Cuomo says "we haven't flattened the curve."

That's because your city is full of imported shit-eaters and you have spent the last decade and more telling us that we must accept this, we must import more of them, we must keep doing it and it's all ok.

Nope.

Now you're eating the shit, literally.

"Social distancing" is not the answer nor are "lockdowns" because you can't enforce them, you can't support them as the infrastructure to do so doesn't exist in the US, you wouldn't get rid of the high-spread people before this happened, now its too late and you also can't maintain a lockdown, even if you're willing to go around shooting people who refuse to comply for the amount of time required without the health system collapsing due to lack of government revenue.

Isolating high risk people and offering them, at their own risk and choice, prophylaxis that may not be proved but is worth trying can at least blunt some of the impact.  It won't eliminate all of it.  You wrote the check in those areas of the country and now it's getting cashed.

Quarantining people who test positive and attempting to trace their contacts (and then testing those individuals) can be somewhat effective.  It's also sound public policy.  But that, for the most part, isn't being done and even that is not completely effective because this virus sheds before you become symptomatic.

The wages of bad public policy, "open borders", refusal to cooperate with removing illegal invaders, refusing to insist that employers actually verify every single employee and more is now coming back to bite all of these places hard.

No, NY is not what is coming everywhere else.  But it probably is what is coming to similar cities, towns and areas that also have a large number of shit-eaters and it is not the responsibility of those of us who did not countenance such policies and in fact advocate for them to bail your ass out when you freely made the choice and ignored those of us who said this was stupid and nothing more than an attempt to find ways to exploit people who would work without tax payments or benefits -- in other words, to suppress the employment of Americans and the money they earn.

AOC and her "squad" are in the middle of this and it's not a coincidence that AOC lives in NY!

Nor is it a coincidence that shit-eater advocate Nancy Pelosi and Diane FeinSWINE are from California.

Nor is it a coincidence that Inslee presides over yet another state with such "sanctuary" policies.

Nor is it a coincidence that Shitcago is going to be involved too -- and in fact already is and is perpetrating it by refusing to test.  I have inside baseball on it, and that's what they're doing to intentionally understate a problem they caused.

None of these are coincidences.  They're causal factors for the mess you now find yourselves in.

The fact of the matter is that public policies matter and quite frequently the stupidity you embrace has a lag time before you get fucked by it whether personal or throughout society.

If you believe "healthy at any size", a factual lie, and trust in medicine to give you a pill when you're fat, unable to climb 10 flights of stairs because your pulmonary capacity is fucked, you have high blood pressure and are diabetic, and thus pop pills to "control" this one of which is suspected to greatly increase mortality when you get this virus when the bug comes around it's too fucking late to change your mind.

You were wrong.  

You are NOT healthy at any size. 

Instead of a 0.05% risk of death from this virus your risk of death is one hundred times higher!

That's what the data out of Italy tells us.

0.5% of those who have died in Italy had none of cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure or diabetes.  Italy's death rate is quite high; last time I looked about 7% and change.  That sounds awful.

But if you do not have any of those co-morbidity factors your risk of death is not 7% it's 0.05%!  You can nearly count those deaths on your fingers and toes!

Not all of these factors are under your control.  Some people get high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease or diabetes without lifestyle choices.  But in nearly all cases these diseases are due to choices you make over a period of decades.  Not always, but most of the time.

Yet we hear how "this is all a personal choice and not anyone else's business."

Ok that's fine with me -- if this is your personal choice and not anyone else's business then it's not my responsibility when you get sick and die as a result of it and we must NOT destroy the economy because of the consequences stemming from your personal choices.

The facts are that the average age of someone in Italy who has died is something like 81.  This equals or exceeds the life expectancy for both men and women.  While that really sucks we all die of something and as we get older and more-frail the odds that something a younger person will not be terribly troubled by will kill us goes up.

We can dramatically increase that risk by doing things that are stupid and advocating that this is not only a civil right but that you're "healthy at any size" while making those demonstrably stupid decisions is criminally insane.

I have a "near son" (no actual blood or adoption relation, but we're very close) who's grandfather just passed.  The test came back this morning; positive for Covid.  That sucks.  I knew him and he was a great guy.  But he was also very old, well past the average expected age of death for a man born when he was, quite frail medically and his frailty wasn't due to doing stupid things -- it was due to simple good luck and nothing previously getting him.  This time he lost the bet and that blows but eventually something was going to get him.  It's inevitable.

If the government had, instead of demanding we all "social distance" at gunpoint by closing bars, restaurants and other events told him and his wife to stay the fuck away from everyone and have his groceries delivered with nobody coming or going from his house he might not have caught the bug. At least for now.  I don't know if he could have taken a prophylaxis with the anti-malarial or not; I don't know what sort of underlying conditions he had, or what medications he was using.  But if we had done that he might still be alive.

Instead of telling him a month ago to lock his ass in his house with his wife and do not open the goddamn door we tried to "lock down" the entire fucking nation and play "social distancing."  That strategy, which was not targeted at those especially at risk, failed for him.  He's dead.

That's not causative, of course.  He might have died anyway.  At that age it's always a risk.  So far his wife is not sick.  Maybe she actually was the one who got it, got a silent infection and give it to him.  We don't know because there's no antibody surveillance so we have no idea and at this point it doesn't matter, other than that his wife should bolt the door and shoot anyone who tries to come in.  In addition we owe her an antibody test (which we have but refuse to approve) so she knows if she needs to stay bolted in her house and shoot anyone who tries to come in that can't prove they're immune or whether it's safe for her to be out among the rest of us.

The policy of "everyone's welcome" is stupid.  The claim of "healthy at every size" and "pop a pill will fix it" is criminally insane and bankrupt as a matter of public policy.  You never know when a bug like this will come, some of them will be greatly potentiated via the mechanisms of action of various pharmaceuticals whether OTC or otherwise and viruses do not give a crap about your political and social justice bullshit.

