

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Babylon Bee Fun

 From the newspaper of record, er, satire at the Babylon Bee:

CIA Replaces Waterboarding With 12-Hour Lectures On Intersectional Feminism

May 5th, 2021 - BabylonBee.com

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