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Biden, Crime, Culture, Education, Health Care, Immigration, Politics 2022, Religion

FREE TRUCKIN’

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President Joe Biden speaks about his domestic agenda from the
East Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021,
as Vice President Kamala Harris looks on. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Thousands of independent truck drivers in Canada have coalesced to protest their government’s Covid-19 “vaccine” mandate.  Many are “vaccinated” (have accepted the weird injections) but are demanding freedom to choose what goes into their bloodstreams.  Their Premier, Justin Trudeau, has scurried off to hide from them, claiming exposure to Covid – what else?  He’s a heroic figure by his own account.  He looks more like an asshole, but that’s subjective.

In all likelihood truckers in the U. S. are going to form their own convoy in protest of our government’s denial of freedom, too.  Canada’s convoy was up to 45 miles long as it descended upon Ottowa.  The Americans will try to exceed that, one suspects.  Either way, the Canadians have inspired working people around the world to organize against the soft, yet hardening, tyrannies of supposed pandemic suppression; this applies mainly to the Biden Administration.

President Joe Biden has imposed an odd case study of how strange, long debunked theories of leftist governance, can screw up a large nation in a matter of months.  Still, we have to go back further than January 20, 2021 to appreciate the impact of leftism on a supposedly Constitutionally limited democratic republic, particularly in reaction to a national “health emergency.”  Covid-19 was such a perfect foil for destroying freedom and personal responsibility, that leftists have almost rejoiced in the opportunities to show how much better life can be under the firm hands of government control.  It has fit their dreams so well that the creation of Covid-19 might appear to be a gift from the great leftist in the sky… or in China – same thing to some.

All of this brings us to contemplating how many left-ward changes POTUS (Poop-head Of The United States) has made in slightly more than one year.  Among them are a host of UN-Constitutional, EXTRA-Constitutional and ANTI-Constitutional actions and policies.  A number of them will, patriots hope, lead to impeachment and conviction of Mr. Biden.  One glaring example is illegal immigration, one of the first “orders” POTUS issued on January 21st, his first full day in office.  Biden reversed every Trump administration border policy, stopping virtually all deportations and virtually all arrests of illegal entrants.  By so doing he ushered in one of the great travesties in U. S. history.

Since the end of January, 2021, nearly 2 MILLION illegal entrants have crossed the southern border – by the hundreds and thousands – and Joe Biden has forced the Border Patrol and I.C.E. to allow them in and then to provide various articles of clothing, cell-phones, prepaid for a year, hotel rooms and rides, even flights, to wherever the illegals want to go, or wherever Biden wants them to go.  This policy requires the specific subversion of U. S. law.  It forces expenses upon the sovereign states that created the FEDERAL governing system, completely subverting the Tenth Amendment.  There is no pro-American value to it.  Indeed, beyond unfettered access to public welfare programs and illegal residence in our country, illegal entrants are afforded more rights and far fewer legal constraints than are U. S. citizens!  In fact, the federal government bends over backwards to provide Constitutional rights and protections to illegal aliens, including providing attorneys to every illegal entrant to defend their spurious claims to asylum.  Many bleeding-heart liberals consider that it is the duty of the United States to feel sorry for, and provide welfare to, every unhappy person in the world.  While that’s a sweet opinion, it has almost nothing to do with the purpose of nationhood: survival.

Every nation on Earth has a reason for being.  For some, for most, actually, it is ethnicity.  That is, nationhood typically has sprung from tribal identity, although most countries have also been fought for against neighboring tribes, and often expanded thereby. In too many examples nations have been cobbled together through domination and war.  Commonality of language and / or religious belief has proven just as nationalizing as ethnic tribalism.  Many factors combine to establish – and maintain – successful nations.  Only one nation has survived because of a set of principles, almost despite ethnicity.  It is exceptional.

To cement its unique reasons for being, the founding Fathers – and Mothers – of the United States of America, established an ageless covenant with the people of their recently fought-for states: The Constitution, the most respected and “copied” foundational document in the world.  Every President, commencing with George Washington, and virtually every other elected state and federal official since, has sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.  One might think that failing to do so would be justification for removal from office.

Every nation, however it justifies its continued existence, recognizes and passionately defends its borders… and its culture.  For a nation to be led by a person or group of people who take actions to NOT defend its borders or even its culture, would seem to honest citizens sufficient reason to remove him or them from power.  Back to Covid-19.

There is a large cohort of ostensible Americans who are charged with the vital task of conveying the culture and heritage of the United States to its children – to our future, in fact.  Unfortunately, teachers and the overarching public education industry, have, over the past fifty years, been co-opted by ultra-leftists and virtual communists.  Teachers’ unions have established themselves as the operators of schools, rather than the parents of children or the local, elected, school committees or boards who, presumably, answer to their constituents.  It all results from political – and financial – corruption, with most of the finances being tax dollars… tax dollars extracted from real property owners, primarily, under the threat of police powers.

As a consequence, anti-American ideologies are taught to students in schools of “education” and then taught to elementary school students with the knowledge of their parents.  This is changing, but decades of damage have been accomplished, reflected in a general malaise infecting 5 to 21-year-olds, noted in rates of drug use, lack of religious education, hyper-sexualization and suicide rates.  Many of our youth believe they prefer socialism to capitalism, and if it’s the form of monopolistic, oligharchic wealth concentration we have allowed to date, they are right.  Our Constitutional Republican form of governance and freedom is designed to allow for hope, imagination, joy and attainment.  Our schools and attendant politics have produced less and less capable or independent young adults, and a lack of hope so profound as to destroy institutions like marriage, motherhood and fatherhood.  If a primary purpose of nationhood is survival, America is failing.  Illegal immigration won’t fix what ails us.

Covid provided thousands of incipient fascists with a perfect opportunity to push people around.  The three most destructive effects of government “emergency” powers are the destruction of thousands of small businesses and millions of jobs, destruction of what was left of American economic freedom and budgetary strength, and destruction of the education and development of millions of K through 12 students.  “Educators,” so-called, in teachers’ unions and administrative positions in virtually every school system, learned to exercise powers they’d only dreamed of prior.  Parents, their schedules and economies and their precious offspring could be controlled in ways never imagined under our Constitution.  As the truth has been spilling out about actual Covid threats and effects, schools are the largest remaining poisoned well of fascism – including pushing these dangerous injections onto kids as young as five years.  It all constitutes a crime against humanity.  Australia, New Zealand and, now, Canada, have enjoyed practicing new-found fascistic powers, to the point of mobilizing against freedom.  Many of those same teachers are envious.

Naturally, parents have rebelled against the cloying, sticky blob of indoctrinators, and have succeeded many areas.  Covid helped to expose the rot.  But the lerftist, Democrat power structure will not relinquish its attempts to replace the American system with global socialism, readily or cleanly.  Its members are clever and cunning, albeit not wise.  The Biden deministration is happy to sic Merrick Garland and his DOJ thugs, so to speak, on parents who resist the wasting of education time on critical race or gender theories.  What the Hell are we doing with the American dream bequeathed to us over the centuries?

Americans like to believe that we can work hard to elect this or that person or set of persons, and thereby change the direction of freedom, opportunity and of government, itself.  It barely works anymore.  Elections come and go, but the direction of government is inexorably toward higher pay and benefits for government officials and employees – higher than for average citizens – toward increasing benefits and rights for non-working welfare recipients, toward increasing benefits and rights for illegal entrants, toward increasing controls over individuals’ rights and freedoms, and toward perpetual, unredeemable debt. 

Two things must happen: 1) voters must become smarter, hopefully wiser; and, 2) candidates for office must become smarter and better principled in terms of commitment to our Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. 

Are we wise enough, collectively or individually, to stop electing anti-freedom, anti-American officials and “representatives?  Do we actually believe that we can ignore the Constitution and just vote ourselves benefits from government much longer?  Please.

Biden, Crime, Economics, Education, Elections, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Politics 2022, Religion, Representation

THIS IS THE YEAR

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What can he see?

This is the year.  2022 has been forced by the left to be the fulcrum of history.  The perception of the left in 2020, faced with the likelihood of Trump’s re-election, was that the field was finally fertile enough to sow Communism (under a variety of euphemisms) in the sharply divided and guilt-ridden, formerly United States.  Cities were collapsing in 2020, “Black Lives Matter” had coordinated with thousands of weirdos, “antifa” thugs and students and other youth who had been taught to hate our nation and history.  The time seemed right to pull the trigger on revolution… besides, the media and a strange congress had many municipal leaders so consumed with hatred for Donald Trump and the Americanism he represented, that they too, agreed with “BLM” and allowed rioting in the name of myriad hatreds to destroy their communities.

The demise of George Floyd provided the spark as if written into a script.  If Derek Chauvin had not been so incredibly stupid, some other event would have happened, some other black man would have conflicted with police and drawn fire while unarmed.  Then his family would have become millionaires and Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of other dopes would have kneeled in the rotunda in that man’s memory, while the same cities – and hopes – burned.

The left engineered the answer to a big wish of theirs: dumping Donald Trump.  We can begin to grasp what leftists really have for an end-game, when we dissect their hatreds, and their hatred for Trump – and trump supporters – is instructive.  Trump, they decry, is a “populist,” which is to say, he only goes with what is “popular.”  “Populist,” however, actually means being a member of the “Populist Party,” which gained traction in the late 19th century over issues like initiating an income tax, public ownership of utilities, support for unionization to counter the power of large corporations and banks, and support for fair returns for farmers.  As a “people’s” party, the Populists were seeking to balance  economic freedom for small business and workers, against the explosion of industrial growth and price-fixing power of industrial and financial trusts.  Many of these issues were assumed by Progressives and the “Trust-Busters” in the first decade of the 20th century.

The more meaningful approbation of Trump is that of “Nationalist.”  This is supposedly terrible, and likened to Nazism, ostensibly because Hitler was a nationalist.  “America First” became pejorative in the view of leftists.  So, what is the alternative goal?  Globalism: the dissolution of national identities and, therefore, national heritage and culture.  Destruction of American culture was the primary effect of 2020 lawlessness.  It seemed to have many allies, one of whom is now president.  What were/are they thinking?