This bug is known to spread in feces and personal sanitation protocol is not something you can enforce at gunpoint.  It's a cultural thing and as we are now, sadly, finding out there is a price that said "open borders" leftist screamers are going to inflict on everyone in those jurisdictions, like it or not.

I'm hearing anecdotal reports that material numbers of hospitals are starting to stockpile and use hydroxychloroquine as part of their Covid-19 response protocols.

Now theoretically it is now available on "compassionate use" and "right to try" sort of situations, but that's a one-off and someone has to request it.  These reports imply that these medical facilities either are now or are preparing to go much further than "one-offs" and start to use this as a front-line response to people coming in long before they get to the serious or critical stage, which is where the "right to try" stuff kicks in.

That is very important, because as I've noted once you get to the point where critical support is necessary in a given case the data we have from other places (e.g. Wuhan) says your survival odds are near zero.

This means that attempting to interdict case loads so as to not "overload" ICU and similar is stupid -- while it will feel good, and look good, it won't change outcomes.  If I'm 95% likely to die if I go on a vent with Covid-19 (and that is the data folks!) then whether I have a vent available or not is exactly the wrong place to give a wet crap.

The goal must be to stop that progression.  If you think I've been blowing smoke about this and calling those people arguing for cranking up beds and vent counts criminally insane and nothing more than criminal felons trying to jack up the cost of this thing and make money on people dying that table should shut you up right here and now.

Out of the 61 people who had "assisted breathing" by machine three survived.  That's a 4.9% survival rate.  

In fact free flow oxygen via nasal cannula didn't do well either.  Only one in five persons who had that intervention survived.  The other 80% are dead.

May I remind you that supplemental oxygen via cannula does not require a hospital; we do that all the time for people with COPD and such via either concentrator or bottle at lower levels.  Yet if you get there, 80% of the time you die.

The goal for mitigating death in this disease has to be on preventing compromise of the pulmonary system to the degree that those interventions are necessary.

This is why I've said that all of the focus on "overloads" is simply wrong-headed.  It's not that I don't want "inconvenience" or anything of the sort it is that such interventions do not work.  Nobody can seriously suggest that a path of action that fails 95% of the time is worth screaming about or arguing for irrespective of cost.  Shutting down the economy to accommodate a health system intervention approach that fails 95% of the time is criminally insane.

We must focus on paths of action that have better outcome profiles and the data out of both South Korea and the EU says that there are.

Fortunately it appears that a number of medical facilities have figured this out.  They may not be coming on TV to tell you that, but they have.  They're going after attempting on a front-line basis to attenuate the severity of the attack in individual cases and thus halt the progression to where the hospital itself is necessary.

That, rather than being primarily worried about whether we'll "overload" the hospitals, is the right course of action.

Not because I want people to go back to being able to run their bars and restaurants.

It's because I don't want people to die due to the stupidity of our elected officials.  Simply "accepting" that we must protect the hospital admit rate on the false hope that if there's a bed you'll be fine but if not you die, a premise that countless TV series over the decades have ingrained into the American consciousness (e.g. Marcus Welby, House, etc) is absolutely and completely, in the case of this virus, FALSE.

The only means forward that improves outcomes is to avoid the hospital requirement in the first place.  Dribbling people in to facilities with 95% treatment failure rates just means the same people die of the same thing, but slower.  Avoiding the hospital in the first place means they don't die at all.  We have what appears to be the means to greatly attenuate the need for the hospital in the first place.  While I'm sure that the alternatives are not completely effective almost anything beats that which fails 95% of the time and in terms of all-in costs doing nothing beats 95% failure rates because doing nothing avoids all the collateral damage including all the health care workers who will be sickened or killed by drawing this out for months or years.

Even a 50% failure rate of those alternative paths, which might well happen, radically beats a 95% failure rate.

PS: If you think China has had "zero" new cases and has stopped this in their nation -- that is, if you believe them -- you're nuts.  There is now leaked video coming out of Wuhan showing lines at 6' spacing out the door of their hospitals.  Again folks: China lies and if we allow their lies to dictate our policy and response our people will die too.

Facts known:

1. Healthy young children have an effective death rate of zero.  

2. Ordinary, healthy adults are at very low risk of having a serious, critical or fatal outcome.  "Serious" is defined as "in hospital required."  "Critical" is defined as "ICU/Intubated/extraordinary measures."  Fatal is obvious.

3. Co-morbidities, or serious age (>65) dramatically raises the risk of bad outcomes -- by a factor of ten, twenty or even a hundred.

This virus primarily attacks the lungs.  It causes other symptoms but the bad outcomes occur when you are essentially asphyxiated.  Those who have compromised pulmonary capacity (e.g. persons with COPD, diabetes with complications, old people with seriously compromised physical output capacity, asthmatics, etc) are at much higher risk.

While we do not have accurate data, which is likely because our governments don't want to characterize this, or quite possibly because they haven't bothered to do the backwork to do so, we can draw some reasonable inferences.

1. This infection causes some damage to the oxygen/CO2 transport mechanism, centered in most cases around the lungs.

2. A healthy person, not an athlete but an ordinary healthy person, can typically sustain a range of 1 MET (sleeping or sitting quietly) to roughly 10 METS.  Each MET is about 3.5 VO2 points, more or less.  Thus, if you know your VO2Max you know, more or less, what your METS capacity is.  (This relationship isn't exact, but the estimates you can get without a lab test are close enough for this purpose.)

3. Moderate exercise (e.g. walking at ~3 mph) requires somewhere around ~3-4 METS.

4. Vigorous exercise is typically defined as 6 METS or above.

5. Climbing Stairs has been shown to be somewhere between 8 and 9 METs, or materially into the vigorous exercise realm.

6. Many runners, even reasonably-elderly ones (e.g. myself) can radically exceed 6 METS.  In my present (not peak) condition, which is down a couple of VO2 points from typical, I can sustain about 13 METS.  Therefore 6 METS is not really all that impressive at all.

Incidentally, in a few months of effort you can go from a capacity of ~5 METS to quite close to 10.

