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Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Governance, Health Care, Immigration, Politics 2021, Representation

ON LITTLE CAT FEET

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Tyranny by any other name…

Tyranny crept in on little cat feet.  You may have been too busy – or frightened – to have noticed what happened to our nation and to our attitudes over the past 60 years.  So, ummnnh, let’s see… 2021 minus 60 years, well, that would be, ahh… 1961!  All right!  I got it.  Don’t ask, it’s a white supremacist thing.  Nineteen-sixty-one: Kennedy was president; the United States had achieved its pinnacle of average standard of living for all races and classes of people.  Black families were making economic progress at a higher rate than whites.  We were starting to tickle the edge of space and gearing up scientifically, technologically and educationally to defeat the Soviet Union.  People everywhere respected, envied, the United States’ obviously superior political and economic system: Freedom… even Americans themselves!

There were rumblings, for sure.  It was fairly obvious that Kennedy’s election was the result of vote fraud in Chicago among other cities, but particularly the Mayor Daley machine that delivered Illinois to Kennedy.  Kennedy won by a “national” margin of about ONE VOTE per precinct.  Nixon, to his credit, decided to not challenge or call for recounts, even in Illinois, believing that doing so would be bad for the country, a foreign concept in 2021.

Kennedy squelched the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Communist Cuba by denying U. S. air support for the C.I.A. –trained and encouraged army of anti-Castro Cubans.  It was a project hatched under Eisenhower, possibly without Eisenhower’s own awareness.  An unholy alliance of the Mafia and shadowy C.I.A. operatives, the invasion was inherited by Kennedy, who was already skeptical of the latitude of operations arrogated by that secretive agency.  To Kennedy’s credit, he took responsibility, publicly, for the failure of the “invasion.”  It is widely perceived that the same unholy alliance that wanted to re-establish pre-Castro Cuba ultimately had Kennedy assassinated in 1963.  The slide from America’s pinnacle had begun.

Lyndon Johnson, a racist, shepherded Kennedy’s Civil Rights Act through Congress, relying on substantial Republican support and widespread sympathy for Kennedy.  More significantly, he acquiesced to another C.I.A. scheme in French Indo-China where, following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May of 1954, French colonialism in Southeast Asia ended.  The U. S. had helped France fight the Viet Minh communists to no avail.   Truman’s policy of “containment” of international Communism was threatened.  Viet Nam was divided into North and South and U. S. “advisors” attempted to build up South Vietnam’s resistance to takeover by the North, viewing South Korea as a shining model.  The C.I.A., as an armed tool of the State Department, basically set policy for America’s role, there, ultimately engineering the assassination of South Vietnam Premiere, Ngo Dinh Diem and his much disliked brother and sister-in-law.

Theories have swirled about Kennedy’s assassination being linked to his supposed desire to pull away from involvement in South Vietnam, but facts don’t support such a course.  Anti-Castro Cubans, Mafia leaders and the C.I.A. are the more likely perpetrators.  Once Kennedy was eliminated (There were about 16,000 American troops assisting ARVN efforts against the Viet Cong when Kennedy died.) Johnson fell for the ridiculous “Gulf of Tonkin” incident report and committed major ground forces to the Vietnam “Conflict.”

With daily broadcast of bad news from Vietnam and revelation of the “Pentagon Papers,” Americans began to lose faith in our government and our military, while the existence of a “Deep State” within our own government became apparent.  Politics, and the future of the United States had become clouded.

The Press and the Democrats took down Richard Nixon.  In the process they had even Republicans believing that the crimes Nixon had apparently done in covering up stupid political stuff were so threatening to our Constitutional Republic that he had to go.  Maybe, but there was a lot of theatre.  Numerous characters saw their careers secured by working to expose the President or working to sabotage him.  Some were right… about the career part.  But “the press” has never been the same.  No longer are journalism majors directed to learn how to report the truth; now they all intend to change the world from their digital pulpits from which they preach about others than the God of Truth.  Fake news is a mark of pride, today, if the result fulfills intention.

The loss of a free press and of free speech is a key stepping stone to tyranny.  An “agenda-press” will protect crimes by people whose philosophy comforts it, while it works to erode and corrode those with whom it disagrees… truth be damned.  Readers, watchers, listeners are misled through misinformation, and by the rat-a-tat-tat repetition of lies spread by philosophers the organs of information agree with.  Soon whole beliefs are addled and worse philosophers and philosophies, become “mainstream.”

Public employee unionism, especially applied to the education industries, public and private, has in recent decades, gained control of teacher qualification and certification, all with 90+% leftist attitudes.  Students seeking a path out of poverty, often a path away from failed families, are fully malleable by prevailing philosophies in schools of education.  They all seem to want to change the world, as well.  Trusting parents are trusting the wrong institutions to reinforce their philosophies of life, truth, honesty, religion and responsibility.

Since the 2000 elections the concept of government by litigation has grown beyond rational bounds.  When the Supreme Court ended the charade of selective recounts in Florida the politics of hate gelled into a real means of acquiring power: first, destroy the opponent(s) personally, then destroy his or her followers and supporters.  “The politics of personal destruction.”  It’s not an “American” thing.

For whatever reason, Republicans posted two weak candidates in a row against Barack Hussein Obama.  McCain had a shot in 2008 with Palin as V.P., but her conservatism was carefully constrained by McCain’s handlers.  Then the financial crisis hit.  What a fortuitous coincidence for the Obama campaign.  Eight or ten key money people demanded settlement simultaneously and dominoes began to tumble.  President Bush was out of his league, deferring completely to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a product of Wall Street and Goldman Sachs.  As the FED and emergency legislation started a flood of hollow dollars to bail out the very investment banks that precipitated the crisis, McCain appeared helpless while Obama remained simply concerned, saying little.  Goldman Sachs got a goodly share.  Others did less well, places like Lehman Brothers, and AIG, the re-insurance company.  General Motors took plenty, as did Chrysler, but Ford declined.

As a result of it all, McCain lost respect, Obama got elected to “transform” the United States, and the financial system became more tightly controlled by – or integrated into – the federal government.  The near-collapse was global, exposing the dangerous (to self-government) interconnectedness of banking, particularly of central banks.  The ease of controlling populations is multiplied by control of their personal money and finances.  Legislation that reacted to the 2006-2007-2008 banking crisis, like Dodd-Frank, define certain financial institutions as “too big to fail.”  American taxpayers, indeed, American short-term financial health altogether is now tied to propping up what are essentially international institutions.  The loss of financial sovereignty is a keystone to collapsing national sovereignty, the worst element of tyranny when that nation is the United States.

It should be growing clearer how seemingly unrelated events provide facilities for imposing Fascism or worse should a government be controlled by people who believe that top-down imposition is the best way to organize a nation or a people.  Constitutional limitations interfere with that form of thinking.  The American Constitution serves as an obstacle to global, transnational tyranny of every type, but its strength depends on leadership that agrees with its principles.  The Constitution, itself, provides very limited tools to counter the political power of anti-American leadership.  It is one of the contingencies of self government that the founders could not conceive of: that the electorate would be so twisted in its thinking that it would elect – and re-elect repeatedly – representatives who were decidedly UN-Constitutional, or anti-Constitutional – which is to be anti-American – in their thinking.

Obviously the effects of two or more generations of public education could sway enough voters to misunderstand their roles in self-government, and to misunderstand the roles of the institutions of government to be not defenders of individual rights and responsibilities and of private property, but rather dispensers of welfare in various forms so as to provide comfort to citizens.  In order to provide that much welfare the government entities must take the money from those who have earned it and to whom it belongs.  If people are constantly being taught, or encouraged to think that it’s not FAIR for some people to have more wealth, the political will to take more from “the rich” is easy to find and hard to oppose.  Undreamed of debt, weakening the nation’s ability to defend itself or to perform its Constitutional duties, becomes a threat to everyone.  As resources begin to fail, more government, and more tyrannical government will appear to be the only answer for literal survival of large fractions of the population.

Government types have encouraged media conglomerates to tilt, then embellish and finally create “news” that has political value and, now, actual control value of nearly the whole country.  This has been the greatest “end-run” around representative government and inalienable rights, ever.  A generation of Americans has been convinced that its country is so imperfect as to be indefensible.  In effect, patriotism for the United States has been made negative, something espoused only by ”white supremacists” and other sorts of obvious racists.  Even the U. S. flag is viewed negatively by some – those who are in agreement with Black Lives Matter, that the whole American culture, history and success must be torn asunder and replaced with communism, the direct route to tyranny.  For shame.

The Biden regime openly colludes with Google, Facebook, Twitter and others to censor ideas and speech it doesn’t want heard.  For the government to be involved with that corrupt and twisted role, assumed by those companies, is utterly unconstitutional, but the Congress is unable to convince itself that the political advantage those organs provide is not worth the damage to the Republic.  With representatives like those, who needs tyrants?  There are, potentially, institutions and limits that could be created to prevent this form of Fascism from becoming rooted, but we have yet to find the courage to create them.  At the present time there are about a dozen courageous members of both houses combined, and 523 sheep who are most involved with re-election and not with the defense of America or even with citizenship.  For shame.

