Further Thoughts On The Virus Of No Origin

Comparative Advantage Means It's Better To Import Viruses Than Make Our Own: Here's your reminder that we've had thirty years of pretentious midwits lecturing us on how globalisation makes us all better off in the long run. Now all the supposed economic benefits have been wiped out in a matter of weeks, with mass death as a bonus, how about these people self-isolate until we can be sure they're free of the 'blustering fraud' virus?

Fifty years should do it.

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures: So desperate that one of the most heavily-subsidised and protected industries in Britain might have to resort to... crikey...employing British people.  

Hey,  how come all the folks who give us pious sermons on the vital importance of muh free markets are outrageously outraged by the suggestion that if you can't afford to pay the going rate for the job, your business sucks and it should fold?

Meanwhile, back in the real world, if you're a British business that doesn't want to employ Britons, feel free to submit your claims for a subsidy to the folks in Bucharest.

So Can I Go To Weatherspoons If I Canoe There? We're all stuck in Lockdown Town, but you know who isn't?

These guys!

Now tell me that the Open Borders lobby isn't a cult! Everyone else has to hunker down, but the Gimmegrant Express must keep on rolling (we're just lucky the virus hasn't hit anyone from Iran....)

And Talking Of Religion: If you think the Prime Minster can vanquish a pestilence, you're not an atheist, you just worship government instead of God.

UNtrustworthy: Talking of absurd objects of liberal worship, it turns out that the WHO - henceforth to be known as 'The Organisation That The Left Wants To Appoint As De Facto Chief Censor Of Coronachan News' - may not be entirely trustworthy.

I know, right?

A UN organisation turning out to be a dysfunctional bunch of thug groupies. I'm just shocked - shocked!

Student Activists Hardest Hit: Hey, if a virus from China isn't a Chinese virus, doesn't that undermine the whole 'cultural appropriation' thing?  Who's to say sombreros are a Mexican thing after all?

'Prejudice' Is The Liberal Word For Common Sense: Say what you like about Chernobyl but at least the USSR didn't run a huge propaganda campaign claiming that if you took iodine tablets, you were a bigot.

Yep, the Government of the Country That Shall Not Be Named didn't just lie and conceal information, they actively tried to spread the doom, and liberals did all but hold the syringe for them. But at least the MSM have learned their lesson....

Journalists Are Not Key Workers: They keep implying they think they'll be exempt from any lockdown but, honestly, who needs this level of insight?

Hey, you'd think these people more than anyone else would understand that drugs are always cut with something before use. Then again, people stupid enough to snort coke mixed with bleach are stupid enough to believe anything.

Wait until someone tells them about paracetamol...

Hey, MSM: Wuhad One Job!

It may just be me, but I thought Piers Morgan's criticism of government policy on GMB this morning was totally over the top. 

As it happens, with a death toll of 55 up to yesterday, the virus had still killed less Britons than jihadists managed on a single day in 2005 but so far there's no sign of anyone handing out flowers or impromptu street posters yet.

“This job has changed significantly from planning for organic, people responses to tragedy, to being told: ‘We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there?’”

“A lot of the public’s responses are spontaneous, of course. But a lot are shaped. The [British] government doesn’t want spontaneity: it wants controlled spontaneity.”

The MSM were prepared to take part in a massive state propaganda campaign to manipulate the public reaction to terror attacks but now the same people claim it's super important that they give airtime to every unhinged conspiracy theorist and quack on the planet.

As the punchline of the old story goes, when it comes to the MSM and spinning the truth we've already established they're whores, now we're just arguing about the price.

Apparently, the price depends on whether or not a particular story helps the left, so I guess the MSM will start calming down about the virus as soon as it evolves enough to start filling in postal voting forms. Expect to start hearing about the vast majority of harmless viruses, coupled with glowing profiles of the ones used in gene therapy.

And then there's the other thing. Like I keep saying, 'freedom of the press' is short for 'freedom of the use of the printing press'. It means any citizen is free to set up a printing press and start publishing - or, to put it another way, it means the literal opposite to what the MSM claims it means.

There is no special group of people called 'the press' who have special freedoms over and above the ordinary citizen. That's important because the MSM has spent years supporting all manner of restrictions on the citizen's right to free speech. Remember these people thought it was perfectly sane for the police to prosecute a comedian for Felony Tasteless Comedy. 

The MSM has devoted zillons of words to the supposed threat of hate speech, and 90% of their output has referenced the same old cliche about 'shouting fire in a crowded theater'. Now we have the crowded theater of crowded theaters, they've suddenly turned into free speech maximalists.  Our democracy apparently depends on their supposed right to ask stupid gotcha questions, push absurd hypotheticals, and promote all manner of loons and malcontents.

This is who they are and whatever happens we should never forget that when we needed unity more than ever - the real sort, not the phoney baloney 'don't look back in anger' sort - these people were happy to act as saboteurs just so they could get one of their own in No 10. 