People do it all the time; it's called Couch-to-5k and while it takes effort most people can accomplish that in ~3-4 months.  You could start now, but I know damn well if you're on the couch now you won't, so I won't bother trying to urge you to fix that.

Now let's contemplate what all this means.

First, if you cannot climb stairs without becoming winded you're in quite a bit of trouble and it doesn't matter whether that's due to asthma, COPD or just generally poor physical condition.  Presume that you get hit hard enough that this bug takes 5 METS out of your peak capacity at its worst.  If you can only barely reach 6 you're at risk of death!  Add some cardiac compromise and the risk goes up quite materially.

I have long harped on the "any size is beautiful" thing, or the "fix it with pills" deal when it comes to diabetes.  That's flat-out bullcrap and now we're going to have hundreds of thousands -- or even a couple of million people find out why.  None of that virtue-signalling garbage will do a thing for your capacity to move oxygen and CO2 and this virus attacks that ability.  You either have the reserve capacity or you don't.

Don't means you're DEAD.

Further, ICU and similar medical interventions will only change a few of these outcomes.  The reason is somewhat complex, but it hinges on the fact that the body has to fight off the virus before it kills you.  There is only so much medicine can do, irrespective of how invasive, when it comes to oxygen exchange.  You can't run 100% O2 down someone's windpipe, forced or otherwise, for more than a few hours; after a day or so that actually causes temporary lung oxygen transport damage, which of course is going to make a situation like this worse.  The maximum concentration that can be tolerated indefinitely is about 50%, which is roughly double that in the atmosphere, and in addition mechanical ventilation is not as efficient as natural to start with.  What this means is that while an ICU can give you some margin back, it's not much.

A rush on hospitals will likely kill more people by a wide margin than it saves.  The reason is simple -- if you don't have the virus and rush the hospital thinking you do the odds of being exposed approach 100%.  If you're "at risk" and rush the hospital, and 10% of those "at serious risk" wind up dying, then the hospital has to save one person for every person who rushes the place whether they get in or not.  It's not at all hard to imagine a situation where this kills ten times as many people as would otherwise expire!

Further, if this gets into a NICU it will probably kill every premature infant in there.  You need to think very carefully if you have a kid in there about the implications of this in that a failure to be completely effective while scrubbing in will hose every kid in there, and if hospitals aren't freaking about this well they had damn well better right now.  Infants wind up in NICU specifically due to pulmonary compromise; that's the issue with premature infants.  For obvious reasons those wee ones have no spare capacity to fight something like this off.

That, along with a general rush on hospitals, would be bad so let's not do that, eh?  Panic will serve nobody and is likely to get a sizable number of people killed.

There are roughly 1.5 million in nursing homes. By definition if you're in a nursing home you are incapable of taking care of your basic daily needs on your own. This almost-always correlates with being unable to sustain any sort of material physical oxygen demand.  All of these people are at very high risk.

There are about 16 million Americans with COPD, most of them as a result of smoking.  With any stage of COPD you are at severe risk with this infection.

Then there are those with diabetes, mostly Type II.  This amounts to almost ten percent of the US population, or around 30 million Americans.  What's worse is that another 80 million+ have pre-diabetes, essentially all of those Type II.  The risk here is less-clear.  To the extent that these conditions are potentiated or accompanied by severe obesity, and it frequently is, the exact management status of the diabetes is not going to be anywhere near as important as the person's general capacity to process oxygen.

So can we put some numbers on this?

Yes, but we need a denominator, and there isn't an accurate one.  The bad news is that given our offshoring and "globalism" insanity over the last 30+ years and the "necessary" re-arrangement of our households to accommodate that such that one person going to work is no longer possible for most families we have a huge problem, like it or not.  As a result of YOUR greed, avarice and allowing the invasion of the lower end of our labor pool by unskilled illegal invaders and sending the medium-skilled jobs to China and India we no longer can keep the kids home and teach them there where they won't get the bug, bring it home and infect you or, much worse, grandma.  Your kids are going to get it and you're odds-on to get this thing too over the next year or so in no small part for this very reason.  The good news is that your children are very unlikely to be seriously harmed by it.

You (and especially Granny) -- not so much.

(By the way, give a big hug and wet virus-laden kiss to the Democrats, Republicans along with yourself and your friends for cheering onward this garbage.  If you think this is the worst of such bugs, and thus the worst-case outcome, you're nuts -- this is a preview of what will come again, and next time has even odds to be worse than this one. Maybe we ought to cut that crap, along with the open borders garbage, out eh?)

Since that's a guess let's assume you get it, and try to figure out how bad your odds are in that instance.

For those who have a METS capability in excess of 10: You can climb stairs for an extended period of time, you can hike on moderate to severe trails without having to stop frequently (or at all), you can jog or run a 12 minute or better pace for an extended period of time (several miles) without having to stop or walk. Your odds are very low of needing even basic medical intervention (e.g. a doctor visit) and vanishingly small of having a severe, critical or fatal case (likely less than 1 in 1,000.)  However, do not be surprised if the virus forces you to curtail your physical activity, perhaps by quite a lot.  In other words you might have a really bad time of it but not hospital-grade bad.  We're talking about odds of materially less than 1% for any medical intervention required of any sort, and under 0.1% for hospitalization or worse.  BTW the good news is that virtually all healthy children from toddlers to the age of 10 or so fall into this category.

For those who have a METS capacity under 10: This includes anyone with unmanaged asthma, COPD, who cannot climb more than a few flights of stairs sequentially without being winded or forced to stop, etc -- your odds of NOT having a serious or worse outcome go down rapidly with decreasing METS capacity.  If you have asthma make damn sure it's controlled; that's typically not an actual shortage of oxygen transport on a physiological basis, but rather from spasms and similar, and as such is unlikely to correlate, if controlled, with more-severe outcomes.  If you have compounding cardiac involvement that also limits physical activity that is a severe negative on top of lung issues because the last thing your heart needs is trouble in getting oxygen.  If you're incapable of even moderate exercise (that is, you can't sustain a walk for a few miles without becoming winded) you are at extremely high risk and should do everything you can to avoid exposure.  Those with serious health conditions, especially immune system disorders or cardio-pulmonary function trouble may have odds as bad as 1 in 10 of getting their ticket punched -- or worse.

