Intellectual poverty

I monitor the BBC late at night, often a barometer of global thought, such as it is. Last night the subject was the Covid 19 crisis. Guess what was *NOT* mentioned during a one-hour panel discussion among allegedly notable thought leaders in Britain, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. Correctamundo, China. The origin of Covid 19 was animals (!) and it was serenely accepted that Nature will continually threaten humanity with new infections. HIV and Ebola were mentioned as prior viral pandemics, reprehensible in the context of stigmatizing the sick, emphatically condemned by BBC panelists. They also agreed without exception that rich European countries (there is only one: Germany) were obligated to bail out poor European countries, especially chronically bankrupt, socialist Spain and Italy. The Swiss human rights expert (?) spoke angrily about solidarity and unity. I suspected her day job was communist agitator. The editor of Lancet advised there was no cure forthcoming and therefore it's imperative for governments to impose totalitarian control of everything.

Callers asked the experts a string of softball questions. The answer was always more fascist control, more government spending, no exit from lock down. Immunity was poo-pooed as divisive and socially improper for some to be treated differently than others. We all have to suffer indefinitely, forget about weeks or months of solitary confinement. Two allegedly positive aspects of global economic disaster were an increased appreciation of nationalized health care workers and the possibility of leveraging revitalized pan-European consensus to inflict more hardship by fighting climate change. Unemployed societies produce less CO2 emissions and eat less food, proving that BBC experts can kill fossil fuel. American frackers are bankrupt, already cut 2 million barrels per day of oil production, hurrah!

No one was worried about inflation, scarce food production, or fragility of transport. The BBC panelists were like primitives or small children, unable to conceive how goods and services magically come into existence. It was merely a policy decision for governments to distribute food, medical services, and entertainment bandwidth "fairly" to 400 million rightless, idle European citizens in permanent lock down. The problem of Africa never came up, except in condemnation of European disunity concerning settlement of refugees and migrants.

Same story on NPR. Black Americans are dying from Wuhan virus at triple the rate of whites. Has nothing to do with black behavior, unanimously agreed by government spokesmice. It's racism and social disadvantage. They previously declared that AIDS had nothing to do with sodomy. Please note that no one on earth has yet to develop an effective HIV virus vaccine, after 40 years of lavish government subsidies. Outrageous and insane that homosexuality is pitched as a legally protected privilege in mandatory K-12 sex education classes. Hopefully, U.S. public schools and state universities will remain closed forever.

The NPR cure for unending isolation and economic disaster? -- "comfort music" composed by obscure, dreamy airheads, all of whom in today's broadcast were latino. The TED talks that followed were equally soporific. Discussion of 1918 Spanish flu social distancing confirmed the imperative of closing all theaters, restaurants, and religious services. Social welfare and psychological safety nets must be deployed worldwide. Vaccination, whether effective or not, should be mandatory and universal, including vaccination of bats in Peru to halt rabies infection of sleeping children. If you live in New York, put a teddy bear in your window.

Commercial radio channels are chockablock with Public Service Announcements, because advertising croaked. Go online and complete the 2020 census to provide more heath care and government education for the next ten years. Wash your hands and stand six feet apart.

You know what's profoundly sad? The lost youth of the Wilson sisters. The insolent swagger of young Chrissie Hynde, hot stud Tom Jones, the mature warmth of Robert Palmer. I don't care if a million Americans die this year, which they will, as per usual. We lost the power and poetry of boundless freedom when Bonham and Carlin died years ago. Nothing much left to save, some vinyl and CDs, a few videos. Let's nuke Beijing and call it square.

Do you have any idea of what's going on at U.S. power plants? Rows of RVs in the parking lot, crews of operators quarantined at their place of employment, working 14 days straight, then swapped with an offsite crew that had been quarantined at home and tested twice. Better paid than Chinese slave labor, but equally rightless. The supply chain of pump gaskets, light bulbs, SO2 detectors, and coffee filters is shaky. With Smithfield in Souix Falls shut down, there may be a sudden scarity of bacon. I don't think anyone can operate a U.S. power plant without bacon. Just saying. More bad news: another meat packing plant closed in Greeley. Fifty retail grocery clerks dead from "essential" viral infection.

