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Finding Strength Along A Post-COVID Fury Road

Finding Strength Along A Post-COVID Fury Road

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

The COVID-9/11 pandemic is over. With the failure of Omicron to capture the imaginations of only the most unimaginative midwits, the question

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Finding Strength Along A Post-COVID Fury Road

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

The COVID-9/11 pandemic is over. With the failure of Omicron to capture the imaginations of only the most unimaginative midwits, the question now is how do we move forward from here.

While we can rejoice that the threat to life and limb from COVID-9/11 may be effectively over, there is still the threat in its name to our liberty and sanity from those who profit most from the fear of the virus.

The aftershocks from COVID-9/11 will be with us for the foreseeable future. An entire generation has been scarred by this manufactured apocalypse and there will be no going back to the way things were.

We’d been warned by so many for so long. From investigative journalists, to the rare honest politician to the film-makers and artists who crafted stories for us to contemplate the lurking dangers in our deteriorating society.

Conditions were ripe for those in power to take maximal advantage of the fear from COVID-9/11. And they did so, enthusiastically.

The warnings were clear. There are toxic people out there who would rather destroy the world to hold onto their power rather than admit defeat.

Looking at where we are now reminds me, funnily enough, of 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road. A brilliant fever dream of a movie that portrayed a world in a post-rational, post-civilizational state.

At it’s core Fury Road’s conflict is asking the question, “Who broke the world?” History had been erased to the point where the people living in this hell couldn’t even form the question into an indictment beyond the most base and reductionist caricature of gender roles.

Those who think this is the movie’s perspective have read it all wrong, unfortunately. It’s easy to do given the elevation of Furiosa to near leading lady status. Many have remarked that Mad Max is a bystander in his own movie.

They, again, are wrong. Max, in all of the sequels to the original, has been this mythic figure who wanders into a deeply disturbed existential crisis for some outpost in the Wasteland. That’s the setup for these films. And in this one he is brought into the most out-of-balance one yet, where every destructive tendency of men and masculinity runs rampant and has strangled the people and the last outpost of life nearly to death.

Bear with me, this stuff is really important.

Man? Woman? I’m the Guy With the Microphone

Back to the ‘real world.’

Thankfully in our post-COVID world we still have some sense of our history, though those in charge have decided to only allow a version of it that is even more cartoonish than the world of Fury Road in an attempt to erase it.

Every instance where someone tries to frame a counter-argument to this cartoon is met with ever more strident claims of gender oppression and white supremacy.

We’ve reached a point where those with any dissenting point of view are systematically shut down, censored, silenced or worse. Words are violence in the new Woke West, dontcha’ know? But by taking the position that the ‘other side’ isn’t allowed to speak, they speak volumes about the fragility of their grasp on power.

Ideas that cannot be challenged, that cannot bear even the slightest scrutiny, are ideas that can’t evolve. It doesn’t matter whether they are right or wrong.

They are static, mechanical and ultimately devoid of life itself.

This is our world today in the hands of the Woke Left, a world where the destructive and vindictive feminine has been elevated to the point of unimpeachable rightness. But this isn’t any kind of healthy feminine. It’s a Furiosa-like feminine, devoid of nurturing, all implied violence, all sexuality suppressed to the point of masculinity.

Look at Furiosa and tell me it isn’t asking another vital question, “In a dying world, is there any room for fertility while clinging like moss for survival?”

In our world feminism has robbed women of their greatest attribute, the ability to gestate and nurture life itself. Hollywood has spent two generations giving us female action heroes who are ultimately nothing more than Doods with Boobs. It’s the ultimate power fantasy of Third Wave feminism.

It’s not as destructive an archetype as the sluts on Sex in the City, mind you, because at least it can be tied in some ways back to motherhood, i.e. Ripley in James Cameron’s Aliens, but it’s still damaging to the cause of the healthy feminine nonetheless.

Furiosa is what happens when gender roles are maximally out of balance.

This claiming of the microphone, this flooding the airwaves with anti-white/anti-male propaganda is itself a very dangerous strategy. First, because it’s disgusting and hateful but second, because it will spark a pendulum swing that will shock everyone.

By not allowing people to speak and work through what is bad AND good about the state of the world, it robs people of more than their voice. It robs them, ultimately, of their identity.

Which brings me back to Fury Road.