Unfortunately the odds of a vaccine being developed, tested, and manufactured before you contract the virus, that is, before the next 18 months to two years, approximates zero.  Therefore there is nothing but bad news if you're severely compromised and can't do anything to fix it.

So with this all in mind I'll take some wild guesses here on mortality.

We're going to lose an additional 10-25% of the people in nursing homes beyond those that normally expire in a given year.  This sounds nasty but it really isn't -- the median nursing home patient dies in about six months!  In other words while this is going to make the news (as it certainly did at Kirkland) the difference between cacking right now and six months from now isn't really very significant.  It will make for a hell of a lot of press and scare the bejeezus out of people but in terms of outcomes and economics it's not going to matter much.

The much larger impact is going to be on those people who have COPD and similar disorders.  I will not be surprised at all if 20% of those people die within 12 months as a direct and indirect result of this virus and there is nothing that can be done about it as COPD is not only progressive there's no medically known way to reverse it.  SE Florida has huge areas where Sunday mornings feature an enormous percentage of the patrons at various eateries sucking down carbs by the plate-full, most of them ridiculously obese and many of them are toting around oxygen cylinders.  More than a few, astonishingly, drag said cylinder outside with them in the middle of their meal to have a cigarette!  A huge percentage of those people are going to die when they get the virus and there's nothing that can be done about it.

If you're seriously compromised as a result of diabetes and/or severe obesity it's definitely worth getting the damned carbs out of your pie hole right now.  Every bit of compromise you can get rid of in that regard, and every pound and point of insulin resistance or hypertension you can remove will help if you accomplish it prior to getting the virus.  I know, I know, you can't give up the pasta, potatoes and cake, choosing green veggies, eggs, cheese and meat instead.  This time it's not just the size of your ass, it's whether your ass survives that may be stake.  Choose wisely because if 10% of those people die we're talking about a couple of million additional corpses.  That will matter both in terms of public perception and economics.

If you're not into athletics taking up a severe training regime is likely counter-productive in that the last thing you want to do is get well into oxygen debt if you have a bug like this, especially if you have some sort of cardiac problem you're unaware of.  However, moderate exercise, if you're not currently doing it, cannot hurt and may help if undertaken outdoors in clean air.  Not only are there unlikely to be virus particles you can inhale there and nothing you can touch that has virus on it, but in addition even a couple of additional points of VO2Max provide you with a bit more margin when, not if, you get the virus.

Finally, there's luck.  There apparently are two serotypes of this thing going around -- the older version, and then a second serotype that is "younger" and more virulent.  What's not clear is whether you gain any cross-immunity from getting one before the other; if not then you definitely want the bad one first, since if you get the bad one while recovering from the less-bad you're already compromised and that raises the risk of very, very bad outcomes.  On the other hand if one is partially protective you want the lesser one first because it may blunt the impact of the bad one.  Right now there's no science on this, so take your coin and toss it; this is a pure luck of the draw thing right now.

When In The Course of Human Events......

The Founders of this nation put forward a very basic premise:

to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them

That no government, no person whether royalty or not, King, Queen or Pawn, can take from one to give to another, to make one lesser than another, to bring remove from one the basics of humanity for the privilege of another.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

That the very premise of humanity is that one has a right to live, to be left alone to do as one pleases, and to pursue -- but not be guaranteed -- happiness.  The only lawful and proper constraints arise when your exercise of same prevents someone else from having that same peaceful enjoyment.

One cannot have a right to life if one cannot defend it using tools at least as powerful as those who would take it from you.

One cannot have liberty if one is compelled to slavery for another's benefit.

The Founders put together a document called The Constitution.  The debate over it, and what needed to be added to it, is found in The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist; two books that are the chronology of the running debate of the time.  Anyone who claims to have an opinion on the foundations of our nation and why the Constitution is important ought to have read both, as should anyone who claims a right to run for elective office at any level -- state, local or federal.

Chief among the foundation of this nation is The Rule of Law and that it apply equally to everyone, all the time, in each case without exception.  Our government and We The People have made a mockery of this.

Not one illegal immigrant has a right to be here under any circumstance; The Rule of Law says so.  It does not matter whether they personally intended to break said law; that merely encompasses whether they bear criminal culpability for the offense.  If you find yourself with someone else's $1,000 and you did not intend to steal it, but you had no lawful means by which you came to have it you still have no right to keep it.

Calling someone a Dreamer is an insult to America.  Their "dream" is theft.  A thief has no right to keep the spoils irrespective of their personal culpability in obtaining same nor do they have any right to demand respect from anyone else.

Senators Richard Blumenthal and Mark Warner, both Democrats, have threatened legislation that is a rank violation of the First Amendment in response to the Christchurch livestream.  Where is respect for the contract our government has with the people; the terms of which are embodied in The Constitution and its Amendments?

There is no respect because the people of this nation no longer have respect for themselves nor any willingness to hold government to the terms and conditions of its very existence.

Every single person in America should not only watch the Christchurch slaughter they should watch all videos of any extremist Muslim who saws off heads or throws gays off buildings.  It is not possible to understand evil and the only effective means to stop it if you refuse to recognize it exists and watch the errors others made that led them to their demise.

How many gay people would support a person who supports said political and religious philosophies if videos of those adherents murdering gay people by throwing them off 20 story buildings were readily available?  Why do you think Senators Blumenthal and Warner want that content declared illegal despite it being a rank violation of the Constitution to do so?

Governments are banning and attempting to ban such not because they fear copycats: They are banning that speech and literally burning books because faced with the gore, the nastiness and inhumanity of these acts the people may conclude that it was the government itself that sowed the seeds of these acts, conspired with and gave comfort to said people and groups all the while rendering individual people powerless to stop it by infringing on The Right to Keep and Bear Arms -- and did all of the above intentionally.