Forced sameness, one rule for all. Stay home and wash your hands. If you go out, do yourself a favor, citizen, and leave your smartphone home. It's being monitored and located 24/7 to report where you went and who you came into contact with. Not joking. Not an exaggeration. It's hard to grasp how low we've sunk as chatty, ditzy middle brow technology users. Heart, heart, smiley face.

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Chris and Peachy are suddenly important

Under normal circumstances, becoming an obscure monk to write coloratura noir romance is a thankless task. Old fashioned, Cass says. No hope of a movie deal which, believe it or not, was my sole purpose in writing the four-volume Case Files of Cable & Blount. Do I remember it correctly? Over 600 pages of comedy, mystery, steely resolve, gunfights, and some of the hottest boy-girl sex ever presented in frank language. For fun, look up coloratura. It does not refer to "persons of color" as the expression goes, which dimly implies that I'm as white as paper and that only Africans and mestizos have meaningful color. How silly. Negroes are inky black or mahogany brown, except for mixed race people like Barack Obama. If a caucasian is mixed race like I am (French, Prussian, and a dash of Norse) we're called mutts. Mutts are more surefooted and less fractious than thoroughbreds, which is why mules were important in the Old West, pulled heavy wagons in teams.

I pulled the heavy wagon of literary drama solo. It had to be that way for an authorial voice to emerge. Why is that important? Because voice infuses story with life, if the writer is a rebel in command of original work. When I worked in Hollywood, everyone religiously repeated a tired sermon "There are no new stories" because they were incapable of original work.

I mentioned Case Files of Cable & Blount in the context of tyranny. Chris and Peachy live in a world that no longer exists. I recommend that you read it. Something very important was lost recently, and it behooves you to experience an exposition of what liberty means. Chris and Peachy never heed regulations, never follow the rules of common sense. If they did, they would be no different than the folks next door, which other novelists endeavor to celebrate, especially people of color writing about their favorite aunt or antebellum hardship. Stephen King concocts malevolent ghouls, and P.G. Wodehouse laughs at Roaring 20s English pajama boys. I write about hard white American heroes and lovers, people in trouble typically self actualized as their professional duty. Private investigators know that cops do little and solve nothing. Chris and Peachy have the advantage of ample power and unbreakable devotion to each other, keenly aware of the palpable pulse of life on life's terms, male and female.

I may be the only contemporary writer who knows what liberty is.

In a nutshell, liberty means no handouts for Africa, no matter how many millions of women and children are starving, ignored and penalized by their governments and threatened with Wuhan virus on top of rising prices, food shortages, no sanitation, widespread HIV infection, malaria, and police orders to lock down, forbidding men to work. Liberty means a bright line between self and others, no matter how others exercise their powers, or whether they are doomed. Liberty is not fair or benevolent. It is a universal legal and moral right to thrive, to the extent that one can. What Africa needs is what America needs, less government, more liberty, pandemic or murderous gangs notwithstanding. America has murderous gangs that government has failed to eradicate. Gang threats cease in the Second Amendment liberty of personal self-defense, which Chris and Peachy consistently exercise with excellence. More people could and should defend themselves instead of remaining hapless victims, hoping that government will protect them, feed them, and make life happier. Every dollar that the state gathers to itself is a dollar taken from victims that they pretend to shelter. The truth of government is arbitrary power very thinly disguised as patriotism. That's why Chris walked away from his legacy as a sprig of institutionalized power, and won personal autonomy.

How well a man lives today is less important than his liberty because liberty is an open door to a freer life tomorrow, or a higher challenge, depending on what opposes his progress. In today's Covid-19 tyranny, the human right of liberty seems distant. Hah! -- an illusion, easily sidestepped. Buy a set of surgical scrubs, a stethoscope, and a pair of paper booties. Shazam, you're an overworked neurosurgeon. If an undocumented immigrant can get a fake ID in Los Angeles, so can you. A mail carrier outfit is not hard to fabricate. Learn a foreign language.