Anti-nationalism has only one goal, globalist, one-world government.  Is there any reason to expect that one-world government will be based on the American, Constitutionally limited  model?  We can learn a lot from the last 50 years of United Nations “enlightenment.”  The vaunted U. N. was a creation of liberals and leftists who sold war-weary Americans on the image of diverse peoples all getting along to spread peace, democracy and the end of hunger around the world.  Communists never accepted those premises, nor did other kinds of tyrants… nor Nazi-enflamed fundamentalist Muslims.  To poorer nations it was a way to get money from the United States; to Communists a way to weaken the United States, to Muslims, a way to get the U. S. to pay for oil for poorer nations while weakening Christianity.

Within a very short time the U. N. became an excusatory congress for the U. S. policy of containing Communism, and we were thrust into the Korean Conflict for that stated purpose, but at its heart that war was an excuse to pit the U. S. against the Soviet Union and, ultimately, against communist China, while weakening the only super-power.  It was the first war we won by losing: a new experience for the greatest generation.

Right on its heels the globalist C.I.A. and State Department leftists concocted what became the Viet-Nam War, the scars of which have never healed.  Still ostensibly “containing” Communism, the U. S. consumed about a $Trillion dollars (back when a Billion dollars was a lot of money) and destroyed Americans’ faith in their military.  So many lies were told about the conduct and success of that stupid conflict, that the Army had to hire hundreds of paid dissemblers to keep up with the flow.  Again, we lost by winning, and were shamed.

Since Viet-Nam we have embarked on numerous military adventures, most of which are unknown to Americans and better grasped by other nations, including our enemies, of which there is a considerable list.  At the same time we have exhausted our credit line with policies of welfare, corporate, family and personal, international and more. Nine administrations and 18 Congresses have seen fit to overspend – not at declining but at INCREASING rates.  We now have commitments that cannot be met, and devaluing the currency is the final effect.  Americans are seeking a political solution to a philosophical deficit: we have accepted the blandishments of socialists and communists for 60 years and mismanaged our industrial base so badly that we can barely afford to defend ourselves, much less project power to constrain tyrants.  Freedom is shrinking, everywhere.

Americans have swayed from responsibility to licentiousness, forswearing God and religion, turning instead to the perpetual debt-creation of government.  We are not able to sacrifice for a better future as our parents and grandparents did, automatically.  We have a plethora of foolish rights… and fewer freedoms.  The freedoms remaining are under assault, now that we have elected a tyrant of our own.

So, 2022 poses a host of problems that took a long time to gestate, but which need to be corrected in very short order.  It will take sacrifice on everyone’s part.  America has never been invaded, discounting the War of 1812, and we have not felt the devastation and losses of war.  But a war is brewing, here amongst us, and a welfare check won’t stave it off.  What do Americans have to do, now?  Learn Mandarin?

More than once over the past eight years we have considered our ballooning debt.  For the past two years elements of our deep state, agencies of the National Institutes of Health, elected leftists, George Soros’ minions and Communist China, have conspired to hobble capitalism about as rapidly as has ever been done – our hobbling of ourselves not having proceeded as quickly as they’d liked.  Brutal lockdowns and debt-defying welfare payments to locked out workers and free-loaders, fearful school closings and now mandated injections of ersatz vaccines or firings – even in the military and emergency domestic personnel – have stripped our workforce and businesses of the people needed to produce our goods and productive surplus.  We are broke and rushing to become poorer…, well, except for a few multi-billionaire-global merchants and money manipulators.  We have given up the capitalist opportunity society for an oligarchy of wealth and severe stratification into the rakers, the makers, the takers and the fakers.

Even more effectively, we have turned the “vaxxed” into haters of the “unvaxxed,” while formerly trustworthy doctors and hospitals, in thrall to the pharmaceutical manufacturers, have started denying medical care to those who choose to not be injected with mRNA poisons, whose safety and efficacy have been unknown, only now being revealed as neither safe nor effective.  Our barely recognizable “government’s” only offering is dissolution of the constitution and further expansion of the debt by another couple of $Trillion.  God save us.

It appears that a massive shift in political alignment is in the offing for the mid-term elections, but so what?  We are teetering, contemplating a preposterous war1 and swearing at one another.  Society is rending itself as it awaits the next free-delivery of goodies and gadgets from Amazon Prime and GrubHub, no longer even bothering to cook for ourselves.  We’ve demonized smokers, and glorified tokers.  Will changing control of Congress mean a tinker’s dam?  What do we expect a powerful new Congress to do?

Will a Republican congress cut the federal budget?  Will it use its “power of the purse” to force enforcement of the Constitution and of laws?  Will it impeach scurrilous Joe Biden?  Will it pursue exposure of the deep state and various collusions and corruptions that seem to have happened?  Will it force a complete house-cleaning at the Department of Justice?  Will it impeach Merrick Garland on Constitutional grounds?  Will it stop raising the debt “ceiling?”  Will it undue a host of bad laws and regulations?  Will Republicans eliminate clearly racist distinctions in the application of laws?  Will it pass a budget?  Will it resist any legislation of more than say, 30 or 40 pages in length?  Will it prevent the back-door passage of unrelated “wants” that certain Reps or Senators want to attach to true “needs” legislation?  Do we think either House will reform itself for the benefit of citizens or in defense of Constitutional rights and freedoms?  Given the last 40 or 50 years of congressional history, all these hopes… indeed, ANY of these, seems like a long shot.

We saw, upon the surprise election of both leftist and somewhat questionable Democrat Senators from Georgia, that the Democrat party was poised to push through utterly radical policies.  Indeed, their virulent attempts to “reset” American Constitutionality would lead patriots to accept the plausibility of concerted efforts to steal the presidential – and other – elections in 2020, in order to get the “reset” underway.  It, the rabid intensity for replacing the American system, seems to not be politics, anymore; it is no longer based on how to best represent the needs of the American people, but rather a mission to undo the last bastion of freedom in favor of a Chinese-led global tyranny.

The question, then, aside from “will we descend into war over Ukraine,” is how radically, how rabidly will the Pelosi-Schumer Democrats breach the bounds of law, custom and ethics to achieve victory in the mid-terms?  They have shown, repeatedly, that free and fair elections cannot be depended upon to maintain their majority in either house.

Consequently, given the building expectation of a Republican sweep of the mid-term elections, the threat to a Democrat majority anywhere is also building.  Watching the criminality guiding the Biden administration along our southern border, and the willingness of Merrick Garland to abridge the Bill of Rights, the threat to the survival of the United States will likely be experienced in 2022.  There is no one to our West who will save democracy for US.  We must save and defend it ourselves… right now.

1 There is really only one solution to the Ukraine standoff.  With consequences for invasion on the table, the U. S. must reach out to Putin and President Zelensky, not at the same time or place, but close, to commence negotiations.  Ukraine deserves respect, but not American blood.  Biden or Blinken or one of their apologists must make clear to Zelensky that neither NATO, or an assemblage of European states is going to risk everything to defend Ukraine from the Russian juggernaut.  Russia holds the military cards and killing thousands of them and more thousands of Ukrainians is not going to shift that balance materially.

Russia also must be respected, and assuaged.  The U. S. must assure Putin in no uncertain terms that war will not ensue over Ukraine IF an acceptable condition of neutrality for Ukraine: neutrality with sovereignty, can be established that is acceptable to Ukraine and Russia.  That may involve special trading status between those two nations, and sufficient flexibility for Ukraine to trade elsewhere as well.  It will have to recognize the special status of Crimea as a military enclave for the Russian Navy with some rights of veto by Ukraine for other than agreed uses and operations there, perhaps with a 99-year “lease” of the peninsula.  It could include a pact within which neither nation would take sides with any 3rd party against the other.  It must also recognize the cultural distinctions of ethnic Russians resident in Ukraine, and possible changes in the acceptance of the Russian language within Ukraine.

There is a diplomatic path that the U. S. could broker and cause to be recognized by the European Union and NATO itself, including NATO’s firm rejection of membership by Ukraine and agreement by Ukraine to cease negotiations with or appeals to NATO.  The U. S. should agree to recognize the neutrality of Ukraine and to lead the effort to have the rest of the U. N. similarly recognize the new status.  Russia must agree to exercise no military provocation or threat to Ukraine and to recognize, unequivocally, its independence, neutrality and sovereignty.  It’s possible.  All alternatives to this framework are disastrous.

Biden, Health Care, Politics 2022

SUPREMACY IN QUESTION

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Dr. Anthony Fauci responding to charges of lying about origin of Covid-19 virus –
Jan. 11, 2022 Senate hearing. (Greg Nash/Pool via AP)

SUPREMACY IN QUESTION

America’s faith in the ability of the Supreme Court to figure out difficult issues of constitutional law, has been shaken over the past couple of years, and at no point more than during the first week of 2022.  Facing the Court is the question of the Executive branch’s authority to incorporate OSHA rules on workplace safety into its (the President’s) desire to mandate the taking of an injection by a major fraction – although not all – of the U. S. workforce (those who work for employers of 100 or more employees).

Justices Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor, managed to demonstrate unimaginable ignorance about Covid-19 and the purported vaccines available to fight it, and so much so, that other ideas they may hold could be judged troubling for those who rely on their cognitive discretion.  They believe some weird things.

A fair question for all 9 Justices is, “What research do you do to prepare for evaluating testimony?”  Don’t they have staffs to help them prepare?  They were all aware of this case reaching the Court… what is the source of the false ideas and statistics that these three Justices espoused from the Bench?  It’s scary.  What on earth do they listen to?

Breyer, for example, stated that the vaccines are unequivocally the way to “stop” Covid and the pandemic, itself.  Yet, increasingly, the very opposite of that impression should be drawn from the latest Covid statistics.  He stated that “750 million” people had tested positive the previous day, which is about two and a quarter times the population of the United States.  Rather than enter the Courtroom with knowledge, Breyer appears to have entered with only beliefs.  What sort of penetrating questions would he ask plaintiffs?

