Minding My Own Business

"There I was, walking down the street, minding my own business, when all of a sudden, for no reason, I got attacked".

My husband, a lawyer, and I, an ER nurse, have heard versions of this narrative multiple times in our careers, which is why we crack up whenever international events happen in which spokespeople give the national version of it.

The latest is Britain. There they were, sailing their warship in the Black Sea, minding their own business, when all of a sudden, for no reason, Russia provoked them!

The nerve!

Nazi Germany, Rwanda, or Both?

The Niemoller lament that used to be frequently quoted "First they came for the communists" is never mentioned by the Vichy Democrats of today.

In the American case, it was "First they came for Alex Jones" and most self-identified liberals said nothing, although honest liberals like Glenn Greenwald and Caitlin Johnstone did speak up.

In the ensuing years, more and more censorship and bannings have taken place, but still the latte liberals are silent, or supportive.

Last year, they cheered on the mobs in the streets openly hunting down citizens wearing MAGA hats, culminating in the execution of a Trump-supporting man on the streets of Portland. The lawlessness and violence of the mobs, reminiscent of the mobs in Rwanda who hunted down and killed Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were supported and defended by the Democrats and their allies. A widely traveled Brit who visited Portland last year said that he was shocked to see graffiti on the walls calling for the murder of journalist Andy Ngo, (who had previously been beaten so badly by a mob that he suffered a subdural hemmorhage). He pointed out that that kind of violent intimidation is not usually seen in democratic countries, and he wondered why the authorities allowed it to stand. Why indeed.

Now our ruling overlords have moved into imprisoning political opponents, and instead of finally speaking up at this escalation of state oppression, Democrats openly gloat, including celebrating the well-known horrendous conditions of US prisons, which include inedible food and widespread rape of inmates. I saw a thread celebrating the arrest of a married couple who had entered the Capitol on Jan. 6th, who the poster said were prisoners 523 and 524, in which a series of commenters cheered on their impending weight loss from inedible food and rape by guards or other prisoners. There are over 500 American citizens now in jail, some in solitary confinement, for the crime of trespassing on public property (after the security guards opened the doors and let them in), but this is seen as a righteous step by the commenters.

As Steven Weinberg pointed out "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.” In this case, the self-righteousness of the woke totalitarians comes not from organized religion, but their unshakeable belief that they are morally superior and thus entitled to wipe out the impure citizens who dare to disagree with them.

It looks like we are going to have a mixture of Nazi Germany, with organized state repression of all dissent, and Rwanda, where citizens take up arms and hunt down their political enemies. I am appalled and dismayed.

Research Shows That Some Peasants Can Think For Themselves

A group of woke researchers followed Americans who were skeptical of their betters and unwilling to accept royal pronouncements without question.

It turned out that these people were scientically literate. So the solution can't be to give them more information or teach them how to think critically. The problem (as explained by the researchers) is exactly that they are able to think critically.

I did a podcast about the study.

Brain Worms

One time, in the ER, a man from Mexico came in complaining of a severe headache. We did a CT scan, and put it up on the viewing screen, and there, plain for anyone to see, were the trichinosis worms in his brain. Anyone walking by reacted the same. "Eeeewww. No wonder his head hurts''.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter are the way that our ruling overlords scan the body politic and see how our minds work.

If they put out a particularly ridiculous brain worm, say "If an American president meets with a foreign leader, that bestows legitimacy upon that leader", or "$40,000 in ads on Facebook can overcome a $2 billion election", or "a man ate a bat in China and a couple of months later, nursing home patients in Washingon and legislators in Iran started dropping dead because of it" and millions of people accept that as some sort of credible idea and immediately start repeating it to their friends, as if they are being logical, then our monitors can see that, right there on their viewing screens.

And then they know that a certain percentage of Americans are idiots, and they react the same way "These people will fall for anything! Let's tell them that "Putin hacked our slaughterhouse grid and now meat is more expensive' and then we can put more troops on Russia's border"

If they can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire

Forbidden Thoughts

In 2017, Congress demanded that the leaders of the three most popular social media companies, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, plus the most popular search engine, Google. present themselves to Congress for a scolding and demands for censorship.