But all such disguises are unnecessary. Your search for liberty should have begun years ago, as a teenager, right? Liberty is not a new subject to any man or woman on Earth. Tomorrow is a blank page in an unfolding drama, of which you are necessarily the author and actor. There could be a pivotal choice today, if it's time to reclaim more of your liberty, independent of whatever chains of sorrow have kept you from the pursuit of happiness, a fundamental right that no government or family can legally abridge. I realize that there are moral ambiguities and impossible conflicts. Without difficult challenges, there is no story in your story.

I like the story of Chris and Peachy, both of them challenged repeatedly by government and family pressures. They have the advantage of long experience as self-reliant rebels, seeking greater liberty and personal happiness, neither of which is easily won. The first three Case Files novels are $5 in a Smashwords edition. Charity, my favorite Chris and Peachy adventure, is available on Kindle, and the concluding double mystery Finding Flopsie is at Amazon. All four Case Files novels were revised and published together in a collector's edition. The cover photo is a fictional "Treloar Building" in salute to Ray Chandler. Chris met Peachy on the 3rd floor corridor. He was drilling into a bomb. She became curious and wouldn't go away.

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Poison goo

Old hippies will remember The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, easily the best comic books of our stoned generation. I commend to your recollection Fat Freddy stomping on cockroaches in the kitchen, determined to eradicate them. Next panel, under the refrigerator, a cockroach general is dressed like MacArthur, dark sunglasses and pipe. A distressed lieutenant reports 100 troops killed. The general calmly observes: "I have billions of them. We will prevail."

Let's examine a sequence of published facts. Wuhan is the location of a Chinese biowarfare laboratory. NIH scientists say that the "novel corona virus" is unlike all others. It's sheathed with an HIV shell and survives on surfaces up to 72 hours. It may have been engineered. A benign explanation is that it was released accidentally from the Wuhan laboratory. It seems implausible that the Chinese authorities would deliberately kill their own people, right?

Not so fast. The Chinese government suppressed initial reports of an outbreak in Wuhan. An alarmed doctor was detained by police for five weeks and died. Two journalists disappeared. The government allowed (encouraged?) a mass Wuhan banquet attended by 40,000 families and did not quarantine Wuhan until there were hundreds of deaths and tens of thousands infected, many thousands who traveled to Italy, Iran, South Korea, and the United States. Let's suppose that the "wet market bat" story was disinformation. Chinese officials advised WHO that the respiratory disease in Wuhan was not communicable by human-to-human contact, which was a lie and had to be revised six weeks later. Offers of U.S. medical experts were rebuffed. China accused the U.S. Army of releasing the virus, another lie. The benign explanation is repeated attempts to save face, an important Chinese cultural tradition.

Not so fast. China got its butt kicked in Trump's trade war. Their economic house of cards is crumbling for structural reasons, and they have been universally condemned for slave labor and brutal "re-education" camps full of Muslim prisoners. Beijing and Shanghai are almost uninhabitable with pea soup air polution. Hong Kong is in open rebellion. Red China has no chance of winning a kinetic war with the United States, nor is that a strategic objective. They want to become a dominant global superpower as stealthily as possible.

I think the novel virus was a deliberate release to cripple us economically. It was a matter of indifference to Xi and his inner circle that some thousands or tens of thousands were killed in China, plus thousands who traveled to and infected Italy, Germany, Iran, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Africa, England, France, and the United States -- which is dependent on China for pharmaceuticals, vitamins, cheap consumer goods, and electronics. It is almost unanimously agreed that the U.S. has to claw back production of pharmaceuticals and vitamins pronto as a national security matter.