The Man With No Name

Max never refers to himself as Max in Fury Road until the very end. Even in the unfortunate Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome he’s some other persona — “Raggedy Man,” “The Man With No Name,” or the reincarnation of “Captain Walker.”

He’s lost everything, including his sense of self. He’s purely a survivor now. There is no Max anymore. The Wasteland has stripped him of this.

Multiple times in Fury Road he’s asked his name. Every time he doesn’t answer.

This is the key to reading Fury Road as a Mad Max movie, not a Furiosa movie, as the woke propagandists who masquerade as film critics and commentators would have you believe.

Furiosa knows what she is, she’s looking for redemption for her sins, which are she abandoned her fertility to serve a literal blood god who farms women for their breast milk and given his Warboys purpose only through their sacrifice to him if only to be ‘witnessed’ doing so.

There is no life for the Warboys in this world, since they can’t reproduce, so their initiation into manhood is becoming ‘shiny and chrome,’ worshipping their cars — the only recognizable technology left from the old world, except for guns.

They worship the mechanical, the cold, the lifeless. Cars don’t bring life. But all that repressed energy gets turned into the grotesque creations they drive (insanely) across the Wasteland. They are the ultimate symbol of the static masculine.

The only things this economy produces is food, guns, and gas.

Since Immortan Joe hordes everything, especially the water and the food, he can maintain the stranglehold on life itself, the only women capable of giving birth.

Into this nightmare a healthy Max is a resource, a literal blood bank, who gets caught up in Furiosa’s plans to escape with the only symbols of fertility left in this world, the concubines.

From here Fury Road is that redemption plot we all know so well. But they don’t find redemption in the Wasteland, only the seeds to rebuilding the world. It is Max who realizes the only life left is back where they came from.

And it quite literally says, there is no ‘better world’ out there than the one we live in. To begin unbreaking the world you have to go back to the one you have and fix it. You can’t run away. Clean your room, if I can invoke Dr. Peterson here.

It is on this leg of the Fury Road that Max and Furiosa fully work together to bring down the charnal house that Joe built.

It’s only then when he freely gives up some of himself, his blood, to save Furiosa at the end that he offers her his name, regaining his identity for the first time since the Toecutter’s gang ran down his wife and daughter when the world was only damaged, not broken.

And it is with that simple act of kindness, that Fury Road asserts itself as Max’s movie.

But Max still sins that he can’t wash away. He will forever be the gargoyle that guards the gates of the cathedral. It’s not because men aren’t welcome there. Furiosa knows now what good men look like. The balance between men and women can begin again but not with Max.

He knows what he is and knows salvation isn’t for men like him.

This is why he can’t ascend to the Promised Land at the end of the film, just like each previous film in the series. It has zero to do with the film being woke or dismissive of men in any symbolic sense.

Healing the Gender Divide

Unfortunately, our divided world has destroyed our ability to recognize any balance in this conversation. As I’ve previously argued about the Disney Star Wars films, the deep divisions between men and women, the inversion of gender roles in our society, clouds our judgment of them because so many are afraid of the answers they offer.

YouTube has empowered an entire sub-culture of MGTOW’s, itself the ultimate expression of male weakness in the face of toxic femininity, to obsess about these things and drive ad revenue to them.

Their hate has made them powerful. They hold sway over a whole rotten sub-culture wallowing in their hate.

We have a toxic femininity problem. Retreating into masculine safe spaces looks attractive, a kind of ‘Going Galt’ until women get less crazy. But it’s the wrong response. Because those same women who say the most hateful things about men, are really pleading for us to step up and be protectors, like Max becomes to Furiosa and the other women.

Saying any of that doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t have a toxic masculinity problem. But the way to female strength is not denying men or white people or binaries or whatever the fuck they’re labeling us with today access to the microphone. That way madness lies.

That way leads to Immortan Joe and a broken world where the reality of male physical superiority is left unchecked by the tempering presence of the divine feminine and their ability to bring life into the world.

Unfortunately, we live in a world ruled by Communists who spend every waking hour undermining these basic truths about humanity in their Quixotic quest for power and control.

The chaos of COVID-9/11 while we’re all anxious about our failing economic system, a creation of rent-seeking oligarchs, erecting this Citadel of Exclusion is now condoned by previously normal people gripped by a madness that is far deeper than we want to admit to ourselves.

Friends and family, storeowners and co-workers have been transformed into self-hating monstrosities willing to reduce everything that represents a challenge to their worldview into a symbol of oppression that further proves their loyalty to the nascent medical-industrial complex.

