Category Archives: Family

THE INFLATION CHRONICLES

The Biden “administration” has done everything it could in 19 months to destroy the trajectory of the U. S. economy, and, possibly, U. S. permanence.  Above all, everyone is either helped or hurt by the big “bugaboo,” inflation.  Economists, pundits, commenters and news-readers galore, all have wise-sounding opinions, yet no one seems to know what inflation IS!

It seems Prudent to assume that some of them do, but the average person listening to any such is not going to find it out.  To a mouth, all say in so many, many words, that “inflation” is prices increasing.  Well, no it isn’t.  Inflation is inflation of the money “supply.”  And that isn’t even accurate; it’s inflation of available cash OR CAPITAL that is “liquid,” or lendable.  Capitalism and “inflation” go hand-in-hand to create prosperity for most people.

“Wait just a minute,” you’re thinking, “Inflation makes prices go up, and that’s bad, so it’s not helping MY prosperity.”  Actually, it has helped it – look at the riches and bounty we enjoy.  It’s a two-edged sword… like fire.  It can cook our food, keep us warm, run our engines or… burn the house down.  The key is keeping inflation where it runs the engine without burning down the house.  So, where does this wonderful inflation come from?

The simple answer is debt.  Our economy – even your personal economy – operates on a “futures” basis.  If you own your home you probably have a mortgage on it, which is a long-term debt, well into the future.  One of the quirks in our economy is that banks can legally loan out more “money” than they actually have on deposit.  It’s called “fractional reserve,” and it is about 14%.  In other words, among all the stored “savings” deposits and “performing loans” and temporary deposits, the “Bank” has an average number of dollars “in reserve,” at any given time.  If it amounts to a million dollars, our laws allow the bank to lend out up to $7 Million, round numbers, of which 6/7ths is, fundamentally, air.  So long as the honesty and ability to repay of most borrowers are intact, this is a safe system and the recipient of the check for the house you bought, accepts the dollars that were created to write it, as well as if he saw them peeled from a big fat roll of $100-dollar bills.

If the seller of the house also dealt with the same bank, his or her new deposit of, say, $400 thousand will, for a while, increase the average “reserve” the bank can lend seven times as much of.

Anyway, you commit to paying your mortgage for 20 or 30 years because the pain of losing your home is worse than the pain of making the payments.  Besides, you have a job, you’re productive, you’re helping to create profits somewhere – productive surplus, if you will.  It is reasonable that you will keep your promise to pay.  You have made your work valuable enough to produce some “productive surplus” for your own family.

Try to imagine where the construction industry and millions of jobs would be if there were no such thing as mortgages or construction loans.  But, if you’re worried about inflation, look at what you just did: you caused the inflation of the money supply by about $340,000!  Depending on the “velocity” of that money (through the economy), possibly even more than that.  But!  It’s OK.  You’re going to pay it down – or “back” – to the bank.  Owning that house will cause you to buy a bunch of other stuff that increases production (let’s hope, inside the U. S.), as well as future repairs and upgrades, and it will enable you to raise your children to become productive, too.

Transactions like these happen thousands of times a day, whether for homes, or cars, or work vehicles, trailer trucks and on and on.  Every loan creates some inflation, but not more than the “economy” will absorb, or, we might say, not more than the economy needs.

In the process of economic activity, wages, sales and so forth, governments collect taxes.  That is, BECAUSE THERE IS PRODUCTIVE SURPLUS in our economic activity, “we” can afford to pay taxes for those services and public works that individuals cannot provide for themselves.  Among these are public school facilities, police departments, fire departments, all the bureaucrats who are there to help US, the military, highway and roadway constructions, sewage treatment, water works and sewers, themselves.  All that stuff is paid for from productive surplus.  If kept in a rough balance, it all works together amazingly well as more people become productive and relatively financially independent, and benefiting in safety and economy from our shared public works.

How does it get out of balance?  Put most simply, if the money supply grows with no commensurate increase in production or productivity.  Take the example we’ve experienced recently where governments, based on perceived, raw, political advantage, decree that the “minimum wage” shall be $15.00 per hour.  A kid stuck at the fry station in a McDonald’s, making French fries for as many customers as desire some, gets a sudden, say, 20% pay increase.  He or she cannot fry more potatoes than before the raise, there are only so many orders for fries in a given day.  The added pay does not enable the fry-kid to encourage more people to buy fries than they used to buy before the change in pay.  Do you think the individual cost of an order of fries is going up?  Of course.  Or, is it possible that customers might wait a little longer to get their fries – and their whole orders, when it’s busier?  Perhaps the restaurant owner can’t afford to put two kids at the fry station in busy periods, now that the pay has increased arbitrarily.  The customer pays – or suffers – for this arbitrary work rule.

So, French fries go up in price, but is that “inflation?”  Well, no, obviously.  It’s an imposed change to the “CGS,” or Cost of Goods Sold.  How would inflation cause the price of French fries to go up?

Suppose that in a certain marketplace: your town, for example, there are both a lot of disposable income – free cash, as it were – and a limited supply of frozen French fries.  Potatoes are neither grown nor processed locally; they are transported some distance to the restaurants that want them in your town.  People in your town are in the habit of ordering fries with their burgers and sub sandwiches and business in fries is brisk.

Because the supply of spendable cash has been inflated (increased), people who might have held off adding fries to their sandwich orders, have started to order them more frequently, yet the total volume of fries coming from the processors can’t increase for quite a while, as the extra cash in everyone’s pocket makes it possible to afford the fries in other towns, as well, and the price of fries appears to be a bargain where they used to be a bit of a luxury.

Restaurants are finding that they’re “selling out” of fries and seeing customers go to another restaurant that still has some.  The owners get on the phone to order more fries but there aren’t any extra to be had.  Very quickly busier restaurants will offer a premium price to the distributor to get an extra case of frozen fries every day.  Realizing the nature of the increased demand, the distributor makes a deal with a potato processor who guarantees additional frozen fries, but at a higher wholesale price, too.

Pretty soon, the French fry supply problem is solved and people in your town can obtain all the fries they want, although each order costs a little more.  Lo, and Behold!  Inflation of the money supply changed demand patterns in the French fry marketplace.  This example is too simple, but also real.  During the engineered Covid crisis, the federal government wrote checks to millions of people that it/they, the federal, state and municipal governments had thrown out of work… billions and billions of dollars’ worth, but they were from accounts that had no actual – although highly hoped-for-future – money in them!  The checks were written from AIR.  Worse, they were doled out without regard to increasing productivity or other economic growth.  No new crops were planted, tended or harvested; no new mines were opened and their valuable minerals retrieved; no new inventions were spurred causing new manufacturing to commence.  But people accepted the ‘air-checks’ and spent them like money.  The money supply increased by over a Trillion Dollars while the supply of goods to be purchased actually went DOWN!

Prices started to go up until states started to re-open their businesses and let people go back to work.  The economy was roaring back when Biden was shoveled into office.  He promptly signed another Trillion-dollar “Covid Relief” bill that was no longer needed, indeed it extended payments to not work, and inflation really started shooting up.  The money supply – more air, but who’s counting – was now completely untethered from productivity, production or quantities of goods for sale.  In addition, there was an even larger incentive to not work.  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) started to take off in a serious way.

Because of “petro-dollars,” a sweetheart deal we made with Saudi Arabia (and, therefore, OPEC) when Nixon closed the gold window in the early ‘70’s, our federal spenders have developed a habit of calling everything a “crisis.”  It doesn’t have to be a war, a disaster, a plague… just a problem – like getting re-elected.  And, since there is (almost always) a terrible crisis, they can justify borrowing to resolve it.  So, they spend about one-third or more, MORE than the real money tax receipts that the federal government collects each year.  That missing third or 40% or so must be borrowed, largely adding to the “national debt.”

Now, if the extra federal spending were creating real wealth, which is what real investment does, the loans would steadily be repaid by the productive surplus the investments made possible.  Another way of saying it is that the DEBT would be DESTROYED.  That’s a good cycle: ideas vetted, loans obtained, practices, processes or new resources are implemented or obtained,* and the new productive surplus can be applied, in part, to “retire” the loan while net societal – or National – wealth increases.  Living standards improve and the repaid capital (the loan) becomes available for other real investments.

This neat system collapses when non-productive or ANTI-productive effects of the loan (deficit spending, it’s called) are mandated by law.  Most commonly, it collapses because the government borrows money to PAY FOR CURRENT EXPENSES, like welfare, interest on older loans, increasing the numbers of people employed in non-productive pursuits, and so forth.  A good example of hiring more people to be non-productive is part of the recently passed “Prosperity Reduction Act,” or, as it is officially mis-labeled, “The Inflation Reduction Act.”  Inside of this dishonest legislation is a provision to hire 87,000 more IRS agents, who will harass and impoverish productive people (tax-payers they are called) with absolutely no increase in productive surplus for anyone.  Oh, there’ll be some fat paychecks, but the net wealth of our economy will decline. 

The extra payroll dollars (among others in the bill) will inflate the money supply, however, and prices will move upward again as more cash chases fewer goods.

There are $600+Billion other dollars in the “bill” that also don’t represent any new production, productivity or wealth… they just lower the value of all the dollars floating around or in your wallet and retirement accounts.  Thanks, Brandon.

*Where are new resources “obtained?”  Well, there are only so many sources of new wealth that can add to an economy and total wealth of a nation.  The first is agriculture.  The elements of a crop of wheat or corn or soybeans or potatoes, are relatively inexpensive.  We count on God to provide the soil, the rain and sunlight… even the seeds, although humans have figured out how to augment everything but sunlight, and how to till the soil and harvest the crops with automated machinery, which has reduced the cost of labor in food production, as well.  Barring weather disasters and political interference, agriculture creates new wealth with every crop-cycle.  Many inventions and new mechanizations have been developed in response to the need for better food production as population has grown.

Coincident with expanding agriculture are various forms of mining, whether for coal, metals, oil, gypsum, quartz and dozens of other riches the earth provides.  From them have come thousands… no, Millions of products and inventions and improvements to standards of living, not least of which are pharmaceuticals and computer chips.  Virtually every one of these bits of progress and improvement has required some “financing,” or, as better known, debt.  Little by little every step has also “inflated” the money supply, but in rough equivalence to the new economic activity each has spurred.  A lot of that activity has been in the form of “fixed” assets, like buildings, roads, bridges and so forth.  At their creation, “fixed” expenditures DEFLATE the money supply, while enabling long-term economic benefit for lots of other activities, comforts or safety.

Somebody is going to paint those buildings.  We’re still driving across bridges that were built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930’s.

Some companies, banks, agencies, treasuries and individuals are benefitted very nicely by inflation, primarily the federal government.  They get to spend the money first.  Debts and other invoices the federal government owes are paid off with “cheaper” dollars.  Increased payrolls result in increased tax receipts.  Favored industries obtain contracts and payments to carry out policies incorporated in the inflationary legislation.  Millions of votes are purchased as loans are forgiven and exorbitant expenses incurred and paid off.  So, some benefit immediately and don’t begrudge deficit spending.  Others, tax-payers, not so much.

The actual net result is a reduction in both national and individual wealth for MOST people.  The few favored in the legislation get an artificial boost of income.  It’s all very unfair and sold to the American people as a universal “good.”  But, what does it have to do with “petro-dollars?”

Petro-dollars refers to our agreement with OPEC that oil would be traded only for dollars.  Every nation, basically, would need to always have some dollars on deposit – some even made the U. S. dollar a “reserve” currency – so that when they needed to buy oil they could.  If they sold oil, they accepted having billions of U. S. dollars on deposit.  Dollars could be exchanged for any other currency an “oil” nation needed to buy products from anyone.  Still, a global acceptance of dollars gave a golden “carte blanche” to ignorant congresspeople to borrow without any practical limit.  All they need is a “crisis.”

At the same time that President Biden has ruined relations with Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC, and attacked fossil-fuels in the United States, multiple countries like Russia, China, Brazil and Iran, are making moves to eliminate the dollar as the currency of trade in oil.  When they succeed – WHEN they succeed – countries will start dumping dollars.  They won’t have the impetus to buy stuff from the U. S. in order to use up the dollars they have had to hold.  Currency markets will turn upside down.

We will experience price increases that are unimaginable.  All the goods and goodies that we import now, will have to be paid for with more valuable currencies than U. S. dollars.  Exchange rates are going to punish the dollar when that day comes.  All the dollars that have been created in other countries and banks have been inflating the same “money supply” we talked about earlier.  Every dollar BILL is, in fact, a bill that must be paid with something valuable, not merely with more “Federal Reserve Notes.”  The mendacious debt that Congresses and administrations have racked up to the tune of almost $31 TRILLION, will complete its cycle of inflation, as well, while much of the trading world rejects payments in dollars, preferring gold, rubles, rials, or, most likely, yuan.  We have no concept of and no political ability to balance our books and bring the number of dollars floating around into alignment with some form of productive output from our economy.  Prices, for everything, will shoot up.

