Category Archives: Family

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Family, Taxation

BUSINESS, PROFITS, CHARITY & FREEDOM

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Taking care of business…

Fewer and fewer people understand capitalism, despite every, single, one of us being a capitalist.  This is an odd distortion of knowledge and understanding, and it has taken a lot of work.  There are two kinds of capital: earned and unearned.  Figuring out which is which will make clear where each of us is on the spectrum.

Consider a newborn baby.  He or she will cry and fuss until he or she receives food and/or comfort – often the very same things.  There is no sense of sacrificing for greater rewards an hour or two later, or of “saving up” cries in order to obtain a larger portion at a later time.  Babies exhibit raw capitalism: pure barter.  I won’t make your motherly instincts feel the discomfort of a crying baby if you will provide what it takes to comfort me and put enough food into me so that I will sleep… like a baby.  We all start out as capitalists.

We might also note that a baby doesn’t save any food or comfort for later, nor does he or she offer more quiet alleviation of motherly guilt in exchange for food than it takes.  Everything is on the expense accounts as “current” – no accrual.

It takes a while for infants and toddlers to figure out that kindness and caring can be “banked,” as it were, for increased pleasure and happiness any time later.  It’s a big concept.  If lovingly raised, however, children do learn to avoid punishment for “bad” or costly actions, and to express love and kindness toward parents and others when they are not hungry or uncomfortable… and even to share possessions.  At some point they learn to trade possessions for perceived “profits.”  Something Tommy has seems more desirable than what Jeffy has – and vice-versa – and both parties “profit” from an exchange of goods.  Also a big concept.

Like all human “isms,” even incipient capitalism requires regulation and “institutionalized” bounds.  Almost every child learns that simply taking something of Tommy’s is extremely profitable: nothing is given up in exchange.  Parents or other adults are, at that point, obligated to punish – or dis-incentivize – that practice.  Jeffy’s taking, or stealing the possession of Tommy’s, must be made costly enough that Jeffy learns as immediately as possible, that there is no advantage or profit in that act or acquisition.  And, it must be a cost that exceeds the simple return of the stolen property.  Whether it’s a period of disfavor from a parent, or deprivation of a desired activity, a slap on the hand or something else proportional to the “crime,” there must be a cost that the perpetrator, Jeffy, will do his best to avoid going forward.  Otherwise, stealing becomes a habit and will be perceived as profitable and worthwhile.  Several big concepts.

It’s easy to imagine the fairly short-term consequences of the lack of institutionalized sanctioning of “bad” actions.  In this case, the “institution” is the “law,” or, at least, the automatic and swift punishment (let’s hope, by parents) of theft in addition to retribution.  This is the fundament of civilization; capitalism is woven amongst all the threads of civilized society.

Now let’s assume that our properly guided and sanctioned child grows up, essentially according to the Ten Commandments.  People of faith attempt to obey all ten, there being nothing negative about any of them, which is to say: nothing that hurts social cooperation and quality of life, or the raising of new adults with civilizing self-control.  Strictures against creating and worshipping graven images instead of God; taking the name of God in vain (cursing involving God’s name or power); keeping the sabbath day holy is also a good idea, albeit one that we in America have cleverly set aside; honoring our fathers and mothers is both logical and essential to the health of society; not killing one another; not committing adultery; not stealing; not lying about our neighbors; and, not coveting the property of our neighbors.  These are essentially society-protecting strictures that we attempt to talk ourselves away from only at our peril.  The hate-based riots of 2020 are the clear and clarion proof of the fragility of civilization in the absence of “the Commandments,” whatever their source.

Our new adult decides to start a business.  Having been raised “with a conscience,” Jeffy plans to sell his skills as a carpenter, and he recognizes that he’ll need a partner with similar skills in order to keep his contracting promises and to help avoid mistakes.  He makes arrangements with a local lumberyard to establish an account with sufficient credit to do significant renovation or add-on projects.  The account is based on Jeffy’s reputation as an honest person and, in part, on his father’s equivalent reputation.  The lumberyard considers the potential of a growing business customer as a worthy risk of a certain level of credit, or debt.