COVID-9/11 drove far too many to this state. They reject the basics of virology, immunology and common sense to support their need for order. As the world broke they sunk further into madness, unable to cope anymore with the basic risks of living in the real world.

I’d go off on a rant about how destroying risk assessment in capital markets and the creation of new money through debt and financialization feeding the solipsism that we’d conquered the scarcity problem in modern society, but why bring up facts in an era where people have become allergic to them?

Getting off the Shining Path

This fear of living is what drives people to become cheerleaders for tyranny. To love their muzzles, proudly display their vax cards and fetishize their subservience to an authority just two years ago most would have distrusted to their core.

The same people who marched on D.C. in support of ‘gender equality’ in the name of a women’s right to choose to murder their unborn children now want to deny the unvaxxed a seat at the civilizational table. Got news for you, folks, there’s a barbarian in this room, and it ain’t the unvaxxed.

Now a false sense of shared purpose to fight the illusion of a pandemic energizes their fear, amplifies it into anger for those that disbelieve this illusion and turns it into self-righteous resentment for lengthening their agony.

Just get the clot shot, they argue and come on board for the big win over COVID, they screech from behind their shiny grills.

If it wasn’t so despicable and naïve, it would almost be tragic.

Because we, like the people of the world of Fury Road, are all in agony, even those that support what little societal order there is left.

This is the post-COVID world Davos has planned for us, worshipping the images of ourselves on our screens. Shaking our asses nihilistically on Tik-Tok or OnlyFans, if only to be ‘witnessed’ in our debasement for a few minutes. Trading our dignity for a dopamine hit and our principles for a paycheck.

The push now is to take from the heretics to the COVID-9/11 Death Cult all that is left of the old world. The Immortan Joes of Davos will hoard their part of the shrinking pile of assets and send out their diseased and maniacal Warboys (and girls) to enforce this new Utopia.

Arguing with conviction the unvaxxed should be left in the cold, unable to leave their homes, take a walk in the sun, share a meal with their loved ones or have access to medical care.

Unlike Fury Road we know who broke the world. They did.

But they blame those still willing to face the risk of living in the real world from partaking in it, lest we make a mockery of their selfishness and unquenchable envy.

That’s what scares them the most. And that’s where we find the strength to stare them down and build our own ways forward. Because if we don’t start doing that now, if we don’t stop pining for the world that was and accept the world that is, there is no hope of fixing anything.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden Sun, 12/19/2021 - 07:00

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Government

Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

A new survey reveals that only 20% of Americans view covid-19 as "a major threat"…

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Survey Shows Declining Concerns Among Americans About COVID-19

A new survey reveals that only 20% of Americans view covid-19 as "a major threat" to the health of the US population - a sharp decline from a high of 67% in July 2020.

(SARMDY/Shutterstock)

What's more, the Pew Research Center survey conducted from Feb. 7 to Feb. 11 showed that just 10% of Americans are concerned that they will  catch the disease and require hospitalization.

"This data represents a low ebb of public concern about the virus that reached its height in the summer and fall of 2020, when as many as two-thirds of Americans viewed COVID-19 as a major threat to public health," reads the report, which was published March 7.

According to the survey, half of the participants understand the significance of researchers and healthcare providers in understanding and treating long COVID - however 27% of participants consider this issue less important, while 22% of Americans are unaware of long COVID.

What's more, while Democrats were far more worried than Republicans in the past, that gap has narrowed significantly.

"In the pandemic’s first year, Democrats were routinely about 40 points more likely than Republicans to view the coronavirus as a major threat to the health of the U.S. population. This gap has waned as overall levels of concern have fallen," reads the report.

More via the Epoch Times;

The survey found that three in ten Democrats under 50 have received an updated COVID-19 vaccine, compared with 66 percent of Democrats ages 65 and older.

Moreover, 66 percent of Democrats ages 65 and older have received the updated COVID-19 vaccine, while only 24 percent of Republicans ages 65 and older have done so.

“This 42-point partisan gap is much wider now than at other points since the start of the outbreak. For instance, in August 2021, 93 percent of older Democrats and 78 percent of older Republicans said they had received all the shots needed to be fully vaccinated (a 15-point gap),” it noted.

COVID-19 No Longer an Emergency

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently issued its updated recommendations for the virus, which no longer require people to stay home for five days after testing positive for COVID-19.

