COVID-19 and Science Denial: More To It Than I Thought

Here is an awesome article that is a must-read. You don’t need to understand every word, but You’ll likely come away knowing more about something that has been bothering you. It sure has bothered me.

One warning before you read, though: in the end you will not get all of the answers raised during the pandemic. It does not explain everyone’s behavior and it will not offer you any comfort.

Should you read it or store it as a pdf file for later, keep that in mind. Remember that with the SARS-CoV-2 onset and the initial failure of methods for treatment being arrived at, nobody knew what to do. It overwhelmed us like a deadly blizzard until we were buried, reduced to using refrigerator truck-trailers to store corpses. It may be easy now to forget so many details, because we were all on sensory overload. The brain takes things at its best speed, and when it does overload, shock or some other mechanism slows everything down. Trauma? Yes, I talk about that a lot, but with good reason; everyone goes through traumatic events, perhaps varying in severity, but in the brain, it seems the damage is not always so apparent. Damage does show up in brain scans, although it must be actually looked for by a trained diagnostician to be interpreted as damage from posttraumatic stress disorder.

I’m mentioning PTSD because the article doesn’t. Yet some of the damage associated with the syndrome may be worsened by such a crisis as a pandemic, and may even affect the mechanisms required to respond rationally to anything, much less a health crisis.

For example, I know of two people with PTSD who responded similarly, then very differently to the early part of the pandemic.

Both knew each other. One had almost certainly had the virus. Both agreed that improvising masks when none could be found was a good idea. One went over everything brought in from a grocery with sanitary wipes, the other couldn’t find them in stores or online. One knew that the other had been very sick and advised turning often when lying down and even sleeping on the “stomach”. It probably saved the life of the sick one. The dry cough turned productive and gradually that person felt better, but certainly not overnight. The other subject never showed symptoms. That was the one wiping down everything brought in from the outside.

We have since learned that such a precaution was never necessary, although hand washing seemed crucial. As masks became available and in areas where people actually used them, numbers of morbidity and mortality decreased. The decline was definite, easily visible on line graphs.

This is where the article comes in. I’ll let you read and soak it in, but we know that many people denied that COVID-19 was real and cooked up conspiracy theories to explain the shutdown. They denied that anyone had died, much less in so many numbers. That is, of course, until they or someone they knew went into a critical care unit. People they knew didn’t come back. Some said only hours before their death, “It’s real” and via video calls begged their families to take it seriously.

But even if they believed that it was real, conspiracy theories covered that and the mortality rate: it was manufactured, or engineered, if you will, by the Chinese. It was deliberately spread to the world by infected subjects via air travel. Stories were out there of people boarding planes feeling fine but deathly ill by time to land. These stories fed “proof” to conspiracy theorists who then spread their interpretation far and wide via internet. When it became clear that people believed these theories and Donald Trump began calling it the “China virus,” hate crimes against all Asians became prevalent. Sure, it’s disgusting, but it happened. It is still happening.

People would look up and see a private, single engine Cessna circling as it climbed-out after takeoff, and suddenly the skies were full of Asians using chemtrails to spread the virus. Or it was the CIA, or anyone else you can imagine.

The whole idea took a different turn some time in early spring, 2020. Focus on bioengineering switched locations to from Wuhan Province to USAMRIID, Fort Detrick, Maryland. It went from there to the University of North Carolina, where some puddinghead found out that research on coronaviruses was ongoing. When it came to light (it wasn’t a secret) that studies included modifying a virus and infecting modified mice, the staff in that department were issued death threats.

The novel coronavirus which causes the disease COVID-19 has repeatedly been proven to originate in wildlife. In earlier outbreaks of coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, the virus had evolved by going from bats to other animals, then making the jump to humans. With this one, it came directly from bats and didn’t need a middle host animal.

Republicans had a field day with conspiracy theories, all of which, Trump claimed implicitly, were to make him look bad. He was desperate to downplay the COVID-19 pandemic or to thrust false allegations to deflect what he thought made him look bad. Fox News and OANN scrambled to make liberals and Asians appear guilty for creating the virus and inflating the numbers.

In a now infamous interview, though, Trump seemed to have had a mental break, and flat-out told the opposite of what he had said in the beginning: that it was fake, then that a “few cases, and it will be gone”. In that interview he was a actually clear: “It’s the plague,” he said. And he described exactly how easy it was to catch.

Later he would act as if the interview was a deep fake. And he went right off the deep end. In a press conference, he said it could easily be beaten by injecting disinfectant into patients because “I hear it does a real number on the lungs” and worse, that ultraviolet lights could be inserted into the body cavity to kill the virus. Either treatment would be fatal.

After he had endorsed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment or a preventive and caused chaos enough, because anti-masking activists actually took it, and some died anyway, this press conference stands out as one of the most outrageous ever given by a United States president.

There has never been more concrete evidence that conspiracy theories are extremely harmful. Homicides were committed over these during the pandemic’s peak, and even after. People died because some people whose brains malfunctioned spread bullshit to a population with a growing sense of panic.

When shops closed, family businesses like delicatessens, when people lost jobs, they foamed at the mouth for someone to blame. I’m all for placing rightful blame where it belongs, but after that blame is fixed, cooler heads must prevail. Justice cannot be served by angry acts of or by vigilantism. If you haven’t noticed, US prisons aren’t a solution either; too many innocent people populate those Hell holes, and midemeanants never belong there at all.

In the sad case of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no blame, not for the origin of the coronavirus that causes it. There is plenty of blame for everyone still adhering to conspiracy theories. For smear campaigns and death threats. For homicides and hate crimes. True, the first link I posted above does explain why some people are especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories and it’s tragic. It’s not their fault and we need studies that can end in ways to treat them. But that doesn’t account for everyone else who were, and still are, motivated by politics and religion.

The first step comes with understanding the difference and continuing the mission of telling the truth and trusting the scientific and scholarly communities. Because the bug that will cause the next Pandemic? It already exists. It just needs to make the jump. Time to gather what we’ve learned and prepare ourselves.

God Save Her Royal Highness

While I’m off getting my stuff together, the world will not stop.

Queen Elizabeth has tested positive for COVID-19 and while her symptoms are mild, I’ll still worry. The world’s longest reigning monarch, an extraordinary woman, I’m sure she will be fine. Nevertheless, a prayer is in order.

God save her Royal Majesty.

I’ll Have A Blue Christmas Without You

No. Just, no.

It’s time for a reality check.

Biden has hit his stride but his own party (and idiots with no loyalty to any party except the one offering the biggest Swiss bank account deposits like Joe Manchin) are giving us lies and excuses.

And the COVID-19 pandemic goes on, and people (think “dickheads” here) have succeeded in shutting down two (at least) Broadway shows, and still masks aren’t mandated in public venues.

And the WHO is recommending that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines be your first choices of covid vaccines and boosters because the J&J can cause blood clots in women say, between 25-45 (just as a round figure). So there’s another excuse for people to say, “Don’t get the Vax, it’ll kill you!”

And so the disease will go on and on, spread by the misinformed, the stupid and those too scared of a fucking needle to save lives even if it’s their own. And in such people it will mutate, again and again, because that’s what viruses do. And one day, who knows? We may get a variant we can’t protect ourselves from no matter what we do.

It’s so stupid that I have come to hate writing this shit. People in stores, no mask. The pizza baker? No mask. For God’s sake People, it’s just a fucking mask, and yet some folks act like you’re asking them to report to a fucking concentration camp. They scream “Facism!” and will readily punch anyone asking them to mask.

No man should ever have been allowed to wear a fucking leisure suit in public, but despite we who wanted to shoot then back in the 70s, we let them live. Now all we want is for you to wear a cloth over your face, but vanity and rebellion is all anyone cares about. I’ll bet if we asked these roosters to wear a leisure suit they’d probably do it. Especially if Joe Manchin or Trump said to do it.

What the fuck?

If Joe Biden asked us to wear a leisure suit, he’d be laughed clean back to Delaware. But if Trump asked, they’d be flying off the racks at Walmart.

Easy now. It’s just an example. I’m sure they don’t make leisure suits anymore.

That is, I’m pretty sure.

In this fucking country, it’s hard to know something like that.

So: I’ll bet you want to know why this rant, am I right? Because nothing has changed since my last one.

Oh, but something has changed.

Something big.

Something that may very well ruin your holidays and perhaps even change the world.

And this big thing? It’s bad.

Really bad.

Although, like leisure suits not being made anymore, it’s hard to write about things really.

Kraft will pay you to not use cream cheese in your holiday baking.

You read that correctly: Kraft Foods. Will pay you not to use cream cheese for your holiday baking.

Because, you see, there’s this shortage.

A cream cheese shortage.

Of cream cheese.

A no shit, honest to God, real shortage.

All you folks who don’t get masks, don’t get vaccines, you see what you did?

I know you don’t give two farts about the people you might have killed.

But now you gotta make your pumpkin cake rolls without cream cheese. See how much your kin folk will like that.

You holiday killers.

Going to Shit

This week I took two shots.

Flu vaccine on Tuesday.

Covid booster on Wednesday.

The doc said the consecutive inoculations would be a shock to my immune system, and that’s good. It kind of revs it up. Being a senior, I need all the help that I can get.

To be quite honest, by Wednesday afternoon I felt like death. I swear, the shots never bothered my arm. But I was weak and tired and I ached a lot.

I would much prefer that to dying of COVID-19.

I have never been anti-vaccination. Never will be. I don’t listen to fucking conspiracy theories. I don’t want to fucking hear about the “plandemic” especially because it doesn’t make a lick of sense. What motivation could possibly be behind that? It interrupted world trade, global economy. No country benefitted from it. The coronavirus caught us completely flat-footed and has killed millions, and it is still killing.

Omicron is a mutation which has alarmed scientists and medical experts because the number of differences is an indication that anti-vaxxers are possible petri dishes for spread and mutations.

The Last update I read said that Omicron is resistant to the vaccines. However, the existing vaccines and what you have already been inoculated with are so far observed to prevent severe symptoms should you contract it.

Doctors are concerned about the sudden and rapid distribution of the variant; when asked if the variant was moving with speed or not, the medical community said, “fast.”

They’re not wrong.

What’s really scary is that the buzzword used by the American political right, “herd immunity”, grows more obsolete with a virus mutating so quickly. Cases of breakthrough covid even occur in vaccinated individuals. And we’re not taking it very seriously; mask mandates are laughed at.

At an office of Sheppard Pratt Healthcare, I was called into a small office to sign a document. The man was not masked. I protested and he donned one, but it was too late. In an office that small, if he were infected, his respiration would have put a viral load, or concentration, if you prefer, into the air so that anyone not yet given the booster, or who had refused vaccines, could contract the coronavirus readily. If such an institution requires masks, but only in common areas, that’s almost as much of a risk as not requiring masks at all. A mask protects not just you, but also others.

Why are people being shitheads about a killer virus?

I go into my local Harris Teeter. Most people, including those of the local high school, wear masks. There are many though, who do not. I’ve observed over many months that they’re all Caucasian. Shitbird Republicans, I’m sure.

People cannot seem to use common sense anymore, and right-wing bullshit is killing and has killed people who thought Trump was being honest. People who want the far right in power in an authoritarian state.

Biased, terrified, racist, homophobic people who don’t like white women dating black men, don’t like seeing two men holding hands, don’t like empowered women, don’t like atheists, hate Catholics and want prayer back in schools, among a shopping list of other repressive and totalitarian shit. They’re a threat to the United States.

***

A combination of National Guard units at the border with Mexico has failed its mission. Exactly what the mission was is not clear, but it failed, because its leadership failed. Sure, there have been arrests and a bunch of Article-15s dealt, but the fact remains that the soldiers were terribly used. Morale was low. Drug use was common. Traffic accidents were alarming. There was at least one manslaughter case and a seriously troubling amount of sexual assaults. How did things go so wrong?

This is the direct fault of leadership failing to do its job. As far as Mexico goes, tourism is no longer safe, not anywhere. The resorts are the worst. The government has given cartels an ultimatum, but it has never been effective in stopping them.

***

Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a warning that any move by NATO or any Western countries to protect Ukraine will result in hypersonic missile attacks by Russia. He’s just, in essence, declared war. While the West has vowed to protect Ukraine, he has vowed serious actions will be taken against any threat to Russia. He’s waiting for an excuse to open fire for any action he deems a threat, and he will claim to be in the right. He wants to provoke the first shot, after which troops we don’t even see at the border yet will mass, deploying weapons of mass destruction. This will put pressure on the West to back down or engage, and no matter what happens, scores of people will die. His speech used couched threats, open threats and snide praise of U.S.President Biden.

Things are not looking too good. Americans are acting stupid. Laughing at Biden. I’m going to pray that I’m not going to be alive to watch everything go to shit, while part of me has a morbid desire to see people acting all sorry for being dumbass, hateful turds.

In Violation Of Reason

It seems to go back a way, but I can’t tell how far. And it has just been repeated by some fucking hysterical nut somewhere in the United States during a protest.

