4 Comments

That's an excellent quote. It is the fact that we can't have faith that shakes us.

Do I believe elected officials? That is not my default, though neither is disbelief. My default is skepticism because I think nearly all of them are first motivated by a wish to be re-elected, elected to a higher office, make more money or create a mythical legacy or (this is my favorite answer) all of the above. So, maybe they are telling the truth and maybe not. I do not believe the truth is their default and when they do speak the truth it is not for its own sake.

Do I believe non-elected officials? Much of the above applies, though I am less skeptical of this group.

What sources do I use to determine what is accurate? At this time, in the Covid context, I am most concerned by hospitalizations. Cases reported will include very minor cases. (Caveat: My son-in-law had a mild case of Covid in April 2020. He still has back and chest pains as a result, so even minor episodes can have long-term effects and should not be taken lightly.) High hospitalization rates lead to overcrowded conditions which can keep people from getting the attention they need, be it from Covid or non-Covid conditions. I don't think hospitalization rates are fabricated. I don't think stories of crowded or full ICUs are fabricated. (As with all conspiracies, consider how many people have to be in on the conspiracy for it to be one. You can't claim full or nearly-full ICUs and not have a hospital worker say No, that's not true.)

Likewise, I don't doubt the increasing number of cases and hospitalizations among students. Nor do I think it is a coincidence that those rates are rising as schools open.

Finally, when doctors and hospitals say they are full of non-vaccinated folks and even momentarily walk off the job to get attention to ask folks to vaccinate, I don't doubt them. I don't see any upside to hospital workers telling a story that it is worse than it is. They get paid, but won't be getting bonuses for telling people to get the vaccination so I don't apply the same skepticism to their voices. I can understand someone being skeptical of the pharma companies as they will make a lot of money. The ICU nurse and doctor don't and would prefer not to have to work under such conditions and, at worst, have to turn away patients in need of their care.

Expand full comment

The American people need to up their game, is all there is to it.

Forget all about goddamn party politics and elections and all that masquerade-ball farce.

You need to be sitting down with your kids and studying the Constitution together as a family activity. Then you can get started, behaving like citizens of a free republic ought to do what with all that freedom to, which is be skilled enough to out-lawyer any government agency and out-investigate any suspicious activity by government being passed off as real law enforcement, and set off shitstorms between all these brain-dead bureaucracies, and their parties, until whatever it is they have pointed at you self-destructs under the exces pressure of its own illegalities being brought into the open.

Read the First Amendment, for fuck's sake. You think those rights are just yours for the having, and you never need bother to learn the advanced skill sets required to keep government from robbing you of them?

Vigilance, people. Eternal self-respecting freedom-demanding vigilance, on your part one citizen household at a time as is your duty, and start issuing the orders with the precise laws right in hand, rather than making pathetic meek requests of these charlatans. Anybody on official payroll has you for an employer, and you have way the fuck more tools to use and advantages to hold over them, to fuck with them, than they do you.

But you do have to care enough about your own sacred liberties to even know that.

Government points its toys and experiments at you, and if you don't turn right around and face the people's worst enemy of all, which is the civil servant caste and the aristocratic patricianate who think they own everything they see, and point way more law back at them than they ever even dreamed you knew and that was why they were counting on conning you yet again,

then you only have yourselves to blame.

Illiteracy of the laws which govern government is freedom's worst hazard.

Cure it.

NOW.

Expand full comment

Most of my life has been spent in deep and continual distrust, for cause continually updated, in officialdom. I could not have been more than six or seven before I realized that pretty much anything out of anyone's mouth while on official payroll at any level was basically a pack of pants-on-fire shameless bullshit, by policy.

And, as a natural-born conservative so limited-government in my views as to border on anarchism, I had spent most of the first half-century of life since 1960 living in what is now known as Blue States.

I'd grown up in the old Jim Crow all-donkey Old South, moved to the union-mafia-Vatican colonies of the all-donkey northeast at eleven, and then into an utterly corrupted (down to the grade school level, all-donkey machine-Democrat radfem protest-generation California public education system of the mid-seventies, and those motherfuckers calling themselves 'public servants' had been lying to my face every goddamn day.

I knew what any real conservative knew in 1974, when that smooth-operating con man Nixon had finally got his comeuppance for his laughing conempt for the rule of law caught on tape and corroborated by dozens of witnesees before Congress, that if this elephantine Grand Ole Party had sunk so low since Eisenhower as to hitch its star to the likes of old Tricky Dick, then there was some terrible and tragic absolute disconnect between what the Republican Party said it stood for, and what it really does all day.

Propping up that half-assed actor of a B-movie cowboy-hero three presidents later, just confirmed my suspicions all the more.

Then his ex-CIA successor (actually the first known intelligence operative to become a head of state before Vladimir Putin, though Comrade Volodya had way more experience as a real-life spy than old 'read my lips' GHWB ever bothered to acquire as cosmetic head of a spy agency and state-within-a-state which certainly kept him in the dark about everything the boss didn't need to know....)

Then, I'm like, WTF is up with his little boy's face? Does he like study Pat Robertson video clips and then try to imitate that self-righteous grimace in front of the mirror? Ol' United We Stand Dubya may well have been the most profoundly stupid man ever to hold that office.

I'm not even gong to go into what an embarrassment and disgrace it was for the GOP to fall for that T-word asshole's long-con, when all they needed was somebody with a pulse to wipe the floor with a former first lady who was way too smart for herself, given how stupidly she insisted in behaving while she punted the only real chance she would ever have, bought and paid for by her husband to get her out of his face with her radfem glass-ceiling jealousy of being so powerful he cold take blow jobs in the Oval and deny it on TV.....

Get the fuck away from me, is about all I have to say to anyone, ANYONE, on official payroll.

If they start the fight, I finish it. Many notches on that tomahawk, and more to come.

Expand full comment