Justice Sotomayor shared her “knowledge” that there were 100,000 children in hospitals, seriously ill with Covid, many on ventilators.  In fact there were about 3500 in hospitals across the country, many of whom were in hospital for non-Covid reasons and tested positive for the virus.  She then questioned why the federal government didn’t have police powers similar to those of states, to enforce health-care mandates.  The Bill of Rights should inform her.  Where did she get her ideas?  What sort of preparation to hear testimony on the federal “vaccine” mandate, did she do? Leaves one nervous.

Finally, Justice Kagan stated that “We know” that vaccines are the best way to stop the virus and the best way to stop serious illness is also the vaccine.  The next best thing to do is to wear a mask.  All three ideas are wrong according to the latest data.

Other justices did not add to Americans’ concerns about the understandings of Supreme Court Justices.  We can hope that most were prepared CONSTITUTIONALLY, to issue opinions based on that document.  Supremes’ opinions based on “talking points” or CNN and MSNBC commentary, or on comments from Tony Fauci, should have no place in that hallowed Court.  See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2021/12/29/in-pharmas-fields-the-rumors-grow/

Biden, Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Health Care

IN PHARMA’S FIELDS THE RUMORS GROW

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IN PHARMA’S FIELDS THE RUMORS GROW

In days of yore (a term used here for the very first time in all of Prudence’ writings) DOCTORS were much revered and obeyed for their advice, in part for their licensed acceptance by their profession and peers, and just as much in part for their ethical standards to which they had sworn as had been their ethic for days and centuries of even greater yore.  They also possessed various elements of arcane knowledge to which the average supplicant of their curative powers was not privy.

Those days are gone thanks, most specifically, to the Great COVID Reset during which the politicization of medicine… of MEDICINE… has been completed.

Inadvertently, President Trump fed this beast upon the advice of both good and somewhat black-hearted advisors, many of whom are now billionaires.  Hapless Joe Biden has not only ridden the beast of politicization, but has whipped it into frenzy. “Politicization” can nearly be defined as the “monetization” of medicine, which has been going on for a long time, primarily, in the U. S., since the Johnson administration.

Many countries have provided “universal health care” while the United States has done so only stepwise, retaining as much innovation and private initiative as possible, resulting in the greatest industrialized health care system in the world even since Medicare, while the beast nibbled away, digesting philosophies and dollars with equal rapacity.  There are vestiges of independence and competition remaining, which enables our remarkable responsiveness to medical needs in comparison to most state-run “health-care” programs.  Unfortunately, competition and independent excellence are increasingly perceived as problems by the “nattering nabobs of negativism”1 whom we continue to re-elect.

The hitherto ethical boundaries that defined and protected our phenomenal medical care systems, have nearly disappeared.  Where “doctors” in general were once automatically trusted because of their ethical standing, more commonly, now, doctors are forced – and their patients just as much – to provide certain treatments at certain rates of contact for costs dictated by federal agencies.  The most egregious of these trends is crystallized by the Pfizer and Moderna and other injections purported to “protect” us from Covid-19 and variants thereof.

“Medicine” has attempted to protect itself through a principle known as “informed consent.”  The old “Hippocratic Oath” was too close to a religious oath, for one thing, and, as the ability of medical technology has improved to a point of sidestepping many life-threatening conditions (ie. Heart bypass and valve-replacement surgeries) ever-larger medical consortiums have seized upon “informed consent” to reduce their liability for bad outcomes.  Extraordinary promises require extraordinary defenses.

Consequently, patient-customers are presented with various forms of Informed Consent or “waiver” forms on even fairly simple procedures.  Contained within each is the promise by the patient to pay for any part of the cost that is not covered by either government or semi-private insurance.  Despite the fact that they have just agreed to the indemnification of the provider from bad results of whatever set of procedures are being ordered, what patients mainly recall about the forms ritual, is that he or she has agreed to pay.  The “waiver” part, though, helps contain the costs of “malpractice” insurance for the provider(s).  More on malpractice, later.  Let’s look, first, at how governments, and politicians and political appointees, are mandating medical procedures.

It’s fairly clear, now, two years after the fact, that sloppy, or, God forbid, intentional procedures in the Wuhan, China Virology Institute caused the recently engineered SARS-Cov-2, novel coronavirus to spread rapidly in the city and across the Hubei Province of which it is the capitol, and from there across the globe.  Sadly, the Dr. Anthony Fauci-led National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases – NIAID – funded gain-of-function research through research company, Eco-Health Alliance, a “non-profit” headed by British scientist Peter Daszak.  Eco-Health remains non-profitable as it funds research in various places around the world, including Wuhan, from grants it obtains from entities like the National Institutes of Health, within which lie the NIAID and Dr. Fauci.  That sentence means what it says.

“Gain of Function” means that a natural bat coronavirus was modified, or engineered in the Wuhan laboratory to enable it to readily infect humans and “humanized” mice for research purposes, but it is a matter of intent.  If some Communist dictatorship intended to create a bio-weapon – just saying – it would cause the exact same engineering to go forward.  Any outside source of the funding needed for such engineering or research would, if it had half a wit, deny any connection to such a sharp, 2-edged sword.  This may account for argumentativeness on the part of the world-renowned Dr. Fauci during testimony in Senate hearings on the coronavirus.  He certainly has half a wit.

For those Americans who carefully limit themselves to certain news sources, the participation of the NIAID in development of Covid-19 is just a rumor, nothing more.

Another rumor that is very widely known… and repeated by numerous official sources, is that President Trump’s “warp speed” regulatory changes and funding produced three very effective “vaccines” against Covid-19 in record time.  Millions are convinced that the rumor is true.  But how could modified RNA technology have been applied to this novel coronavirus so rapidly?  Well, “Moderna,” a little-known Cambridge, Mass. Pharmaceutical company just happened to be working on such a rumored “vaccine” against the SARS-Cov-2 novel coronavirus IN THE WUHAN INSTITUTE OF VIROLOGY in late 2019 before the rest of the world had even heard of the disease.  What a fortunate coincidence.  Almost as if they had been preparing for the “lab leak” that put Covid-19 on the world stage, when the President called upon “science” and business to work together on an emergency search for a vaccine against the deadly worldwide pandemic, why they were more than halfway there!

Miracle of miracles, not just Moderna but Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson / Janssen were also able to develop “vaccines” in record time that were able to be “approved” by the FDA for emergency use, right AFTER the 2020 federal elections, since approval before November 3rd would have yielded bad optics.

Unfortunately, Trump was as much in the dark about the legal and illegal machinations of the NIH, CDC and NIAID as the rest of us.  He simply recognized the need for a vaccine to stem the disease and believed that what the pharmaceutical industry and Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and the FDA were calling vaccines actually were vaccines.  Trump is a do-er, not a doctor, taking the best advice he could get.  He had no idea how thoroughly corrupted federal health agencies were by “big Pharma.”  Even the FDA whom we trust to protect Americans from bad foods and unproven drugs, is populated almost completely by former pharmaceutical-industry hacks.  So, we can put that rumor to rest.

The other rumor we can finally bury is the “vaccine” status of the modified RNA injections that are, even now, being mandated by businesses and governments, willy-nilly.  They’re not vaccines… they are stimulants.  They stimulate one’s cells to create non-infectious “spike” proteins that are similar to Covid-19 spike proteins.  There very quickly develops a flood of “foreign” spike proteins that the body does its best to get rid of.  If, while the flood of foreign proteins are sloshing around, one is also exposed to the Covid-19 spike proteins, well the body will get rid of them, too, during its stimulated get-rid-of-foreign-spike-proteins-phase.  It’s ingenious, really, and it can reduce the number of Covid-19 proteins (viruses) that are able to infect a person’s cells.  This provides some time for the body’s immune system to finally begin creating defenses against Covid.  For most who are exposed following an MRNA injection, the resulting Covid infection will be somewhat milder than it would have been if never injected.  However, the MRNA injections do not cause the body’s immune system to create T-cells and B-cells that will confer virtually life-long responsiveness to Covid proteins, and rapid immune defenses to them.  They do, however, practically guarantee the emergence of mutations – the dreaded “variants” – by mass-injection programs during a pandemic.

Since the body is good at filtering out foreign proteins, the MRNA injections wear off in a few months, leaving injectees vulnerable to future exposures to Covid-19, and with no built-up immunity or rapid immune defenses, possibly more vulnerable than if never injected.  There is some evidence that natural immunity function, itself, and natural immunity to Covid-19 following infection and recovery, may be impaired by MRNA injections.  Natural immunity to Covid is 5 to 25 times stronger than the temporary “immunity” conferred by MRNA injection, so it seems a shame to weaken it with future MRNA shots.  Apparently our politicians know better than scientists and doctors what is “good” for us.

As part of “warp speed” development of the MRNA injections, pharmaceutical companies were granted immunity from suits due to bad injection reactions up to and including death.  This is interesting.  The same people who shy away from you if you are not “vaccinated” and who rush to get their children “vaccinated” with MRNA injections, want gun manufacturers to be made fully liable for the use of their products, yet many, many more people die from pharmaceuticals and bad reactions to them, and from bad drug interactions, than from gunshots – many more.  The MRNA injections, themselves, account for upwards of 45,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of bad reactions that have yielded debilitating effects, including paralysis.  “Give it to our children!” some people cry.

One of the greatest, life-changing effects of MRNA injections, is the creation of dozens of new billionaires from governments’ purchasing of these “free” shots.

Malpractice insurance is no problem for big Pharma, but it is for most treatment providers.  Throughout medical school and residency, future physicians are schooled in the employment of “best practice” when diagnosing or treating patients both medically and surgically.  Best practice is a doctor’s only defense against charges of “malpractice.”  Hence, defensive medicine is the best practice: every test that might illuminate and inform a doctor’s next step or recommendation or prescription, must be employed lest a key piece of “best practice” be overlooked, creating malpractice vulnerability.

