FÁSACH: waste, desert; deserted place; luxuriant growth

Fás, -áis, pl.id. m., act of growing, increasing, becoming; springing or resulting from (ó, de); growth, cinrease; a plant, a rod; a growth; an dara f., second- or after-growth; f. (na h-) aon oidhche, mushroom, al. the name of an ancient monument near Dundalk; ní’l aon fh. fé, it (he) is not growing well; d’éirigh an f. leis, he has grown considerably; tá f. gach uile shóirt ann, everything grows there; tá sé ag f. geal, fuar, ⁊c., it is grwoing white, cold, etc.; dims. fásán, -óg. See fáis.

Fáis, a., gs. of fás, growing; flasraidhe f., growing vegetables, greens.

Fás, a., empty, void, vain; go follamh, f., quite empty; in compds. fás-buille, a missed stroke; fás-bholg, an empty bag; fás-chogaint, empty chewing; fás-bhruchtghail, empty belching.

Fás, -áis, m., a void, a waste, a vacuum.

Fásach, -aigh, pl. -aighe, m., a precedent.

Fásach, -aighe, a., desolate, desert, overgrown with grass.

Fásach, -aigh, pl. id., -aighe, and -atha, m., a desert, a wilderness, a prairie, a wast; paster land, a field, luxuriant grass, pasture ungrazed for a long time; the grass headland of an unploughed field; a deserted place or house. f. coille, a grove; tá f. ag na buaibh ’san pháirc sin, the cows have prairie pasture in that field; ní féar atá ann acht f., that is not ordiinary grass but something more luxuriant; ag tabhairt an fhásaigh, lit. growing grass, i.e., dead and buried; bhí an gnó ’na fh. air, he got into business difficulties; beidh an teach so ’na fh. ort, you will not be allowed to enter this house; dearg-fh., sheer wilderness; flaitheas na naomh ar Shéamas ’na dhearg-fh., may heaven be completely closed against James (McD.). See fásaigh.

Fásachadh, -chta, m., desolation, act of depopulating.

Fásaidheacht, -a, f., act of devastating or turning into a desert.

Fásaigh, gs. of fásach, a., wild, overgrown with vegetation, ruined; teampall f., a deserted church yeard; biolar f., wild cress.

Fásaim, vl. fás, v. intr. I grow, increase; I am born, sprung from (ó); I rise, as a river from its source; I come constantly, as an income or a periodical allowance; tá an t-airgead ag fás chuige, he has a constant income; ar fhás eadrainn, those of our stock, those who grew up with us; there is a mod. tr. use.

—Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla, 1927, by Patrick Dinneen

Bealach na Spáinneach le Liam Mac Cóil

Is grástúil é an leabhar seo, an triú cheann sraithe. Agus grástúil atá a laoch óg, Lúcás Ó Bhriain, pionsóir den scoth, léannta, fiosrach, machnamhach, múinte, agus saonta. Giota beag mar Parsifal mar laoch. Tá sé gafa istigh plota mór casta, spiaireachta agus polaitíochta, agus creidimh i gceist freisin – bhíothas siocháin ar bun in Eoraip sa bhliain 1612, ach tá gabháil níos crua ar bun in Éirinn faoin rí nua Sasanach. Le linn a thurais ó Ghaillimh go dtí an Róimh, tá níos lú ina thuiscint an níos mó ina fhios air.

Tar éis a éalamh Sasana le báid go dtí na tIsilthíortha ag an deireadh dara leabhar, dúisíonn Lúcás ag tús an cheann seo i bhFrainc, baile beag cois fharraige san Bhríotáin. Bhí stoirm ar muir agus bhualadh a chloigean le crann scóide (.i. búm) an bháid. Tar éis an oiread sin gníobh i Sasana, bhí sé anois ina scíth, an t-aoi amháin in óstán leis an bhean tí agus a hiníon déagach aisteach, ag fanacht a neart a fhilleadh.