A vaccine for COVID-19 mandate for school students above a certain age is…well, it’s being …

What the fuck. How do I write this?

“This is rape,” some mother says. In front of children, in front of cameras, in front of God and everyone.

Holy shit.

No, it isn’t. It’s just a fucking shot, you fucking idiot, and how dare you compare it to the ultimate sexual violation?

I didn’t know this was a thing. I didn’t know it went at least back to Australia and New Zealand ca. 2015.

I’ve never heard or read anything so infuriatingly stupid or offensive. The video on CNN hit me like a brick to the face. I mean, what?

An incredible and very sad moment recorded for the masses.

***

And look. I understand fear. I know where it comes from and I know the desperate things it can drive a person to do. I get it.

But this hysteria over vaccines is so misplaced that people have died because of it.

As it happens, I’ve studied cases of mass hysteria, and I’m sure that’s not what’s going on here.

One sad thing I’ve learned is that history is often badly misrepresented in the Era of Mass Media, the Age of Knowledge, as it were.

It has often been written that one night in October of 1938, a radio show by Orson Welles and a bunch of great writing talent broadcast a news-style version of the H.G. Wells novel War of the World’s and gave the setting as New Jersey instead of England. During the show, “special bulletins” updated listeners on the progress Martian invaders were making as they sacked New Jersey. That had to be hilarious. Jersey!

The one place real Martians would not dare to exit their parked starship! They’d have found far more plunder in Texas, and it would have been so poetic.

Welles later was called on to humiliate himself and explain what he had intended and to express sincere surprise that his audience had taken any part of it as real.

Modern sources like to blame Welles for the current fake news crisis, which is so far away from the truth that it’s appalling. Welles was portrayed decades later in a made-for-TV movie as people across the country took up shotguns and farm implements and waited for the invaders, who of course never showed up.

Evidence of disclaimers broadcast before, during and after the show are still claimed to have been aired, and there is no reason to doubt this. By the end of the broadcast, Welles said that it was the equivalent of the network putting on a sheet like a ghost costume and yelling “Boo!” But, according to Britannica, the damage was done. I’m not sure what damage the article means; no casualties were ever reported.

More archaic accounts of mass hysteria are far worse. The Christian inquisitions and witch executions across Europe and the New World were perfect examples; owing to a single story in the Bible, witches and non-witches alike were tortured and killed. Neighbors accused friends and watched then hang.

***

Then there were the nuns of Loudon, the famous dancing “fever” in which people died of exhaustion and possibly heart attacks. The Seattle windshield folly. History is full of examples. Some are correctly retold and some are embellished to include paranormal elements. One would think that, given so many calamities of such a nature, that today we would be immune to the phenomenon.

We are not.

Death stalks the misinformed and the believers of propaganda. It strikes down without warning those who take up the fear of lies without questioning them. Some late news on COVID-19 indicates a downward trend in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. The same reports indicate higher numbers of the vaccinated population.

That’s welcome news, but we who face reality know that this crisis is not over. We know that there have been cases of breakthrough covid, and that boosters are necessary. We’ve learned about “long covid”. We are threatened by the unvaccinated to at least some small extent. It is not over. Autumn in the Northern hemisphere won’t help. And the virus continues to mutate. We hope that vaccination programs have weakened it but viruses usually find new ways to attack. With anti-vaxxers getting their warped messages on cable news, and free passes on Facebook, the threat will not magically vanish.

COVID-19 has changed the world forever. How much more damage it will cause is up to us. And refusing vaccines because of fake news and conspiracy theories is irresponsible and unreasonable.

But comparing inoculations to being raped is a horror. It scares the impressionable, children don’t understand, and all it does is insult real rape victims, myself included, and cause the division in this country to grow.

In the end, rational people don’t do this shit, whether they want to be vaccinated or not. It takes a high level of crazy to make such a comparison, and you can’t fix crazy.

World Travel Advisory: Avoid The United States At All Costs

While my attention was on what Hurricane Ida was doing to the south and then the northeast, and my God it was epic–dozens dead, property damage I can’t get my head around–some terrible things have been going on here.

In Texas, two laws which either defied or abused our Constitution have passed. First, because this is only the beginning of women losing every bit of their equal rights so bitterly fought for, is the Texas abortion law. I’ll tell you right off, if you are against abortion, you probably would be much happier skipping this post.

Because, fuck that. Rich white men in bed with the Catholic Church and other interests had passed a law in May which the U.S. Supreme Court has given its blessing to. And god damn them for it, too.

Known as the “heartbeat” bill, it specifies what on the surface looks strange.

It says that as soon as any doctor can detect a fetus’s heartbeat, the mother may not legally abort it. It also restricts the state from enforcing the law and puts responsibility for that onto private citizens through civil cases. Oh, and that goes for the mother, the doctor and includes anyone who aids the mother. With that kind of ambiguity, even a municipal bus driver can be sued, although I doubt that will happen.

At least not right away.

This now forces women to leave the state for the procedure, but you can bet all states surrounding Texas will do something to prevent it; probably with their own abortion restriction laws.

Pregnant women will be forced to carry and deliver babies with severe birth defects and handicaps that will make child and parents alike suffer. The states are fighting to take away all aid to poor parents. That means that the heartless Republicans would gleefully have a child born with special needs that the state is not responsible for giving any help to. Not for procedures, not for formula, pediatrician visits–nothing will be provided. And if the poor baby dies, I would not be surprised to see a law providing for parents to be criminally prosecuted.

A bunch of bald, fat white men are taking away the right of a woman to decide what to do with her body.

A Grenade With The Pin Gone

As of 1 September, people in Texas can carry handguns without a permit.

Or training.

This makes it the most dangerous state to travel through or to. Stay out. Because any traveler from another country is in grave danger. The Texans who will carry guns also are the most likely to be racist. Or in a gang. Both are equally dangerous.

There are many infamous cities around the globe that are rated the most dangerous. Although not in the top ten, Baltimore Maryland consistently ranks around the same general spot on the charts. It’s an easy city to get shot in and we don’t have any such gun laws. That doesn’t matter; gang violence and other gun violence kill over 300 people per year, and children, even babies are among the murdered.

I live about 45 minutes away. I don’t go there and constantly tell others not to. Because visiting the amazing National Aquarium, the magnificent USS Constellation, dining in Little Italy or watching a Ravens or Orioles game is not worth your life. True, most crime happens away from those areas, but not all, and the Baltimore Police Department has a long record of corruption. It’s not safe anywhere.

COVID-19 Alert

The rising rate of infection from coronavirus makes any travel in the United States dangerous. Particularly in Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Mississippi and Texas. The governor of Mississippi told his constituents that they would not be provided with the vaccine. He actually told them to sit back and let God take care of them. He forgot the part of the Bible that says “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

Despite what’s reported by American media as an increase in vaccinated individuals, the rates of transmission are rising and there are still cases ending in mortality. If people here aren’t taking covid seriously by now, then stay away.

Why risk your life for anything in this country? I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I’d rather see businesses lose money than to see visitors to our country die because of stupid bastards without regard for others.

Take care of yourselves. Stay away from the United States.

Stay safe. Be well.

As always, I’m humbled and grateful that you’ve let me be a part of your life.

Larry The Blunt

“Just get the damn vaccine.”

That’s what Maryland Governor Larry Hogan says when asked whether masks are going to be required again because covid cases are rising.

His goal is to force unvaccinated people to get the shots. If the virus is spreading fastest in unvaccinated people, it means that vaccinated individuals who aren’t wearing masks are spreading it. Mathematically and logically there is no other conclusion which is possible. It is right there in front of us.

Delta variant is spreading fast and coincides with the end of many mask rules. Putting aside the fact that some people never conformed with mask mandates unless forced, as when entering a grocery store, those who have stopped wearing masks must be transmitting the virus, which accounts for such a rapid rise in deaths, not to mention the number of positive test results and hospitalizations.

Among vaccinated individuals the virus can occur but its effects are probably only mild symptoms. However, the language used by media leaves me confused. They don’t help much even though they bitch about misinformation. News media will do what it always does: fill in the blanks between commercials and clickbait.

So Hogan didn’t bother saying anything the media could confuse, muddle or fuck up. He just told people to go “get the damn vaccine.”

At this point, and considering that schools are due to reopen and that the Delta variant can spread to and from kids, I must go one step further than Hogan, who has proven himself a great crisis governor.

I say that considering how many people have died and are about to die, fuck you and your right to be a moron. Go get the fucking shots.

I know what your excuses are. They’re stupid. And if you don’t get the goddamn shots, you are likely to get exposed and possibly die. I don’t question your right to die. But you’ll likely spread it to other morons in your fucking circle of friends and family.

And I do question your right to commit murder.

America, The Hungry Tigress, Will Now Eat Her Own Cubs

Not that it’s anything new, the United States has once again turned on the poor, and is going to put unknown numbers of people on the street.

Get ready to see the initial footage of furniture and trash bags full of clothes, dishes and everything you can imagine lining the sidewalks in front of suburban homes, apartments and condos, and row homes in neighbor hoods you wouldn’t choose to live in, but had no choice and, in time, made it your home. A home you will now be unceremoniously kicked out of.

The moratorium or ban on evictions for not being able to pay rent during the COVID-19 crisis has expired as of 31 July. It means, in simple terms, that landlords who were kept from kicking people out until that date are now at liberty to get court ordered eviction notices. These have a humiliating and terrifying effect on the recipients. People have been known to see this notice scotch-taped to their front door and go into shock or even have heart attacks. For many people it is a death sentence because they have no way to stop the process and no other place to live.

If they were unable to pay rent or a mortgage, what makes anyone think that they have the money to move, much less rent some other place?

I SAW THIS COMING

As seen in this article on CNN there’s nothing right or good or merciful about to happen. What’s worse is, if I knew this would happen, then the excuse Speaker Pelosi gave about not getting informed until that last minute is a bold-faced lie. Not just an excuse, mind you, but a fucking confession of uncaring distance: “I knew it was time but I was busy.”

She and everyone else in congress knew and a last-minute attempt by the House to pass emergency measures didn’t even make it despite a Democratic majority.

That’s a signal, America. Your elected government has finally backed out of its obligation to represent everyone, especially the sick and the poor.

I don’t understand the Biden Administration. With Trump I expected heartlessness, but not with Biden. Biden has proudly announced that progressives hate him because he’s not progressive, yet he’s not even a fucking moderate. He too has a lame excuse for letting the moratorium pass, although a week earlier he told everyone that he had concerns about people not going back to work because their benefits for unemployment were still coming in. I’ve never heard such bullshit from a Democrat. Not with circumstances anything like a crisis. And I know COVID-19 is the biggest crisis of my lifetime, but to hear such bullshit from a democratic president is out of place and far away from what I could have imagined. He said, in effect, “Go ahead and put the lazy motherfuckers on the streets.”

CDC RECOMMENDS RENEWED PRECAUTIONS

Hand washing, facemasks indoors, it’s back to square one because unvaccinated people are dying. New cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising. Misinformation is compounding everything happening. We are already in for what I’ve said was bound to happen. And if people call me negative they’re not wrong. I’ve maintained since early last year that in any closed system, predictability is bullshit. Impossible. Chaos maths dictate it. History bears that out. Human behavior is not geared toward self-preservation, but destruction and extinction. Wars alone prove that much. And even in war, nothing specific can reliably be predicted, just as no chess player can accurately predict every move during a match, no matter how they have mastered the game, and so it is with any war, right down to specific battles. Who, among German high command, could have predicted what Patton did with his divisions during the Battle of the Bulge? And even if they could have known, who could believe it was even possible? Even his peers thought he was nuts. Until he did it.

Dealing with unpredictable situations is not a strength of humanity. Overkill or the lack of a reaction. The in between grows less likely with every second.

We are seeing a lack of a reaction right now. Even when it was known that the Delta variant was reported in every state, restrictions on social distancing and wearing masks indoors were being removed. How fucking stupid can people get?

The Biden administration bitterly complains that misinformation has hampered the vaccination process. But what about people who are vaccinated? Can they be carriers? Can they, in other words, infect others who are not vaccinated? The numbers and the rate of spread led me to believe that it was not just possible, it was happening. Dr. Fauci has since confirmed this as fact.

The news is vague. “Most new cases…are unvaccinated…”

Most? See, journalists don’t know shit. Vaccines are definitely desirable; we know from the numbers that cases rapidly decreased because of them. But lax attitudes toward the virus in parts of the country meant it never went away. One misconception I hear is that before Delta, COVID-19 had gone away. That’s not true.

The renewed recommendations are an obvious indication that health experts know it’s a whole new ballgame. But I go into stores and people aren’t masked. They aren’t disinfecting shopping cart handles. The risks being taken are equal to the premature lifting of safety procedures and restrictions. Cases did, in fact, almost immediately rise.

Keep this in mind when the evictions start. When neighbors vanish.

There’s been talk of help from the White House. But Biden does not want to be seen as soft on people who don’t want to work.

Pelosi’s expression of concern led us to believe that last minute help would come.

That will not happen. It’s vacation time for our pissant, self-absorbed, lazy elected representatives. Because, fuck you, America. I’m going after a trophy marlin. Have fun dumpster diving you sleazy common people.