Terrible news flow: The White House Task Force projects that up to 200,000 Americans could die from the bioweapon unleashed by China (an act of war). Long haul truckers are working 90 hours a week, 20% shortfall of drivers, DMV offices closed, no way to license more big rig pilots. Virus outbreaks on two 7th Fleet aircraft carriers. 500 TSA workers tested positive. Houston air traffic control suspended. 1500 NYPD cops and EMS infected. New York hospitals mobbed, doctors and nurses begging for help. Rhode Island National Guard stationed on highways, at bus stations, going door to door looking for New Yorkers. Texas troopers doing the same at airports and highway checkpoints, detaining escapees from New Orleans. Florida cops searching for New Yorkers, breaking up religious services. Nationally, you need DHS permission to visit a dentist for emergency care. Arkansas troops are breaking up crowds in state parks. Oklahoma has relaxed its rules to serve as a police officer, no training required. Numerous states unable to process or pay unemployment claims. Trump says that perhaps some liberty can be restored in June, which I doubt. It will take America years to recover, unless we're attacked by another more lethal Chinese bioweapon.

Much depends on bare knuckles economic war to punish a dangerous adversary that has tens of thousands of agents embedded in U.S. tech firms, higher ed, Democrat campaign funding, and organized crime. We should task FBI and DEA agents to investigate Chinese criminals and saboteurs, but it won't be sufficient, like Fat Freddy stomping roaches in the kitchen.

There are billions of Chinese. They will prevail unless we put on our Orkin hazmat suits and squirt poison goo in the supply chain cupboard, starting with rotten Apple. Put WalMart on a diet, punitive tariffs on slave labor Christmas decorations and toys. Dell and HP will have to train Americans to build computers, immediate blockade of Chinese components. We can import smartphones, big screens, and auto parts from South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

Fumigate the fucking murderers. Deport all Chinese diplomats, commercial envoys, tourists, and students. Evacuate all Americans from Communist China except Elon Musk. If they want kinetic war, do it. Find their subs and kill them.

Rush Limbaugh and I are the same age. I can read between the lines, because I understand him. He's been briefed. He knows that it was a deliberate Chicom biowarfare attack. I agree with Rush that it's intolerable to duck and cover, to destroy our economy, allow a handful of infected sailors to cripple 7th Fleet naval aviation operations, and let imbecile politicians repeal the Bill of Rights, state by state, unopposed. We support President Trump, but he's been mesmerized by Deep State statistical modeling. Trump has to be shaken as roughly as possible by his friends. Let freedom ring, and bring China to book, indict their asses.

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Public health and wealth

The first thing to fizzle in a bad recession, much less a total crash of all economic activity, is advertising. That means Google and Facebook bleed. Commercial radio and TV. Ad supported pro sports, which is all of them. Three months from now? Police and fire, day care, big rigs, grocery stores, gas stations, doctors and nurses. You wanted big government, you finally got it. Until further notice, civilian society has been terminated. It's not possible to restart it by turning a key in the civilian ignition and driving it out of the junkyard. It will take years to repair the damage, assuming that Trump is reelected or continues to rule by decree. I doubt there'll be any nominating conventions, and a November general election seems like fairy dust. Vice President Pence said that 15 days will be the whole extent of a crash test dummy civilian quarantine, after which we can all go back to work on April Fool's Day. I suspect that Pence had his fingers crossed behind his back, fibbing. Meanwhile, in India a billion dopes observed a national lock-down of 15 hours, after which they went out on their porches and shook little tinkly bells to ward off virus. [BBC report]

Let's get real. Americans should prepare for 15 months of fascism, assuming that we get an affordable, safe, effective Wuhan vaccine next year and that riots and grocery store looting are relatively mild in the meantime, which is highly improbable. People are already pissed off and accusing each other of bad behavior, college kids getting stoned and frisky on Florida beaches and crowds of surfers and bikini-clad shielas smiling on Bondi Beach in Oz. Police were dispatched and beaches barricaded on three continents. The Cannes film festival was canceled and Spanish sun worshippers hustled back into mandatory confinement.