By virtue of hiring Aaron, a friend he knows from High school, who also loves building things, Jeffy takes on a remarkable burden of employer obligations, including various benefits that must be paid, including health care and liability insurances, and, of course, meeting “payroll.”  As owner of the business, Jeffy also is responsible for legal contracting with customers, and for other tax consequences of success.  He and Aaron still believe in their abilities and respective roles. and business commences.

“Jeff’s Construction” finds itself busy and able to pay both the owner and his employee reasonable wages while gaining assets in the form of two trucks and several power tools, and while accumulating some money in a local bank.  In other words, “Jeff’s” is profitable.  Knowing that his little company was facing taxes on his profits at both the state and federal levels, Jeff decides to make a donation to his church’s Christmas Food Drive.  With profits on the books of about $12,000, Jeff donates $2,000 to the food drive.  He and Aaron get their picture in the paper handing over a big cardboard check to the chairman of the Drive committee.  The minister and several other key people are also in the picture.  Jeff makes a handful of new connections, as a result, a couple of whom later contract with “Jeff’s Construction” for renovations of their homes.

As the years go by, “Jeff’s Construction” becomes “J & A Builders, Inc.” incorporated and no longer a proprietorship.  They grow to 6 full-time employees.  Each summer J & A work with the regional technical high school to provide summer jobs to budding carpenters.  Aside from income taxes to state and federal government, J & A’s building and garages plus the property taxes on the two partners’ and their 6 employees’ homes total over $100,000 per year, while excise taxes on their vehicles kick in another $26,000.  Donations to the Food Drive, the Boys and Girls Club and to the local “Y” for Summer Camp sponsorships plus support of a local Little League team, amount to nearly $25,000.  J & A also matches 401-K contributions up to 5% of income for all 8 personnel.

Those who misunderstand the immense values of honest profit are always looking for “businesses” and “business owners” to right non-business wrongs in society, perhaps because they are “fortunate.”  But that is not a business obligation.  The business is obliged to operate legally and honestly, delivering what it promises and not cheating customers, and to do so at a profit so that all legal obligations to employees and suppliers are met.  By providing multiple streams of tax revenue, businesses provide for all that civil society is relied upon to provide for residents.  Charity is in addition, and a blessing, not an obligation.

Of course, everything is different for those small businesses that have a room in the back that’s full of cash… cash they’re just too greedy to share with their oppressed workers and every poor person in town.  But, there are damned few of those. 

There are  many ways to add new wealth to an economy and to a nation.  The first of these was personal manufacture, in a sense, where the best tools or weapons compared to other groups or tribes created an advantage in terms of safety, hunting and survival.  Next came agriculture, permanent villages and cities and the need to defend them, which latter need spurred invention, metallurgy, and more.  Along with agriculture, fishing also introduces wealth and spurred marine technology.  In the presence of defensive pressures came a third major source of new wealth: mining.  Everything, of course, required managed labor and the necessary efficiencies that make ever-larger projects, whether construction or war-fighting, possible.  Indeed, it all made the Roman Empire possible – a success of management and leadership that taught some lessons to all of today’s successful – and failed – governments.  Religion, particularly in terms of Judaism and Christianity and the economic and familial ethics they spread across Europe, led, eventually and often unpleasantly, to the enlightenment and the explosion of technology, which made intellectual invention a new source of wealth and source of medical advantage, which is another form of civic wealth.

Today, virtually pure intellect is like a global form of mining.  New products are “manufactured” from a raw material of electrons, bringing new wealth into existence.  Construction, of homes or factories or office towers or highways and bridges, adds new wealth, too: fixed assets, from which use is derived for years and decades, enabling other wealth and our gigantic “service economy.”  Still, no matter the type of business in which one engages, the obligations of businesses and business owners – including stockholders – are the same.

What are they?