The updated guidance recommends that people who contracted a respiratory virus stay home, and they can resume normal activities when their symptoms improve overall and their fever subsides for 24 hours without medication.

“We still must use the commonsense solutions we know work to protect ourselves and others from serious illness from respiratory viruses, this includes vaccination, treatment, and staying home when we get sick,” CDC director Dr. Mandy Cohen said in a statement.

The CDC said that while the virus remains a threat, it is now less likely to cause severe illness because of widespread immunity and improved tools to prevent and treat the disease.

Importantly, states and countries that have already adjusted recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19,” it stated.

The federal government suspended its free at-home COVID-19 test program on March 8, according to a website set up by the government, following a decrease in COVID-19-related hospitalizations.

According to the CDC, hospitalization rates for COVID-19 and influenza diseases remain “elevated” but are decreasing in some parts of the United States.

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/10/2024 - 22:45

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International

Rand Paul Teases Senate GOP Leader Run – Musk Says “I Would Support”

Rand Paul Teases Senate GOP Leader Run – Musk Says "I Would Support"

Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul on Friday hinted that he may jump…

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Rand Paul Teases Senate GOP Leader Run - Musk Says "I Would Support"

Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul on Friday hinted that he may jump into the race to become the next Senate GOP leader, and Elon Musk was quick to support the idea. Republicans must find a successor for periodically malfunctioning Mitch McConnell, who recently announced he'll step down in November, though intending to keep his Senate seat until his term ends in January 2027, when he'd be within weeks of turning 86. 

So far, the announced field consists of two quintessential establishment types: John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota. While John Barrasso's name had been thrown around as one of "The Three Johns" considered top contenders, the Wyoming senator on Tuesday said he'll instead seek the number two slot as party whip. 

Paul used X to tease his potential bid for the position which -- if the GOP takes back the upper chamber in November -- could graduate from Minority Leader to Majority Leader. He started by telling his 5.1 million followers he'd had lots of people asking him about his interest in running...

...then followed up with a poll in which he predictably annihilated Cornyn and Thune, taking a 96% share as of Friday night, with the other two below 2% each. 

Elon Musk was quick to back the idea of Paul as GOP leader, while daring Cornyn and Thune to follow Paul's lead by throwing their names out for consideration by the Twitter-verse X-verse. 

Paul has been a stalwart opponent of security-state mass surveillance, foreign interventionism -- to include shoveling billions of dollars into the proxy war in Ukraine -- and out-of-control spending in general. He demonstrated the latter passion on the Senate floor this week as he ridiculed the latest kick-the-can spending package:   

In February, Paul used Senate rules to force his colleagues into a grueling Super Bowl weekend of votes, as he worked to derail a $95 billion foreign aid bill. "I think we should stay here as long as it takes,” said Paul. “If it takes a week or a month, I’ll force them to stay here to discuss why they think the border of Ukraine is more important than the US border.”

Don't expect a Majority Leader Paul to ditch the filibuster -- he's been a hardy user of the legislative delay tactic. In 2013, he spoke for 13 hours to fight the nomination of John Brennan as CIA director. In 2015, he orated for 10-and-a-half-hours to oppose extension of the Patriot Act

Rand Paul amid his 10 1/2 hour filibuster in 2015

Among the general public, Paul is probably best known as Capitol Hill's chief tormentor of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease during the Covid-19 pandemic. Paul says the evidence indicates the virus emerged from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. He's accused Fauci and other members of the US government public health apparatus of evading questions about their funding of the Chinese lab's "gain of function" research, which takes natural viruses and morphs them into something more dangerous. Paul has pointedly said that Fauci committed perjury in congressional hearings and that he belongs in jail "without question."   

Musk is neither the only nor the first noteworthy figure to back Paul for party leader. Just hours after McConnell announced his upcoming step-down from leadership, independent 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr voiced his support: 

In a testament to the extent to which the establishment recoils at the libertarian-minded Paul, mainstream media outlets -- which have been quick to report on other developments in the majority leader race -- pretended not to notice that Paul had signaled his interest in the job. More than 24 hours after Paul's test-the-waters tweet-fest began, not a single major outlet had brought it to the attention of their audience. 