The engineered diseases that result from COVID-19 have exposed the weak-mindedness of a large number of Americans , and the tendency toward Fascism of many of the rest, mostly government types and other authoritarians, even in private business.  A supposedly “free” people has been exposed as unable to make thoughtful judgments about where personal sovereignty ends and government control begins.  In the American Constitutional system the individual citizen is sovereign, relinquishing only enough freedom as to enable the “federal,” not “national” government to provide what individuals and local governments, even state governments, cannot.  The system is virtually backwards, or upside-down, today.  The supposedly federal government has arrogated powers to dictate everything from lightbulb design to grade-school curriculum, even the meaning of words and content of religious faith.  Forcing free citizens to wear masks or receive injections of barely understood concoctions falsely called “vaccines,” while lying publicly about the nature of and origin of the latest, new, viral disease, was a relatively small step.

That same government has succeeded in dividing Americans against one another over relative rates of conformity to false premises – even to restricting everyday freedoms for failing to conform to federal “Covid” dictates.  America, awake!… please.

Major corporations are in league with proto-tyrants in subverting Constitutional limitations and in subverting freedom, itself.  While an individual artist baker or web designer is punished by the courts for refusing to employ his or her artistry for morally or religiously objectionable activities, airlines, sports team, employers of 100 or more and many others, are empowered to refuse service or entry to those refusing the injection of phony and proven remarkably harmful, “vaccines.”  It’s how Hitler built the Wehrmacht.

“And you tell me, over and over and over again, my friends, that you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction…”

Economics, Family, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2021

INJECTABLE WISDOM

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Vaccine is a comforting word… concept.  Inject some serum, or drink it, depends, and one will become safe from a serious, if not existential, threat.  What a concept.  What could go wrong?  Some of the most profitable industries in the world have accepted billions of dollars of “aid” from the federal government so that development of a “vaccine” that promises to protect everybody from COVID-19, could be accelerated.  Numerous regulations were relaxed to permit development and testing to proceed together, there being no time to waste!

Miraculously, the first two, then three vaccines were all phenomenally effective and safe, safe, safe.  Hurry, everyone, and get your shot or shots or jabs; they’re FREE!  Oh, here and there some rare reaction or “allergy” to the serums was reported, but when you compare the millions and millions of doses, a few thousand hospitalizations, disabilities and deaths are a small price to pay to defeat the worst virus since the last one, regardless of how it was engineered or spread across the world in record time.  Hurry!  They’re safe, effective and FREE, say the pharmaceutical giants who produce the serums, as do the government functionaries and politicians that financed their development and rendered them available for “emergency” use, despite their connections to the very companies producing them.

“FREE” is a relative term in matters of emergency vaccines.  Aside from the $billions to accelerate their availability, every single, damned shot and jab is being paid for by Uncle Sam, our benevolent government, on the arm, so to speak.  Some of the top medical agencies of our friend, the federal government, helped to engineer COVID-19 both in this country and in China with our funding, to make it more communicable to humans, it being a virus in bats, after all and very unlikely to infect humans, it turns out, without the engineering.  But, glory be, we have the vaccines!  We’re saved.

Unless we aren’t.  These vaccines are still experimental drugs that have received emergency-use authorization because there are no alternative treatments for COVID-19.  Our thoughtful and benign government-types have made sure we are as safe as humanly possible by creating laws that protect us from being forced to take experimental drugs unless there are “no alternative treatments” available.  How good of them.  Not.

There are alternative, effective, inexpensive drugs available that have remarkably good effects on COVID-19 both in early treatment and even in preventive (prophylactic) uses.  In many countries one or another of these drugs are readily available, even over-the-counter-available, and people have taken them and benefitted.  Even some late-treatment uses have reversed “hopeless” disease trajectories.

“But, they can’t prescribe off-label!” critics and talking heads on television say.  Well, duh, every friggin’ drug in the world is off-label for a brand new virus, now, isn’t it?  When people are dying and standard procedures are failing to save them, why not try drugs that have worked for thousands of cases?  Because it’s off label?  No, because Donald Trump recommended that we try them.  Shame on us.  Doctors, actual practicing medical DOCTORS who had copious evidence of effectiveness of Ivermectin, for example, were not praised but cancelled.  Twitter and Google suppressed their opinions.  Why?

“We don’t know how safe they are!” worry the heads.

Let’s consider that we don’t know how actually safe the “vaccines” are, either, do we?  In fact, let’s consider that thousands of people have died or suffered life-changing reactions to these experimental drugs – drugs the manufacturers are promoting for children and even infants!  Some authorities are forcing children to be vaccinated, when there is no evidence that these vaccines afford ANY protection to people younger than 20 or 24, say, since they are at an infinitesimally small risk from COVID.  Who takes a vaccine – an experimental vaccine – against the threat of a disease that is not a threat?

There are thousands of people whose effects from the vaccines will never be included in any database of pros and cons about these vaccines.  As it is, if someone complains about a bad effect every medical effort seems to be to hold the vaccine harmless.  Many people don’t register a complaint because they don’t connect the injection with a new physical problem.  In Prudence’ case it’s shortness of breath, loss of endurance, poor sleep patterns because poor breathing interrupts sleep.  After 76 years of quite good health, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine has initiated an imPrudent slow, uncomfortable decline.  We’ll find out if anything can be done, other than taking some other pharmaceutical(s) for the rest of Prudence’ life.

There is something – or many things – rotten about the creation of COVID-19 and these vaccines, while alternative treatments are suppressed.  It is a billionaire’s game, led, in part, by the unusual Bill Gates, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others in the CDC, NIH and USAID, not to overlook the U.N.’s W. H. O. whose leadership helped Communist China suppress information about the new virus even while it was being spread across the world.  Billionaires and would-be billionaires.  Giant pharmaceutical companies and would-be giant pharmaceutical companies. 

The formula is simple: create a worldwide health crisis and pop out serums that virtually every human will need to take… and damn the consequences for some.  Let’s say four billion doses at $150 a jab… whirr, clunk, click, ding a ding-ding: $600 BILLION!  If 5 or 10 or 50 thousand die from the vaccine, or 150,000 die from “lock-down” drug abuse and suicide, well, we’re overpopulated, anyway.

It is unhealthy, we might say, to lose trust in the medical establishment.  The erosion began with the inception of Medicare and the federalization of welfare under Lyndon Johnson.  Piece by piece, hospital by hospital, practitioner by practitioner, medical group by medical group, insurance company by insurance company, pharmaceutical company by pharmaceutical company, device manufacturer by device manufacturer, the entire industry/delivery system has adjusted to the political value of health care… and to the financial flows directed increasingly by government.

The politicization of medicine takes place to a significant degree by the direction and management of grant monies.  Both “non-profit” universities, colleges and teaching hospitals, and for-profit laboratories and pharmaceutical manufacturers are very concerned to not buck prevailing politics.  The research they do is often closely aligned with the opinions of politicians.  While they may not publish “lies,” per se, they look only for certain truths – truths that keep grant money flowing.  The increase in “billionaire-ships” over the last 20 years has created another source of grants aimed at fulfilling, often, a single person’s views of what is important research and what is not.

COVID-19 brings to light all of these weaknesses in medical science, as well as outright corruption, as private dollars sway the work and attitudes of “official” federal agencies that are depended upon for dispassionate truth.  The World Health Organization division of the U. N. has also proven itself corrupt by kow-tow-ing to the Chinese Communist party in matters of truth about COVID-19’s origin and spread, helping to contribute to thousands of deaths, worldwide.  To whom can we turn?  The N.B.A.?  NIKE?  Not bloody likely.

There are truth-tellers out there.  Hopefully, you are one, and so is your best friend and your significant other.  There are a handful of people in office who are both truthful and unafraid of the truth – not always congruent conditions.  Support your local truth-tellers and follow those who have the courage to proclaim and defend truth.  Don’t fall victim to repeating the claims of suspected – hoped-for – truth-tellers, without confirming the truth, yourself.  You will be challenged by people who believe things that aren’t so.

Truth is the right medicine for our health care and our health/medical industries.  What else could be?  It is the right medicine for our own health whenever we interact with those increasingly government-driven organizations.  Is it not the right medicine for government and the law, too?  Would truth work in government?

Is a COVID vaccine the right set of chemicals to inject into your only body?  Find out the truth to the best of your ability, before you say, “Yes.”

A reckoning is surely coming.  Hearing those words causes some listeners to imagine China being hoist on the World’s petard for causing so many deaths and economic losses.  Won’t happen, it seems Prudent to say, at least not during the Biden-Harris administrations.  They are long bought and paid-for.

No, a reckoning over COVID-19 could take the form of reduced health for millions around the world, due to widespread vaccination with serums that are effective against COVID while also being effective against good heart function, or against pregnancy and maternity.  Such “side effects” have side-effected many thousands, including, as our friend, the global socialist movement in the persons of the U. S. government, God forbid, forces inoculation of youngsters.  Not many have died, some merely debilitated at age 12 or so.

