The Bomber Story 2020

 Lots of crazy here.

When officers arrived at Perry’s home, police said she had two unloaded pistols sitting next to her on the porch. She told them those guns belonged to “Tony Warner,” police said, and she did not want them in the house any longer. Perry, then 62, was then transported for a psychological evaluation after speaking to mental health professionals on the phone.

Throckmorton told The Tennessean that Perry had fears about her safety, and thought Warner may harm her. The attorney was also at the scene that day, and told officers Warner “frequently talks about the military and bomb making,” the police report said. Warner “knows what he is doing and is capable of making a bomb,” Throckmorton said to responding officers.

https://apnews.com/article/ap-top-news-nashville-police-21f4f5b6b75216fcfe06c10e82606ae6

Authoritarian Power Sans Trump

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-threat-of-authoritarianism-in

Learning About Gratitude

Suddenly altering one’s lifestyle to include verbal affirmation for others will not cure anxiety or depression or miraculously alter one’s mindset.

Rather, making a concerted effort to show gratitude for others in one’s life can help generate a feeling of support. It creates a sort of network of goodwill.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/the-science-of-gratitude/ar-BB1chgHw 

The Sacred Cow (Stole the Movie Title)

A friend was patiently explaining to me the reasons he believed meat eating, and therefore hunting, is wrong. He's a deep thinker with impeccable logic, but often hasn't delved too deeply into the issues he's feeling strongly about. 

But as for the ethic of meat eating ...

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Non paid support for this, go check it out:    https://www.sacredcow.info

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First, there is no option that is less damaging to animals. Industrial mono cropping gave us:

-pesticides

-fertilizer from oil

-oil used to transport seeds, prepare for seeding, seeding, weed control, insect control, harvest, transport, preparation from the raw product and refined to the food portion

-very low quality nutrition for humans

-massive quantity of animals killed in the process, from the oil extraction and transport to the other transportation stages to the plowing, insect control, weed control and harvest. Snakes and other small predators, mice, grasshoppers, crickets, slugs, snails, birds, etc; all are killed in the process

-irrigation adds salt to the soil, eventually it will be unfit to grow any plant; although, plant engineers are growing mono crops that are more salt resistant to delay the inevitable

-oil based fertilizers leave the ground unfit to grow anything but mono crops; the fertilizers kill the soil bacteria

-the fertilizer runoff has created a massive dead zone where the Mississippi dumps into the GoM

Summary: industrial mono-cropping is environmental disaster, kills more animals than animal farming and provides food that is of low quality for humans and drives poor health outcomes

CAFO animal husbandry utilizes the products from industrial mono-cropping to feed the animals. The waste from the confined operations is not manageable and becomes toxic. The amount of anti-biotics needed to help cattle tolerate corn based diets makes the cows sick and increases risk of anti biotic resistance. The famous methane cow farts you have heard about result from cattle being fed food that makes them sick whilst being injected with antibiotics to make it possible for them to survive the sickness from the food they are fed (fattening cows with corn is effective and cheap, but very costly in the larger picture)

Economists call these outcome "negative externalities". They are not the point of the system, but they are hand in hand with the system. 

The only approach that can generate the food that humans need without negative externalities described above is pastured meat animals. They fertilize the soil, and support the life cycle around herd animal grazing that is natural and sustainable. The carbon impact is not only low – it is inverse, because pastured animals are part of the creation of topsoil which sequesters large amounts of CO2.
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Best books on the topic: Guns Germs and Steel and The Vegetarian Myth

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All animals are made to die to feed either another animal, bacteria or a plant (often all 3). Plant to animal, animal to plant, that’s how life goes. Deer in particular are built to live about 8 years, after which their teeth become so poor they cannot eat enough to survive the winter. A deer will starve of old age, be hit by car or be eaten by a predator. Humans have taken away the predators that would keep the weak and ill out of the herd, and would keep populations stable – over population of deer is bad for deer and their immediate environment due to over browsing. In Maine, the winter kill is estimated to be 30%, and even with that the herd is growing enough that either sex permits are needed to keep the population regulated (lower deer populations help reduce the incidence of Lyme disease).

