US may be one panic away from disaster

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for September 8, 2021)

A couple of centuries ago, a smart fellow known as Voltaire pointed out, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

This is a timeless truth.

It explains why a disturbing number of people in the year 2021 are calling for segregation, imposed poverty, or even concentration camps-- they prefer to use euphemisms-- for their neighbors who are, for whatever reason, unvaccinated against Covid-19. If this isn't a willingness to commit an atrocity, what is?

They've been fooled into believing absurdities concerning the virus, now they are publicly calling for atrocities. Society is ripe for some political functionary to start committing atrocities, using the excuse of "public safety", and these people would cheer and start lighting up the tip lines. Or dragging their neighbors to the "authorities" themselves.

There is a big overlap between those who want officials to punish their unvaccinated neighbors and those who want government to ban gun ownership. Maybe this doesn't mean anything, but it is worth noticing.

Many of these same people want to convince you that Ivermectin is only a horse de-wormer. Would they also characterize penicillin as only a horse antibiotic? Both are partly true, but incomplete.

Any medication can be dangerous if used incorrectly. Trying to shut down discussion concerning a medicine-- whether Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, or Cannabis-- is neither rational nor ethical. It's not science, but superstition. If you feel the need to shut down debate you've admitted your position is weak.

This doesn't mean I believe you should use any particular medication. Your medical decisions are between you and your doctor, with your informed consent being the deciding factor in every case. Government, social media corporations, and I shouldn't have any say in the matter. You might as well listen to your dog's medical advice-- the credibility is about the same.

I have no idea whether Ivermectin or anything else is effective against any specific virus, but I know when people are lying. You are being lied to.

It's not completely their fault. They've been lied to by politicized "experts" and they bought it hook, line, and sinker. Now, based on the absurd lies they believed, they have come up with what must seem to them to be a reasonable reaction.

It's not ethnic cleansing, but ideological cleansing. Does this make it better in their minds? America may be only one panic away from disaster because so many have believed absurdities.

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"Tyrannovania has the right to..."

I do not support any state. No state has the "right" to exist. 

Yes, individuals have the right to organize and cooperate, but not to form states or otherwise violate the natural rights of any other individual.

This always comes to mind when I hear someone say that such-and-such a state "has the right" to do something. No, it doesn't. Individuals do, as long as they aren't violating the life, liberty, or property of anyone else, but a state doesn't. No collective has the right to violate the rights of any individual. (Not even of those inside the collective, especially when their "consent" was coerced.)

The belief that they do has caused a lot of tragedy on a massive scale. "Consent of the governed" is a scam.

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No political government-- "government" or state-- is legitimate, credible, or ethical. Not one ever has been or ever will be. Because they are political. And if you remove the politics it stops being what anyone would generally call "government".

Abolish the police. That's not bathwater and whatever's floating in it is no baby. Toss it out.

William Shatner is going to space on Blue Origin's rocket. I can't help but think that's kind of awesome. Even if something goes wrong-- space is risky-- for Captain Kirk to die in a spaceship mishap (or even just in a spaceship) seems correct in some way. I'm hoping for his safety, of course, but he's 90 years old and has had a good run, and this wouldn't be the worst ending.

"Just breathe...."

The last few days I've been wound up. Too wound up.

I was worried about my dad's vaccination sickness-- he has finally recovered.

I've had some particularly aggravating repair projects going on that I wasn't having a lot of success with. Self-inflicted injuries, sore muscles, frustration, and things that didn't fit together the right way because they weren't the right parts. I'm sure you know how that goes. If not, you're more competent than me.

Then, on a visit to my parents' house, I was subjected to live "news" reports about that Arlington, Texas school shooting, and the absolute idiocy of the cops, politicians (including school administrators), and the news media comments just about drove me up the wall until I could escape. My daughter said I started yelling.

It was a perfect storm to stress me out and get me worked up.

Normally I'm a pretty calm person. Just maybe not these past few days. I need to recharge. I need a cave in the wilderness. Or, even just some wilderness-- which doesn't exist near here. I'd love to be a castaway on a deserted island somewhere. For at least a few weeks.