Education, Family, Governance, Health Care, Representation

EDU-TYRANNY

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At 71 inches the risk is unbearable.

Americans aren’t stupid.  Some are a lot more clever, or educated, or skillful, or depraved than others, however.  Some, who have seen their greatest personal opportunity within a legalized government employee union environment, now tightly – and politically – protected by law, eventually gain both economic freedom and inordinate influence.  Most Americans, perhaps 98% of us, never gain similar advantage and, until the Covid “plan-demic,” never grasped what we have allowed to happen.  Our subservient position is becoming clearer.

There are multiple tyrannies at issue.

Not only taxpayers but every parent and other providers of product to “public” school systems, has awakened to the tyrannies of public employee unionization, made sharply clear by the machinations of teachers’ unions.  We who PAY for public schools, by law and state police powers, have learned that we have no control whatsoever, personally or through our elected “representatives” or through the “experts” we have hired to “manage” “our” governments.  It’s humbling.  The people “we” have hired and pay lavishly to “educate” our children, are exposed as our education “rulers.”  They, not we, will determine both curricula and process.  No longer shall our children be reinforced in the best of life’s lessons as we impart at home; they will learn what odd theories of social reformation and anti-American psychology that they, our education rulers, agree with.  No longer will the routines of school and vacation be followed if we, your education rulers, don’t like them.  No longer will your children be permitted into the same rooms that we inhabit if we, on our own, decide that there may be the slightest threat to our health or safety… and you will pay us according to our negotiated contract, including scheduled raises, while we ponder our next demands.

Well, that’s a fine “how do you do?”

Suddenly, teachers have become more powerful than our elected “representatives,” so-called, and the government created by we the people, is powerless to correct this destructive imbalance.  To whom can an economically assaulted citizen/parent turn for redress of grievance?  Well, no one.

Let us imagine, then, an actually representative government.  Can you imagine what such a rare construct might do on our behalf?  Can you imagine what it might do with regards to “public” education?

First, (and one can only dream of any government in the United States today, having the testicular fortitude) such a government representing the values and interests of its citizens, would arbitrarily de-certify its local teachers union on the basis of an undeclared and illegal strike.  That is, since the jurisdiction had not failed to uphold the terms, financial and otherwise, of the existing contract with teachers, it had within its inherent rights the power to suspend a collective contract and offer individual contracts to teachers who were prepared to go to work at the next earliest opportunity.  That jurisdiction would also have an obligation to fulfill state laws requiring a set number of days of school attendance by every school-age child in residence.  At the same time, the jurisdiction would assume the obligation to protect any individual and family thereof from retribution in any form under the guise of a negotiated “contract” that was abrogated by union-enforced action.

In the event that not enough formerly contracted teachers agree to go back to work to fill basic minimum teaching slots, the jurisdiction could temporarily open up teaching slots to anyone with sufficient background in or love of subject matters to enable a temporary fulfillment of educational minimums as part of an emergency declaration.  Meanwhile students would return to classroom instruction, do homework, pass tests and matriculate as able.  Between school “years,” certified teachers could be hired individually to round out the teaching staff as appropriate.  A lot would be expected of a highly compensated Superintendent and his or her staff to make sure that proper education was accomplished, but, but… just imagine.

Superintendents and other supervisors who are incapable of managing the system without kow-towing to a teachers union, could be replaced.

Then, we might imagine that every student would be taught to read, comprehend, write logical, well-constructed sentences and coherent essays in legible longhand, and to calculate and reason algebraically.  Simultaneously those same potential adults would learn American and World History, civics and citizenship and the truth, good and bad, about our exceptional Constitutional limits on central government.

Unfortunately, that last paragraph is a dream too far.

Biden, Economics, Elections, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2021

THESE AREN’T FOLLIES

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(Photo by JIM LO SCALZO / POOL / AFP) (Photo by JIM LO SCALZO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The once and nevermore defenders of average Americans, laborers and factory workers, and rock-solid, patriotic citizens, ready to sacrifice for their country when the call came to do so, are shedding their snakes’ clothing. With the burying of a most questionable set of elections for presidential electors in 2020, the once-proud Democrat Party has shown itself capable of undermining everything it once stood for, while actively denigrating those very principles, and of forming the most tawdry allegiances with uber-wealthy technology companies and Wall Street globalists… all in the name of “social justice” and “equity.”  To make it all work, much like the National Socialists did in post-Weimar Germany, they have needed a universal hate-focus, a common enemy to the poor and oppressed for whom Democrats will fight to the last fetus.

Fairly described as the party of death, Democrats have set forth on a long march toward socialist Godlessness, convinced that Communism executed by those as clever as they will finally work to the benefit of “the masses,” with whom we all shall identify as soon as power is delivered to Democrats’ hands.  There will be many deaths along the way, should defenders of the American idea stopping fighting for the life and lives of our wonderful experiment in freedom.

The most obvious, however mis-identified deaths, are those of millions of aborted babies, of which the largest losses per capita are sustained by black and brown people.  “Black Lives Matter,” which are believed by Democrats to be allies of theirs, whereas the opposite relationship is believed to be the case by “BLM” Marxists, care only for headline deaths, numbering fewer than 20 each year, where Blacks fatally encounter police officers.  Those events justify killing other police of whatever skin color or ethnicity, along with those killed in the course of peaceful protests.  The hundreds killed each year in major cities by other blacks are of no concern of theirs: no headlines, no “racist” angle to milk.

The tens of thousands killed by Planned Parenthood (major Democrat donors, they) and a few other “clinics” each year, are invisible to “BLM.”  At the same time, “BLM” is solidly behind opening the borders to unrestricted immigration, despite its clearly negative impacts on the lives of black workers and families.  We should follow these boobs… question mark.

Patriotism has become the wearing of masks, the mistrust of every other human and twisted sexual identities.  So-called immigrants are somehow more valuable than Americans or their ability to earn a living without government help.  We are literally borrowing the so-called money to purchase our new slaveholding masters.  Conservatism is being shut out of the public square as it has been for years at our institutions of so-called learning.  A new administration is wasting no time in stripping away “America first” and replacing it with the American province, just one in the great big global family.  Joe Biden doesn’t know whether to salute or get off the pot.  We should follow that boob, too.

Our feckless “free press” can barely catch its breath between slobbering sycophancies, so caught up in their revelry over the defeat of America first-ness and that gauche making-America-greatness stuff.  If they can possibly help Senator Schumer convict Trump of whatever he did that Democrats don’t like, all extra-constitutional-like, they certainly will, touting the tiny statistics of the storming of the practically unprotected Capitol, over and over, inversely to their ignorance of the Antifa/BLM riots of the past 10 months.  We’ll be living in strange times for a couple of years, if not decades, boys and girls.

Every one of you, and you all know exactly who you are and what you did to make it appear that Biden won the election, will fade into history memorialized as the people who brought America to its knees, electing a crime family and a communist to the most powerful job on earth, not that it will be that for long.  When China takes Taiwan and Ol’ Uncle Joe puts his mask on to mumble some crap about it always having been part of China, anyway, democracy be damned, you all can congratulate one another, you Quislings.

As the Harris-Biden administration completes its overturning of justice and Constitutionality to keep any pesky Patriots from ever gaining power again, everyone who rioted or packed ballots counts in 2020 and on January 5th 2021, can take solace, as America ceases to matter much, that you did your part.

We had a good run, we crazy Americans, believing that we could govern ourselves by Constitutionally limiting the powers of the Federal government that We the People created.  You, all, don’t even recognize the truckloads of socialist crap we’ve already accepted, perhaps worshipped.  That $26,000,000,000,000 debt should keep it fresh in your minds.  If Democrats succeed in adding on a couple of Trillions or more to that total, everything will suddenly become better, fairer, greener and egalitarian.  Anyone in the new Administration who can financially walk and chew gum at the same time, is much lauded by the “press” as a breath of fresh air compared to those awful troglodytes in the awful Trump awful administration.  This doesn’t include the president or vice-president; it is Prudent that they don’t allow Good Ol’ Joe Biden to chew gum, anyway.

There is quite a crackdown on conservatives and anything they might say or agree with.  Communists are intensely consistent with their plans and steps to subdue dissent: never allow it – the Party is infallible.  This quaint viewpoint doesn’t allow much wiggle room for religions, scriptures or individual sovereignty.  The Chinese, whom the new administration intends to emulate, have proven that society runs so much more smoothly with just one party holding power.  And, none of that checks and balances baloney, either.  No “power-sharing with states; no independent judiciary; no trying to set an example of honesty, freedom or democracy for other nations.  That last is nearly abolished through mis-education.  Society runs so much more smoothly with just one party in one country  holding power.  That country won’t be the United States, one party or not.  Most of the “free” world has borrowed into China’s hegemony… what in God’s name are we holding out for?  Bigger TV’s?  Green energy?