In studying the remains of cultures at the time they shifted from hunting and gathering to farming, those populations became shorter, had very poor teeth, lived shorter lives and showed more markers of starvation in their bones (including vitamin deficiency diseases).

Summary: humans are omnivores and apex predators. We are engineered to eat meat and meat is far more nutritious for humans than any vegetable products. A deer is essentially a nutrition refinery for a human – they eat high amounts of food you and I could never live on and turn it into complete, perfect human nutrition.

Until a few hundred years ago, humans at nose to tail; tongue, eye balls, genitals, internal organs, bones for marrow and soup, and the brains – and the skin and sinews and bones became tools and clothing. We were made to kill and eat large mammals and are at a peak of health when we do.

Why The Rich Pay For Everything

I'm always glad to see Tamny's stuff and this one is more readable than most, and just as helpful to be clear about the significance of human freedom to human well being.

I hope the good doctor found as much satisfaction as it seems like he should have ... some of the successful do not. 

 https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/12/29/remembering_the_great_lawrence_d_dorr_md_654733.html

Real "Tolerance" ....

 This article is full of MSM nonsense about Trump, but Haidt strikes a chord I agree with. It will never be the case that "all of us" will agree on the complex issues of government and human liberty. It would serve us better if we could view those with differing perspectives as "equally human" in spite their threat what we value. 

Haidt discovered that conservatives had some important insights to offer on human nature, the value of institutions, and the importance of moral capital. He felt conservatism offered an important counterbalance to the excesses of progressivism. He also came to appreciate the pedigree of conservatism, from the writings of people like Edmund Burke in the 18th century to Thomas Sowell in the 20th. (Haidt told me he considers himself to be a centrist, engaging with views from multiple sides in order to understand issues. But he’s a centrist who only ever votes for Democrats, because he thinks the Republican Party has been in a state of moral and philosophical decline for many years.)

Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” he said, “the populism there is really explicitly xenophobic and often explicitly racist … I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”

Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”

Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/jonathan-haidt-pandemic-and-americas-polarization/612025/

Walter Williams on Individual Liberty

 He appeals to the authority of the founders too much, but his logic is always spot on. Hand salute, again, Dr. Williams, on the journey.

On the other side of the coin from limited government is individual liberty. The Founders understood private property as the bulwark of freedom for all Americans, rich and poor alike. But following a series of successful attacks on private property and free enterprise—beginning in the early 20th century and picking up steam during the New Deal, the Great Society, and then again recently—the government designed by our Founders and outlined in the Constitution has all but disappeared. Thomas Jefferson anticipated this when he said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

"Ironically, the free market system is threatened today not because of its failure, but because of its success. Capitalism has done so well in eliminating the traditional problems of mankind—disease, pestilence, gross hunger, and poverty—that other human problems seem to us unacceptable. So in the name of equalizing income, achieving sex and race balance, guaranteeing housing and medical care, protecting consumers, and conserving energy—just to name a few prominent causes of liberal government these days—individual liberty has become of secondary or tertiary concern."

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/future-prospects-for-economic-liberty/?utm_campaign=williams&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=101929147&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_7Xid2e4YvUwbiTjrmw2xXJfrmqurfhpWDcYSOULhZa6PD5GENDtXckseLMDURb4szR5W3KFI3lBpJpBJAg8BFOkBbVA&utm_source=housefile

As good to re-read as it was to read the first time ...

Two hundred years ago the American people were quite a bit more equal in terms of wealth, and life was marked by unrelenting drudgery. Those relatively brutal living conditions weren’t an effect of socialism, even though socialism would have eventuated the same outcome.

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Cooperative exchange is the highest form of human interaction.

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The shame of socialism is that the wildly talented are restrained from profitably improving the lives of the people around them, and perhaps continents away. Thinking about life two hundred years ago, distance was a severely limiting factor for the talented when it came to making things better for everyone. No doubt there were people with skills similar to those of the richest Americans today, and some became very well-to-do by early 19th century standards. But they didn’t become staggeringly rich simply because a lack of technology limited the ability of the ‘1 percenters’ of the early 19th to touch the U.S. (and the world) with their genius. Limited technology has socialistic qualities in the outcome sense for it restraining the brilliant from improving the lives of others while getting rich for doing just that.

