The Preparedness of the 24/7 Surveillance State

Steyn On-line ^ | March 31, 2020 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

When seconds count, the police are minutes away. When days count, the government is weeks away:

Health Canada is expected to approve the use of the rapid test kits within a few weeks.

You have to admire the bureaucratic jobsworth who can type that line with a straight face. Just because the test is rapid is no reason for Health Canada to be so. It's like a fast-food joint with a month-long tailback at the drive-thru window.

~Sample headlines from my old friends at The Spectator:

Is France Being Pushed to Breaking Point?

Spain Faces a Political Reckoning After Its Coronavirus Crisis

Germany May Never Be the Same After Coronavirus

World War Two enabled the post-war social-democratization of Continental society; in Britain (and other parts of the Commonwealth) the social solidarity of Churchillian resistance enabled the social solidarity of Attlee's NHS and nationalized railways. Even in America, which continued to pay lip service to small government and individual liberty, the liberator of Europe as president did nothing to disturb FDR's expansion of federal government via the alphabet-soup agencies that metastasized across the decades and plague us to this day.

So, if three weeks, four months, a year-and-a-half of house arrest are going to change us, the question is: How?

Gavin Mortimer's report from the Fifth Republic reminds us that France's electoral demography is almost the inverse of America's: In the US, to over-generalize only slightly, the old vote Trump and GOP, the young are woke and Berniephiliac. In France, the old vote for Macron, the young for LePen. That's because, France being further down the toilet of history than America, their youth is beyond the flourishes of wokeness and has actually awoken - to the reality of the fact that their parents and grandparents have screwed them over.

[SaveFerris]

[Gavin Mortimer’s report from the Fifth Republic reminds us that France’s electoral demography is almost the inverse of America’s: In the US, to over-generalize only slightly, the old vote Trump and GOP, the young are woke and Berniephiliac. In France, the old vote for Macron, the young for LePen. That’s because, France being further down the toilet of history than America, their youth is beyond the flourishes of wokeness and has actually awoken - to the reality of the fact that their parents and grandparents have screwed them over.]

yep

[allendale]

People may wish to reconsider the rush to get tested. Eventually every positive case either by culture or in the near future by serological testing will be entered into a government database. How will the data be used and those identified as having had the virus be treated? Will the data be secure from hackers.

[Rummyfan]

Beyond China, the issue is preparedness. Actually, for almost twenty years, the issue has been preparedness. Since 9/11, freeborn citizens of advanced democratic societies have been subjected to a level of inconvenience and continuous surveillance they would never have previously entertained, from the pointless security theatre of the shoeless shuffle through LAX and O'Hare to the rubber-stamp FISA court warrants to monitor every aspect of Carter Page's life for years on end with no probable cause. And what's the upshot of all this 24/7 surveillance?

They didn't see it coming.

Just as our vaunted intelligence agencies, the best-funded in the world, didn't see 9/11 coming.

[jmacusa]

The moment you were given a Social Security number you’re in a government data base. Relax, ok, what are you going to do?

[Rummyfan]

New York, for example, is a city that has already had a huge smoking crater blown into it - and what's the upshot? Eighteen years on, as I noted last night, after expenditures of billions on purpose-built federal, state and local bureaucracies, a city of eight million people can't cope with an extra four thousand patients in critical condition.

Shameful.

[jmacusa]

In the middle of WW2 Allied intelligence didn't see or was aware of a build up of armored force in The Ardennes Forest in late 1944 by a supposedly ‘’beaten’’ German Army. Intelligence is only as good as the people gathering it and looking at it.

[Hojczyk]

Cuomo said today that the state run hospitals were not as strong as the hospitals run by the private sector...

There was no system to send patients in over crowded hospitals to ones that had beds available..