Ansin bád eile go hOstainn agus eachtraí nua ina hiarraidh a bhealach a dhéanamh go Róimh an litir diamhair a sheachadadh cuig an lámh Aoidh Mhór Uí Néill. Go fírinneach tá an cuid is mó den eachtraí i dtaobh an turas fada seachas an tóir Sasanach chun Lúcás a dunmháradh agus an litir a gabhail as: tríd na tíortha éagsula, na cathreacha mhúrtha, na bailte ar an mbóthar, agus na daoine go hairithe.

Is é bealach na Spáinneach an bóthar mileata idir Milano agus Bruiséil. Ó Lobháin taistealaíonn Lúcás le buíon de triúr shiúr agus triúr saighdiúir agus a ngiollaí mar tionlacán, Éirinneach siúd uile. Tá na saighdiúirí i seirbhís Uí Néill, agus bhí aithne ag an ceannaire ar an athair Lúcáis. (Faoin am seo, tá a bfhios ag roinnt na hÉireannaigh i ndeoraíocht i Lobháin ar an litir agus cé hé Lúcás féin.)

Ní gá a rá, baineann Lúcás Róimh amach agus criochnaíonn sé an scéal i seomra i mbarr páláis fad a bheith an t-amhránaí cáiliúil Girolamo ag canadh amhráin John Dowland i gcóisir i mbun.

“Dúradh liom gur litir thábhachtach í agus go gcaithfinn í a leagan isteach i lámha Uí Néill agus ina lámha seisean amháin. Rinne mé sin.” Thóg sé 1,262 leathanach (agus cló níos lú ná an cinn eile sa sé chéad leathanach an triú leabhar seo), gach uile acu suimiúil, beoga, tochtmhar go minic le gliondar agus iontas nó cumha agus brón, go hálainn i gcónaí.

[Bhí an leabhar foilsithe ag Leabhar Breac]
[An chéad leabhar sa tsraith: An Litir]
[An dara leabhar sa tsraith: I dTír Strainséartha]

How the Left Hijacked Civil Rights

Robert Woodson and Joshua Mitchell write in the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 16, 2021:

The civil-rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., helped deliver America from the historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow by forcing the nation to confront the full humanity of its black citizens. King’s words and actions glorified America by transfiguring its racial wound and revealing its redemptive promise. Yet today many black leaders have lost sight of King altogether and are aiding and abetting the crucifixion of their own people. Rather than hope, they see despair; rather than the Easter Sunday of true liberation, they offer the bleak Good Friday of never-ending misery.

The history of black American responses to slavery and Jim Crow generally followed three paths. They were hotly debated, but all emphasized human agency, sought liberation, and rejected despair.

First, there were the recolonization or “back to Africa” movements championed by the likes of Marcus Garvey. These movements sought an exit from America.

Second, there were the insurrectionists of the 19th century, who believed that black Americans should engage in armed rebellion or vocal opposition so that they might find a home in this country. Here lie Nat Turner and, later, W.E.B. Du Bois. They wanted to have their resistant voice heard in America.

Third, there were accommodationist movements of the sort undertaken by Booker T. Washington, who thought that loyalty to America was the best course.

Exit, voice, loyalty—however different these strategies were, each supposed that human agency mattered, that oppression wasn’t destiny. That is why, even amid great struggle, black Americans responded by building their own institutions and businesses. Great universities, medical schools, hotels, restaurants, movie companies and even a flight school sprung up. All of this was self-financed—and made possible by two-parent families, churches and other cultural institutions that provided shelter against the outside storm of racism.

In the 20th century, that same creative conflict between these three schools of thought reappeared. Debaters included the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Africa, which sought to establish a separate black state within our borders as an exit strategy.

King offered an inspiring combination of the strategies of loyalty and voice. In 1960, when students in Greensboro, N.C., became frustrated with the slow pace of legal action favored by Thurgood Marshall, King was sent to discourage them from engaging in civil disobedience. The students told King to lead, follow or get out of the way. They were determined to liberate themselves. They understood the difficulties and were undeterred by the obstacles. Like King, they were willing to persevere toward justice even when it was inconvenient, and to suffer the consequences of their actions. Hope, not hopelessness, animated all that they did.

