Fauci, 'The Science', And Neighborhood Gestapos - The Dismantling Of Civility By A Corrupt Man

Alicia Kent lived through the Hong Kong flu of 1968 although she was unable to get out of bed for a week, was unable to walk more than two blocks, and took a month to recover.  Others were in the same boat, laid low by a virus which disabled even the young, strong, and healthy. 

Yet nothing was closed, there were no mask mandates, no social distancing.  Children went to school, barber shops and restaurants stayed open.  People took reasonable precautions and stayed away from crowded theatres, walked rather than rode the subway when possible, and in time the epidemic slowed and disappeared. Life went on, people assumed the risk, hoped that they would be spared, and went on with their daily lives. 

Influenza was a fact of life, some cases worse than others, but in the scope of cancer and heart disease which killed vastly more people yearly than the flu did in its entirety, the only sensible response was to carry on. 

So when COVID arrived on the scene, Alicia was concerned but undisturbed.  From what information should could glean from CDC and WHO authorities, the disease mostly affected those with already compromised immune systems; and since most elderly were ipso facto immune-compromised, it would certainly be they who should receive priority attention.  In other words, COVID should be treated like any other epidemic - locate the epicenter and the vectors, and focus on them for quarantine and care. 

She was surprised when the first edicts came out from government which claimed that this was The Big One, the existential one, and only if life as we knew it was shut down, coast-to-coast Black Plague level deaths would occur. 

Yet his was nothing like polio or measles, airborne diseases which spread like wildfire and infected thousands in a day.  It was not Ebola or other unknown, virulent viruses cutting swaths through the population; and it was certainly not the Spanish flu which was indeed a worldwide, killer epidemic.  Most people who contracted COVID got a bad cough and symptoms of a bad cold, recovered quickly and went on with their lives, certainly nothing like the Hong Kong flu. 

Anthony Fauci, new COVID Czar, said that we must follow the science, and that one must be patient while the epidemiology of the disease was investigated.  In the meantime, it was only prudent to assume that it was transmitted by all means - airborne, aerosol, contact, bodily fluids, etc. - and proper protection should be taken against all of them.  

Furthermore since we did not know who was most at risk and who were the most important vectors, it was only sensible to assume that all people were equally capable of spreading the virus. As far a government's role, it would exert its full authority to protect the nation. 

Panic followed these announcements.  Every person looked at every other as a Typhoid Mary, and before long civility and good sense turned into vigilantisms and hysteria.  Homes were turned into refuges, sanitized, protected, inviolable redoubts to which no one was allowed entry, all mail and packaged deliveries were left outside and untouched until the life cycle of the virus had run its course. Kitchen counters, tables, and all surfaces were scrubbed with industrial strength lye, air purifiers were installed, No Entry signs were posted on every lawn. 

Children were interned at home, trying to adjust to home schooling, fumbling with online courses and put upon by overwhelmed, frustrated parents.  Old people were incarcerated in retirement and convalescent homes and kept from seeing outside relatives. 

All while the science came up with new, contradictory evidence daily.  It wasn't the surfaces after all, expensive new industrial air purifiers putting dentists out of business really didn't have an effect on infection rates, outdoor social distancing was unnecessary.  Yet Fauci asked Americans to 'trust the science' which is always evolving. 

Alicia was one of the few who was never overly concerned about COVID. For one thing she had worked in the most pestilential, disease-ridden, miasmic places in Africa, and had been exposed to every kind of noxious disease, had near fatal misses on chaotic roadways, and had barely missed kidnapping and carjacking. If she had survived decades of serious risk, COVID was not something to get exercised about.  That plus the life-as-normal Hong Kong flu episode of her youth gave her a practical stoicism and calm. 

As far as trusting the government, she had long given up.  It was when the government was insisting that AIDS was 'everyone's disease' when it clearly was not that her suspicion began. Because of the well-organized and influential gay lobby, the fact that the epicenter of the HIV virus was in the bathhouses of San Francisco and that the vectors were gay men was disregarded.  In order that already stigmatized gay men should receive no more censure and alienation, the disease must be portrayed as everyone's. 

As a result warnings were everywhere, school children indoctrinated, and general worry and concern spread throughout.  Although most populations never saw a case of AIDS and were legitimately skeptical of the 'everyone's disease' meme, the informational juggernaut kept on. 

So, any person with at least some worldly experience should have doubted the Fauci edicts, warnings, and closures; but panic and hysteria are resistant to logic; and the more the hysteria is fueled, the more intense the fire.  

Before long neighborhoods had become no different from mental wards with inmates crawling the walls, howling, bawling, scratching and accusing. Not only were homes sealed off, all social contact forbidden, and began smelling of the antiseptic and harsh cleansers of a hospital, but vigilantes were sent out to find, identify, accuse, and censure anyone who broke the mask and social distancing laws.