Were the people to reach that conclusion they'd be correct and in response they might revoke their consent to said government entirely and demand it depart.

A slave is not allowed weapons because he might use them to become free.

Cultures collapse when there is no cohesion remaining -- when the primary means to get ahead is to stomp on someone else's head instead of innovating and when cheating is no longer punished and is celebrated instead.  If that is not curtailed then collapse is inevitable -- it is simply a matter of time.

Whether something is "hate speech" is in the eye of the beholder but irrespective of that The First Amendment protects it.  Why?  Because even the most-vile expression of dislike is one's right to hold and have.  To state otherwise is to state a right to control another person's mind and thoughts -- to not only enslave as to labor but to thought itself.

That is profoundly evil.  It is what the Communist Chinese are doing right now with the Uyghurs, numbering more than 11 million of their citizens.

This very same act is what our government is now calling on "big companies" to do, it is what the left has repeatedly done to anyone who dares speak against their policies and desires whether on college campuses, in corporate America or in the public square and now we have two Senators who deserve an immediate and long prison term for their threat to knowingly and intentionally violate their oath of office and The First Amendment, including the threat to impose said violation by force.

Celebrities with dim-witted children got them into colleges by paying bribes and cheating.  The claim that said students were "blameless" if their test scores were faked or they faked a "disability" to extend time and thus be able to cheat is a lie.  Said "students" are fully culpable yet none of them have been charged; not only did every one of them know they didn't compete on the rowing team (for example) any of them who got an extra hour or two to take the SAT or ACT knew damn well they were cheating, whether they knew their answers were being modified or not.

Why did this happen and why aren't the kids in the dock too?

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

Colleges claim they need "diversity."  That's nonsense; in a meritocracy the best rise irrespective of skin color, race or religion.  The fact is that this "diversity need" is met by lowering standards and allowing unqualified people who cannot do the work into the school.  This was going on in the 1990s and it has only gotten worse -- much worse -- since.  There is, of course, no value in that to a person "selected" via "diversity" if they have to pay full price and will inevitably fail to be able to do the work.  This in turn means someone else gets screwed so they don't have to pay full price and they also don't have to do the work they are incapable of.  The alleged "degree" conferred by said school is thus rendered meaningless; it no longer denotes competence and to prevent that from being recognized and their "brand" destroyed said colleges conspire with employers and governments, both outwardly and not to "require" said "credentials" for an ever-expanding list of "professions."

In short college is no longer about education; it is about grift, fraud, bribery and slavery.  It's a racketeering enterprise writ large and ought to be prosecuted as a felony, starting with the "most-elite" schools.  Is it any surprise that a tiny bit of the bribery began six months earlier with so-called "standardized" testing that really isn't and claims of being on a soccer team that were false?

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

The Fed is prohibited from buying anything other than government backed securities.  Fannie and Freddie paper have on their face the statement that they have no such backing; go online and view any of their prospectuses.  I pointed this out more than 10 years ago with a copy of the front page of one such offering out of thousands; every one bears the same statement.  That the government bailed them out does not matter.  The Fed's transacting in same and their continued ownership is illegal.  Rather than change the law (which might provoke a debate over exactly what The Fed "prints") they simply ignore the law and you let them.

The Fed's legal mandate under the law is for stable prices.  The Fed's chair and other governors make dozens of speeches a year and testify under oath before Congress to their intent to violate the law with their "2% inflation target."  Congress could change that law but doing so might provoke a debate over exactly what The Fed "prints" and so instead both Congress and The Fed ignore the law and you let them.

The truth is that Money is a medium of exchange which you acquire by producing something of value to someone else.  It facilitates trade because it is fungible -- that is, you don't need to transact in oranges, chickens or hours of programming a computer; all three can be reduced to money.

You cannot print money because it is impossible to materialize a television, a car, a piece of computer software, gasoline or electrical power out of thin air.

You can print credit, which spends like money.  But if you emit credit then what you are claiming is that someone in the future will produce a thing to legitimate what you did.  If the people refuse what's left?  Force -- slavery in point of fact.

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

A Pakastani American named Imran Awan worked for Democrats in Congress from 2004 - 2017.  While doing so it is rather apparent he ran a spy ring inside Congress and stole Congressional computer equipment, much of it with the knowledge of Congressional Democrats.  Prosecuting him would have inevitably drawn those Democrats into what could have easily wound up being criminal culpability including spying for foreign nations.  So they let him go despite proof that he wired more than $280,000 to Pakistan -- funds that very well might have been used to facilitate terrorism!

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

It is a felony to restrain trade, attempt to monopolize or fix prices among people who are supposed to be competing.  The medical industry does it every single day.  Why not when the example set is that if you're rich or powerful (and they are both) you could even spy for a foreign nation and get away with it.  We could literally dispose of the entire federal budget deficit, all of the Federal debt, all of the state and local pension problems and cut property taxes in half or more if we put a stop to this crap.  They do it because despite the law they have no fear of prosecution.  Why should they?

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

I can, through hard work, earn a mid-six-figure income and have multiple business ideas that I'd like to develop.  I've done it before and can do it again.  But given the above examples, along with the myriad things I've watched big business do in the last 20 years and get away with all of them -- acts that were I to do myself I would be prosecuted criminally and go to prison, why would I?  If I was to undertake any of those risky ventures and put my capital and intellectual effort at risk any of those people could illegally undermine my product or service, putting me out of business or simply steal it.  Unless I was willing to personally kill the persons responsible there is nothing I could do about it and I'd go broke.  I will not undertake such a venture for as long as all of this crap exists, and that's why.  I instead choose to hike, ski, run, drink beer and enjoy a much lower stress lifestyle.  I do not need any of the trappings of wealth; they're options.  When my time comes to die those ideas,  products and services intentionally left undeveloped will die with me instead of being produced.