Although the 1996 Telecommunications Act treated social media platforms as providers, not publishers, thereby protecting them from lawsuits for what citizens said on their platforms, Congress insisted that the ability of citizens to communicate with each other horizontally instead of receiving information top down from media companies, beamed individually into each house, car or phone, made it harder to control the narrative. If citizens were allowed to communicate with other people in their country and around the world, they could check facts, give reactions and share opinions.

How can a ruling class rule properly when citizens can think and speak freely among themselves? That is downright "undemocratic" as Congress members put it, so self unaware that they didn't realize how Orwellian they seemed to citizens who can think. You can't have a democracy without free speech and open debate, contrary to what our elected officials assert.

The CEOs of the corporations, offered a choice between a carpet of gold or a carpet leading to destitution and prison, turned their companies over to such entities as the Atlantic Council.

A new Thought Crime court was rolled out and the term "community standards" was introduced. Community standards are not defined and appear arbritary, with people being silenced for any dissent from Establishment pronouncements, or for using proper English pronouns, and even for sharing mainstream media articles deemed "hateful". Hate, like community standards, seems to be in the eye of the beholder. Citizens were forced to stop communicating freely and to start guessing what words or thoughts might trigger the all-seeing algorithms.

"Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. . . . He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—'the Party says the Earth is flat', 'the Party says that ice is heavier than water'—and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them."

"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” Emanuel Goldstein

Welcome, My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

We're an Empire now, a fact-free, grifter-based, Fantasy World of magical thinking and widespread looting.

A place where Reality is whatever you think it is, the Public Treasury is up for grabs to the highest bidder, and ethics are for suckers.

Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends.

And how do you spin a bioweapon release that killed 3.5 million people? With the usual finesse.

Binary vs Spectrum

Some years ago, a bunch of college students brought their passed-out friend into the ER. We did a blood alcohol test and it was high, around 300.

Her friends were very concerned by this and asked me "What is the number where you are legally dead?"

I was confused by their question at first. Then I tried to explain that there is no "legally dead" alcohol number, but I was unable to convince them. They kept demanding that I give them the number.

That is not how it works. You are either dead, or you are alive. Lab ETOH results do not change that status.

It is true that she had some superficial characteristics that made her look dead. She was lying there without moving and she was unresponsive.

However, on a cellular level, she was quite alive. Also, she was breathing and her heart was beating, and her skin was warm. That made her alive.

Yes, there are legal variations on the two states, such as brain death. But that distinction is also based on bodily reality, not a lab test.

And if a group of people all decide that their particularly stupid friend is ''brain dead'', that does not change the reality of his actual brain function. Their opinions do not change reality.

The young people of today (and some older ones) strongly believe that checking a different box on a form can make a person literally change their body sex. They are encouraged in this belief by the entire Establishment, which puts out articles, TV and movies and also passes laws to firm up this delusion.

There is bodily reality and there are appearances. Just as a passed out drunk is not actually dead, a person in a dress is not literally a woman, no matter what box they check on a vital statistics form.

That is not how it works.

Stupidity, like drunkenness, actually is on a spectrum. But sex is binary.

The Spin About Fauci

Well, this is interesting. And dismaying. The control the Establishment has over the minds of the population is a never-ending source of amazement to me.

Can you imagine if back in the Zodiac Killer days people said "Who cares if the killer is still on the loose? We need to look forward, not backward."

And yet, they are spinning the gain-of-function research that their government is funding as something in the past, far, far away, and no longer of any interest.

The Democrats, who spent four years screaming about the Evil Russians buying Facebook ads, and the last year smothering themselves because of the Scary Virus, are now screaming that talking about bioweapon research is Racist and must not be done. It is of no interest to them where the Scary Virus originated. And leave St. Fauci alone! Instead, we should carry on talking about Bad People who go outside without covering their breathing holes.

The Republicans are screaming about the Evil Chinese, who hosted Dr. Fauci's research, because they let it out into the market, where it quickly spread to a Washington state nursing home, and then to New York nursing homes. How dare the Chinese spread their virus to our nursing homes in Democrat states!

No one is talking about shutting down germ warfare, starting with our very own Fort Dietrick, et. al.

Well played, Masters of the Universe, well played