We can see the World Economic Forum, a group of self-selected control freaks by which real governments – including our own – are being influenced, is spreading the organic fertilizer of “nitrogen pollution,” since carbon-dioxide hasn’t scared enough people.  To limit “nitrogen” requires, in their view, reducing crop yields (by refraining from using chemical fertilizers) and going “organic.”  There is an agenda that is far removed from “climate” at work here.  What will we do when hyper-inflation is chasing reduced supplies of food around the world?  Or, when Chinese- and Bill Gates-owned land is held out from cultivation in our own country?  We need miss only ONE growing season to be faced with famine, which is very unpleasant, even here.

Looking at the effects of the “green” movement and the recent pandemic-inspired tyranny, and the so-called vaccines that resulted, the main effects, cumulatively, have been death and sterilization.  Sounds like population reduction, if one were being Prudent.  Lo, and behold!  Bill Gates and the people he hob-nobs with agree that there are too many people on Earth, by a factor of two-thirds or more!  Let’s “vaccinate” every person on the planet.  Inflation won’t be a problem, then.

SEX SELLS

It is becoming ever more clear that there are good, solid, society-strengthening, family-strengthening and tribe- or nation-strengthening reasons to NOT sink into hyper-sexuality and debauchery.

“Oh, come on, you damned Republican prude, sex is fun and ‘empowering’ for individuals that didn’t like themselves before learning to translate everything about life and economics into sexuality.  Don’t be such a Donnie Downer.”  And, if one steps back from identity politics far enough to see the forest AND the trees, that one can see the point being made in that reactive statement.

Now, now, now… calm down, there.  America and the West have tried a 60-year experiment in immorality and sexual depravity, all couched in terms of “love,” “freedom,” “rights,” and “health care.”  It has proven extremely confusing, mainly because all the things the experiment was supposed to make better, have proven to become worse.

Of course, the prime target of the acids produced (and “dropped”) by the experiment has been morality, primarily Christianity.  REGARDLESS of your opinion of “the Church” or any reformation thereof, or of “the Bible,” the rules for living contained in both Testaments, are far, far better than the pack of “rights” and re-defined words we attempt to operate society with, today.  There is plenty of evidence of the breakdown of “Western” civilization, here in 2022, not least of which is the installation of an American administration controlled by mostly traitors and liars, and the “root cause” of this breakdown is mirrored by, or caused by, the spread of hyper-sexuality, mainly, but not exclusively, in forms of “non-binary” expressions.

“Oh, you hateful homophobic trans-phobe!  You can’t say that, you hater.  Next you’ll say you’re opposed to gay marriage.  Hummphh!”

It is not Prudence’ intent to use broad-brush half, or even smaller fractional truths to express feelings about others’ partial truths.  She intends to make very pointed statements about them.  Some examples might help.

Let’s consider pornography.  No one talks about it anymore.  In the 1950’s and 60’s pornographic photography came of age, or so people thought, in part thanks to Polaroid technology whereby film negatives didn’t have to be shared with any third parties in order to be shareable.  Of course there were always hidden, secretive “foreign” magazines from “Sweden” or some other exotic place, but, for the most part, “porn” was under-the-counter or back-room stuff in sleazy joints that most honorable, upright citizens would never frequent.  And then came “Playboy.” 

With Playboy numerous barriers were breeched: a new envelope was created, as it were, and ever more prurient publications pushed to stretch it.  Our own Constitution was unprepared for it.  The First Amendment had to be applied in some way to keep porn under wraps… and it couldn’t.  Judges, themselves, couldn’t agree on what constituted pornography or obscenity.  Pictures, and full-color, high-definition videos, of course, of naked bodies in the midst of various activities, are “protected speech” according to clever attorneys and agreed-to by judges, including supreme court justices.  Somewhere along the line, unlike the strict definitions of words usually applied to the Constitution, “speech” has been stretched to include “expression” which is automatically stretched to include bodily movement and exposure, all sorts of cursing and verbal attack.  One can almost hear the arguments.

“Freedom of Speech” now means any form of observable or audible activity detectable by another.  So, what, you ask?  Well, how about skewing life and sexuality toward unreality?  Do you not see the damage to marriage, families and morality?  And, now that what used to be hidden in various ways is quite public (any “Gay Pride parade), in movies and on television and a raft of advertising campaigns, can we even define morality?

“Morality?” you scream… “You mean that Christianity stuff?  Separation of church and state, pal!”  Hyper-sexuality has become the most effective weapon against true religion, most particularly, Christianity.  Just count the rainbow flags and laws that are closing in on what pastors and priest can even SAY within the liturgy.  What good has over-sexualizing everything from elementary school to church services actually done for America?

“Well, we can have more and innovative forms of sexual pleasure, so there… besides, it’s a free country and she can always have an abortion if something happens.”  Something.  And, it makes health care busier.

Let’s consider another example: the “trans-gender explosion.”

Hyper-sex has become a tool of the left – perhaps it always was.  We can define the left as always attempting to erode freedom and responsibility, turning both over to some form of tyranny, camouflaged or not.  Federalizing every personal unhappiness is a clear marker, making tyranny stronger and individuals weaker.  Ultimately, spirituality and religion are weakened or lost altogether, as we are experiencing, now.  Back to “trans.”

Public schools, so-called, are increasingly federal, government schools, with “the public,” whose offspring are the reasons for their and their teaching staffs’ existence, increasingly excluded from participation or influence.   Children, from the age of 5, and even earlier in “pre-schools,” are carefully prepared to distrust their parents, prepared to ignore their own realities, like physical features and even names, IN SCHOOL!  Teachers, to whom the kiddos are entrusted for 3, 4, 5, 6 hours a day and more, and who are clear authority figures and sources of wisdom – which every child is attempting to gain – are spending less time educating the kids in preparation for adulthood, and more time guiding, or grooming them, for early-onset sexual experimentation and experience.  “Do you feel like a boy or a girl, today?”

“You can feel like both, if you want.  We’ll call you by a name you like better and we’ll use the pronouns that fit how you feel.”

“Don’t tell your parents about your new name; they’ll be mad at you.  You can change into different clothes when you get to school – to match your new name.  It will be our secret.”

Can you imagine such conversations? … from TEACHERS?  These are your tax dollars at work.  When the kids are older, the boys are taught how to tuck their penises into certain underwear so that they’ll look like girls in their underpants rather than boys.  What the Hell do “underpants appearances” have to do with school?

Girls are taught to bind their breasts so they’ll look more like boys.  Both are offered drugs to prevent development in puberty, risking permanent physical damage and developmental retardation and likely sterility.  Is that the point?  To prevent more children?  Or is it simply, and cruelly, designed to dissolve tradition and normalcy and family bonds?

Who, or what “institution” benefits from the breakdown of chastity?  Casting about in all directions reveals only a single beneficiary: government… and Satan, one might say, often indistinguishable.  And as it expands, it is not a government of benign partnership in the success of its citizens; it is a government that almost automatically divides its population against one another, increasing dependence upon… you guessed it, not freedom, but increasingly tyrannical government.

Government of, by and for the government.  87,000 new, armed, IRS agents will do that.  None of their purpose is to enhance freedom – it’s to vacuum money from we the serfs.

Interestingly, the strongest political force against this foul creep of foul creeps, is parents, fighting to keep their families intact and their children as pure as possible. 

Why the hyper-sexualization of kids, though?  There is an overarching control-meme pushing otherwise professional and ostensibly educated people to adopt Critical Gender and Race theories.  We can encapsulate it with the term, “ideology,” but that’s the same charge these groomers use against religion: ideology, a belief system without empirical proof.  And, they are the first to shout the loudest about “impose your religious mumbo-jumbo on my body…”  Yet, the only “proof” that has emitted from Critical Gender Theory is the destruction of lives, families, suicides and lifelong regrets in all but the rarest of cases.  And WE’RE the haters?

Dear friends, we are fighting the Anti-Christ, pure Marxism.  Marx, who believed in God, believed also that he would go to Hell for his philosophies.  He knew what he was doing and advocating.  We need to know, also, and reverse the tide on Marxist hatred that seems to have infected much of our American governance.  Those who are its advocates have adopted the anti-life, anti-freedom philosophies for the crassest, crappiest political advantage and wealth.  For shame.

FROM ISSUES TO CRISES

Despite Prudence’ writings over the past 8 years, the nation has not adjusted to the models of governance and behavior she has carefully laid out.  Upon the election of the odd Joe Biden and his basically anti-American administration, irritating, family and society-weakening tendencies have become policies, however illegitimately.  Now, they’re crises – crises that threaten the survival of our nation and of Freedom, itself.  Like the heart of Socialism in every sense, it derives from the avoidance of responsibility.

People say things like, “it’s a new day,” or “Times have changed.”  Except “times” haven’t changed, people have.  They’ve – we’ve – been taught new ideas to believe, habits to adopt, pleasures to revel in.  We can look to a sudden change upon the murder of President John Kennedy.  Most likely, the purpose of that assassination was political, not cultural.  Kennedy had created powerful personal and political enemies.  The abrupt change in culture and morals was an inadvertent one.  Lyndon Johnson became president, federal civil rights legislation moved to center stage, for right reasons, but its adoption was made possible by the crassest political calculations.  Inadvertently, for some but not all, the Civil Rights bill shifted morality into the metastasizing businesses of the federal administrative state and the court, where it has become enforced amorality. 

Prior to the ‘60s, change in living standards and integration was happening due to improvements in individual beliefs in better moral codes… not fast enough, by a long shot, but improvement and progress were being made.  The Civil Rights Act and the movement that brought it to fruition, inadvertently changed the nature of federal moral enforcement, even as it made long-overdue corrections to discrimination and segregation.  Part of the federal “corrections” included elements of the “Great Society,” which federalized welfare and began the application of laws differently for different groups.  This process, in all of its corrupt and socialist pieces, has rendered the federal government a soft tyrant which is hardening daily, while providing $Trillions of support for sub-tyrannies throughout the administrative state, particularly in Education.

Under the Constitution, the only moral adjustments can and should be made through equal justice: Equal protection under the law / equal application of the law.  That canary escaped with the passage of the Great Society.  Otherwise, our system works only if the vast majority of our citizens and residents share basic morals and mores, a claim that can no longer be made.  Every institution that could reinforce the moral strength of our people, including schools and churches, are either hell-bent in the opposite direction, or bending a knee to popular immorality.  For shame.

Freedom isn’t freedom without responsibility, it’s mere licentiousness.  As responsibility began evaporating in the 1960’s, leftists accelerated, as part of civil rights and the Great society, their domination of public education and colleges of education, themselves.  Like Mao’s “Long March,” it has taken decades – well-paid decades – to convert the role of education from conveyance of language, culture, skills, morals and history to our youth, to one of separation by race, class and, incredibly, gender.  Everything happening fulfills the Communist Manifesto: separation from God and from Responsibility.

Churches and liturgies have proven to be much weaker than the years of bygone sacrifices to hold to and establish those faith communities would indicate.  Just count the rainbow flags that some churches think override the teachings that brought them this far.  They are proving every day that it is nearly impossible to convince others of ideas you, yourself, don’t believe.  Simple economics can’t take the place of shared moral goodness.

America has been under moral attack for 60 years at a higher intensity than during its first 170 years.  As the lessons of Genesis make clear, God’s Word (or, if you find that term more offensive than child abuse) moral truths, are always under attack here on Earth.  Christianity has long been the primary target of such opposition, both from within and without.

For centuries those attacks tended to fail because the engine of responsibility kept working.  People still, for the most part, paid the price for their own follies and failures.  That is, until socialism replaced monarchy.  Evil men – almost always men – grasped socialist ideas as a better way to control nations, economies and armies, but they ultimately fell: their bases were evil and so counter to human nature that they became insane.  There has never been a government that created for itself political defenses that not only protected amorality and immorality, but learned to erode morality and, specifically, responsibility by individuals.  Not until the U. S. federal (and state) administrative states.  They’ve made a lot of “progress,” but they are “Progressives” by their own description.  It has taken 60 years of “re-education” to bring us to an America facing the corrosive issues we do today.

What are the parameters of responsibility in matters of conception, pregnancy, abortion and birth?

Since the ‘60s we have replaced marriage as the cultural norm, with contraception, abortion, “hooking up,” and fatherless children.  Responsibility has shifted to federal and state welfare programs.  Women have become convinced that they need not choose a decent, committed and loving man who will provide for his family and children, and who will be in their lives through puberty and into adulthood – and this all before having sex!  All they need is the sperm… and other men when they feel like it.  It is the destruction of the American family and of children – especially boys: our vote-buying tax dollars of destruction, at work.

Along with hyper-sexualization of grade school children, lewd “Pride” parades and filth in school libraries, the left appears to be obsessed with fornication for “all genders.”  To Democrats and other anti-Christian groups, fornication is a “right” as important to freedom as the First Amendment and all the rest.  Except, without responsibility, it’s not a freedom at all.  Enter abortion “rights.”  Except abortion never was a “right,” per se; democratic decisioning at the state level is the “right” our Constitution guarantees.

