Black Days Coming

I’ve read a lot in the last few hours, but this one brought me to a stop:

It’s Over: Trump Promises “Orderly Transition” On Jan. 20 After Biden Win Certified

What that means is that Joe Biden has successfully stolen the 2020 US presidential election..

And everybody knows it was stolen. The evidence available, in affidavits and videos and mathematical analyses, could fill a book. And the evidence is going to keep on coming. It’ll probably end up filling 20 books.

And that’s going to mean that Joe Biden is going to be an illegitimate president, a president that many Americans – perhaps even most Americans – will not regard as their real president. He’ll be a false president. A faux-president. A pretender.

I’ve got nothing against Joe Biden. He’s a politician like many others. I just wish he’d got honestly elected, fair and square. But he hasn’t been. And that’s going to hang over him throughout his incumbency. A lot of people are simply never going to accept him.

Has this ever happened before? Bush v. Gore was contested – hanging chads -, but was eventually resolved. That’s not going to happen this time. It’s going to rumble on for years, maybe even decades.

What’s shocking about this stolen election is that it was all so blatant. Maybe JFK stole the 1960 elction from Nixon with help from the mafia, but it was never so blatant as this.

Maybe it’s not over yet. There are still a raft of court cases winding their way through the courts. But the courts are broken too. The courts don’t want to hear the cases. Not only has the election been stolen, but also the courts won’t allow legal redress. There’s a judicial crisis as well as an electoral crisis.

I’ve been listening to my usual US commentators. Lionel Nation. Mark Levin. Michael Savage. They’ve all been incoherent, in different ways. Angry. Gloomy. Bitter.

What happens next? Who knows?

Donald Trump tried to drain the swamp, but instead the swamp has just drowned him.

Biden is really just a place-holder. He’ll probably be removed in a few months, on the grounds of senility. And then President Kamala Harris??? Really??

And with the swamp back in control, there’ll be more wars. One of Trump’s crimes was that he didn’t start any new wars. So expect to see cruise missiles landing on one poor god-forsaken country after another.

Trump didn’t buy global warming either. That was another crime. So expect to see windmills sprouting up everywhere.

And of course Trump shrugged off Covid. That’ll be back too, with a vengeance.

There are terrible days ahead.

On the Brink of Civil War

It’s unreal:

A CNN reporter appeared stunned after interviewing several Trump supporters who said Joe Biden will NEVER be their president, and that they’re going to Washington D.C. to see President Trump sworn in for a second term.

“Are Trump and his supporters just sore losers?” CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan asked a pair of Trump supporters.

“No. We haven’t lost,” the man said simply.

“Will you accept Joe Biden as president?” the CNN reporter asked.

“No. He will never be my president,” the man replied.

“Mkay…but you know, you accept that he’s going to be inaugurated?”

“No, I don’t.”

“How could that change at this point?” the CNN reporter asked.

“There could be a civil war, you never know,” the man said.

When asked if he wants a civil war, the man replied: “I don’t. Show us the voting machines. Show us the ballots. Show us that this was a fair election, or we’ll never accept another vote again. Ever.”

People have begun to inhabit separate realities. In one, there’s President Trump, and in the other President Biden. There’s no longer a single common shared reality.

And perhaps that’s why there’s talk of civil war. How can people get along if they have little or nothing in common with each other?

It’s not just a contested election. There’s a lot more that is no longer shared. For example:

Democrats propose ban on ‘he’ and ‘she’ and all gender-specific words in new rules for Congress. Republicans called the move ‘stupid and ridiculous’.

People are being asked to stop using words like man and woman, husband and wife, brother and sister.

And then many people believe that the world is being swept by a deadly pandemic, known as Covid-19, requiring whole cities to be locked down, everyone wearing masks. Others think that it’s no worse than the annual flu epidemics.

And then there are many people who think we’re facing a climate catastrophe, with rising global temperatures, and rising sea level. Others think the global climate is pretty much the same as it ever was.

And then some people think that a few whiffs of tobacco smoke will give them lung cancer. And some people don’t.

That’s five different separate realities. And five different polar opposite views. And there are probably more. Society has divided in two. How can the two co-exist?

The answer may well be: they can’t.

And that’s why America is on the brink of civil war. And it’s also why US gun sales have been exploding in recent months.