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A license is not the same thing as a credential. A license is government permission-- after paying government-- to do something government pretends to have political "authority" to ration. A license is mandatory.
A legitimate credential says you have been judged (by someone others believe to be competent) to be competent at doing something. But no one is prohibited from doing the same thing without a credential.

The view through "government goggles"

People who hallucinate that any part of political government is "ours" are going to see almost everything through that filter. In other words, they won't see anything accurately, but through the distortion of government goggles.

Scarier still, they'll not see you or your rights as you or they actually are. Since they don't see these accurately, they don't have any qualms about violating you. They may even deny you've been violated at all.

After all, if you think your life, liberty, or property are sacred, you'll get in the way of "our democracy", "our president". "our law enforcement", "our military", "our schools", etc. Standing up for yourself feels to them like you've violated them since you didn't allow them to do to you as they wish.

If you doubt me, take a quick peek through government goggles sometime. But don't let them stay on your face too long or you'll get brain damage.

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This morning's kinderprison shooting happened at the school my w0ke niece worked at a few years ago. 

To scare people into supporting mandatory Covid "vaccines" it has been necessary to convince people that a cold virus is as dangerous as polio.

It has been said "That government is best which governs the least". Thoreau was on the right track, but not exactly right. That government is best which governs the fewest. The best government governs only one individual-- the self. Governments get worse the more people they attempt to govern. Any government trying to rule, for example, 300 million+ people is pure evil and needs to be disposed of.

Politics makes people stupid, but it also makes them aggressive, evil, and easily manipulated. Divorce yourself from politics as much as possible. You'll still be cornered by people armed with politics, but defending yourself from them isn't politics; it's survival.

Malpractice

I'm more than a little angry.

Friday morning my dad got the (at least in his case) unnecessary Covid booster and the flu shot. He's been sick since Saturday morning. It made him more sick than he was when he had Covid back in the summer of 2020.

I think encouraging an 80-year-old-- who has already had Covid-- to get the "vaccine" and its booster is malpractice. Giving him the Covid booster and a flu shot at the same time compounds the malpractice to an almost incomprehensible level. Flu shots alone have always made him sick, but not this sick.

The only reason he and my mom got the Covid "vaccine" in the first place is that my 29-year-old niece-- who has been oozing w0keness ever since college-- insisted that no one in the family could see her baby unless they got the jab. I could live with that mandate; my parents couldn't. So they took the completely unnecessary shots. The baby subsequently caught Covid anyway and had the sniffles for a couple of days.

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Not anti-vaccine but anti-mandate

(My Eastern New Mexico News column for September 1, 2021)

I am not anti-vaccine. I've been vaccinated for a few things in my adult life because I think the risk of those vaccines is less than the risk or inconvenience of the diseases they are supposed to prevent.

I wouldn't bother getting a quasi-vaccine which neither prevents the vaccinated from getting nor spreading a disease I'm not particularly worried about; a sort-of-vaccine which doesn't even last a few years, to moderate a new, slightly more dangerous, cold virus. A cold virus, which like all other cold viruses, will never go away.

It would be dishonest to call me an "anti-vaxxer". I'm not one. I think some vaccines are very useful and are a great benefit. Just not this one.

If you want the vaccine because your opinion of the relative risks differs from mine. I want you to get it. If you get the vaccine, I hope it works or at least makes you feel safer-- whatever you want it to do.

New data might change my mind and make me decide I want one of these vaccines, too-- if the new data comes from a source I trust. A source more credible and trustworthy than those currently counting the numbers of cases and deaths. Government is not such a source.

Why would anyone assume the numbers reported by government agencies and other politicized entities are even close to true? It is an unsupported assumption. I don't trust anyone connected to politics.

I oppose using government power and threats of violence to force others to get vaccinated or to wear masks. I also oppose using government power to forbid vaccinations and masks for those who voluntarily choose them and bear the full costs themselves.

