Jan de Heem, Still Life with Glass and Oysters

Jan de Heem, 1606-1684, was the outstanding painter of still life during the Dutch Golden Era. Few of his works are dated. Still life painting was a family enterprise started by de Heem's father and uncle and continued by their sons and Jan's sons and their extended family. Jan de Heem was the most distinguished and successful.

 

Sigh. The Wuhan Flu. Or whatever name it's going by this week. It's become the gravity well of daily life. The tipoff is when the narrative goes symmetrical on a large scale, meaning for every yeah there's a nay and, absent reliable facts, savvy opportunists talk their book to the newly bewildered. In terms of creativity they're as engaging as they are useless.

Among those things I fear is a monster mutation creating a second wave, the present first wave being the left jab, the future second wave being the right hook, typically eight to ten times more lethal than the first . This is the ruling class's daydream, expect rule by daily decree.

Be watchful in early Autumn. Yes, the same malevolent morons will be in charge at CDC and other catch basins. Instead of timely and sound information you'll get the same hambone blather. You'll be on your own then as now. Top off your preps. For those new to prepping there's a rule: when you have twice as much as you need, double it. It may barely be enough.

Have a viable and practiced plan B for the worst of the worst cases. Yes dear heart, this includes survival. When you can't bug in, you gotta bug out, which means living as a nomad, perhaps a hounded nomad.

This isn't 1920 or 1930 when we had a surplus of everything, a broad consensus on how to use it, and natural private lives. We're enfeebled, actually, by a scarcity of irreducible basics. Plan accordingly.

Kozmik troofs aside, the Wuhan Flu is the only theatre open this week, so I present some of the more compelling short features on offer.

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Steven Greenhut at Spectator reminds us how far we've fallen into a police state. An excerpt:

The current situation eventually will pass, but any time there’s any crisis — real, perceived, or exaggerated — government will instantly hit the police-state panic button. Thanks to so much of the reporting on the pandemic, which mostly has targeted those politicians who didn’t “do something” quickly enough, we’ll see an arms race over who can take the boldest moves without delaying over quaint concerns about our liberties.

Just as Americans have become accustomed to the TSA’s security theater and to endless police cameras and checkpoints, we soon may also become accustomed to routine lockdowns and arbitrary edicts any time officials get wind of a coming health or other problem. We won’t know for sure, of course, but just wait until next year’s flu season.

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It may be there's such a thing as too much Spam but I put it down as sinister speculation. Hormel's Illinois plant is shut down . Consider this a ranging shot. Spam is mostly made in Hormel's Austin, Minnesota plant.

And there's this:

Gateway Pundit - China Billionaire Undermines US Food Supply, Shuts Down Pork Plants in Multiple States ... Chinese owned Smithfield Foods shut down its operations in South Dakota recently

A reader comments: Smithfield brands include Armour, Berlinki, Carando, Cook's, Curly's, Eckrich, Farmland, Gwaltney, Healthy Ones, John Morrell, Krakus, Kretschmar, Margherita, Morliny, Nathan's Famous, Pure Farmland, and Smithfield.

But wait. There's more:

Zero Hedge - Meat Prices Suddenly Surge As Food Processing Plants Shut Down, With 1000s Of Tons Left To Spoil ... as one of the many worst-case "supply-side" shocks unfolds Americans just might riot

WSB-TV Atlanta - Nearly 100 Tyson chicken workers test positive for virus ... chicken plant in Tennessee. A facility in Columbus Junction where at least 148 employees were infected and two died, has been closed since April 6th

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The Z Man says the savvy leaders of whatever comes next for right-wing politics are just now leaving high school. An excerpt:

Having reached the end of the tournament and being relegated to the loser bracket, the various teams in fringe politics now seek to start the tournament over again. It’s why the Left side calls themselves anti-Fascists and the Right side embraces the Fascist aesthetic. It allows both sides to believe they can start the process over again and this time, get a better result...

Of course, this type of fringe politics is almost exclusively male. In fact, the reason for so much interest and energy in fringe politics in general is that mainstream politics is almost completely feminine now. Both sides of the liberal democratic order are dominated by harpies and schoolmarms. There’s simply no place for a normal male in conventional politics, so normal males are filtering into antiquarian politics. For many, this is just a better version of the video game of life.

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From Bloomberg, via Yahoo. The automobile industry has hit a brick wall. Excerpts:

Used-vehicle auctions are for now virtually paralyzed, much like the rest of the economy. The grave concern market watchers have is that vehicles already are starting to pile up at places where buyers and sellers make and take bids on cars and trucks—and that this imbalance will last for months.