  • Operate legally (but don’t hesitate to challenge regulations and laws that are irrational and which amount to unequal application of the law)
  • Earn a profit legally, without cheating customers
  • At best, manufacture a product (best way to create new wealth benefitting the most people)
  • Next best, grow a product and/or improve the growing process
  • Treat employees equally and provide appropriate training and safe conditions for work
  • Provide real services that add value to products and their use or availability
  • Deliver what is promised, never less than promised, and more if you can
  • Do not employ false advertising or sales tactics
  • Maintain honest accounting, pay applicable taxes
  • Do not dirty your property, the air or the waters

Individuals, business owners or not, are always free to be charitable and to take part in politics or social issues they believe in.  But these should be personal decisions and personal resources.  A business owner fails his or her basic obligations to a community , to customers and to employees, by diverting business resources that should be enhancing working conditions, or providing insurance against future threats to the business.  Otherwise, if this sense of purpose and obligation to the health of the business is being weakened for any number of reasons, the business should be sold to those who will work to meet the listed obligations, or folded, having fulfilled, or no longer fulfilling, its mission.

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

IN PHARMA’S FIELDS THE RUMORS GROW

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IN PHARMA’S FIELDS THE RUMORS GROW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

vaccina, vaccina

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Let’s go, Brandon!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family, Health Care

OPEN HEART

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OPEN HEART

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t you just love hyphens?

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

ON LITTLE CAT FEET

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Tyranny by any other name…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economics, Family, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2021

INJECTABLE WISDOM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Family, Politics 2021, Race, Representation

FIELD OF TRUTH

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We, meaning the Exchange Club of Lawrence and the Andovers, and a bunch of wonderful volunteers and relatives thereof, installed the “Field of Honor” for the third time on the North Andover, Massachusetts Common, this past Saturday.  It is a labor of love and patriotism and, in fact, a most serious community service, part of two of Exchange’s Four Pillars of Service.  To do a lot of what a “full-calendar” Exchange Club wants to accomplish each year requires money, and mixed with our forms of service to our communities are some vital fund-raising events; the Field of Honor is a four-way winner on that calendar.  With a single project we fulfill “Americanism,” we raise needed funds, we unify our Club and we provide “Community Service” for all of those who sponsor flags in memory of loved ones or in honor of them, who recognize first-responders, health-care workers, coaches, teachers and other personal “V.I.P.’s” in their lives.

Each sponsored flag has affixed a colorful, laminated “Tag” that names the honoree, field of service and heartfelt commentary by the sponsor about this very important person.  The first time we “did” a Field of Honor we followed the lead of a nearby Exchange and tried to read all the dedications on the day of ceremony at the end of the Field’s term of display.  We messed it up fairly well since we didn’t have a good database, but the hearing of one’s dedication was very important to the flag sponsors, a fact made abundantly clear to us by those who did not hear their own, or who missed the reading.  That is when the nature of the service we were suddenly responsible to provide properly, became clear.

We’ve fixed that database problem.  We’ve also fixed our lack of recognition among the communities we’ve served for, now, 75 years.  Both our Club members and the Club, itself, can be identified with this beautifully visible display, now of three-week’s duration.  But, the “Field” is still greater than the values already noted.  It’s a unifier when Unity in these “United” States is under its greatest stress.  This is the larger part of the story.

Dis-unity is the most potent weapon there is in the hands of an enemy of a democratic republic – a republic built on personal morality and personal responsibility and above and beneath all, FREEDOM.  In the past dozen (or five-dozen) years, or so, we have witnessed the coalescing of “liberal,” socialistic tendencies toward dictatorial government, around the always-tender concerns about race and attendant hatreds.  There is very little within the non-discussive discussions about race in the U. S. that involve truth.  Among intentional, often political LIES about race or racism, exist often-repeated – shouted – non-truths that are based upon beliefs that are just not so.  That is, many, mostly guilt-ridden liberals, repeat statements they believe are true, but the premises of which are false.  They have no intention to lie, per se, but become greatly exercised as they parrot non-truths.  We should stipulate some truths.

One – Different races are not limited compared to any other race in terms of ABILITY, only by BELIEFS.  Within those beliefs are familial, parental and social expectations that are imprinted even before birth, as to what constitutes propriety and success for an individual.