No auditor or economist could estimate the wreckage on Wall Street or Main Street. Massive government intervention, trillions injected by the NY Federal Reserve to goose bond market liquidity, a snap embargo on flights to and from Europe, and closure of all Broadway shows, giant strides toward naked fascism. Powerless sheep went bonkers. WalMart was stripped of toilet paper, Disneyland closed, all sports suspended, 90% of domestic flights canceled, Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos boarded up, tens of thousands of colleges and schools shut, all restaurants and bars emptied, millions of workers laid off. Banks are closing branches and limiting access to drive-up. America has screeched to a halt, because fake experts and fake journalists ran around in circles with their hair on fire, pointing at Italy, where thousands of Chinese textile workers returned from their Chinese New Year visits to Hunan and infected thousands of Italians. The death rate was 8%, all hospitals overwhelmed and military trucks called to carry off hundreds of body bags stacked in a church. The same tragedy unfolded in Iran. Chinese workers spread deadly Hunan infection, untold number of dead. You're next! Millions of Americans will die, according to fake U.N. worst case statistical models.

This might make sense if we had adequate evidence of a medical crisis in America, but we don't. Federal agencies bungled testing. A smattering of deaths were reported, 30 of them in a single nursing home. The Wall Street crash was less a response to the Wuhan virus than the global disaster of oil falling from $70 a barrel to $20, instantly bankrupting U.S. frackers and threatening supermajors like Exxon, BP, Chevron, and Shell. Airlines, hotels, and banks were hammered. Overvalued tech stocks cratered as traders sold positions to cover losses in blue chips. When the Fed cut overnight rates to zero, it signaled catastrophe, shattering investor confidence. NYSE circuit breakers tripped repeatedly, and no one knows how ugly the bottom might be. Martial law? Seems likely in traditionally busy gutzy New York and sunny California after a month of mass lock-down, no different than solitary confinement, forbidden to work or to travel any farther than a grocery store with empty shelves. Goldman Sachs estimated a contraction of -25% GDP in the second quarter, but that was before Cuomo ordered 100% of the NY workforce to go home, bankrupting every small business in the state and crippling big ones like General Electric, Eastman Kodak, and IBM. Sickening if the U.N. mob is deemed an "essential service" exempt from Cuomo's order to do nothing. Will it apply to Black Rock and 30 Rock? Presumably yes. Oh, shit, Connecticut has followed suit, ordering everyone home. Hartford has the largest life and casualty insurance companies in America. And now Illinois! -- John Deere, Sara Lee Kraft, Allstate, the city of Big Shoulders, industrial and commercial hub of transcontinental trade, from meat packing to interstate natural gas distribution.

Holy hell! -- a friend just told me that Boeing is still building planes in Everett, despite total lock-down in Seattle, hundreds of skilled workers jammed together in tight spaces, no air circulation in fuselages and compartments being wired and equipped, no way to wipe down and disinfect complicated surfaces. Fifteen Boeing workers already tested positive.

For an anarchist, the question is how a free society would handle the threat of an epidemic. We might as well ask how libertarians would deal with war or an invasion of impoverished, illiterate caravans from Central America. The short answer is that "sovereign government" failed to halt a multi-decade tidal wave of narcotics, dangerous migrants, urban crime, and endless bloodshed in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Sane people don't applaud incompetent government solutions. It doesn't matter how much borrowed sugar Trump pours on cruise lines, casual dining, biker bars, opera companies, and movies. None of them are productive industries. Funding airlines to transport no one, $1200 tips for furloughed bartenders, and blank checks payable to state and local bureaucrats is fiscally insane and inflationary. Why weaken the U.S. dollar? A trillion here and a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking about worthless Benjamins and wheelbarrows. A rational alternative is staring us right in the face, and it doesn't need a dime of public payola or a single word of emergency guidelines.

