Was she a mask Nazi, or a masked Nazi? She was both. Here’s the story.

I was hiking alone in the Colorado Rockies. I encountered a woman rounding a bend in the trail who muttered something to me as we passed one another. I said, “Excuse me?”

She unloaded on me with a tirade of unprintable curses and uncompromising demands that I wear a mask, like hers. So worked up was she that the microdroplets expectorated straight through her mask at approximately 3,400 mph.

Colorado still does not require masks for solitary activities like showering (I sincerely hope not to encounter her there) and hiking alone in the woods. Apparently, she personally has a different rule and she insists that everyone else follow it.

Her blitzkrieg shocked and awed me but I had the presence of mind – and I can say without undue boast, the considerable courage – to suggest that if she didn’t want to encounter perfectly legal unmasked people hiking alone in the woods then maybe she should not hike on a popular trail. After all, there are thousands of Colorado trails where you won’t see a person for days.

To that, she shouted “moron.”

I found that reasoning unpersuasive in substance, style and volume. Notwithstanding, I replied that she seemed like a very classy person. I think my sarcasm was perceptible, even to her. I like to think I defeated her but it was not my finest hour.

We then went our separate ways. I doubt we’ll exchange Christmas cards. What about me attracts such people?  I wasn’t even wearing my MAGA hat.

The COVID experts disagree on mask-wearing, as they disagree on so many other things. Initially, the Surgeon General told us not to wear masks because they did more harm than good.

As it turned out, he was lying, or at least he intended to be lying. Now he says we should wear masks after all.

The reason the Surgeon General intended to lie initially was because he wanted to save the masks for health care workers. He could have just told us, “Masks are good. But, hey, don’t go out and hoard them the way you did toilet paper. Because health care workers need some.”

Instead he lied. Because that’s what government does when it can.

Here’s where it gets complicated. Although the Surgeon General intended to lie, maybe he accidentally didn’t. Other experts continue to say we should not wear masks.

You ask, who?

WHO, that’s who.

You ask, what’s WHO?

Much as I’m tempted to answer, “WHO’s on first base,” the real answer is WHO is the World Health Organization. WHO is who helped the Chinese conceal and nurture the virus into a pandemic monster.

WHO is headed by an Ethiopian doctor. Because that’s where they have the best doctors, said nobody ever.

But this Ethiopian “doctor” (he actually has a Ph.D. not a M.D.) is in pretty good company this time. An article last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, which gets things right more often than not, said masks are unnecessary outside a clinical setting.

How many times will the COVID experts be inconsistent, lying or wrong, or otherwise inexpert, before we stop calling them experts?

COVID masks are interesting from a societal and psychological perspective.  They’re of course highly visible and obtrusive but that’s a feature, not a flaw. They may not prevent the transmission of disease but, more importantly, they serve to communicate to the world, loudly and without nuance, that the wearer is a good person.

In other words, masks are the latest in virtue signaling. If I ever see a middle-aged lady wearing a mask while driving a Toyota Prius hybrid with a C-O-E-X-I-S-T bumper sticker, I’ll hurl.

Alas, I didn’t have all this cleverness on hand or on the tip of my unmasked tongue on the trail the other day when I had my close encounter of the turd kind with the mask(ed) Nazi.

Next time I see her, I’ll be ready. But I suppose by now she and her ilk are in Poland, where any survivors of their invasion will be sent to concentration camps as slave labor to make masks. While wearing, of course, masks.

The odds of a young healthy American catching and dying of the COVID virus are roughly 1 in 70,000 and going down. Their odds of dying of sunstroke are ten times greater. Their odds of dying in a car wreck or by suicide are a thousand times greater.

So why are many young healthy people afraid of dying of the virus? I have a theory.

It’s because fear is pleasurable. Bear with me.

Our modern lives are plushily furnished with everything we need and most of what we desire, except the stimulation for which we evolved. We no longer engage in the difficult, risky and exciting hunting, gathering, war-making, animal-fighting and harem-building for which we evolved.

Instead, we sit in cubicles, sit in rush hour traffic, sit watching sports and sit in front of predictable LED screens that display exactly what we want, no more and no less.

People are shaped like pears these days because they act like pears. Continue reading →

Martha Stewart and Michael Flynn have something in common. Both were nearly ruined for lying to the cops.

In Stewart’s case, she was accused of insider trading for accepting the recommendation of her broker to sell some stock. In doing so, she avoided a loss that was paltry by her standards, less than $50,000.

She was acquitted on the charge that her stock sale was illegal, but was convicted on charges that she had lied to federal investigators about the circumstances of it.

For that, she served time in a federal prison and her media empire was nearly destroyed. She rebuilt her companies, and today she’s once again the crème de la crème of homes and gardens.

Stewart’s decorating style is not my style, mind you, but readers who’ve seen my homes will know that’s a compliment to her. Continue reading →

A Marxist is credited with saying “by any means necessary” in a 1960 speech entitled “Why we use violence.” In other words, the reason Marxists use violence is that violence is necessary to accomplish their goals.

Later the slogan was commandeered by communist sympathizer Jean-Paul Sartre. He stated, “It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.”

French philosophers always complicate things. This one thought the way to abolish lies was by eradicating class, violently if necessary. Wouldn’t it be better to just tell the truth?