What are the parameters of responsibility in matters of guns, ownership, self-defense and crime?

Gun owners quote the phrase, “… the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  It is part of the Second Amendment.  Some like to ignore the stuff about the “A well regulated Militia…”  But, as they may also choose to ignore, the amendment goes on to qualify the concept of a “militia,” as follows: “… being necessary to the security of a free State, …”  Above all, the Bill of Rights amendments and their wordings are intensely Prudent in their purposes of preventing a tyrannical central government.  Guaranteeing individual armament is crucial to that purpose.  Clearly, by simple inference, mindful of why the Constitution was drafted and mindful of the horrendous sacrifices needed to permit its creation, is it not obvious that arming the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT had nothing whatsoever to do with the second amendment?

The only “militias” in the new nation’s experience were those formed by local communities and others to fight off the central government, perceived to be tyrannical toward the colonies.  This aspect is never, ever acknowledged by that same federal government.  Yes, gun ownership is crucial to individual self-defense, which that same federal – and some states’ – governments appear to discourage, if not deny, to its citizens, even as those governments purposely abdicate their contracted role of public safety.  Had the British monarch established today’s same failed public policies, the justification for overturning his authority would have been far more popular.

There is a high expectation of responsibility for Constitutionally legal gun owners.  As a definable demographic, legal gun owners are the least source of crime and, by far, the least source of crimes involving firearms.  Yet this same group is always the target for restriction whenever a mentally or criminally defective person commits a “mass” shooting.  Individual shootings and murders by gang members and drug dealers are of no particular concern to those who attack the rights of legal gun owners.

Maybe the concept of “militia” for legal gun owners is one that should be developed – not by any government, but by gun owners, themselves.  “Whoa,” you might be saying.  “That sounds like a mechanism for insurrection.”

Well, it’s not, but that threat should ALWAYS be on the mind of the Executive departments, and on the minds of voters.  Sadly, and our own faults, the Congress should have it at top of mind, as well.  Americans have the RIGHT to replace a tyrannical government with a representative one.  One bright light – President Biden – during a press conference on gun control, uttered these non-sequiturs:

 
“Those who say the blood of lib- — ‘the blood of patriots,’ you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

If these words had been uttered by someone who knew what he were talking about, they’d be chilling to Americans…  perhaps, upon reflection, they are.  That bozo is President.  But the concept of “militia” is not far-fetched.  Certainly it is not a federal force, nor should it be funded federally.  “Militias” should be local, and the more local the better.  In the most Prudent view, those gun owners who choose to carry concealed could be part of an anonymous police-trained force that has been earlier referenced as “Guardians.”  (See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/30/the-guardian-program/) These same would be the nucleus of local militias.  Leadership of each jurisdiction’s militia would be chosen by election within the membership, and thereby granted officers’ titles.

The nature of “Militia,” Constitutionally, is inherently anti-federal.  No wonder this aspect of the Second Amendment is never discussed.  “Nuclear weapons,” indeed.  At the time of its adoption, the concept of “Militia” was understood as the forerunners of the Continental Army ultimately led by George Washington, named a General by the Continental Congress.  To make the revolution work required the establishment of a governing body separate from the King and his governors and troops.  It was all extra-legal and deemed illegal by the Crown.  Militias were already fighting the Redcoats by the time the Continental Congress got down to the business of revolutionary government.

Americans are so reliant upon a steady and dependable government in Washington, that we find it hard to conceive of an autonomous civilian militia, yet that is precisely what the framers were talking about.  The colonies had just fought off a tyrant and the framers were determined that we be just as prepared to fight off another, should the tyranny arise.  There existed very little affinity for a central government because of the tendency toward tyranny by virtually all such entities.  The ability of citizens to check the power of government provided all the justification needed for a Second Amendment.  Armed crime in the streets was practically non-existent in 1789, so that wasn’t the reason for it; hunting was so crucial to provisioning of food and even clothing, that no one had to “allow” for it in the Constitution.  What was crucial was preventing another tyranny from replacing the British Crown.  The twenty-seven words of the Second Amendment guaranteed the ability of citizens to replace a tyrannical central government, and Ratification was impossible without it.

Today, unfortunately, discussion of the true reason for the 2nd Amendment brings forth accusations of sedition and insurrection, “fringe” white-supremacist grouping, and religious fundamentalism.  Yet, it is the Constitution we have and that forms us, even now.

To the “left,” constitutionalism is suspect in all iterations.  It challenges and exposes the sanctity of the STATE for the hollow proto-tyranny towards which it constantly slithers.  The “establishment,” nearly as tyrannical as it could be – economically, morally, politically – is directly threatened by the Constitution, as are all tyrants, everywhere.  Our own proto-tyrants fight to make the U. S. as much like every other nation as they can, while patriots recognize and try to enhance the exceptional nature of our constitutional Republic.  “America first” sends chills down the spines of the permanently re-elected swine that wallow for decades at a time in the halls of Congress. 

Americans have unique responsibilities, including defense and preservation of the Constitution; it is not the task of elected people, specifically, but of THE PEOPLE.  The Constitution came not from government, but from “We, the People…”  WE ordained it, which is that we gave it life.  WE ratified it, but only when the Bill of Rights was appended to it, which is that we entered into a covenant  with all who forever after held office upon swearing to Preserve and Defend it – the Presidents merely a handful of those.  The ultimate defense and execution of the Constitution is our business: the People’s.  We are obligated to preserve it, defend it and live according to its rights and responsibilities on behalf of every American citizen, now and forever after, as well as on behalf of every nation and people, who depend upon the United States to stand firmly against globalism, socialism and communism… and dishonesty.  Let’s get busy.

GUNS, BULLETS, PEOPLE AND POLICY

PARKLAND, FL – FEBRUARY 18: Shari Unger, Melissa Goldsmith and Giulianna Cerbono
(L-R) hug each other as they visit a makeshift memorial setup in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Facts are part of the problems that must be solved to prevent “school shootings.”  Everyone who is distraught about yet another mass murder of our most innocent and, in every case, unprotected children, has facts about the incident, about other, similar incidents, perhaps about certain guns or numbers of bullets in a clip, and about what various public or political leaders have said about the same subjects.  Facts, however, are often mere data-points and not necessarily good anchors for solutions or even “truths.”  Those require judgment, balance, cool reasoning and imagination.

For example, we have learned that Salvador Ramos, the sick, troubled 18-year-old who had considered, if not planned, to shoot up a school for at least FOUR YEARS, had managed to buy two AR-15 model rifles and more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition.  Those are facts but they don’t lead us to any solution.  Some have said, in effect, “He should never have been able to buy those items!”  They are absolutely right, but why?  Because no one should be able to buy them?  It is a Constitutionally protected right; do we throw out our right to self-protection because a crazed teenager committed a terrible crime?  Some believe that removing the rights of law-abiding Americans IS a solution.  It’s not that clear.

Ramos was known to be disturbed and dangerous for at least 4 years.  He was arrested and held for mental evaluation at age 14.  Nothing was placed in his record.  Four years later he appeared to be a legal 18-year-old ADULT when he went to buy a gun, BUT HE SHOULD NOT HAVE appeared so!  One has to ask why we have background checks if no data is going to be added to that background?  Legal, licensed gun owners are fully in favor of realistic registration and licensing… not to punish gun dealers, but to keep guns out of the hands of people too unbalanced to handle the responsibility of gun ownership.  If regulations are not designed to assess responsibility and balance in individuals, then they will likely reduce freedom and rights for honest citizens, which is not the covenant the Constitution is based upon.

We could list all the mistakes made on the day of the event in Uvalde, but few will listen because they already “know” some un-Constitutional restrictions are the “real” answer.

Here’s another set of facts: somewhere between 600,000 and 2 Million times a year (fairly steady data over the past 20 or more years, including studies by beloved, official agencies), private gun-owners stop or prevent crimes, almost always without actually shooting a gun.  Even if it were only 1,000,000 times a year, that’s an average of 2,740 incidents a DAY that a criminal act is prevented or interrupted before police could arrive on scene.  It likely prevents several hundred other crimes that would be perpetrated had the “perp” succeeded in the interrupted one.  Civil society would be almost impossible without private, legal gun ownership.

In fact, legal gun owners – MOST ESPECIALLY NRA MEMBERS – are the least likely demographic to commit crimes in the United States!  Why is the NRA hated and vilified by so many?  Perhaps it’s because they do not compromise on the Constitution, whereas one political party, and politicians individually, are constantly trying to soften the restrictions placed on them by the Constitution… especially on the Left.  One can look not so far back in history to see that authoritarians, dictators, fascists and Communists consistently move to disarm their populations.   Why are America’s “leaders” always trying to do the same?  Perhaps they dream of leaving the home of freedom and its massive responsibility, and joining the club of dominance, repression and never having to answer to anyone or for anything.

A known screwball, virtually unchallenged by those well-paid and trained to challenge and STOP nuts like him, is allowed into a “gun-free” school where, again, he is not challenged for an HOUR or more, during which he completes the murder of 19 children and two teachers.  Before the little bodies have cooled off, leftists began clamoring to take guns away from honest citizen-gun-owners, especially if they are members of the NRA!  It makes only twisted, leftist sense while offering no solution to mass shootings.  Yet anyone who tries to point out all the failures of existing gun laws or of police agencies is vilified and accused of “having blood on (your) hands.”  What rot.

No gun, hand or long, has ever shot a bullet by itself, but people who are the most ignorant about guns have labeled the scary-looking ones as “assault” rifles.  Somehow, the scarier the appearance of the rifle the more likely it is to have its own intentions.  Augmenting the intentions of the shapes, springs, nuts and bolts of a rifle are the declarations of the frightened that “no one needs a rifle that can shoot 10, or 20 or 30 bullets without reloading.”  Alternatively, those scared or angered by the shape of rifles climb a little higher upon their dudgeon, claiming that, “no one should be hunting a deer by spraying it with bullets from an assault rifle.”  Finally, something that has a kernel of truth, although it’s not the argument that will expose a solution to the vulnerability of school children.

Prudence’ task is not to defend AR-15’s or any other legal weapon; the purpose at hand is to figure out how to keep bullets fired from ANY weapon from traveling toward a child, in school or anywhere else.  This is the point, is it not?

First, without destroying any part of the Constitution, let’s “harden” the schools, themselves.  Make it a rational process to get into school buildings, and have an armed guard at the point of entry as children arrive and leave.  Have facial recognition systems that identify any adults who may be connected to a student, there.  Have metal screens that can block doors and windows by remote control, and panic buttons that start recordings of every hallway, office and classroom, as well as immediate surroundings, as they summon police electronically.  Along with this there should be at least a handful of staff who are exceptionally trained to fire back at shooters with AR-15-type weapons that are locked in a gun safe or safes inside the school.  Schools would become very UN-inviting targets, rather than corrals for “sitting ducks” as they now are.

All of these steps only apply where people who think children are entitled to grow up, live.  They aren’t designed to help anyone’s re-election.

What about “common-sense gun laws?”  Apparently, there aren’t any since all of those proposed don’t add to anyone’s safety.  But there are rational, Constitutional regulations that increase both freedom and public safety, and they should be employed before anyone loses his or her unalienable rights.  Here are a few:

First, teach children about guns, safe handling, the law, and responsibility.  We seem Hell-bent on teaching kids how to have sex, with NO responsibility, while non-marital sex ruins more lives than guns each year – many time over.  Prudence would start gun clubs and teams around the 7th or 8th grades, with severe consequences for irresponsible handling of any firearm, even to the point of delaying the age at which a person can legally buy a gun or be licensed, should he or she not take school gun courses seriously.  Such training and practice would also reveal certain psychological problems or tendencies around guns that could bring useful counseling into the picture.  It would also prepare youth for later military acceptance should they choose that form of service or career.

Firearm skills can be the basis for healthy competition just as golf, tennis or basketball skills are.  Sharp-shooting is hard.  Learning the mechanisms, maintenance and proper handling of a weapon is no more likely to turn a teen toward murder than learning how to cook with sharp knives, hot oil or heavy frying pans.  But it will reveal tendencies to ignore safety and propriety and some other reasons for denying or delaying later gun ownership.  It is infinitely safer than school-age sexual experimentation.  Being taught to be afraid of guns is both illogical and immature.  Guns are tools, in a sense, like baseball bats.  They can’t shoot themselves any more than a bat will hit a pitched ball by itself.  They should be learned and understood: it’s part of growing up in America.  After learning about them one isn’t forced to own or deal with them later in life; he or she should know the rights and responsibilities that connect to guns… it’s part of the Constitution, after all.