 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johntamny/2018/11/11/surging-wealth-inequality-is-a-happy-sign-that-life-is-becoming-much-more-convenient/?fbclid=IwAR3BbDsvASk_GAtBhFiiO3KtAxq5wHf8sSXies80B4IBUvXsc-McUme928I&sh=2657557064ca

The scarcity mentality leads folks to believe that if one person is rich, the wealth must come at the expense of another person. What the wealthy do in a capitalist economy is create more wealth - more stored human time and energy - through cooperative exchange.

Bearing the Weight of Liberty

It appears we've become security state lap dogs with not appetite for bearing the weight of self government. The home of notsofree and the notreallybrave. Maybe the generation suffering from the current jelly spined responses to government over-reach will grow hungry again for the benefits of individual liberty.

In The Price of Panic, Douglas Axe, William M. Briggs, and Jay W. Richards offer a contemporaneous answer to this question while at the same time exploring alternative ways to deal with the pandemic that are not violations of mere socialnorms, let alone the inalienable rights that are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. There have been violations of the free exercise of religion and the right to peacefully assemble, both enshrined in the First Amendment. The Second Amendment’s guarantee of right to keep and bear arms, which is fundamental to allowing a free people to defend themselves against both criminals and the government has also been restricted; this is particularly important when the government does not protect its people from criminals. The sanctity of private households, the Fourth Amendment, has been disregarded. Presently in most of California, you are not supposed to have any friends or family over to your house. Many governments have disregarded the right of due process and property, which as part of the Fifth Amendment are not to be ignored. The Twenty-First Amendment’s guarantee to drink liquids of one’s choice is in many places functionally returning to the Eighteenth Amendment. While some may quibble at “intoxicating liquors” as an inalienable right, the ability to drink such liquids is certainly part of the natural law tradition.

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/viral-panic/

Gingrich with the excellent summary of affairs

 An excellent summary of what this feels like to even a late the party Trump supporter. I'm in the middle ground. This seems all wrong, but what's a law abiding citizen to do about it? It looks like they will get away with it; and there's no reason to think what went wrong won't be duplicated next time. 

In 2016, I supported an outsider candidate, who was rough around the edges and in the Andrew Jackson school of controversial assaults on the old order. When my candidate won, it was blamed on the Russians. We now know (four years later) Hillary Clinton’s own team financed the total lie that fueled this attack.

Members of the FBI twice engaged in criminal acts to help it along — once in avoiding prosecution of someone who had deleted 33,000 emails and had a subordinate use a hammer to physically destroy hard drives, and a second time by lying to FISA judges to destroy Gen. Michael Flynn and spy on then-candidate Donald Trump and his team. The national liberal media aided and abetted every step of the way. All this was purely an attempt to cripple the new president and lead to the appointment of a special counsel — who ultimately produced nothing.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/21/why-i-will-not-accept-joe-biden-as-president/

About those vote spikes ...

 Seems like nothing will come of this.

Will anyone tackle the job of reinforcing the voting system so that we can be confident in the results? 

I'm does not appear to be in the best interest of politicians to have a manipulation free system ...

"In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major “vote spikes” that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these “vote spikes.” Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny.
This is one such case: Our analysis finds that a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern."

https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-2020

An Easy, Obvious Fix In the Tax Code

The solution is to take a cue from the tax code, which allows married couples filing jointly to earn more before a higher rate kicks in, accounting for the fact that both adults can be breadwinners. Congress removed marriage penalties for highly paid professionals long ago, and it is past time to give this basic consideration to working-class Americans.

