Our rulers, as much as we criticize them, exceed at one thing. Spending your money. Few rulers in history have mastered the art as well as ours have. They have concentrated their remuneration genius in the new Cramnibus Bill, of which you have heard, and which ostensible purpose is to avoid “shutting government down”, which to our ears sounds a wonderful and indeed far superior plan.
The Bill is over 1,500 pages, each redolent in riches. Your riches. Riches gifted and doled out to proven Friends Of Congress. For your own good, of course. You wouldn’t want it to be said that your government had to take a two-week vacation when instead you could cheer a wincing increase of the National Debt to unpayable levels, bringing an acceleration of inflation, and proving yet again Malthus was right in his poor-house arguments that as government spending on the poor increased so would the number of the poor, guaranteeing the government would spend more on the poor, guaranteeing an increase in the poor guaranteeing…and so on ad infinitum until the gloomy end, would you?
Of course not. Which is why you must be thrilled to learn that, according to this Bill, the only lesson learned from the covid panic was that no lesson was learned. Except the lesson that rulers love a good panic. Every declared emergency—which are only coincidentally actual emergencies—increases their power. And enriches their Friends.
In this Bill is an enormous section about how to encourage participation in and fund a new medical panic, designed on the lines of the last successful one we are only now exiting. Title VI: PANDEMIC AND ALL-HAZARDS PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE.
Before we come to it, it’s well to remember the Do Something Fallacy so beloved of Experts and rulers. When something happens, the temptation to Do Something, and to be seen Doing Something can be overwhelming for this class. They cannot understand that their services might not be needed, and that sometimes doing nothing is precisely the right plan. Doing nothing is a thought, to them, that cannot be thought: they are constitutionally unable to consider it would be best to sit down and shut up.
You see this in action even today. For Gruesome Gavin Newsom declared yesterday a State of Emergency in response to bird flu. Get ready for Solutions!
Back to the Bill. Most of it is like this: “in paragraph (2)(A), by striking ‘\$250,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2019 through 2023’ and inserting ‘\$335,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2025 and 2026.'” We can ignore all this.
Some of it does not sound horrible on its face, for instance this starting on page 748 (which is called “paragraph (1)” of this section):
The Secretary of Health and Human Services (referred to in this subsection as the ‘Secretary’) shall not fund research that may reasonably be anticipated to involve the creation, transfer, and use of enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential or biological agents or toxins listed pursuant to section 351A(a)(1) of the Public Health Service Act if such research is conducted by a foreign entity at a facility located in a country that is determined to be a country of concern as defined in paragraph (2).
They spell out China, Russia and Iran, because our rulers have conceived a hatred for these countries. Most of this hatred is performative, because shortly after they say they won’t fund gain-of-lethality research in these countries—implying it is fine and dandy to fund it in others—they add:
The requirement of paragraph (1) may be waived by the President for the duration of the initial response to an outbreak of a novel emerging infectious disease if the President determines that such requirement impedes the ability of the Federal Government to immediately respond to such outbreak.
If the entire thing is void whenever the President says, then the Bill itself it mere petulance, a virtue signal of which enemies to hate.
Some things don’t sound bad, but are, like this (page 727):
DIAGNOSTIC TESTING PREPAREDNESS PLAN.—
The Secretary shall develop, make publicly available, not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Response Act, and update not less frequently than every 3 years thereafter, a plan for the rapid development, validation, authorization, manufacture, procurement, and distribution of diagnostic tests, and for rapid scaling of testing capacity, in response to chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear threats, including emerging infectious diseases, for which a public health emergency is declared under section 319, or that has significant potential to cause such a public health emergency.
Test kits sound okay, at first. Until you recall insane self testing, and mandatory official testing, especially for those who refused the Big V was one of the prime idiocies of the covid panic. Incessant testing kept the grip of fear on everybody’s throat. Notice carefully this would create tests not only for when they might be needed, but for situations which some Expert deems “has significant potential to cause such a public health emergency.” Potential.
One word, the rest of the Bill on that matter confirms, is all it takes.
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