We all should fear the warped intentions of the few who are willing to commit gun-shot murder, itself, or to enforce surrender by the victims of other crimes.  Many of these intentions can be discerned well in advance of the commission of criminal acts, including school shootings.  Whether in Newtown, Connecticut (Sandy Hook School), Parkland, Florida (Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School), Uvalde, Texas (Robb Elementary School), or even in Littleton, Colorado (Columbine High School) and elsewhere, the troubled mental and emotional states of the perpetrators was well-known to many, sometimes for months or years.  Parents knew, school officials knew, fellow students knew.  In some cases, police, mental health services or agencies, even the F.B.I.(!) knew of threats to “shoot up” a school and did nothing or blame some bureaucratic error for doing nothing in time to stop the impending murders.  To solve this problem, the Biden administration and other dim bulbs want to take away legal weapons owned by law-abiding, stable citizens.  That’ll work.

Another approach consists of “Red Flag” laws, where guns might be removed from people who appear to be unstable in some way, or criminally inclined.  A strip-mine dump-truck could fit through that legal loophole as currently proposed.  But maybe a form of pre-emption would be Prudent; maybe clear heads could craft laws that preserve due process and the Constitution while minimizing the likelihood of future crimes.  Instead of punishing people for their political views by accusing broad groups of Americans of some “ism” or other, observations of aberrant tendencies could be acted upon in special, secret hearings that won’t destroy suspects’ reputations.  Would this mean executing an arrest warrant?  Not necessarily.

What if a plain-clothes officer arrived at a residence to interview the person named – what sort of document would he or she have that might convince the resident to allow entry?  Could it be created and presented without creating a permanent “black mark” on a suspect’s “record?”  Could the “accuser,” or, at least, suspicious observer, remain anonymous throughout the process to avoid retribution?  What about when the suspicious observer is a member of the suspect’s household?  Will the revelation of the suspicions aggravate family tensions?  These are all factors that must be dealt with before police legally try to take guns away from a licensed owner.

Perhaps gun training in school would help create a profile that would enhance the licensing process for certain individuals, keeping guns away from potentially unstable young adults.  We know the profile of instability; couldn’t we be just a little more careful in the presence of that profile?  Even Prudence would agree to some limits.  Why is the “solution” proffered by leftists ALWAYS confiscation and banning?

One of the “commonsense,” but dopey ideas that is often mentioned on the left, is some form of personalized connection to one’s firearm.  That is, a fingerprint or palm-print has to match before the gun is operable.  This is so impractical, especially at times of emergency, that it literally negates gun ownership for any of those one-to-two-Million prevented or interrupted crimes each year.

However, as is popular for certain cars, the gun could be rendered usable only in proximity to a key-fob type, RFID device.  Even if stolen, the gun would not be usable without gunsmithing work.  The proximity could be so localized that children handling the gun would be prevented from accidental wounding.

It seems obvious that “protecting children” is not the purpose of Democrat-proposed “commonsense gun laws.”  Protecting children could start in any urban ghetto by enforcing mandatory sentencing for illegal gun use or possession.  Hundreds of children, mostly teenagers, kill one another with illegally possessed AND used guns, primarily handguns.  If arrested, so-called “gun charges” are routinely plead down specifically to avoid incarceration, which is so unfair if a perpetrator’s skin is brown.  Disproportionate impact.

By the same token, they could protect kids who are struggling to be born… if they cared about children.  There’s certainly disproportionate impact on unborn babies with brown skin.  But those killings aren’t murders – killings with guns are.  Yet, they continue, despite all gun laws to the contrary.

Are we interested in preventing school shootings?  Protecting our children from sexual abuse in grade school?  Protecting our children long enough to be born?  How are the children, anyway?

Belief, Reality and Death

Says it all…

Life can be much more uncomfortable for any group or faction, than its members, literally, never planned for, should the motivating ideologies that have activated the group politically, emotionally or intellectually be exposed as, essentially, incorrect.  It is very upsetting, and more so if you are in the subset of that faction that is the last to realize that your beliefs really can’t apply to reality any longer.  Those so impacted are quite likely to strike out against those who knew of the wrongness of the formers’ beliefs well in advance of the “new” awareness of those upset.  In effect, a larger and larger majority of society appear to be becoming enemies of the newly “awakened” – a most unsettling environment.

This shift in “truths” can affect the powerful as well as the marginal.  For those with political power, the reaction seems never to be an adjustment in action or belief, no admissions of error.  Rather, the reaction is likely to be what is called “doubling down” on the old beliefs and supporting actions.  To a degree, we can see this reaction in Congress, most particularly within and around the so-called “January Sixth Committee,” which has as its main purpose the proving of “White Supremacy” and “domestic terrorism” as the prime motivators of anyone who ever supported Donald Trump.  As expected, evidence of the opposite being true is routinely ignored or denigrated as simply part of the “big lie” that the ever-smaller sub-group is sacrificing so mightily to expose.  This concentrated cabal remains certain that all Americans will embrace their sacrifice once that premise is “proven.”

For many, the foolishness embodied in the January Sixth committee barely registers as a problem worthy of Congress’ attention, which helps to show the falseness of the premise noted above.  The shrinking inner group of alternate believers seems to be more determined than ever to prove their case.  Should that fail, hatred of the alternate believers will be the irreducible collapse of their dimming star: there will be no supernova.

So it is with abortion and “choice,” but on a much longer timeline and background of seeming success.  This awakening will be one of the most wrenching that America has faced, certainly since the 2nd Civil War.  That one, over slavery, finally, made America stronger.  The collapse of Abortion, Incorporated, has the potential of doing the same, but only if churches wake up at the same time.  America “works” only in a society of shared morality.  Will a new understanding of life, itself, open people’s hearts?  Not very quickly, Prudence fears.

Abortion “rights” distill the human conflict between spirituality and the worship of socialist government.  This conflict has existed since the “Garden of Eden” when the “serpent” convinced “Eve” that surely she would not (actually) die if she ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but that she would become like the gods in knowing of good and evil.  When God learned that Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree His love for them tempered his punishment: not death, but difficulty, and banishment from “the Garden.”  The “thesis” was that Eve and Adam would die if a certain commandment were not observed; the “serpent” provided the “anti-thesis” that surely they would not die.  God’s love for His “children” softened the punishment, as love does and should do, which was explained as the antithesis being slightly more true than the thesis.  This is the same dialectic employed by Marx and Hegel and Engels. 

For thousands of years, amidst phenomenal progress, prosperity and elevated standards of living, the lure of authoritarianism, Nazism, Soviet Communism and Fascism has clung to the human condition like a voracious parasite.  Its only opponent is God and, as Christians believe, his son, the Christ.  The story of Jesus Christ, whether one is a believer or not, is a dramatic departure from identity only as part of a religious group.  Grouping is virtually automatic, but being FREE because of a personal connection to God, rewards faithful individuals with personal responsibility for individual decisions, choices and actions.  There is no freedom without that responsibility; there is no freedom when “right” action is taken only in fear of some earthly authority. 

Back to the future of our once-great nation.

Is there a source within society that can rebuild a common morality?  Our collective conscience?  We need two key elements… no, THREE: 1) Non-political churches; 2) Morally guided education; and, 3) Equal application of laws.  Free individuals have the power to empower all three factors.  Yet, our imperfect politics is what we tend to look to for salvation from problems created by, mostly, politicians.  Do we have some reason to believe that, facing a wide replacement of those in Congressional power, that the new crop of “representatives” in either House is going to help us chart a more morally straight national course?  There is almost no historical support for that outcome.

But there is opportunity for America, and it’s wrapped up in our ability to deal with the promised agitation from pro-abortionists.  There is no greater moral imperative than to protect our children.  There is no economic value that comes close to that of protecting our children.  Supposedly economically or politically powerful people can issue drivel that tries to connect the destruction of the unborn with some sort of economic benefit.  Obviously the economy exists because there are people, but it is a stretch beyond all reason that aborting new lives is good for everyone, let alone any one.  Still, there is a good possibility that overreaction to the end of Roe v. Wade will awaken many who are rabidly in favor of abortion, now.  It certainly will focus attention on the worst forms of butchery and profiteering.  Prudence would indicate that there is still sufficient moral outrage in Americans’ hearts to overcome the allure of political/financial power.  To those in Democrat power, abortion has been played for added power for 50 years – the destruction of 62 Million lives has been a small price to pay to keep re-electing Democrats.  What a foul bargain.

The illegal “leak” of Justice Alito’s draft opinion on “Roe,” has unleashed a rash of law-breaking by proponents of unfettered abortion.  Within that is the possibility of exposing the utter lawlessness of our own Department of Justice under AG, Merrick Garland.  Not only has he lied to Congress in sworn testimony, but he has employed the FBI to investigate parents who are upset about improper educational curricula and ideological indoctrination of their children.  The FBI was instructed by Garland to open cases under “domestic terrorism” titles regarding parents who broke no laws.

Now, as proto-criminals harass Supreme Court Justices in direct violation of federal law, America’s AG ignores them and refuses to direct the FBI to apprehend and charge those breaking 18 U. S. Code Section 1512.  Unfortunately, with Garland’s apparent political agreement with demonstrators who are in contravention of that section of federal law, and with his established willingness to break federal laws, himself, and to lie about it, no apprehensions or prosecutions appear likely.  Perhaps stopping illegal demonstrations is a threat to Democratcy. (spelling intended)

As Prudence has noted before, contracts, including covenants with a free people, are only as good as the integrity of the parties to them.  Changing the meaning of words is a common and corrupt means of sidestepping truths, a major cornerstone of integrity.  The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence says, in English, that our unalienable rights include Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  The abortion travesty of 1973’s Roe versus Wade decision tried to codify the redefinition of “Life.”  There no longer was a question of life or death of a fetus, provided that the pro-death faction was allowed to define when life began to exist.  The court did not rule on that, although it tried to “split the baby,” so to speak, by stating that States could limit abortion to the first one or two trimesters of, well, LIFE, perhaps, for lack of a better name.  But, in the Blackmun opinion, abortion was allowed throughout pregnancy.

The floodgates were thus opened to dozens of interpretations of “when life begins,” largely coming down to “when the pregnant woman decides it does,” largely on the basis of convenience, not on the life or health of the mother or of the baby.  Needless to say, this open-ended death warrant included, and has been argued to include, “abortion” up to the moment of birth.  In effect, a woman who decides at the very day of birth that she does not “want” the baby, for it certainly is such, can deny its right to live beyond a point of starvation or dehydration after birth.  It seems Prudent that a live baby is a citizen of the United States and causing it to die is murder, no matter the reason or logic for the act.  The pro-death faction has been allowed, in some jurisdictions, to redefine the meaning of “murder,” too.

Perhaps there will arrive a national awakening to the horrors of abortion, the cruelty, the pain, the denigration of humanity and even the anti-God aspects thereof.  Perhaps morality will win out.  Perhaps this 5th Civil War will begin the process of restoring America and erasing our ability to believe one of the worst aspects of socialism: that a fetus can be both a person and not a person at the same time.

Socialism depends on large numbers of people acting as though two diametrically opposed ideas are true.  Such mental incongruities are all around us, today.  That so many young people can believe, in the midst of unparalleled freedoms, that socialist central governance will make them more free, is one such incongruity.  Believing that men and women can change their genders with enough determined willpower, is another.  People will fight to hold these opposing ideas simultaneously.  In order to do so, of course, requires constant reinforcement by immersion among groups who are also determined to believe two incongruous ideas.  They have to redefine a lot of words to support their beliefs.

They ought to be made to answer some obvious questions as, for example, when the somewhat confused mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was asked if there should be any limits on abortion, and his answer was “No, no limits.  It is a woman’s right.”  Any reporter with enough courage to ask a public figure a question without prior clearance, should have then asked, “Are there any limits on what procedures may be used to stop the heart of a baby who survives the abortion process?”

As an alternative, should no one with that much courage be within earshot, would be, “Mr. Mayor… if the baby survives the abortion, is it a citizen of the United States?”  Surely there would be an answer to one of those queries.  At least one of the “abortion activists” shouting slogans in recent days opined that a mother could decide up to the age of two years, or even later, whether the living, growing fetus actually had a right to live and grow any longer.  When pressed, it all came down, FOR HER, to “… it’s the mother’s right.”  That outlook seems imprudent, at least, and blatantly murderous.  How did a female of the species arrive at such a belief?

Prudence indicates that truth will overcome evil, whether EVIL agrees with it or not.  The subgroup that likes rubbing shoulders with evil or Satanism, itself, will be come smaller as those farther out from the pit are able to be revulsed by what they’ve been instructed to ignore.  At the same time, those who never bought the pro-death lies will gain the courage to resist, if not fight, the proponents of eliminating children.  In fact, here are a couple of protester signs that might help: Babies are a pain in the vagina: Get rid of them!  Or, if that point is misunderstood, All unwanted children should be killed!  Convenience über alles, God forbid.

MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM

And there is love…

A man shall leave his mother and a woman leave her home

And they shall travel on to where the two will be as one.

As it was in the beginning is now and till the end

Woman draws her life from man and gives it back again.

And there is Love.  There is Love.