I believe that this country as it has been is doomed. Until such time as there are more people who care about others than those who do not, and caring people run for political office, we are doomed.

What will be left?

I’m sorry. Chaos theory says there’s no way to answer that except to say, it’ll be a much worse place to live. As if God Himself had come to smite a land already marked by blood and a history of being run by uncivilized barbarians who had their chance and blew it.

Divine retribution or karma. They always get their way.

I’m deeply sorry for starting your week on a story this depressing and disgusting. Do stay informed. Visit the WHO, CDC and sites like BBC News and CNN to keep misinformation down. Tell others what you learn. Wear double masks, carry hand sanitizer and keep social distances. The future of this country is really in doubt. Don’t make it any worse. Please don’t.

Delta Death

In the summer, the weird summer of 2003, it was hot. It was the year of the Valentine’s day blizzard, Hurricane Isabel and some deadly heat in between. We had just invaded Iraq, there was a huge eastern power outage and it just happened to be a freaky year.

One late afternoon at the end of the summer, I went outside to sit on the front porch with a glass of iced tea and a pack of cigarettes. It was warm but still pleasant.

As I sat there without anyone else to witness what happened next, a movement across the street caught my attention. I looked, and moving quickly from my right to my left, something–some…thing…ran upright, on two legs!

It was about ten to twelve inches tall, light gray or white, mammalian and impossible. Humans are the only species known to traverse that kind of distance, walking or running, with such speed, on two legs. A feeling of the uncanny ran through me from head to foot. I was frozen. Never had I seen the like; it was chilling, not awe-inducing.

It was wrong. I was seeing something that was not right.

It ran to a wooden utility pole with a streetlight. It climbed rapidly, using all four limbs. If it can do that, I wondered, why not run on all four limbs?

What happened next was even more freaky. At the top, difficult to see because the streetlight had come on, something big spread its wings and jumped off. It couldn’t fly, or didn’t want to; it just glided into the back yard of the house across the street, where it was dark because of trees, so I lost it.

I thought, after the shock wore off, that I had seen a cryptid (an undiscovered species), and this one a shape-shifter. I still can’t explain it.

I know what it’s like to see something you can’t understand, haven’t seen before, hope you never see again. I know what that’s like. It’s rather scary, but you can never forget it. The fear may go away, but the vision never does.

I wonder, then, given the perspective of such an experience, why people who know something dangerous is around insist on throwing caution to the wind. Maybe I never felt threatened by what I saw, but it still shook me up considerably.

This would be a different story if I had continued seeing it, but I didn’t. Something very large and unusual later flew close to me but it was too dark to see what it was. That doesn’t count.

But what if I had seen it? What if it had displayed dangerous behavior? Well first of all, I’d have avoided going outside at dusk.

With a known predator, things change. If wild cats like lynx or something larger stalked your area at night, you wouldn’t go out unarmed, and then only rarely, preferably with help.

In medieval England and Western Europe, there were rarely classic fireplaces in single family homes. Fires were centrally located and roofs had holes in the peak to vent smoke. No one was getting in that way. Further, windows were shuttered at night by heavy doors on the inside that were barred just as the heavy door was. After the ritual of locking up for the night was complete, a family could sleep, knowing brigands and animals were not a likely threat.

I wonder, then, why a stalker which kills so often is not similarly defended against. Long after the novel coronavirus appeared to strike so many down, we finally have a way to bar the door, yet not only are people not barring their doors, they’re flinging them open because they don’t believe that there’s any danger. Of course, danger does lurk, and it claims many victims.

Even after neighbors have been found ripped apart by predators, they continue to leave their doors open. When the local magistrate orders them to lock up, they refuse. They claim the right to leave their doors open.

Until one night when they hear their baby crying and realize some animal’s carrying it away to eat at its leisure away from the village.

They have learned a great lesson which never had to happen. Had they simply listened when the word spread that tigers had been spotted by the nightwatch, then acted accordingly, with some common sense, their baby would still be in its cradle, soundly sleeping.

It’s history. All along we have known that certain animals posed a threat. We learned how to defend ourselves and use caution. It was common sense, really; a barrier and weapons, usually ranged ones, were required for survival. Nobody wanted close contact or combat with large predators, so the barricades of walls, fences, fires and the fortified house were common.

***

Disease has come calling many times. It always took too many from us, leaving grief and a weakened population in its wake. The Plague of Justinian was to return many times, and was identified in modern times as Bubonic plague from an “extict” form of the bacterium Y. pestis.

Historians recorded the symptoms of Black Death and the toll. Today that toll of around 10 to 15,000 a day is questioned, but there’s little question that two forms of the plague were spreading. Descriptions of people dying the same day they showed symptoms point to septic plague, in which the same infection infiltrates, and remains in, the blood. Today it is treatable and can be survived if identified and treated quickly. But in the time of Justinian, it would have happened exactly as historical records indicate: wake up fine, dead by sunset. And we know that Justinian was a dick. He did nothing to understand or combat the affliction. He watched his people die and what do you think he did?

He raised taxes!

I’m sorry, but is this not the height of evil, of denial, and betrayal? Sure, sure, you can argue that there was little he could do. It is the first recorded spread of the plague on such a massive scale. But not being able to solve a problem and making the problem worse are the difference between good and evil. Justinian was a dick.

Plagues had been around before. I daresay many were so severe and occurred at such an early time that little to no record of them survive. Perhaps we will one day find an answer in a written language we haven’t learned to read yet. Or archaeological sites may yield written history. We haven’t found everything.

The Plague of Athens was noted during the Peloponnesian War, hitting the city hard in 430 BCE, less than a year after the onset of hostilities. That one was quite mysterious and remains so today. While no conclusive proof has been found, the University of Maryland found typhus the likely source, but others maintain that it could have been typhoid, bubonic plague (unlikely) or Ebola. Descriptions also lead others to believe hemorrhagic fever was present.

It’s doubtful that we will ever know. But in the face of this unknown killer, trouble in the populace and immigrants also presented.

This is the nature of any pandemic; it disrupts the lives of an infected or exposed population and all forms of trade. Soon bodies are everywhere. They stack up, posing a secondary health risk. In the ancient and medieval world, bodies were thrown on massive pyres or buried in mass graves. There was no time for burial rites, which were abandoned, usually by decree, as the risk of contagion was noted to be too high.

***

I’m reminded as I write this of refrigerated trailers dropped off at various places in 2020 to store dead victims of the novel coronavirus. I remember people being terrified. Health care workers being interviewed and saying they had to reuse masks, and, how many of them died.

I remember the lockdown and how I thought no one should be surprised by it considering the gravity of the situation. How quiet it got around here.

Then, knowing that the Delta variant was out there, the last of the mask and social distancing restrictions were lifted.

Sure enough, spikes on the line graphs, big spikes, are showing up. Worse, it’s particularly deadly to unvaccinated people who know everything they need to know in order to survive. Yet even vaccinated patients get the virus. They are all likely to survive with minimal symptoms, though. The vaccines are effective against it.

And now it comes time to ask the question, Why risk the end of your life and those of your family when it’s not necessary?

The reasons given are pathetic. “Documents” show that the government made it up. Or rushed the development of the vaccine. Or have microchips in the serum to track you. Or kill you. Or turn you into a Borg or a Manchurian candidate. Or tag you for abduction by martians.

The disinformation out there harkens back to the days of old, when no one knew what plagues were and attributed them to the unfair wrath of Zeus (which really did result in the refusal to make sacrifices and attend to the temples).

According to BBC News, “influencers”, YouTube personalities with lots of followers, have been approached by mysterious benefactors offering chicken scratch money to cite false claims about vaccines by brand name. The plot was exposed but questions remain about the perpetrators; it seems to go to the top of the corporation competing against the one being smeared. Big money is behind a lot of such bullshit and they’re trying to get people killed.

You think that, maybe, CEOs and board members are innocent because they never pull a trigger, but when their commands are carried out, their employees cause desolation and death. Sometimes it takes years for a scandal to be exposed, and defense attorneys insist that corporate leaders are always innocent. The truth is that by casting doubt on one vaccine, operatives know that all vaccines will be mistrusted. It doesn’t make sense, as a business tactic.

People die this way. And far from having plausible deniability, presidents and CEOs who approve of dirty tactics are responsible for people dying, just as the ones following orders are.

In such an environment and considering decades of anti-vaxxaer’s campaigns, it is little wonder that even people who lose loved ones will deny it was covid. It’s a government plot to thin population, it’s a plot to track you. Whatever.

It doesn’t occur to people that population thinning would be impossible to control, cannot be selective, and would result in the loss of educated and experienced workers, leading to disaster. Population control by pandemic is a stupid concept.

Not only that, but someone high up in the government would blow the whistle.

In the end, it is the individual who chooses not to be vaccinated. No reason they can give is good enough. They could die. Many already have. Way too many.

Depending on the country being discussed, vaccine supplies vary, as do percentages of population having been inoculated. But to have plenty, for free, it is suicide to refuse the needle. The Delta variant is more easily transmitted. It is deadlier. And maybe it is true that people are free to choose, but this choice is a no-brainer. Misinformation combined with preconceptions is lethal and in full play.

Meanwhile, terminal patients with cancer or anything you care to use as an example would give anything if a simple pair of shots could save them. It seems to me that anti vaxxers don’t want to die either; they simply choose the risk over something they have been taught to fear, or they still believe that covid is a hoax.

I’m sure that if I live to be a thousand, it will never make any fucking sense to me.

Pardon Me, But Were You Looking For Someone To Blame?

WARNING

The following blog entry contains triggers and adult subject matter. It is intended for adults only.

In New York, we have Andrew Cuomo to thank for mass confusion and bitterness. Last year a blogger outright blamed the death of his in-laws from COVID-19 on Cuomo.

Look, I’m not going to sit here and defend the man. In the article linked above, his behavior is described as “skeevy” which sounds worse but means less than what he’s been accused of. I’d call his behavior downright creepy. He had been vetted as a demigod by the press, and thus made untouchable. Many who have met him, but cannot know him as those closer to him do, have defended him with an alarming amount of zeal and venom. Being a democrat, I am disappointed and frightened.

Because the democratic party doesn’t need this. Any bad publicity is dangerous to this country’s political future. After January 6, 2021, no person should ever question the threat Republicans have become.

That doesn’t mean we should endorse cover-ups. The article leaves no doubt that watchdog journalism is lagging, biased left or right, the truth trapped somewhere in between.

CNN did in fact practically deify Cuomo, regardless of his brother having a show on the cable channel. And I will admit, that, while Andrew Cuomo did a fair job with his press conferences, he also ended up using them, and the positive feedback from them, for self-aggrandizement and a book deal.

Because. They always write fucking books, don’t they?

Then they actually sit and have conversations about who will play their role in the movie. They’re all the same, and with Trump saying that he will be back in office by July, and a bunch of loopy idiots believing him, Democrats needed to come out of the elections looking better than this. He’s a stain, Cuomo is, impossible to cover up, impossible to miss. His ego is sickening. And, yes. He cooked the books and lied.

The blogger said his relatives were casualties of Covid who should never have died. No one can truly judge the ultimate outcomes in a pandemic; it is a case of everything we know being inapplicable because of chaos mathematics. Because people in a closed system, a house, a village, a city, a province, a country – will behave in unpredictable ways and render all casualty projections crude guesswork no matter how many programmers are running variables through a system. Human behavior cannot be reduced to an algorithm.

Cuomo compensated his ego by lying during a crisis that never needed to be downplayed. The truth was what everyone needed, and now he’s just a character in a horror flick, one so bad that no director would touch it.

But if anything, the blogger found someone to blame. Isn’t that what we all want? Someone to blame for anything bad that happens? And if there isn’t anyone to blame, don’t we just pick the easiest target and throw the worst accusations, however crazy they are, at that target?

Oh, wait: I forgot to mention one thing. The blogger kind of tossed in the accusation that Democrats are engaged in depopulation.

For pity’s sake, not that again. Fuck that’s old. Make it go away, God!

A recent PSC featuring Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama stressed the fact that while they urged people to get a Covid vaccine, it was up to them, that they had a choice.

That, in the most devastating pandemic since the Spanish flu, getting the shots was still your choice to get or refuse. That’s freedom.

Trump, the man who cried “hoax”, was vaccinated. He did not shout it from any rooftop. But he got it.

Meanwhile, after leaving office as the most dishonorable and dishonest president in history, he started his own blog. When millions of readers failed to log on, he shut it down like a petulant little boy whose birthday party no one showed up for, breaking his few presents and holding his breath until his face looked like an overripe strawberry.

But here, we get back to my central point: we have the freedom of choice.

The pandemic was no doubt made worse by the poor choices of people all over the world. When countries initiated border restrictions and social distancing, and businesses shut down, many defied the rules and spread the disease. Nursing homes were hit so hard that some had trucking companies spot reefer trailers on their lots. That’s because assholes who visited them infected them. Nobody to blame. No conspiracy theory; just people who had no honor and would not face the fact that it was they who exposed the elderly to COVID-19…and basically killed them.