It’s a very dangerous situation. But it’s also one which CNN doesn’t seem to understand. Because, well,…. the folks at CNN occupy a separate reality from everyone else.

…

For the record, I believe that 1) Joe Biden has stolen the election. 2) men and women are different from each other, 3) Covid-19 is no worse than flu. and 4) we’re not facing any climate catastrophe.

Upsidedown

A headline that caught my eye:

Soccer Club Demands Fans Who Booed BLM Undergo Re-Education Courses Before Being Allowed Back

Cambridge United have handed a stadium ban to fans who booed players taking a knee before their home game against Colchester.

Other fans have been asked to undertake education around discrimination and equality before they are allowed back into the Abbey Stadium.

A handful of fans could be heard booing ahead of kick-off in the League Two fixture on December 15, even though it was quickly drowned out by applause.

As I understand it, soccer fans are the paying customers of soccer clubs. So Cambridge United is banning its own customers. How long can any business last if it bans its own customers? Not very long. I expect to soon hear that Cambridge United has gone broke.

It’s another example of how crazily upsidedown our world has become. We no longer pay attention to public opinion: we instead re-educate the public Public opinion has become something to be shaped by an elite of experts.

I experience such re-education myself, from my tobacco packets, which tell me:

Smoking causes 9 out of 10 lung cancers.

My tobacco packet is encouraging me to stop smoking tobacco. Isn’t that just like Cambridge United banning its own fans?

My response to this advice is to simply become ever more determined to carry on smoking. And I imagine that the response of Cambridge United fans will probably be to become ever more determined to boo BLM (which thoroughly deserves to be booed). When people are pushed, they push back.

So how successful are attempts to re-educate the public likely to be?

I think it’s likely to backfire spectacularly.

Merry Christmas

Dehumanisation and Infantilisation

Someone complaining about lockdowns:

We have now had nearly nine months of being treated like utter imbeciles. A once great country with a once free people has been reduced to the level of being governed by pathetic, childish slogans. And for some reason we have allowed ourselves to be infantilised.

Nine months? Is that all?

UK Smokers have been infantilised for over 13 years. We’ve also got our own special, pathetic, childish slogans printed on all tobacco products. Example (from the packet in front of me):

Smoking clogs your arteries.

The author continues:

But the infantilising of an entire population is by no means the worst thing they have done to us. Worse by far has been the dehumanising of millions of people, which has been done via a number of enormously destructive methods.

The dehumanising of UK smokers has also been going on for 13 years, if not longer. Smokers are excluded from bars and restaurants (and almost everywhere else as well). No Smoking actually means No Smokers – because cigarettes don’t light themselves.

My own response has been to dig my heels in, and carry on smoking. If they can make people stop smoking, they can make them do anything.

And I now feel nothing but contempt for the medics and Public Health zealots conducting this odious campaign. I don’t listen to anything they say, not just about tobacco, but everything else as well.

Their latest scam is of course Covid-19, of which the appearance of a new and more contagious variant is now being used to impose even tighter lockdowns and restrictions on the entire population of southeast England.

Is this surprising? Any bug that is more contagious than others is likely to rapidly predominate. It’s also likely that the less fatal a new variant is also likely to predominate, since fatal variants will kill themselves off more rapidly, as fewer pcarriers are able to transmit them to others. The result will be a highly contagious but largely harmless bug, much like the common cold. Surely the sooner this happens, the better. So my view is that life should continue as normal, and let the bug spread where it may. Indeed it seems to me that attempts to restrict normal social interactions might even have the opposite effect, making the bug more dangerous rather than less.

It’s not about health. Covid-19 is being used to remove freedom. And this is the real goal of the totalitarians in Public Health

Disproportionate Responses

ZeroHedge

To cut to the chase, we have gone and thrown out reason, rationality and proportionality this year. A coronavirus, which posed a danger to a very small proportion of our society, but which actually has an Infection Fatality Rate of around 0.2% – 0.26% (not too dissimilar to a bad seasonal flu), and which could thus have been dealt with proportionality, somehow became the catalyst for the biggest mass hysteria in the history of the human race. Indeed, many were so taken in by the great hypnotic spell set in motion by charlatans with their “hard-hitting emotional messaging,” that they adopted practices so irrational and disproportionate to the threat, one wonders how they managed to live before this year.