Private actors combined in local, regional, and national voluntary enterprises would defend their own interests, not unlike American colonial pioneers. Hostile savages were fenced out and shunned. Invading foreign armies from England and Mexico were fought. Independence was cherished, price no object. In the aftermath of our Civil War, all government Federal and state were bankrupt and easily bribed. The Gilded Age was a long interval of freedom that built cities, factories, railroads, and skyscrapers. Liberty conferred wealth and vast diffusion of knowledge. American ability to understand science and public health was bequeathed by private research, private universities, and competitive medicine that flourished during the Gilded Age when government was weak, stupid, and corrupt.

Nothing has changed except the perfidy of elevating government to supremacy, attributing to it an honorability and superhuman intelligence that it does not possess and never did. We killed two million Vietnamese for what reason? We invaded Iraq for what reason? Democrats want to eliminate internal combustion engines. Name any problem in history or the current state, and then try to justify corrupt boobs like LBJ, Shrub, or Lunch Bucket Joe as national patriarchs with plenary police powers. In 2009, Obama did nothing until 1000 people died in the H1N1 epidemic. Little was achieved by declaring an "emergency," except briefing books by bureaucrats who stumped for Obamacare that regulated and taxed private health care. 12,500 Americans died from H1N1. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi think that government should spend more and tax more and handcuff private initiatives to deal with the Wuhan virus. Stay home and put on an N95 mask, citizen. Food rations will be delivered by troops in hazmat suits. You will die if you go to work, or school, or church, or visit friends and family. All human interaction must be electronic until further notice. Your smartphone is being monitored to track where you go, who you encounter, and what you text in criticism of 15 million Federal, state, and city bureaucrats who can't be fired, have called in sick, and are cowering at home, fearful of amply deserved torches and pitchforks.

Initially, Trump did the sensible thing. He freed hospitals from regulation, enlisted private labs, Walgreens, WalMart, and Target to accelerate testing. It was clear as centrifuge glass that CDC and NIH couldn't test their way out of a paper jam. Unfortunately, Trump foolishly heeded the hysteria of CDC bureaucrats and declared a national "emergency." Mayors and governors took the bait and abolished civil liberty, echoing the panic and kindergarten logic emanating from bureaucrats. "I don't want anyone to die!" bartender-in-chief Sean Hannity wailed in surrender to wholesale suspension of common law civil rights.

Shit. Next it will be a door to door search for weapons. U.S. sporting goods and farm supply stores are 99% sold out of .223 and 9mm ammo, 99% sold out of handguns, 100% of it legal sales to experienced shooters, many of whom have had tactical training and carry concealed. They will never surrender their weapons, no matter what Congress or CDC says, about 40 million armed white people. If blacks go feral, they'll be cut to ribbons by rednecks.

With or without collapse of civil society, with or without 100,000 deaths from Wuhan virus, let's apply some public health common sense. Over half a million Americans die each year. Tens of thousands are drug overdoses, tens of thousands in car crashes, but most die from cancer, chronic diseases, and various complications of old age. Some succomb to childhood illness or accidental drowning. Construction is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. What kind of dumbshit proclaims "I don't want anyone to die!" when 80% of homicides go unsolved in Detroit, and 50,000 Americans die from ordinary colds and flu every winter?

I know it's tough, that the Wuhan virus will kill people, maybe a lot of them. Private choice matters more than dictatorial edicts. I have no desire to party in a pub, and smart barkeepers will close up. Maybe a lot of shopkeepers will pull the shade down, put a sign in the door, and disappear for a few months. Hopefully, plumbers and electricians won't. With a little extra care and less paperwork, we need big rig drivers to restock grocery stores, and we need grocers to keep their doors open, with cops and doctors and nurses on deck to save as many lives as possible. But personal safety and happiness matter, individual decisions to work overtime or walk away, to go home and wash off the filth and sorrow of duty, to embrace a loved one and rest, no matter how loudly a manager begs or threatens punishment.

Government has no right to our work, play, or spiritual life. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is our right, it is our duty to throw off such tyranny.