Some weren’t supposed to have a choice, depending on where they were. Lockdown meant, “Stay in your house.” A lot of rumors came from countries around the world, but I know that here, parties went on, masks weren’t worn even after the initial shortage was over, and people still went and made choices that we cannot deny got people killed.

Andrew Cuomo heavily restricted gatherings and travel in New York, and people were threatened with fines should they choose to defy those restrictions. He talked a good talk and most listened. Largely out of fear of dying, not any fear of the law.

If you were caught walking without a mask, most NYPD officers just gave you a mask.

Now people have more freedom and with it more choices.

It’s fascinating that few people chose to read Trump’s blog, but it means nothing because he’s clearly become more delusional since leaving office and might be unmedicated to boot. But the weird movement he started with Steve Bannon and a party of psychopaths hasn’t gone away. It won’t go away.

And if he’s unable to tweet, that shouldn’t lull you into thinking that the rot within the GOP will fade away. Like ship worms, the rot and evil are eating the party alive and no one has the balls to try to stop it. That…is their choice. Republicans have sold their souls in exchange for power, and, like all deals with the devil, been forced to commit to something which will be their undoing, yet can cause much collateral harm: we are in trouble.

And…Facebook might let Trump back on. His ban was six months, not permanent, to be reviewed after the suspension expired.

In my recent post about incest, I failed to make a critical distinction. It’s regarding choice, the right to choose, and the right-wing habit of placing blame where it doesn’t belong because they never want to appear responsible for practically anything, and anything that will further their cause will be used to frighten you.

What I’m getting at is my reference to a porn addiction which began when I was a child and was shown 8mm movies by my parents, with a sibling also watching.

I must clarify one very important thing: I am not anti-porn. Viewing pornography is anyone’s choice to make. If it is restricted after becoming so widely available, nothing good can come from it. That’s repression, and it involves the basic human function of sex. Sexual repression is nihilistic and will cause way too much harm. This article I found by accident, but I had already noticed that major internet porn sites had gone through a shakeup; something had happened, and I didn’t know exactly why.

It was as noticeable as it was puzzling.

The changes involved format, content and the ability to download it. This was startling; I knew it was legal in nature as soon as I saw it, but what had happened to make such a change necessary?

My god. The porn industry was policing itself!

It had before, but never like this.

Over the years, AIDS-infected porn stars have caused tremendous fear in those they’ve worked with, beginning with Mark Wallice, who was accused of falsifying test results after he knew he was positive. According to Wikipedia, that’s questionable, and yet it’s not. Because the health of another person in any job shouldn’t depend on one man’s honesty. In the porn industry, it does, but that’s really an illusion since testing is not prevention, and to this day, condoms are rarely used. But still, in 1998, before smartphones and broadband availability or affordability, the amateur and piracy markets had not yet become pervasive, limited largely to VHS tapes and a few DVDs. A shutdown of the main porn industry was extraordinary.

This is nothing like those days. Any time a part of any service industry begins to police itself, whether it be hospitality (which could use a shakeup) or entertainment, including music, film, TV, video games, it means the wagons are being circled.

It means that a legal fight is coming, and leaders of a particular industry know that repressive policies and laws are being drafted that will curtail the scope of their audience and therefore the profits they currently enjoy (few actors in porn ever got rich, but studios and distributors did).

The gaming industry was under such a threat in the early aughts because of violence. Not so much with Medal of Honor, but when Grand Theft Auto 3 came to the PS2, my god. You’d think the Battle of Armageddon had started; it was surely the end of the world!

To prevent congressional attacks and laws restricting content, the industry leaders, mainly publishers, agreed on a rating system that would warn consumers about content and whether it was appropriate for minors. It worked, although parents did not always pay attention. Some only noticed ratings after watching their children playing the game, at which point they freaked out. They tried to sue, but they didn’t fare well because the ratings system was in place and had been widely reported.

It was left to parents to be responsible for everything their children could see, hear or play, an argument that went farther into the past than they knew.

The conservative vultures fly in circles above internet porn. It is something that they believe is appealing to right-wing voters. It’s become a crisis, they say. And if banning all internet porn can be done in one state, namely Utah, the promise is that it can be banned by legislation in 15 other states. But there’s this thing about conservative politics lately that should scare everyone. Voter suppression bills are being drafted in multiple states which lost to Democrats last November but technically shouldn’t have; some of those are red states. And if I tell you that even in a blue state like New York, Andrew Cuomo has caused harm and resentment, even if some of that resentment is misplaced owing to conspiracy theories, then be very careful; conservatives are working at this moment to take away the rights to choose what you watch and who you vote for and without proper resistance, can actually do it.

Republicans like to scare the shit out of everyone. If they can cite a study that backs them up, or worse, inspires them, they’re all over it and men from the pulpit to the senate floor will start a panic if they can. It’s what they do, but if you look at what they’re doing, you’ll become a human lie detector. Because the fearmongering is built with lies on a foundation of biased or outright fabricated studies and reports. Often written by men and women with letters behind their names, these studies are so entrenched in lies that some are unintentionally funny. In the late 70s, dry cleaning fluid, bacon, tea and a few other major products were declared carcinogenic. No, I’m not lying; you can’t make this kind of stuff up. Paul Harvey got so fed up with the cancer nonsense that he described it like this: “they take a bunch of lab rats, pump something in through tubes constantly and when they die, they (the scientists) say, ‘See, they can’t take it’.”

But did anyone stop these stupid biased studies?

Nope. They just made worse ones. And money, usually in government grants, powers these goofy endeavors.

Take the afternoon I spent circa 1994 listening to Rush Limbaugh for example. Normally he moved from one segment to the next covering various stories. Not this day. He went on and on about some study that concluded that women will “reject” the sperm of a man who cannot afford to take care of or provide for them. I couldnt turn it off because he was serious. He believed it and was using it as a theme for the might of white men educated and all smug about their futures.

He managed, in one day, to discredit himself as an intelligent man; he further offered proof that women “on welfare” couldnt possibly have children and men out of work couldn’t possibly be fathers, and furthermore, that women had the supernatural ability of Darwinesque natural selection in their vaginal tracts.

What horseshit, because he’d made a living insulting everyone who ever took money from the government when in times of need. If women had such innate superpowers then where did all those babies he referred to as “welfare kids” come from?

How could he, claiming to have intelligence “on loan from God,” not understand that no such study was possible in the first place? Did some creeps at a university watch women have intercourse and then get them into stirrups and watch as every sperm cell was “rejected” and accounted for?

This is what Republicans do. It’s their trademark, bigotry, lies and fearmongering. Imagine if a marriage was canceled because of a woman hearing this and deciding her fiancee might not keep his job and be able to get her pregnant. Because the worst thing about Republican lies and fearmongering is that someone always believes them.

In the battle brewing over pornography, they’re doing the same thing. Calling it addictive and a mechanism for a threat to public health.

Hypocrites! They resisted measures that would have kept people from dying of Coronavirus complications. Plain and simple. They’re about as concerned for public health as a mass shooter armed with an AR-15.

The arguments against porn are, but are not limited to: it encourages violence against women; it is easily accessed by minors; it gives young people a distorted view of sexuality; it is addictive by nature and constitutes a risk to public health.

Good points, but misleading. My case is not a common one. And besides, because of my prevalent PTSD, I must correct what I called an addiction and instead label it as compulsive. It doesn’t feed any sexual need for arousal and merely floods the brain with more dopamine and serotonin than I’m getting, and usually it calms me and allows me uninterrupted sleep with no nightmares. With the chemical reaction, anyone can argue that this constitutes an addiction, but that’s flawed analysis. When not viewing adult material I do not have any withdrawal symptoms at all; indeed, I’ve gone for months, even years without it, and I was the same in every way.

However, the shame and the stigma with it are overwhelming for some people. I had neighbors in my last neighborhood who were so nosy that in a house with seven bedrooms, they must have stared at my windows, watching for any sign of movement. Due to a budgetary situation the house was, as a group home, not adorned with the most private window coverings. With curtains closed, and from a block away, a certain neighbor apparently was able to see my computer activity. Don’t ask me how he managed it; it remains a fact.

One day, I made the mistake of leaving my computer on, signed in and everything. A staff worker named Kelly used the time I was out to get hold of a partial search history and then forward it to a neighbor who was a police officer. As unprofessional and illegal as it was, soon a group of neighbors had printouts of my entire history and were across the street, reading it and commenting quite audibly that I was one “sick motherfucker” and that they would all join forces in monitoring my behavior.

That’s the stigma of living in a group home. That’s the stigma of looking at porn. It’s everything you can imagine it is, humiliating, embarrassing and terrifying. Nobody should ever know such a horrible situation.

The officer had expanded the partial search Kelly gave him. No warrants, no questioning, no arrest and no conviction, but suddenly I was the neighborhood sex predator. It got worse.

I got several emails that were being sent to people in my area, and it said a sex offender lived in the area, and was recognizable by a limp and a cane. At the time I needed surgery and I did use a cane.

Even when I arrived at a new place the emails continued. I should have consulted an attorney. If my name ever showed up, I would have.

You should be free to do whatever is legally your right to choose. But you’re not. Watch anyone you know go through what I’ve described and you’ll be filled with rage. You should be. Violating someone’s privacy and then engaging in harrassment over anything you find is against the law.

I wish it worked that way. But from the minute you logged into your first computer, you started an electronic footprint that anyone can see. You may be blackmailed, fired from your job, divorced, expelled, harrassed, bullied, maybe eventually murdered. Because some people don’t respect your freedom to choose anything at all. They think if you don’t go to church, you can’t possibly be a Christian. Or that if you watch hardcore porn, then you’re secretly gay or bisexual, if you’re a man. Because hardcore porn has penises in it. They really say these things and they believe them. The homophobic hate is the scariest because people die when it gets worse. And it always gets worse.

If you are on disability, you’re taking taxpayer dollars because you’re a lazy person who doesn’t care about working for a living.

I’ve been accused of just about everything except for the failures I freely admit to. People act all sympathetic and say I can’t blame myself for the deaths of my children. As a father, yes, I can, and I don’t have the right to dodge whatever responsibility, however small, I had. But the sympathy dries up when it comes to freely talking about what I’ve freely done. There are many things I can blame on my parents and others. Watching porn isn’t one of them. Maybe they showed me something I found more interesting and appealing than what was being done to me. I don’t know.

The injuries I sustained during my childhood are many and run deep. But if I can blame certain things on them, then there are some things I cannot. Perhaps it’s true that I was conditioned for sexual preoccupation, and that may have contributed to my promiscuity as a teen and younger man. Or compulsive masturbation or whatever. But some things I can’t fix blame for on anyone.

Conclusions

I’ve seen arguments on both sides about porn. It’s disgusting. Five years ago I read several articles, at least one from an official Christian leaders guide, that gave a large percentage of porn downloads to pastors and church computers. The protestant and catholic churches were in a real quandary: how to stop something that ultimately would be seen as damaging to the credibility of church leaders? How does one stop a man from doing anything in private?

The issue remains in limbo.

So too is it a major activity for Republicans, which makes everyone fighting porn a hypocrite of the highest order. I doubt legislation will pass restricting internet porn, but if it does, they’ll know all the loopholes.

There is scant evidence of social harm from pornography. It’s probably even saved a few marriages. I can’t side against that, because a divorce is not always the answer. Divorces destroy. It’s even true that a couple watching a movie will better communicate their needs, thus strengthening the union.

Porn is sometimes offensive even to those who regularly watch it. Many have no stomach for B&D. Extremely negative for women, breast rings are painful and likely cause deep tissue damage along with vascular and nerve damage. Men lose their penises or their ability for erections because of restrictive rings. And films where mouths contact the rectum don’t have disclaimers about the chances of getting quite sick. But you have a choice as to what you watch and what you do.

Outlawed and bootleg porn are even more extreme. I saw one involving a young woman and a horse. To accommodate the horse, she laid upon a raised table and spread her legs. The horse didn’t thrust right away, and the girl thought she was safe. She was not; one powerful thrust went all the way in and she immediately pulled away. She walked, in shock, to a wooden deck and sat down. She later died of peritonitis.

Extreme sex is therefore best avoided, in porn and in practice. But in general I have to defend your right to watch it and the government has no business trying to stop you. The comparison to voting rights restrictions is appropriate. It’s all about Republican muscle and the fight to continue their fascist rule in 2024.

If you let up…if you don’t pay attention to suppression and oppression, soon you will have no rights left. No abortions regardless of whether your life is in danger. No choice in news networks. Or schools. Or churches. Your children and grandchildren will grow up in a different world, one you cannot imagine.

But you should try to.

Because they’re going to have someone to blame.

You…and me.

What Have I Become?

Disillusionment: I had a ninth grade English teacher who had the word on our vocabulary list, and gave us an example of the meaning. He’d worked in a church as a boy. Idolizing the pastor, he ran errands and did odds-and-ends jobs. One day he happened on the janitor showing the pastor a colorfully embroidered set of handkerchiefs, each depicting Snow White doing “different things” with each of the seven dwarfs. He was disillusioned.