Society had broken down.  Vigilantism was everywhere, schools and public institutions closed down, small businesses shuttered, commerce interrupted and dire warnings and forecasts dominated the news. 

All because of one little man, Anthony Fauci who was given a blanket pardon by outgoing President Joe Biden who knew that his actions were liable to prosecution,.  Fauci was finally has been brought up before Congress to answer the accusations of his totalitarian, oppressive, damaging regime; but took the Fifth over a hundred times, even though he had received complete immunity from prosecution by Biden, and in so doing risked contempt of Congress. 

His absurd, ridiculous show went viral, and any semblance of respect offered him disappeared.  Comedians like Len Chappelle pilloried him in hilarious skits, and the AI-sphere had a field day. 

Finally a comeuppance for the Little Caesar, or so it seemed likely; but the damage had already been done. Years of community, productivity, education, and civility had been compromised by him.  

There is only one good to come out of this regrettable episode - that the American public had become more skeptical of government, took what it says with circumspection and a grain of salt, and was less reticent and complaisant when it came to government policies and programs. 

But have they?  The persistent and increasing popularity of 'democratic' socialism and its philosophy of government uber alles belies the fact.  Americans are even more credulous and naive than ever before, and it won't be long before another faux epidemic is unleased on the public. 

Democrats have already caused an intellectual epidemic, and have convinced millions that sex is fungible and a choice, that men can become pregnant, that mothers are dispensable, and that the gender spectrum is reality. If these outrageous ideas can be so universally believed, than the certainty of a far worse viral campaign of idiocy is in the offing 

So Fauci should be clapped into irons but will probably escape punishment, the whole smarmy truth of the COVID episode will never come out, and Americans will just have to suffer the long-term consequences of official arrogance and unlimited power. 

A Good Hand - How Mrs. Linder's Dancing School Taught A Natural Beauty The Art Of Deception

Mrs. Linder's Dancing School, a relic of the now distant past, was the place for all proper, well-brought up children of New Brighton to learn social grace. On Mrs. Linder's polished floors, boys and girls learned how to dance and the courtesies of courtship. 

Every Saturday morning Artemis went to Mrs. Linder's Victorian home on Lincoln Street, adjusted the bow in her hair and her crinoline dress, smiled at the reflection on her patent leather shoes, and walked onto the dance floor. 

Mrs. Linder - a wealthy Victorian widow with time on her hands and a love of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, decided that a dancing school for the well-to-do children of the West End would be just the thing to occupy her time and add to her already comfortable financial portfolio. 

Mrs. Linder, a tall, imposing woman with a turn-of-the-Century aplomb, had more than just the fox trot and rhumba in mind when she opened her doors.  She was a fierce conservative, a believer in survival of the fittest, competition, and the raw sexual ambition which propelled it and meant to probe its meaning.

Boys sat impatiently on one side of the dance floor, girls on the other; and at the sound of Mrs. Linder's clicker, the boys slipped and slid over the polished, waxed floor, and picked their dancing partner.  It was a free-for-all, a charge, a stampede, a pure, unadulterated show of male ambition and desire. 

To today's inclusive, compassionate eyes, the scene seems barbaric, a throwback to raw human tribalism and sexual aggression.  No one today would even contemplate such an untoward show of boys stumbling over each other to be the first to grab the most desirable girl and would never allow - as Mrs. Linder deliberately did - more girls than boys, leaving wall flowers who danced with each other.  

 

No, that would be unconscionable today, but to Mrs. Linder it was the apogee of the day.  She waited until near the end of the class to stage the happenings.  She whetted the children's appetite with waltzes, instructing girls to seductively embrace their partners and boys how to take them firmly and closely in their arms and then engaged them.

By the time the moment of the gantlet approached both boys and girls had been primed and prepared, and were not just expectant but aroused. 

Mrs. Linder reveled in the moment - the boys lined up like hurdlers in a 200 yd. race, on their toes, arms ready to pump and propel them across the floor, the girls making last-minute adjustment to bows, hair, and frills. 

Artemis was the one girl that all the boys wanted and for whom they tussled and fought over the floor to her, a tangle of them until the lead boy took her hand and the rest dispersed. 

She knew she had 'It' as her mother, a flapper of the Twenties had called it - some mysterious combination of pheromones, beauty, allure, and come-hither seductiveness that men could not resist.  Even at a very young age, she had this preternatural sense of sexuality that comes to a very few. 

Vladimir Nabokov wrote about it in Lolita where Humbert Humbert is irresistibly attracted to the 'nymphet', a pre-pubescent girl with an uncanny sense of her sexual power; and was definitely a Lolita clone. 

More than that, the stampede at Mrs. Linder's was epiphanic - a bolt of understanding not only of male sexual behavior but of their vulnerability. Men could be had, she instinctively knew, and felt a power over them that only the most beautiful, limitlessly desirable women could know. 

