Posts Tagged → Chinese
99 Red Balloons
If gigantic “unidentified” balloons are floating across Hawaii, bombarding its surface with green lasers, probably looking for hidden US missile silos and underground bases from which to repel an attack coming from Asia, and if gigantic “unidentified” balloons are floating from the north Pacific Ocean all the way across American military bases in Alaska and our ballistic missile military assets in Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, etc, and nothing is done by America’s “leaders” in Washington, DC, then only one logical conclusion can be arrived at: These known Red Chinese spy balloons are studying American military capability up close and personal, and Joe Biden and the Pentagon are simply OK with them.
And for open borders advocates, this means treason. No leader and no national military ever allows the nation’s most dangerous enemy to surveil a nation from within its borders without having already, secretly, capitulated to that enemy. There is no other explanation for Joe Biden’s reluctance to even talk about the spy balloons, and there is no other explanation for our military’s acquiescence not only on these balloons, but on several others several years ago that apparently also went unchallenged. America has open traitors running our government and our military. They are not against China, they are working for China, either because of money pay-offs or because our officers are ideologically aligned with the communist Chinese.
Do you want China to take over America? If you do, you are a fool. All of the nice things, your fun vacations, the protests and the free speech and personal choices that you on the Left now enjoy will be taken from you, if the Chinese become the rulers of America. It is self defeating to want this outcome, but apparently a ton of money has changed hands at the highest levels, and people who should be guarding America are opening the door and letting the enemy walk right through our gates.
Treason is a capital offense (Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution), meaning it is rewarded with death. Usually by firing squad or hanging, after a tribunal finds the accused guilty.
Americans have our founding documents to rely on in times like these:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence)
Any American administration that allows Chinese spy balloons to float across our nation and collect God knows how much secret information about us and our defense capabilities is, by definition of the Constitution, “destructive of these ends [of government by The People]…[and] it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.”
All Americans now find themselves in the crosshairs of a rogue administration that is daily doing everything it can to destroy America from the inside. The Chinese spy balloons are just the latest and most grotesque evidence. This is the kind of aberrant behavior we would expect from the same people who would steal a national election (explain the 800,000 Pennsylvania ballots counted in the 2020 election that are greater than there are registered voters here) and thereby steal a nation. We American citizens are now in our third year of being under siege by the government in Washington, including our most senior military officers.
We The People have every right to alter or abolish the Biden Administration, any time or way we choose. This is not a “revolutionary” or threatening thing to write, because these words are taken directly from the American Declaration of Independence, and they are the essence and core of being an American. What is revolutionary and threatening is the Biden Administration’s ongoing war against every corner or America, against every fiber of our national legal system, our rule of law, our access to daily food, our vehicle of choice, our job of choice, our children’s school of choice. The insurrection against America is the ongoing nonstop attack on America by this illegal and treasonous occupation force in Washington, DC, not legal protests against it by free and patriotic America-loving citizens.
How many Chinese balloons have there been across America? No one knows, really. The Pentagon stated that quite a few had been allowed to float across America in the past administration, and that the Pentagon’s senior military officers had chosen not to tell the president, or anyone else for that matter. Officers like Admiral Mike Mullen and General Mark Milley have publicly stated that they illegally broke the chain of command and committed treasonous insubordination against the American people because they did not like the former president. How many other officers are there like these two?
Let’s just round off the number of communist Chinese spy balloons at 99. It seems like a reasonable number because it is what the traitors in Washington want, which is the end of America.
Movie review: “Avatar – Way of the Water”
If you can and also desire to endure three solid hours of anti-White racism, anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and a whole host of other “woke” evils being jammed up your butt, by white American capitalists no less, then go spend your money to see “Avatar – Way of the Water.”
One of my kids persuaded me to go see it with him, encouraging me to do so in order to confirm in person my own impression that the movie was crap. Well, for twenty-eight bucks, I can now absolutely confirm by personal experience that Avatar is what many people might already think it is, and what I thought it is, and that is garbage propaganda and crap.
Avatar- The Way of Water is just crap. It is also a theft of major themes of at least half a dozen major movies, including Star Wars.
Nazi Germany was largely built on this movie’s same kind of colorful propaganda, however, so do not dismiss Avatar. Oh sure, Nazi Germany did not live beyond a dozen years, its “thousand year Reich” blown to bits in an orgy of mass murder and retaliation by Germany’s victims. So the woke world of Caucasian slaves serving communist overlords and whatever else pure crap Hollywood envisions for us won’t last very long either. But in Nazi Germany’s short twelve year time span, tremendous destruction was done to Europe and to the world. So, when the propaganda works, it works, and if you are on the receiving end of it, do not ignore it. Or, put another way, if you love a free America, you ignore this crap at your own peril. Like fentanyl and other scary drugs purposefully being allowed over America’s southern border by the current administration, it is powerful crap. Avatar is not innocuous. It is damaging America, as it is intended.
We all know that Hollywood is a cesspit of hideously evil people playing dress-up and make-believe on behalf of China, and Avatar has found a new way to use its power of evil suggestion with only voice actors. This movie, like its predecessor, is Computer Generated Imagery. Fake. Basically anthropomorphized Gumby people presented to us as human-enough-like humanoids that we can relate to them. The Gumby movie characters all have really nice big white teeth smiles, of course. Friendly racists.