Lunchbucket Joe from the dingy mines of Scranton, PA isn’t wasting his limited time leaving “America First” in the dustbin of history.  He knows his days and weeks are numbered.  They’ll retire him a hero of the working ”Joe” who always “fought” (is that incitement?) for the little guy against the big, bad, anti-union corporations like…, well, like, like Amazon!  And Twitter and…, and… Google, for crying out loud!  [Ahh, Joe…, umm, those  are our friends… the ones that suppressed Hunter’s laptop story and gave us all that money and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of vote suppression.  Joe gets that steely, hard look in his eyes, furrows his mighty brow and leans in closer.  “Hunter had sex with a laptop?” he asks.]

In any event, lots of leftists / Democrats / well-known reporters and anchor-people, have been asking the tough questions – mostly of one another: “How could we start the necessary de-programming / re-education of Trump supporters?”  The 60% of the United States, including the 20% that normally don’t care much, who are opposed to such gulag tactics, think we are poking fun at the jackasses who ask and ponder questions like that.  But there is no fun connected to them, at all.  Those people are seriously asking and Lord knows they have many sympathizers among the weirdo’s Biden is naming to various posts of power.

The Trump Impeachment Show is perfectly situated to divert attention from Uncle Joe’s daily executive orders.  Technically – and legally – executive orders have force only in the arena of directing Federal agencies and employees in the means and methods of carrying out Federal laws.  Legally, the President no matter how popular or senile, cannot CHANGE laws or effectively create any.  These quaint facts have long been ignored, but very gingerly until President Obama.  Just in the imposition of the A. C. A., Obamacare, he changed the law(s) that were passed by Congress, as they were offending various voter blocs Mr. Obama liked.  He changed those laws, a big “No… no!”

Chief Justice (in name only), John Roberts, saw how easily it could be done and changed the law himself in order to keep that pile of A. C.r A.p from collapsing constitutionally.

Now Ol’ Lunch-bucket Joe has issued some 40 “Executive Orders” that one might safely assume he hasn’t read despite his wholehearted agreement with their contents.  The one on rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement is 7,600 words by itself.  Joe would have read a mid-length novel since taking office to fully grasp everything he’s signed.  Seems doubtful.

Keeping Trump and those 75 Million or so troglodyte Republicans on the front pages allows for a lot of attention over here while the “transformation” is happening over there.  Sort of like a street magician working a little sleight of hand on the credulous crowd, except it’s more likely sleight of mind.

Don’t be surprised if, along with the exhaust from right-wing lawnmowers, the smoke from firing guns at a practice range is made a climate crime, punishable by confiscation.

Family, Health Care

THe Allison Effect

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We wished Allison Paige Hawkes Godspeed, yesterday.  Pollard’s Funeral Home, Methuen, Massachusetts, U. S. A., planet Earth, Milky Way, was very good to our family and to all who came to commiserate with us and to celebrate the wonderful and wonder-filled life of Allie Hawkes.  She passed on Sunday, the sixth of December, less than a week ago.  It was  just after 8 in the morning.  Her mother held her as she slept.  She stirred enough to struggle to tell Christen that she loved her.  Christen had her hand upon Allie’s heart as she left the painful, cancerous bonds of Earth.  There could be no better way to finish one’s journey.

We compiled our photos, and Allie’s, and all the newspaper articles that Christen had saved.  There were thousands of the former, dozens of the latter, and millions of memories.  Christen, Allie’s dad, Gavin Hawkes, her sister-in-law, Kim Andon (brother Joe Wescott’s wife for 20+ years), Kim’s daughter, Sarah, “Grammie” Gretchen Wescott and I, her “Grampa” Bob, sorted and printed and distilled hundreds of photo’s to display during funeral services.  Allie’s girlfriends created yet another “photo-board.”  We were researching someone known more by others than by us; the breadth and depth of her people-rich life was, in part, news to all of us, even to her most-connected mother, Christen.

During Allie’s brief life, many days, weeks and months were consumed by cancer treatments and effects.  Virtually all of those hours were shared, in person, by the world’s greatest mother.  Christen became Allie’s primary nurse and watchful angel, more than once conveying the instructions of physicians and the applications of potent drugs, more accurately than nurses, themselves, remembered.  Allie and her mother built a bond of mother-daughter love that is rare.  Christen had not a burden, but an opportunity to do more mothering than most mothers have.  We all tried to be involved, but it was truly a matter of learning from Christen what Allie had just gone through or, thankfully, what she had just done.  She was a do-er, most effectively as a creator of friends.

At the funeral home most of the three families gathered to greet the hundreds of friends on whom Allie had left her impact.  She didn’t have any casual friends, it seemed, but hundreds of good ones.  They, and we, all felt a loss when her light faded out.  Indeed, as her Camp Otter, YMCA, Wheelock, Marsh School, Methuen High and, so heartbreakingly, many of her nurses from the Floating Hospital, Children’s Hospital and Dana Farber explained, she was nowhere “just” another student, another friend or another patient.  The “Allison Effect” is large on everyone she knew. 

Ostensibly, funeral preparations included having her cousin, Sarah Wescott, speak about her lifetime friend.  Sarah worked hard to get her words and feelings exactly as she wished to express them.  I, Grampa Bob, was also going to say a few words, and though mine were not written in advance, I too had prepared what I wanted to say.  In fact, my erstwhile comments were much modified as the afternoon of meeting so many of those who also loved Allie Hawkes.  They changed what I knew about my granddaughter.  So, I want to share what I had decided to say Friday evening, though could not.

Good evening and thank you all for sharing your love for Allie Hawkes.  Before she died I thought I knew her pretty well.  You, all, have told me so much more about her; culling the hundreds and hundreds of photos she and others took of the many places she went and events she attended, has made her even more wondrous in my heart and my memories so much richer.

When she was first diagnosed my first reaction was to tell her mother that she would be okay, and I believed it.  For the following 19 years that belief was justified as she beat cancer back again, again and again… until she could not.  My second reaction, as I would walk each morning, was to pray for a miracle essentially every day, and often, twice a day.  I was trying to tell God what the correct miracle for Him to effect was, and exactly when to manifest it.  I realize that a lot of our prayers are like that: giving God and Jesus instructions… as if we knew.

What I should have prayed for is mercy and understanding.

Each time our relatively crude medical tools brought her back to remission my conviction that I was issuing the correct instructions was reinforced.  Every time cancer came back, I would feel that my miracle-instructions were flawed, somehow, or not specific enough, and I would redouble my efforts and word my supplications to be much more specific as to what I wanted God to do.  I hope that what I did helped Allie in some way.  I know that as the end approached she became more of a believer, ready to pass through that awesome door alone, always part of my prayers.

So, I had been praying for a miracle for most of her life rather blindly, it turns out.  But I recognize, now, that the miracle was right here with us, all along.

Education, Family, Health Care

A BEAUTIFUL DASH

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2001

In Methuen, Massachusetts a young woman is trying to prepare for a very early death.  It’s not her fault; she’s done nothing wrong in her nearly 27 years.  Indeed, from the very first she has been a bright, delightful person, quick to learn, quick to love pretty much everybody.

Inside her genes, however, something is not the same as most people’s.  She can’t fight off dysfunctional cell growth.  Her first cancer arrived when she was about 6, it’s not completely certain when, but she had been complaining of “back pain” for months before her mom finally got her to a “pediatric gastroenterologist” whose connections at Tufts Floating Hospital for Children found and diagnosed neuroblastoma.  There can be no worse day for a mother, unless it’s the one approaching inexorably, almost exactly 20 years afterwards.

That’s a short dash, 27 years.  In between those dates were 5 big battles with cancer, excellence in school, swim team, graduation from High School, excellence in college that included trips to New Orleans to help repair Katrina-damaged homes, trips to England and Ireland, visit to Paris through the Chunnel, Graduation from Wheelock College, Masters degree through Merrimack College, friends’ weddings, even one she coordinated, a trip to Peru and Machu Picchu only to run headlong into the fifth cancer struggle, now stretching into the last.  Loving teaching, early childhood and special needs, was not enough.  There never will be the full-time teaching position of which she dreamed.

How does one prepare for death?  I don’t know.  My good friend, Tony Fusco, prepared for his when an undiagnosed tumor in his brain stem proved inoperable, impossible to biopsy and ultimately fatal.  I got to sit with him the last Sunday afternoon before he re-entered the hospital to try some other treatments multiple neurologists had only the faintest idea might help.  I’d brought some nice scotch thinking we might enjoy a sip together but his gag reflex was so impaired he dared to sip only water.  It was a good afternoon and I expected he’d be home again.

When the only option of a feeding tube was offered, Tony realized – decided – that it was a tube too far: no further treatments, thank you.  His world shrank to a room at a beautiful hospice facility that was always busy with visitors and family.  He had a huge heart; it took a couple of weeks for it to go to sleep.

