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Strange Daze

Every separate day in the year is a gift presented to only one man—the happiest one; all other people use his day, to enjoy the sunshine or berate the rain, never knowing, however, to whom that day really belongs; and its fortunate owner is pleased and amused by their ignorance. A person cannot foreknow which day exactly will fall to his lot, what trifle he will remember forever: the ripple of reflected sunlight on a wall bordering water or the revolving fall of a maple leaf; and it often happens that he recognizes his day only in retrospection, long after he has plucked, and crumpled, and chucked under his desk the calendar leaf with the forgotten figure. – Vladimir Nabokov, from “The Potato Elf,” The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage, 1997)

We are about to move into a new phase of this madness. What will be the short- and long-term consequences of the crackdown? The stock market seems to think the V-shaped recession is the way to bet. The political class is hoping for devastation, as they think they will rid them of Trump. Economists can’t seem to agree on what comes next, as this has never been tried. There are lots of red lights flashing in the debt markets and the supply chain. The next months will be interesting.

It’s right out of Sun Tzu: make yourself look weak when you’re strong and thus befuddle your enemy. Trump does this purposely. I’m convinced that when he sounds most blowhardy, that’s when he’s being the most deceptive. The Democrats think Trump is dumb. Which is fine with him. He is not hampered by a desire for their approval. He absolutely does not care what they think about him.

The COVID-19 Debacle Previews the Chinese Communist Party’s Imperial World Order CCP-Beijing caws and brays that COVID-19/the Wuhan virus wasn’t created in the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, which, for the record, the CCP built so it could appear to compete with U.S. research facilities, and which is in the proximity of the Wuhan wet market. But check the terms. By created they mean a man-made biological warfare weapon.

We’re going to see a rush back to freedom. What’s going to happen is conservative states are going to start opening up and they’re going to start opening up soon. Then people in fascist nightmare states like California and New York are going to look over at Texas and North Dakota and the rest of free America that lies outside of the future People’s Republic and wonder why the hell they are still getting yelled at for going to the beach. Pretty soon it’ll be an avalanche as people demand to re-open. And then the stock market is going to soar and unemployment is going to come down and we’re going to put this nightmare behind us. And Trump will get re-elected, which they fear more than any virus.

PVP Diaries #29 “ Andy HavensFor one half of a marriage, the garage is a place where things can be put in order to be kept out of the way. For the other half, the garage is the way. No harm done, no ill-will here. Just the necessary deviation in cognizance that arises from differently distributed usage. The janitor, after all, sees a garbage can very differently than I do.

“As a general rule, the earlier you recognize someone is trying to kill you, the better off you’ll be.”

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where humans beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me? — George Orwell, 1984, 1949

One thing global warming has taught the Ruling Caste: confer payola, positions, and prestige on the Scientific Caste and you can get whatever Science you want. So roll out scary pandemic predictions from bought and paid for Experts and Voilà! people will hand you their livelihoods and their freedom. In that Ruling Caste perfect world, we’d grant them permission to execute us if the Experts recommended it, docilely lining up for the firing squad or gas chamber. Who are we to argue with the Experts?

Shutdown Could Kill More Americans Than COVID-19 No model or guesswork is required to foresee the deadly impact. Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities deaths of despair.

Nolte: Climate Denier Bill Gates Quietly Buys $43M Oceanfront Home If you judge Gates by his meaningless words, he is not a climate denier. But where it matters… In his actions, his behavior, his multi-million dollar investments, Gates is one of the biggest climate deniers in the history of climate denying. No one — not even if you’re worth billions — pisses away $43 million. Which proves that just like CNN and Barack Obama, Bill Gates is a Climate Change activist who knows it’s all a hoax (and trust me, it is) because no one who truly believes the oceans will flood the coasts would invest 43 million goddamned dollars on a doomed house that sits right on the ocean.

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  • John the River April 24, 2020, 6:31 PM

    Oddly enough…
    “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.”
    The first time I read that quote from “1984” was mid sixties in a “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” paperback.
    It provoked me to hunt up that book and read it. Now I’ve finally caught up with it.

  • Harry April 25, 2020, 9:54 AM

    It just hit me. Henry Kissinger said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Maybe Big Brother just wanted to meet girls.
    Yeah, I know. That’s dumb. I blame it on the times we’re living in.