                                                                        From Peter, Paul & Mary: Wedding Song

To hear it screamed about, the apparent likelihood that the Supreme Court will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that upended common law regarding abortion, marks the end of life as we know it. (Pun intended.)  Or, maybe, the end of civilization, itself.  How grievous that women may again be celebrated for motherhood.

Well, maybe that’s not fair: women are so much more than mere “birthing persons.”  They are able to work, after all, which the artificially high costs of living and taxation require these days, and even earn more than many, Ugh!, men can earn, for Heaven’s sakes.  Careful of the “Heaven” reference, there, Prudence.  No sense bringing spirituality into this “life” argument; it’s taken nearly 50 years to denigrate it as well as we have.

Besides, religion is for the handful of weirdos who are not as enlightened as abortionists and who, still, think abortion is somehow “wrong:” science-deniers, all.  KEEP YOUR RELIGION OFF OF MY BODY, or can’t you read the signs of deep wisdom all around you as you leave church this Mothers’ Day?  We will not be held in subjugation by men for a million more years as we have been: mere mothers and homemakers and nannys to the children of, Ugh!, men.

Well, that’s one way to look at it.

One sign that popped into being since the big, illegal reveal says, “(euphemism for fornicate) to come, not for pregnancy!”  Females, then, (since ‘women’ can’t be defined) have been elevated to the higher status of pleasure-seeking pleasure objects… which is another way of looking at it.  That men have benefitted the most from freely available abortion – at least in terms of unfettered pleasure-seeking – and WHITE MEN most of all, seems to have escaped the notice of enlightened females.  Black men tend to be discarded in abortion clinics at much higher rates than whites, but, then, who’s listening to them?

Somehow, though, the relative power of the feminist mystique has resulted in wholesale destruction of women’s true status which was supposed to be elevated by loosening the shackles of pregnancy.  Exactly why current ideological, pedagogical theory requires pediatric exploration of sexual pleasure rather than language and arithmetic skills, critical thinking and problem-solving, has not been explained, but it certainly is a component of socialist beliefs.  Children, both sexes, we are told… they are told, need to be separated from traditional “roles” that science-denying religionists assign to them at birth, especially traditional roles of boys and girls growing into men and women, from whose love shall come forth new generations.  Those same kids must be separated, psychologically from their parents, who can’t be trusted as much as their true friends, the “education” establishment.

Go ahead and give birth, if you want to, but that’s where your rights end.

Men are pigs, so to speak.  Despite their strengths and values, men tend to set aside almost any higher calling when they perceive the possibility of having sex.  To borrow a phrase, it takes a village to keep men in their own pasture, and the head of that village is a man’s wife.  Women are the civilizing force in society.  Decades ago the strengthening feminist juggernaut decried President Reagan’s statement that “women are the civilizing force on men.” (Or, words to that effect.)  The feminist “leader” who put Reagan in his place for that comment, was signally offended by his statement, apparently because it linked men and women in the processes of socialization and civilization.  God forbid.  No way did a modern, liberated woman have any obligation to do anything – even a good thing – for a man: everything required negotiated parity between equals.  Love had nothing to do with it, nor, apparently, did child-rearing or family dynamics or nurturing stability or dependence on some, Ugh!, man to provide for the family.  It is remarkable, indeed, that any families are still being formed, today.

A measure of the destructiveness of feminized socialism is the breakdown of traditional father-mother families, and it is at its worst for black families.  Today nearly three-fourths of black children grow up in single-parent households, mostly fatherless; nearly 30% of white and Hispanic children do, also.  This shift began in earnest with the “Great Society” and the federalization of welfare, perhaps the worst public policy experiment ever conceived.  People blame Lyndon Johnson for the foul execution of military policy in the Viet-Nam War, as they should, but 100 times as much damage has been done through federal welfare programs that facilitate single-mother households.

Since the eugenics of Margaret Sanger, but really since the inception of the Great Society, the “liberation” of women, constantly touted by the Democrat Party to their key voting block, as they help them throw off the shackles of oppression by men, women have striven towards economic equality with men, but it has cost them the rewards of their majestic roles as mothers in loving 2-parent households.  In part as a result, American citizens no longer have enough children to replace ourselves.  Is this a measure of feminist success?

It is almost better referred-to as a success in the battle against motherhood, now that the battle against fatherhood is so well underway.  The rabid attempts to sexualize and gender-neutralize elementary school children could play a vital role in this battle.  Indeed, the greatest impact of convincing children that they are not who they originally thought they were, but are some sort of gender-fluid non-boy or non-girl, is STERILITY!  In the minds of feminized socialists, separating children from their parents and from reality, is the most effective way to destroy Christianity, as it destroys procreation.

Are there any demonstrations over Roe v. Wade outside of Mosques?

Indeed, the entire, sick fad of trans-genderism, non-binary identities and gender fluidity is an assault on both masculinity and femininity.  To what end, a normal person is inspired to ask?  To express hatred towards life?  Towards God?  Towards love?  It expresses nothing better than hatred for all of these things.

Perhaps the destruction of traditional sexual mores is the natural outgrowth of feminism.  Can a half-century of celebrating anti-masculinity result in a new appreciation for the value of men?  Our culture teaches boys that they are flawed almost to irredeemability, able to restore approval only by renouncing maleness in grade school.  The same culture teaches girls that the least-attractive aspect of their lives is as a mother, then it teaches that some giant boy pretending to be a girl is worth more than girls, themselves.

Then we select and celebrate a female judge who is incapable of defining what a woman is, and entrust her with discerning the essence of our Constitution when she cannot discern her own.  No wonder women are angry these days, and, as on most days, when angred there must be a man at the root cause of it.

Prudence is not certain that having more women in government really is an answer we’ve been waiting for: more real men might help, though.  Maybe the liberal wing of the Supreme Court can find a right to love one another in the penumbra of the Constitution, and override all State laws to the contrary.

WHY IN HELL?

Buds.

Prudence, in her most Prudent way, is always trying to keep up with events, trends, purposes and consequences.  And, never one to stir up trouble, Prudence must admit to being fully puzzled as to why in Hell Russia invaded Ukraine?  Perhaps you are wondering the same thing.

History has shown almost every way and purpose humans can imagine for attacking, invading, occupying, destroying, annexing, blockading, burning, looting, bombing or decimating both neighboring and far-off nations or tribes or even continents.  Ghengis Khan and Alexander the Great had what seemed to them and their followers, valuable reasons for dominating as many states, cities and regions as they could.  Hitler had his own “good” reasons for doing the same, and most Germans and like-minded – or like-confused – neighbors went along with him.  The Romans could justify what they did, so did Japan so did Lenin and Stalin in Soviet days.

One expects that Vladimir Putin has a sufficient reason to attack Ukraine, but it certainly isn’t very clear or explicable.  What is going on? 

Given that Mr. Putin hasn’t conferred with Prudence and is not expected to anytime soon, most evidence to which we might allude will be circumstantial at best and inferential, otherwise.  Many wise people have tried to evaluate what he is trying to accomplish, including experienced military leaders.  But they are making military judgements of tactics and short-term strategies and, no matter how accurate, such musings won’t explain the overall purpose of employing war to “solve” some nebulous threat from Ukraine.

Perhaps the non-existent threat from Ukraine was never the impetus for invasion.

Putin is not someone most people would want to chum around with, but he’s not stupid, nor does it seem Prudent to assume that he is mentally addled.  He has managed and manipulated Russia for more than 20 years, gained power and influence geopolitically in that time, and become one of the wealthiest men in the world by cleverly holding and exercising power over the oligarchs that own or control most of Russia’s large industries and banks.  A significant “vig” is paid to Putin for every significant domestic and international trade deal: he is a billionaire.

However, Mr. Putin is also messianic in terms of restoring what he perceives as the once-great Russian empire.  As a loyal KGB agent, once assigned to East Germany, arguably the empire’s furthest outpost, Putin was probably less concerned about Communism than he was about the territorial and political extent of the Soviet Union.  The end of the Soviet system was a severe setback in his view, and something he wishes to set aright.  He had what appeared, at first, to be two audiences to satisfy as to his intent and purpose: Ukraine… and Russia.  It doesn’t appear that he gave a damn about what other countries thought of his threat to return Ukraine to the Russian fold.  It was strictly a local matter for Ukraine to resolve by folding in the face of his threats.

Like it or not, however, Putin’s Russia is a big puzzle piece in geopolitics.  As local as he may have wished to keep his piecemeal dissection of Ukraine, Putin needed to shore up his flanks while going to war on his western border.  Russia’s overall military significance is tied to its huge nuclear stockpile, at least half of which is modern enough to be reliable, which is to say, 2,000 or more warheads and hundreds of missile systems that can deliver them.  Its economic significance is mainly tied to oil and natural gas and extensive mineral resources.  Russia’s longest border is with China, slightly longer than that with Mongolia.  There have been shooting skirmishes along the border with China and the relationship between the two countries has been likened to two praying mantises in a bottle, neither trusting the other.

Lately, however – 6 to 7 years, cooperation between the two socialist/communist giants has been more active.  China’s economy, despite its problems, is 6 to 7 times that of Russia’s.  Russia’s huge land area sits atop enormous natural resources, particularly in oil, gas and relatively untapped shale-oil and gas.  Its population, however, is shrinking.  Programs have been tried to give stipends to parents for having children, but they have not worked to bring births up to even “replacement” rates.  Ultimately, along with politics, economics and industrial base, population size is the key determinant in national strength, depending on how it is achieved.  Massive immigration is not, generally, the solution.

China has 5 times the population of Russia, but lacks sufficient energy resources and, because of an unintended consequence of the “one-child” policies pursued in the late 1960’s through 2010 and beyond, the bias toward boys remains.  This pattern skewed the balance of boys and girls significantly, as parents aborted female fetuses.  During that same period, many thousands of girl babies were “adopted out” so that families could have another baby, hopefully a boy.  China’s ratio of female-to-male is 100 to 118: there are not enough marriage partners to civilize the males, essentially, or to produce enough children to replace aging workers.  China well understands the importance of population quality, rather than mere quantity, and it plays a multi-decade game in its quest to be the dominant country and culture.  So what, you may be asking?

The issue behind almost everything is the U. S. A.  China’s “problem” is not Russia, although the CCP is perfectly happy to buy oil from Russia while it stirs up problems for the “West.”  It is the United States that is the main impediment to Chinese hegemony, even in its own side of Asia and Southeast Asia.  After decades of buying off the elites, Wall Street, the universities, the banks and major industries in the U. S., China has finally secured a compromised President, who it has also “bought off,” and, praise the ancient dragon-gods, is also mentally incompetent!  Things seem to be aligning for China’s big move to unseat the U. S., globally.

Wait a minute, you’re saying, I thought the worst problem is the brutal destruction and wanton murder of Ukraine.  Sadly, Prudence thinks not, although the brutality is the worst the world has seen – paid attention to – in 30 years, except for the murder, rape and slavery promulgated in Africa, in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Libya, Uganda, Nigeria, Mali, Angola, Namibia… and on and on.  Of course those countries and tribes didn’t have such good communications or beautiful buildings to be bombed as Ukraine has / had.  Besides, we like Ukraine and our President’s family scammed a lot of money there.  But the dead, starving, uprooted people in Africa are just as dead or more in pain than Ukrainians, who have modern neighbors to flee to and billions of dollars of aid pouring in.  Prudence hates all of it, but Americans are rather selective in our outrage.

What else has been going on in Africa these past 30 or more years?  Why, the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.  The same long-term strategy reaches into European countries, Arab /Muslim countries, South Asia, South America and Oceania.  China lends money and expertise to countries that need major infrastructure in order to compete economically, but many cannot afford to pay off the loans.  China is happy to trade ownership for the notes, or lifetime access to ports, natural resources, communications systems and so forth, resulting in a densifying web of influence and military advantage that is, bit by bit, surrounding Russia as effectively as it does the United States in their Western Hemisphere efforts.  Hard to tell which of us is more blind.

So, is it really Prudent to connect the “Rape of Ukraine” to China?  Really?  “Absolutely,” seems to be the answer.

Keep in mind that China’s actions are ALWAYS in favor of China.  That kind of nationalism deserves respect, and it’s fully understandable.  This is why we were safer when Trump was president: “America First.”  The United States is the only country that has always tried to do things, internationally, that are better for other countries, including shedding jobs and production in order to “buy” cooperation, first, to resist the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism, but later to try to buy friendship from China, of all countries!  While our largesse wasn’t restricted to only China, the shift to our insidious pro-China tilt, in academia, in industry, and in our “grass-roots” politics, believe it or not, has weakened our will to defend America.  The Biden regime has stopped enforcing requirements to reveal foreign sources of funds flowing to colleges and universities, most of it Chinese.  Why would they do that?

