On March 11 Dr. Anthony Fauci famously told a congressional hearing that the COVID-19 virus was “ten times worse” than the seasonal flu.  Then fifteen days later, on March 26, he co-authored an article that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in which he wrote that the COVID-19 was “no worse” than a “very bad flu” but nothing like SARS or MERSA.

Having been involved in the academic publishing business for the past 41 years, I can say with some authority that the article published in the New England Journal of Medicine was almost certainly submitted to the journal months before March 11, probably many months.  This fact suggests that Fauci knew on March 11 that he was misleading Congress — and the world — about the severity of the coronavirus.

According to the cdc.gov Web site as of 8 AM EST on March 28:

COVID-19:      1,711

Seasonal Flu:   As many as 62,000

They speak out against hysterical fearmongering and the politicization of science.

Good for Shannon Bream for allowing him on to give his view. Strange times when even AOC makes one good point.

Yoo’s legal “reasoning” is always great for a good laugh when it doesn’t make your blood boil over. Of course he loves the move: not authoritarian at all before adding that people need to get over their fear of seeing the military roaming around the country a lot more. Jones makes one good point–how can you nationalize what’s already Government Motors?

That’s what Anthony Fauci is known for according to some of his peers.  The useless “swine flu” vaccine is just one example.  Could that be why he is so adamantly opposed to any therapeutic treatments now, even ones that appear to work extremely well, while telling us to remain in limbo for another 18 months until the CDC can sell its next patented vaccine?

Yet, Trump puts a bunch of government doctors in charge of turning America into a totalitarian fascist state under the assumption that everything these “experts” say about the corona cold virus is God’s truth.  Like the original prediction of that British Doctor Furguson that 250,000 British citizens would die from COVID-19, now reduced to 20,000 “or substantially lower than that.”  Oops.  The CDC doctors based their original response partly on this wildly inaccurate speculation by an obvious flake.

From My op-ed in The Hill:

Allow existing bankruptcy and insolvency processes to run their course. Bailouts are not the answer, new owners who can turn companies around are. Corporate assets, contracts and products don’t disappear in bankruptcy. Yes, there will be pain as many (not all) existing employees lose their jobs. But executives and boards of failing companies should lose their jobs first and foremost, and new shareholders should seek clawbacks of ill-deserved bonuses and stock compensation.

Again, this will not be pretty — but shareholders, not taxpayers, must bear the economic burden when companies fail.

I am on RT to discuss the unprecedented power grab at every level of the US government during this coronavirus “crisis.”

We always like to say, “They don’t even hide it anymore.” Never let a good crisis go to waste.

A 42-second message from the US government: If you have what we need, and you don’t give it up, we will come and forcefully get it from you.

In response to “An Open Letter on Closed Churches,” Dr. Daniel O’Roark wrote me. Yes, as in medical, giving him the creds needed to combat the panicked ignorance out there about C-virus. 

The good doctor also follows Jesus Christ. He’s combined that with his medical knowledge to produce a pamphlet entitled, “A Brief COVID-19 Analysis and Its Implications for the Church.” I was cheering before I’d finished the first page, in which he affirms philosophical and religious truth. He then explains the medical facts about C-virus [“Coronavirus, a frequent cause of cold and flu syndromes, is not new. The current strain (COVID-19[CV]) is novel (7th Coronavirus strain discovered that infect humans) … CV is one of about 200 microbes that can cause flu syndromes (there are a number of non-infectious diseases that can cause “flu”). Therefore, having the “flu” describes only a syndrome (a collection of signs and symptoms: cough, fever, shortness of breath, muscle aches, headache, nasal congestion, etc.) but cannot inform us as to the cause of those symptoms…”] while calling on Christians to respond as Christ would (i.e., not by running away and closing churches). 

If like me you’re hoping to change minds among our siblings in the Lord and re-open our churches, please email me for a copy of Dr. O’Roark’s PDF. And do so quickly, before your state outlaws churches as Virginia has.

I also heard from Norman Patterson of The 100th Sheep Ministries. He’s kindly “updated” James 5:14 for “the modern day pastor”: “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call, text, or email the elders of the church, and let them pray remotely for him, as he anoints himself with sanitizer in the name of the Lord.”

In an excellent video, Ben Swann notes that under the guise of a health emergency, national, state, and local governments are violating our Constitutional rights. Attorney General William Barr has proposed legislation under which people arrested can be detained indefinitely without trial, violating the right of habeas corpus. Governors and mayors have in some cases banned gun sales, a clear violation of the Second Amendment.  At the same time, in some areas criminals are being released from imprisonment, in order to avoid spreading the Covid-19 virus among the prison population. Assemblies of more than ten people have been forbidden, even though the right to assemble and petition the government for redress is guaranteed by the First Amendment. Swann reminds us that emergency powers to suspend rights are not relinquished, even when the emergency has passed

The latest totalitarian to come out of the closet is Bill Gates, who says Microsoft and MIT have developed a tattoo to be implanted on everyone’s arm after the government makes a coronavirus vaccine mandatory.  Presumably, you wouldn’t be able to fly, receive social security, enroll at a university, send your children to school, etc. without your Holocaust-style arm stamp.