Throughout medical education, “best practices” are taught, tested, drilled and tested again and again.  The advancement of medical knowledge is not as rapid as it may appear.  It takes time and extensive trial and error: studies, “teaching hospital” trials, even for surgical improvement, before a new procedure among dozens that comprise complex surgery or cancer treatments and every other interaction with doctors and laboratories, may be accepted as a “best” practice.  To a great degree, the defensibility of the procedure contributes to its “best” designation.  Also crucial, however, is the predictability of result in the majority of patients.

When new procedures are finally tried and used, the old “informed consent” firewall is duly presented and signed.  Progress is made, somewhat better methods and, presumably, results manifest, the patients recover, possibly faster.  Because of testing and trials with careful analyses of results written up for peer review and duplication of results in similar patients, “informed consent” is genuinely “informed.”  Insurance companies and their attorneys have been satisfied that coverage should, properly, be extended to cover the new procedure or device or development.  What ever the patient now consents to has been deemed “safe” enough and effective enough that the overall risk to the insurors can be quantified as low enough – and, thus, to the patient – that they’ll “cover it.”  The provider institution and every clinician who will be part of the new whatever, is also able to be insured, and PROTECTED so long as the insurable “best practice” is employed.  Are MRNA injections a “best practice?”  Who the Hell even knows?  Evidence is accumulating that they are NOT.

The cost of progress is not small.  Research and trials are financed, oftentimes by the pharmaceutical industries.  Many changes require new drugs or new formulations of drugs, and their new aspects and applications must also be tested, whether under real treatment conditions or in research programs at medical schools, among other venues.  Doctors are “educated” in large part by and thanks to pharmaceutical manufacturers.  All of their professors have been, too.  Best practice is as much best prescription as best action.  And doctors and institutions like pharmaceuticals that have been “approved” by the “independent” Food and Drug Administration (FDA); they form a large part of “best practices.”  If a malpractice suit is brought against any provider, his, her or its only defense, all things being normal, is that “best practices” were employed, documented, and witnessed by other professionals.  Every medical student knows this: it helps cement their trust of “Pharma.”  Their products are predictable in effect and “approved.”

Now and then, however, a drug is approved only for “emergency” use or for “last resort” use.  This is because there has not been sufficient testing on enough populations to gain full FDA approval.  Typically the emergency demand for such a drug is from a fairly small population, each of whom signs a quite different “Informed Consent” form that makes clear the experimental nature of the drug in question and its “emergency use only” designation.

Where does this leave all the brilliant people in the medical industry when the subject is the “emergency use only”-designated Covid-19 MRNA injections?  Are they impressed or confused by the description of the injections as “vaccines?”  Surely that can’t be so.

Are they blinded by the CDC’s daily recommendation to be “vaccinated” by these experimental chemicals, regardless of the mounting evidence of the rapid decline of such “protection” from Covid that they offer?  Impossible.  They’re all very smart, very careful professionals.  Are all the providers of the injections offering informed consent forms to every guinea pig…. ahhm, recipient of the experimental shots?  Well, no, how could they when the data from testing has not been released by the FDA?  Clearly when people roll up their sleeves they are consenting to the injection, but not because they are well-informed of the risks.  In fact, by calling the shots “vaccines,” they have been MIS-informed by every official health-care agency or department in municipal, state and federal governments, including the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci and the NIAID he heads, the FDA and thousands of Doctors nationwide and even worldwide.  Even the President and his predecessor and a host of other politicians are on the same misinformation train: they all refer to these weird biologics as “vaccines.”

People fundamentally trust vaccines.  Vaccines protect the recipient from diseases like polio, Rubella, chicken-pox, diptheria and tetanus.  Vaccines can protect against pneumonia, tuberculosis and shingles.  They confer “natural immunity.”  Someday, we hope, there will be an actual vaccine that protects against Covid-19; people will want to get that shot.  Unfortunately we don’t have one… not yet.  We have Modified RNA injections that don’t confer immunity and provide only temporary protection from the worst effects of infection.  They’re NOT vaccines.  OMG.  Is money a factor?

“Medicine” has crossed an ethical line, as if to catch up to the dozens of ethical and legal lines politicians and governments cross every day.  Across the country hospitals are literally firing highly trained and experienced doctors, nurses and others who are declining to receive the experimental MRNA injections.  This seems stupid, on the face of it.  Why would smart professionals fire other smart professionals over an experimental shot the safety and efficacy of which the former group cannot describe to the latter?

Do you know who else is being fired?  Police officers, firefighters, Army, Navy, Marine and Special Operations troops – all expensively trained and needed.  What kind of idiots would do that?

Speaking of crossed lines, did you know that life-saving surgeries are being denied to people who are not the recipient of these weird injections?  God save us. 1. With thanks to the late Spiro Agnew.

Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2021

THE VELOCITY OF CARBON

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Masking won’t help…

In terms of money, economists measure the health or activity of an economy using “velocity” of money in an economy.  There are a thousand measuring tools measuring the same parameter, whether it’s investment dollars generating new production or a change in policy like a tax cut or increase that either releases money to or sucks money from, an economy.  Supply-chain snags can certainly reduce the velocity of money; building road, rail or air infrastructure can speed it up.  If you’re seeking real understanding of this kind of velocity you’ll have to ask someone else: I know only how rapidly $20 bills move out of my pocket these days, converting themselves to a few coins in a blink of an eye.

Let’s talk about the climate… a place where velocity is never discussed as a “good.”  It’s always “bad,” and it’s everybody’s fault, which means “climate change” by today’s – or this morning’s – definition, is going to increase a lot of financial velocities while slowing or stopping others.  These effects will affect everybody and his or her $20’s like we’ve never seen.  In any case, the velocity of “change” in the Earth’s climate seems to always be too fast, potentially the end of humanity, often in a very small numbers of years, and the result of conservative politics.  That is, unless the “conservative” in question is neither European nor English-speaking.  The Earth knows.

Very quickly, climate change discussion centers on carbon: carbon dioxide, carbon-based fuels, “carbon-neutrality” by 2030, 2050 or next week.  Anyway, the other day, at a point when no other useful actions were possible, Prudence led to an interesting question about climate that we’ve never heard asked: “What is the velocity of carbon in the Earth’s climate-economy?”  And this will be followed in most people’s minds with, “What the Hell is wrong with this person?  There’s no such thing as carbon velocity.”  Ahhh, but there is, my friend… there is.

The Earth has about as much carbon on it as it has ever had.  A lot of it is buried deep underground, but a lot more is in the biosphere between, say, 20 feet below ground and, maybe, 200 feet above ground, although with 1,000-foot high rise buildings we’re certainly stretching those limits.  Then, there’s the ocean – definitely part of the biosphere, so… cripes!  We live in a gigantic biosphere!  And, it’s carbon-based, which is to say that molecules with carbon in them are the fundamental building-blocks of life, including seaweed and us.

Now, the CLIMATE we all live in has been “changing” for billions of years, which is a very good thing.  The simplest example of a climate-change “good” is the endings of ice-ages, of which there have been several.  Humans were impacted by only the last couple of them: they’re not very frequent, thank goodness, and the impacts of the last one are still with us, even being enjoyed by us, like the Great Lakes, Cape Cod and so forth.

For the average ersatz vaccine-loving supplicant to climate-change fears, the movement of carbon from safety underground to horrific, polluting, crime above ground is a cumulative, onrushing white-man-caused threat to life.  Why, the USGS (U. S. Geologic Survey) tells us that upwards of 36.5 TRILLION TONS of carbon spewed (probably, “spewed”) into the atmosphere worldwide in 2019!  That is a hu-u-u-u-ge number, but there are lots of huge numbers involved when measuring worldwide things.  A small amount was in the form of methane, other ethanes, ordinary “anes” and the majority of it from CO2 which is a lot heavier than average, breathable air.  Fortunately for all concerned, plants “breathe” CO2 in and oxygen, O2 out.

“Oh, my Gawd!  Everybody stop breathing!”  Also, stop mowing your lawn, heating your homes, cooking, refrigerating, making plastics, driving cars and trucks and, for God’s sake, stop flying back and forth around the world on those terrible jet planes… just stay home.

Quite a bit of CO2 derives from cute little woodland creatures that, since Walt Disney gave them names, we must love and protect, along with every other sort of elk, antelope, bison, bear, reindeer, POLAR bears, for heaven’s sake, whales, dolphins, dogs, cats, protected tigers, elephants and, of course those evil cattle who do little but eat and fart, don’t you know?

Still more comes from rotting vegetation in the normal cycle of plant life and the bacteria and bugs, termites and ants that live off of the trillions of tons of IT.  Government types, those who really like to apply rules for living to most everyone else – rules derived from superior intellects like theirs – hold, without fail, concepts of perfection for humanity and how humanity should live, among which are rules against eating animals that Disney may have named or which provide substantial amounts of nutrition for sub-perfect humans, nutrition those same humans may be “taught” to live better without.

Just the same, carbon in various chemical combinations moves into and out of the atmosphere at rates that could be measured, extrapolated, closely estimated, and measured again for more or less controllable impacts humans might want to have.  Except no one asks the velocity question.  There are no grant millions for calculating how fast carbon churns in what kinds of weather, over what kinds of land or waters. Or, in what levels of the atmosphere.  Grants are plentiful if researchers – or advocates – can add to climate panic; only a level of panic enables political control, after all, which is a large part of making grant monies available: find out something that makes specific political or taxation controls possible.  If you find out something else, give it a good leaving-alone.

No matter how carbon moves around, whether from volcanoes seen and unseen, or burning forests to yield cropland, or propelling planes at 35,000 feet, or burning trash at ground level, moving trucks and things, or, pushing ships with both vital and frivolous container loads, joy-riding passengers or militaries setting off to war, not all climatological consequences are of the same value.  Some are just plain pollution, spreading dirt where we live in ways that we could control if the value were better understood.  Others are “necessary evils,” tolerated, temporarily, for lack of cleaner alternatives.  Over the past 130 years, say, humans have quite consistently moved away from “dirty” ways to improve life and living standards, towards much cleaner ones.  Only a relative handful of people on Earth burn cattle dung to keep warm – too many, and a very controllable problem – but a handful.