King paid a heavy personal price for his hope that America was redeemable. Twice his home was bombed; once, his wife and daughter were nearly killed. Surrounded by hundreds of angry, armed black men after that bombing, he discouraged retaliatory violence. He was assaulted several times, and jailed as well, but he remained steadfast in his commitment to nonviolence. He united black Americans behind the proposition that racism is evil in itself, not simply because white people visited it upon blacks, and that all must unite to combat evil. He warned us about the self-destructive path of violence, not only for blacks but for the whole nation.

One of the original arguments to justify slavery was that blacks were morally inferior and thus incapable of self-government. John C. Calhoun famously asserted: “There is no instance of any civilized colored race of any shade being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government.” Black efforts at self-liberation in the 19th and 20th centuries were based on the opposite assumption.

Today many black leaders defer to angry white progressives who make the same arguments about blacks’ lack of moral agency, reject the country’s founding principles, and seek to undermine its institutions. For months, the radical left has been exploiting the country’s genuine concern for fairness to keep blacks in a constant state of agitation, anger and grievance, urging them toward behavior that lives down to the slanderous stereotypes of white supremacists. The leaders of these movements insist that every inequity suffered by blacks is caused by institutional and structural racism, that they have no power to liberate themselves, and that they will remain oppressed until white people change. Even to raise the issue of what role self-determination plays for blacks earns you the label of “racist.”

Civil-rights organizations and their leadership, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus, need to wake up before it’s too late. A faction of black leaders has been silent about, or complicit in, the takeover of the civil-rights movement by the radical left. The effect of this is not to glorify black achievement but to crucify low-income blacks, who are represented in national media outlets by their worst-behaved members, and bear the brunt of the attacks by the woke radical left on the cities where they live.

“Justice” for black America cannot be achieved by framing it solely through the distorted lens of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others in fatal police encounters. For every unarmed black American killed by the police, hundreds are killed in neighborhood homicides.

Those who call for the defunding of police departments, such as leaders of the official Black Lives Matter organization, are silent about this inconvenient truth. They have a narrative and cannot let the facts get in the way. Their story is that the whole of American history is stained and the whole of America must be overthrown. When citizens declare that they support Black Lives Matter, do they share its opposition to the nuclear family, its objective of abolishing the police, and its view that the Christian cross is a symbol of white supremacy? These positions of the organization—language that has largely been scrubbed from its website—in no way improve the lives of black Americans. They give up on black America and encourage its needless suffering.

Like all Americans, blacks have triumphed over their circumstances only when they have adopted bourgeois virtues such as hard work, respect for learning, self-discipline, faith and personal responsibility. In the 19th century, Frederick Douglass found reading to be the key to his own personal liberation amid slavery, and he understood that whites deliberately withheld literacy from blacks precisely because it was so valuable. Bourgeois values drove blacks to build the powerful religious, fraternal, and other voluntary associations that helped them thrive in the worst days of Jim Crow and cultivated the essential virtues in the next generation.

There would have been no civil-rights movement without this. But radical progressives now insist that such virtues are the legacy of white supremacy, colonialist values that reflect the continuing bondage of blacks to oppressive Western culture. The only “authentic” expression of blackness in America, they claim, is the opposite of bourgeois self-restraint and discipline—indulging in the passions of the moment, whether anarchic rioting, insulting teachers or other unsalutary forms of expression. The radical left—disdaining exhortations toward work, family and faith as “respectability politics”—argues that blacks should feel free to indulge their “true” nature, echoing the age-old white-supremacist notion that said nature is violent, lascivious and incapable of self-restraint.

The slave masters’ trick of old was to dissuade blacks from adopting bourgeois values precisely so they could be kept in servitude. Marriage was forbidden and families were split apart. Douglass observed that slaves were encouraged to indulge in drink and debauchery during the holidays so they would be “led to think that there was little to choose between liberty and slavery. We felt, and very properly too, that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum. So, when the holidays ended, we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field—feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery.”

But there were always those who saw through the trick and used the holidays to hunt, make items for sale, visit distant family members, and hire out their own labor. Some of these were even able—eventually—to purchase their freedom.