I'm not anti-vaccine. I am anti-mandate.

In this case, I see no difference between bullies, governments, or corporations. No government or corporation has any right to do anything, since rights are individual, not collective. A collective can't have the right to violate individuals' rights.

Yes, private business owners have the right to require masks in their business. I also have the right to refuse to trade with those business owners.

I oppose anyone who helps government create vaccine passports of any sort. I oppose those who advocate for social division based on vaccination status. Even if I later decide to take the vaccination, I will always oppose "Papers, please" and other authoritarian interference in life.

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Justifying mandatory Covid "vaccines" for young kids in government school with the observation that other vaccines are mandatory for admission into kinderprison illustrates that mandating any vaccine is wrong rather than making the argument that a mandatory Covid "vaccine" is OK. Also: Death to kinderprison.

Heed the warnings you are lucky enough to get

It's a constant frustration for me to warn someone about an issue I can see on the horizon only to be scoffed at or told I am lecturing. Then-- at least when it's my personal life-- to be expected to fix the problem once it happens. After my warning was completely ignored.

It happens so often as to be a theme.

It's the same whether I'm warning people in public about looming inflation, warning people to prep, or warning someone in private that they are ignoring something that's going to cause a problem in the near future.

Do you experience this, too?

I am often a good "fixer", but I'd rather avoid issues I see approaching, heading them off before they become problems that need to be fixed. But when I warn others, and it's up to them to do something to avoid this future problem, they usually don't. Then they expect me to fix what their inaction caused. I guess they think it's easier to let the problem happen and then have me fix it. I should just refuse to do so, but I won't.

To be honest, I've been guilty of ignoring the warnings of others, too. More when I was younger, but it still happens sometimes. So I guess I can't be too hard on others.

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No, I'm not pharmacologically enhanced

A few months back I was asked by a reader if I had ever used "shrooms". 

He thought that the way my mind works, as seen in my writing, suggested that I had. I haven't.

He wasn't being sarcastic or mean by saying this-- we had a nice conversation about it after he asked.

It's an interesting thought, though-- that my mind might, without 'shrooms, work similarly to the minds of people who have had that experience rewire their brains. Or maybe it doesn't and that was just his way to make sense of the way my mind works.

Maybe 'shrooms would make me "normal". That would be a tragedy!

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Burn it with fire

It's always easier to keep from making a mess than to clean up a mess you've made. Not that it's easy to not make a mess, just easier than cleaning one up.

When you neglect the messes you've made, they snowball into bigger and bigger problems. After a while, the mess is so bad there's simply no way to clean it up anymore; you have to just burn down the house. 

Like one of those hoarders whose house can't possibly be cleaned up and made safe or healthy again.

Those who came before us had the chance to clean up the messes they were making by establishing states-- political governments. But they didn't want to. They just kept making more and more messes (governments) and pretending it was fine.

Now the disgusting thing is filled with rotting food scraps, dead cats, roaches, billions of pages of legislation filling every room floor to ceiling, and who knows what else. It can't be cleaned up. It will simply have to be burned. Don't blame those who are facing the reality you don't want to face.

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Anthony Fauci is Death? Faucheus is French for the Grim Reaper. Coincidence?

Improbable things and gullibility

Sometimes I think about earlier eras, when naive people believed in sheep plants (not cotton) and other animals that grew from the ground. When they believed in things like cockatrices and werewolves and strange people with backward feet and people without heads but faces on their chests instead. And they wrote detailed descriptions of the characteristics of these things as though they were real, and told of encountering them somewhere off the map, where no reader was likely to venture.

But people believed in these things. Really odd beliefs based in a deep ignorance of what was real and why these things they believed in were biologically improbable (or impossible). 

But at least it was an interesting time if you allowed yourself to believe in these things.

And then I smile because I know sapient beings will eventually look back on the belief in political government the same way, shaking their heads that anyone could believe such silliness and improbabilities. Think how many of your acquaintances actually believe in this stuff even now!

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