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

The Christchurch shooter, obviously nuts, wrote a "manifesto" which governments are actively trying to suppress your ability to read.  In it he pointed out an inconvenient truth -- that there is no nation with a material white population percentage in which white women are reproducing at a replacement or better rate.  That is, unless this changes white people will eventually go extinct.

We bemoan a little fish, frog or bird disappearing but there is literally not one word in the media about the most-productive and innovative differentiated group of human beings ever to walk the planet heading directly for extinction by their own voluntary decision.  Why are white women choosing not to bear children?  Maybe it's because a goodly number of them have come to the same conclusion I have -- that there is no rule of law -- and thus unless they're so rich they can cheat like those who did so to get their kids into college their offspring have no chance of success on a merit basis and they thus make the entirely reasonable decision not to create children at all.  After all why would you willingly and intentionally bring a child into this world if you believe they are going to be enslaved and mercilessly robbed for their entire lives?

Rather than correct that problem governments instead are importing people who have not yet made that determination or worse, believe and are explicitly promised that they can simply put their hand out and force others to provide whatever they want and need -- and thus those people make the entirely reasonable decision to breed like rabbits!

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW AND WE ARE GOING TO LITERALLY EXTINGUISH WHITE PEOPLE THROUGHOUT THE WESTERN WORLD AS A RESULT.  AS FURTHER POPULATION SEGMENTS ARE TAPPED TO BE THE VICTIMS OF SAID POLICIES THEY WILL CHOOSE NOT TO REPRODUCE AS WELL AND INEVITABLY THEY WILL ALSO GO EXTINCT, ONE AT A TIME.

We have in fact become so depraved that our own government is giving cats diseases on purpose to study them and even though those diseases are easily curable and the animals could then be adopted out that takes a bit of effort and more than a a nickel in cost so they kill them instead.  That would be bad enough but our government is also importing cats and dogs from nations around the world for the purpose of meat to feed said study subjects, practicing animal cannibalism.  We can't be bothered to use byproducts of human food production; you see, that might cost a bit more money.

I'm not the only one who recognizes this; here's another article pointing out many of the same things.

America is extended, riddled with debt and too reliant on ever more debt, past its growth peak, incapable and unwilling to address structural issues. Both political parties have given up on dealing with debt, illusory monetary policies such as MMT are invented to render structural issues as irrelevant. Meanwhile wealth inequality keeps expanding from administration to administration no matter who is in charge with voters distracted by the ideological divisions of the day, not trusting their leaders or each other.

And all this with 3.8% unemployment. What will this all look like during the next downturn? Nobody knows. Rome showed us to not take civilization for granted. It also showed us to not ignore structural problems before they become too large to tackle.

Sven may be hopeful but I am not.  I'm not alone either.  Charles Hugh Smith has written a number of columns on this same point, including just recently.

I challenge you to show me just one "grand idea" or modern stock market rocketship that is not a scam in some form over the last 10+ years.  Netflix, as just one example, effectively stole their entire distribution infrastructure, which is very expensive, through various forms of browbeating and when that was threatened they got the government to mandate their ability to force non-customers to pay for what they wanted during the Obama Administration.  Then, when Obama left, both he and his wife got a multi-million dollar contract from the company.  You don't really think that was the kickback payment to the former President since the stock went from ~$5 when Obama took office to nearly $400 now....

I've written on many of these other firms, in detail, over the last decade.  None of them would exist were there an even-handed enforcement of the law for the simple reason that all of them violate the basic law of business balance: The more people who touch a transaction the more it costs -- always.  The reason for that is simple: Nobody works for free and if you think you've found someone who is someone else is stealing from them because no rational person will perform work that benefits only someone else.

THERE IS NO RULE OF LAW.

This can't -- and won't -- change without Americans rising up by the millions and demanding that it stop and be willing to enforce that demand by whatever means are necessary.  This does not mean violence is required but until and unless those who claim to be "our leaders" believe that any such demand has the force of the people behind it and will be enforced should they stick up their middle finger toward common people once again as they have done for the last 30+ years they have no reason to stop stealing, stop rigging the system and stop screwing everyone else.

There's no reason for me to be hopeful because there is no reason to believe that Americans, say much less the people in any of the other developed, western nations will in fact demand this crap stop.  In fact there is every reason to simply sit back and enjoy what little time is left, given that within the next six years tipping points will be reached in the US on a budget and monetary basis that will destroy the illusion of "growth and prosperity" and from which there is little or no chance of recovery.

Let me make a few observations.

First, eight years ago, and again four years ago, America elected a President.  Fully half, give or take a couple of percent, disagreed with the outcome.

There were exactly zero riots, fires, "mass protests" and similar following that outcome despite the fact that half the population vehemently disagreed with it.

This time around, not so much.

Now I want you think very carefully about the following.

Most of the land mass of this nation is owned and resided upon by people who are in "red" (that is, the winner this time) areas of the country.  With the exception of certain urban centers and right along the Mexican/Texas border there are very few "solid" blue areas.

Those urban centers consume roughly 90% of the energy and food in this country yet they comprise 5-10% of the land mass.  The "red" areas produce 95% of the food and energy this nation consumes and occupies 90-95% of the land mass.

Do you really think that doing something like eliminating the last pieces of the structure our founding fathers put in place to prevent tyranny of the majority from being able to take hold is a good idea?

A little history lesson: Prior to the 17th Amendment ratified in 1913 it was impossible for the Federal Government to shove any program down the throats of the 50 states.  That's because the state legislatures had effective control of the Senate and could recall their Senators.

The House was elected by the people, the Senate was elected by The State Legislatures (and could be recalled by same) and The President was elected by the Electors, which were voted for in the popular vote.

The latter provides a modest but real increase in the representation of "flyover" states; that is, those with lower population counts.  In other words it is a check and balance in the ultimate tyranny of democracy.

Yes, I said democracy is ultimately tyrannical -- because it is.