An interesting idea popped into my mind, laughing at an idiotic Congressman on the radio who sounded like a 22 year old pajama boy. I'd like to open a Manhattan speakeasy, call it the Testing Lab. Plenty of Broadway showgirls and classy waiters out of work. Massive pent-up demand among millionaires and wise guys for nighttime entertainment, say midnight to five. All I need is a silent partner, an NYPD vice captain maybe, and an old brownstone on Huston. Not expensive to put in gaming, a bar, a showroom and stage for torch singers and muzos, no crap hip hop bullshit, Depression-era ballads and 60's show tunes, a couple big bouncers in white tie and lab coats. Screen the members and staff for negative virus test in a first floor Testing Lab office managed by an evil Jane Russell type in thigh high lace-up boots.

Bwahahaha.

I've had some experience running a private nightclub, in Nevada. Charter members were the county Sheriff, a newspaper editor, and the state Speaker of the Assembly. We had poker tables, live music, cute waitresses, a kitchen, and a well stocked bar. I also had eye-opening fun as a guest member at a private nightclub in Philadelphia, operated by Puerto Rican crime bosses, and another private club in Sydney. Interesting things happen in nightclubs. Ooo. I forgot Peter Stringfellow's nightclub in Covent Garden, dinner with Mel Gibson, half naked waitresses in tutus, bouncer at the door, a dignified maitre'd in tux, and a big mirrored disco downstairs. Ah, the Candy Store in Los Angeles, black mafia and NBA stars. The Page Four on Rodeo, hookers and Motown people. Bananarama in Amsterdam (use your imagination).

Ahem. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't matter which frankenstein drugs government toys with in "compassionate use," or how sympatico the chipmunks on NPR bemoan heroes hiding in cramped Castro flats. Moored hospital boats and converted Fantasy Island cruise ships are going to be prisons, the first 50,000 inmates homeless bums and drug addicts with every imaginable disease except Wuhan. Normal people infected by the new virus will be told to self-quarantine, talk to an unintelligible Nigerian doctor on Skype, and cough quietly on a waiting list with a couple million others, while obese black women jam the ER lobbies bellowing that they's sick and rival gangs paint the streets red in drive-by gun battles, an exceptionally high body count of innocent bystanders waiting six feet apart in front of a Rite-Aid to buy cough drops and generic Cold & Flu pills made in China. Wait and see what happens when jails are emptied to "socially distance" the correctional staff.

Good policy to steer clear of big cities or bug out. Truly awful news bulletin: Sen. Rand Paul has tested positive, the sole libertarian voice in Congress. National Guard deployed in New York, California, and Seattle, Democrat machine pols as amateur military commanders.

Now it'll be unanimous in Sacramento, Albany, Washington, Westminster, and Brussels that central banks have to print money on a truly breathtaking scale, to support industry with no customers, households with no jobs, and the entire continent of Africa which has no testing kits, laboratories, doctors, nurses, gowns, masks, intensive care units, clean water, modern sanitation, or food. Ooops. I forgot the 3 million trapped in Gaza, 20 million Syrian and Libyan refugees, a billion paupers in Venezuela, Haiti, Dominica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil; another billion devout Muslims and Hindus in southeast Asia and Indonesia; and a billion Indians who are accustomed to consulting untrained storefront quack "doctors." The Wuhan pandemic will kill hundreds of thousands in the Third World. It still remains to be revealed how many slave laborers died in Red China.

At the lowest, worst moment of my life, I said it out loud to get me and a heavy crate of tools off the roof of a hotel: "I swear by my life and my love it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine!" That was 20 years ago. I was being paid $35 a climb to risk my life, point a satellite dish at a new bird, so restaurants and banks could listen to Elton John and James Taylor, terrible crap that I despised -- and I despaired of my miserable life, 49 years old with sore feet and an aching back, driving a borrowed pick-up, a penniless wage slave. So I understand hardship and humiliation. Maybe it's different that I was a literate white American. The following year launched me around the world on a U.S. passport that became cluttered with visas and entry and exit stamps on every page, renewed at an overseas U.S. embassy in a country where wage slaves had no legal right to travel.