Tellingly, leftist elites teach their own children the values of working and studying hard even as they encourage behavior among blacks that will make sure they remain uncompetitive but “authentic.” By the time young blacks today discover, as did the slaves of Douglass’s time, that freedom understood as “do whatever you feel like” is no way to build a worthwhile life, it will be too late. The fruits of the civil-rights movement’s hard labor—teaching the young to be so self-disciplined that they were able to resist responding in kind to hatred and abuse from whites—will have been lost.

We must turn away from the present course, which preaches despair rather than hope. Black achievement must be glorified. The crucifixion of black America by the radical left must halt. There is a grander, more fruitful future for us all.

Mr. Woodson, a veteran of the civil-rights movement, is founder and president of the Woodson Center and author, most recently, of “Lessons From the Least of These: The Woodson Principles.” Mr. Mitchell is a Washington Fellow at the Claremont Center for the American Way of Life and author of “American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time.”

Presidential Inaugural Address, January 20, 2017

Every four years, we gather on these steps to carry out the orderly and peaceful transfer of power, and we are grateful to President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama for their gracious aid throughout this transition. They have been magnificent.

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.

Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment: it belongs to you. ...

What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people.

January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. ...

Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves.

These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.

But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.

We are one nation – and their pain is our pain. Their dreams are our dreams; and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.

The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.

For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry;

Subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military;

We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own;

And spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.

We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.

One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.

The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.

But that is the past. And now we are looking only to the future.

We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power.

From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.

From this moment on, it’s going to be America First.

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. ...

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America, and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other.

When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. ...

It is time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget: that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American Flag.

And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky, they fill their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty Creator.

So to all Americans, in every city near and far, small and large, from mountain to mountain, and from ocean to ocean, hear these words:

You will never be ignored again.

Your voice, your hopes, and your dreams, will define our American destiny. And your courage and goodness and love will forever guide us along the way.

Together, We Will Make America Strong Again.

We Will Make America Wealthy Again.

We Will Make America Proud Again.

We Will Make America Safe Again.

And, Yes, Together, We Will Make America Great Again. Thank you, God Bless You, And God Bless America.

[source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/]

More Salem than Thanksgiving: Coronavirus panic has set America back hundreds of years

Heather Mac Donald, The Spectator US, November 24, 2020 [excerpts]:

Nearly half the 102 occupants of the Mayflower died in their first year of settlement at Plymouth, sometimes at a rate of three a day. Such a mortality rate was predictable. The earlier outpost at Jamestown, founded in 1607, lost 66 of its original 104 settlers in its first nine months. ...

And yet the voyagers kept coming, driven by something beyond safetyism — religious zeal, ambition, passion for discovery, the desire for greater freedom. Those Americans who later spread across the continent, whether as solo explorers or in wagon trains, likewise eschewed a ‘stay safe’ philosophy.

Today, we are strangling American society in order to avoid a risk of death so infinitesimal — roughly 0.001 percent — for the majority of Americans that it would not have registered in any possible cost-benefit analysis governing both notable American endeavors and quotidian activities over the last four centuries. Our current Thanksgiving Day mantras — ‘Stay within your pod. Stay within your bubble. Stay within your household’ (in the words of a University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist); don’t travel, don’t share food, don’t touch your family members or friends, speak only in hushed tones — make a mockery of the spirit that creates a country and sustains human life.

This present moment is less like that first Thanksgiving celebration and more like the Salem witch frenzy of 1692. To be sure, the coronavirus is real; witches were not. The virus has cost thousands of lives; witches did not. But the fear that has gripped much of the population over the last year, whipped up by sundry experts and authorities, is as disconnected from reason as that emblematic burst of hysteria in colonial Massachusetts and other such panics throughout medieval and early modern Europe. The shared features of all such contagious fear events include the following:

The belief in ubiquitous threat

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti has advised Los Angelenos to ‘assume that everyone you encounter is infected’. Under even the most liberal assumptions of undetected community spread, however, only a small fraction of Los Angeles’s population would be infected and currently contagious.