Cars and trucks get phenomenally better mileage compared to 40 or 50 years ago, as do even those jet planes at 35,000 feet.  More and more electricity is generated without coal, and “scrubbers” can mitigate particulates and sulphur compounds, which are actually bad to have in the air, along with some CO2, making even coal much cleaner.  New buildings are built to be far more thermally efficient.  New lighting and electronics are far more efficient, too.  Watch for the impact of solid-state batteries in making almost everything electrical more efficient, including cars and trucks.

The point is, CO2 in the air is not, per se, a bad thing, but if you ask the average, fearful, climate-change crybaby what he or she is afraid of and the answer will be that we have to stop spewing CO2 or else the world is going to end… possibly even before illegal aliens and polar bears get the vote!

In a sense, we are constantly reminded that the CO2 from last year, and the year before that, and before that, and ever since the first automobile burned gasoline, is hanging over our heads ready to destroy the PLANET, including my daughter’s recycling science project!  All it will take to tip the balance is for a few more Trump voters to drive through drive-up windows for a cheeseburger and some Freedom Fries, when they could have had a hand-picked kale salad.  The time to act is now, now, now!

But it isn’t, is it?  The CO2 building up in the atmosphere, I mean.  It churns around, dissolving into bodies of water, like oceans, of which there are a lot, and if not dissolved right away, generally CO2 sinks down to near ground level because it’s quite a bit heavier than air.  This, alone, is a good thing, because that’s where most plants that we can eat, grow.  Whoever thought of this system was a very smart Dude.

Mankind, however, is both brilliant and ignorant, wise and foolish, scientific and superstitious, and clean and dirty.  We used to think that God had provided convenient sewers in the form of rivers, but we have become smarter about that foolishness – we could be and will be much smarter about that.  We used to think the atmosphere was a big river to dump effluents into, too, but we’re coming around quickly on that foolishness.  Politically, however, we are being propelled to ever greater foolishness over CO2, not because we can “save the planet” and keep ocean levels and weather right where WE want them by limiting it, but so that we can, politically, control how people live, prodding them ever closer to the perfection models government-types have clung-to since Miss Hannigan’s 4th grade terrarium with the turtle in it.

Just like fraudulent COVID-19 statistics, if the government and compliant media focus on single numbers, a lot of fear can be ginned up, quickly modifying sovereign individuals’ actions, beliefs and willing abandonment of freedoms… like the number of COVID “cases,” as they “spike” from time to time.  Most are simple positive results from testing, and what they have detected are remnants of spike proteins, mostly not actual infections.  If you run enough cycles of PCR tests you can detect a lot of “cases.”  Everyone can be made to change his life through the police-power of the state or municipality because of largely meaningless numbers like these.  Fixating on how much CO2 goes into the atmosphere is much the same.  That we should be happy it’s there, for the most part, is never part of the news.  Do you have any concept of where we’d be without global warming?

Respecting our home planet by not dirtying its air and water is a noble thing to do – not from baseless fears but from purpose.

There are satellites watching the whole earth, now, measuring CO2 for places where it comes from and goes to at different times of year.  These are fine data to have and will, little by little, improve recommendations for spewing less CO2 .  Which we probably should… spew less, that is.  But we never will, or never will fast enough, if we don’t adopt a worldwide perspective on being clean or dirty in how we live, prosper and move ourselves and things about, starting with how cleanly we can generate electricity.  This will have to include nuclear power at its best, for urban areas, and solar collection and energy storage at its best in rural areas.  Cleaning up the planet need not, and should not require forcing people into cities, for example, or forcing ever tighter regulation on freedom (quite the opposite) or directing whole economies from a dictatorial, tight-control top.

It does involve honest education and a recognition that fouling where we live is anathema to both God and to humanity.  Economic mobility is prime in terms of balancing needs and wants and increasing qualities of life.  That comes from freedom.  Any “plan” for defeating – pick any – COVID, inflation, climate change, crime, ignorance, poverty in every other country in the world, that also includes restricting personal freedom or sovereignty, is the absolutely wrong move to accept.  A political party that identifies with restricting freedom and which villainizes those who don’t, does not deserve any American’s vote.

Biden, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Family, Health Care

vaccina, vaccina

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Let’s go, Brandon!

The most misunderstood word in the world in 2021 is “vaccine.”  Thanks to the internationally criminal actions of Communist China, there has developed a world-wide effort to “vaccinate” virtually everyone who has not perished from COVID 19.  President Trump, a person who knows how business works and how changes in regulation can influence business success, also provided seed money to Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to jump-start development of vaccines against Covid-19.  He and others called it “Warp Speed.”  Little did he realize the nature of the corrupted cesspool that “big pharma” and the federal government’s health agencies: CDC, NIAID, NIH and the multitude of agencies that provide forms of payment for health service, like Medicare, Medicaid, HRSA and HCFFA… and many others, had created.  Making sure that everything this band of worthies desires to sell to Americans and others is actually “safe” and “effective” for the purposes for which it is intended, is the ostensibly “independent” agency, the “FDA,” now mainly staffed by former “big Pharma” functionaries.

To everyone’s delight, Project Warp Speed worked; all 3 multi-billion-dollar, global companies, produced viable injections that everyone calls “vaccines,” and in “record” time – given that most actual vaccines require years of careful testing and review by our careful overseers of the public health, mainly the FDA. Hmmnnh…

While not vaccines, the three companies’ injections do produce temporary resistance to COVID infection such that the disease usually won’t progress to severe levels and fewer victims will require hospitalization, or, at least, not lengthy  hospitalization.  Definitely a plus, however imperfect.  Harder to explain is the two-year suppression of actual treatment of the disease with drugs known to reduce the ability of COVID to overwhelm the body’s defenses while it figures out how to fight the infection off, resulting in natural immunity.  Indeed, some perfectly safe drugs, anti-parasitics like Hydroxychloroquine in combination with zinc and other chemicals, and Ivermectin, that are widely used around the world and among our own Congress members, have been rendered nearly illegal to prescribe, and if prescribed, often not provided by pharmacists regardless of “doctor’s order.”

True vaccines impart a protein mapping to the immune system that is relatively permanent.  Chicken pox or Rubella or Polio, for examples, if encountered years after vaccination, will trigger a rapid response by one’s body.  Vaccination created a specific type of T-cell that “maps” to a specific pathogen should it enter the bloodstream.  These cells are reproduced normally such that there are always some present after vaccination.  If the pathogen enters the bloodstream these cells trigger production of B-cells created to attack the pathogen molecules or cells, as well as increasing the numbers of the specific T-cells.  Together with “custom” macrophages that can “digest” a disease invader, neutralizing it while alerting the body to recognize similar invaders, our immune systems keep us alive, literally from birth and even before.  Successful vaccination is a wonderful medical advance.

The various types of “RNA” manipulator-injections that Pfizer and other manufacturers like to call “vaccines,” (a comforting term) do not create any “cell-memory” that will recognize future infections.  They work by stimulating cells to create “spike proteins” that are similar to COVID-19 spike proteins: billions and billions of them.  The immune system, in turn, is stimulated to attack and remove these proteins.  If one is infected within, say 3 or 4 months after receiving the injection, the immune system will simultaneously remove COVID proteins and serious infection consequences MAY BE avoided.  The COVID protein, itself, however, does not trigger an immune system response to fight off a COVID infection nearly as rapidly as it fights off other pathogens.  This fact is part of the magic of bio-engineering an animal virus so that it can infect humans most efficiently.  This engineering took place in Wuhan Virology Laboratory, a project of the Chinese Military, partly funded by the NIAID (National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases), where Dr. Anthony Fauci is the head worthy, watching out for us.

Since the modified RNA injections don’t “map” any T-cells, and because the human body continuously tries to rid itself of foreign proteins in the bloodstream, the effects of the very expensive “vaccine” shots wears off to a point of uselessness after about 4 months or so.  “Booster” shots, also expensive (you may think they are free, but we are all paying for them through our largely socialized health care to the tune of $150 to $200 Billion so far) are therefore needed to regain some level of resistance to serious infection, which will again prove temporary.  What a money-maker!  Create enough fear, make it political rather than scientific, force everyone to accept the injection whether he or she needs it or not, and watch your stock-option wealth multiply.

“Well,” leftists say, “who could possibly not need this wonderful vaccine?”

Let’s group them.  Young people up to age 24 or 25, is a large group now being forced to accept the injections through extortion, an ugly, anti-liberty process.  Even if they have paid for college they aren’t allowed the “value” of the education they’ve contract for.  Colleges have changed the terms of the contract ex post facto: no injection – no entry to classes or even the campus.  Younger children, who have been bounced from pillar to post with “remote” learning and mask mandates, don’t need the shots since the disease called COVID is of virtually NO THREAT to them, as statistics bear out.  Neither are the older youth through college age much threatened by COVID.  In these age groups there is greater threat from bad reactions to the injections, of which there have been thousands, including deaths and disabilities.

Next group is everyone who has had and recovered from COVID, more than 50 million of us, for they have natural immunity, now shown, scientifically, to be 5 to 10 times more effective against COVID than any of the existing injections.  In fact, forcing these folks to accept the shots carries a greater likelihood of a bad reaction than if they had not developed immunity.  Making them do so is downright stupid.  There are lots of leftist-influenced people, hitherto fairly decent folks, who will swear at you if you refuse the injections regardless of the validity of your refusal.  They call the un”vaccinated” “anti-vaxxers,” which is really, really bad, except they aren’t refusing an actual vaccine, so what is the berater’s point?

Then there are a host of other people who have medical conditions that are logical reasons to not risk the injections no matter how happy someone else might be if they did.  Why should they lose their jobs and freedoms for not accepting an unproven injection of RNA-modifying chemicals?