It is safe to say that the timing of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was based on China’s “granting” permission to Putin.  There may have been, it seems likely, some sort of permission from the W. E. F., as well.  Russia had its forces gathered east of the Ukrainian border for more than a year; they could have invaded at any time.  What made the winter of 2022 the “right” time?  Prudence indicates that it is the presence of the Biden administration and a number of steps Biden has taken to soften U. S. policy towards China, both for responsibility for the Covid pandemic and with regards to China’s multiple efforts in other countries that have begun to compromise even southern Europe.  An “America First” foreign policy would have the U. S. countering the Chinese “Belt and Road” initiatives around the world.  What we must aggressively, diplomatically do is attempt to keep poorer countries from succumbing to China’s bait-and-switch.  Instead, the Biden regime has ignored China’s encirclement.  China has observed the shift in U. S. policy since Trump and, it seems, has decided that this period is when invading Taiwan might be most successful.  It is unclear how much more encouragement China needs.

The final test has been observing how “the West,” most particularly the United States, deals with Russia’s aggression.  At the same time, Russia’s abilities are also being evaluated.  China is perfectly happy to fight to the last Russian, even as the West seems to be happy to fight to the last Ukrainian.  Gaining such knowledge will be put to China’s advantage – everything is.  China cares very little what happens to Ukraine or to Ukrainians; just as little about what happens to Russians and Russia, itself.  Russia has been a rival of China’s almost since Mao Tse Tung took over.  China is playing a century-long game with respect to Russia, too.  Helping Russia, now, buying its oil and gas, for example, may, in China’s view result in the acquisition of far eastern Russia, enabling the encirclement of Korea and Japan and control of key parts of the Pacific.  If you’re thinking that , “… oh, China would never try to do that…” then you haven’t been watching its creation of artificial islands and their militarization and disturbing encroachment upon the Phillipines, and Taiwan.  Indeed, the entire arc of Southeast and South Asia is waiting to see how the U. S. responds to China’s expansionism.  No other country in the world can oppose China and the globalization of Communism.

Interestingly, the World Economic Forum is pushing capitalist countries toward global unification, obviously under the benign management of bankers and oligarchs.  This is diametrically opposed to China’s plan for world hegemony, under the benign management of the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP.  Where the W. E. F. says that in the future we won’t “own” anything and therefore we’ll be happy,  the CCP believes we’ll be happier under their form of Communism and total social control that our ephemeral “freedom” fails to afford us: not that different in net.  Neither option will be “Constitutional,” and no one but the United States will be a defender of the principles of our nation.  This part of our exceptionalism is being constantly eroded BY AMERICANS!  Even people we have elected to our own Congress are actively attempting to destroy our Constitutional culture, now reinforced by a Biden administration that is compromised by BOTH China and Russia!  Interestingly, Biden’s family is even compromised by Ukraine!  What a mess.  Just be certain, in your heart of hearts, that NEITHER THE W.E.F. OR THE C.C.P OPTION IS IN THE UNITED STATE’S INTEREST!

Prudence is deeply concerned about the ascendancy of the oligarchy in the U. S. and elsewhere in the West.  Multi-billionaires do not respect Main Street, U. S. A., nor do they respect the basic family values that drive American culture.  Moms, Dads, marriage, Christianity and children raised by parents, are not the path to power that oligarchs crave.  The general morality of the ultra-rich is quite different from that of most moms and dads – by some reports, rather depraved.  When one’s fortune reaches a certain size, the impetus to make governments protect that fortune becomes paramount.  Politicians, unfortunately, are unusually attracted to power and money much like true oligarchs, although they are not smart enough to earn the billions to gain economic entry to the oligarchs’ club.  So, sadly, many are willing to sell-out to the real power brokers, because re-election is equally sought-after.  There is a relative handful of true patriots or statesmen and women in office who will sacrifice to protect the last best hope of mankind.

Wow!  All of this from the “Ukraine” problem?  May God protect that nation and its people.

Cons-piracy, n. : Piracy Together

Although it seems imprudent, Prudence is going all conspiracy theory in this post.  Needless to say, there are numerous such theories on a myriad of matters.  Did Oswald act alone?  Or did Hinckley?  Was Barack Obama born in Hawaii?  Did he ever regain citizenship after living in Indonesia?  Why did he claim to be a foreign student?  Maybe Roosevelt knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, but he wanted to be forced into war.  Were Armstrong and Aldrin acting on a soundstage?  Did Eisenhower meet with UFO aliens?  Do Freemasons know secrets from the Knights Templar?

So, there is no end of possibilities, but we’re going to examine one of the very latest:  Are the mRNA “vaccines” part of a globalist population control scheme?  If so, was the creation of the SARS-Cov-2 virus part of this plan?  Was the coverup of the Wuhan Laboratory gain-of-function research, engineered by Dr. Anthony Fauci and others in the U. S. NIH, also part of the plan?

Those aren’t all the questions.  What role do Bill Gates – and others – play in the worldwide promotion of these rather dangerous injections and the drumbeat for “booster” injections?  What about the U. N. and the W.H.O. and the World Economic Forum?  Why has the W.H.O. lied about the virus and its pandemic and the role of the Chinese?  And, how did Moderna know about the novel coronavirus research taking place in Wuhan but the United States remained ignorant of its nature and potential infectiousness?  How were the mRNA injections developed and distributed in such a short timeframe but that timeframe allowed for approval only after the 2020 elections?  Why have so many standard medical practices been subverted in response to Covid-19?  And, why have safe drugs that have shown effectiveness in slowing down Covid infection been suppressed and made illegal in the U. S.?

Those aren’t all the questions, either, but they’re enough to make us go “Hmmnnhh.”

The human fertility / maternity questions are vehemently answered, “Absolutely no effect,” by the CDC, NIH, WHO and major hospitals and universities around the western world.  There are, literally, hundreds of articles stating no measurable effect of the mRNA injections on either male or female fertility: lots of studies, charts and statistics.  Interestingly, all refer to the shots as “vaccines,” and all claim that there is no effect on DNA from the shots.  To refer to the Moderna and Pfizer chemicals as “vaccines” is to comply with a widespread fraud since they do not meet any definitions of “vaccine,” legally, nor do their patents make any claims of being vaccines or list any effects of defined vaccines as their effects.

The potential effect on DNA has been shown in a laboratory setting by Swedish researchers. 

Technically, then, both companies’ concoctions are correctly described as experimental chemical gene therapies, not “vaccines.”  Most people would refuse such shots since they don’t treat or prevent any known disease.  Most people, however, trust vaccines.  What is going on?

In the simplest sense, a conspiracy to create the Covid-19 novel coronavirus and the expensive “vaccines” to fight it under pandemic conditions, can be reduced to a hunger for money.  Not only did the U. S. federal government spot Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson/Janssen many billions of dollars to develop vaccines as quickly as possible, but that same government set aside many regulations to speed the process.  Then it guaranteed more and more billions to those companies to purchase millions and millions of doses.  People were so fearful of dying from Covid-19 by the end of 2020 that there was no question that all the doses that could be produced and distributed would be used, and paid-for.  Financially, it was a gold mine, so to speak.  But Covid and the pandemic and resulting states of emergency, in the U. S. and many other nations, was far more complex than just an obscene transfer of fortunes in public funds.

The earliest stage of complexity hearkens back to 2003 and the outbreak of SARS in Asia.  SARS is caused by the SARS-CoV virus (or SARS-CoV-1, now that were counting), a novel coronavirus.  Those in the coronavirus fascination business: people like Tony Fauci, key people in the CDC and a couple of researchers at UNC–Chapel Hill, recognized as early as 2002, before the outbreak, interestingly, that coronaviruses that cause things like colds and some forms of pneumonia, are wonderfully manipulable.  They busied themselves in engineering changes to the original SARS-CoV virus so that it could be PATENTED.  There are legal issues around patenting life-forms.  Naturally occurring life-forms cannot be patented.  Only a modified, or “engineered” iteration of a life-form can be patented, and the SARS-CoV virus is defined by patent number 7776521, held by our own, very trustworthy CDC agency of the National Institutes of Health.  Later, the CDC petitioned to have this patent made “confidential.”

UNC at Chapel Hill also holds a patent, number 7279327, which protects their methods of making “recombinant” coronaviruses, which is to say, coronaviruses that contain protein elements from more than one source.  This is, however IM-Prudent, a valuable skill to have, for some reason.  You never know when the market for recombinant coronaviruses might open up.

In any case, the work being done at UNC, financed by Fauci’s NIAID agency, was skirting the law as it was close to bio-weapons research.  Subsequently, the newly modified SARS-CoV coronavirus, the patented property of the CDC, and the patented skills of engineering same, were transferred to the Wuhan Institute of Virology under a contract placed through an U. S. “NGO” headed by Dr. Peter Daszak.  It has taken many months but Americans and the rest of the world have finally learned that the NIAID financed gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute.  The functions gained were designed to take a bat-origin coronavirus, supposedly the source of the SARS outbreak in 2003, although that may have had help, too, and make it able to readily infect humans.  There wouldn’t seem to be any economic value to creating a more infectious coronavirus, although there may have been some scientific value.  Certainly no one would want to sell a new disease and, in fact, the CDC / NIAID / EcoHealth cabal didn’t sell it, they gave it away – to China.

Still, there’s no market for the disease, but, if by the rarest of circumstances, we are told repeatedly by eminent scientists, at the direction of Anthony Fauci (the Great), this engineered-to-be-infectious virus were to escape the lab, there would be a Hell of a market for a vaccine to fight it!  “Oh, c’mon, Prudence,” you’re crying, “that sounds like some huge conspiracy theory!”

Prudence doesn’t want to spread a conspiracy theory… just sayin’.

Still, if the impetus were simple enrichment, Covid has worked out very, very well.  However, if the larger purpose is something else… something more in the line of shifting free peoples away from freedom, as leftists are always – unfailingly – attempting to do, then the political, dictatorial “emergency orders” have had a far greater impact than Covid-19, the disease, has had.  What if the purpose was to prepare millions… no, billions of people to accept heavy-handed, un-Constitutional restrictions on movement, freedoms, employment, private properties, personal hegemony and education?  What if weakening the fabric of free societies were the main act?

The heavy-handed, largely UN-scientific reactions by various government entities, to the “threat” (read: fear) of Covid-19, has had, as its GREATEST effect, the division of populations against one another.  Masks and mask-mandates are a perfect example of this.  Despite the utter lack of scientific/medical value of popular masking products against the spread or infection-rates of Covid, Americans become angry toward anyone who questions them.  Schools have been allowed to open, for example (by teachers’ unions), only if children as young as pre-schoolers are forced to wear masks.  There’s plenty of data and evidence for the negative effects of masks on children, yet teachers have gone so far as to tape masks onto special-needs children – as if somebody were made the tiniest bit safer because of its forced placement.  Anger results, and great defensiveness that cites “CDC Guidance” as justification, yet the CDC’s mission is research, not public policy.  Who gave the CDC, of all people, this enormous power?

The Congress, supposedly the most potent locus of power under our Constitution, is left begging for information.  This is upside down, is it not?  The W.H.O., a corrupt agency within the corrupt United Nations, is just as often cited by our administrative state as justification for recommendations that have effectively militarized medicine in the United States.  W.H.O., we should not forget, began its advice about Covid by lying, for weeks, about the role of China in developing and spreading Covid-19 around the world.  It is completely IM-Prudent to take their advice on much of anything.  Now there is building the idea that any NATION that opposes W.H.O.’s directives on health and future (and current) pandemics, should be punished!  This can only be effected by reducing the sovereignty of member nations. 

Almost 90 nations have adopted or are considering some form of “vaccine passport,” including our formerly quite free neighbor to the north, Canada.  Here we have a set of injections – called vaccines – that the latest evidence and releases of information from Pfizer and the FDA show are greater risks than the supposed disease they are supposed to prevent.  Governments and major employers – even the Department of Defense – are using threats against continued employment should individuals refuse to receive those questionable shots.  We seem to be trading our freedom for… well, for risky medication about which mostly lies have been told.  Yet W.H.O. and the U. N. are pushing global requirements to accept the injections.

Clearly the overriding purpose of this pandemic and the vaccines, lockdowns and damage to independent businesses, increased drug overdose deaths, increases in multiple cancers and other diseases and deaths caused by the mRNA vaccines, is not public health.  Nor is it improvement to the standards of living for a majority of the residents of this planet.  No, it’s something else.  You can see this, Prudence hopes.

So, how can inordinate fear of a disease be maintained?  Well, as any government afficianado can tell you, by widespread, even mandatory testing… and more testing, weekly testing, daily testing, testing if you have a friend who knows somebody who was in the same suite of offices as a person who tested positive, him- or her-self, for the dreaded Covid-19.  With enough testing – especially with “PCR” testing – the numbers of “cases” can be kept artificially high.