I understood. I may have been the only one in the class who did.

I was already disillusioned and long past being damaged. Damaged beyond repair, as it turns out.

If only life were like movies, comic books and video games, I could have made a comeback. In the end, or at some point, I’d have gotten the love of my life. Made myself a success and had time for deep sea fishing, drinking beer and going to football games. I’d have raised kids who would still be alive.

Then I would retire to the mountains and write novels while snow fell outside and the fireplace had a crackling fire in it.

LEVEL UP!

In a video game, every birthday I would have leveled up. More XP. Stronger, wiser.

I’m close to leveling up for the 61st time. Level 61.

I will not be stronger. I will not be wiser. I’ll still be a loser, one year older, in more pain, still broken.

No repair, no recovery having been made, because life is just that way for losers.

At around level 61 in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the game sent a level 99 mercenary into the Greek Islands. I spent hours eluding him, but one day I had a bounty on my character and the merc who showed up first was the level 99 behemoth. Tired of having unfair shit thrown at me by the game, I took him on. I beat him easily. Again: life is no video game. If it were so, the many level 99s I’ve faced would have done no harm. I could be writing the great American novel right now, well into the night, looking forward to visiting my grandchildren after COVID-19.

Now, I look forward to nothing.

There is nothing that I can feel excited or enthusiastic about. I’m flat. No highs, no days when I can say I’m blessed to be here and really feel it. It is a fact. Nothing more.

What have I become?

This is mental illness at its most basic. I cannot easily socialize because my words are lies. I care and really want an answer when asking a neighbor how they feel. Faced with the same query, I lie: “Oh, I’m fine, thanks.” It’s the act of a liar, and I should feel shame, but instead I feel nothing.

This is how I felt the last time I tried to kill myself: I felt nothing.

The physical pain is there; a constant reminder that I must still be alive. On the inside, I’m dead.

Incapable of love, sympathy, righteousness. Everything good I thought I was, is gone. Was it ever there?

For a while I thought I was going to have a place in someone’s life. That I would be a part of something resembling a family.

That was stupid. A loser can never win. Once alone and unloved, love can never again fill one’s heart, and if it does, something will happen that will end it. When a woman began to be adversarial, I understood. She was going through too much. When I was called a disparaging name, it hurt. I didn’t immediately unplug, I tried the phone. I knew I’d get no answer.

That’s okay. I understood that, too. I guess I deserved it. Being an asshole, I’m sure I did. So I disconnected all those involved. Clearly, I was fucking up their lives. I do that. To everyone.

I will let you down.

I’ll hurt you.

And I just can’t hurt anyone else. I’ve done far too much of that.

I’ll disappoint or hurt you enough to chase you away. Sooner or later I do that to everyone. If I think they’re ambivalent or about to leave my life, I cut the ties first. It hurts less that way. At least that’s what I tell myself.

What have I become?

Because trauma, low self esteem and deep, long-cycle periods of depression have more power to take apart who I am and whatever talents or any good in me than I have to fight back.

To this fucking day people still tell me I have to move forward. It’s more insulting that the worst abuse I ever got from my father or my ex-wife. Don’t tell me to go forward. Don’t you think I wish I could? That it was that fucking easy?

Don’t tell anyone to go forward, move on or whatever else you think sounds good. It hurts. Because some of us can’t.

On these posts, any reader can see that I’ve been up and down but mainly down.

You know what I want to do? I want to talk about how openly stupid and deviant the Republican party in the United States is. How they throw themselves under a former president’s belly like mewling kittens looking for teats. And I want to discuss in front of the rest of the world how people who voted for him after he constantly lied, committed crimes against humanity, lied about those, bribed and brainwashed and lied more to get reelected are among the most stupid bastards on this planet.

I don’t have it in me to do it and give it justice. The United States is doomed if this trend toward fascism doesn’t stop. With our arsenal, everyone else in the world should be praying that Joe Biden is successful and gets reelected because that would mark eight years of a gradual recovery of sanity.

I can’t tell you that. It should be evident but I’m sorry, we of good conscience must always stand against evil. I want to talk about that.

I can’t.

What have I become?

I’m also unable this time to remain on social media. This time it is not because I can’t take the hate on there.

It is because I’ve hurt people…friends…

With my own words. Always so down that I could tell people were unfollowing me. Always such a downer…a sick man trapped by misfiring synapses and betrayed by his own brain, trapped in the past, chased by ghosts and in constant despair. Who would want me on their friends list in my current condition, I asked myself.

And this time for the good of others I left a post saying I’d shut down my account in a few days.

Some know that I stabbed mutual friends of theirs in the back. They’re no longer communicating. Can you blame them?

Others don’t want me to give up.

I’m grateful to them. More than words can say, I’m so very grateful. But if I stay, I run the risk of emotionally reacting, hurting any one of them. Words can do such great harm. I can’t risk it. I can’t be on social media. I can’t.

Level 61. Wow. Never thought I’d get this far. I know it isn’t fair, because while a loser like me goes on, good people with families have lost their own. Not fair. COVID-19 continues on and idiots refuse the chance to be vaccinated. They think a lower mortality rate means it’s over. They lost family too, and still won’t bother with two simple, free shots that could save themselves and save others from them. People have left us. Gone forever, leaving behind families and friends and jobs and bright futures.

And I sit here wondering why, why am I here, why someone else could be taken while I’m spared Death’s reach.

For all my years on this earth I have seen so much suffering and injustice that I am both thankful and feeling cursed by my sensitivity. Look at what is going on right now, and again I refer to COVID-19. In India, the infection rate is simply apocalyptic. I mean, they’re even out of oxygen.

People in news footage lie helter-skelter on pallets, mostly on the ground, any several of which you see will die or already have died. The strain of the virus doing this has already made it to the US, and the travel ban may be on, but we really need to help the rest of the world if we can.

India needs help now. We’re the ones who can give the help.

As I write this, Rachel Maddow is discussing the Biden administration’s proposal to lift patents for the vaccine to facilitate generic manufacture and distribution in order to provide an already sectioned 16 billion dollars in global aid.

It’s really complex and certainly will be strenuously fought by the corporations involved as well as Republicans. And there’s more involved than the manufacturing process. But helping India, and other countries with no vaccines, is the right thing to do.

When did it become okay for America to turn away from rendering help to other countries? The answer begins with Donald Trump. A man of no conscience, devoid of anything remotely human. A man worshipped by the power mongers of the Beltway and the abominable ones who come in the name of God or Jesus.

When, or if, I cycle out of this extended period of deep depression, I hope I’ll feel how blessed I am. Yesterday I received my second COVID-19 vaccine. The odds that I will survive to level up just got better.

I hope I can feel gratitude for it. I hope that by my level-up day, I’ll have picked up some powerups for extra stamina like in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Or that I’ll stumble upon some treasure. And live long enough to use it to help people.

But…

But…

Life is not a video game.

And I’m an asshole.

And I’ll hurt you.

I’ll bring you down.

I will regret it later…

But then, it won’t matter.

What have I become?

Happy Thanksgiving, Assholes

A news report.

Actually, lots of them. Everywhere you look. Every hour, every day.

Not about Trump. He’s broken about every protocol and a host of laws; no shit. Made us look like a “banana republic”, quoth many politicians and pundits. Oh, it’s worse than that.

Not about Biden, either. A good man who Trump cannot admit he lost to. Now, finally, transfer and the sharing of information and intelligence can go forth as it should. Through it all, Trump played golf, tweeted hate, incited rebellion, bribed Minnesota and intimidated Michigan officials and generally tried to take food stamps and basic rights away from citizens. He’s engaged in a scorched earth policy to wreck everything and interfere in a smooth transition of administrations. To make Biden look inadequate. To throw shade on all who voted against him, Trump almighty.

No, I’m not talking about seeing reports on any of that.

I’m referring to idiots who continue to refuse to wear masks, sanitize hands, use the six-foot rule, and who are absolutely killing other people.

Those people who are traveling or hosting gatherings for Thanksgiving. This week.

This fucking week.

Experts are alarmed.

Have the horrifying events of this year not already impressed you how deadly COVID-19 is? Haven’t we lost enough people, family, friends, coworkers to get through your fucking selfish, small brain?

I guess not.

I’m not a wise or intelligent man. I have no decency, no dignity.

I am without honor.

And I am quite sick.

But I’m better than you.

I try to do what I should. I wear my mask. I keep my distance. I stay home when it is not necessary to go out. I don’t want to kill. I’m not selfish or vain or rebellious enough to fucking murder a stranger or a friend.

But for the sake of a fucking carved turkey, you’ll risk anything: air travel, mixing in grandma’s house with family from 5 states. Whatever. Bus, train, air. Makes no difference. None. And you don’t make sense to me.

Happy Thanksgiving you fucking morons. Even if you kill someone, you’ll never believe it was you who gave grandma COVID-19.

The airlines are happy to sell tickets. Coaches too, and trains, oh, always. You gotta wear masks but when nobody’s looking, they can’t tell you’re bare-faced. You’re pathetic.

Morons.

Idiots.

In December and January, just stand back and wait for your phone to ring. And watch the news. Because those climbing numbers of deaths? You and everyone like you did that.

If you think I’m being presumptuous and harsh, prove me wrong. Stay home. Cancel the meal. Eat a TV dinner and watch the Lions and the Ravens lose.

Live and let live.

Opium For The Masses

Conspiracy theories are often laughable and we have great fun at the expense of those engaged in spreading or just believing in them. We call them crazy, but There’s something awful to consider as well: they’re not harmless. Not even close.

JACK THE RIPPER?

Of course, that’s not enough to stop the constant recirculation of things both lurid and outlandish such as the maddeningly stupid royals of England stories. You think those are modern? Think again. My favorite involves Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, who some claim was a simpleton. Others believe he was insane because of syphilis and yet others believe he had impregnated a peasant woman, which would have caused a scandal of promethean proportions. Somehow the royal family physician (and accomplice) found out it was an east-end prostitute. That’s even worse. The shady doctor and his assistant trolled Whitechapel in a carriage, killing and mutilating prostitutes in the fall of 1888, giving birth to the terrorist Jack the Ripper. This theory, which gained popularity in the 1970s, was featured in the film Murder by Decree, a decent Sherlock Holmes flick starring Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Watson.

Prince “Eddy” was actually said to be a nut, but to this day it’s bitterly challenged. As to being Jack the Ripper, he was not even in London between August and November of 1888 (although this doesn’t dismiss the doctor or other accomplice part). Other claims include Prince “Eddy” being gay and having visits at a male brothel, a ridiculous idea, and in fact he was engaged when he died of influenza in January of 1892. As in the Ripper film noted above, facts never stopped anyone from including Royals in literature and film. Mark Frost wrote a brilliant novel, not about Sherlock Holmes, but the author who created the character. The list of Seven is a page-turning yarn which involves Arthur Conan Doyle and his inspiration for the Holmes character chasing a group of people planning on bringing Satan’s child into the world. They planned on using Prince Eddy as an unwitting seed donor, but the story reveals he is unsuitable, as his IQ is that of a puppy.

The Duke of Clarence and Avondale was the Grandson of Queen Victoria and is otherwise not noteworthy; a name known more to the fans of fiction and conspiracy theories than to history. That’s sad.

KING AND QUEEN?

Then there’s Queen Elizabeth I. She was a man. She really died as a child and was replaced by a boy who grew up and impersonated her all his life. Holy crap.

THE ROYAL VAMPIRE

Prince Charles is a vampire, because he’s a descendant of Vlad Teppes, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler (!or Dracula) because during his reign in Transylvania he would fight battles and have the captured or killed impaled on stakes all over the place. Charles made people suspicious by buying a home there and joking that he’d one day rule there as well. There’s no evidence that Teppes or Charles were and are vampires.

LONG LIVE THE GORN!

And Queen Elizabeth II is a cannibal or a reptilian creature disguised as a human, both of which preserve her health. No wonder she chased James Kirk for an hour in Vasquez Rocks park!

From Star Trek Season One: a Gorn captain. Episode: “Arena”

Holy mother.

TIME AFTER TIME

Greta Thunberg is a time traveler. Didn’t know that, did you? Well check this out.

Greta Thunberg in 1898 mining gold in the klondike on the left. Right, as she appears at 16. Or this century. Whatever.

Of course no one can explain why she came from the future and wound up gold mining in the nineteenth century if she was sent to stop global warming. Perhaps it explains why so many search Google for her net worth.

By the way, we haven’t heard from her in a while. Maybe she went back to the future to tell everyone what shitheads we are and that we wouldn’t listen.

WE ARE THE SOY BOYS OF RADIO, WE TOSS ESTROGEN TO AND FRO

Soy boys are a definite fucking no-go with me. This conspiracy theory comes straight from the alt-right. Which is a nice way of saying “the dust bin of psych wards”. You know, the ones always accusing the left of conspiracies? One of those is that soy is given to boys to boost estrogen levels to make them effeminate. Alex Jones said “Soon as you’re done with your juice box you’re ready to go out and make (have) babies.”