So where is this whole, unscientific, politicized, faux-medicine tyranny taking us… us Americans who formed a more perfect union and constrained the government with the Bill of Rights?  Will we devolve into Australia?  Who knew that beneath their outward geniality Australians had been itching to go Fascist all this time?  That society is falling apart as rational Aussies grasp that their small-g governors are out-of-the-closet Nazis.  The same kinds of governors in the U. S. of A. are less well perceived as a dozen crises unfold at the same time, dividing citizens’ attention.  After all, who knew that Joe Biden, of all people, was a left-wing-shit-turned-tyrant?  Who knew that he had such a grasp on medical science that he would attempt to impose a nationwide injection mandate?  Aside from 72 million Trump voters and the people at the upper levels of the Democrat Party, Xi Jianping and other leftists, who actually knew?

There are treatments appearing just as the bloom is fading on the so-called vaccines.  Merck has one and now, Pfizer.  They are expensive enough to be approved against COVID.  The off-label treatments, despite their effectiveness, were very inexpensive and the wholly-owned worthies at the CDC, NIH and others in the alphabet soup of money-holes, could not allow any of those to challenge the panic-necessity of the injections.  Their side-bosses who controlled Pharma’s grants to these agencies were counting on the multi-billions flowing from the shots.  What’s a few hundred thousand bad reactions, some debilitating, and the 17,000 or so deaths from the injections really mean in the grand scheme of things… the grand life-saving miracles of erstwhile “vaccines,” after all?

Interestingly, back when the FDA and others were independent, rigorous and non-political, there was a pandemic called the Swine Flu, which name was changed to “H1- N1” to protect the pork industry.  H-1 and N-1 refer to certain proteins that define this strain of influenza as unique.  In 2009 a vaccine for H1–N1 was developed and tested specifically on infants.  Some serious reactions occurred during the study period, including about 50 deaths.  The manufacturer pulled the product from study distribution: 50 deaths, not 17,000.  H1-N1 is also a “coronavirus” by description.  To date there has not been a very successful vaccine against natural coronaviruses.  The gain-of-function engineering done in Wuhan, China, makes a highly effective vaccine somewhat more difficult to create, since “COVID-19” is so highly transmissible, even in the presence of any of the current stable of injections.

Novavax, another pharmaceutical powerhouse, is claiming that its “nanotechnology” has created a COVID vaccine that is immunogenic – like an actual vaccine is supposed to be – which none of the current shots are.  One wonders if this new approach will be delayed and resisted by those who appear beholden to Pfizer, J&J and Moderna.

One wonders if any development will ever get Biden’s boot off of the necks of Americans.  If “Lunch-bucket Joe” ever does anything that is good for the American citizens he is sworn to protect, it will be the first time, and an accident.

Culture, Economics, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2021

WILLS AND TRUSTS

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How America Works

It is difficult to find an area of American culture, education, economics, race relations, security and, one might say, expectations, that is hopeful or uplifting.  The Biden administration seems to be creating threats in all these areas and in areas that are increasingly personal… like health.  The unsettledness seeping through the American people, even through Biden supporters, is going to manifest in other than political arenas – primarily economics.  Underlying all of it is the loss of Constitutionalism and trust, which many in the political business have decided to take advantage of for their own power and benefit.

There are many dangers to the Republic.  There are dangers to families, schools, students in particular, to our supplies of basic necessities, and to our ability – or willingness – to believe advice from any level of government.  With the corrupt connivance of tech platforms, there are dangers to truth, itself.  Can a nation that is unable to withstand Dr. Suess and must bury his books to “protect” fragile psyches, be trusted to raise children, at all?

The greatest and newest threat to integrity is the reaction of the United States, at many levels of “authority,” to COVID-19, the Chinese-spread, engineered coronavirus.  As of today, the misinformation / disinformation and literal tyranny surrounding the mis-named “vaccines,” developed in extraordinarily short time-frames, has reached its highest pitch.  Hundreds of thousands of employees in every sort of business, industry and professional service, are going to lose their jobs if they fail to accept the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson anti-covid injections.  It appears that as the efficacy of these shots is revealed to be increasingly temporary and NON-protective from Covid-19, the harder the President and various agencies of government, including OSHA, are pushing, indeed, forcing workers to accept them, no matter their legitimate objections.

It turns out that one of the big lies about the injections, at least for Pfizer, is that no aborted fetal cells were used in the development of the shots.  In fact, there were such cells, sparking intense religious objections from many whose employers, private and government, are forcing the objectors to take the injections.  The penalty is their livelihood, religious objections be damned, so to speak.

To sugar-coat the threats involved in the “forcing,” there are constant claims of “safety” and “protection” conveyed by the injections.  More and more these claims are proving to be false.  Worse, the mountain of evidence of negative reactions to the shots, including over 16,000 deaths, is ignored and suppressed, even as approvals are rushed through the “FDA” to require the shots be mandated for schoolchildren as young as 5.

Across the country parents are raising strong objections at their elected school board meetings, to mandated mask-wearing and mandated injections.  Unfortunately, the reaction to this opposition (and to objections about Critical Race or Gender Theory) by the mendacious Biden administration and our odd Attorney General, Merrick Garland, is to assign the F.B.I., of all agencies, to investigate angry parents as if their concern about their own children were criminal.  It would seem Prudent to investigate treasonous actions by key people in the military rather than moms and dads.  To institute policies like these, a lot of lies have to be firmly held as either true or so crucial as to become policy regardless of fallacy.  These are un-American times.

Still, COVID has proven the perfect foil for proto-tyrants, and it takes a lot of lying to keep it going.  For example, the U.S. claims a total of 711,000 “Covid deaths.”  Unfortunately, due to financial pressures, virtually all primary reporters – mainly  hospitals, with government connivance – have overstated the numbers of deaths since Spring of 2020.  How much overstated?  At least 25% and possibly by as much as 50%.  Hospitals are paid more for treating Covid-19 patients.  Anyone who expires in hospital and who can be described as a Covid patient, will be claimed to have died “from” Covid-19.  Craven politicians, accommodating their only two motivations, imposed lock-downs, closed churches, stopped all sorts of family gatherings and prevented relatives from visiting patients in hospitals and nursing homes.

What are those motivations?  Re-election and avoiding blame.  “Making the tough decisions” helped the first, blaming “CDC” recommendations helped the second.  “Following the science” provided enough confusion to keep news on the side of the new tyrants.  That there was little science, in fact, supporting how the country dealt with Covid, and even less, now, supporting Biden’s un-Constitutional dictates on “vaccination,” simply makes clear, we hope, why federal structure and control must be replaced.

Covid-19, distributed for free by the Communist Chinese, is far along the process of destroying our democratic republic, our civil rights, health-care system and educational establishments, public and private.  First, inordinate fears of infection were used to bring suits in multiple states to change voting regulations.  Despite the clear instruction in the written words of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 4 (“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.”) these lawsuits, brought by lawyers working for the Democratic National Committee and others, shifted voting to mailed ballots and extended voting periods, all to avoid “spreading” Covid-19.

A large fraction of Americans has been led to believe that BIG problems can be solved only by BIG GOVERNMENT.  Chief among these is so-called health care.  “We” think health care is a “problem,” (meaning that government is lurking in the shadows ready to take it over with “solutions” to the “problem”), when, in fact, it is a RESPONSIBILITY that each individual citizen is obliged to solve for him or herself and for his or her family.  Recognizing millions of potential customers’ responsibilities to stay well and seek licensed, knowledgeable services from health care providers when less than well or injured, health care providers would compete for those customers’ health care dollars by offering improved services, ever better response and invention and innovation to make “care” ever more successful.

Health-care customers could also “shop” for best providers and best prices, perhaps with licensed advisors… like buying stocks.  The “problem” lies in paying for health care, regulating quality of healthcare, assuring access to care in rural areas, and catastrophic medical costs.  None of these requires federal dominance of the entire system / industry.   It requires creative licensing and subsidies / incentives to assure access, and licensed professionals working for / advising individuals and families.  It requires transparency from and among providers, clear, advertised pricing, and the ability to negotiate with patient-oriented groups and their advisors.  It DOESN’T require politicians issuing threats and promises about personal responsibilities for their own advantage; nor does it require blanket policies for diverse individuals and circumstances.  Governments may serve as partners with individuals in playing its proper roles; government can be a partner when an individual or family is facing catastrophic expenses, by loaning money to that person or family.  That loan can be repaid over a lifetime by the person, his relatives, friends, mutual healthcare group, or religious, charitable or fraternal groups.  Decision-making will be left to those who care, who are also able to negotiate and understand the costs and the invoices for the services and products to be consumed.

Keep in mind, that despite all the claims of “fighting for working families,” our favorite congress-people have managed to pretend to do OUR BUSINESS and OUR BUDGETS over the past 60 years and put us nearly $30,000,000,000,000 IN DEBT!  With all the skim that disappears into the maw of bureaucracy to control where and to whom all those dollars flow, is the federal waste machine where the future of health care, OUR HEALTH-CARE, should be entrusted?

If you believe in government health-care as better than private, you will, unfortunately, believe that socialism is “better” than capitalism, the greatest current lie.  In fact, capitalism is a whole lot better than the economic mess we function under, now.  When communists point out the flaws of “capitalism” that will be improved by socialism, they are easily able to poke holes in the unequal distribution of wealth that our mendacious governors have allowed to replace practical, opportunity-based, Christian-ethic limited, free-enterprise capitalism that was integral to America’s founding.  Americans, generally, should have the wisdom to disassemble our globalised, government-monopoly, over-licensed and regulated business model that is inhibiting success for millions of citizens.  We must do better and stop accepting outright lies from government tax hyenas and regulators.

To whom can we turn when virtually every agency of government, from the President on up, is un-trustable?  The only “institution” in society that must deal with reality and truth every day and with every customer/client, and that is largely untainted by government shenanigans, is small and independent business.  No other group is committed to LESS regulation and MORE freedom than the millions of small businesses and the business owners and workers who go to work every day.  As an adjunct to them are the hundreds of chapters of service clubs comprised of mainly small businesses and their key employees.  These are they who focus on needs and marshal resources from non-government sources, and who deliver solutions to points of need from the heartfelt desire to serve.  These are the motivations that need to expand throughout society in order to restore America.

