Destroy Your Currency, Destroy Your Country

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/happens-currency-collapses-lebanon/ 

A good report on what is happening in Lebanon as their currency becomes increasingly worthless. Our elites assure us "it can't happen here". Why, thinking it would, is like thinking the 2016 election was not invalidated by Russian interference, or imagining that Biden breaking Obama's 2008 record of 69 million with a new record of 81 million was somehow "fishy". Obvious conspiracy theory ... like thinking that the Wuhan Coronavirus may have come from a lab in Wuhan working on enhancing the lethality of Corona viruses.  

Even looking at things like this shows that one's mental faculties are slipping ...  some idiot people even question the clear ability of our vibrant leader Joe Biden! It seems that such people need to re-educated at a minimum ... possibly put in nice remote camp for some therapeutic shock treatment to get their minds right?

It can't happen here! Just look at the gas pump, or a restaurant tab, it is obvious our dollars are as sound as Biden, and isn't that a relief? 

Maverick, A Biography Of Thomas Sowell

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/thomas-sowell-in-one-volume/

The linked review is a good "root" to the book which in turn a more direct root to Sowell's extensive corpus. 

Sowell is first rank on my list of authors,  he is a blessing to humanity. 

Everyone needs to read this book, and at least "A Conflict Of Visions".  

After that, we would have the foundation for a reasonable discussion on "Why Good People Are Divided By Religion And Politics". 

Water Melons On Mars

 https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/09/lifestyle/i-want-believe-disappointment-abounds-new-york-times-publishes-then-deletes-article-about-watermelons-mars/

It came out in the NY Times, you know, the "paper of record", it must be believed unless you want to be labeled as uneducated, deplorable, Trumpist! 

Suicide By Clinton

Dead reporter who broke Clinton Lynch tarmac story. 

Ho hum, another person with connection to the Clintons in some way "kills themselves". It could be true, it seems like any sort of association with the Clintons would lead one to at least consider suicide. Or, it just could be that if you choose to say anything negative about them ... or may even just be suspected of being about to do so, it is sort of like "suicide by cop" ... although in this case, "suicide by Clinton". 

One of my favorites is this tragic "barbell accident" where John Ashe had his neck crushed by a barbell. Anyone who has ever lifted even a tiny amount knows this is basically impossible. Unless you are lifting the neighborhood of 300 lbs, where the bar starts to flex, you just leave the collars off, and if you get into trouble you just drop one side and "bang, bang", the weights loudly fall off. 

Lots of people that likely had damaging information on the Clinton's have just "gone away" by one means or another. Naturally, to even consider that there may be some relationship here proves one is a mentally deranged "conspiracy theorist". 

Rational, sensible people have massive two year investigations into how Trump may have "colluded" with the Russians to defeat Hillary. After all, the Russians are huge energy producers who have spent millions opposing fracking, how could anyone doubt they wanted anti-fracking Hillary elected? 

Sensible people know that Epstein hung himself and Biden was legitimately elected! 

Huckabee, Simple Government

 I'm not a big  Huckabee fan, but the book was FREE! The book is "fine", the message is good, but it is old news published in 2011, and it is still unfortunately current ... our government is less simple, more bloated, our borders are still not secure, families are still under attack, yada, yada, yada.

I wonder if Mike's "hope for the future" has been dented by the "election" of a creepy cadaver to the presidency of Wokeistan? 

This review covers it. If you like Mike's homey, low signal to noise style, go for it. 

Rioting for Boogie

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/unrest-erupts-in-minneapolis-amid-protests-over-police-involved-shooting_3845607.html 

"Boogie" is a name that will likely outlive George Floyd in our minds. It is after all very catchy. 

US marshals shot and killed a black criminal that was shooting at them, ergo .,. RIOT, LOOT! 

Oh wait, the "demonstrations veered"! 

The Star Tribune reported last night at 7:19 pm: “Thursday night’s protests were relatively small in comparison to the widespread demonstrations that followed Floyd’s death but still occasionally veered into vandalism and arson.”

• “Veered” represents a creative choice of verb for rioting. The subject of the verb is “demonstrations.” The verb takes no object; its use here is intransitive. What we have is the Star Tribune version of crime without a perpetrator or a victim. That is really well done.

We may as well cancel all enforcement of black crime. If you can't shoot back at a suspect with a long record who is shooting at the officers, why bother?  

Hoping Bureaucratic Sclerosis Kills The Patient

 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-trying-to-fix-engine-problem-plaguing-fighter-jets-2021-6

Bureaucratic sclerosis was a prime cause of IBM's decline from ruling the computer tech universe to being a poor also ran. Sadly, I saw it from the inside ... quarter to quarter management precluding somewhat risky innovation projects, "cover your ass" being primary over "bust your ass" to innovate, analysis paralysis ... we had it all.  "Buy it vs build it" with the assumption that the guys who built it were replaceable or buyable. 