She had no compassion for the girls who were left behind, the plain, unappealing ones that no boy wanted; and felt only confidence and pleasure at her own success.  She had done nothing to attract the horde of boys who had stumbled over each other to reach her, done no act, no performance, had no conscious intent so common in every other pursuit.  If her simple being had so much power, imagine what she could do with it?

It was almost too easy, this business of sexual conquest.  No flirtation or innuendo was required, no parlor tricks or subterfuge, nothing. Men buzzed around her like bees to a fragrant flower which had done nothing to attract them, had no intent, purpose, or desire. Flowers just were, and so it was up and down the phylogenetic scale with the most attractive of the species the most successful. 

The women of Shakespeare's Comedies - Rosalind, Viola, Portia, and Beatrice - ran rings around the men who courted them, not because of anything they did, but simply because of who they were and how they used the stuff apportioned unequally at birth. 

 

So with very little effort, Artemis made her way up through the ranks - college, the law, courtroom victories as decisive and cruelly delivered as Genghis Khan's, and a Georgetown matron, arbiter of political influence and kingmaker.  Washington had never seen anything like her, and she had done little to achieve her success.  

She understood male weakness - men's fragile egos, native presumptions, dependency, and desire for youth, beauty, and sexual conquest. They were easy targets, so much so that promise alone was a leveraging tool. To be sure, she entertained men in her quarters, an interlude in the more important business of Washington politics but only with men who deserved a reward, or for whom sex exacted a promise.  

Men have always underestimated women, and been duped by them even when their guards were up but still remained hungry for their attention. Men were helpless when it came to Artemis who with a gesture, an innuendo, a nod, a posture, a pose brought them in line, kept them in tow, and pulled them along until it was time to cut them loose. 

From a more liberal, compassionate, kind and considerate perspective, Artemis was an Amazon, a vixen, a woman without principle; but that was to misunderstand the nature of women.  Gifted with this unexpected, gratuitous sexual power, specially endowed women like Artemis used it just as any other animal in the forest would - in a moral vacuum.

It all started with Mrs. Linder's Dancing School.  As she expected the boy who won the race and took her hand was the head of a Wall Street investment bank; and Janie Fisher, Mrs. Linder's wallflower, never married then married badly and was last heard of living alone in Burlington. 

Darwin was right, and so were Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg who got the picture and created women of agency.  It isn't a war between the sexes so much as it is feral competition. 

'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, [my father] told me, 'just remember that all people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had', says Nick Carroway in the first few lines of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - a conservative statement of inherited worth. 

There is such a thing as natural ability, superior intelligence, talent, and insight.  Nurture helps, but little improves on the hand that one has been dealt at birth. 

The lesson of Mrs. Linder's Dancing School was that, too; but rather than turn the gift into something of communal importance - the importance of giving back - Artemis took it as an unsolicited endowment; and to squander it was to deny Nietzsche ('The only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will').  Artemis owed nothing to no one. 

Comeuppance? Never.  Coming a cropper? Hardly.  Anyone with such a natural endowment, such indefinable but irresistible sexual power, can never fail.  Artemis could no sooner end up like Janie Fisher than the sun never rising.  Her fate was predetermined, inevitable, unstoppable and enviable. 

For all those who thought that privilege implies noblesse oblige, thousands more took it as a desirable if unattainable right. 

The New York Times made an exception for her obituary which ran far longer than most.  Despite her ineffably conservative credentials, The Paper of Record felt bound to give her the space her eminence deserved. 

Trump, Iran, And Genghis Khan - Unleashing Hell And Total Uncompassionate Victory

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse. 

 

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world.  At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

The same spirit of total conquest inspired Harry Truman at the end of World War II when he dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events which would bring the Japanese to surrender and would send the Soviets an unmistakable message - 'You're next'. 

Wars were for winning, civilian populations were not collateral damage but complicit in their nations' politics.  The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo as well as the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima caused tens of thousands of civilian lives but contributed to the final, total victory of the Allies over  Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. 

Something happened to American resolve after the war, and in Korea stalemate was the result.  Despite the pleas of General MacArthur to march into China, North Korea's patron and growing Communist power, and to decisively end the Korean War in America's favor, Truman fired him and kept American troops in place.  The result was an emboldened North Korea, a rogue nuclear power and a constant threat to its neighbors, the US, and South Korea. 

Things got worse in Vietnam during America's war with Ho Chi Minh, General Giap, and the North.  President Johnson's policy of 'Win Hearts and Minds', designed to win the Viet Cong and its South Vietnamese supporters to the American cause was a complete failure.  The Viet Cong also fought to win over South Vietnamese villagers to their cause, but did so with brutality, intimidation, and horror and did so successfully. 