Small businesses are where the best Americans work and produce.  Statesmen and women who will fight for their own, their employees’ and their customers’  interests, not Amazon’s, or Apple’s or Communist China’s.

Small businesses, UNITE!  Or, cries to that effect.  Can the best of America regain power, or shall we succumb to professional politicians and national-scope organizations that prefer to play ball with impersonal, largely un-American federalized forces whose answer to problems is ALWAYS TO TAKE MORE FROM THE PRODUCTIVE CLASS?  Small businesses must form, in effect, our own “party,” based on defense and re-empowerment of our founding documents.  America, AWAKE!

Biden, Crime, Education, Elections, Governance, Health Care, Immigration

LYING WITH PURPOSE

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“The Border is closed.”

President-in-name-only, PINO, Joe Biden, day by day, confounds Americans.  Americans who intend each morning to fulfill the obligations of motherhood and fatherhood, who intend to see that their children are educated and advanced just a little, along their paths to balanced, successful adulthood, and who intend to perform their best at work or service, providing for their families and communities, are assaulted by ideas foreign to our culture and to our fundamental legal, moral beliefs.  Some of these are freshly minted, like the attempt by Attorney General, Merrick Garland to criminalize parents objecting to some of the crap being taught to their children, most particularly a parent whose daughter was raped at school by a boy claiming an identity that “allowed” him into the girls’ room where the attack occurred.  As this father was being arrested for yelling at the local school committee who had participated in covering-up the attack due to their agenda of promoting “trans-genderism” ideology, the committee members, the Superintendent and the principal of the high school claimed the attack was unknown to them!

Normal citizens find this hard to process.  We grew up trusting our public schools, entrusting our children to them for 5, 6 or 7 hours a day.  When did we have to become fearful of everything they do?

Some of what assaults us is several months old and only lately reported upon by even some of our “media” who typically ignore issues that don’t fit within their own agendas, as untoward as the concept of agenda-driven news, is.  When did we have to become skeptical of everything our “news” sources tell us?  One of these issues is immigration.

Most of media – and the high-tech censors like Google, Facebook and Twitter, don’t allow coverage of the illegal actions of the Biden administration at the southern border.  Millions of Americans are unaware of the ongoing crimes Biden, himself, has caused.  This odd man has proclaimed that a constant flow of “immigrants,” illegal, unvetted, often disease-ridden entrants, is a source of strength for the United States.  His reasoning: he was the grandson of Irish immigrants and look how great he turned out!  What a scurrilous dope.  His party engineered an illegal, fraudulent election to make sure he got certified for enough electoral votes to put that party and its socialist benefactors into power. Lie upon lie upon lie.  And they lie about the illegal entrant invasion that they have CREATED.

We have laws, including laws that limit and control immigration.  The disingenuous President swore, on January 20th, that he would “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” among his other responsibilities and obligations, not least of which by any measure, is “to the best of (his) Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”  None of what he promised during that inauguration has been fulfilled: he lied, outright, to the American people.  In particular, on the matter of Immigration, Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution he has sworn to uphold, there is a clear directive to the “United States” nation, as follows:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.

Pertinent to the time of the writing of the Constitution, the term, “Invasion” applies exactly to the organized breaching of our defined borders, including the borders of States, by hordes of non-citizens who have NO LEGAL RIGHT TO OCCUPY any portion of those states.  Now, not only has Mr. Biden directed the Border Patrol and ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to NOT ENFORCE the laws that define those agencies, but he has marshaled military and domestic transportation systems to distribute the flood of illegal aliens across the nation – without consultation with States’ governors – and, interestingly, significantly into states that typically vote Republican.  One is justified in wondering why that would be so.

Surely it wouldn’t be to distort the voting patterns in favor of Democrats, would it?  Despite the occasional admission of this being the purpose of rampant illegal entry, no real American, sworn to “uphold” the Constitution of the United States, would ever sink so low as to disrupt the rights, freedoms and safety of U. S. citizens, or steal their income and wealth as the result of illegal entry, would they?  Say it isn’t so.  You’d be lying.

Biden, Crime, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Immigration, Obama, Politics 2021, Representation

THE TRUTH WILL SET US APART

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The statue of Goddess Athene on the top of the famous Pallas-Athene-Brunnen
in front of the Austrian Parliament in Vienna. Built by Theophil Hansen 1898-1902.

For a free people, freedom becomes increasingly harder to realize or defend when knowledge is limited by twisted education (which is to say, by the government) and by outright, calculated lying by that same government.  To maintain control at the most fundamental levels, a government bent on Fascism will weaken the economic standing of most Americans and, equally as powerfully, create dependency upon the government for health care.  Nearly $30 Trillion debt clarifies the former; elevating Anthony Mussolini, errr… Fauci, to prevaricating pandemic potentate, makes obvious the latter.

To whom does a citizen turn to counter a government that lies?  Does he or she try to work more often with local or state government because they are more likely to tell the truth – no certainty, just greater likelihood – because he or she may know someone whose best friend has met someone working at that level?  Like all contracts and covenants, only the honesty and integrity of their guarantors can give them force or value.

“Official” lies have become more creative since the Viet-Nam War.  Viet-Nam exposed the mendacity of our well-respected military, whose veterans we have always revered.  That period also revealed the ease with which our “free press” could be co-opted to push a leftist agenda.  In the case of Viet-Nam this meant reportage of destruction and failure, terror and war-criminality, while beleaguered marines, soldiers, sailors and airmen are winning every battle of the conflict, an untold story.  Trust in officialdom began to crumble.

Governments lying about, obfuscating or withholding truths from those governed is nothing new.  History is a series of stories about conspiracy and secrecy within and between governments, not populations.  The U. S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that gave it flight, formed a shift toward honesty between government and citizens, culminating in the Civil War, in which both sides were brutally, murderously honest about their purposes and positions.  It has been mostly downhill ever since, as the forces of tyranny, the more comfortable theory of governance for government-types, rubbed and abraded the notions of citizen sovereignty and bottom-up authority – liberty, itself.

The threshold events and actors are well-known: Teddy Roosevelt; Wilson; Hoover; FDR-Cordell Hull; Johnson-Humphrey-Rusk-McNamara; Nixon-Kissinger; Carter- Brzezinski; Bush the 2nd; Obama-Clinton-Kerry-Rice-Jarrett; Biden-Blinken-MIlley, and many of their hangers-on, of whom some were/are virtual if not avowed communists.  Numerous congressional leaders steadily pushed American government further and further left, now to an accelerating rate by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer-Adam Schiff-Jerrold Nadler, A.O.C., Eric Swalwell, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and other fellow-travelers, many of whom literally seem to hate the United States.  Here we are in 2021.

Gently speaking, the only federal agency whose pronouncements are accepted as true is Amtrak when they inform erstwhile passengers that thus-and-such train will be late by some number of minutes or hours.  We also believe the Federal Aviation Administration is truthful, we hope.  But anything coming out of any Cabinet department or the White House, or the House or Senate, or the “Pentagon,” is now taken with so many grains of salt.  Since the phenomenal lies told during the Summer of Hate in 2020, and through the federal elections, there is very little that is trustworthy coming from any spoken or printed communication of the federal government.

Not a whole lot from state governments, either.

To whom does a law-abiding citizen turn when he or she is governed, cajoled or tyrannized by his or her government?  A church?  In a few cases, yes.  But even normal conversations are rare among ordinary civilians, in 2021.  Until one can discern or deduce what news sources a correspondent pays attention to, conversation is superficial at best.

Most Americans achieve respect for a politician who promises certain actions or efforts when running for office, and then does those very things.  Even in disagreement, honesty by an office-holder is respected.  Trump, for his braggadocio, embellishments and “mean tweets,” still pursued – and accomplished many of – the things he promised to do.  His fundamental philosophy of “America First” never wavered, and his foreign policy held true to his philosophy.  Americans learned to love “America First.”  Under the Biden regime, whomever is the leader of it, We have learned to hate “America Last.”

Biden and his strange, far-left crew, have realized one distinct accomplishment.  By reducing Americans’ expectations from the President and from any of his cabinet officers and functionaries, they are now meeting Americans’ expectations on a daily basis.  When the Press Secretary speaks, everyone expects her to lie on behalf of the Biden cabal and she never disappoints!  When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken testifies before Congress or holds a press conference, everyone, even including Congress, where most members are well adjusted to prevarication, expects him to avoid answering reasonable questions, to provide only partial scraps of information when he does answer, or to repeat lies that the regime has already spewed.  No one is disappointed!

If the reader thinks that “all politicians lie” and Joe Biden is just being a “politician,” then he or she should pay attention to the southern border, which has spawned lies so grotesque as to place political lies in a wholly separate category of simple mendacity.  Biden administration words, phrases, sentences and non-answers about the border and illegal immigration, are so crooked and twisted as to fold back upon the truth!  How is this possible?

It seems as though the military, Homeland Security, the President and the president’s spokeswoman stay up late – well, not the President – just thinking up how to explain or avoid explaining to the American people that what they are seeing and experiencing at the southern border with Mexico is actually NOT what they are seeing and experiencing.  Every action taken by the Biden regime regarding border protection, immigration policy, public health, “Homeland Security,” drug interdiction, human trafficking, child abuse and sexual slavery, makes clear how gross were the lies Mr. Biden told when he swore to uphold the Constitution and promised to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.  With nearly hourly disingenuousness from media sycophants (formerly known as fellow-travelers) Biden cruises along, seemingly oblivious to the conditions at the border.  When a question is tossed to him about “the border,” he turns his back and walks away.