Child care assistance — inherently pro-work, but with the largest marriage penalties due to the high cost of childcare — is the perfect candidate for reform. Moreover, state lawmakers have significant discretion over the program and can enact desperately needed reforms. First, increase the program-eligibility threshold of family income for working-class married couples to account for the reality that two adults will earn more than one adult. Then, phase out the benefit slowly to reduce the financial hit to recipients as they earn more or get married.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/16/a_simple_policy_fix_to_encourage_two-parent_homes.html

The Deaths of Despair

A record 621 people died of drug overdoses in San Francisco so far this year, a staggering number that far outpaces the 173 deaths from COVID-19 the city has seen thus far.

The crisis fueled by the powerful painkiller fentanyl could have been far worse if it wasn't for the nearly 3,000 times Narcan was used from January to the beginning of November to save someone from the brink of death, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/overdose-deaths-outpace-covid-19-deaths-san-francisco-74823530

I suppose the drug dealers are not obeying the lock down. They should be ashamed. 

Back in the 90's I worked the Flight Deck of the USS ENTERPRISE

I had a memory of being assigned to ENTERPRISE, where I was a catapult and arresting gear officer. One day after we shot training command jets for 3 days (new pilots flying with instructors earning their carrier qualification the first time), my boss (the “Air Boss”), who knew the CO of the training squadron, got a ride for me in the back of a trainer jet - 5 shots and traps.

The catapult shots were 4g of acceleration – 0 to 120 in 4s. It feels like nothing could possibly stand up to that much pressure, the thought in my head was “nothing could survive this” even though I was surviving it. I learned it is best enjoyed when giving a rebel yell when the jet started down the track.
At the end of the cat shot, 60’ above the water, the transition was from crushing acceleration to none. It felt like the jet was hovering off of the bow of the ship, absolutely surreal, like the plane could just fall into the water. 

I had a moment at work like that Thursday morning - only not a physical experience, a purely mental one when the frantic work hit the finish line and I had nothing to do ...

There was a lot to love about my tour aboard Big E, and a lot to grieve as we lost 5 members of the team in that 3 years - and I watched helplessly as a Sailor lost his hand in a jet intake in a moment of carelessness on deck. 

I enjoyed the intensity, the team work, and my sense of responsibility to the youngsters on deck working long days in the cold and heat, with way too little sleep. I did my best to shepherd them, I pulled or directed many of them out of dangerous spots and was honored to have the opportunity. 

The Population Time Bomb

Can you hear the song? "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine ...."

"No fewer than 23 leading nations—including Japan, Spain, South Korea, and Italy—will see their population cut in half by 2100. China’s will drop by a stunning 48 percent, knocking it out of contention as the world’s economic super-power. This precipitous decline will not be caused by disease, famine, or any kind of natural disaster. The missing population will simply never have been born. Their would-be parents are simply forgetting to have them."

https://quillette.com/2020/12/11/the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/

Liberty or Death

 I identify with this guy. Both sides have a better grip on some pieces of virtue than the other, and both sides have some "so wrong for so long" strongly held beliefs. Both sides are at their best when grounded in individual liberty and self government with rule of law. I'm pretty sure many of our citizenry either doesn't care about or doesn't understand the idea of individual liberty and self government.

"Haidt laments the state of contemporary American politics, believing that on both the right and the left we’re seeing populism that responds to real problems but in illiberal ways. “On the right,” ... "I think we see strands of populism on the right that are authoritarian, that I would say are incompatible with a tolerant, pluralistic, open democracy.”

Looking in the other direction, Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”"

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/jonathan-haidt-pandemic-and-americas-polarization/612025/

Take Them Down

But there’s plenty of evidence of misconduct — among the FBI investigators. A scathing report from Michael Horowitz, the Justice inspector general, documented some of it.

• Agents relied heavily on the known-to-be-discredited Steele dossier, full of made-up rumors, to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.

• Agents lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get multiple warrants to monitor campaign adviser Carter Page — who they knew to be a CIA asset, not a Russian agent.

Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok were fired, and Durham has delivered one conviction so far: FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty for falsifying a document sent to the FISA court.

https://nypost.com/2020/12/04/ag-barr-does-his-job-on-two-key-calls-annoying-democrats-and-trump/

The Man Has a Voice

The greatest obstacle to success is an excuse.