Two – Mixing races together, including by force, as with slavery, ALWAYS carries the risk of continuing division because of conflicting BELIEFS, not because of mental or physical abilities.  Humans are much more alike than not, despite oft-repeated untruths we may have grown up with.  Diversity, in and of itself, is a weakening agent to the cohesiveness of a society, to a nation.  Similarity is the great strengthener, and, when reinforced by diverse experiences, a tremendous strength to the United States nation.  Diversity for its own sake is a source of social divisiveness, yet now governs our economic and social constructs, including valuations of one another as “sufficiently diverse” enough in our daily lives and actions.  No nation can survive, no society can succeed if its interactions are biased toward the non-traditional beliefs of newcomers, rather than the newcomers being required to live by our traditional moral standards, no matter their personal beliefs.

Three – Shared morality is essential to social unity and to economic success.  America’s economic success is based on fundamental honesty in contracts written and unwritten, from marriage to multi-year leases, commodity pricing and delivery, and in covenants between the people-formed governments and those governments, themselves, local state and federal.  Together with honesty in contracting, our sense of – belief in – sacrifice for a better future for our children and for people unknown, made our phenomenal growth and wealth possible.  Welcoming, or allowing establishment of, moralities alternative to the historical, traditional morality of a society, is a first step to social suicide.  Americans, in our folly, are not merely tolerant of other beliefs, which is relatively harmless, but we fail to require all citizens to live by our own fundamental moral traditions.  Indeed, we have managed to talk ourselves out of living by them.

Four – There are two genders: many feelings about one’s place and purpose and pursuit of happiness, but only two genders.  That so much heat is generated over “trans-genderism” or “trans-sexuality” is based on those individuals who desire so much to believe in two contradictory ideas at the same time, that they will endure a host of suspicions and fears among “straight” populations.  Others who desire acceptance of aberrant lifestyles, AND those who are mainly interested in the dissolution of the United States, seize upon those who believe in trans-genderism and employ their suffering – which is real – as a further wedge to separate the vast majority of Americans from their traditional morality.  Sadly, ultra-progressive parents, themselves, are changing their own beliefs to accommodate the popularized mental incongruity that two diametrically opposed concepts may be true at the same time.  Small children who claim to be other than their actual gender are encouraged in this incongruity even to the point of chemical – EVEN SURGICAL – modification of growth and maturation (with untold consequences, nearly all of which are negative).  Supposed psychologists, scientists of a sort, including “child” psychologists, have bent their attitudes towards normality and no longer advise maintaining traditional roles for children until maturity.  Most minors “grow out of” dyspohric fantasies.  Unfortunately, a less and less morally constrained population has created political pressure sufficient to have draconian laws passed requiring society to accommodate these incongruities, to the direct affront of not only honesty, but of all traditional moral codes, including religious codes, and to our peril as a democratic republic, which, as noted, can function only amidst a population self-controlled by shared morality.

Five – Derek Chauvin did not kill George Floyd.  Oh, he was “convicted” of murder, much like Joe Biden having been certified as President.  The Chauvin conviction was mere confirmation of what weak, jittery politicians had agreed with mobs to do.  The nearly sainted George Floyd was on an express bus to an early death that day, before his antics even gained police attention.  Chauvin, not the brightest bulb in the string, could have feigned great concern and demanded that people taking videos go find a doctor instead.  He could have laid George’s big head on his lap and tried talking to him while they waited for the EMT’s.  He’d still have his job, Minneapolis would still be a city, and dozens of businesses and thousands of jobs would still be supporting families in Minnesota.  No, Chauvin didn’t kill Floyd, but he caused the deaths of many others and many more to come as idiotic, fearful, politicians attempt to buy favor from Communists and fascists by weakening police departments.

Six – To say that “black lives matter” is to state an obvious fact; all lives matter in a non-communist society: our morality informs us of the sacredness and sanctity of human life.  To adhere to the “Black Lives Matter” organization as some sort of leaders in the mattering of black lives, however, is to put the lie to every aspect of the sanctity of black and every other life.  More than in any other “advanced” culture, lives matter most under a system of freedom and personal worth.  Religion has a lot to do with that, Christianity most of all in this Prudent view.  To latch on to anti-Christians for leadership in this area of humanity, is utterly nonsensical.  Misguided blacks, in fact, are at the forefront of DISCOUNTING the values of black lives!  Let us count the ways.

