The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (No. 33)
January 28, 2022
THE GOOD
FEEL GOOD STORY OF THE WEEK: WWII Soldier’s Letter Given To Widow 76 Years After Being Sent
“LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN AND OUR FATHERS THAT BEGAT US”: Celebrated Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee dies at 102
WOW. JUST. WOW!!! Incredible story. And finally a story from the world of swimming that I can get behind: Tongan man, 57, survives 27-hour swim after being swept away by tsunami
THE MORE I HEAR ENES KANTER FREEDOM (YES, THAT’S HIS REAL NAME) TALK ABOUT FREEDOM AND COMMUNISM, THE MORE I LIKE HIM: NBA STAR ENES KANTER FREEDOM ACCEPTS YAO MING’S INVITATION TO VISIT COMMUNIST CHINA—WITH CLEVER CONDITIONS:
Lastly, Freedom speaks directly to Ming. “Listen, Yao Ming, you or your Communist Party cannot buy me. I do not need a luxury tour of China,” he says. “I want the world to see the real side of China under [the] cultish Chinese Communist Party’s brutal rule, [with] slave labor camps and millions living in fear because of inescapable government surveillance.” Freedom concludes the video, saying he will certainly buy his own ticket to China if Ming will agree to show him the real China of the Uyghurs, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Shuai.
Kudos to Enes Kanter Freedom for such a clear and clever response. It’s refreshing to see a high-profile celebrity refuse to bow to financial or social pressures and instead do and say what is right. It’s a good bet Yao Ming and the Communists wish Freedom would quietly go away. As of publication time, Ming and the Chinese government have yet to respond.
YES! Let’s do this: After 150 years, is the time finally right for deep-ocean mining? (Fascinating essay by the way.)
GOOD ARTICLE ON YET ANOTHER NEGATIVE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE OF THE LOCKDOWNS: The Pandemic Changed How We Drink. It’s Time to Go Back to the Joy of Social Drinking.
It is therefore not surprising that large-scale epidemics of alcohol abuse are invariably driven by one or both of these banes of modernity, distillation and isolation. Hard liquor becomes particularly harmful when the availability of spirits coincides with a breakdown of social order or ritual regulations. Both forces were at work, for instance, in the Russian vodka epidemic (1992-1994) that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union: life expectancy fell 3.3 years for women and an incredible 6.1 years for men, driven by a massive increase in vodka consumption. The restrictions on socializing caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may present us with a similar public health crisis. There is debate about whether or not overall alcohol consumption has increased, rather than simply shifting from bars and restaurants to the home, but either way our drinking has become more solitary, isolated, and unhealthy.
ARE YOU STARTING TO DETECT A THEME? How Alcohol Saved Civilization.
In Drunk, a witty and erudite homage to alcohol, Slingerland offers a novel explanation to an old evolutionary puzzle: Why do we keep drinking? “Humans are the only species that deliberately, systematically, and regularly gets drunk,” he writes. “The rarity of this behavior is not surprising, given its costs.” The downsides of alcohol have always been obvious: impaired motor skills, wretched decision-making, excruciating headaches, and assorted long-term damage to body and soul. Logically, a society of teetotalers ought to be so much more productive that it would long ago have conquered its drunken neighbors and eventually the rest of the planet. Yet from the ancient world until today, from the wine sipped at Greek philosophers’ symposia to the champagne toasts on New Year’s Eve, the richest and most dynamic societies have given alcohol a central role in their cultures.
MY DAILY COFFEE INTAKE IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY AND LIFE PROMOTING, BUT IT’S ALSO HEAVILY REGULATED. Two cups by no later than 4:30 AM. That’s it! No more coffee for the rest of the day. Oddly, my morning coffee is the best tasting thing in the world, but I don’t particularly like the taste at any other time of the day. Best News of 2021: Coffee Is Incredibly Good for You. Maybe your New Year’s resolution should be an easy one: drink more coffee.
AMAZING! Is there anything it can’t do? Hydroxychloroquine Shows Promise As A Treatment For M.S.
WAIT, WHAT? I THOUGHT THE REALLY SMART PEOPLE TOLD US THAT HORSE DEWORMERS WERE FOR HORSES WHO, YA KNOW, HAD WORMS: New Peer-Reviewed Study Shows Ivermectin ‘Significantly’ Reduces COVID Infections, Hospitalization, and Mortality Rates.
THE BAD
“NO” IS THE SHORT ANSWER. “IMMORAL AND FOOLISH” IS THE LONG ANSWER: Should the government control the price of food and gas?
WHEN THROWING AROUND OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY BECOMES AN ADDICTION: Biden administration approves college students getting COVID relief checks.
SOMETHING VERY BAD IS COMING. Promise. The Biden Administration Isn’t Even Hiding Its Designation Of Mainstream Americans As ‘Domestic Terrorists.’
Related: Is Tulsi Gabbard the only sane Democrat left in America?
ALTERNATIVE MEME (see below): “What socialism promises vs. what socialism delivers.”
(I’m in California right now, and I promise you that the second photo of LA is mostly what I’m seeing. Parts of the city look like the slums of some Third World country.)