People bound for success run from excuses. People bound for failure look for them.

Modern political liberalism, particularly its racial orthodoxy, is the science of excuse-making, the training of black minds for failure. Wokeness is the Doctorate of Race Philosophy. Black Lives Matter is the online, social media university awarding PhDs in Race Philosophy. Jack Dorsey’s “Black Twitter” algorithm serves as the faculty, teaching athletes, entertainers, journalists, bloggers and broadcasters the doctrine of Critical Race Theory.

I do not reject the legitimacy of CRT, the notion that some American institutions are constructed to advance the cause of white supremacy. I just happen to believe we’ve identified the wrong construction company.

https://www.outkick.com/whitlock-what-derek-masons-vanderbilt-failure-says-about-excuses-critical-race-theory-and-racism/

More Ice?

In the Southern Hemisphere, sea-ice levels just smashed through the previous record highs across Antarctica, where there is now more ice than at any point since records began. In the Arctic, where global-warming theorists preferred to keep the public focused due to some decreases in ice levels over recent years, scientists said sea-ice melt in 2014 fell below the long-term mean. Global temperatures, meanwhile, have remained steady for some 18 years and counting, contrary to United Nations models predicting more warming as carbon dioxide levels increased.

https://principia-scientific.org/ice-growing-poles-global-warming-theories-implode/

I don't know if this is more "sky is falling" or "emperor has no clothes" or "boy who cried climate alarmism". 

The Sky Is Falling! I see a wolf (no really I do)! And ... the Emperor has no clothes

 I feel like almost all of the Wuhan bug discussion is just proof that old allegories are the sum total of the human experience. 

I love my sister and admire her to infinity. She does "her" so much better than I've been able to "do me". Her authenticity scale is 1000%. 

I'm just WIP by comparison.

So I'm stunned that she's sucked in the #covidmadness. Maybe I shouldn't be. 

For one, my job has never been threatened by #covidmadness, and the business she and her husband created has been gut punched.

For two - I'm an idiot. I got into old USN airplanes and flew them at 300mph at 300' above the water. I also flew at a small margin above stall speed 200' above the the water to make fast passes over the submarines we were tracking. We did that for hours on little sleep with a crappy auto pilot (did I mention how old the planes were ...). 

Then when they sent me to an aircraft carrier I found a way to work in the world's 2nd most hazardous industrial environment - launching jets from the flight deck. 5000 launches, the airplanes crossing over my head while I - after directing the launch - crouched to the deck and held my goggles to my face so at least I I wouldn't have hydraulic fluid in my eyes.

And when they said "the good news is you get to go on an all expense paid vacation for 14 months, but the bad news is you are going to Bagdad and you leave in 5 days", I did it and ... dealt with it, became a better version of me while my kids and beloved wife were doing the same 12 time zones away. 

And that's what I wish the USA were doing now. 

Instead we pretend politicians and the CDC know what to do. We pretend that governments "can get this thing under control". We pretend that masks make things safe and social distancing must work since some expert says so (maybe it does, it probably helps, but makes things safe? Not likely). We talk about lock downs, as if they really were lock downs, and we say "15 days to flatten the curve". 

We act like humans act when in challenging, unfamiliar circumstances - we act the fool. We listen to the "news" - a group that earns their living by keeping us frightened and feeling like we have to know the latest thing that will make us all the more fearful and judgmental.

We listen to politicians who tell us they think they know what to do, when a brief review of the history of political judgement could prove they are lucky to find their assholes with the toilet paper. 

45,000 people per year die in cars - and we all just drive every day anyway, as we should based on the risk/reward curve. 

70+ percent of the 7000 to 8000 people who will die today (and have died every day for the last 20+ years) die a premature death from metabolic derangement from eating sugary, high carb diets - and before these unfortunate souls die they live a drastically diminished life characterized by vascular disease (heart attack, stroke) neurological disease (ALS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's) or cancer (a substantial majority of these predicted by diabetes or pre-diabetes). More than 5000 people per day, year after year, dead after a long suffering end state based on our food choices, most of which were advocated by our government's USDA food recommendations. 