America is not a Democracy.  It is a Constitutional Republic.  This is very important; in a democracy 50%+1 can render the 50%-1 slaves by mere vote.  Those who are in the minority in a democracy have no rights at all.  Democracy is best represented by two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

We are all minorities in some form or fashion.  If you're gay, black, yellow, male, female, whatever -- all it takes is some other set of groups to get together and decide to oppress you, and in a democracy you're fucked.

America's founding fathers put in place two systems to prevent this.  The first was the bicameral legislature; a House elected by the people at large and a Senate elected by the State Legislators.  This structure guaranteed that a landmass that amassed 50%+1 of the population (not even in the same state or states!) could not band together and shove down the throat of the States any policy measure because you needed the concurrence of more than half the state legislatures, where each were delegated but two votes to their Senators who were accountable to said legislature, to pass anything at all.

This evaporated with the passage of the 17th Amendment.  Now you only needed 50%+1 of the people in a given state to pass anything you wanted and they could all live in a tiny percentage of the land mass -- such as is the case with Illinois where more than half the population lives in the immediate area of Chicago.

What came right after that?  Prohibition, shoved down the throat of the States, less than 7 years later!

What also came after it was an unbridled expansion of the Federal Government into state affairs.  Indeed, virtually everything became a "legitimate" federal matter.  Why?  Because it was impossible for the States to prevent it.

Do you think the founders were wrong to do what they did, and the 17th Amendment corrected that?

If you believe so then please consider this.

Ever drive through small town America?

Hell, how about "not-so-small-town" America?

Many of these towns look like something out of a WWI or WWII European war movie.  There was one factory or maybe two, but now it sits empty, weeds growing out of the parking lot as high as your head, all the windows are broken out and the roof has caved in.  Over on the outskirts there's a Walmart that pays $9/hour, but only offers 20 hours/week.  The factory paid $30/hour, full-time, plus benefits and food, power, medicine and beer cost half of what it does now. 90% of what formerly were little diners and shops in the "center" of the town, which might have one actual traffic light, are gone -- boarded up and often literally falling apart.  There might be one bank left, a branch of a big national chain, and maybe an antique store.  Maybe.  All the factory jobs left for China and Mexico and everything else died when the middle-class incomes to support them disappeared.  We did that as a nation with our "progressive" and "global" agenda driven by the 50%+1 that live in the closest big city 200 miles away.

The locals who used to work in the fields within 10 or 20 miles from that town are all unemployed too.  Why?  Because the illegal Mexicans came and we refused to throw them out.  They work for a few bucks a day in cash, no taxes, no unemployment, no nothing.  No American can live on that; the embedded cost of just trying to stay alive would leave you with zero.  But the Mexicans work hard and then sleep 10 to a single-room apartment, which incidentally is a total shithole as you'd expect given that density of occupation.  They don't care; it's better than what they had in Mexico, you see, and they can Western Union home some of the money.  This is the face of "immigration", mostly illegal, that really exists in this country.  They brought their third-world shithole here and while it's a little bit better than what they had in the process of doing it they dragged us into the gutter with them.

The people who lived in that town did and most who are still there do go to church every weekend, and some go again during the week, usually on Wednesday.  There's usually one, sometimes two churches.  Every one of them has the word "God" or "Christ" in the name on the front.  They mean it when it comes to their faith and in addition that's where all the local people shake hands, exchange chit-chat on the last week and, for younger people, it's where they meet one another.  You know, girls and boys.  Yeah.  Faith is real there, you see, and it's Christian. But from your point of view that's deplorable and that "those people" don't like the idea of making a wedding cake for a gay marriage is deserving of a federal lawsuit and loss of the bakery (which is, as a result, now closed -- putting yet more people out of work.)  The people who live in these towns don't see your point of view as a civil rights matter but rather as attacking God.

What was left after the factory was displaced isn't enough to run a "service economy", which is why it never showed up there and the old business buildings are all boarded up.  Nobody can afford $8 lattes on a $9/hour wage for 20 hours a week and nobody would want them if they could.  There's probably a McDonalds on the outskirts, and a couple of self-serve gas stations with a convenience store.  It sells cheap beer and lots of it to the locals who have nothing to do but drink and then go to church and pray for forgiveness for last night's 12 pack.  None of the jobs at any of these places, except maybe the store manager, makes more than $9/hour and Obamacare has forced all the regular workers down to 20 hours a week on top of it.  Try living on $180/week gross sometime -- before FICA and Medicare is taken out, never mind gas for the car and the rapidly-escalating car insurance bill -- and you might understand.  Yes, I know the car is 15 years old and runs like crap.  What do you expect on under $1,000/month of income?

This is what 40 years of sending jobs overseas with "trade deals" did.  It's what Amazon did.  It's what Walmart and its Chinese supply line did.  It's what "progressive America" did, and then to add insult to injury the teachers in the public schools tell all the kids that Mommy and Daddy are bad people and hate both the planet and their own kids because they don't drive a $30,000 Prius or a $60,000 Tesla.

This is everywhere in rural America.  Get in your car and out of your comfort zone some time and you'll see it. It's not far from wherever you are.  I've driven through dozens of these formerly-alive places in the last six months -- every one of them dead today, but full of real people.  I never met one such person that was a racist, xenophobic asshole, but they're not very happy, and the people they're unhappy with are those very same folks you wanted to keep in office in Washington DC.

If you think the destruction of small town America is confined to farms you forget the other half -- energy.  Would you like your lights to work?  Many of those small towns are dead because of the insanity of our energy policy -- or lack thereof, tied to left-wing whackjob nonsense.

Now you want to add insult to injury when they show up to vote, exactly as civics tells them we have a right to do, and a large number of you in the cities did not show up.

They bought into the message of bringing American jobs back to America and ejecting those who have no right to be here.  You call them xenophobic, racist and small-minded -- they call it a shot at decent employment for the first time in 30 years.

They believe in the Henry Ford model of American business, and they're not wrong to do so.  Make the product here, pay the people well enough to be able to afford it, and you'll do just fine.

They win the election, in short, and you lose.