Is it really he biggest mass hysteria in the history of the human race? And was it just this year?

Smoking bans are just as bad, if not worse. They are now an institutionalised example of hysteria. They are just one of many successive deposition layers of solidified hysteria, building one atop the previous ones, slowly burying everything.

Global Warming is another hysteria, peddled by hysterical girls like Greta Thunberg.

Asteroid Impacts are another lurking terror: 

99942 Apophis  is a near-Earth asteroid with a diameter of 370 metres that caused a brief period of concern in December 2004 when initial observations indicated a probability up to 2.7% that it would hit Earth or the Moon on April 13, 2029.

The closest approach of Apophis will be 31,000 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. The Earth’s diameter is 12,742 km. Earth geostationary satellites are 35,786 km above Earth’s equator, Were it to strike the Earth, Apophis would create a 5.1-kilometre impact crater. The Chicxulub crater in Yucatan Mexico,, created during the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, is about  10 km in diameter.

We may have no doubt that the event will be accompanied by global mass hysteria, and quite likely lockdowns, and martial law.

Perhaps it’s simply that the more prosperous people become, the greater the lurking dread that it will all be swept away in some cataclysm: fire, earthquake, volcanic eruption, plague, nuclear war, UFO invasion, sea level rise, atmospheric warming, and so on.

The more leisured life becomes, the more time that can be spent fretting over unforeseen and unforeseeable threats.

It’s perhaps self-correcting. The net effect of all the lockdowns and restrictions will be to crash the economy, reduce prosperity, and restrict leisure. Once that happens it will be harder to worry and fret. People will have more pressing concerns. The panic will subside.

And then everyone can go back to smoking tobacco, just as they have for thousands of years.

The Madness of Experts

https://zerohedge.com/political/expert-consensus-also-favored-alcohol-prohibition

When we look back on American history, Prohibition stands out as one of the craziest social and economic experiments of modern times. The very idea that the government, on its own authority and power, was going to purge from a Western society the production and distribution of alcohol, strikes us today as a millennarian pipedream, one that turned into disaster for the whole country.

We could say the same about lockdowns in 2020. Indeed, measuring the absurdities on a scale of extremism, the idea of lockdowns, with forceful human separation, mandatory masking, and the practical abolition of all large gatherings, fun, art, and travel, seems even more sadistically preposterous than alcohol prohibition.

And we could of course say the same about the War on Smoking. This also is a millenarian pipedream, And it entails forceful human separation, mandatory smoking bans, and the practical abolition of many large gatherings, fun, art, and travel. And it is equally sadistically preposterous.

The prohibitionists all share one characteristic: they are killjoys. They differ only in which joy they wish to kill. It seems that, in the face of some threat, they instinctively always blame it on one of life’s small pleasures.

The article also mentions

the astonishing mathematical gymnastics behind the “science” backing Prohibition,

Once again this is also true of the War on Smoking. The association between smoking and lung cancer is purely statistical: there is no explanation of precisely how smoking might cause cancer. It is simply that there is an association between the two.

I might also be the case that there is also an equally strong association between cancer and tea drinking, at least in Britain. So why isn’t there a war on tea?

The answer is probably that the medical casino wheel of fortune has yet to settle on tea (and coffee) as possible causes. But one day it probably will. Tea and coffee are beverages that many people enjoy drinking, and that should be enough for the killjoys to fix upon them.

But in the long run the result is likely to be the death of medicine, the death of epodemiology, and the death of statistics, after years of abuse. People will stop believing “experts”, when it becomes transparently obvious that none of them know much about anything.

Are we living in China?

I was watching Julia Hartley-Brewer in conversation with Peter Whittle, complaining about the attack on fundamental freedoms by Covid lockdowns, pubs closed by experts who knew nothing about anything, and depressing public compliance,. “Are we living in China?” Julia asked.

They both spoke as if this was something wholly new, that only started in 2020.

All I could think was that this has been going on for a very long time. It all started with the 2007 UK public smoking ban. That’s when fundamental freedoms came under attack. That’s when it stopped being possible to just sit in a pub and drink a pint of beer and smoke a cigarette – something people had been doing for centuries.

