When Will the Madness End? by Jeffrey Tucker

Not yet.

After 2005 when the Internet developed into a serious repository for human knowledge, and it became accessible via smartphones and near-universal access, I too was tempted by the idea that we would enter into a new age of enlightenment in which mass frenzies would be quickly stopped by dawning wisdom.

You can see evidence of my naïvete with my April 5, 2020 article: With Knowledge Comes Calm, Rationality, and, Possibly, Openness. My thought then was that the evidence of the extremely discriminatory impact of the virus on plus-70 people with underlying conditions would cause a sudden realization that this virus was behaving like a normal virus. We were not all going to die. We would use rationality and reopen. I recall writing that with a sense of confidence that the media would report the new study and the panic would end.

I was preposterously wrong, along with my four-month-old feeling that all of this stuff would stop on Monday. The psychiatrist I met in New York was correct: the drug of fear had already invaded the public mind. Once there, it takes a very long time to recover. This is made far worse by politics, which has only fed the beast of fear. This is the most politicized disease in history, and doing so has done nothing to help manage it and much to make it all vastly worse.

We’ve learned throughout this ordeal that despite our technology, our knowledge, our history of building prosperity and peace, we are no smarter than our ancestors and, by some measures, not as smart as our parents and grandparents. The experience with COVID has caused a mass reversion to the superstitions and panics that sporadically defined the human experience of ages past.

Eventually, people have and do come to their senses, but it is as Mackay said: people “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

via When Will the Madness End? by Jeffrey Tucker

Somebody help this guy, he’s damaging himself and apparently can’t stop

This professor writes something — had to, he says — and it scares him dreadfully.

Some foresee a huge battle inside the government when the president tries to declare martial law. “There are significant forces, including the military, the National Guard, the FBI, that would probably oppose any outright effort by Trump to declare something like martial law and cancel the election outcome,” wrote Tufts University professor and Washington Post contributor Daniel Drezner this week. “But the fact that I had to even write that last sentence scares the bejeezus out of me.”

Well, if he would stop writing such things, he wouldn’t be so scared. Sigh.

Poor guy. It’s not easy being a professor.

St. Louis prosecutor allegedly ordered crime lab to tamper with evidence in McCloskey case

This can be verified, it appears:

The famous handgun, along with Mark McCloskey’s AR-15 (clearly visible in the memes) were confiscated by local police and taken to a crime lab, where the alteration to the handgun took place. Technicians were able to successfully re-engineer the gun and make it fire again.

The handgun had been permanently disabled by putting the firing pin spring on the wrong side of the firing pin, making it inoperable. The McCloskeys indicated that it has been used as a prop in a courtroom during a lawsuit the couple had brought against a gun manufacturer. They had done this to the weapon so that it could be admitted into the courtroom legally.

Used in court as un-fire-able? But once prosecutor’s crime lab got through with it . . . ?

via The Post Millennial

Washington Post to pay Covington student Nick Sandmann after $250 million lawsuit – The Post Millennial

Liars or at best incompetents pay:

The story of the Covington kids highlights the mainstream media bias that has been directed against conservatives and Trump supporters since the heated 2016 election season.

Pocket money for Bezos, but . . . it’s the principle of the thing, right?

Black Lives Matter sues to keep federal agents out of Chicago

A BLM founder:

Aislinn Pulley, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Chicago, speaks during a news conference Thursday in Federal Plaza. Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

But her lawyer is ill-informed:

“We know the authoritarian tactics they have planned because of what they’ve been doing in Portland,” attorney Tess Kleinhaus, who filed the suit, said Thursday during a news conference downtown in Federal Plaza.

But this Chicago incursion is not the Portland kind at all, and Mayor Lightfoot is all for it.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot appeared open to the plan, while drawing differences from the Trump administration’s aggressive response to the unrest in Portland, where federal officers clashed with protesters as local and city officials called for them to leave the city.

“Federal agents who are here in Chicago have been here for decades. … They know their city and they live here. … They’re not federal troops,” Lightfoot told reporters Wednesday. “They will be plugged in to the existing infrastructure of the agencies, manage and supervise existing cases and investigations. That’s a big, important difference.”

Let us hope it all works out.

via Chicago Sun-Times