Then you decide to be a sore loser and loot, burn, beat people, issue threats, cry, whine on social media and try to obstruct everything by any means possible -- legal or not.  You bus people in to "protest" and riot, you "petition", you raise hell in short -- oh, and all this after you implored the other side to "respect the outcome of the election" and lambasted them for suggesting they might want to merely count the ballots twice!

Note again, as I pointed out above, that eight years ago, and four years ago, these very same people were on the losing end of your stick exactly as they had been for the previous three decades yet they did none of the above.  They understand duplicity and your double-standard quite well, seeing as they did the honorable thing and respected the outcome twice in a row despite getting screwed sequentially both times.  The only thing your brand of government offered them in the end was Medicaid or worthless "health insurance" through the exchange; the former has no doctors that accept it within 20 miles and the latter has a $5,000 deductible before it pays anything, which is utterly laughable when you consider these folks have a gross wage of under $1,000 a month.

Now the question:  Are you prepared for the possibility they might decide en-masse that they're done with this crap -- and with you?  That they're not going to take it any more?

What if the people who live in the "red" areas, that is, those who produce the food and energy that are consumed to the 90th percentile in the "blue" areas, decide they're not going to do that for the blue areas any more?  What if their middle finger goes up, in short?

Remember, we allegedly do not permit slavery in this country any more -- which means that which someone owns they have the right to sell - or not sell.  They have the right to produce - or, more to the point, not produce.

What if the people who peacefully conceded the result of two elections over the last eight years despite vehemently opposing the outcome decide that if the "blue" folks can riot, loot, beat people who vote the "wrong way" and similar they will not accept any further election result that doesn't go their way, and instead of rioting or burning things they will simply shut off the flow of food and energy to said "blue" areas?  After all, you don't value them at all -- you consider them subhuman, racist, xenophobic, deplorable and irredeemable -- all at once.

I'll tell you what happens if they take that decision: Every major city in the country would go feral within hours.

Within days those cities would not be blue, they'd be blackened and reduced to ash as those very same "protesters" you like so much loot, burn and shoot at each other trying to get the last scraps of food and fuel remaining.  They would then probably try to come out of the cities and take by force what had been denied them, only to run into a major problem - the "red guys" have more guns, they know the land because they live there, and more importantly they actually hit what they aim at, having had plenty of practice feeding their families with deer, wild boar and similar.  Mr. Gang Banger against Mr. Deer Hunter isn't a very fair fight, when you get down to it.

Oh by the way there's a phrase for what this would mean, if you haven't figured it out by now: Civil War.

Is that what you want?

It's where your actions are headed, if you keep doing what you're doing -- and nobody knows exactly where the tipping point is.

Better think long and hard, those of you in the "blue" places who are running this crap.  You do not have a snowball's chance in Hell of being able to grow enough in the way of crops on the landmass you control to feed a tenth of your population and every squirrel in your trees would be shot dead and eaten within an hour after this began.  Silent spring indeed.  Never mind the fact that most of you "wonderful snowflakes" couldn't shoot, skin, butcher and cook a deer -- or even a squirrel -- if you had to.  Never mind that a good 80% of you couldn't manage to run one mile if you were being chased by someone interested in eating you.

The day that cellophane-wrapped chicken stops showing up in the grocery store is literally the day 90% of Blue America starves.

Nobody in their right mind wants such an outcome.  But where do you think this all goes if you keep it up, eh?

Every bit of it has been enabled by the 17th Amendment and tyranny of the majority -- a tyranny you wish to increase by doing things such as abolishing the Electoral College.

There's a very good reason our founding fathers designed a Constitutional Republic instead of a Democracy.  They understand the problem with democracy: It doesn't work.  Democracy always ends up leading to riots and civil war, because exactly what the blue folks are doing now escalates until everyone starts shooting everyone.

A Constitutional Republic avoids this outcome because even a very large majority cannot infringe the rights of everyone else -- even when the majority lives in big, concentrated places like cities.

That was the magic sauce of the original design in our legislature and Presidency.  It's why we have an Electoral College -- to provide a bit of "overweighting" to those places that are utterly crucial to the cohesiveness and survival of the nation as a functional republic -- that is, a bit more balance against tyranny of the majority of 50%+1.

We got rid of the biggest check and balance with the 17th Amendment and I have, for decades, maintained that whenever America finally is declared dead and done, and the book is closed, that will be written in as the reason our nation's political system failed.  It's the only Amendment we cannot reasonably repeal, because to do so would require the sitting Senate to vote itself out of a job.  I'm sure you can figure out how likely that is.

But we can avoid doing more violence to our Constitution -- and we had better, or the outcome, given the annals of history available to anyone who cares to look, is quite certain.  If you want to see how this turns out should you keep pressing the issue go have a look at the map of how many states Trump won .vs. Clinton, or how the county-by-county map looks.  You'll see a lot more red of various shades than you will blue.

The bottom line?  Go ahead and be a sore loser.  Go ahead and whine.  Go ahead and try to change what our representative process led to.  Go ahead and decide to loot, burn and beat.  Refuse to accept the result of the election, if you insist.  Hell, go ahead and try to threaten or even bribe the electors!  Make sure you tear down the last little bit of foundation and structure inherent in the design of the legislature and executive of the United States.  Who needs it; it's all in the name of being "progressive", right -- even if when counted by landmass, counties or states the election was a landslide for Trump.

Just don't be surprised, if you keep it up, that at some point, given that you're utterly reliant on those you're abusing for the basics of life -- the loaf of bread, the gallon of gasoline, the electricity that powers your lights -- they decide they've had enough.  That day your supply of cellophane-wrapped meat and plastic bag full of bread disappears like a fart in the wind.  There comes a time when those who you've put the boot to for so long, and then try to deny the ability to change things peacefully through the representative process our founding fathers gave us, decide that despite their religious beliefs and good manners they're not going to service you on their knees any more.

Don't be dumb enough to think you can keep doing what you've been doing forever because you can't and if you go too far there will be no warning, no second chances and no saying you're sorry.  It'll just happen starting with one final stupid act -- and then we all lose.