racism as a public health emergency

time to shift the grift?

over the last year, we’ve heard all manner of wild and implausible framings like “racism is such a public health emergency that we support mass protests in a time when no one is allowed to eat at a restaurant because this is more important!”

it even got published in once credible medical journals like the lancet that have now descended into some sort of performative woke purgatory of histrionics and hair-shirts.

honestly, it was a great thing to see. it, more than any other watershed i can recall, helped the american center see what a complete and total farce their public health officials were. it exposed their craven politicization and the primacy of tribal virtue signaling over science in such stark and blatant terms that it woke people up.

you simply cannot ignore a dichotomy as jarring as “going to applebees is FAR too dangerous but we applaud the gathering of hundreds of thousands in the streets for days on end, cuz justice.”

i remember lots of people suddenly saying to me “oh my god, these people are complete muppets, aren’t they? they never believed a word they said.”

it laid bare the rancid and dishonest foundations of policy prescription as tactical political performance and nothing else. in this sense, it was a valuable public service. the cure for mendacity and stupidity among leaders is to give them a soap box and a megaphone and then to listen carefully when they speak. you can learn an awful lot.

so what can we learn from this latest set of actions from notable gravy train grifter lori lightfoot? quite a lot, as it turns out…

firstly, clearly, this is a woman with zero sense and less shame. (but you probably knew that) this is the classic “there is some difference in outcome, therefore racism” logic that would not convince even a precocious second grader. it’s presumptive twaddle end to end and lacks any foundational basis. it’s not even mistaking correlation for causality because the cause itself is not even clearly shown to exist in meaningful fashion. this woman is literally calling heart disease racist.

but beyond the fun of poking holes in this dog’s breakfast of grandstanding claims and assumptions, i think there is a second, more interesting take:

covid is over.

lori may not be much for epidemiology, logic, or even for making the rudiments of sense in her proclamations, but she is an astute and effective political operator and a world class grifter and gravy train engineer. she’s not quite a cuomo, but she’s not far off; not MJ, but at least pippen. and she is pivoting.

this move to start using flimsy and hallucinatory woke pretexts to grab federal money is telling.

you do not do this if you think the gravy is going to keep coming through the pipeline. you do it when you know it’s about to end, don’t care who sees you do what anymore, and realize that it’s time to grab all the remaining shrimp from the buffet, dump it in your purse, and run.

it’s the move you make when you know the goodie room is closing.

this is that last gasp of “gimmie free stuff” when the free stuff is going away. this augurs well for chicago having a decent summer in terms of boot on neck covid oppression and perhaps for the rest of us as well as it means the feds are just not funding this anymore.

there is no more gravy to grab, so it’s time to shift the grift. (and expect LOTS of this. the current level of federal slush has engendered serious addiction in many quarters and withdrawal is going to be savage)

even the cuomos and newsoms see it. the covid crisis canaries are dropping all over this coal mine. you just cannot keep the fear going when so many people have now seen people out living their real lives with no ill effect.

so, take it as the good sign that it is and go enjoy your summer.

even the most dedicated of team gravy guzzler are throwing in the towel on covid and springtime for rationality is returning and with it the clarity to see the evidence and to see what was done to us. our lizard brains have relinquished control and rational minds are once more en vogue. the window is shifting rapidly now and all the ideas no one would listen to are going to become common currency.

as the facts about covid and PCR and NPI ineffectiveness keep coming out, a year from now, it’ll be hard to find anyone who still admits to having been pro lockdown. (if you doubt this, try finding politicians who still claim to have supported the iraq war, because support was near universal at the time)

this is going to make it harder to round up the culprits (who will all be on to new cons and outrages) and vote them out of office and into well earned ignominy, but all the more important for being so.

fortunately, we all know who they were. and we’re going to remember.