Got a call today from the Peter Meijer campaign, running for Justin Amash's seat (MI-3)

I asked about Meijer's position on immigration. Got the typical "he supports Trump's position" and favors lots of LEGAL immigration.

When probed on H1B visas the caller didn't know what they were. When I explained they allowed foreigners to work in the US, he offered that he thought Meijer was in favor of lots of those, too, even after I pointed out that tens of millions of Americans are out of work and don't need the competition. 

The campaign worker clearly expected me to be a libertarian who is in favor of lots of immigration, which is what you'll get from Peter Meijer, Republican, if he's elected.

The caller wasn't prepared to encounter a voter who has often voted Republican who is against that.

Shows you how thimble deep Republican thinking is on the issue, and that Trump's GOP hasn't moved an inch in the direction of immigration restriction, mostly because Trump's a phony on immigration.

Won't be checking the box for Peter Meijer.

If it isn't obvious by now that you're an idiot, Johnny Reb tried to tell you

The Civil War was obviously a waste of time, blood and property.

For every Confederate statue now coming down at the hands of BLM there will eventually be three of a founder of America, a Yankee, or an abolitionist to match it. Eventually, the symbols of your country will be gone. That you'll just let them go shows the actual country is already gone.

This isn't a war on racism. It's a revolution against America. Racism is simply the pretext for it. It is led by the "worldly" type of communist, the black radical who:

"with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power".

Think Shaun King the "Christian", who now explicitly aims to obliterate the white Jesus from every one of America's ~375,000 congregations.

No good deed is going unpunished, but fools like Ann Coulter will still argue that blacks deserve and should be paid reparations: Those who have done no wrong should pay those who have suffered none, we are told.

140,414 dead Yankees are just chopped liver to these ingrates and fools.

Pay all you want, it won't change a thing. Still more will be required of you.

They now think they have the upper hand and are out to replace you. "Diversity is our strength" means "their" strength, not yours. Diversity means your weakness, and the unchecked riots and looting are proof of it.

Christians 244 years ago took up arms against "tyrants" like these and called it "obedience to God".

I can't imagine finding one such person among us today. And you certainly won't find one among the paid mercenaries, the cops. They're just trying to make it to full retirement like everybody else.

Instead, most Christians have become Spengler's "credulous" type of communist, who:

"obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort".

On obsession with doctrine think First Things Magazine, think Sojourners, Christianity Today, and the Patheos crowd for the feminine sentimentalists and wealth condemners, think the Prosperity Gospel movement and the charismatic Dominionists for the critics of the Christianity which is content with little, think Rod Dreher's Benedict Option or the survivalists for the separatists, and also the libertarians who "go Galt", accountable to no one but themselves. Representative all.

Perhaps the only Christians who think in robust opposition to the communists are the followers of Adrian Vermeule who envision a once and future Roman Catholic authoritarianism from North to South America with a heavily Spanish content. In other words, when white supremacy fails, replace it with . . . not black.

 

"To put through the ideal requires dictatorship, reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of masters and slaves, men in command and men in obedience - in short: Moscow".

 

The answer to Bolshevism from the foremost grandmothers of Bolshevism is to double down on the Bolshevism. Pre-modern Europe was just a dress rehearsal.

 

I'm sure Black Lives Matter will be thrilled.

Two months ago, on the morning of March 10, Michigan still had zero cases of SARS-CoV-2

Today, May 10, Michigan has 46,756 cases and 4,526 deaths.

The case fatality rate of 9.68% is the highest in the nation.

In my county of Kent, barely 21% of the cases are Caucasian. By far Hispanic or Latino people have the most infections at over 35%, with African Americans having fewer cases than whites at 19.5%. Asians have fewer than 8% of total infections.

Frankly when I began posting about this in late January after following the news in China quietly for a few weeks prior to that I never imagined we'd be in this situation.

I felt certain America's health care system was too robust to let it happen.

Boy was I wrong. 

15% of those tested in the US have turned up positive so far, and of those 5.9% have died. Mind you, the average flu season in the US sees 8% of the population estimated to have been infected, with just 0.1% dying.

South Korea, on which I had hung my hopes as the proper comparison, has had just 1.6% test positive so far, with just 2.3% dying.

It's infection rate came way down from the 4.7% which obtained in early March because it employed extensive testing, quarantining (using phone apps to track, and gps wrist bracelets where necessary for scofflaws) and contact tracing. In other words, South Korea acted like Big Brother if you are an American libertarian.

South Korea's mortality rate came up dramatically from the 0.6% which obtained in early March, but of course it was still early in the outbreak. Needless to say, America's current rate of death at 5.9% is still 156% higher than South Korea's, despite the massive rise from 0.6%.

Cases in South Korea stubbornly remain below 11,000 in a country of 52 million (.02/million) because it determined to stop the spread.

In the USA we have .4/million and climbing (1900% more) because we are not a serious country.

We are a country filled with and run by childish people whose disregard for the health care system resembles nothing so much as the disobedient child's interminable disregard for a parent who never disciplines it.

Guess what? SARS-CoV-2 is coming for you. The beating will continue until morale improves.

It's the libertarian crazies among us who are clueless and spoiled, not the cooks, servers and dishwashers

"In other words, if they’re farming or working in a mine, they’re doing so by choice. This should be remembered the next time some spoiled or clueless American politician, economic thinker or worker yearns for a return of the jobs of the past. ... Increased devastation in the U.S. born of lockdowns will be cruel, and if not arrested through a cessation of lockdowns, will reduce Americans to work they previously wouldn’t have been caught dead doing".