But neither Julia Hartley-Brewer nor Peter Whittle mentioned the draconian 2007 smoking ban. And this is probably because neither of them smokes, and so neither of them were affected by the ban, and in fact maybe they even approved of it.

But really that’s when the loss of freedoms and the public compliance started, and Public Health experts started dictating what everyone had to do. There’s been 13 years of it.

Julia Hartley-Brewer and Peter Whittle only noticed it when the insidious process started to affect them.

At one point Julia Hartley-Brewer said that we should demand that every single last one of our freedoms had to be restored. If so, then that should include the simple right to sit in a pub and drink a pint of beer and smoke a cigarette.

But does she want that too? Given that she never mentioned the smoking ban, I’d guess that she’s actually quite happy with it.

It’s too late now to recover these lost freedoms. The Public Health juggernaut has picked up momentum over the past 13 years, and it’s become unstoppable. Lockdowns are just an extension of the same mentality. And now they’re even talking about “passports” for people who have been given the (ineffective) vaccination. The web of social control is getting tighter and tighter.

Are we living in China?

Well, yes, we are. And we have been for a long time.

Maybe salvation will come from China. I was reading about what’s happening there.

Once a fervent Marxist, I had parted ways with Marxism and increasingly looked to Western thought for answers to China’s problems. Once a proud defender of official policy, I had begun to make the case for liberalization. Once a loyal member of the CCP, I was secretly harboring doubts about the sincerity of its beliefs and its concern for the Chinese people.

It seems there is dissent in China against the Communist Party. It’s not quite the same as Public Health, but if there can be dissent there then maybe there can be dissent here too.

Re-run The Election

With its recent contested election the USA has entered a political crisis that looks set to endure for at least the next two months, and most likely a lot longer.

Paul Craig Roberts:

If the stolen election stands, America falls.

Whoever is eventually declared the winner, half of America will not accept it.

There’s even talk of civil war

The United States Is At A Tipping Point That Could Lead To Revolution Or Civil War

The USA now resembles the Roman Republic in the 80 years of the optimates (the established Deep State) versus the populares of Julius Caesar (Donald Trump), which ended in the assassination of Julius Caesar, civil war, and the emergence of the Roman Empire under Caesar’s adopted son Augustus.

A new American civil war would not be between the North and the South as in the last one, but between the Democrat cities and the Republican ‘flyover’ country in between them. It would probably result in a military dictatorship, given the enormous power of the US military. And since the military is largely conservative in character, a military dictatorship would most likely be a Republican dictatorship. Democrat politicians like Clinton and Obama and Pelosi would be rounded up, and imprisoned in Gitmo. A civil war would be bad news for Democrats.

But even if it doesn’t come to that, a divided America will be greatly weakened. It probably won’t be possible to maintain an American empire which currently has US troops all over the world (including Britain). The current global 80-year Pax Americana may have just come to an end. And that will mean political instability everywhere.

Perhaps this is far too alarmist. I hope that it is. But right now things are not looking at all good.

The simplest thing to do would be to re-run the election, with stringent safeguards against fraud. But this doesn’t look likely to happen.

…

Infowars:

Trump attorney Lin Wood tweeted a declaration calling for the president to implement Martial Law and hold a new, safe and fair election if lawmakers fail to protect the Constitution.

Wood wrote, “Good morning. Our country is headed to civil war. A war created by 3rd party bad actors for their benefit – not for We The People. Communist China is leading the nefarious efforts to take away our freedom. @realDonaldTrump should declare martial law.”

Epic Theatre

Whatever the outcome might be, the current US election has become an extended thriller, with plot twists coming thick and fast. Every day brings something new. And it’s set to run for another two months. The suspense is unbearable.

I’m hoping that Trump wins. I think he’s the best US president of the last 50 years, maybe the best president ever. I’m not even critical of his bombast or his language, as many others are. Trump is a phenomenon.

But the pundits are divided.

My favorite pundit is the ever-optimistic Steve Turley, who is predicting Trump’s re-election. Here’s his last couple of videos:

By contrast Laura Ingraham on Fox News is a pessimist who thinks Trump has lost:

Who to believe?

None of them.

The pundits are also players in an unfolding plot that rivals the Watergate affair (which I can remember).

But it’s great theatre.

I’m going to be feeling dazed and empty when it’s over, like after watching some epic movie.

Except it’s not a movie: it’s history being written.