Random Thoughts On TEOTWAWKI

• Apparently the MSM has already gone into some kind of very specific lockdown where they question everything about the government's strategy of trying to spread out the number of cases... except how that's compatible with open borders. That bit makes perfect sense to them
• Right now, an Italian can drive over to Calais, get on the Eurostar and come to the UK, and the only problem he will have is if he goes too fast on the motorway. So it looks like we'll have border security once the government works out how to issue tickets to viruses
• Notice how everyone is looking to the greedy capitalist pig dogs in the biotech industry to fix this, and no one expects anything at all from our bloated academic sector
• On the other hand, libertarianism isn't looking too good either right about now. These people have spent years sneering at the peasants who won't accept free trade uber alles as  the way of the future, now - in a development no one could possibly have foreseen - it turns out that having your own industrial base is quite a good thing after all. 
• Hey, is it just me or have the BDS crowd suddenly gone quiet too? They wouldn't stoop as low as to accept an Israeli vaccine right? 
• Surely even some members of the left must be having a Mitchell and Webb moment right about now?  Yes, it's true: if you're celebrating the prospect of mass slaughter because you think it will help your party into government, you are the bad guys.
• Things would  probably go a lot better if only someone could come up with a better phrase than 'herd immunity'
• For all the people sneering that the right suddenly wants to listen to experts that's for one very simple reason: we're talking about people with an actual track record of verifiable accuracy, rather than leftist experts, who are almost always members of the chattering class dealing in vague generalisations, pseudo-science and tautological appeals to authority
• If the left could discover vaccines they way they can find racism, the epidemic would be over.  Right now, they're claiming it's racist to call the virus from Wuhan 'Wuhan virus' or remind anyone it's from China. The MSM has picked this up and run with it, meaning that the same people who keep claiming to be shocked - shocked - that fewer and fewer people trust them are also explaining why reporting actual facts is bad
• In so far as the left, and the MSM, are taking talking points from the Chinese government, can we at least have a break from the left's whole 'Hitler had a dog, Boris has a dog, therefore Boris is Hitler' line of reasoning...  No, probably not: for reasons.                                                                                               

The Elephant Entering The Room

The Honorable Representative from the Great State of Texas asks an important question:

Raises the question: if a global pandemic is a concern, why would we want policies that encourage more people crossing illegally & released unaccounted for into the country?

Well, quite. Of course, round here, BoJo's just said 'hold my champers'.

Forget sneaking in, they won't even stop anyone jetting in from Venice. It's a plague and a pandemic, but let's not go crazy here and start questioning muh open borders.

The left has spent a hundred years sneering at World War I generals and their cold-blooded decisions to keep throwing away lives with hopeless, head on attacks. Now, suddenly, open borders are in the firing line and these people are all but giving out white feathers to anyone who questions the sanity of Italian citizens being locked down and unable to go anywhere.... except Heathrow.

Hey, I consider The Omega Man to be an underrated conservative classic, but I don't want to live in it!

All of which explains BoJo's reluctance to do.... well, anything really. Unlike the mainstream of the left, he's at least smart enough to realise the obvious problem with putting all manner of limits on people inside the UK, but none at all on people arriving here. He's just not smart enough to realise that he's torpedoed the exact reason why he got a majority in the first place.

The whole reason why Boris Johnson got a whacking majority where Fat Dave and Theresa Won't failed is precisely because he came across as someone who regarded Britain as something more than just some failing division of a global multinational. Fat Dave in particular always looked like he'd be quite happy to jump ship and go be PM of somewhere else if they offered him the right deal. Boris was supposed to be better than that, but it turns out that when push came to shove, his true loyalty was to Globacorp after all.

The Economist Discovers Economics

Very Smart Person magazine The Economist wonders if there may be some kind of mysterious connection between supply and demand.
 
Like Ace points out, in so far as these people are always warning about imminent disasters that never actually arrive, they're basically indistinguishable from a loony cult. In fact, the resemblance goes a lot deeper than that. Listen to these guys and it turns out that people who reject the Sacred Texts of Open Borders in favour of relying on their lying eyes aren't just stupid, they're positively evil. Evily evil bigots conspiring to rob humanity of the new golden age that will come about when everyone accepts globalisation into their lives....

... And that's how some of the worst people in the world managed to convince themselves they were the good guys. It goes all the way from supposed socialists who object to paying a living wage to their kid's nanny all the way to free marketers who want the taxpayer to top up the wages of Megacorp's imported labour. Supporting open borders is the perfect combination of class signifier and naked self-interest.

That's what I keep saying. Just like with Brexit and all the rest, this is not just a clash between specific political doctrines, it's about who the country is actually run for: the snoot class or actual normal people.

LARPing With Liberals

Say, here's a question I've been wondering about: if liberals are so smart how come they keep getting taken in by obvious frauds like this?

It's a Scooby-Doo mystery all right!

I guess they didn't notice the cardboard helmets and that all the 'miners' had names like Julian and Roderick.

The important point though is that rich kids dressing up as working men is in no way like wearing socioeconomic blackface. No, siree, Jack.

As ever, the bias is annoying, but also strangely reassuring. Think about it this way: the left has spent forty years claiming that liberalism is the default, with conservatives as the loony outliers. Yet every time the BBC interviews some 'member of the public' who criticises the government, it turns out that he's actually a leftist nutcase.

Labour is the People's Party, providing you mean specifically the people who think there are ninety six genders but no valid reasons to criticise Diane Abbot. Other than that?  

Nope!

Hence, the reliance on the Trustifarian Theater Company and a state broadcaster guaranteed not to ask any hard questions.... apparently 'scrutiny' isn't that important after all.