UPDATE:  David S. writes to point out that John in Revelations 13 thought of this first:

“[The beast] forced all the people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be given a stamped image on their right hands or their foreheads, so that no one could buy or sell except one who had the stamped image of the beast’s name or the number that stood for its name.”

“Wisdom is needed here; one who understands can calculate the number of the beast, for it is a number that stands for a person.  His number is six hundred sixty-six.” (Rev. 13; 16-18).

ABC news just showed some people in Pittsburgh who organized a neighborhood sing-a-long of “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” the Mr. Rogers song.  They were all on their own porches, far away from any neighbor.  Just like so many singing birds in cages.  And of course none of them had to think that it was a “beautiful” day in the neighborhood.

Kudos to the reality-TV stars who own this Las Vegas pawn shop; they pledge to keep their drive-thru window open 24/7 in spite of the city-mandated business shutdown.

Casino industry and other retail/service/hospitality workers will need money more than ever, so the shop may well be a lifeline for some. As Lew points out, pawn shops lend money without increasing the money supply. They also have the closest ear to the ground regarding day to day precious metals prices– they create the true, localized “spot” price. Plus they make firearms available during these uneasy times.

According to Forbes, the annual cost of the Afghanistan “war” in the past couple of years has been about $50 billion.

Academic economists have been studying this for decades.  Here’s one fairly recent study. The media hate it, but Trump is on solid ground here.  (Of course, if Obama had said this they would all have nodded in unison, kind of like those little bobble head dogs people used to put on their car dashboards).

In the 1866 case of Ex Parte Milligan the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Lincoln administration’s practice of suspending the writ of habeas corpus and mass arresting tens of thousands of Northern-state political critics and imprisoning them either without any trial or by a military tribunal was unconstitutional.  The majority opinion, written by Lincoln appointee (and confidant) Judge David Davis, said the following:

“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and it covers with its shield of protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances.  No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of men that any of its great provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of Government” (emphasis added).

Like a flu virus, for example.  In other words, the Supreme Court said that it is precisely in times of “national emergencies” that civil liberties must be most strongly defended and protected, for tyrants are always tempted to use “great exigencies of Government,” real or fabricated, to “justify” dictatorial powers.

The CDC’s “Epidemic Intelligence Service.”  Is it run by “President” Fauci?

“Corona is the Cure.  Humans are the Disease.”  Same as the old slogan, going back at least to Thomas Malthus.  Remember how the founder of “Earth First!” once said “we can only hope that the right virus comes along”?  And how the founders of the modern American environmentalist movement were, first and foremost, anti-people, celebrating authors like Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb”?  And all the predictions that too many people would lead to mass starvation and much worse before the end of the twentieth century?  The late Julian Simon engaged in a twenty-year debate with the humanity-hating environmentalists like Ehrlich, culminating in his book, The Ultimate Resource.  Hint:  People are the “ultimate resource” in Simon’s book.  Paul Ehrlich must be smiling about today’s events and hoping for the worst.

. . . on average from the seasonal flu according to the CDC (23,000 in total).  Big deal.  So what?  Who cares?

As of 10 AM this morning EST the CDC says that total deaths in the past six months from Covid-19 is 804.

We already have flu vaccines (they don’t work, obviously, but we have them), but none for Covid-19.  Therefore, we must destroy the economy, adopt fascism, create hyperinflation, destroy all civil liberties, and essentially make a Giant Leap Forward towards totalitarianism until we do, and then make it mandatory.  It’s just common sense.

The key feature of the State that supports its suppression of freedoms is its monopoly of law-making. It leverages this monopoly by exerting control over one industry after another. The coronavirus provides an example.

The U.S. government claims monopoly control over food and drugs, an application of its general monopoly position. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) controls approval of drugs and their uses. Doctors and their patients have not been free (of risk and liability) by trying drugs out on this virus on their own.

This situation of monopoly control is why we read that “The FDA cleared the way for New York to experiment with the malaria and lupus drug hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic Zithromax (generic name azithromycin) as a treatment for COVID-19” or why we read that FDA approval is necessary for this trial to occur or for any drug for that matter to be used for many other diseases and health conditions.

If we were free, we wouldn’t depend on FDA clearing the way or approving a drug use that’s currently disapproved or in limbo.

A feasible libertarian solution to this freedom-limiting agency is available under current political conditions, and it should be given the broadest consideration because it can also serve to ameliorate many other agency rules and laws that suppress freedom. The remedy is simple. The government should allow us to opt-out of the regulations at our own risk, that is, with the legal understanding that we cannot sue a doctor if it doesn’t work or the outcome is adverse. If people, patients and medical practitioners, contract one with another, specifying for themselves the risk-sharing arrangements they prefer, that solution frees them both up and it encourages exchanges that enhance the welfare of both sides to the exchange. Meanwhile, if other people do not do this but wish to stay under the regimen of law and control provided by the laws of the U.S. as implemented by the rules of the FDA, they may. They will have their freedom to turn the matter over to the FDA if they desire. Others will have their freedom to make their own arrangements.

