Category: Pandemic that Ate a Planet

Conservative Communist Canada

Doug Ford, the “conservative” premier of Canada’s most populous province, my native Ontario, has once again instituted a province-wide “stay-at-home order,” promising that those found in violation of his government’s strict but nebulous new rules on private behavior (i.e., living) and business activity (i.e., supporting oneself) — those whom Ford labels “bad actors” — will be punished. Will this ever end? I know...

Discussion Questions for Your New Year’s Zoom Party

Do you believe that the state has the authority — legal or moral — to shut down any or every sector of society as it sees fit, when it sees fit, for any reason that the state has decided warrants suspending all property rights, all private economic activity, and all freedom of movement and association indefinitely? If so, explain? (Note: “This pandemic is...

A Little Stock-Taking

For decades, we all tried to deny this looming cloud to some degree in order to carry on with our daily lives and interests. Some even tried to deny the threat outright, on the grounds that they could still carry on with their daily lives — as though “daily life” were evidence of freedom. This year, however, denial has become impossible: You live...

COVID Context Again (Updated with More Context!)

The other day, in my essay “COVID Context Alert,” I concluded by yet again comparing this year’s fake cataclysm in the U.S. to the same country’s battle with the 1918 flu pandemic: The 1918 flu pandemic death total, by the way, if we could estimate its size relative to today’s U.S. population, would be well over two million — about seven times this year’s coronavirus...

COVID Context Alert

The heart of statistical propaganda is the calculated citing of ominous-sounding numbers without any clarifying context, which is to say without those numbers being subsumed within an attempt to provide knowledge, but instead isolated so as to provoke hysteria of the sort that cries out for saving action, any action, from anyone who promises to alleviate the panic state, if only you will...

The Worst Event That America Will Face

A few days ago, White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Birx, Dr. Fauci’s priggish schoolmarm understudy, went out of her way to establish for all who ever doubted it that she is (a) a hyperbolic alarmist worthy of the nether regions of the Trump campaign’s legal team, (b) quite ignorant and narrowminded, and (c) a leading candidate for Upper Class Twit of the...

Random Reflections on Tyranny and Thugocracy

If I were an old man, and I were told that for the sake of my health, the government was going to universally restrict normal life throughout my community indefinitely, causing widespread unemployment, poverty, small business failures, suicides, untreated cancers, mass hysteria, and a general breakdown of civility and goodwill among my fellow citizens, would I thank the government for protecting me at...

Santa: Superspreader!

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. — I suspect we will not be hearing that middle name too often in the mainstream media — is out there today courageously urging his fellow Americans to overcome their fears, to come together with strength as the American people always have during a crisis…and to hide from each other by avoiding their loved ones at Christmas, by not...

Pandemic Lexicon

COVID-related: Euphemism for “government-imposed,” designed to obscure the real effects of excessive state power by reframing these effects as symptoms of a virus that has in fact caused almost no such effects, e.g., “COVID-related unemployment,” “COVID-related poverty,” “COVID-related closures,” “COVID-related suicides,” etc.

Expert: (1) A person whose beliefs about a given subject have been elevated to the status of absolute truth by…