Malcolm X later declared he intended “to bring into existence” a new day “by any means necessary.” Continue reading →

Here’s some contraband, some non-fake news. If you repeat it, you might get face-masked. If you’re a nail salon owner trying to feed your family, you might get thrown in jail. I assume it will be banned from Facemaskbook.

Here it is. The virus numbers are dropping. In hard-hit Italy and Spain, the numbers peaked around the end of March – over five weeks ago. Both daily new cases and daily deaths are now down over 70%, as shown in these graphs.

The rest of Europe is seeing similar downward trends, including Germany, France and the UK.

Given these trends, Europe is starting to re-open. That’s good news that you don’t hear much in American media. Continue reading →

American universities once attracted students from around the world. Prestige places like Harvard and Caltech did so, but it also happened at good state schools like the University of Illinois, University of Texas and even my own alma mater, the University of Colorado.

The scientific education was second to none. Even outside of science, a broad-based humanities program thrived. As an engineering student at CU, my required curriculum included two full years of “Great Books” where we studied Socrates, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer and Milton.

But then some interrelated things happened.

First, our culture mistakenly came to believe that being an educated person requires college. Today, many businesses require a college degree for everyone on the payroll.

Colleges were happy to go along with this. It meant more customers.

It also meant dumbing down the curriculum, and you might think colleges would resist that. They did in principle but not in practice. After all, teaching easier stuff is easier.

This sentiment permeates all levels of the education industry. Self-serving high schools perversely pride themselves on how many of their graduates go to college, as if there’s not a single one in the graduating class who would be happier in military service, or in a trade or in a restaurant. Meanwhile, those same high schools fail to teach these college-bound youngsters the basics that they used to teach.

Second, our leftward-drifting society began rejecting Western ethics and values such as work and objective truth. Those things are too hard. A work ethic demands work, and many people don’t like work. Objective truth requires hurting the feelings of those who believe in things that are false.

Our culture was so rich that we could afford frivolity. The engine of enterprise created by industrial and technological revolutions harnessed to free market economies was powerful.

Laziness and falseness were drags on the economy but the economy still generated phenomenal riches for almost everyone. Our poor people are considered middle class in most of the rest of the world.

In the colleges, this feel-good luxury translated into a disregard for their mission of educating students. Why should they imbue students with knowledge, if we’re so rich that knowledge is not necessary anymore? And how could they, if there’s no objective truth anymore?

Stripped of their legitimate mission, the colleges found another. They became cultural talismans to the point of parody.

Colleges used to tolerate unconventionality. Fine, being exposed to unconventionality is part of growing up. Then they started to celebrate it, then they demanded it, and now they won’t tolerate any opposition to it.

They’ve made a fetish of tolerance except tolerance for those with whom they disagree.

Ah, but now we have the COVID crisis. As Hillary Clinton might say in a different context, and did, let’s not waste it.

It’s true that colleges were in tough financial times even before COVID, largely due to oversupply of their product, high prices and a demographics-induced shrinking of their customer base.

The internet – the most powerful invention since fire – undercuts their business model just as it undercuts every other business model that relies on monopolizing information.

Why pay $40,000/year to go to a third rate school in a fourth rate town to hear a fifth rate lecture from a sixth rate ponytailed professor who gets summers off and a month for Christmas while lambasting the suburban parents who are footing the bill, when on the internet you can watch and re-watch for free at your convenience a brilliant talk from a fantastic speaker who’s at the top of his game?

From the standpoint of the student, the only answer to that question is, because the second option doesn’t get him a certificate called “college degree” which he needs for the cubicle job downtown.

This won’t last. Driven by something they hate, competition, colleges are beginning to offer online degrees. Some such degrees are indistinguishable on their face from the on-campus degrees. And employers are increasingly willing to test for knowledge, not simply trust a degree to prove it.

Ah, you say, but that approach would miss the pot parties and keggers. Yes, I suppose it would. But $40,000/year (double that at private colleges) would buy a lot of parties elsewhere.

We can no longer afford six-figure, four-year expenditures for institutional pot parties that serve only to enrich the educational industrial complex while delaying adulthood.

Harvard with its $40 billion endowment was caught with its hand in the COVID cookie jar. Think of the unabashed greed behind that. Faced with an outcry, Harvard put the money back.

But hundreds of other schools are dipping in, from ordinary state universities whose financial responsibility should be with the state that runs them, to Harvard-wannabe private colleges with their own endowments. They do so even as they hire new diversity czars, clamp down on freedom of speech and deny due process to the criminally accused.

I submit that before taking taxpayer handouts they should engage in a little introspection. A little veritas.

A truthful institution of learning run by civic minded professionals – what we used to call “the academy” – would consider how to help society, not just how to milk it. Many of these tawdry but exorbitantly expensive scams should close their doors forever.

Defying apocalyptic predictions, Colorado was not particularly hard-hit by the Coronavirus. The number of cases and deaths per capita were in the middling part of the U.S. range.

Moreover, in Colorado the virus is nearly dead now. A website set up by the state showing virus data over time shows this:

It can be seen that the daily death toll follows the classic bell-shaped curve that epidemiologists learn in med school. If anything, it’s better than one might hope for, in that the decline in right-hand part of the curve is steeper than the increase in the left-hand part. Yesterday, the death toll was zero.

One might think that the state’s largest newspaper would see this as news. They don’t. Continue reading →