And in a remarkable reversal of fortunes . . . may I present Poland in 1980 versus today:
BURN-SALT-REPEAT: Federal Government Lost 5x More to Stimulus Fraud than it Spent Developing COVID Vaccines.
TOTALITARIANISM: the “ism” that is spreading around the English-speaking world almost as fast as Covid-19. Yes, You Can Use the T-Word to Describe China
This year, H&M disappeared from China’s internet. Ride hailing, e-commerce, online promotions: The world’s largest fashion retailer simply vanished without a trace. Its stores were still open for business—if you could find them. They suffered no broken windows or tax raids, but China’s own Baidu Maps and even Apple Maps literally wiped them, well, off the map.
That might seem like a small price to pay for taking a principled stand against modern slavery. But the precision of China’s strike on H&M is just as shocking as its smothering completeness. It demonstrates that the government exercises a form of power in China that is as fine-tuned as it is total. Whether it’s lashing out at a corporate critic, silencing all warnings of an emerging infectious disease, or suppressing the language and religion of an entire ethnic group, China’s government is no brute-force authoritarian regime. It is the inventor of a new 21st century techno-totalitarianism. It possesses all the tools of classic totalitarianism—and many new ones of its own invention.
Totalitarians demand their people give up sentimental attachments to established institutions in favor of an empty ideology of state power. The great theorist of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt explained that totalitarians teach their followers to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” Totalitarian regimes are entirely unfeeling, committing genocide or scrubbing a company from the internet with equal equanimity. They murder as a simple matter of state policy. To use the chillingly clever aphorism so often attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” Or as Arendt put it, Hitler’s concentration camps made even “death itself anonymous.”
Read the whole thing before the CCP gets it taken down!
YES, YOU CAN USE THE A-WORD (AUTHORITARIAN) TO DESCRIBE SEVERAL WESTERN NATIONS: The West Is Burning Down Before Our Eyes.
AMERICA’S COMING TOTALITARIANISM: Editorial board argues military should lock unvaxxed Americans in their homes
The Salt Lake City Tribune editorial board published an editorial on Saturday that called on the Utah governor to use the National Guard to prevent unvaccinated citizens from going anywhere.
In an editorial titled, "Utah leaders have surrendered to COVID pandemic, the Editorial Board writes" the paper lays blame at elected officials for failing to mandate the vaccine for all citizens. The paper asserted that if Utah was a "civilized place," Republican Gov. Spencer Cox would implement a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the state and have the National Guard enforce the mandate by not letting unvaccinated people go "anywhere."
"Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere," the editorial board wrote.
CANADA’S COMING TOTALITARIANISM:·
Related: Covid: Quebec to impose health tax on unvaccinated Canadians. Why all the pretense? Just set up the damn camps and be done with it!
OUR FUTURE IS CLOSER THAN YOU THINK: Quebec descends deeper and deeper into COVID tyranny.
SERIOUSLY, THIS IS SOVIET LEVEL STUFF. I left Canada in 1979 because of the creeping socialism of Pierre Trudeau. Turns out Junior Trudeau is more than a chip off the old block: Oh, Canada: Get Jailed For 5 Years For Telling Your Kid They Aren’t Trans, Gay
Here’s how the text of the law defines “conversion therapy”: In sections 320.102 to 320.104, conversion therapy means a practice, treatment or service designed to:
(a) change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual;
(b) change a person’s gender identity to cisgender;
(c) change a person’s gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth;
(d) repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour;
(e) repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity; or
(f) repress or reduce a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.
Those who disobey the law could face up to five years in prison.
“Everyone who knowingly causes another person to undergo conversion therapy — including by providing conversion therapy to that other person — is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; or guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction,” the law states.
WHAT WAS THAT LENIN SAID ABOUT CAPITALISTS SELLING THE COMMUNISTS THE ROPE AND ALL THAT . . . ? Without firing a shot, China seizes control of America's farmlands
THEY LIED, BUT IT TURNS OUT NO ONE DIED: Not One Corpse Has Been Found In The ‘Mass Grave’ Of Indigenous Children In Canada.
THE UGLY
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? This is appalling: Virginia hospital denies unvaccinated patient spot on 'active' kidney transplant list: Terminally ill man refused the vaccine after contracting COVID-19
THE IRREPARABLE DAMAGE DONE TO CHILDREN: A Partial List of the Myriad Abuses That Facemasks Inflict on Our Children.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN TO AMERICA, AND HOW DID IT HAPPEN SO QUICKLY? Huge number of Dems want the unvaccinated to lose custody of kids!
Democrats were more than twice as likely as other voters to favor harsh government restrictions being placed on unvaccinated people’s lives, ranging from fines and house arrest to imprisonment in government facilities and loss of child custody, in a recent poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports and the Heartland Institute.
Forty-eight percent of Democratic voters said the government should be able to fine or imprison those who publicly question the COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy, . . . .
Twenty-nine percent of Democratic voters said the government should take people’s children from them if they refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine . . . .
HOW CAN THIS BE AMERICA? The stupidity, the immorality, and, yes, the evil of these people defies belief. And what happened to “your body, your choice”? Family Fights for Ivermectin for Dying Loved One, Courts Say ‘No.’