Biden’s Secretary of “Homeland Security,” Alejandro Majorkas is in an impossible position… at least in terms of public relations.  He does face questions and is required to claim that “the border is closed” while the Border Patrol tries to keep count of 200,000 or more illegal entrants PER MONTH.  On the other hand, he has dropped the ultimate truth bomb: “…things are being handled according to plan,” or words to that effect.  The sad truth is, an open border and flooding the country with unskilled criminals IS the plan – a plan the most crass, cynical and hateful aspect of which is no more than to first make the U. S. a one-party nation and second to tear down the United States as a stumbling block to global communism.  Millions of Americans voted for these poop-heads, who claim that we “need” immigrants to fill jobs that are not getting done by citizens.  It’s as though they might actually expect most of our invited illegals to actually work.

Joe Biden has never been at a loss for some prevarication or another.  The first time he ran for president he contrived an elaborate story of his father’s mining career in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Lunch-bucket Joe, father was a miner.  Unfortunately the story was untrue and, worse, had been “lifted” from a speech given by a British politician, Neil Kinnock, about HIS father.  It was such a good story and Joe’s mental capacity being so limited, even in his 40’s, that “borrowing” it for his own campaign just seemed the best path.  Rather odd, that.  But Biden was uninjured by what should be seen as a gross lack of honesty.  Somehow the father-was-a-miner whopper became part of the élan of Joe Biden.  “That’s just Joe being Joe.”  Well.

Joe was being Joe when he voted for the Iraq war and the Afghanistan invasion, but speaks forcefully against both actions, now.  He worked as Vice President to help Saudi Arabia fight Yemeni fundamentalists, but speaks against it now.  He advised Obama not to attempt to “get” Bin Laden in Pakistan, but he’s proud of it, now  He was opposed to busing in the 70’s and 80’s, even working with Jesse Helms on legislation, yet was offended when Kamala Harris called him out on it during the 2020 campaign.  Now, as Obama was, he is in favor of eliminating single-family zoning everywhere in the country.  Millions of Americans voted for this poop-head.  Now his title is POTUS: Poop-head Of The United States.

So, the fundamental question remains: To whom can a citizen turn in a supposedly Constitutionally limited Republic?  Federal agencies and officers, top congressional leaders and most states have been lying to Americans while generating irrational fears about the Chinese-spread pandemic of 2020-21, while denying use of effective treatments for Covid-19 infection, and while destroying small businesses in the name of “stopping” Covid-19.  Federal agencies, including the White House, and several state officials and agencies are colluding with media companies to censor news and opinions about alternatives to the “party line” on the pandemic, the “vaccines” and treatments, not to mention questions about vote fraud in the presidential election of 2020 – quite arguably in contravention of the First Amendment – and citizens are wondering where to turn for “redress of (their) grievances?”

What is a greater threat, lying outright or preventing the dissemination of truth?  Perhaps the President will set that straight for us.

Family, Health Care

OPEN HEART

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OPEN HEART

Prudence’ closest friend mowed his “lawn” today, which is to say he mowed grass that grows amidst various other plants where the lawn has long been hoped-for, dug and raked for, struggled for, fertilized for and never really found.  The pilot of that little electric mower is anticipating his cardiologist’s scheduling a visit to Massachusetts General Hospital where a date will be set for open-heart surgery to correct near blockages of at least 4 arteries.  That kind of operation is a big, damn deal and carries a lot of risk, having one’s heart exposed and worked-upon while machines handle the pumping and breathing the “lawn” mower would normally handle for himself.

In any event, since learning about those blockages, every significant task carries with it the possibility that it may be an experience that won’t be repeated.  “Oh, no,” friends and loved-ones say, “bypass surgery is routine, now.  They do them all the time.  So-and-so had it and he / she is doing great.”  Probably, but contemplating one’s chest prized open disallows such simple reassurances and even remarkable records of success don’t set worries, or, better, reflections aside.

More than 76 years of good health can lull a person into planning out what a good length of life should be.  First he would look at what his own father’s age got to be despite setbacks and bad habits, and then add on a number of years because of being more careful than the old man was, and more active and more something or other than one’s ancestor, and therefore entitled to a few more years.  But no amount of calculation will actually place the length of one’s life into one’s own control.  There’s no bargaining.  Who do you bargain with?

So, the not-so-old guy begins thinking about other actions, responsibilities, habits, projects unfinished and kisses not bestowed or received, that may be the result of the probable operation.  It’s automatic, and he has to decide a thousand decisions.

Am I satisfied with what I’ll leave for people to remember?  That’s a hard decision.  Maybe if I sell an extraordinary number of raffle tickets for the next drawing… maybe they’ll remember me better.  “Yeah, we’re going to miss the old dude: he sold a lot of raffle tickets.”

Will I leave my wife feeling glad she gave her life to me, the guy who doesn’t take vacations, instead of that other kid she grew up with?  Will she wish she had done something more exciting with her loyalty?  “Yes, I loved him, but he was such a stick-in-the-mud, always doing some work or project or helping his Club.  It was like pulling teeth to get him to take a vacation.”  Hard to decide if I am satisfied with how I was as a husband and companion.  But it’s too late to change it, if things go South.

Still, the neighbor down the street has a college buddy who’s 85 now and he had six bypasses 20 years ago and he’s still walking 3 miles a day and doing great.  So, nothing to worry about, it’s a routine procedure, now.  Maybe.

Not-so-old guy has always said he “wants to die healthy,” but it’s hard to figure what that really means anymore.  The line always got a chuckle.  But the concept was that he’d do whatever he felt he needed to do until all the home projects were done, new bathroom installed and the house painted, business sold, great-grandchild born somehow (the usual way, one hopes), and then keel over with his second heart attack.  Such plans are mere wisps of cloud.

Did I sell enough copy machines?  Obviously the answer is no, and always would be; can’t sell too many in that business.  But, the ones I did enabled a reasonable life, kids through college and the ability to help people through Exchange and otherwise.  We haven’t wanted for anything important but we’ve never had a lot of money, either.

Our son and daughter are wonderful, handsome and beautiful in turn, and very strong where it counts.  Each created two wonderful children of their own about whom not enough good can be said.  I envy them their long futures and their brains and good looks, but not necessarily the state of the United States and the world, the way my generation is leaving them.  Freedom teeters on a knife-edge and many will die when it is next attacked.  At least these grandchildren have their heads on straight. 

The man who is starting to count his years in limited terms has been fortunate in a thousand ways, with one of the greatest having been alive to know granddaughter, Allison Paige Hawkes, daughter’s daughter and guiding light for so many of us and many dozens of others we never got to know – or meet – until her funeral.  Her beauty and strength were boundless as she resisted the grasp of cancers for 20 years.  What a treat it seems to me to have known her and been loved by her.  She didn’t waste a minute that was granted.  Me, I’ve wasted a lot of them, but there’s no regaining even one; an old person hopes that he did enough in the minutes he didn’t waste.

A lot of minutes have been spent on home projects in, literally, every room in the house.  Some were big projects, like making one room out of two and leveling the ceiling across the whole master bedroom space, and like moving the kitchen into the dining room and making the kitchen into the dining room with new hot water heat, new ceiling, new French doors at the other end of the living room, like two new 24” bay windows, new picture windows in the east walls of the living room and dining room, lots of plumbing and electrical work, complete renovations of the other two bedrooms, and like new front steps and entry-way with sidelights, pillars, curved ceiling and piece-made wooden fan over the front door, new back steps, ramp and back and cellar doors, plus a whole new kitchen door entry off of a new brick patio, recently cut in half with a new 64-pounds-each landscape-block outer wall.  Then there is the 8 x 10 shed and a whole lot of inlaid brick walks and aprons and stone covered, brick-outlined sections of the yard.  Very early on, the main bathroom upstairs was expanded as the master bedroom was created, by eliminating a linen closet and an original small bedroom closet.  Lots of plumbing and carpentry, there.  There were many new windows the old guy replaced when much younger.  There’s also a built-in bed platform with drawers underneath, and an under-window bureau and a built-in mirror with make-up lights in the, now, 3rd bedroom.

Unfortunately, most of it is 20 to 40 years old and needs major work the old guy can’t do, particularly as suddenly restrictive heart problems are accommodated.  Now that the heart has been examined several ways, old man’s wife doesn’t want him to even tie his shoes too tightly.

More decisions will have to include how a grandson might help complete the brick-defined terraces in front of the house, where the steep drop of the yard has thwarted desires for decades.  Blessed with lots of bricks from the shortened patio (see 64-pound landscape blocks, above) it makes perfect sense to use them to solve another problem, doesn’t it?  Not even a little?  So far the brick sculpture-terrace-what-the-Hell-is-he- building-there, looks potentially good, except there’s a huge pile of dirt on the walk near the house, which ultimately must be screened for agricultural purposes on the terraces and elsewhere.  Now it’s grandson work.  Tugs at the heart, don’t you know.

How many things can be set aright before the big cut?  That’s another decision, linked to how much can the didn’t-realize-he-was-getting-old-so-quickly-guy get away with?  Number-one son and his number-one son already got roped into moving the adjustable bed into old guy’s office / TV room, and moving other stuff the helpless old bastard shouldn’t try to do.  Huh!  Well, okay; can’t move it back himself, anyway.  There are bushes to be clipped, again… can he get away with that?

But underlying every surface concern are the profound ones.  How many normal actions have the potential of being the last time they’ll be done?  Driving to the office?  Selling a copier?  Helping customers?  Or, more importantly, kissing beloved wife or painting woodwork; or getting windows replaced or hallway floor redone.  What about this, or that or the other thing that comes down to fixing up the house for the next owner?  Will he get to lay out the Field of Honor again, straightening the flags when they sag from vertical? What about having lunch with Will Vercoe, one of the world’s best people, or having lunch with Dennis Galvin and Jay Gaffney, two more of the world’s best people, or bantering with Frank Allen, the world’s best person, a man without whom the old guy’s life would have been far less fulfilling or useful.  The best.

Or, everything will be so wonderfully wonderful after the operation that we’ll all be joking around about why there was any worry at all.  They do this all the time.

Don’t you just love hyphens?