Maybe China is showing the same signs? 

"They're better at just reverse-engineering simpler components and building simpler things," Heath said. "All this requires a level of expertise and competence that SOEs just often are not very good at. You have to recognize the limitations of the SOEs in China when it comes to innovation."

SOE -- State Owned Enterprise. As organizations become larger, the tendency to become ponderous bureaucracies is strong to possibly inevitable. The same thing is happening to Western civilization, and the exceptions like Elon Musk are becoming more and more rare. Apple used to have "think different" as a motto, today it is more like "think how to keep our profits large". The organization doesn't have to be "state owned" to develop this disease -- just being PC, Woke, too convinced it was "management for managements sake" rather than deep tech wizardry that let to success, etc. can also kill the patient. 

The linked is an interesting discussion on how and why SOEs tend to fail when it gets to the really difficult stuff. 

"There are a few technologies that are really at the apex of technological manufacturing," and jet engines are one of them, Timothy Heath, a senior international and defense researcher at the Rand Corporation think tank, told Insider.

"These high-end technologies are so difficult to master that very few countries succeed. Many have failed," Heath added.

Here is hoping that bureaucracy kills SOEs faster than just "Woke" fascist states!

 

Fauxi E-Mails

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/about-those-fauci-emails.php

One never gets a clear answer out of a bureaucracy -- obfuscation is a prime function of bureaucracy, right after increasing their power in priority. 

The following from the link: 

 ... conservatives have found confirmation of their suspicions of the life-long bureaucrat, who went to work for the NIH during the Nixon administration and has been rising through the bureaucracy, as opposed to treating patients, ever since.

The liberals view him as a saint, but of course bureaucracy is one of most important tools in their agenda of ever increasing centralized government control. The following from Wikipedia: 

After completing his medical residency in 1968, Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases's (NIAID) Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI).[14] He became head of the LCI's Clinical Physiology Section in 1974, and in 1980 was appointed chief of the NIAID's Laboratory of Immunoregulation. In 1984, he became director of the NIAID, a position he still holds.[6] Fauci has been offered the position of director of the NIH several times, but has declined each time.[15]

You decide if he looks like a career bureaucrat, up to and including avoiding the big chair, where he is more likely to be held accountable. CYA is a bureaucratic mandate. 

A little further evidence that COVID19 was created in a lab ... this time, a technical one. 

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/why-the-science-points-to-a-lab-leak.php

Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?

Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape.

I'm sure that scientists can be found which will dispute everything about this ... super, science like any other human endeavor is prone to bias. 

What skeptical people need to keep in mind as we dive deeper into the modern era of Lysenkoism "truth" is whatever the state says it is. 

The Distraction Curtain

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-distraction-storm/

Our age is one of distraction, denial, diversion, drift, deflection, and a host of other such terms of avoiding being here now, in the present. 

"Pay no attention to that man(reality) behind the curtain"  is the defining  metaphor for our time. 

Let's ignore trillions of dollars in debt, unfunded liabilities, and deficits TODAY, and rather focus on climate, "Critical" Race Theory, etc 

What is necessary to understand in the present is that our current cultural convulsion — the constant, distracting storm of outrage and panic and hatred and denunciation that plays out over social media and in real life every day — is being used as moral camouflage for failing institutions, from city governments to federal agencies and from the college campus to the commanding heights of media and technology. The burghers of the Bay Area won’t be around to comment on the weather in 100 years, and they’d much rather not talk about what’s happening down at the corner drugstore right now.

It is important for governments to look to the future and to understand history — planting trees under the shade of which we never will sit and all that. But governments at all levels also have a responsibility to the here and now, to the clear and present, to the local and the ordinary — a responsibility to see what is in front of their noses and, when necessary, try to do something useful in response to it.

CCP Virus Breakthroughs, Stop Counting

Epoch Column

I'm happy that the CDC and media are treating virus breakthroughs of fully vaccinated people as "not a concern", because that is how reasonable people operate. If only they would have treated the tiny number of serious  cases in children and even healthy adults under "50" in the same reasonable manner. 

What does concern me a bit more is: 

Of the cases, more than six in 10 occurred in females, with the median patient age being 58, according to a new report from the CDC, which stopped counting breakthrough infections as of May 1, except for those that cause hospitalization or death.

 Is there a pattern here?  The Obama administration stopped counting H1N1 cases in 2009 because "they already knew it was an epidemic". I've often said that if you don't like what someone tweets,  quit following them -- my general attitude to lots of supposed "sources" these days. 

However, when it is your job to count, ceasing to count when you don't like what you see tends to make your "counting" more political than scientific. It makes the sham of trusting the bureaucracy a bit too clear -- the actual mission of any bureaucracy is to increase its power,  not to actually do some supposed "critical mission".

As I've often observed, the real meaning of "believe the science" is "believe the narrative".