There’s nothing wrong with Polymerase Chain Reaction testing; such tests can be very accurate in proper laboratory settings.  The only value to a PCR test for Covid-19 is to expose infectiousness.  Finding out that there may have been exposure to Covid-19 outside of the period of perhaps a week or less of actual infectiousness, is fairly useless… at least in terms of preventing disease.  It is useful, however, for inflating the number of “cases.”  Higher case rates justify the imposition of restrictions, mask mandates and, ultimately, injection mandates.  Higher case rates can keep schools closed, businesses shut down, and can empower civil authorities to criminalize normal commercial and religious activities.  God forbid one would be part of a “super-spreader” event.  Constant testing provides justification for all sorts of government reactions, legal or extra-legal, constitutional or UN-Constitutional.

So, if PCR testing is so accurate, how can it be abused?  It doesn’t require malicious intent, necessarily, for testing “data” to be abused by politicians, for they must be portrayed as “doing something.”  The process involves, first, detection of an RNA string unique to Covid-19.  This might involve only a few copies of the RNA “snippet.”  The chain reaction step then replicates the small number of strings in repeated steps until there are enough strings to confirm and display by concentration assay.  Bingo: a positive!  Keep ‘em coming, boys and girls, and we can lockdown those pesky right-wingers for months.

The only real counter to fear of covid is early, safe treatment of symptoms and inhibition of viral replication in the body.  Given a little help, natural immunity will figure out how to stop the virus and create an immune response that can last for years.  Unfortunately, mRNA injections start out lasting only a few months and, by the 2nd “booster” shot, only about 4 WEEKS.  In the process, since they defend against only one protein in the virus, they augment the ability of the virus to mutate, creating “variants” that may or, often may not be deterred by the “vaccines.”  Aha!  More fear, more restrictions, more dependence on government, more formerly self-sufficient individuals on welfare, more billions to develop still other mRNA shots: a lifetime of “boosters.”  If this is a plan, it’s a damned good one.

Treatments for Covid-19, however, have been suppressed.  Typically, facing a new disease, the best medical reaction is to try everything that might help from the pharmacopeia of known drugs.  Obviously, EVERYTHING, in the beginning, will be “off-label!”  Duh!  Every potential anti-viral should be tested, AND THEY HAVE BEEN, and in various combinations with nutrients and complementary drugs.  Protocols have been assembled that are VERY effective at certain stages of infection and progression.  Medical science is a remarkable engine of innovation.

Why do you suppose these treatments have been made, essentially, illegal?  Such a reaction is unique to covid-19!  Patients who exhibit symptoms were told to go home and come back to the hospital if they became really ill.  No treatment offered.  Once in the hospital, again, no treatments, just maintenance.  Some recovered on their own, many were intubated as lung function declined, many of those died, apart from loved-ones.  Eventually, Remdesivir was approved and pushed onto patients, but it is a treatment that’s worse than the disease, with severe, organ-damaging side effects.  None of the inexpensive treatments are ever offered, and even if prescribed by a physician, hospitals will not ALLOW them to be administered.  In many cases – most – pharmacies will not fill those prescriptions because of “CDC guidance.”

The only answer offered to the question of SARS-CoV-2 fears are the weird mRNA shots, shots that don’t promise to immunize, or stop infections or even prevent future infections – only to mitigate infections, but then, only if you happen to contract Covid-19 during the small window of “vaccine” effectiveness.  Unfortunately, it has become clear, these injections tend to disrupt your natural immune system, leaving it able to respond only to the one protein the mRNA shots react to.  “Vaccinated” people become increasingly defenseless against many other diseases, including childhood diseases and cancers that natural immunity typically fights off unnoticed.  Yet, these are the shots governments are FORCING people to take, all around the world.  Why in Hell, one wonders?  And our freedoms will be stripped from us unless we accept them? Populations could decline if this is allowed to continue.

Are we sovereign human beings with unalienable rights?  Or laboratory rats?  How about WE conspire to remove the people who have reduced us to this status?  America, Awake!

LOCKDOWN, LOCKUP

DON’T PANIC!

The concept of “science” as the basis for public policy has been tried during the past two-plus years, and it has been found not only a failure, but fatally dangerous.  “Public policy,” by definition, means politics, and, suddenly, “science,” which is to say, Medical Science, became grossly politicized (more grossly than it already was).  Logic dictates that politically “guided” science or medicine should be questioned in the most severe and intricate way.  For more than two years, however, such questioning has been made virtually illegal and something to be censored.

We can see, no matter what one’s political viewpoint, that all of our public policies of locking down certain forms of commerce and assembly (even while allowing favored others) had only the true effect of destroying, mainly, free-enterprise businesses, denying elementary education, exposing millions of very vulnerable populations to Covid-19, upsetting and destroying marriages, increasing suicide rates across many age groups, increasing opioid deaths, creating huge disparities in rights, and expanding the reach and power of all levels of government.  Fear, itself, was spread across nations, which simplified the tasks of causing people to act in contravention of their legal rights.  It did not, however, actually limit the spread or medical impacts of the Covid-19 virus.  Otherwise, fewer people would have died in the second year of the “pandemic” when supposedly “safe and effective” vaccines were widely administered… except that more people died in the second year.  If face masks were effective in preventing infection from Covid-19, some statistical proof would exist… somewhere, but it doesn’t.  There are quite a few untruths being spread by government types and those they have co-opted into alliance in the promulgating of ideas that are not so.  For those who cared to learn the untruth of these ideas, these utterances become lies.  And there are many.

For example, the mRNA injections do not constitute “vaccination.”  Quite cleverly, when the “government” called for emergency development of a “vaccine” against the SARS-Cov-2 virus, giant pharmaceutical companies happily took upon themselves the heroic task of creating vaccines that had never succeeded (against corona viruses) and at “warp speed.”  Fortunately, mRNA biotechnology had been developing for a decade and, in fact, was being developed to stop Covid-19 in the fall of 2019, before the “Coronavirus Pandemic” was even heard of, by a company called Moderna, in a city named Wuhan, China, amazingly enough.

So, the “heroic” aspect was not true, nor, it turns out, was the “warp speed.”  It’s possible that the approval and release of the supposed “vaccines” could have been done by June of 2020, rather than immediately after the presidential elections in November.  Ostensibly that was impossible because of the rigorous testing being done to gain even emergency use approval by the independent FDA.  Ooops, there are a couple more… lies, that is.  The testing performed wasn’t all that rigorous, ignored several potentially vulnerable groups (children, pregnant women, etc.) and the FDA is far from independent from either politics or “Big Pharma.”  There seemed to be some political timing on the release of the “vaccines.”  Surely not, you must be shouting – our benign representatives and public servants would never delay life-saving treatment for political reasons… never.  We won’t bring up the refusal of hospitals to perform life-saving procedures on patients who won’t take the injection. (!)  Back to the non-vaccines.

These shots stimulate cells in your body to create spike proteins that are similar to the Covid-19 spike proteins.  What they don’t do, which real vaccines do, is stimulate B-cells and T-cells to create immune response to the pathogen, itself, response that becomes part of your immune profile, ready in the future to “wake up” and fight off the covid virus.  By flooding your system with billions of spike proteins that the body recognizes as foreign, it causes the liver and kidneys and digestive system to get rid of them.  If you happen to be exposed to Covid, itself, during the next couple of months or so thereafter, your body will get rid of those, too.  Are there antibodies to “Covid” created?  Yes, but they won’t be created if there’s a second exposure to Covid, so you need a second injection, then a third.  In effect, the injection hi-jacks the immune system to reject spike proteins.  The story is / was that the mRNA chemicals that induce that action were not going to make “permanent” changes to cells, that it would be out of the body in a couple of weeks, perhaps, and it definitely would-not-affect-your-DNA-itself… no, no, no, no.

So, the big lie continues: these shots aren’t really vaccines, but they are called “vaccines” because people are comfortable with that term, just as they are with “booster” shots.  However, there is also the sad fact that the rather poisonous chemicals of these injections do NOT leave the body in a couple of weeks, and can actually be found over 12 months later, still capable of producing spike proteins. 

Unfortunately, also, spike proteins accumulate in the ovaries, lungs, brain, kidneys, heart and pericardium, and elsewhere, causing “long Covid” and a host of other chronic bad reactions.  So much dis-information, so little time.  Now it is being revealed, drip by drip, that the shots, themselves, weaken your body’s natural immunity – not just towards Covid, but towards, well… everything.  Pathologists have detected, following the injections, significant increases in childhood cancers, for one example, but not just in children!  Adults are being diagnosed with supposed childhood cancers and other diseases, and the increase follows Covid vaccination – apparently.  For some reason, the typical immune responses of millions of Americans are not stopping these diseases that are usually handled without notice by immune systems.  Normal public health regimens would have this uptick carefully studied, but the CDC is not interested.

There are accumulating statistics from several countries that susceptibility to Covid-19 is much greater among fully “vaccinated” and boosted people, than for un-vaccinated people.  At least one country has ceased publishing that data lest the average person misunderstand it.

There has also been noted from insurance companies’ death-benefit statistics, an astronomical uptick in all deaths for 18 to 64-year-olds – just in 2021, year of the “vaccines” – amounting to about 40%.  What?  FORTY PERCENT%?  What in Hell is causing that?  The NIH and the rest of the public-health alphabet-soup of agencies and departments are uninterested.  The rest of us should be very interested.

Very sadly, research in Sweden has shown the mRNA chemicals can actually CHANGE the host DNA in living liver cells.  Oh, no… this was the biggest safety promise of all when these weird injections gained political power: They could not change or damage one’s DNA.  Uh-oh.  Is this going to be another Thalidomide?  Or a new type of cancer, in effect?  Please, someone, tell us the truth… or, if not THEtruth, how about Atruth about these God-forsaken shots.

Maybe the FDA could release all it knows about mRNA injections and the premises under which they were approved, even for emergency use.  Maybe the CDC could reveal all it knows about adverse effects of the shots.  They have a “vaers” system for “voluntary” reporting of bad reactions to all vaccines.  It is Prudent to expect that CDC has a great deal of information about such events, but they’ve released a report that covers only about the first month after emergency-use approval; why not the rest?  More than a year has passed since then.

Would it be asking too much to reveal what the costs have been to the federal government for the development and purchase/distribution of the “approved” vaccines?  How about what the NIH, CDC or NIAID know about TREATMENTS for Covid that can prevent serious disease, hospitalization or ventilation and death.  There are several, some have the status of over-the-counter medications in many parts of the world, and they are not just safe, but extremely safe after decades of use.  There is overwhelming experience and data about their effectiveness as anti-viral products, yet they are virtually illegal to prescribe or administer in the United States.  Is repression of information about these inexpensive, proven-safe drugs, in the realm of lies of omission?

How much are hospitals and extended-care facilities paid by HCCFA, MEDICAID or MEDICARE for care and treatment of ostensible Covid patients?  One good description listed the main ways hospitals made the most:  1) Admit and test the patient – test him or her more than once if necessary to obtain a positive result; 2) Place the patient in a “Covid” ward; Start him or her on Remdesivir (a very dangerous anti-viral linked to liver and kidney damage); 3) As patient declines, place him or her on a ventilator;      4) Discharge patient or release him or her to a mortuary.  What might all of this be worth?  About $100,000!  The key to great billing, however, is the positive test result.

Even less complex regimens are good billing so long as “Covid” is tied to the patient.  When $Millions start to pile up, ethical fences start buckling.  Overstating the number of “Covid” patients – and getting rewarded for doing so – has been a great boost to institutional incomes and a great boost to public hysteria about the danger presented by Covid-19.  Despite all sorts of statistics to the contrary, most Americans believe that Covid is practically a death sentence, following a long, painful decline and probable intubation/ventilation.  Worse, since it is “so contagious” family members can’t visit those in extended care or in hospital, even as they pass away.  Across the country, thanks to most of media burying inconvenient statistics, governors and mayors empowered themselves to strip millions of their citizens and residents of their constitutional rights, and those millions of Americans willingly went along with the restrictions out of FEAR!  Fear generated by a steady stream of real dis-information happily spewed by the so-called “main-stream media.”

People who lost a friend or relative to covid are angry at anyone who questions the mish-mash of illogical, often erroneous “public-health” dictates, as though opponents of the government overreach might be part of the reason their loved-one got sick.  They should be angry!  They should be angry with China, for spreading the disease across the globe after it had escaped from their lab in Wuhan City; they should be angry with the NIH, the CDC and the NIAID, who surreptitiously passed the research, including Gain-of-Function research, off to the Wuhan Laboratory because it was illegal to do it in the United States; they should be angry with those same bozos and the FDA for not only approving these increasingly useless injections, but also for denying and suppressing safe potential treatments that have been shown to almost stop the spread of the Covid virus in the body, allowing natural immunity to fight the infection off far more quickly than it could have, potentially preventing the deaths of half a million or more of the reported “Covid” fatalities.  They should be angry… but not at people who refuse to wear ineffective face masks.