This, coming from the guy who sells perineum wipes.

IT TAINT WHAT YOU THINK

After John Oliver made extensive fun of the perineal “Combat Wipes” sold by Jones, HBO sold single wipes for one million dollars each. And what’s worse is that in both male and female, the perineum isn’t limited to the outer dermis in the area referred to as “taint”, or the place between the distal vagina and the anus or the penis and scrotum and the anus. The anatomical structures include internal musculoskeletal structures and organs in the region. Perineum is something more complex than Alex Jones can comprehend. That will never stop him, nor would it prevent people buying his bullshit after he’s scared them to death over a lie. You can’t cleanse the internal perineum with a wipe. And you don’t need wipes for your skin. Soap and water is good. Using a washcloth is cool too, but what the fuck, right? Soap is soap and water is water. If traveling, personal hygiene is sometimes a problem. Carrying spare napkins or tampons is good, and wipes too, but not the ones on infowars. Preparation H even makes wipes that are cool for both men and women who suffer from hemorrhoids, but it can be used to freshen up “down there” after a long uncomfortable flight or whatever. It should be noted that some people are a bit more fastidious concerning hygiene than others and really, to each their own. Not needing or using a moist towelette isn’t a crime. However, making men or women or both scared to death of failing to clean their perineum and selling wipes for that express purpose is a crime. It’s called fraud. Lawsuits haven’t stopped him. He promoted the conspiracy theory that no one died at Sandy Hook (Elementary School), that it was a false flag operation by the political left under the Obama administration to cause public sentiment to swing toward gun control. But he’s no good at advocating against gun control because during an interview with British Broadcasting he went psycho, yelling so much that the interview was terminated.

At least he wound up in court, as he should every time he opens his mouth. One time as a defendant he was found in contempt before any hearings began. Another time he claimed he was psychotic when he said something and had to apologize and retract.

But aside from promoting conspiracy theories that don’t hold water such as the New World Order (connection: the Bilderberg Group), Antifa, Parkland massacre being another false flag operation, tap water making men turn gay (and selling a $500.00 filter to remove fluoride even though fluoride does not make men turn gay), he’s paid the price. He’s been banned from using Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and more, has been banned from YouTube and spotify, a bunch of radio stations and has been successfully sued. Not only that, but his wife divorced him.

And still he could not be restrained; the state of New York issued a cease and desist order because he was selling toothpaste “containing silver” which killed the coronavirus. Dont worry, though. Alex Jones is a devious and crazy idiot who will never stop his conspiracy theories or fake cures. Stay tuned.

Speaking of the New World Order…

THE ORIGINAL SHIT

The Illuminati is the gift that never stops giving when it comes to conspiracy theories. We’ve gone from Bavaria in 1776 to the present and it just won’t go away. Beyonce and Jay Z are in it. Except the Illuminati wouldn’t take black people into their ranks as equals even if they were real. It’s rather like the John Birch Society. That’s a super-radical right-wing group, and those are just about as white as you can get. They don’t bother with political correctness and there’s little about them that’s subtle. The Illuminati wouldn’t last even if it ever did exist in America because of infighting. Greed is the prime motivator in the rich; they must gain and keep total control. And while corporate executives do conspire, no two will ever cede power to the other. The evidence says that the Illuminati do not exist.

IT’S ALL IN THE BAR CODE

Wayfair is that furniture store which still uses jingles in TV ads. Yeah, like it’s still 1970. Wayfair, you’ve got just what I need!

Except furniture is just a front for a third party selling children by coding in the numbers of very high-priced but low-end crappy tables and shit. Oh, brother!

CRAZY

And now let’s have a go at something with a bit more meat on its bones. According to Rudy Giuliani, “China owns the Biden crime family.” He’s off plumb by so much you can’t even see the bubble anymore. His own daughter is begging people to vote for Biden. There’s never been any evidence of Biden or his family being a crime syndicate. I’d laugh, but it’s not funny. Just plain stupid.

HUCKABEE HOUND

Last year Mike Huckabee said that CNN pays people to hate Trump. This is the basic mentality of the political right. He was angry because a CNN interview started with the reporter saying that outgoing spokesman for Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, would be remembered as trump’s personal liar. Of course Huckabee, a real milquetoast, had to get in a comeback. But the accusation that CNN pays people to hate Donald Trump is ridiculous when people really do it for free.

YOU SHOULD GET THAT COUGH CHECKED OUT

Coughing through an interview on Fox after Trump returned to the White Taj Mahal, I mean the White House, Giuliani said the science isn’t always right and with a sniffle between coughs said science didn’t prove that closing schools was necessary. He said that more people died from suicide after the shutdown, without finishing out loud the insinuation that more people died by their own hands than the number of mortalities COVID-19 has.

Suicide?

Killed more than 260,000 people from January to October?

Really?

Hell. He’s so out there I can’t imagine whether he sees the Earth or Neptune under his feet.

But he’s in very good company with his old kissing pal, Trump. Remember when they did that skit? That’s when they still seemed human. And sane. It was funny. Nobody’s laughing with them anymore. They laugh at them. Trump has since broken records for manic, insane tweets in a 24-hour period. The previous record was set by… him.

TRUMP IS NOT SANE

First he tweeted that no more relief funds were going to happen unless he was reelected. Then he backed up and tweeted that relief had to be passed in Congress before the election.

The first crackpot theory was that all White House staff and advisors as well as the staff, doctors and nurses at the prestigious Walter Reed hospital center were in on a hoax. Trump was faking his malady and doing so to avoid the next debate. The worst part, for me, is that it’s coming from the left.

That’s so stupid it debunks itself.

First, let’s remember that Trump is superficial. It has always been about appearances with him. Did you not see him posing after returning to the zoo, I mean the White House? He did poses without his mask, with his suit jacket open and then buttoned. He turned slightly like he was on a red carpet. He looked like Mussolini for pity’s sake. This need to be perfect in appearance is responsible for his ride around the hospital parking lots during his hospitalization. It’s why he returned with orangeface when, in hospital that Saturday, he recorded a video of himself looking pale and with his hair combed back instead of what his daughter called a hilarious swirl when confiding to a friend.

He was obviously very ill. He had COVID-19 for sure. And he’s not well yet. I think an oxygen deprivation may have caused some damage. He lied and said the hospital stay was just a “precaution”. But according to Mary L.Trump, being sick is a sign of weakness in the Trump family.

The conspiracy theory comes as I said, from the political left. It’s because nobody can trust him after so many lies. He’s become his own worst enemy. The boy who cried wolf too many times.

DEEP THINKING IS NOT HIS STRONG SUIT. THE DEEP STATE AND ANTIFA

Trump believes in a “deep state” which is another version of the Illuminati. Except that Steve Bannon’s the asshole who told him about it and this illuminati is out to get Trump.

If there really were a deep state, they would surreptitiously run the government and could operate without any need to worry about Trump. Bannon was gaslighting Donald Trump as Trump gaslit America. And he recorded a video in which he asserted seasonal influenza kills more people than SARS CoV-2, a video removed by Facebook and hidden by Twitter, he’s clearly gone insane. The steroids and the virus have him more crazy than ever.

An·ti·fa/ˈan(t)ēˌfä,ˌanˈtēfə/noun

a protest movement comprising autonomous groups affiliated by their militant opposition to fascism and other forms of extreme right-wing ideology.

The thing about antifa is that it’s more of an ideology than a real movement. There are pockets of militant anti fascists but they aren’t quantified or, to my knowledge, identified. It’s not even established that they’re anything more than vandals, arsonists and thieves. But Trump keeps throwing it at us and at Biden as if it’s the boogeyman of social unrest. His problem is that he believes in wild bullshit like Obama and Biden bugging Trump Tower. And he thinks Hillary Clinton’s emails were full of classified documents that were easily hacked. After numerous investigations, it was found that she had done no wrong. James Comey let it leak immediately prior to the election that she was once again under investigation, but Trump never understood that it worked in his favor. He fired Comey.

The Mueller investigation turned into a clusterfuck. Sessions recused himself from the entire affair, and Trump never understood that that also worked in his favor; Sessions would have otherwise caused a lot of trouble for Trump. This was before Barr came along and changed all the rules at will.

Still, Trump drones on about all the plots against him, with conspiracy theories that boggle the mind of anyone who is sane. He still swears there’s a leftist-controlled deep state. He just won’t let it go.

IT AIN’T NO SECRET

Drinking Corona beer will not give you COVID-19.

5G towers Do not spread the coronavirus.

Wearing a mask has been, along with social distancing, shown to be effective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus. Nothing about the shutdown was a lie. It was the only way we knew to react in an emergency situation that involved life or death.

Wearing copper or ingesting silver won’t kill COVID-19.

Injecting a disinfectant into your bloodstream will likely end your covid fears as you’ll probably die in agony within a minute or two.

Taking advice from Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani or any Republican at this point proves those who listen are not in touch with reality.

We know why people fall for conspiracy theories. In the past, a few were proven true. The CIA really did give people LSD, for instance. But the psychological allure of lurid and contrived tales is all in the brain. Talking or writing about them is addictive. Therefore dopamine and other delicious neurotransmitters flood their receptors and it feels good.

It’s exactly like opium for the masses. That’s why everyone but people with extreme paranoia can’t leave them alone. The extreme paranoids? They’re scared. They just get off on scaring the shit out of others.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/07/22/fact-check-wayfair-not-involved-child-sex-trafficking/5460739002/

Netflix’s algorithms seem to be a new entry point for conspiracy theories. Be aware!

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/16/us/flat-earth-conference-conspiracy-theories-scli-intl/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/may/15/avril-lavigne-melissa-cloning-conspiracy-theories

https://www.salon.com/2018/11/14/the-soy-boy-conspiracy-theory-alt-right-thinks-left-wing-has-it-out-for-them-with-soybeans_partner/

“I knew it was bad, but I played it down” –Donald Trump, President of the United States, on COVID-19

Ah. I could live for days like this. A gentle rain, the rumble of distant thunder, the scent of a cleansing on the earth…

But it isn’t tranquil. Too much is happening for me to be lulled by it.

Out there, it’s a nightmare. Maybe you live somewhere that’s trapped in a nightmare. To see the news this morning took every good thing out of me.

Watching Morning Joe was no fun at all. I like that program. Particularly when Joe gets on an angry tear. What a speaker. Mika sometimes sighs and says, “here we go,” and it’s funny, because they’re married. I always get a chuckle when she does that.

Today was a day I didn’t hear anyone get that riled. It was a bad day. Yesterday was a bad day and every day before it was bad.

I suspect anyone who does a news and commentary show is deflated right now. The wind ain’t gonna come to those slack sails, you know?

Which story did you want to cover first? Toss up there, Mika. Did you ever think you would see a day like this? Did you ever really imagine this? All of this?

The dawn over the Bay area in California on Wednesday looked like a scene in the Keanu Reeves film “Constantine” when he goes to Hell. It’s a chilling scene, no play on words intended. But waking up, seeing that, whoa. How do you even handle that?

The latest update I could find is actually on Wikipedia’s update page and counts ten deaths so far. Dont tell me climate change isn’t real. We know by the extended dry season in California and the violence of the storms providing lightning strikes. We know some of the fires were caused by human activity including, for pity’s sake, a pyrotechnic display. That’s goddamn irresponsible, but it’s done, and its effects are far from done.

In another time, this would not be happening. We’ve seen terrible fires before, but never anything like this, and there’s really no stopping it. The wikipedia references the amount of acres, or hectares, burned. That those numbers have increased while I’m writing this staggers my imagination.

I’m personally very frightened for people I know, and one relative, who are out there. But my concern is for everyone. It is a truly hellish scene. I’m horrified by what you’re going through out there.

According to a tweet by the NWS, there’s no model to account for the future of the smoke, which today is darker and closer to the ground in some places. They were asking for people’s observations to try and sort out what they could.

NWS, as I suspect NOAA and every other organization that deals with weather, are having a tough year. If 2020 was a weather system, they’d all say that it sucked. Not very professional, but honest.

The hurricane season isn’t over and keep in mind, October is not here yet, and some of our worst hurricanes have occurred late in the season. Right now, there’s tropical activity and more to come. This, after Louisiana has been hit hard. They cant take another hit like that. Not that any state can, but hey, the news ain’t gonna tell you much about that state while so many other horrors are going on. Keep a weather eye. Literally.

BOOKS

Yeah. Everybody’s got a book out. For a price, you can now read things about Donald and Melania Trump that in all honesty we should have been told about long ago.

Melania is a terrible person. She’s illiterate and cruel and driven by greed to put up a false facade. For years we speculated on why she would slap her husband’s hand away and whether she was a battered wife and too scared of losing custody of her son to leave him. We were foolish to think these things; not only are they untrue, but she never deserved the slightest bit of our sympathy. The book to read: Melania And Me.

Then comes the shocking (not really) book Rage by Bob Woodward. We’ve heard the audio with Trump admitting that he knew COVID-19 was seriously contagious and deadly but he played it down to “avoid panic” and that he’s still playing it down.