Clearly he’d prepared for the end.  He was 71.  At his funeral I told him that I knew where to hide a flask for when I’d join him on a porch where he now lived, where we could enjoy a sip and analyze the world situation.  He was a year younger than me.

How does one prepare at age twenty-six and three-quarters? Without an abiding religious faith it is hard to imagine.  She believes in God, but hasn’t had a lot of religious education.  I try to explain, but it is uncomfortable, certainly it was a year ago when the lung cancer appeared.  It represented a third kind of cancer, and her tiny body could tolerate no chemotherapy.  They operated and radiated, but the treatment was still a variation of repair and destroy with the overarching hope that the cancerous cells might be killed before the patient, herself.  Her breathing hasn’t been very good – or comfortable – since then.  Within a couple of months lesions were found in multiple places: brain, bones, pancreas and more.  Now at Dana Farber, they’ve radiated as many places as possible and she’s been taking an oral chemo pill with side effects.  It tended to slow down the growth, but never stopped it and now isn’t slowing it much, either.

There’s only one door open to her… to a place where the weaknesses of her body will no longer be a problem – a place where her health will become perfect.  One needs a reason to hope in order to contemplate passing through that door, alone.  Observers might say that she has no choice so “…she just has to deal with it.”

What does that mean: deal with it?  If one has any trust in God it should be clear that trying to pass through when angry and bitter is probably not the right approach.  One school of thought is that when you pass you’ll find exactly what you believed you’d find.  If that is a fade-to-black scenario, and hopeless, then that is what it will appear to be.  I believe that there is an eventual judgment, an audit if you will, of how well your tests were passed – tests you knew were coming when you agreed to accept the lifetime just ending.  Your “you” or your soul, may or may not have aced everything.  The life just ended may or may not be the last one you need to make your ascension, but Redemption is the unfailing lesson of the Bible.  It doesn’t make sense that in the matter of life and death itself, that the opportunity to redeem oneself would be absent.

For the soul, the agreement to accept a new life that includes the needed tests, is the greatest act of love expressable.

Another path of spiritual guidance says that not only are we responsible for our un-passed tests, or “karma,” but also for our reason for being, our “dharma.”  Both are part of judgment.  The more aware we are while on this side of that door, the more likely we are to meet and exceed the reasons for this life.  Life is not a knife-edge: Hell on one side and the gift of Heaven on the other; it is a path made broad by our free will.  The choices we make have meaning.

When someone passes very young, there has been little time to make bad choices, which is to say, few sins have been committed.  At the same time, few opportunities have presented for passing tests.  Maybe a life that ends in youth is lived sacrificially so that those around you can pass their tests.  Living that life is your test: a unique expression of love.

From the limited, somewhat fuzzy understandings of a human lifetime, this is my most comforting perception of the young lady’s life: one of sacrifice.  Neither I nor anyone else on this side of the door is privy to the purposes of the lives of others, and barely able to grasp the meanings of our own.  Still, this observer has recorded no imperfections in our young patient’s life. 

Is she comforted thereby?  Does she perceive the success of her life?  Or does she feel she’s been punished or singled out for “bad luck?”  I try to tell her to not fall into those ideas, but to approach the door with an open heart and mind, accepting of the possibilities of immense love on the other side.

Something she has earned.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2020

If You Knew Covid…

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YOU DON’T KNOW COVID

Prudence has often commented on the casual mendacity of politicians, and that quality of theirs is troubling enough.  New depths are plumbed, however, when hundreds of appointed, elected and hired “officials” agree to lie together  for some tawdry political purpose.  Many lie without knowing what that purpose even is.  Suffice to say that the greatest power on Earth is unified belief, including evil belief.

Like the man or not, honest observers, liberals included, have to agree that hatred of Donald Trump inspired some of the most virulent and congruent political lying our nation has ever experienced.  Virtually all of the lies have been exposed for what they were.  Dishonest observers retain belief in many of those lies and have convinced themselves that because of what they perceive as true there is no possibility of compromise or even courtesy towards those who believe that the lies were, in fact, falsities.  This mish-mash of lies and truths and the distrust of so many for so many others, provided the perfect breeding ground for the most widespread political lying yet: the Covid-19 pandemic.

It appears that only in the United States, where Donald Trump is running for re-election, has the Covid-19 epidemic played a significant part in the unseating of a government.  Many countries have been hit hard by the initial attacks of the new, somewhat engineered, coronavirus that China spread across the world, but only in the United States has this medical threat been politicized.  At the same time, and again, only in the U. S., leftist thugs have chosen the same moment to riot in dozens of cities.  That resulted from a completely different set of lies from those told about Covid-19, and this isn’t the place to recount them, but the confluence of the two, essentially unique events, is itself unique and conveniently coincident in a political sense.

But “Covid” provided – and provides – a rich harvest of public policies – all left-leaning and largely unconstitutional – that are serving to twist electoral politics and sway votes based – on – half-truths – and outright lies.  Everything from business and religious lockdowns, intrusions into personal properties and lives, and the enforcement of personal actions like mask-wearing, are based on half-truths at best, complete untruths at mid-range, or utter falsehoods at worst.

Americans have been misled.  We hear constantly how many of us have died… DIED, from this awful scourge, now totaling some 169,000… THOUSAND(!) poor souls struck down by a disease that the Trump administration practically spread on purpose because all those people who work for Trump hate the rest of us.  Remove the silliness from that sentence and we’re left with a statistic that is meaningless.  The CDC counts “deaths” as people who died WITH Covid, not FROM Covid.  Why would bureaucrats count such a serious phenomenon in such a flaccid way?  Even people who died in accidents but who happened to test positive for Covid, are counted as Covid deaths.  What good is a “statistic” like this?

Well, this half-truth serves erstwhile dictators who need to induce fear to gain compliance.  There were reasons for fear in late February and March of this year.  First, the virus protein was altered in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, from a corona (shaped) virus that existed in weird, ugly bats!  Few of us know much about bats in the first place, and most of us are a little fearful of them, thanks to various horror movies.  A wonderment for the average person was: “Who the Hell cares what kind of viruses exist in Chinese bats?”  Fair question.  It was totally rational to be afraid of the entry of a bat virus into humans, especially from such ugly creatures as Chinese horseshoe bats.  The researchers who first discovered the bat-source of the SARS-like novel coronavirus, were certainly frightened.

Another reason for fear, then, was China-caused rapid spread of the new virus around the world, especially in the middle East and Europe, areas where China had developed intensive trade relationships and to where Chinese personnel were traveling in large numbers.  Scary numbers of cases.  A third reason for fear… then, was that the U. S. was not sure what to do or how to do it to contain or prevent the disease, and all kinds of directives were being issued and soon abandoned in favor of other directives.  People, officials, with no medical background were creating public policy on the fly upon the advice of medicos who were often wrong.  But recommendations quickly became economic shutdown dictates.  Americans’ private properties were being stripped from them without compensation in the hopes that stopping commerce would stop the virus.

It certainly stopped commerce.

Oddly, maybe, the most Democrat-controlled jurisdictions have imposed the tightest restrictions on business.  Despite improving knowledge from Europe and Scandinavia, governors and mayors insisted on ever-tighter lockdowns.  Amazingly, State and Municipal employees didn’t lose their incomes, nor were they forced onto unemployment or furloughed or, simply, fired.  When a governor said “We’re all in this together,” he was really saying, “YOU’RE all in this together.  I and everyone else who is paid by the state, we’re pretty much divorced from your problems, especially if you lose your business or your job.  We will borrow some money – from YOU – to pretend to care about you today.”

So who is benefitting from tight, anti-business and anti-religious lockdowns?  Certainly not the people who own or work at those businesses, nor the ministers, priests, choir directors or secretaries who work at places of worship, certainly not the believers whose unfettered right to worship has been soundly fettered without debate or legislation, and certainly not all the people who depended upon those shuttered businesses for their daily living, health, recreation, library services or exercise routines.  So, who, exactly?

Is it all to keep healthy people from coming down with Covid?  Maybe… that’s what we are told to justify forcing everyone to wear masks when outdoors at pain of monetary fines and even apprehension should we ‘fail to follow the law.’  Except that it’s not a law, it’s a gubernatorial impulse or, sometimes worse, a mayoral one.  If asked, those worthies would declare adherence to “CDC” advice and the implied fulfillment of “science” because of that connection.  Of course there is no science that informs us of the efficacy of masks or other face coverings, although you’d think there must be because elected officials clearly care so much about saving lives.  Indeed, they care so much that they are willing to implore us to endure the discomfort of masks and, even better, to distrust anyone who isn’t wearing a mask.  In fact, we should no longer trust anyone to not be about to spray us with Covid-laden spittle.

Did you know that hospitals are rewarded, in a sense, by up to $25,000 for treating a Covid-19 patient who dies in the hospital?  That accident victim who died WITH Covid was worth $25 Grand if the right box was checked for C.O.D.  Follow the money for the outrageous total of Covid deaths.  China, our far-eastern friend who blessed the world with Covid-19, has 4.34 times as many people as the United States and about 5 times the population density.  Yet, miracle of miracles, the U.S. has THIRTY-SIX AND A HALF TIMES as many Covid deaths.  Ignorant governors… and malevolent ones, have been making rules to barely live by, based on BS statistics designed to hurt the President of the United States: an odd way to execute public policy.