As for the threat of death, most of the population faces none from the virus. The average age of coronavirus decedents is 80, which is four years higher than the average life expectancy for US males in 2018 and just a year under the average life expectancy of females. Most decedents have underlying co-morbities. Up to two-thirds of coronavirus casualties may have died of other causes by the end of 2020. Forty percent of US coronavirus deaths have occurred in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Sadly, death is already the fate of virtually all residents of such facilities, however much we may understandably try to defer it.

Scapegoats and stigma

Public officials have piled onto those intransigents who do not wear masks in the great outdoors, blaming them for the spread. Outdoor mask refuseniks have been screamed at and shamed by citizen enforcers of the outdoor mask dogma. The media imply false causal connections ... But there is no evidence for open-air transmission, absent highly unusual packed settings and prolonged contact. Transmission, per the CDC’s own contact tracing guidelines, requires a cumulative 15 minutes of close contact with an infected person, overwhelmingly in poorly ventilated, cramped indoor settings. In the outdoors, circulating air disperses any possible viral dose to the point of non-existence, even if most outdoor encounters were not too fleeting to be of concern.

People who have recovered from the virus are shunned as pariahs, despite their lack of infectious status.

Amulets and ritualistic gestures

The mask is believed to possess totemic power, even though there is little evidence that its use correlates inversely with community spread or that it protects wearers from infection. ...

Magical formulas and the arbitrary exercise of government power

Once hysteria takes over, any expectation that public officials will act according to reason is discarded. New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has long set a metric for re-closing the city’s schools: a three percent infection rate among the tested population. He arrived at the number in conjunction with the teacher’s union. How did the mayor and union come up with it? We don’t know. Is it related to anything real? By definition, no. The evidence is by now overwhelming that children have virtually no risk of dying from the virus, nor do they spread it to adults. A random sample of 16,000 students and staff in New York City schools yielded only 28 positive tests; none of those cases resulted in serious illness or death. The New York City school system, were it a free-standing community, would be among the nation’s safest places to reside. ...

Virginia requires that children from age two onwards wear masks. Such a practice, lacking any grounding in actual science, will likely have crippling psychological consequences.

The rising caseload and the oncoming Thanksgiving holiday have triggered a new explosion of arbitrary government dictates. Oregon’s governor is limiting social gatherings to no more than six people. How did she arrive at that number? By no known body of evidence. If it existed, presumably the six-person ceiling would be universal. But Yolo County, California (where Sacramento is located), has a 16-person cap on Thanksgiving and other gatherings, while Kentucky is limiting Thanksgiving to eight people from two different households. The state of California magnanimously allows a grand total of three households. Before celebrating such relative liberality, note that California requires that the lucky three social units (whose members must of course all be masked) disperse after two hours. That three-household, two-hour ceiling applies even if the gathering occurs in a public park, where the chance of transmission is at its lowest ebb.

Without any advance warning, Los Angeles County shut down all outdoor dining on November 23, signing the death warrant for thousands of restaurants and casting thousands of workers back into unemployment. Restaurant owners had invested thousands of dollars into outdoor heat lamps and other outdoor dining equipment; they will have to throw out thousands of dollars of food.

Los Angeles County has no evidence of any transmission among outdoor diners. It is reacting blindly to a rising case count, even though more than 72 percent of the new cases reported on November 21 were in the lowest risk category — people under 50 — and nearly half of the 34 county residents who died of COVID-19 on November 21 (per the usual over-inclusive count methodology) were over 80. Protecting those octogenarians does not require wholesale business destruction.

The experts are so confident in their fear-induced hold over the popular mind that they feel no compunction about self-contradiction. The CDC has acknowledged that there is little surface transmission of the virus. Yet it recommends that should someone be so rash as to attend a Thanksgiving gathering outside his home, he must bring his own food and utensils so as to avoid touching his host’s kitchenware. We are regressing further back along the civilizational path to medieval times, when everyone carried around his own spoon on his belt. At least those medieval trenchermen followed the environmentally sound practice of reusing their spoons. The CDC advises that all utensils and plates be thrown out after the Thanksgiving meal, showing yet again that environmentalism is usually just empty virtue-signaling.