Most of the world is unfair, downtrodden, brutal, and heartbreakingly sad, the plaything of dictators. Americans and Europeans have done everything in their power to liberate and save every soul. Our farmers doubled world population. Our expat teachers and missionaries and doctors labored to ameliorate ignorance. Our armies and spies fought dictators and funded democrats, asking nothing in return. Sometimes it made it a difference. Arguably, we won the Cold War and freed Eastern Europe, tempted Red China to modernize and trade with us. We were chumped repeatedly -- in Turkey and South Africa and Nigeria, in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, in East Africa and Argentina, in Russia, Venezuela, and most of all China.

Now we're faced with global disaster, a consequence of outsourcing and decades of liberal largesse. It comes at a time when the United States and Europe are bankrupt, powerless to save ourselves or billions of primitives we couldn't save in the past with a flood of finance and goodwill and free food and university training of their best and brightest, rescuing and pampering 100 million Third World migrants in America, Germany, Britain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and France. There is no way to reverse history. A weaponized virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory made possible by Kissinger and Nixon, Bill Clinton and General Motors and Apple. Tens of millions will die. World trade has crashed, starving hundreds of millions, inflicting pain and sorrow equal to war on the poorest and least free in Brazil, Keyna, Egypt, and mainland China, whose apparatchiks lied to us for months and who continue to lie about widening infections and body bags. Wuhan is still on lock-down, a city of 11 million under martial law, forbidden to leave their apartments, nothing to read except state propaganda. Ghastly to see it happen in New York City, in glaring shame and betrayal of Lady Liberty.

It will be difficult to reassert the American Way of liberty and justice, under martial law and unending economic hardship. If you're too old (like I am) to open a speakeasy in Manhattan, your best bet is to escape, if you can, to the self-reliant, sensible, and fiercely independent Heartland, birthplace of Dwight Eisenhower and Abe Lincoln and Thomas Alvah Edison.

A personal item. A smarmy but sincere radio announcer just noted the death of a Hunan virus victim in Cincinnati, said every death was tragic, somebody who was loved by others. That doesn't apply to me. When I die, no one will mourn. It's the price one pays for autonomy, the privilege of living for my own sake. I'd prefer to be remembered for the ideas I discovered, but that's unimportant. My thoughts are simple and should be obvious to everyone.

Live free or die, the New Hampshire state motto.

Finally, I'd like to pass along something that a NYC detective told me. As a young cop, he had to report every morning for a briefing. One day on his way to work, he chased and collared a purse snatcher, brought him in. The sergeant was pissed off about this unexpected delay. "Quit creating crime!" the boss bellowed angrily. Moral of the story? Cops aren't what you think they are. They don't want to stop a car, stolen or otherwise, without back-up, not even for something as trivial as a burned out tail light. That's why you see three or four squad cars attending a fender bender. They are extremely worried about Wuhan viral exposure, being coughed or sneezed on by a suspect or a little old lady asking directions to a deli. Cops are ordinary people. In New York, they have to watch their backs constantly. During Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans police disappeared to look after their families. Three of them were caught looting. When shit comes to holler, cops put on riot gear and stand together tightly, like a football team, shoulder to shoulder, and do as little as possible, a mostly theatrical show of force, not interested in arresting protestors, unless they're attacked. Don't rely on policemen to save you when things fall apart. LAPD let Los Angeles burn during the Rodney King riots. Wilshire Blvd was defended by Korean shop owners firing rifles from rooftops.

Commercial fishing boats loaded with tuna catches have been denied permission to dock in San Diego. Wholesalers have been shuttered, no demand at empty restaurants. Bananas are rotting in Philadelphia warehouses, no schools or company cafeterias open to buy them.

This is far worse than government or media is prepared to admit, not a medical crisis, but a tragedy of pusillanimous politically correct social rot, chickens coming home to roost, trading liberty for fascism, rationality silenced by gender fluidity and infantile cries for safety. Our colonial and frontier American ancestors would be shocked and disgusted.

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