Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I’m sorry I’ve been largely absent from my own blog. The truth is that I’ve been largely absent from my own life.

It is a form of depression, but one I hadn’t wrestled with before. I’ve never before been THIS angry. Angry enough I had to shut my entire ability to work—including non fiction and short pieces down—in order not to live in a state of near-berserking.

And I’ve never before felt so impotent that it feeds into the depression. Of course I’ve never before watched the imposition of Cuba-style socialism on the bastion of free men (yes, women are included in that, and if you think I need to mention this every time you’re part of the people destroying civilization without realizing what you’re doing and one of the people I’m no longer in the mood to give consequence to.)

It doesn’t help that this dropped on top of other worries that were ALREADY consuming my life before: I appreciate the world’s and politicians attempts to distract me from a couple of things I’m waiting to drop to make sure the boys DO graduate this year, and from my fears the boob thing will be cancer by going completely insane. I particularly want to thank my state governor for attempting to crash the state economy in tandem with all the other crazy state governors, in what (if they keep it up) guarantees a famine event by next winter. I think HOWEVER you’re going overboard a little.

Maybe it’s time to back up?

Okay, to be clear, the chances that the Chinese Virus was ever going to wipe out 1/10th of our population, let alone more, were very, very, very low. HOWEVER when this started out, we didn’t know that. We just didn’t. And the sh*t coming out of China, including the crematoria running day and night were terrifying.

The virus is still horrible in China. PROBABLY. I mean, the Chinese are still dying and a lot are still locked in. But is it the thing that has many names but which started out as COVID-19?

No one knows. No one really knows what is going on in China. Partly because, as a friend of mine who loves the culture and has lived in China put it “It’s not that they lie. It’s that they don’t really have a concept of the truth.” Some Arab cultures have similar issues. You see, truth that can be verified by other people, truth that is “scientifically testable” is not only not a given for humanity, it seems to be a really difficult idea. Judging from oour plague of irreproducible results, it’s really difficult for US too and being lost here. It might be something that came to the west, or solidified in the west with the scientific revolution.

In China “truth is what serves our purposes.” For everyone. Which is why medicines made in China might be full of plaster. If you’re lucky.

Anyway, the point is no one knows what is going on in China, and though we know that people are dying in droves, and that we’re not being told the truth, we don’t know that it’s caused by this virus.

In fact there are tons of reasons to believe it isn’t, including the fact that the virus isn’t that lethal anywhere else. And before you say “Italy”—Italy is cooking the books, including counting anyone who dies of anything else and had this virus onboard as dying of the virus—besides the fact that Italy has other, systemic problems, just as China does.

There were always those of us who suspected that some purging of political dissidents was going on behind China’s facade of virus attack, and some of it might be true. But there are a lot of other things going one. One of them is that China was hurting—badly—economically. The 8 years of Obama’s Summer of Recovery had put a dent in how much “cheap crap” Americans were buying. There were already parts of their economy dying. They compensated by stealing patents and frauding more (remember they have no concept of fair dealing, along with no concept of the truth. And no, this is not racist, though it might be “culturalist” but I don’t know how, unless you believe all cultures are exactly the same, in which the technical name for you is “idiot.” And yes, I know there are a ton of you out there who were taught that. You were mis-taught. There is no value judgement involved. Cultures are different. I think ours is more suited to survival and thriving of the human race, but that’s me. However, if you’re going to be dealing with other countries you have to be aware of the differences. This, BTW doesn’t mean diddly about the character of people of Chinese origin. It just means that people who grow up in the Chinese culture might have blind spots which aren’t ours and which make business affairs cross culture difficult.)

But then came Trump’s sanctions and attempts to stop our bleed out of jobs and currency. And no, he wasn’t wrong. But it put the hurt on China, MAJORLY which is why all our press—who knew they were in the pocket of the Chinese to that extent—squealed like stuck pigs.

The thing is it might have caused FAMINE in China. China has a veneer of modernity and western civilization, but it is not. The average peasant in China still lives in conditions our 19th century ancestors would find primitive and stark. They might wear t-shirts, but they’re living in primitive, and close to the bone conditions.

When the sanctions cut into them, crematoria running night and day might be a sign of anything, including widespread famine. And Wuhan was particularly impoverished due to hosting the Military games, which means the government emptied parts of the city and destroyed people’s livelihoods uncaring of what happened. There were APPARENTLY a lot of people on the edge of starvation.

Which, yes, makes them more susceptible to disease. Or just dying of hunger.

On top of which, there have been rumors filtering out of a new bird flu, and worse of locusts in unprecedented numbers eating their crops. This comes on top of a swine flu that killed or caused them to kill most of their pigs, to the point rivers ran red.

So, you know, what happened with the virus and China is not a sign of anything.

But when I first became aware of this in January, I was briefly very worried. It looked like it would be bad, very bad indeed. And like everyone else, I kept thinking “Would China react like this if they didn’t have way more deaths/it weren’t way more severe?”