-- John Tamny

Coronavirus data update for Sun Apr 26, 2020

Johns Hopkins reports right now 5,184,635 tests completed in the US with 940,797 confirmed cases of infection.

That's an infection rate of 18.1%, after stay-at-home has been observed more or less nationwide since mid-March. Average flu infection in the US, without stay-at-home, is 8%. So imagine how bad this could have been, and still might be.

Reports of infection rates as high as 31.5% in Chelsea, MA, are problematic. These are antibody tests, and so far have high false positive rates, meaning all the positives could be false, test populations which are much too small, and test populations which are not representative. People on the streets right now and people in grocery stores right now are not representative of the whole population. What's more, the antibodies detected by these tests could well be for non-COVID-19 coronaviruses, which means you've learned nothing about exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

There have been 54,001 deaths according to Johns Hopkins data right now, for a mortality rate of 5.74%.

Flu mortality averages 0.1%.

Therefore we are dealing with something at least 2.3 times more infectious than flu, and 57 times more deadly.

Global data indicates as of 0730 hours a mortality rate of 6.98%. Test data is too uneven globally to draw firm general conclusions. Mortality data from places like Iran at 6.31%, China at 5.53% and Russia at 0.92% just looks like lies in comparison to open, free societies, as follows.

The European big five, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the UK have an average mortality rate of 11%, 1.9 times worse than for the US. Germany remains a standout with mortality of only 3.75%, however, which is 35% lower than in the US. Belgium has the most liberal counts of deaths, and so a very high mortality rate of 15.38%.

Norway is at 2.68%, Sweden 12.06% (oops, they followed herd immunity, and are now paying the price), Finland 4.15%, and Denmark 4.84%.

Switzerland 5.56% and Austria 3.56% really stand out relative to Hungary at 10.88%.

Canada reports in at 5.6% with Mexico at 9.43%.

Japan and South Korea come in at 2.72% and 2.26% respectively.

It's obvious to me right now that if America wants to return to some sense of normalcy after this debacle has been allowed to reach the stage that it has, the only plausible way forward is to ramp up testing for the disease massively, and provide masks to the general population which protect it while in public. Instead our president and lawmakers have been busy with other things, like bailing out businesses. They are not serious people, anymore than the people they represent, a minority of which is clamoring for herd immunity, and therefore massive casualties.

The pro-life anti-abortion party is infected with a pro-death coronavirus party. The real division in the Republican Party between the actual conservatives and the libertarian ideologues has been laid bare by SARS-CoV-2. The former want to save you, as do many liberals. The latter believe only in survival of the fittest.  

The idea that immunity will be built up for this disease in the US population so that this will be over once and for all strikes me as completely speculative at this point.

America has to prepare to live with this disease indefinitely.  

Trump The Libertarian to America: We have to get back to work and infect the whole country in order to save it

“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this".

“America will again and soon be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting.”

'Trump very strongly hinted that he planned to ease federal guidance on social distancing at the end of his administration’s “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative, which ends next Monday, despite an expected explosion of reported cases as tests for coronavirus become more widely available.'

'Trump began broadcasting his growing impatience with public health measures meant to combat the pandemic — even as public health officials have offered contradictory forecasts — on Twitter over the weekend, a shift that continued throughout the day on Monday.'

Read the whole thing here.

The gifts of libertarianism: Plague of Women Voters, and plague

Trump vomits libertarianism and Richard Spencer laps it up

Nyet to Richard Spencer, libertarian, and his "Individualism unites societies"

Rod Dreher likes the French version of Southern Agrarianism, doesn't get it that whenever it raises its voice in America the Mark Levins of the world denounce it in the name of libertarianism and individualism

Nincompoops from left (Newsweek) to right (Sean Hannity) keep calling this a great economy, but believe me, I once knew a great economy, a great economy was a friend of mine, and this is no great economy

You'd better be a millionaire by the time you're 50 because they're going to fire your sorry ass in the United States of Libertarianism.

The death yesterday of British conservative Roger Scruton reminds us why conservatism in America is such a fraught enterprise

Scruton was what American conservative and fellow Burkean Russell Kirk might have styled a conservative of enjoyment, a person wedded to the vicissitudes of a local history come what may, with all the comforts, misfortunes, oddities and delights bound up in it, to whom it would never occur to be separated from it.

To be sure many Americans have been and still are people of such places, lovers of their new! ancestral homes, their communities, their churches and all the other institutions which over time they have come to make and make their own. This has been true especially in rural America, the bastion of Republicanism.

But this has always been in conflict with the idea and the reality of immigrant and industrial America, whose people are traitors to their birthplaces, homes and communities not just whence they came, but also here. Coincident with modernity's forces, these Americans willingly and happily move frequently for employment and new experiences, and abandon old places, old laws, old books, old boots and old friends whenever the winds of change blow strong enough in whatever direction. The great problem now is most never even bother to learn the old ways before they abandon them.

These libertarians now have the upper hand in America, making a sorry spectacle of the cause once known as conservatism. Most know nothing of what conservatism even means. Reading Scruton could teach them, but they would recoil in horror.

 

If Ann Coulter really means it, we should invade Mexico, kill their leaders and convert them to libertarianism

Ann Coulter endorses the dumb libertarian hide-your-head-in-the-sand take on Iran

Oh look! A deer!

They're Muslims. Kill 'em all. Let God sort 'em out. Like you said in 2001.

Oh, you mean like the billionaire Mercers, the open borders freak flag flying libertarians who co-opted Trump in August 2016?