Now the big battle is re-opening schools… because of the need to protect the children, don’t you see?  School-age children, say, 5 to 17 years, are so slightly impacted by Covid that it is nearly impossible to state their Covid death rate in terms of percentage: the decimal point is too many places to the left.  But despite the desire of most teachers to teach, their unions have hamstrung craven politicians into “hybrid” schooling (some education / some goofing off) for the Fall and beyond in some cases, or long delays in re-opening, as if they’d only just heard of Covid-19.  Teachers are all college educated and it would be reasonable to expect them to know and follow the latest approximations of “science” in judging the safety of schools reopening with real teachers and real students.  But, apparently not.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, not only did the teachers’ union force delays in reopening, they forced the county to prevent private schools  from reopening, as well, all of which, essentially, were prepared to open safely.  The county refused to even examine their reopening plans, citing the fact that public schools weren’t going to open, as if it mattered.  Private schools are generally smaller, more lightly staffed and better able to enforce social distancing and other rules, and, it seems, more committed to real education.

The more one sees the tactics of various “public” employee unions – particularly teachers’ unions, one sees that worries about Covid are largely political and financial.  Between home-schooling and private schools, the grand government school monopolies are threatened as never before, as is the hyper-sexualized, white evil oppression, bull-bleep they spend so much class time on as if educating.  The Lord works in mysterious ways.

What will come of nightly riots and mayhem in major cities?  Would the changes demanded by the anarchists and BLM Marxists make America stronger, fairer or more beautiful?  Not a chance.  If police departments closed down, incarcerations ended and white people gave up their homes to black screamers and haters, would the demands for the relinquishing of all white possessions end?  No.  Kow-towing to rioters or other thugs has never ended the thuggery… it simply increases the level of demands and changes the targets.  In fact, changing public policy on the terms of rioters  instead of on society’s carefully considered terms, is the stupidest path any responsible leader could follow.  The stupidest.

How is it that so many people are holding office at this moment whose decisions to respond to public mayhem are all the stupidest of available choices?  Have these mayors and governors always hated the United States or are they mere cowards?  We know how several District Attorneys got elected with the help of socialist money – anti-American money, but are there no “lawmakers” who can craft legislation that will provide for their removal if they fail to prosecute criminals?  Or even laws that require that EVERY case be brought to court even if unenthusiastically?  Or shall public safety and the fulfillment of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments be at the whim of a single person without constraint of law?

What do we actually believe about our civil rights?  It’s silly enough to wear masks outdoors, please don’t put on blinders, too.

Culture, Economics, Family, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility

So, is the cat dead?

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Even when the Governor escapes he won't know if he's dead or alive...

Every cloud has a silver lining, we tell ourselves.  We believe, or hope at least, that no matter how grim conditions may be, we will emerge from them to a new level of happiness, love or accomplishment.  We know – or believe – enough to sacrifice today and in this lifetime, to receive the rewards of a better life before we die… or afterwards.

So it must be with this God-forsaken imposition of leftist tyranny that politicians are blaming on “the coronavirus.”   Most of us have quickly, aggressively, agreed to forego our “unalienable rights” to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Most of us have agreed to be frightened by the dire descriptions of what is happening to a fast-shifting number or percentage of COVID-19-infected fellow citizens and to denizens of foreign countries.  In the span of 3 weeks or so Americans watched China (until the news was clamped down) Italy and Iran erupt with thousands of deaths from COVID-19.  Suddenly in early March, politicians and medical bureaucrats who days earlier had been telling Americans that they would not be very much impacted by the new coronavirus, were grimly commanding us to stay at home, stop intermingling with others, stop working or playing, and to obey, obey, obey in order to “flatten curves” and “save lives.”

It might have.  There really is no way to precisely state whether the curves “flattened” because of the lockdown.  It’s possible that the course of the infection rate (which is still not fully known) would have been about the same if people were given good advice and masks and told to stay out of work if exposed or symptomatic.  Unfortunately, locking down a whole city or state is something the true government types have dreamt of: stopping people from enjoying life unfairly, and enforcing the stoppage with police powers.  Oh! My! Gawd!  “I never realized how good this would truly feel,” hundreds of mayors and governors (may) have been overheard to say.  “My Poli-Sci professor tried to tell us but who could have imagined the glow?”

There are several collateral injuries that result from any brutal attack and the requisite stern defenses governments must mount on our behalf.  Businesses close down, for one, but, when you think about it, most of those were unfairly profitable, especially for the owners.  Lots of people lose their jobs, for another, but, when you think about it, a lot of them are church-goers and even Christians, so the damage isn’t as bad as it could have been.  If we put a stop to church-going altogether, no one will feel unfairly repressed.  There are more reports of domestic violence, but that’s a problem of degree, only.  Child abuse is also up, according to agencies that watch those things, but those kids were going to be abused at some point, anyway.  Let’s get the federal government to send out checks to everybody and they’ll all put up with the house-arrest that is so obviously necessary.

Still, we can’t let people stew over conditions for long periods.  We’ll have to add new policies and closures here and there to keep lock-down opponents off-balance.  We are saving lives, after all.

There are several silver linings, though, despite the multi-trillion-dollar costs (so far) and building conflict with Red China.  For one big thing, the utter inability for state governments in “progressive” states to do the right thing for even a large fraction of their populations, has been made glaringly clear.  Their citizens, tenuously holding the power of voting idiots out of office, should take note: big opportunity ahead.

The purposes of those at the federal level, both elected and appointed, come in two sets: elected and deep-state.  Elected officials have two goals: re-election and avoiding responsibility.  Deep state denizens have only one: staying in power.  Everything else is subordinate.  This should help explain why change can be excruciatingly slow or, about as often, way off-target… not off any target, just off our, citizens’  target.  Whatever politicians do is hitting, first, their personal targets as they become wealthy in office.

Power and re-election are drivers for state pols, too.  The most common end of legislative service is retirement at age.  Citizen-legislator is a mythical being from a long-ago time; today we have the inside-government “us” and the lesser, civilian “them.”  In any case, once a sweeping declaration of change is made, it must be defended and justified as the very best, life-saving decision that could have been made due to forces over which the deciding politician had no control.  Then, when the consequences appear to be going sideways, the same politician will defend and reinforce the underlying, out-of-control circumstances that forced the original decision.

In effect, then, regarding current political fears, it is Prudent to describe the problem as one of politicians building a box from which they cannot escape.  With haphazard statistics peppering them during January, February and into March, everyone in a decision-making position – president on down – was afraid to not shut things down.  “We must flatten the curve,” said the medical experts, “for if we don’t our hospitals will be overwhelmed and people will needlessly die… die…die.”  OMG!  The possibilities of politicians being blamed for something – being forced to take responsibility for something, anything – were growing to be a real crisis.

As each day passed and unfortunately ill-suited supply chains drew unending accusations, the future looked bleak.  Hot spots seemed to be simply precursors of what was waiting around the corner for every city and state.  Stormy skies for the Republic were forecast, minute by minute, to finally fall on our heads the day after tomorrow.  Things were worse than we thought and getting worse than that.

Quickly, private enterprise shifted manufacturing and supply chains to fill the gaps in equipment and personal protective equipment.  Hospital ships were deployed; ventilators found, refitted or newly manufactured.  Less than 3 weeks later there were too many ventilators and the emergency hospitals and ships were largely unused.  We’re told those successes are all due to stay-at-home orders and strictures on groups as small as, well, one.

The work of the healthcare “system” was and is remarkable as it dealt with an infectious disease not fully understood.  But understanding has developed quickly, as have testings that seek current infections, and past infections, more interestingly.  The folly of many policies and mandates intended to slow the infection rate, is becoming stark.

All incidents are anecdotes until they are added up.  People, especially blame-shedding politicians, can adhere to the “science” of mathematics while ducking responsibility simply by adding up certain incidents and not others.  Every “covid” death was not a covid death; every shutdown business was not about to cause increased infection if not shut down.  School-age children were neither at risk nor a risk for others.  Even public transportation turned out to not be a major source of cross-infections.

Still, shutdowns were not relaxed and even enhanced to varying degrees.  Governors and mayors were just beginning to flex their dictatorial muscles when pesky statistics began to intrude into the shutdown model.  Two things were never going to happen as a result: 1) Those elected executives would change their shutdown tactics to accommodate new facts; or, 2) Those same would admit they had been wrong about some of their policies.