Used-car sales fell 64% in the last week of March, according to Manheim. The Cox Automotive-owned auction company estimates that prices have fallen about 10% in recent weeks, though that figure is based on unusually low volume at auctions.

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James Kunstler sees "a harsher, hungrier, angrier society of broken promises and dashed expectations" when "the hocus-pocus of Modern Monetary Theory" crashes in a heap. Excerpt:

The world never reached such a pitch of activity up to the blow-ups of 2008, and it went through the motions for a decade after that. Now that it’s stopped, all that’s left is the law of gravity, and it doesn’t get more basic. The “wealth” acquired in the decade since by the so-called “one-percent” was loaded onto a defective aircraft, like a Boeing 737-MAX, and an awful lot of it will fall to earth now on broken wings.

Their agents and praetorians on Wall Street are working feverishly to stave off that crash-landing, like a band of magicians casting spells on the ground while that big hunk of juddering metal augers earthward. Wait for it as spring brings new life across the land and things unseen before steal onto the scene.

 

1955. Zenith magazine ad

 

The Zenith Flash-matic, invented by Eugene Polley, was the first successful wireless remote. It was soon superseded by the Space Commander which used high frequency sound, then ultrasonics, which in turn was replaced with the infrared system of today.

 

 

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By her own statements, the "lead vaccine scientist" at NIH reveals herself as an embittered and tiresome race hustler. To quote the immortal Daffy Duck: what a maroon. This stuff is one more way the NIH has forfeited the trust of decent people and needs to be replaced and fumigated. Excerpts from Fox News:

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett , who is described by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as the "lead" member of the U.S. government team racing to find a coronavirus vaccine, has engaged with online theories calling the pandemic a black "genocide" and condemned what she called "systematic oppression" by white people, a review of her social media posts by "Tucker Carlson Tonight" reveals...

"I am praying that policies reflect this is [sic] multiple ways," she wrote, referring to addressing systemic racism. "They must or we will be doomed in the next pandemic(s) too" ...

On March 29, Corbett tweeted out a Bloomberg article about how the poor are dying at higher rates from coronavirus. In her tweet, she said that doctors would deliberately choose to deny ventilators to black Americans, leaving them to die instead.

Are the CDC, FDA, NIH and WHO warehouses where the medical profession puts their fascist schoolmarms, race-baiting clowns and third rate opportunists? They had one job. They failed. In fact, their confusion and misinformation made a bad situation worse.

Apologies, if offered, are not accepted. It's time for the lot of them to cease betraying the citizenry for their own amusement, clean out their desks and be gone. Whatever replaces them has to be better because it can't be worse.

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As always, Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish cuts through the polemicist blather that sees everything through a racial lens. An excerpt:

The Chinese virus is a social evil that seems to attack good social behavior, like going to churches and synagogues, socializing across generations, and making sure that grandchildren interact with their grandparents, while rewarding bad social behavior, isolation and distancing. It’s almost designed to further fragment American social life...

At a time when the country should be coming together, their only thought is of how to tear it apart for their political profit, racializing the virus and then blaming it on racism, instead of on Communist China, which lied about the pandemic, may have created it, and then cornered the market on protective gear.

But blaming China doesn’t serve Warren or AOC’s political interests.

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Beth Baumann at Town Hall takes on those who say "Lockdown Protestors Are Racist Confederates". An excerpt:

It's rather amazing that the left always goes to the extreme and say everything is racist. Trump was called a racist when he shut down flights from China to protect Americans from the virus. That turned out to be a good decision, even though he went against the grain.

If every single state had an entire lockdown, with absolutely nothing open, people would have a meltdown. The left would say Trump is somehow propping up the wealthy because low-income people can't afford to have months and months of savings in their bank accounts. If no one was allowed to work because it was deemed necessary for the health of the public, that too would be considered racist.

No American is being "sacrificed." People are tired of sitting by, watching their families struggle. They're scared for their communities, their farmers and their neighbors. They're seeing our entire economy and their livelihoods flushed down the toilet.

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Aesop at Raconteur Report cites "people yammering that this evil, fascist lockdown must end, because reasons" and replies:

Okay. Name them...

How many people are you willing to kill? Where's the line in the sand where we finally hit too many dead? Is it one? Or shall we just leap straight to mass murder? (Why should abortionists have all the fun, amirite?) We've already equaled flu deaths for an average flu season and a half, in six weeks. We did the deaths in an average flu season in just the last week...