They should be angry, as well, at political “leaders,” or controllers, who locked down our economy as they did, and locked down our personal activities as they did.  The collateral deaths from suicide, drug overdose and, in a sense, broken hearts, as lives, businesses and marriages crumbled, amounted to more than a quarter of a million.  If “an enemy” had invaded and killed over 200,000 Americans, we’d all be angry at him, her or them… certainly.  And we would fight back until he, she, it were vanquished: totally defeated and rendered unable to repeat that evil action.  Unfortunately, we were convinced to TAKE DIRECTION FROM the enemy!  And here we are, still arguing over face masks for toddlers.  Shame on us.

LETTER TO A GRADUATE

Dear Jon,

Congratulations are truly in order.  This is a milestone.  You have a diploma, but what does it mean?

That is, what does it mean to those who do not know you?   The LACK of a High School diploma would mean a lot to people who knew only that much about you, but the fact that you have a diploma simply places you in a group of hundreds of thousands of young people who got one.  Now what?

Some kids are lucky.  They have a strong direction and interest by the time they finish highschool and they go right off to college to learn more about what interests them and some of them even wind up working at what interested them when they began college.

Many don’t.  They go to college, spend tons of money to get a degree and eventually wind up doing something entirely different.  However, the fact that they have that COLLEGE diploma, means a great deal to potential employers and colleagues.  That’s because there is no law that says a person has to attend college.

Gaining a college diploma means that an individual had enough drive and self-management to complete a course of study, and almost regardless of what the course of study was, that diploma marks the person as a good do-er – someone who could get his or her homework done even when parents weren’t there to nag and remind.  So, maybe that person can be trusted to do valuable work in exchange for money.

Some kids are even luckier.  They have a drive to learn and excel in a particular field and then go on to master that field and strive to “make a difference” in the “world.”

For many, the easiest way, or, at least, most certain way to make that difference is by becoming a teacher, and there is some truth to that.  As a teacher one is able to affect the minds and beliefs of dozens and hundreds of children – affects that will be part of them for the rest of their lives.  So teaching is pretty significant… but it’s not the path for everyone.

Sometimes the best difference that a person may make in the world derives from what he or she teaches just one or two other people – maybe children or grandchildren.  You never know.

The world, however, is still there, ready for all those “differences” to be made in it.  All those differences are not made only by high-minded diploma-holders:  the greatest ideas will evaporate if some do-er doesn’t make them real.  Often, the thinker and the do-er is the same person, and we celebrate those people.  Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Eli Whitney, Edwin Land, Thomas Edison, Clara Barton, Marie Curie, and a host of other industrial, military and political leaders are among that group.

Then there are those who are famous for having done what others dreamed up: people like Neil Armstrong.  He didn’t conceive of the machinery that took him to the moon,

but he had an ability of courage and good thinking, combined, to execute the great ideas and engineering of others.

Most of us are not like that.  Most of us are pretty-well occupied dealing with “life” as it comes along, earning a living and meeting our responsibilities.  Eventually, in the course of doing what’s best for ourselves and our families, many of us also give to others in time or money or otherwise, and make our own little, un-heralded “differences” in the “world.”  This applies to most, and is the greatest, cumulative force for good in the “world.”  Some turn criminal for whatever reasons, but most are good and civilization and society move haltingly, unevenly, even stumblingly toward an average better life for all people.  You can see there is a long way to go.

Which means there is plenty of room for you to make your own difference as you make your own way, your own life, your own living.  Eventually you will do your own good.  But, how?  Ay!  There’s the rub.

I know you didn’t have the most happy, care-free experience through school.  Neither did I.  But that’s done, now.  Now – right this instant – you are alive, healthy and strong, smart and good-looking and existing at the time of greatest opportunity ever!  Right now is when you can’t shuck your responsibility to yourself because you “deserve” a vacation or a little “rest” after your twelve grueling years slaving over textbooks.

Right now is when you have to make a map, of sorts.  It’s not a map that shows roads, trails, paths and correct turns at every intersection.  It’s a map of decision, though – definitely of decision.  You are very fortunate – lucky, even – that you are where you are with the people in your life who are here.  You have a smart brain.  And, it’s time to make a decision about making decisions.  Life on this planet is based on assumptions, beliefs and decisions.  And love.  It’s also based on love.

First, let’s examine what love has to do with it.  You are a product of love, for example.  Your mom and dad loved enough to go to the trouble of creating you, but not simply as a gift to YOU, but as a gift to each other, and with some expectation – an assumption, if you will, that whoever you were would give love back in return.  That is the real circle of life.

Love is not infinite.  It’s huge, but it has limits.  People who never return love that you send their way, can literally suck all the love out of you, leaving emptiness.  By returning love, you can multiply it, and the person to whom you returned that love not only has as much love as he or she originally had for you, but more than that.  Multiplication.  It’s a really cool phenomenon.  We don’t always call it love. 

Oftentimes the energy or effect that we might call love, is called and expressed as trust.  When you are trustworthy, when you keep your word, when you keep a secret, when you deliver on a promise, when you meet right expectations… you are expressing the force we call love.  People who learn to trust you develop an assumption about you that is called trust, but is a form of love.  Like love, trust given in return tends to

multiply trust between people.  There are very few “good” accomplishments that do not include a lot of trust between people.  It is the unwritten contract of honesty that enables most of the commerce of life, both monetary and personal.  Honesty, trust, love.  Obviously it’s important and you know you have already learned to trust quite a few people in your first eighteen years on Earth.  Have they all learned to trust you back?  That’s the first decision on your decision map: am I willing to do what it takes to be a person of trust?  Am I willing to sacrifice, sometimes, to maintain that trust?  Am I willing to do what it takes to deliver on promises I have made?  Will people who know me always know that I may be trusted to keep my word?  That’s the first decision, Jon.

People who live in accordance with that decision generally GIVE as much as they RECEIVE.  Like emotional love, people who accept the trust of others and don’t return it by action and discipline, will soon suck all the trust out of a relationship, leaving emptiness.  I hope you decide to be a trust generator.

You are bound to encounter people who are not worthy of your trust and you must be wise and careful of where you place YOUR trust.  You know someone like Frank Allen, for example, can always be trusted, but there are those who will lie to you, take advantage of your trust, even steal from you, and you must recognize when trust is the wrong thing to do with that person.  Trust is big but not infinite, and it’s extremely fragile.   A solid trust relationship is worth more than gold, and you are obligated to protect and nurture it.  It’s everything from doing what you said to saving the life of the soldier next you in battle – or him saving you.

We all live on a path built out of assumptions… assumptions that are part of our personal belief structure.  For example, we assume that the sun is coming up on time each morning; we assume that when we put our foot down on the floor that it will be firm and able to support us – same thing with the ground.  We expect – or assume – that tap water is safe to drink.  There are thousands and hundreds of thousands of assumptions that we have learned to depend upon.  Most accidents, surprises, shocks, injuries… the list is long, that happen, are when something we assumed to be true or real, is not.  Or it’s when something that we are in the habit of assuming, but which can actually vary, has varied and we fail to observe it – we fail to adjust our assumptions.

For example, a driver may assume that the person in the intersection who appears to be signaling for a turn is actually going to make that turn.  We have experienced enough instances when a turn is signaled and then actually made, that we “let down our defenses” and assume that the turn will be made this fine morning, too.  Unfortunately, sometimes the signaler is not aware he or she is signaling and instead drives right into you, or, worse, you drive right into him or her.

Assumptions can let you down.  Assumptions are created out of one-way trust.  Since the ground has always been solid, you can assume it will be today, also, but you can’t “trust” that the ground will be solid, can you?  The ground has no heart.  It can’t love you, it can’t “return” your trust.  You must recognize that making assumptions is strictly

a one-sided activity.  Make a decision, please, to never assume too much.  Maintain conscious awareness… and a sense of skepticism.  It is an old saying, but totally true: “Things are not always what they appear to be.”

The greatest pain and emotional injuries occur where someone has assumed a certain relationship exists – perhaps one of trust, or even love – when it does not, or that it is of a particular nature when it is something quite different.  The assuming party then acts or trusts in a certain way and is thunderstruck when what he or she expected would happen is completely different from what actually does happen – like assuming the other driver were going to turn – and great pain is the result.

From that might spring great anger or hatred, two things you want to avoid with as much power as you can muster, for they are corrosive, like a strong acid, eating away at your abilities to love and trust.  Don’t assume too much.

You know something about the “scientific method,” I’m sure.  An observer takes note of a phenomenon – maybe as simple as a pin dropping to the floor.  He or she measures how long it takes for the pin to reach the floor and creates an experiment where the same pin can be measured falling to the floor, again.  After two or three repetitions, the observer, armed with the recorded observations, may make a statement that gravity has a “rate” of attraction.  In other words, a weight equal to the weight of the pin will fall the observed distance in so many thousandths of a second, every time.  Others won’t even try the same experiment – they begin to assume the truth of the observer’s statement about falling pins.  Can you already see how many mistakes the others are making?  Let’s list a few:

  1. Does a square chip of metal the weight of that pin fall at the same rate?
  2. Does the pin dropped head down fall differently than point down?
  3. What if the pin is dropped sideways instead of head or point down?
  4. Is it different in a vacuum than in the air?
  5. What about if it were dropped in humid air, or bone-dry air?
  6. What if it were dropped in a freezer at 32 degrees below zero?
  7. If you climbed a mountain and dropped the pin the same height at an altitude of 10,000 feet above sea level, would it fall at exactly the same rate?
  8. What about if you went to the shores of the Dead Sea and dropped it there?
  9. What if you went to another place on Earth at exactly the same conditions, would it fall at exactly the same rate?

Wow.  Such a simple experiment with so many variables!   Who knew?  The point is, just like relationships in life, work, families and friendships, a single observation can’t be the basis of trust or love.  You must decide that you will test for some variables before you start assuming that something is true, real or honest – ie. trustworthy – between yourself and new acquaintances.  This also means that you can’t assume that you have the trust of other people, or that you have the right to be combative or quick to anger with others.  You have to find a pattern of truth from multiple observations.  When you have a basis for trust, your relationship with others will be the best it can be.  If you assume a level of trust and it proves to not be real, you will be hurt and so will the other person, and so will some around you.  Please, make a decision that you will be a wise observer: ready to trust, but only when it’s proper and good.

Of course, a lot of these decisions and observations and even skepticism, apply to you, yourself, as well.  Do you keep promises to yourself?  Do you trust yourself?  What if you said to yourself that you were going to become an expert at… gaming software, for example.  Are you willing to do what it takes to become that expert, to gain that expertise?  Will you keep your word to yourself?

Or, if you find that it is hard work to keep that promise, will you talk yourself out of caring about that promise?

Or, are you willing to find out what the steps will be to gain that expertise, so that you can then plan to achieve it?  In other words, are you going to become a great    do-er or simply dream about becoming one?

Maybe simpler terms are easier.  If you lived in an apartment and there was no food in the cupboards or the refrigerator, would you be willing to do what it takes to buy some food?  Or would you go to a soup-kitchen and beg for a meal?

Those are promises you make to yourself.  Everyone has relationships with others where he or she keeps a high trust level, protecting confidences, keeping promises, stuff like that, yet fails to keep a promise to him- or herself.  You are the only person who can make that trust decision; you are the only person who has the ability to observe whether you have proven to be trustworthy to yourself.

It is that tiny, tiny sliver of distance between trusting yourself or not, that determines how we live our lives.  “This above all, to thine own self be true; And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not be false to any man.”

So, you must decide, and now is when you must.  How will I live?  And you can’t leap, in one step, one experiment, one observation, from where you are to some ultimate dream or goal.  You need a number of observations.  You can try college or junior college and find it a perfect fit for your “map.”   You might observe that it is not.

You could “apprentice” yourself in a field you are interested in, and work for a while before going to college.  You’ll have a lot of observations on which to base your self-trust.

You could take a minimum-wage job and master it.  You will be amazed to see how many doors open up as a result.  It doesn’t matter what it is.  It is YOUR decision to be a drudge or a dynamo.  You took that job with Frank at the Elks and became a dynamo, gaining an excellent reputation, there, while helping a lot of people you don’t even know.  You TOOK the $25.00 but you GAVE much more.  It’s a formula for a good life.  You also gained many observations about cause and effect, work and rest, starting and finishing, cooperation and independence, expertise and apprenticeship.

You can do hard jobs.  You may not always like what has to be done, but you can do hard work.  That’s pretty important.  The greatest successes in America are based on starting at the “bottom” and working your way up.  Every famous general started at the “bottom.”

Finally, you must never stop learning, reading or teaching.  Learn things so that you can teach others about them.  I hope you make this decision / promise to yourself.  None of us knows enough.  The mind is always at a new level, having accumulated the education of yesterday.  Now, it’s today.  You can’t stay here, for tomorrow is coming.  You can try, but you’ll fail in everything if you think today is your forever.

Today is the only day in which you can prepare for tomorrow.  Whether you intend to (which I hope) or not, you ARE preparing for tomorrow.  It’s almost like magic.  No matter WHAT you do today, it is preparation for tomorrow.

The magic is in your soul.   It’s you.