In some states shutdown rules became ever stricter despite evidence they need never have been strict at all.  Besieged governors and even judges, appear to have reacted arbitrarily and personally to citizens demanding that the shutdowns be lifted, including arrests, lifting of licenses, incarceration and harassment.  Essentially none of those instances involved any provable health risk… not even suspected  health risk, the ostensible basis for the “rules.”  Americans should be alert to and instructed by these and hundreds of other examples: Our nation is no longer a nation of laws, but a serfdom of rules.  Rather than “We the people” ratifying shared moral codes of rights and wrongs, set in law, there are now, literally, tens of thousands of rules for what we sovereign citizens are allowed to do.  The solemn advisories that cause small and large “g” governors to promulgate their new rules do not come from US, but from unelected “experts” who self-declare their predictive expertise and carry impressive resume’s.

Some are, perhaps, experts in a field of study, even epidemiology, even in studies of contagions and how they spread in past, somewhat similar environments.  Our newest adversary, coronavirus-19, is not the same as earlier epidemics, it was not spread around the world in the same way, it has not mutated the same way, it has different symptoms, different impacts on different demographics, different gestation periods and different sensitivities to drugs and anti-viral chemicals.  But, they knew exactly what to do before all the statistics were collected and studies were underway.  Presumably these “scientists” would be poised to alter their predictions upon receipt of new facts and observations.  Oddly, however, in direct contravention of scientific method, they have tended to “double down” (a popular gambling term) on their first predictions, making ever more draconian recommendations DESPITE new data.  It is at this point that medical science became medical politics, or ideology.  Like true ideologues they had staked out their beliefs, not their science, and those positions would be defended… economies and lives be damned.

Dr. Fauci appears to be in this class of dictators.  In the span of a few days he switched from reassuring the public that the new coronavirus was not a major concern for Americans, to advising that the economy be shut down, gatherings prohibited and healthy citizens be confined.  Only he can tell us if any science was behind his first views of COVID-19; only he can tell us if any science is behind his current views.  Anyone, however, can tell that there is no science or even judgment behind his praise of W.H.O. director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a politician willing to cooperate with or promote some very sketchy other politicians in matters of public health – including those tied to the Chinese Communist Party.  Ol’ Tedros’ communist-inspired lying can be thanked for many thousands of deaths in the U. S. and around the world.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2020

The Prices of Freedom

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We're surely safe, now....

Our recent – and continuing – experiment with executive, unconstitutional tyranny in the name of public health, ought to wake up a nation that has been doing a poor job of conveying America’s exceptionalism and founding ideas.  At least two generations have matriculated with limited and essentially non-philosophical education about our own country’s history.  The unique responsibility that is part of and the foundation of  United States citizenship is barely mentioned, if not derogated, in government-monopoly “public” schools.

Being shut-down, locked-down, and pushed-around by a variety of state governments brings to mind the importance of our Constitution and our individual sovereignty as U.S. citizens – sovereignty that does NOT extend to non-citizens.  We are exceptional precisely because our form of government, and the IDEAS that define it are an exception to commonplace tyrannies that defined governance prior to the American Revolution.  Our nation is not an outgrowth of ethnicity or tribal history, but of a rare, exceptional set of ideas and philosophies.  One of these is that citizens are sovereign  and the federal government is formed by their consent, limited  by the Constitution that We the people created, ratified and (should) hold sacred.  If we only understood it!

It is hard to explain to Obama types who perceive the Constitution as flawed since it doesn’t list all the free stuff the federal government is obligated to give to people.  Those are they who bristle at the description, “free stuff.”  People will be paying taxes out the wazzoo for all the federal gifties, they note.

Still, as any veteran can tell us, there is a price to pay for freedom; we just don’t contemplate what that statement actually means.  A young-to-middlin’ man whom Prudence has known for his entire life, has grown to be a good observer of political fallacy, and he pointed out a good one regarding coronavirus tyranny: our freedom… our sovereign independence is not a gift from any government.  It is God-given, or, if you can’t stomach those concepts, it is a birthright if born under the Constitution, and precious.  Yet we wiil happily share it(!) with anyone who wishes to become a U. S. citizen.  That’s a gift that isn’t even offered anywhere else in the world, except somewhat in Canada and a couple other former dominions.

Freedom belongs  to the individual; it is personal, private property.  Unless we hurt others by committing crimes, no one can CONSTITUTIONALLY take our freedoms away.  Free citizens installed the constitution to limit the powers that the federal government THAT WE CREATED, could exercise on OUR behalf.  WE delineated the limits to government, not the government – not the congress – not any president except in the rare instances when the survival of the nation was threatened, war was declared by our supposed representatives, or when internal uprising threatened the nation.  Nowhere in its clarity and brevity is there a power granted by the people to restrict our inalienable rights in the event of  really bad influenza.  These bedrock concepts may sound quaint, but THEY ARE THE FUNDAMENTS of the United States of America.

So, since freedom of movement, assembly, religion, the redress of grievances, of speech and from unreasonable search and seizure belong to US, along with freedom from excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments, from being forced to quarter soldiers in our homes unless provided by law in times of war, from frivolous criminal charges except by a grand jury, from deprivation of life, liberty or property except by due process of law, and from having our property taken for public use without just compensation, they are OUR PROPERTY.  We also have the right to a speedy trial, and to confront witnesses against us and to have the assistance of counsel.  We may demand a trial by jury.  The enumeration of rights (protected by the Constitution) shall not be taken to mean that other rights not enumerated are not still retained by the people.  Do you grasp the enormity of those words and others in the Constitution?  WE are the top of the heap: NOT THE GOVERNMENT.

The Fifth Amendment enumerates our right to JUST COMPENSATION when our properties are TAKEN from us.  Where does this leave our small-g governors when they attempt to force us to stay home, to stop working, to stop going out without a face-mask, to stop assembling with whom we please, or to stop earning our lawful livings?  How can we be restricted from buying any lawful product from any lawful seller thereof?  Our RIGHTS are our PROPERTIES… inalienable except in the most dire circumstances.  Over the years courts and even the Supreme Court have established that there must exist some overarching PUBLIC PURPOSE for ANY restriction of citizens’ rights.

There are 1,000 definitions of “public purpose” for every 100 instances of the exercise of police power.  Since the government, AND THEREFORE THE POLICE, exists to serve and protect US, our property , our rights, our citizenship, in fact our sovereignty, public gatherings, riots, parades and demonstrations and other incidents that block commerce and free access to public works like streets and sidewalks which WE PAID FOR AND OWN, legally and only appropriately, may be restricted to serve a public purpose (that purpose being the defense of good order so that private rights and properties may be legally enjoyed), including commercial properties.  Public safety in terms of free and safe flow of traffic and commerce, is also a public purpose.

So where is the government when the “public purpose” umbrella has evaporated in the presence of new information, scientific and otherwise?  It is in the increasingly comfortable position of tyrant, decreeing and attempting to enforce restrictions on the sovereign rights of citizens for NO GOOD PUBLIC PURPOSE.  And here is where we are regarding restrictions on movement, assembly, commerce, travel and personal hygiene in the guise of imaginary “Law” that says no one may exit his or her domicile without wearing a face covering.  We need not get in to keeping 6 feet away from other people.  These restrictions on rights actually form an offer to take with just compensation, our personal properties: things we own without restriction.

So WE THE PEOPLE should issue letters of conditional acceptance to our governors and Mayors and selectmen and Aldermen and police officials if necessary, stating our CHARGE for the loss of freedoms and rights.  That is, “just compensation” is not a price set by government who desires to take these properties for NO compensation; no, it is a price that seems “just” to each of us based on our own free judgment of the importance and therefore value of specific ones of our rights.  It seems Prudent that wearing a silly mask that has neither medical nor public value, should cost $80.00 per day, no terms: payable upon receipt.  Restriction to one’s home is worth at least $336 per day, unless one has school-age children, which adds $121.77 per child.  Staying 6 feet away from others is worth $2.25 per foot, per hour times the number of people so distanced.  The federal magicians have already tried to pay us for our inherent right to work.  Freedom of Religion is worth a lot more than these tiny sums.

It’s a whole lot less costly than days in court with juries, which cases the state and municipalities will lose.

Culture, Economics, Education, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility

ALL AHEAD: LEFT!

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Even government has to employ the Constitution...

There’s a new economics in town.  It’s based on virus avoidance.  A majority of Americans have bought some, if not all the virus-avoidance products suddenly for sale.  Some of those are advertised as something the wise, concerned, empathetic and news-trusting person definitely should  have: things like toilet paper and sanitizing wipes, for example, or things like people-avoidance, face masks and fear.  When sales dropped a little, politicians got up on their pedestals and decreed that most of these products were now mandatory, while others, for some arcane, authoritarian reasons, were forbidden.

The latest viral threat has exposed a host of new sales experts, male and female.  Unlike the multitude of regulations these same, new sales reps have instituted to protect buyers of everything from prescriptions to orange juice and canned soup, there are provided no guidelines whereby the hoped-for… no, required  buyers of the new virus-avoidance products these abrupt sellers are peddling, can fairly judge which are good and wholesome and which are not.  Yet, purchase and swallow we do, lest we miss out on the greatest shared sacrifice of all time – the first to bring our nation to its knees.