Except that, one day after the audio was released, Trump was asked why anyone should ever believe him again. He denied saying what he said and added, “I meant we have to stay calm.”

Sorry, Mr. President, but trying to keep people calm doesn’t cover constant lies, toxic cure suggestions, withholding monetary aid to states and forcing them to order shutdowns, or begging all over the world for PPE and ventilators. You did that, against all the common sense and decency everyone else had but you lacked.

You know what? The administration just took federal taxes off the withholding payroll for government workers. They have no choice and even though the money has to be paid later, this is the probing, the overture, to breaking Social Security. He’s already on his second or third attempt at having pre-existing conditions removed from the ACA. And when the money has to be repaid, you think anyone’s going to be able? No. And their debt will accrue interest. It’s a sin.

There’s a shit storm of revelations about Trump coming out like the ones in Cohen’s new volume. He calls Trump a cult leader and claims to have been a member of the cult. I’m not sure.

Certainly not the first lawyer to go overboard for money and prestige, he’s coming off a bit dishonest to me. I don’t think he’s telling the whole truth. The book: Dishonesty. Quite appropriate.

All these and more are books that contain staggering revelations about the Trump presidency. It’s horrific, and yet, all of the facts that they contain are things that, had they come to light sooner (in March, Woodward knew that Trump was lying about COVID-19 despite being fully aware that it was going to kill a lot of people) would inarguably have saved lives and the economy.

Cohen’s book reveals much about Russia and Trump. It’s every bit as bad as we were sure it was, only worse. Back in 2016, and onward, we were sure that Vladimir Putin had something on Trump. Something he didn’t want to ever become known. This of course, as I wrote back then and since, is the Russian way. They compromise, record money transactions or anything else they can use, and then threaten to reveal it. In Trump’s case, we knew that he had pursued relentlessly some business deals with Russia. He was vocally impressed with Putin and then something happened. Rumor had it that he was taking golden showers, that it was on video and Russia had the proof.

This fits. But it isn’t enough. First, he once visited son Eric at university and the boy came down from the dorm in a sweatshirt, and Trump slapped him. He said “A Trump wears a tie! Go get dressed!” It’s always been about image with Trump. So a video of him engaged in water sports would embarrass him no end. His skin is thin. But I never have thought that was the true nature of it all. There had to be more. It was about his true amount of financial debt or it was sexual, and either way, it was hardcore. In the case of a video, I maintained it had to be egregious, like having sex with a minor. Something he could never get away from if it was made public. In light of his ordering intelligence to move on from investigating Russia and to instead concentrate on China, I believe this to be another smoking gun, telling of the level of corruption in the White House. Barr taking on Trump’s defense? More corruption of our government.

I started this post this morning. It’s almost midnight. Time to publish without any ending thoughts, but I’m not sure I even have any. We’re in big trouble. Microsoft published a report on Russian and Chinese interference in the election. I need to read up…

Typically Republican

I’ve seen enough. I don’t know who it was but some dickhead actually asked Dr. Fauci if the left and the media were being fair to “President” Trump.

His reaction was vanilla. Reason: he knows he must remain where he is in order to help save this country from Donald Trump’s ignorance and insanity. The next question from Dickhead was “do you regret not calling for the public to wear masks earlier?”

Wait. Wait a fucking minute. It was the republicans who denied COVID-19 was going to be a thing. Remember that?

Fauci answered, “we’re going to play that game…if you’ll remember, we had a paucity of PPE and we didn’t want healthcare workers who were risking their lives to have facemasks taken by the public.” Not a word-for-word quote, but essentially correct. How can politicians be so short on memory that they actually try to rewrite history, and how the hell are they so callous that this dickhead brought up deaths from drugs, AIDS and even managed to somehow throw mumps into his name salad?

Mumps?

First of all, that’s the fucking attitude that’s already killed so many people who had COVID-19. Trump’s attitude was, and remains, “fuck it.”

They’ll watch the economy tank, a million people die, businesses fail, and do nothing but throw blame on Democrats. Which is like your kids breaking everything in your house right the fuck in front of you and blaming the neighbors out back that you can’t stand. Today in hard-hit Arizona, Trump’s having a rally. He will not wear a mask. In Arizona. And his staff keep getting infected. He’s not merely stupid. He’s evil, bent on exalting himself as a god who can’t be hurt, get sick or make a bad decision. And while he’s at it, fuck everyone else. He’s not alone because his cult of political and civilian worshippers back him up. By now I doubt any of them even really know they’ve believed the lies they once took objection to. They live in a fake reality.

If you want me to write about him with a bit of respect, or all-out reverence, you can go fuck yourself. Ain’t gonna happen.

Guess what is gonna happen, though…

A lot more people are going to die. God damn these motherfuckers. God damn them all to Hell.

Sometimes I Have The Worst Feeling…

One of the worst things about PTSD is the feeling of impending doom you sometimes get. It’s hard to shake and impossible to ignore. I get it about six times a year, and there’s no telling how long I’ll be a prisoner. I’ve never admitted this in quite these words before. I couldn’t. How do you face such a thing? Because, when it happens, it’s overwhelming. You’re honestly certain that the world is coming to an end.

In 1999, a shitload of people had this. The hysteria was contagious. Many references were made to the “end of the thousand years”. Nostradamus was said to have predicted the battle of Armageddon in December of 1999. There were fears of computer systems crashing, leaving cities without power, and that mayhem would surely reign.

The movies that came out that year didn’t seem to help much. Schwarzenegger was in an underrated film, “End of Days”, Johnny Depp was in the terrifying “Ninth Gate”, which let everyone down with an absolutely dumbass ending to a decent story. But there were plenty of debunkers and unbelievers, too. Watching wrestling, which was better at the time, was fun. Chris Jericho went by the nickname “Y2J” in a thumbing of the nose at the worriers. His Titantron entrance showed chaos erupting.

Plenty of scholars pointed out that Nostradamus was at best a scribbler of fantasy whose writings were completely open to any interpretation a reader wanted to apply.

In November, the superstitious and pseudoscientific population took a truly weird event as an omen. In the eastern Atlantic, Hurricane Lenny was born. He did something that confounded the NOAA, no small feat. He traveled east. He was the first to be observed doing so exclusively, without looping once either north or east. He was born over water and died there, a freak among Atlantic storms which are known to be unpredictable.

The threat we faced was nothing more than fear. On New Year’s Eve I watched the countdown to midnight in Times Square. At 00:00 hours, nothing happened. Nothing blew up. Nothing shut down. Nothing crashed. There was no chaos, no mayhem.

People are often scared of the things that never happen and the things that do happen but defy easy explanation, like Hurricane Lenny. I’ve sure been hit by both. It seems that it’s in our genes.

But what gets me the most is when people should be afraid, but aren’t.

I saw that people reacted to the coronavirus with a mixed response. In some states, people stayed home, but by then the virus was well seeded here. The United States has been the epicenter of COVID-19 for months. Now people have had enough and are reopening businesses. That could have been done with minimal risk and physical distancing. Masks are mostly illusory and provide little protection. But those, combined with distancing and testing, are effective. Quarantine after a positive test result is essential. Some people did it. Some didn’t. Some were contagious way before getting tested, making it worse, so what we had before the protests was a climbing rate of infection. Stories of a decline were false or just wishful thinking and denial. No decline existed. New York may have seen a drop but that’s a different story.

The protesters are in close proximity to each other. Some wear masks, some don’t. But the lack of spacing, the viral load concentration between people as they talk or breathe heavily as they walk distances that elevate heart rate, is a really big problem. I deleted my blog “The Last of the American Dream” because nobody ever read it. To get views, you really need a paid WordPress domain and search engines have to like you. And people have to “like” your posts. I don’t have either advantage and people just don’t come here. My other blog was more political and science based. I followed up news stories on climate change and fact checked, then tried to explain in simple terms what to expect. Believe me, it’s not good. These days nobody wants to read about it. No one wants to put it on the cable news. You can ignore or even disbelieve anything you want. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It is there. Every update I read proved a past prediction about the speed of glacial melt in gross error. Sea level rise isn’t the guide, it’s merely an effect. Watching huge wedges of ice shelf fall into the sea is partially a guide, but what so many miss is that the more ice is lost, the more danger we are in, both short term and long. It should scare the shit out of you, because it’s too late to stop it. Seawater is very good at retaining heat. That seawater, perhaps a degree or two warmer than in past decades, eats away at ice. The sun heats the air more, so that blue pools of melt water are clearly seen on top of expanses of glaciers. Melting has been achieved from above and below. The tundra is thawing. Fear among scientists that an inevitable release of methane will happen, will be epic and catastrophic, are true. Yet no one talks about it. Except scientists and teenage girls smarter than any of us can ever be. Nobody reads. Nobody listens.

The pandemic may have shut down a lot of emissions as highways were empty of traffic for a minute. The Los Angeles sky cleared. The earth didn’t constantly tremble from motor vehicles. I know we can make changes. But now it’s forgotten as the fossil fuels burn again. None will remember. The climate change wasn’t slowed. It wasn’t long enough to do that. In truth even if it had been sustained for two years or more, the temperature would still rise because of what’s already in the atmosphere, which isn’t visible, as smog is.

It’s a pity people aren’t terrified of what’s in store. Every prediction is obsolete before it’s made. It’s far, far worse than you can imagine.

Being unable to imagine something is no sin, but knowing that an event or condition will come and doing nothing about it, is.

We are in an existential crisis. As a country. As a species.

Nightmares are here. More will come.

TRUMP’S AMERICAN DESTRUCTION

You can lie to others. Even to yourself. If you truly see Trump as a saviour, you are full of lies. He has set a record for lies told by a sitting president, so don’t be too hard on yourself for being full of shit.

Everything he’s done has caused irreparable damage to this country. Now Joe Biden admits to fears that Trump will as president bring all his powers to bear in order to limit ballots. He’s considered the possibility that even if he loses the election, Trump will play dictator and refuse to leave the White House. Fuck, I predicted that in 2017, then again last year on my blog. You saw the White House surrounded within days of the first signs unrest following George Floyd’s murder. A new fence. New concrete. Mercenaries brought in to show his power, armed to the teeth, as all dictators begin. He was castigated for his threat to use regular military personnel against protesters; be thankful he backed up. Someone finally stood up to him and made a difference.

That difference will vanish into nothingness when he tries it next time. He has a mission. He clearly acts on the whim of Vladimir Putin. The mission is to take this country to a level of weakness that will allow Russia to complete its invasion of Ukraine and take other countries as well. It’s about resources and military targets. While our military focused on the hopeless war against terror, draining money and wasting lives and time, Russia consolidated every resource for home defense. They can’t be prevented from military operations in other countries with the condition he’s put us in. Putin bides his time, awaiting the hour he knows Trump and his family and confederacy of goons will provide for him. We know Trump was professionally groomed without knowing how deep he was in the shit.

Putin isn’t as stupid as his puppet. He’s watched the United States lose face militarily since Vietnam. He knows what Nixon called “peace with honor” was bullshit, a dishonorable defeat in a war we should have known better than to get into following the French colonial forces getting their asses kicked. When we disengaged, everyone seemed happy. But around the globe, it was seen as proof that America didn’t hold up to its commitment to people it had vowed to save. That on the ground, in the air and even at sea, American forces could be beaten and bloodied.

That war did more damage than anyone but a few can ever know. Veterans returned broken, guilt ridden and damaged beyond the possibility of healing. Scholars picked it all apart in thick volumes that should be required reading. Documentaries were made. In the end, what remained was a nightmare Kennedy and Johnson had inflicted on our country. We’ve been mocked ever since, tested, shoved, provoked and battered as a result of incompetent intelligence and leadership. Money taken from intelligence resources and put elsewhere. Resources which would have kept us out of Iraq and prevented needless death and the destabilization of that entire region.

We are so slow to learn. Even slower to stop, take a breath and consider our actions and give proper appraisal of the possible consequences. Vietnam and Nixon changed everything. We rebounded but with his presidency the corporate world had taken hold of the republican party by the balls, and it never let go. It never will. Water rights are taken by corporate interests by the most horrible means, and in return we get chemicals that are added “for taste” but aren’t tasty at all; they simply make one thirstier as well as being a potential threat to fetuses if enough is taken in by an expectant mother. Not that each bottle contains toxic levels, but over time and with enough consumption, it’s possibly a threat. In any event it is a dirty goddamn trick. Microplastic material is found in alarming amounts and a devoted drinker has been said to take in the equivalent of a credit card in a week. But soon you’ll have no choice but to buy your water from these brazen corporations. Or, to be more accurate, illegal conglomerates who make money enough to fight court rulings and fuck us up the ass. And we take it readily, without asking for any lube or some gratuitous foreplay.

Chaos has been the rule of thumb during the Trump administration. Christ what a ride. And it’s a horror now, today, on a level we’ve never seen. We never asked for it. I have no patience for motherfucking morons who say, “He’s your president! He was elected so show respect!”