As matters stand, the U.S. currently herds everyone into one corral. Consequently on one matter after another, a minority is forced to acquiesce to a law or regulation fashioned through a majority voting and government process. This process, repeated endlessly, is anti-freedom. It can never result in greater freedom. It results in less and less freedom all the time as more and more goods and services come under the state’s monopoly control. The political process of opting out, under one’s own risk and legal arrangements, ends that monopoly. In our current situation, which is purported to be the best we can do, namely democracy or really democratic socialism, we find freedom being suppressed over and over again with little or no hope of stopping the process. We find new generations who know of nothing better and accept it implicitly as the framework within which we must operate.

The socialists, and this includes Democrats and Republicans, want more of the same. They want to gain monopoly control over the state’s monopoly, if they can. They compete for such control. We the people are left out in the cold. A huge number of us correctly choose not to vote at all, knowing that voting simply endorses the monopoly and a process that surely robs us of freedoms.

The libertarians and the party with that name mostly want to control the monopoly themselves too, if only to abolish various branches of it. Others want to work within the system shaving off what government measures they can and steering debates toward the lesser of evils. These approaches have won nothing in terms of enhancing our freedoms.

The way to enhance freedoms is not to control the State or plot its demise, it’s to gain options to opt out of government rules and regulations. Instead of demanding FDA “protection” in return for its penalties and strictures, why not demand the right to get out from under, secede if you will, from its coerced embrace. We do not need and cannot get 100% freedom all at once. We do not even know whether we want it or what sorts of alternatives it actually comprehends. So why not go for such steps as are feasible and that “sell”. Who cannot understand being able to opt out of Medicare or Social Security? Who cannot understand opting out of Medicare taxes in return for foregoing being forced into Medicare? What employers and employees cannot understand giving up the coercive embrace of a minimum wage in return for making one’s own wage and employment bargains with one another? How difficult is it to comprehend greater freedom in specific areas in which we currently face the state’s monopoly powers?

This blog benefited from re-reading an article by Adam Knott.

During the Great War, the progressive poobah Woodrow Wilson created a series of boards to run the economy. The most prominent was the War Industries Board headed by Wall Street fixer Bernard Baruch. Herbert Hoover headed the US Food Administration. And the War Finance Board was headed by Eugene Meyer, a wealthy and ambitious Wall Street financier (who also became Federal Reserve chairman and owner of the Washington Post), was its managing director.

This wartime experience proved crucial in training and imbuing a generation of statist bureaucrats with the enthusiastic utopian vision of collectivism in structuring and attempting to direct American society by authoritarian central planning.

During his term as president when the Great Depression erupted due the monetary manipulation and malfeasance of the FED,  Herbert Hoover was urged by Eugene Meyer to recreate a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation to fight the national emergency of the Depression, as “The Sainted Woodrow” had done during WWI.  FDR, also a seasoned veteran of wartime planning, continued in the same vein.

Later, there was another attempt to resurrect the RFC. 

Now, in 2020, we are seeing yet another futile attempt to resurrect this failed dinosaur of corporate fascism by ahistorical numbskulls, totally oblivious of its failed pedigree. This time the pretext is that of combating the national emergency of the Coronavirus.  Since Trump has declared himself as  “Wartime President,” the deferential Congress will no doubt deliver it to him on a sanitized, sterile silver platter.

HT to Walter E. Grinder

Get ready for this one, folks. This comes with a “Not Satire” warning. And still, the sheeple have no idea that their collective hysteria and begging has secured nothing but their own demise.

We don’t know exactly what this new future looks like, of course. But one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.

…In the near term, we’ll probably find awkward compromises that allow us to retain some semblance of a social life. Maybe movie theaters will take out half their seats, meetings will be held in larger rooms with spaced-out chairs, and gyms will require you to book workouts ahead of time so they don’t get crowded.

. . . now that Congress is about to spend several trillion dollars on every conceivable voter constituency during a presidential election year when most members of Congress are also up for re-election?

The government-media machine has the vast majority of folks convinced that they can just “close” or “open” the economy with a decree, followed by the flick of a switch.

Citizen Stasi are everywhere. In California:

Authorities say they can’t ignore such calls or discount them as paranoia, hypochondria or fakery. They must respond even when every other public entity adopts “social distancing” in order to reduce possible coronavirus transmission.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, we have a small “win” squeaking out from underneath Home Imprisonment Day #1. The Michigan State Police know that they will receive a gazillion calls from obedient slave-type busybodies to “report” people to the “authorities” for being somewhere, anywhere, but home. So they are telling people to not call 911. But oh, it will happen. A lot. And people needing real assistance, quickly, will be the ones who are endangered. So, once again, this is not about helping your fellow citizen stay healthy. It is about proving your obedience by deriding, outing, and shaming others.

In my own community chat room (Facebook group), folks are snapping photos of Trugreen fertilizing lawns and posting them in the group, demanding that they abide by “the rules.”