There is no choice between bitter or sweet, it’s virtually all bitter, and since we are the tough, always successful American people, we join in the sacrifice to show just how patriotic we truly are.  There are even new badges of courage, so to speak, like face masks and oddly walking so as to avoid others, not to overlook cowering at home as one of our greatest strengths.  The only side-effect of the lately prescribed purchase we all must buy, is a new, nearly universal distrust of everyone else should we be threatened by their presence.  Since the FDA- and CDC-approved products are so new, no one knows if the side-effects are long-lasting or even permanent.  Small additional price to pay.

Those who are skeptical of our national reaction to our newly purchased fears, are perceived as barely deserving of the right to buy food, even less the right to buy toilet paper.  This is a great unifying moment.  Obviously it does make sense to wear a face mask of some sort when entering a market or hardware store, although, in a perverse way, it also seems Prudent not to do so, as wearing one indicates acquiescence to the miasma of dictates, pronouncements and unconstitutional separation from “inalienable rights” that hundreds of thousands died for prior.

Nascent socialists love a good crisis like this viral one.  Now, what they have dreamed of since entering their first poli-sci lecture or law class, and subsequent entry into “government” itself, there is presented a chance to change the world, re-order disorganized society, and to clear the path through the jungle of liberty that those sufficiently wise can follow to a brighter future.  Those who cannot share the vision of an orderly nation will need just a little coaxing to walk arm-in-arm with the wise followers… ahhmm, except walking arm-in-arm will be disallowed to prevent a “second wave” of coronavirus.  And, no hand-shaking or sharing others’ spaces, now deemed to be a 3, 4 or 5-foot circle according to the Ministry Of Social Distancing.

Exposure of the best and worst of federal regulation is one of the blatant results of dealing with COVID-19.  Evidently there was some concern among intelligence operatives back in November of 2019, that the rapidly spreading, perhaps new contagion, bore watching in the off-chance that it would spread outside of China.  Initially their concern was focused on problems for U. S. assets in South Asia.  Still, it wasn’t actionable: there was little hard information and it was wholly a Chinese problem.  It was good that our arcane intelligence caught wind of the problem, but anything further depended on the honesty of the Chinese Communists.  Well.

At some time after the problem surfaced, perhaps the beginning of December, the Chinese not only hid their unique problem, but allowed millions of people to leave Wuhan before they realized they had to lock the city and region down if there was any hope of containing the spread of this new disease.  With disinformation as its prime public function, the Chinese Communist Party argued against travel restrictions and coerced the UN’s W.H.O. to repeat their lies for 3 or 4 weeks.  First “it doesn’t spread from human to human,” as Chinese trade and technical personnel spread across the world carrying the new “smallpox” to the indigenous tribes of America, Italy, England, Spain, Germany and Iran, among many others.  No infected blankets – human-to-human works better than expected!

No one seems to want to consider that COVID-19 has damaged the world’s economies, including ours, on purpose.  “Oh, no!  No country would ever do that.  The Chinese are wonderful people.  This was an embarrassing mistake that China feels terrible about.”  Indeed, China feels SO badly that it has striven continuously to blame the United States for the disease.  The trusted professionals at the W.H.O that China controls, have done their best to reinforce Chinese proficiency at handling the virus, in the face of unending disinformation about the extent of COVID-19 in China, the brutality employed to contain it and about the tens of thousands of deaths that have happened.  While the world suffers the constant spread of this new virus, China has miraculously experienced the end of the spread to the point of virtually no new cases and business is up and running and kids are back in school.  Okaaayyy.  Ignore the western news people who have been kicked out of the country, China is the model to follow.  Can you say, “disinformation?”

Relative only to the United States, it has cost only about $10 Trillion in denied business and market wealth to fight the virus… so far.  That’s assumed to be a lot of “money,” but it’s not.  It is a Hell of a lot of obligation far into the future.  There was no money to borrow from the Federal Reserve; the FED didn’t have $2.2 Trillion.  What it does have is the right to create lendable “money” out of thin air, and charge Americans interest for it.  It’s a nice business to be in.  Having received the imaginary air-money from the consortium of private banks we like to call the Federal Reserve, the Federal government, all legislatively legal-like, deposited bits of it into millions of business and personal bank accounts to help us all “fight” the novel coronavirus that China sent us.  China’s model for supposedly containing and defeating the COVID-19 coronavirus, is the model most “Western” countries – ostensible democracies and republics – adopted, rather than the Swedish model of good sense and personal responsibility, without national business shutdowns, that is working about as well as the Chinese model of repression is working for the rest of us.

Measuring the astronomical and ongoing costs our fascist lockdowns of businesses and individuals are imposing, one could speculate that we could have posted two nurses and a personal assistant at the side of every vulnerable elderly person and otherwise medically weak person at a cost of about one-twentieth of that $10 Trillion.  A private chef could have prepared gourmet meals for each thrice daily and fluffed their pillows on demand. The rest of us could have gone about our business, using care and best practices to minimize infection.  One could observe that those who have imposed the shutdowns and stay-at-home orders – all in contravention of our Constitution – are enjoying it a little too much.

As in all matters of great moment and of life-and-death, literally, we are witness to tawdry congressional machinations.  Without hesitation certain key congressional figures have attempted to insert completely unrelated issues into “emergency” economic legislation rushed through to save the economy.  What constitutes “emergency” legislation for those on the left, includes having voters vote up to 45 days “early” and to vote by mail to “maintain social distancing.”  These are election-stealing tactics.  The left: socialists, liberals and our beloved Democrats, never relax in their battle to unseat conservatism and the strengths of tradition.  Every defeat of their radical (anti-traditional) plans is never accepted, but is a key to how to bring a different tactic to bear in the next battle to unseat a specific tradition.  The famous instruction to leftists is “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and “no” means simply, “later.”

Every aspect of traditional life – and belief – is naturally political to leftists in an environment of hateful anti-traditionalism.  COVID-19 is a political  matter on which sides must be taken and defined.  In some way the attack of this new scourge is not a common enemy all Americans should unite against.  No, it is an opportune moment to instill ever greater socialist plans and practices, virtually while people aren’t watching.  If a few dozens or hundreds of people die in the execution of socialist plans, that is a reasonable cost to install “equality” and to tear down the capitalist, unfair economics of the Constitution and of Christians.  China made the same calculation when the (perhaps) accidental release of COVID-19 presented an opportunity, as well.

As epidemiologists have grabbed the economy by the throat, the ostensible requirement of “social distancing” has extended to include everything from weddings to funerals, school classes and restaurants, most jobs and even walks in parks and on beaches, and, quite logically in the eyes of leftists and fascists, our new governors have prohibited Church services!  In a nation glued together by religious freedom and codified disestablishment, and built by believers in God, this is extraordinary.  This exposes the disdain that leftists hold for religious faith: religion is nothing more than social gathering and virtue-signaling such as the left understands all too well.  Amazingly, at the same time that Chinese Christians are risking imprisonment, if not their lives, to hold surreptitious prayer meetings, Americans, and more oddly, their pastors and priests, have acquiesced to the dictates of secular functionaries to avoid church services.  What if prayer works?

Secular leftists are laughing in their latte’s as they think they have proven the fallacy of religion.  Erstwhile Christians are congratulating themselves on being good rules-followers, not grasping the peril their meekness has placed them in.  Regardless of Constitutional guarantees, churches have shown that they will readily forego their faith and their rights when so directed by non-believers.  Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Nearly every religious tradition around the world includes some form of prayer in unison.  There is great effect from unified belief – it’s the strongest force on earth.  Are all churches agreeing that there is no one to hear their silly prayers?  Are Sunday services mere collection-plate convenience?  Good grief!  Prudence has seen prayer work in the physical world.  No pastor should fail to resist the attempt to squash this essential right – and duty.

Finally, it is hopeful that so many private efforts have sprung into being to supply medical equipment and help to other individuals.  Companies have changed course in matters of days to provide masks and ventilators and hand-sanitizer.  Remarkable organic chemists and biologists are testing, creating, and improving drug therapies and even potential vaccines to defeat COVID-19.  Americans, most especially those of us who have dealt with the risks of private life and economics, are generous, charitable people.  Even while unable to work and with their incomes limited or missing, Americans are being asked to donate and they do. 

The brunt of the multiple variations of shutdowns and lock-outs has been borne by private interests: individual workers and contractors, small and large businesses, and charities and non-profits to differing extents.  The pain has in no way impacted public employees economically.  Yes, first responders are working longer shifts – on overtime.  Teachers have had to learn (where union-willing) how to teach on-line.  Big public thinkers and planners have had to think and plan more than ever, but none has lost pay, benefits or pension.  Daily there are stories of private incidents of charity and outreach, some quite widespread as people contribute thanks to social media.  What Prudence has failed to observe are news reports of large-scale public-employee  charitable efforts, whether by bureaucrats or teachers or others, and maybe the reports have just been missed, somehow.  Are “we” all in this together or is it just “you,” the private, not yet socialized sector, who are all in this together?  God forbid.