Well, yes, because as I’ve explained there are a ton of other (very bad) things going on in China, and blaming the virus is not as embarrassing.

Since then, despite various attempts to stampede us, from the incredibly stupid computer model, to the numbers in Italy (note that only 12% of death certificates that show Covid-19 as the cause are plausibly even close to true.), to our own authorities doing testing only on people showing severe symptoms, and publishing the number of infected as though it were growing and not more people being tested for it, to as far as I can tell, hospital administrations assuming when we first tested is when people were first infected and having decided (PFA?) that the thing has no asymptomatic infections, but that most infections “take 16 days” which is why the surgeon general (medical degrees apparently don’t mean you can examine assumptions) thinks this week will be “the worst yet,” the truth is that this virus is probably one of the greatest panics incited over absolutely nothing in the history of humanity.

In the magnitude of delusion compared to the actual effects/danger, it is the elephant that birthed a mouse.

I’m not saying people won’t die from the infection. We’re humans. People die from a hangnail. People die from getting too much sun. People can and do die from sinus infections. It’s just not common. Every year, I guarantee, several people die from the common cold. I once tried to die from a really simple virus my two year old shrugged off in a week.

People will die. But in terms of who dies of Chinese Virus, we’re learning they’re the people who would die of …. well, anything. Most of them will be seniors who would have died in less than year anyway.

And when you type that people call you unfeeling and tell you how would you feel if that were your mother, or your grandmother.

The answer is DEVASTATED. Very very sad. I’ve said in the past, and it’s true, that I’d give years of life for the ability to have tea with grandma once more, in her kitchen.

But my mother is eighty five. My father is eighty nine. Both of them are adults and cognizant that they are MORTAL. They certainly wouldn’t want western civilization destroyed to save them. Particularly because when global economy crashes, they won’t survive, anyway. Nor will anyone their age. Hell, it’s unlikely anyone my age will survive very long, because we get the maladies and the thing that don’t work very well. People are only living to their eighties and nineties because we’re wealthy and stable enough to give them medicine and think nothing of the cost. And because they can be well fed, clean, warm.

The proof that this virus is probably less lethal than the common cold is hard to come by, partly because we’re still only testing people who are showing symptoms. And we haven’t tested that many people, as is. And as proven we can’t trust numbers from China or Italy, and knowing the games they play with numbers for infant death and murder, I’d be very careful trusting numbers from the EU.

So, we lean heavily on the numbers from the Diamond Princess, because it’s a closed test case. Iceland might also be trustworthy. And South Korea might be more or less straight up. And there are studies surfacing of what is really going on that confirm THE VIRUS IS NOT A BIG DEAL.

COVID-19: the unwarranted panic

COVID-19: interesting data from Korea and from the Diamond Princess

COVID-19—Evidence Over Hysteria

Don’t expect the media to tell you this. They benefit from the panic directly. Their almost gone influence has been revived. You see, most people don’t actually read news online. They learned to distrust the media from talking to friends at lunch/diner/office. Those are gone, and bored and scared people have the news on. And they BELIEVE them. So don’t expect the media to EVER give the all clear.

All the more so because they’ve seized on this to create a state of panic that will allow them to push their favorite political prescriptions. If you think your lefty friends saying that we’re adopting Bernie’s program is hyperbole, it’s not. The media has stampeded us into an horrendous recession, and the left is taking advantage of it.

The left will also never ever give the all clear. They’re seizing on the panic to create their socialist paradise by fiat. The fact it looks a lot like Cuba or Venezuela hasn’t hit them yet. And they might not mind, anyway. Most of them would rather reign in hell.

But I still think they have NO clue of the devastation they’re precipitating. Most of them are urbanites, work in offices, and have a degree in the soft sciences. Some are even extremely competent and successful in their own fields, but they are complete idiots when it comes to how the world works or what the economy is.

There are signs they are completely delusional. One of them is the charming illusion they can keep people in lock down for 18 months, and all that will happen is they “save lives” and “socialism.” Another is their uniform support for The Green New Deal, an underwear gnome solution based on wishful thinking and astonishing ignorance. Yet another is how they think printing money will compensate for everything. Yet another is an article I saw yesterday about how we recovered from the 2008 recession by 2009. Apparently someone REALLY believed those cooked numbers and the headlines on “summer of recovery” and didn’t have highly qualified friends unemployed for half a decade at a time.

And that’s the problem. It’s not so much the “enemies, domestic” though of course, it is a major problem. As is the fact these mal-educated emotional children have political power. I mean at the level of functionality and divorce from reality they’re the nobility of pre-revolutionary France. (And it would behoove them to remember how that ended.)

But the really, really major problem is that they have NO clue how their actions impact reality, other than what they want to see. It’s entirely possible they don’t believe reality exists. (College-educated people in possession of half-digested philosophy are apparently more dangerous than a buffalo in a china shop.)

What we have grown-size toddlers, walking around a room-sized computer, randomly smashing circuit boards with their hammers and giggling.

You see, they know the more functionality they take down, the more chance that Orange-man-bad who told them they couldn’t have whatever toy they wanted will be taken out.