That may be his strongest endorsement yet. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/10/2024 - 20:25

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Government

The Great Replacement Loophole: Illegal Immigrants Score 5-Year Work Benefit While “Waiting” For Deporation, Asylum

The Great Replacement Loophole: Illegal Immigrants Score 5-Year Work Benefit While "Waiting" For Deporation, Asylum

Over the past several…

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The Great Replacement Loophole: Illegal Immigrants Score 5-Year Work Benefit While "Waiting" For Deporation, Asylum

Over the past several months we've pointed out that there has  been zero job creation for native-born workers since the summer of 2018...

... and that since Joe Biden was sworn into office, most of the post-pandemic job gains the administration continuously brags about have gone foreign-born (read immigrants, mostly illegal ones) workers.

And while the left might find this data almost as verboten as FBI crime statistics - as it directly supports the so-called "great replacement theory" we're not supposed to discuss - it also coincides with record numbers of illegal crossings into the United States under Biden.

In short, the Biden administration opened the floodgates, 10 million illegal immigrants poured into the country, and most of the post-pandemic "jobs recovery" went to foreign-born workers, of which illegal immigrants represent the largest chunk.

Asylum seekers from Venezuela await work permits on June 28, 2023 (via the Chicago Tribune)

'But Tyler, illegal immigrants can't possibly work in the United States whilst awaiting their asylum hearings,' one might hear from the peanut gallery. On the contrary: ever since Biden reversed a key aspect of Trump's labor policies, all illegal immigrants - even those awaiting deportation proceedings - have been given carte blanche to work while awaiting said proceedings for up to five years...

... something which even Elon Musk was shocked to learn.

Which leads us to another question: recall that the primary concern for the Biden admin for much of 2022 and 2023 was soaring prices, i.e., relentless inflation in general, and rising wages in particular, which in turn prompted even Goldman to admit two years ago that the diabolical wage-price spiral had been unleashed in the US (diabolical, because nothing absent a major economic shock, read recession or depression, can short-circuit it once it is in place).

Well, there is one other thing that can break the wage-price spiral loop: a flood of ultra-cheap illegal immigrant workers. But don't take our word for it: here is Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself during his February 60 Minutes interview:

PELLEY: Why was immigration important?

POWELL: Because, you know, immigrants come in, and they tend to work at a rate that is at or above that for non-immigrants. Immigrants who come to the country tend to be in the workforce at a slightly higher level than native Americans do. But that's largely because of the age difference. They tend to skew younger.

PELLEY: Why is immigration so important to the economy?

POWELL: Well, first of all, immigration policy is not the Fed's job. The immigration policy of the United States is really important and really much under discussion right now, and that's none of our business. We don't set immigration policy. We don't comment on it.

I will say, over time, though, the U.S. economy has benefited from immigration. And, frankly, just in the last, year a big part of the story of the labor market coming back into better balance is immigration returning to levels that were more typical of the pre-pandemic era.

PELLEY: The country needed the workers.

POWELL: It did. And so, that's what's been happening.

Translation: Immigrants work hard, and Americans are lazy. But much more importantly, since illegal immigrants will work for any pay, and since Biden's Department of Homeland Security, via its Citizenship and Immigration Services Agency, has made it so illegal immigrants can work in the US perfectly legally for up to 5 years (if not more), one can argue that the flood of illegals through the southern border has been the primary reason why inflation - or rather mostly wage inflation, that all too critical component of the wage-price spiral  - has moderated in in the past year, when the US labor market suddenly found itself flooded with millions of perfectly eligible workers, who just also happen to be illegal immigrants and thus have zero wage bargaining options.

None of this is to suggest that the relentless flood of immigrants into the US is not also driven by voting and census concerns - something Elon Musk has been pounding the table on in recent weeks, and has gone so far to call it "the biggest corruption of American democracy in the 21st century", but in retrospect, one can also argue that the only modest success the Biden admin has had in the past year - namely bringing inflation down from a torrid 9% annual rate to "only" 3% - has also been due to the millions of illegals he's imported into the country.

We would be remiss if we didn't also note that this so often carries catastrophic short-term consequences for the social fabric of the country (the Laken Riley fiasco being only the latest example), not to mention the far more dire long-term consequences for the future of the US - chief among them the trillions of dollars in debt the US will need to incur to pay for all those new illegal immigrants Democrat voters and low-paid workers. This is on top of the labor revolution that will kick in once AI leads to mass layoffs among high-paying, white-collar jobs, after which all those newly laid off native-born workers hoping to trade down to lower paying (if available) jobs will discover that hardened criminals from Honduras or Guatemala have already taken them, all thanks to Joe Biden.

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/10/2024 - 19:15

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