Much later in the Second Iraq War when after a successful invasion of Baghdad and the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, President George Bush declared victory and withdrew his troops, leaving the door open for radical Islamic militias to assume power.  Bush was convinced that the Iraqi people would assure that the country would transition seamlessly from dictatorship to liberal democracy.  

His generals advisors counseled military rule - a severe, uncompromising period of total control and elimination of anti-American, Islamist, and anti-democratic forces - but Bush declined.  'The people are now free to decide'. 

 

Bush's war in Afghanistan against the Taliban was no different.  He held back on policies of total victory, hoped for carrot-and-stick diplomacy and measured military action, totally misjudged the will, determination and guerilla mentality of the enemy, and left the country to them. 

In the current America-Iran war, President Trump began the campaign with decisive miliary strikes which killed the Ayatollah and his inner circle of advisors and dealt a serious blow to Iran's military infrastructure; but after what looked like an easy military victory, the President - eyeing the coming mid-term elections at home and the country's hope for a peaceful end to the war - began negotiations. The Iranians, of course, more militarily able than the President thought and in possession of tens of thousands of drones and a seemingly limitless supply of missiles, took advantage of he hiatus and began to rebuild, rearm, and deploy.  

Trump signed a conditional peace treaty which the Iranians ignored, and is now threatening massive retaliation.  Given America's hearts-and-minds record, it is doubtful. 

General Curtis Lemay, Vice Presidential candidate for a third party during the 1968 American presidential election said of the North Vietnamese enemy, 'Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age' which of course neither Republican nor Democrat candidates could endorse; but in the end, Lemay was just as right as Truman was in World War II - immeasurable power and destruction will bring any war to a quick end. 

In Ridley Scott's movie Gladiator the Russell Crowe character, general of the Northern Armies, says before his forces attack the barbarians in the forests beyond, 'Unleash hell'.  A great barrage of slings of fiery oil, a rain of punishing arrows, the advance of armed phalanxes, and the attack of armed cavalry followed.  Hell was indeed unleashed, and the barbarians, the last enemy of the Roman Empire, were defeated. 

General William Tecumseh Sherman knew that his Union forces were superior and would eventually and ultimately prevail, over the Confederate South in the American Civil War, but he understood complete and total military conquest was the only victory which would assure that the South would never rise again.  

His goal was to humiliate the South – to show its people that the heralded aristocratic Cavalier was nothing compared to the tough and gritty farm boys from the North; that its leaders were inept and incapable of stopping the Union advances.  His brutal trail of destruction and devastation as he marched through Georgia to the sea and his punitive march up through the Carolinas made it abundantly clear - The days of the Confederacy were over, done with, and consigned to history. 

Sherman understood – like the Israelis in their war against Hamas – that complete military victory would not only destroy enemy military capacity but would destroy the will of the enemy and its civilian population.  

Sherman said, “War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, so let’s give them what they want.”   Sherman understood that such complete capitulation could only be achieved if he “traversed holy ground” and captured cities which were symbols of the Confederacy and what people were led to believe was Southern supremacy; and if they were easily taken or destroyed, the will of the people would be further eroded. 

Sherman was very clear about his march through the Carolinas.  He knew that the journey would be arduous and physically demanding; but he wanted to burn a trail through the very heart of the Confederacy – the place where the rebellion had started – to show the South once and for all that not only had their armies been beaten, but that their whole culture had been destroyed.

A total, annihilating war against Iran would mean thousands of civilian casualties, among whom are thousands who protested in the streets and demanded an end to the theocratic regime.  Yet just as in Nazi Germany and Japan, the complicity of the Iranian people - or at least its complaisance - has contributed to the persistence and longevity of the regime.  Total victory would send the same unequivocal lesson to the Iranian people that Israel sent to Gazans and that Truman sent to Japan - never again will you ever dare to repeat the errors of the past. 

For terrorist regimes like Iran and its clients - ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the death of civilians, has no relevance since the ends of battle are religious and spiritual.  The ends justify the means far more than any secular struggle. What Americans consider heinous crimes – blowing up school buses, crowded markets, and residential neighborhoods – have no moral implication per se.  They are only necessary measures to assure the final and ultimate moral end.

In this war with Iran, the United States' ally is Israel, the  only country that has understood the dangerous, aggressive militancy of Islam, and they fight with the same moral rectitude and purpose as their radical Islamic opponents.  They will brook absolutely no threat to the Jewish homeland, and civilian Palestinian and Iranian deaths are the price the enemy must pay for its aggression and permanent hostility.  The Israelis know that they are fighting an enemy who uses a territorial imperative – a Palestinian state and the creation of an Islamic caliphate – only as pretext for the annihilation of Israel, the ridding of Arab lands of the infidel, and in preparation for universal Islamic rule.

Under these circumstances, total, uncompassionate war is completely justified.