The experts fear no rebellion over rules that destroy the very thing that they purport to regulate. Bringing your own meal to Thanksgiving and not even sharing it cancels the spirit of holiday. Thanksgiving becomes indistinguishable from those cheerless ‘family dinners’ where every teenager microwaves his own chosen frozen food and then slinks back with it to the privacy of his bedroom and smartphone.

Fetishes

Case counts have been the object of veneration for months, despite their near meaninglessness. The obsession with the case count is an implicit admission that the death rates have been a disappointment, for they are falling rather than increasing. Currently, infections among the young make up the lion’s share of new cases; in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for example, 61 percent of confirmed and probable cases are connected to the university there. Most of these cases among the young are asymptomatic: the infection is so mild that the infected person is unaware he even has it. These infections are being picked up thanks to mandatory testing in college and school settings. It is not just the young, however, that are frequently asymptomatic. Across the entire population, a whopping 40-45 percent of cases are initially unknown to their bearer before a test comes in positive.

A rising case count among the least at-risk population is not something to be feared, since it heralds the approach of herd immunity. Males in the 20-29 age bracket without underlying conditions have 99.9997 chance of surviving a coronavirus infection; females in that age bracket have a 99.9998 survival rate. ...

Yet since the start of the pandemic, the media and their bevy of public health sources have histrionically covered case counts, usually on an hourly basis, as if they signaled imminent doom. ...

And despite today’s raging headlines, the current crisis is still largely anticipatory. Los Angeles County’s director of public health, Barbara Ferrer, has been leaning heavily on the promise of future disaster. ‘This much of an increase in cases may very well result in tremendous suffering and tragic deaths down the road,’ she told the Los Angeles Times on November 12. For now, however, the number of hospitals that are severely burdened nationally is small; at least a quarter of all cases now being labeled as coronavirus hospitalizations in the daily media count were likely admitted for other problems and only retroactively classified as coronavirus cases following a positive test. California governor Gavin Newsom has put 94 percent of the states’ residents under another stay-at-home order. But only six percent of the state’s hospital beds are occupied by COVID-19 patients, up from four percent in early November.

Nationally, the case fatality rate and presumed infection fatality rate continue to drop.

Human sacrifice

Almost all the businesses being sacrificed on the altar of coronavirus fear are as innocent as the vestal virgins of old. The public health authorities have no idea what is driving the current spread. They have no hard evidence that outdoor or indoor restaurant meals are responsible; they certainly have no evidence that shopping is responsible. And yet millions of livelihoods are being destroyed in the exercise of inebriating, limitless power. ‘We don’t want you going into restaurants and sitting and eating outside, and we don’t want you going into retail establishments either,’ Los Angeles’s ubiquitous Barbara Ferrer pronounced recently. Ferrer has no basis for stigmatizing retail establishments.

The shaming of heretics and dissenters

Neuroradiologist Stanford scientist Scott Atlas and the physician scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration have been denounced for challenging the efficacy of economic lockdowns, school shutdowns, and outdoor mask requirements. Their heresies have been borne out by the evidence.

False agency

The director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, a major purveyor of pandemic panic, claimed in the Wall Street Journal that the pandemic was threatening ‘jobs and businesses’. It is not the pandemic that is threatening jobs and businesses, however; political decision-making is. COVID is also ascribed a power that it does not likely have. The New York Times has dedicated a special section to ‘those we’ve lost’ from COVID (ignoring the many more people we lose each day to cancer and heart disease). One alleged COVID casualty was a 101-year-old veteran. We are to believe that without COVID, he would have lived an indefinite number of further years.

An advanced civilization builds towards the future, as the Pilgrims and other New World settlers understood. It accumulates social and economic capital to be drawn on by individual discoverers and entrepreneurs for further progress. Now, however, we are cannibalizing our economic inheritance, in the fantastical belief that government transfer payments, generated from ever increased debt, can substitute for private economic activity. Our capital, now being recklessly destroyed by arbitrary government fiat, will take generations to rebuild. We take for granted everything that hard-won prosperity has provided us — well-functioning services (compared to Third World disorder), dependable maintenance, the luxury of choice. We will miss such prosperity when it follows the fate of those millions of businesses whose loss is causing despair, substance abuse, and suicide.