What does that have to do with now?

This Chinese virus kills those who would die anyway. 40% of the deaths are from the .6% of those who live in long term care or nursing homes. 30% of those in those facilities die every year. The other 60% all have the pre-existing characteristics of high sugar, high carb diets (aka metabolic syndrome or full blown type II diabetes). If you are under 50 and have normal blood sugar and blood pressure - your death from covid would be extraordinary.

The politicians only have one incentive - to take action and use their monopoly on coercion. If they take action and people die - oh well, they did what they could, they "followed the CDC recommendations" or whatever. If the same number of people were to die but the pols were cautious of government over-reach, they would be pilloried. We see the witless ordering the timid to do those things which sound good but apparently just pave the way for more of the same government over-reach.

Government was wrong on everything - minimum wage, prohibition, the drug war, USDA food recommendations, the assessment of Iraq's nuclear capacity, the potential harm of home loan guarantees to risky lenders, the benefits of the CAFE laws, and so on and so forth. It's a miracle when the government gets anything right. And like freak show idiots we allow those morons to dictate the covid response. 

When fears are high enough, humans get tribal. "Tribal" means you are either for us or against us - there's no middle ground. That's when we all instinctively start to preach the religion of our tribe, and condemn the intentions of those who will not pretend to comply. 

And that's the part that vexes me. Once folks are tribal, they can only say "the sky is falling" and they can only "cry wolf". Any invitation to dialogue is a threat to the tribe and must be stomped. The need for certainty reaches multiples of atmospheric pressure. Fault lines interrupt human connection. We are deprived of our daily bread of feeling safe with the extended family members we love most. 

Covid will do what covid will do. There's little to be done about it until the vaccines are available, assuming they are effective like polio vaccine (but not like flu vaccine). You can continue to perseverate the risk of death from covid (less than 1% of the population so far), or you can face that risk like the many additional risks we face daily. You can join in the "sky is falling" freak out, or you and improvise, adapt and overcome. You can deal with the risks and get on with life or you can keep yelling about the wolf and adding to the fear. 

The dead? Heartbreaking.

What could I have done to prevent those deaths? Not one thing, nor would their deaths be more noble if I stood around fearful and grief laden. 

I will not be tribal. I will not cry wolf. I will not tell you the sky is falling. I will not wake up in fear of any of the many ways I may perish tomorrow. 

And if I do, I will curse myself, forgive myself and get it right the next day.

The goal: Be person worthy of the incredible liberty and safety you have been given, a birth right few or none have had in any generation before ours. And be merciful and kind and understanding to those who are not yet at the point of clarity. 

Absentee Ballot Abuse

Matt Braynard of the Voter Integrity Project (VIP) approached the 2020 results in a far less arcane fashion. His team analyzed publicly available data on absentee ballots, and he explained his findings in a way that any intelligent voter can understand. VIP looked at suspicious ballot activity in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Among the most significant VIP findings involved people who changed their state of residence, yet voted absentee using their prior address. In Arizona, which Biden “won” by 10,457 votes, there were 19,997 questionable votes. In Georgia, which Biden “won” by 12,670 votes, VIP found 138,221 such votes. In Wisconsin, which Biden “won” by 20,608 votes, there were 26,673 such votes.

https://spectator.org/legitimacy-of-biden-win-buried-by-objective-data/

Mail In Ballots Are an Injustice

 Maybe just accidental ...

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-new-analysis-shows-biden-winning-nearly-impossible-margins-on-mail-in-ballots-in-pennsylvania

Farewell to a Man Among Men

I highly recommend you read the whole tribute from Dr. Thomas Sowell. 

I remember the first time I heard Dr. Williams on the radio. Whenever I've seen anything he wrote, I read it. His analysis, his intellect, his humor - all first rate. I wish I could have shook his hand and said 'thank you'. A brave, original, powerful soul.

Fair winds on the journey sir!

 https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2020/12/02/walter-e-williams-19362020-n2580965