That’s normal considering they were never respectful to President Obama. They bitched despite never having one dishonorable thing he ever did for them to bitch about. The conspiracy theories never panned out. The accusations were nonsensical bullshit. He worked his ass off for us and saved us from a terrible economic situation that was the result of carelessness and greed. Trump’s been all about tearing apart everything Obama worked so hard for.

THE PANDEMIC

The Trump White House was super slow on the uptake. Someone in there knew something, sure as hell, because the CDC was required to clear statements with the administration first. And more was done to muffle the threat. We have ourselves to blame for sitting still. We got news. It was reported. Nobody wanted to believe it. Since when does something that bad suddenly travel that fast?

I read everything I could. I knew it would be bad, but I thought it would be worse than it is at this point. I talked about chaos theory and why predictions were too limited to be accurate. The NOAA has trouble predicting the paths of hurricanes, which don’t cooperate very well with data input. Programs have limits. As far as coronavirus is concerned, I knew and warned that it was impossible to predict, that this wasn’t an SIV, but a SARS disease, more contagious and more deadly than H1N1 influenza. There are variables, I wrote, which cannot be foreseen, but can and will cause the spread among the population to behave unpredictably. It was going to be worse, in other words, than the programs could calculate.

For example, who could have predicted that travel restrictions imposed by the White House would have so many exemptions? Who could have known that summer weather wouldn’t stop it, that there would be no resurgence in the fall because it never went away? Who knew Arizona or Texas would be hotspots in June?

Chaos theory dictates unpredictability in any closed system, and biology is a closed system. Outside forces may occasionally intrude, as in extinction-event meteoroids, but even that comes from an unpredictable, closed system we can define as the known galaxy. Aside from such rare events, we feel secure without reason to feel secure in any way. Disasters happen suddenly, no warning given, or with short warning. Even hurricanes can be tricky, making devilish moves and making landfall when no one was prepared because watches had been lifted. It is rare but it does happen. Just look up spaghetti models and rummage around. Have a go at it. You’ll see what I mean.

One variable impacting the pandemic is the murder of George Floyd. It outraged, as well it should have, a large part of our country. The protesters did us proud, but there’s the devil to pay. Already spikes are being seen in the infections of coronavirus. It will get much, much worse. And severe heat won’t matter. As we enter summer, Arizona is fucked-up. North Carolina has a governor second-guessing reopening public spaces or businesses. Half of the contiguous United States is seeing a terrifying rise in cases of Covid-19.

Combined, hurricane season, global warming, social and economic upheaval, political corruption and the coronavirus have put dark days in our path. Chaos theory is in full play, showing it’s not just real but that we’re weak, all too mortal, and that we must pay for our habit of not heeding warnings. Our habitual abuse of the environment. And for cowardly failing to stand up to a man with no soul. He should never have made it this far. But he has made it this far, constantly being aided by republican politicians and corporate money and clout. If I wonder whether this is the beginning of events predicted in the Bible, you’ll forgive me, yes?

You can disagree, of course. I’m sure I come off as a madman. But tell me: this time last year, did you see this coming? If someone had told you, what would you have thought?

In Memory of All Those Whom The Celebrating Masses Are About To Murder

Missouri was never a place I dreamt about visiting. However, this bunch of morons tell me in one photograph that some of the people have no regard for human life. Not even their own. I don’t just blame Donnie Douchebag, either. The media constantly sends people mixed signals, and a lot of people don’t know how to process such chaos. Some don’t bother trying, and assume they know everything by listening to and reading online bullshit.

My God I have rarely seen such mass stupidity. This time there’s no Jim Jones mixing fruit punch, there’s no Heinrich Himmler or Reinhard Heydrich ordering entire divisions of military personnel to murder millions of civilians just because they’re Semitic. The world will always have madmen who are capable of getting people to do great evil.

And as pathetic as it is, there will always be people without need of leadership to get them to do the most moronic shit.

This time doesn’t fit those situations. Think of the photograph in the linked article as a bunch of parents having a chicken pox party for their children. Because it’s kind of on that level. It’s fucking sadistic and stupid. Oh, they know what they are doing.

But wait. Let’s not be unfair to fucking Missouri, which has a college football team that plays on blue AstroTurf so painful to look at that any televised game makes you want to gouge your eyes out. There’s enough stupid to go around. I’m sorry that I’m not shocked. I should be. COVID-19 is still every bit the threat it was. The news is confusing, yes. Statistics are confusing. Testing is confusing because there are two tests and both seem to have problems. The antibody test is still being argued over. The virus tests have given false negatives and false positives. The work continues to clarify, facts, and to perfect and produce everything used to inform us abd diagnose, treat and prevent coronavirus.

Nothing indicates that the need for social distancing has gone away. Nothing indicates that the use of masks is no longer needed. Indications are to the contrary: the spread of COVID-19 will increase exponentially in short order. Because morons want to swim and drink a fucking pitcher of margaritas. Cocktails with stupid dumbass fucking umbrellas sticking out of the glass. Fucking selfish on top of being historically stupid. They’ll study stupid shit like this in “History 101” a century from now.

I wonder how far up the spikes in different states will go. Because it’s not a question of whether the spikes will be there; when and how severe are the only questions right now.

All of these people (in or on the pools, balconies, living rooms, hot tubs, patios, bars and restaurants) should be immediately considered exposed.

And the tragic part isn’t that they’ll just infect each other. If they’re all that selfish and idiotic I can’t exactly care about that part. The tragedy is the spike will consist of everyone the partiers infect who didn’t take risks but will die. Elderly relatives, siblings with diabetes, co-workers, and more.

Sometimes I really want to die. It passes quickly enough, even though my depression and self-hatred remain interminably. But goddamn if I’m as sick as the people out in pools or sweating on beach towels without masking or distancing, or crammed into bars drinking to the “great coronavirus hoax”. Fuck all if I’m that sick.

A court of law will never try anyone for doing this shit. And no test can forensically prove who a person catches COVID-19 from. And contact tracing? Really? That was always a fucking joke. Now it’s completely out of question and I’ll break the TV with an office chair, I hear any more about it. Enough already.

But I know this: as true as all that may be, these people will get someone killed. That should be grounds for manslaughter charges.

I’m not kidding and it ain’t funny. Being an asshole and a selfish piece of shit are two different things. I know what people are doing. Buying all the toilet paper, hand sanitizer and alcohol including the prep pads.

But that is all for nothing if you’re not staying in. You’re just stupid and you’re taking risks with your own life and the lives of others. But you’re already decided. To you, there’s no risk at all.

I raise my glass of ice water to you as I sit here at home and say, “Fuck you.”

Cowards!

I’ve been a coward all my life. Afraid of bullies. Afraid of pain. Afraid of being embarrassed or humiliated. Afraid of being abandoned. Afraid of being sick. Afraid of loving someone because everyone I loved had hurt me. That last bit was true until I was about 14. That summer I worked with my neighbor Larry. He didn’t hurt me. And I miss him. My first true adult friend from a time when I was a cowardly little kid.

Fear is partially ingrained in our minds, our innate selves. The other parts we have to learn ourselves. I once burned a finger and though very little, I of course learned to fear fire and high heat. I learned even earlier to fear my father. I remember riding a tricycle and he wanted me to come up and sit on his lap. I cried. I seem to have cried pretty loud. Like screaming, until he let me down. You know how you get fear like that. Yes, you do.

Fear as a conditioned response and fear of ordinary things like the darkness of night are very different things. But the mechanisms in the response end up feeling exactly the same. Fear sucks, we hate it. Unless, of course, we can experience it in a controlled way. Like watching a horror movie, reading a Stephen King novel. And sometimes, even that’s too much. If the input causing the fear response becomes too intense, we are no longer in control. We put the book down and sleep with the lights on. We walk out of the theatre. It’s okay; it happens all the time. Hollywood has test screenings to see how audiences respond. From the responses, they may make additional cuts before releasing the film to theatres worldwide.

When the first print of the original King Kong was test screened, the scene where men fell into a chasm and were eaten by spiders caused people to get up and make for the exits in haste. That scene didn’t make it to the original theatrical release. It was later restored, and the Jack Black film has that scene, but on crack and steroids and shrooms. I guess things are different now.

The original Frankenstein with Boris Karloff has a scene where the monster is watching a little girl throw flowers onto the surface of a lake. They’re pretty flowers. So the monster, thinking the girl is pretty, picks her up and throws her into the water. She drowns. Test audiences found the scene too disturbing. It was cut and only years later, restored.

Fear causes other responses from the”fight or flight” reaction to trauma to anger, unreasoning and thirsty for revenge.

But fear is healthy most of the time. It keeps us safe. We check our own emotions and hold our tongues for fear of starting a fight, getting arrested, losing a friend. Proper fear is good.

And fear has nothing to do with cowardice. Being scared enough to avoid pain or run from a fight is actually a pretty brave thing. John Wayne defined courage as being scared to death but getting in the saddle anyway. Sometimes, though, the right thing to do is to not get up in the saddle. It’s down to judgement and perhaps something as arbitrary as how we feel, physically and mentally, at the time. If we’re not up to it, then that’s okay. Maybe we need help. Maybe, some time. Everyone is different. Fear remains the same.

HYSTERIA, STRESS, ANXIETY AND THEIR TERRIBLE CONSEQUENCES

The one thing fear does, especially when coupled with a mental illness such as PTSD, that is not productive or desirable, is to cripple us. Everyday tasks, the most ordinary things, like going out to get the mail, become impossible. We’ve ceased to be afraid and we have become prisoners of anxiety and stress. It’s never good. Some can work through it; most will need treatment, such as drug and talk therapy. We need a support system and coping skills. We’ve learned behaviour that keeps us disabled. It is a bad place to be. Without treatment, people typically self-medicate, using illegal substances and alcohol. It’s tough to save them at that point, and you can beg someone to seek help, but they won’t do it unless they choose to do so.

But there’s another kind of abnormal fear, and often it is not seen for what it is. By the time anyone knows, something terrible has usually happened. Intense fear can only be tolerated for so long. The imperative becomes not quelling that fear, but acting on it. Instead of being a paralytic, it causes radical behavior fueled by anger. The need to stop the source of the thing causing that fear. The need for control.

I knew a man. His neighbor was a Holocaust survivor. Now, back then, in Pasadena, Maryland, and a few surrounding areas, Neo-Nazis were growing in number. They put flyers in mailboxes to recruit, and at the time this was not a hate crime in Maryland. They would also put anti-Semitic messages in the mailboxes of Jewish people. This man, he was old. He was old enough to have seen and to remember seeing the unimaginable. Stuff that even footage can’t convey. He would read these flyers, go inside his house, and get a baseball bat, come back out and beat his galvanized steel mailbox into an unrecognizable chunk of metal lying on the ground next to a steel pole.

I’d say that was a perfectly understandable and healthy response. Action from fear, action fueled by rage.

But what if people drift toward such responses when they are not healthy and not normal? That desire, that need to act, to end the fear and by immediate association helplessness, can take a horrific turn.

That’s when you get something like this. The article tells all there is to know, but make no mistake here; it should never have happened. How it ever became legal to bear arms in the capital building is beyond my ability to comprehend. But more to the point is, people’s fear of the COVID-19 virus had overloaded radicals who went into action out of anger. Their fear of catching or spreading the virus was gone. In its place, rage. Radical groups have a group mentality in the first place. Otherwise, no group. The scariest ones go “paramilitary” and buy all sorts of weapons, including assault weapons and handguns, and sure enough, many are owners of bunkers. You don’t even have to dig your own and line it with sandbags anymore. They’re sold, already made, ready for installation. They include air vents and a locking access hatch. They’ll customize almost any feature you can imagine.

I’ll grant you, the Michigan protesters are radicals already predisposed to a simmering mistrust of authority. And if measures are not taken, one of them will surely pull the trigger before this is over, initiating a firefight in which law enforcement and the radicals would both take casualties. Such a thing will not get anyone back to work, or get any mall reopened. It will be an event that can change the country in ways these radicals will not appreciate.

Being fair about it, I’d have to admit that the Michigan protesters are in no way representative of the majority here. But they’ve managed to prove two things.

The first is that they’re self-serving and wrongly feel entitled and use “civil rights” as a shield. They cannot tough it out with the rest of us. They’re cowards in the truest sense. Too cowardly to hang in there until we can see social distancing really work properly. Cowards. They cannot bear to do what the rest of us do, no matter how scared we are. Courage, said John Wayne, is being scared, but doing the right thing anyway.

The second thing these protesters did is more serious. They may not have broken the law when they entered the capital building armed. That’s true. But to do it in anger and cause the government workers inside to don bulletproof vests, and fear for their lives, is terrorism.

We’re all worried. Scared. We’ve been traumatized by untimely unfair deaths. We’ve lost jobs. It’s a disaster.

I wake up from nightmares you can’t imagine and realize my kids are dead and I’m all alone. But I live with my bipolar and my PTSD and I take my meds and I care so much about other people that my problems vanish on hearing someone else’s story. So I ask: are you as tough as I am? Can you hang with me? Can you do better than I can? Or are you going to admit to yourself, and prove to the world, that you’re really just a fucking coward with a gun who needs to scare the shit out of others to feel like you’re in control?

You choose.