I'll wait right over here why you explain in chapter and verse where and how you derive the right to begin an open-ended pogrom on anybody else, and why you think that the people in your crosshairs shouldn't start shooting you in the face as justifiable homicide for your expressing that malice aforethought, and possessed of the means to carry it out.

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Lee Billings at Scientific American reports new study of galaxy clusters suggests the cosmos may not be the same in all directions. Excerpts:

An x-ray survey of distances to galaxy clusters across the heavens suggests some are significantly closer or farther away than isotropy would predict. This finding could be a sign that the universe is actually “anisotropic”—expanding faster in some regions than it does in others...

A lopsided expansion would be astonishing and depressing because it would suggest our understanding of the universe’s large-scale structure and evolution is profoundly—perhaps permanently—incomplete...

“This is a paper that is very important if it is true but very unlikely to be true. We have many much more accurate tests of anisotropy based on observations of the CMB and of large-scale structure. These observations are simpler, cleaner and have been reproduced in multiple different ways".

 

1942. Chicago Illinois

 

The Chicago and North Western Railway was formed in 1859 and quickly grew through mergers and acquisitions. The photo below was taken two years before the C&NW reorganized out of bankruptcy. It had the largest freight yard in the world and was well into dieselization.

The C&NW specialized in farm produce, most notably potatoes, and intercity transportation. After more mergers and acquisitions, the C&NW was acquired by the Union Pacific in 1995.

The photo shows how railroads stenciled reporting marks on freight cars.

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Angelo Codevilla reminds us reason is called for in this time of the Wuhan Flu, not acting out their dreams of power, in his essay at American Greatness. Excerpt:

The practical meaning of “all men are created equal” is that no one may rule anyone else without his consent. And the consent of equals must be obtained by persuasion. To impose strictures on someone else while dismissing reasonable questions as to the basis for them is no trivial offense. It is an offense against our regime quite as much as it is on the individuals being treated as beings so inferior as to be placed beyond reason’s reach.

In the time of COVID-19, the primary practical problem is that any number of persons who hold positions of power have taken to exercising their statutory authority—and often much more—to please themselves or to act out their dreams of power. This has resulted in such assaults on common sense as the release from jail of common criminals, failure to arrest others, and the arresting and even jailing of those who defy orders to stay indoors or not work.

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Bill Buppert at ZeroGov looks at the Wuhan Flu and says we are witnessing a culmination of decades of government supremacist indoctrination that has rendered common sense obsolete. An excerpt:

All the usual suspects have made claims for knowing exactly what we’re facing. Not a particularly vicious flu season but a goddamned Biblical apocalypse which threatens the very fabric of modern civilization.

Hence the importance of governments planet-wide rushing to impose every manner of tyrannical and ill-conceived centrally planned nonsense that has always made any human calamity worse by orders of magnitude. They can’t help themselves because it is all they know.

You won’t find me parsing the nonsensical and shamanesque grotesqueries of Comrades Birx or Fauci or any of the other “government health” frauds at the hilariously contranymic Center for Disease Control; when not chasing the phantoms of gun violence (is hanging rope violence?) or racism or salt, the CDC is yet another government clown posse who couldn’t predict a sunset much less the verities of viral outbreaks.

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John Galt at Shenandoah foresees a second wave of the Wuhan Flu, perhaps peaking in December, perhaps with ten times mortality, and says, "the period of time between the end of May 2020 and the first of October is the last dip the American people will have to buy and in this I mean to prepare". What to buy:

PPE – There is going to be a massive shortage developing as government globally start to purchase all available inventory in anticipation of a second wave. But, if anyone can buy any personal preparation equipment this is the moment to do it. No matter what one can buy be it N95 or preferably P100, then do so. Rubbing alcohol, high powered cleaners, wipes, hand sanitizer, bleach, whatever one can find is critical.

Foodstuffs – Freeze dried, canned, and MRE’s are the best options. Should the situation worsen, especially on the protein front, the ability to have long term food storage in case the worst case scenario develops is critical for survival.

Protection – Needless to say, if one did not take advantage of this first wave, then the prices one will see in a few months will shock them. Guns and ammunition my friends are going to be in short, and then even shorter supply as our transportation grid breaks down during a probable second wave and the potential of martial law nationally becomes reality. Most individuals will find out quickly that they are on their own.

 

1942. Roanoke Virginia

 

It's wartime boys and girls, and that means scrap drives. Scrap drives were directed by the War Production Board, which was broadly charged with managing the conversion of industry from consumer goods to military needs. Children's participation in scrap drives, as seen in these promotional photos, were organized by the Junior Citizens Service Corps, part of the Office of Civil Defense. See? Nothing is ever simple, not even then.

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21 Apr 2020