          Blacks are solidly Democratic in their politics, evidently expecting expansive government to make their lives better.  Yet it is they who have the most to say about the betterment of their lives and the lives of all blacks.  After 60 years of federalized welfare and the concurrent dissolution of the black family, wise blacks can readily describe the negative impact on black lives, a gift from Democrats.  The incessant turning away from success by so many black youth, consumed in hatred for anything “white,” like educational excellence and personal merit, is also a product of political divisiveness employed by the great protectors of blacks: Democrats.

          Just as was done in South Africa during apartheidt, unions have been strong promoters of unionization and minimum wage laws – the net effect of which have been to make it more comfortable to hire whites instead of blacks.  Black youth, more likely to be lower-skilled, unfortunately, are denied their best marketable quality: willingness to work for less to get started up the ladders of success.  We have made it illegal to work for less.  Alternatives on the streets and gang associations where all the leaders are non-white, are made much more attractive to disaffected youth.  Keeping blacks unskilled and inexperienced serves to make unionized jobs more white… just like in South Africa.  Who are the strongest proponents of unionization and minimum wages?  Democrats, who are trying their hardest to improve the lot of blacks, just ask them.  Those are they who celebrate success of black Democrats while heaping scorn upon blacks of other political views.  Black lives matter, so much.

President Joe Biden, race-baiter in chief… and great “unifier,” has authorized the flying of “Black Lives Matter” flags at American embassies around the world.  It is a move so utterly offensive to so many, and so essentially diametric toward everything the United States has ever professed, fought-for or relied upon in its founding ideas and ideals, and so stupid, as to expose the rank folly of this man’s being president of this nation or of virtually any organization of alert humans.  Nothing he does is to be trusted.  Nothing he has done as president is pro-American… or anti-racist.

Seven – Education is the primary business of parents: not of the government at any level, or of teachers unions or of mediocrity contracts with arbitrary groups of teachers.  Teachers are hired, fundamentally, to teach our children how to be honest, literate, knowledgeable about science, mathematics and the natural world, and knowledgeable about our culture and founding, governing principles.  Educators need not teach religion, per se, but about religion as part of World History.  Nor should they teach against it.  They should teach common decency and respect for others, good manners and propriety in all things within the school campus/environment.  Sports and other team functions and competitions are relevant for good health and good adjustment to the individual strengths and weaknesses of others.  Exposure to the Arts is also essential for becoming well-rounded individuals, armed with some choices of direction to follow after the first 12 years of instruction.  Elective courses should include “manual arts” and tool use, carpentry and basic trade skills.  It is not the business of educators to expose minor children to unusual sexual practices or any sexual practices.  The subject matter of any “Health” class should be vetted by the parents of children in the school system, else their children may not attend said class.  Any school or “system” unwilling to collaborate with parents at that level about sexuality or any other area of controversy, perhaps with open petitioning by a certain percentage of parents, requiring such vetting, does not deserve access to students or to the tax monies that follow them.

          Ideally, every school should be a Charter School, and every child should be expected to excel… and to behave.

Eight – The breaching of the Capitol Building on January 6th was not an insurrection.  It was several things, but “insurrection” was not one of them.  There was no attempt, or even hope, to overthrow the sitting government or our governing “system,” EXCEPT where said system was lying to the American people.  The mealy-mouthed half-truths and outright lies tossed around in the hallowed halls of Congress, ostensibly to do “the people’s business” has become so offensive and off-target that people wanted to talk to their erstwhile “representatives” who were about to certify a most questionable election of one of the most crooked presidents-elect to ever reach that level.  The actions of some who assaulted the building were clearly unrelated to the President’s words; those are they who entered the crowds at the Capitol and who had not attended the rally.