BUT THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY’RE DOING is causing IRREPARABLE damage, and that it might never be repaired.

If they understood the economy and its complexity they wouldn’t be socialists or communists. Because the reason socialism and communism destroys economies and kills people is that it ignores the complexity of economy and people.

They confuse symbol with reality (In this as in everything else, btw) so they think printing money creates value. They think that they can lock us in the house for eighteen months, and as long as they keep us in money, everything will be fine.

They miss not just that food/other necessities still need to be produced, but that they need to be transported. And that for them to be transported, there needs to be oil (no, please, this is not the time to have dreams of tech we don’t actually have) available to fuel trucks, and truckers willing to take to the road. They miss that just handing people money doesn’t mean they can buy food, even if it is available. They miss the interweb of value and interchange that keeps economy going, from building maintenance to paying your rent, to keeping the lights on.

They fail to understand you can’t stop the complex, chaotic system that is American economy and have it restart again.
They are pampered and confident, and they have no clue there can be a world with lates, let alone a world without beans.

If this goes on, we’re going to have a massive famine sometime next winter. Massive. People will die. Not just the very elderly people that the Chinese Virus targets, but people of all ages all over the world.

Even if we’re still producing enough food—we might be, America is a wonder, but I wouldn’t bet. Farmers needs seeds, fertilizer, maintenance for their machines, replacement parts, etc.—there won’t be a distribution network in place.

The stock market is not the way people who are very rich get money so they can build a money bin and swim in it. It’s the engine of the world. It supplies a way to move value around, so that farmers can borrow to buy seed, so that they can have tractors and other machinery. It is what allows trucking companies to operate. It is what keeps food on your table, clothes on your back, and the heat on.

Every part of the machine is interlocked. And what is happening is taking the wheels off. It’s smashing into the center of the economy with a hammer.

BTW when I say there will be famine and people will die, I mean in the US. PEOPLE WILL DIE. Of hunger. Of lack of heat. Of lack of medicine. PEOPLE WILL DIE. And not all of them the insane people who are instigating this.

In fact, most of the power mad governors will be just fine. And one can only hope that the idiots roaming facebook and saying this is their chance to smash capitalism get to FEEL what they’re encouraging. Dying of hunger ain’t pretty.

In the rest of the world? If people starve in the US, the rest of the world will starve worse. Russia thinks it can be resurgent. So does China. They’re going to find mostly they die. Their despotic systems only work in an hyper abundant world.

But what this whole thing adds to is that the Chinese Virus was not the problem. The people imposing crazy quarantines and measures are. The idea that you can shut the country down for two weeks is bad enough. The people trying to stampede us into doing it longer, are ignorant of the realities of economics, or indeed of reality.

Should you wash your hands and not slip tongue to total strangers? Sure, but you always should. Antibiotics have made us cocky and banished a lot of the social distancing and care of the past, but not only do they not work on viruses (viri) but are losing effectiveness.

IF you can work from home, you should work from home. If it’s possible to home school, you should home school. BUT I ALWAYS THOUGHT SO. And you shouldn’t go and lick doorknobs. Or shrines. BUT again, you never should.

Other than that? We need the restrictions lifted. Yesterday, if not sooner.

Listen to me, and start besieging your idiotic political leaders. WE MUST LIFT THE STUPID HAMMER FROM THE ECONOMY.

It will still hurt like a mother. Oh, it will hurt. The next two-three years we’re going to get hyper inflation, unemployment and it’s going to be really hard. But I trust you guys. You’re battlers. Build under, build over build around.

However the president is right. The cure is far far worse than the disease. In fact, the “cure” deliberate or not is an attack at the heart of the economic engine of the world. Which is to say it’s an attack on humans’ ability to lie at all.

And before the greens crow about this, oh, please. This type of thing is not GOOD for the environment (whatever that means. You guys are high on semantic stupidity.) The humans who survive are going to give fuck all for your precious “ecology.” They will do what they have to do to stay alive. Which means the end result will be like something of your worst nightmares, with wood fires everywhere, forests burned for the rich soil beneath, animals hunted to extinction. And yeah, there probably will be enough humans left to do really bad damage. Not that I care, because you see I’m for team human. I want humans to survive. But you idiots, who hate your own species, probably do care. And be aware you lose. In the end, you lose big.

If we continue with this stupid shit, and allowing marginally elected, probably with the help of fraud and disinformation ignoramuses to mandate where we can eat, where and when we can work, where we can walk, and what we can do, will only guarantee that millions die of starvation and disease within the next couple of years. And that’s JUST in the US. World wide hundreds of millions will die.

I beg you, with tears in my eyes, stop being afraid of the virus and start being afraid of the statists destroying our liberties, our economy, our society.

If we can save what remains of western civilization, in the end we win they lose.

They know that. They don’t mean to lose. And they have no idea that they can’t win.

They don’t know what they’re playing with, nor what they’ll unleash.

 

Reprinted from https://accordingtohoyt.com/ for March 24, 2020