A mature civilization understands that risk is part of life and that there are higher purposes — even mere sociability — than avoiding death at all costs. No great venture can be accomplished if staying safe is life’s only guiding principle. Now, however, our elites mock courage and perseverance, explicitly repudiating the virtues that built this country. President Trump, upon leaving the hospital after a coronavirus infection, admonished the country to not ‘be afraid’ of the virus, in the Washington Post’s words, and to not ‘allow it to dominate’ our lives. That imminently reasonable exhortation, once expected in a leader, is still being denounced by public health experts and the media nearly two months later. If Americans do not repudiate this ethic of fear, future Thanksgivings will be even bleaker than this year’s.

Preventing IP leaks with a VPN and torrent client

There’s a good article from November 7, 2020, at vpnuniversity.com/learn/how-to-fix-every-vpn-ip-leak, though it doesn’t mention torrent client leaks. A good testing site is ipleak.net. It would be good practice to visit ipleak.net every time you use a VPN and before downloading a torrent.

To prevent your torrent client from revealing your home IP address as it tries to maximize your connections, you have to specifically bind it to the VPN network interface. With qbittorrent, for example, in Preferences > Advanced > “Network interface”, choose, on a Mac, e.g., utun1 or, if present, utun2 or ipsec0. When your VPN is connected, select its network address in “Optional IP address to bind to” (just below “Network interface”). On the Mac, that address should be specified in System Preferences > Network > your VPN. Or it is given in the VPN application. Also on the Mac, running the ifconfig command in Terminal will show what network interface the VPN is using.

As mentioned above, it would be good practice to check this, i.e., open your torrent client, before downloading a torrent. Then test your setup at ipleak.net.

Other steps to prevent IP leaks while using a VPN:

1. Turn on your VPN’s kill switch, so that it will stop activity if the VPN disconnects. In PureVPN, e.g., this is in Preferences > Advanced options.

2. If your VPN is not using DNS servers from the virtual server it’s using – and instead using your ISP’s DNS servers, or even the DNS servers you’ve otherwise specified (although many ISPs force you to their own) – then you need a new VPN.

3. IPv6 leaks. The new IP address system (because IPv4 addresses ran out in 2011) is still rarely used outside of local networks. It can be disabled on the Mac in System Preferences > Network > WiFi > TCP/IP > “Configure IPv6” → Off. If ”Off” is not an available option, set it to ”Link-local only”, which will use it only on your local network. Or try the Terminal command “sudo networksetup ‑setv6off 'Wi‑Fi' ” (include the straight quotemarks around “Wi-Fi”) (or “Ethernet”) to turn it off completely. Disable IPv6 in Firefox at about:config > “network.dns.disableIPv6” → false (double-click). Alternatively, one of the advanced options in the Windows version of PureVPN is IPv6 leak prevention.

4. WebRTC leaks. This is more a potential security vulnerability while you’re in your browser. It can be disabled, e.g., in Firefox at about:config > “media.peerconnection.enabled” → false (double-click). Ipleak.net describes how to disable it in Chrome and Opera.

As also suggested in a comment to the above-cited article, you can disable location requests, which could reveal your precise location. In Firefox Preferences > Privacy & Security > Permissions > Location, check “Block new requests asking to access your location”. And in about:config, set “geo.enabled” to false.

Finally, use the privacy mode of your browser so no record of your activity (cookies, cache, etc.) is saved.

PS:  In qbittorrent, if a download isn’t starting, try pausing and then resuming it.

PPS:  On a Mac, the torrent client likely requires “full disc access”. Make sure that it is added to the list in System Preferences under Privacy & Security.

PPPS:  When choosing a location in your VPN, be sure it is a “P2P” server.

Tucker Carlson Tonight, November 6, 2020

Who exactly is Joe Biden, the man who may be our president come Jan. 20? The truth is, as of right now, we don’t really know.