          Capitol police, oddly, had not, despite advance notice for days, made any reasonable attempts to make such a breach difficult and, in fact, made the breach easier, even to helping people enter the building once the physical breaches had occurred.  Offers of reinforcement from the Trump administration were refused because of “optics,” we’re told.  Yet the entire period since the rather silly impacts of the vandalism and broken windows, has been nothing but “optics,” as conservatives and Trump voters, generally, have been branded as “white supremacists” and “terrorists” and greater threats to “democracy” than “9-11.”  What hogwash.  The greatest threat to “democracy” in the past several decades exists among those who engineered the 2020 Elections that led to certification of the electoral College votes that propelled Biden-Harris to be sworn in on January 20th.  To say that the January 6th events were not a legitimate “protest” against perceived government mendacity is to rewrite history and word-meanings simultaneously.  Long before the 2020 elections, sufficient reasons to protest the actions within the Capitol were accumulating: things like $27 Trillion in debts.

          Breaching the Capitol was foolish, obviously, and illegal in its own right, from which a host of other crimes and misdemeanors flowed.  The worst crime, committed by a Capitol Police officer, was the point-blank murder of Ashli Babbit, who was not assaulting any person or presenting a threat to the officer who shot her.  Ms. Babbit was unarmed.  Four months later we can finally identify the police officer at fault, despite video of the incident.  He is a Trump-hater, reportedly, but not charged with this crime.  Can we suppose that had the breach been the work of “BLM” that the entire congressional leadership would have taken a knee on their Communist behalf in the Rotunda?  Fourteenth Amendment, anyone?

Back to the Field of Honor in North Andover: Exchange attempts to gather good people to a common purpose, much of which is helping, serving, others.  Through scholarships, recognitions of excellence and of overcoming tough challenges, and through Americanism, we attempt to remind our fellow Americans of the qualities that are worth emulating, honoring and teaching.  In our experience, people need that reminding; they need to remember or recognize and honor those who were raised with those vital qualities; people truly want the reminding: it affirms that the best of being an American is still true and worth emulating, including to whatever extent, in their own lives and in the lives of those around them.

To all those who, for whatever reason or untruth you are convinced of, teach our children, and who convey that America and its entire history and purpose is to be hated and discarded for a socialized, anti-Christian system that has failed wherever tried, stop!  You have no right.

Culture, Economics, Family

THE ANT AND THE OLD MAN

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Aesop’s Fables include a most telling description of the values of sacrifice and, in truth, of love.  In the little morality play the grasshopper is portrayed with a fiddle, which he has played all summer, eating such vegetation as he fancied whenever he was hungry.  The Ant, however, has been stocking his larder (his / her, it’s hard to tell) all during the summer – busy, busy,  busy, foregoing simple pleasures in order that the more vital pleasure of eating during the winter might be made certain. Very Prudent. Old Aesop, there, knew far more than he let on.

One could, if one had a tendency to draw parallels, observe that Socialism and Communism – grasshoppers or locusts, take your pick – and the emerging, barely United States of America, are less and less ant-like and more and more grasshopperish.  This is nowhere more starkly true than in the matters of marriage and children.

So, what came first?  The grasshopper or his / her, it’s hard to tell, thousands of eggs?  Did we “reason” our way away from religion first, or did we destroy family economics first?  And, by destroying economics, who are we serving?  Qui bono?   The result – or coincidence in the “minds” of ruling grasshoppers – is that fewer two-parent families are being formed, fewer children are being born and those who are allowed birth (pay no attention to the 62 Million Americans aborted in the past 50 years; nothing to see there… any longer) are less and less likely to be raised by two parents, and less by two parents married to each other.  Those who are born are also more likely to be only children or have no more than one sibling.

Those who marry are marrying later: late 20’s, early 30’s, with fewer high-fertility years ahead, having waited for more favorable economic circumstances before relinquishing one of their careers for child-rearing.

There are surely a whole lot of intercourse and other sex acts going on, but not for procreation purposes.  Children are, well, “too expensive.”

First and foremost, having little kids cuts into the fun two young, possibly sexy, career-advancing big kids want to have.  Little by little we have “advanced” adolescence into a third decade.  “Kids” are just getting out of 4, 5 or 6 years of college (not always confused with higher education) with loans to pay off and vacations to take.  What with medical science these days, there’s “plenty of time” to start a family when “we have time.”  We’ve been in school for 20 years and we want to “live” a little before we have kids of our own.  A grasshopper could not have said it better.

Wait, wait, wait, wait!  Didn’t Prudence just shift allegories there?  What have babies to do with storing food for the winter?

Well, winter can be a long time coming and once an old person… or couple, realizes that winter has found him, her or them, it’s too late to sacrifice for the future.  There is only one sacrifice, one expression of love that can prepare people for their eventual winter: children who love them.  It’s not food in the larder or cars in the driveway.  It’s not a paid-up mortgage or a substantial nest egg (bad choice of words, there: the nest is empty) or a time-share in a beautiful location.  And those are all nice things, marginally better than reaching one’s childless winter with minimal resources… but only marginally.

The fundamental truth that becomes starkly obvious at age 60 or 70 or older, with no children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren to care about you, is that no hired caretaker, no temp agency, no government program, can take the place of your progeny whom you have loved and who have loved you for 30, 40, 50 or 60 years.  Go ahead, try finding one.  Ask anyone near your age who lives alone and lonely, if the VNA nurse or home-health aide is “just like having a loving child caring how your doing?”

The grasshopper / locust (like a grasshopper, but meaner) “played” when he / she (hard to tell) was young, and failed to prepare for the future that was surely coming, when food no longer grew underfoot.  Like every grasshopper, our subject dies in the end, friendless, no doubt, but probably not childless, grasshopper-wise.  His children cannot and could not help him in the winter of his old age – same as having no children at all.  A childless winter can be bleak.

The phenomenon of too few children to even replace normal death rates in a population, means that said population will fairly quickly: 2 to 3 generations, 50 to 75 years – become too small to plot its own economic or cultural path to the future it desires.  Several populations or nationalities are fading, now.  Along with white North Americans, Japanese, Russian, Scandinavian and Northern European and U. K. populations are failing to replace themselves.  At the same time a variety of wars and crappy policies have yielded broad emigrations of non-white and non-Judeo-Christian refugees into historically “white” and Christian nations and cultures.  It is an historic “double-whammy.”

Despite the flood of anti-white, anti-Judeo-Christian calumny over the last 4 to 5 decades, most virulently over the past dozen years, increasing to abject destruction and politically supported hatred of whites and Asians, Jews and, now Christians, the overarching history of “white,” largely Jewish and Christian development and growth, is one of steady and imperfect progress: intellectual, scientific, experimental, exploratory, democratic and republican and, eventually, the basis for individual, not group freedoms.  Throughout there has always been a force – or set of forces – desirous of reigning in freedom, dominating it with monarchy and other tyrannies, and with wars.

There is no reason to expect that the dispersion of “white” progress along with the irrelevance of shrinking white populations, is going to lead to a new age of increased freedom, economic or otherwise, certainly not of religion, and certainly not in an individual sense.  The alternative to the ideas and ideals of America – to date the epitome of freedom and personal responsibility in that long flow of Judeo-Christian history – appears to be rigid, top-down group-identity governance on a global, not national, basis. 

There are only a few threads and patches left in that grand tapestry.  It frays daily.  Judeo-Christian history is also the epitome of self-destruction, commencing with the inculcation of new beliefs in the wrongness of everything “white,” Judeo-Christian and Euro-centric – everything Constitutional, in effect.  This new belief structure, hastened by destructive, socialist economics, convinces young, white “Westerners” to not bring more children into this world.

Those of us who have the good fortune of not having been aborted, face only a long, cold winter of increasing loneliness, for we have failed to lay up treasure for our futures, in the persons of children who love us and to whom our heritage might have been entrusted.

Education, Family, Governance, Health Care, Representation

EDU-TYRANNY

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At 71 inches the risk is unbearable.

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

There are multiple tyrannies at issue.

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

Well, that’s a fine “how do you do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, that last paragraph is a dream too far.

Family, Health Care

THe Allison Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I should have prayed for is mercy and understanding.

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

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