We have no clue what Joe Biden actually thinks, or even if he’s capable of thinking. He hasn’t told us and no one’s made him tell us for a full year. In fact, it’s becoming clear, there is no Joe Biden. The man you may remember from the 1980s is gone.

What remains is a projection of sorts, a hologram designed to mimic the behavior of a non-threatening political candidate: “Relax, Joe Biden’s here. He smiles a lot. Everything’s fine.” That’s the message from the vapor candidate.

So who’s running the projector here? Well, the first thing you should know is that the people behind Joe Biden aren’t liberals. We’ve often incorrectly called them that. A liberal believes in the right of all Americans to speak freely, to make a living, to worship their God, to defend their own families, and to do all of that regardless of what political party they belong to or what race they happen to be born into or how far from midtown Manhattan they currently live.

A liberal believes in universal principles, fairly applied. And the funny thing is, all of that describes most of the 70 million people who just voted for Donald Trump this week. Most of them don’t want to hurt or control anyone. They have no interest in silencing the opposition on Facebook or anywhere else. They just want to live their lives in the country they were born in, and it doesn’t seem like a lot to ask. So by any traditional definition, they are liberal.

However, our language has become so politicized and so distorted that you would never know it. What you do know for certain is that the people behind Joe Biden are not like that at all. They don’t believe in dissent. “You think one thing? I think another. That’s OK.” No, that’s not them at all. They demand obedience to diversity, which is to say, legitimate differences between people is the last thing they want. These people seek absolute sameness, total uniformity. You’re happy with your corner coffee shop? They want to make you drink Starbucks every day from now until forever, no matter how it tastes. That’s the future.

Now, if these seem like corporate values to you, then you’re catching on to what’s happening. The Joe Biden for President campaign is a purely corporate enterprise. It’s the first one in American history to come this close to the presidency. If a multinational corporation decided to create a presidential candidate, he would be a former credit card shill from Wilmington, Del., and that’s exactly what they got. What’s good for Google is good for the Biden campaign and vice versa. We have never seen a more soulless project. They literally picked Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate, someone who can’t even pronounce her own name. Not that it matters, because it’s purely an advertising gimmick.

We watched all of this come together in real time. We stood slack-jawed in total disbelief as a man with no discernible constituency of any kind rose to the very top of our political system, as if by magic. It’s possible in the end that Joe Biden himself never convinced a single voter of anything over the entire duration of the presidential campaign, but he didn’t have to. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination because he wasn’t Bernie Sanders. He came to where he is today because he isn’t Donald Trump. It’s the shortest political story ever written.

Now, whatever you may think of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, they did it the traditional way. Each one of them had the support of actual voters. Living, breathing people loved them, believed in them, vested their hope in them, and, by the way, agreed with their ideas, which they articulated clearly. But corporate America hated them both. They couldn’t be controlled, particularly Donald Trump, whose complete unwillingness to submit made him the greatest possible threat. That’s why they hate Donald Trump, because he won’t obey.

It’s insulting to say that Joseph R. Biden won this election, if that is what comes to pass. The tech companies will have won. The big banks will have won. The government of China, the media establishment, the permanent bureaucracy, the billionaire class – they will have won, and not in the way that democracy promises. If a single person equaled a single vote, a coalition like that could never win anything. There aren’t enough of them.

But as a group, they have something that Donald Trump’s voters sadly do not have, and that is power. They have lots of power and they plan to wield that power, whether you like it or not. It’s all starting to look a lot like oligarchy at this point. The people who believe they should have been in charge all along now may actually be in charge.

So what does that mean for the rest of us? Will corporate America declare victory and back off? Can we speak freely again? Will they take the boot from our necks? Can we have America back now that the Great Orange Emergency has passed? Will the mandatory lying orders finally be lifted?

Those are the questions we’ll be paying attention to, since we plan to stay in this country. And one other thing while we’re at it, who’s excited to greet our new corporate overlords? Who plans to collaborate, particularly of those on the right side, the Republican side, the side that said it was defending you? Who’s happy about all of this? That seems worth keeping track of, just so we know who we’re dealing with here.

(via foxnews.com)