In a nutshell, an American Marine Corps colonel, Miles Quaritch, is symbolic of everything that is supposedly bad in our life today – hoo-rah toxic macho masculinity, guns, military, America, technological culture, meat eating, natural resource extraction, Western invasions of supposedly “indigenous” lands, and overall Man vs. Nature. This very white Colonel Quaritch is the ultimate antagonist bad guy with a thoroughly American personality (in reality, the real Miles Quaritch Marine Corps people are right now protecting America and Americans so that people can enjoy their high end lifestyle and also continue to virtue signal about how aligned with the oppressed they are). We are instructed to hate him, because everything he does is wrong and bad and evil and…well, if you are trying to demonize an entire ethnic group, you would heap upon them all of the ills that he suffers from and brings to others, and Avatar does that to white people via Miles Quaritch.
That, despite the fact that in this Avatar movie, Quaritch returns to life as one of the genetically modified, lab-grown blue humanoids, along with a cadre of fellow former US Marines likewise re-animated, all of whom look the same as the natives, but who suffer from the same “bad” thinking as the white people they used to be. It seems that regardless of his skin color, Colonel Quaritch and his American Marines still represent everything that is bad: Bad ideas, bad whites, bad identity, bad values, bad desires, etc. while they invade this Garden of Eden planet where everyone and every thing lives in kumbayah.
Pitted against Colonel Quaritch and his cadre of all-bad all-white guys and gals, are a bunch of tall humanoids colored green and blue, depending upon which area of their planet they inhabit in their traditional pre-technology tribal ways. These things are presented as the innocent indigenous sentient beings whose sole purpose is to hunt, fish, make love, and get stoned together and also get stoned with the animals around them on deep love psychology via emotional tethers growing from their heads. Yes, yes, this is meant to demonstrate the peaceful interconnectedness of all things. Gaia. Peace. Their leader Jake was once a moron white guy, but he changed, and morphed into a blue guy at one with Gaia and all the animals.
None of this makes sense, logically, nor would it have made any sense to a Lakota warrior trying to take a squirming Pawnee’s scalp with a dull stone knife, but if functional Americans over the age of fifty are wondering what the hell just happened to America and why we can’t find young people to work at our businesses and why young people prefer to live in a virtual fantasy land rather than work and volunteer and support themselves and why they prefer to get useless college degrees and follow evil corporate media and pretend to be victims while drinking ten dollar coffees, then you need look no further than this movie, Avatar – Way of the Water.
This movie’s illogical woke bullshit is the reality our American kids believe they are living in.
Never mind that the movie’s plot has more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese, it is the feewings it induces that we all must entertain and service most. Feelings of hate for traditional White American males, feelings of hate for the people who mine natural resources for us (which logically must also include the little black African slave children digging in the rare earth mineral and cadmium mines right now so that child actor Greta Thunberg can pose with an EV car that is primarily an explosive bomb that only drives a short distance on Mondays, but don’t tell the makers of this movie), feelings of hate for technology, for human migrations, etc. etc. etc.
Never mind if the blue and green people migrated to the planet (we are briefly shown the giant rusted ribs of whatever spaceship they all arrived in), and killed each other to establish territories. Human migration and killing for territory is only wrong when white people do it. Dontcha know.
About the movie’s ridiculous plot: Why the hell is it OK for the blue people to hunt and eat animals, but it is wrong for anyone else to kill said animals?
And where the hell were all the green people during the end of the last fight? It is like they dropped off the face of their water world with spears held high, at the most crucial moment, and just gave up and went home to eat some dead fish that were once friends but had recently become food. Meanwhile the blue people were locked in a life-and-death fight with high technology that could easily have been won if the green people had stuck around to fight, which they said they were there to do. Crickets. Big plot hole.
My criticism of this racist and childish cartoon movie could fill buckets, rivers, oceans, entire planets, but my biggest observation about it is that it is effective propaganda designed to corrode America from the inside out, to demonize and pit people against white Americans. Probably done at the behest of the communist Chinese, America’s greatest enemy. Go ahead and mock Avatar, but don’t underestimate its negative effect on young Americans and America.
Or go ahead and mock me, late to the show here, but no one pays me to write this blog, and I do as much as I can with the time I have. And in that vein, sorry about the mis-alignment of the photos below. No idea why this happens, and I do everything I can to eliminate it and get them properly aligned.
Character “Jake” the once White guy who became a blue guy, here high on the Earth Mother (Gaia), no lie
Mrs Jake, also high on the Earth Mother and the oneness of all life (what movies have we heard this from before)
There are black blue people and Asian blue people, all opposed to the White people
Lots of current teenage lingo and hookem horns type hand signals meant to appeal to teens
US Marine Corps colonel Miles Quaritch, the representative white guy everyone racist and woke is supposed to hate. He actually looks a lot like my buddy Ron Boltz
Shen Yun thumbs up review
Somewhere in the time frame of 1971 to 1974, a troupe of Chinese acrobats and dancers put on an incredible performance at Penn State University’s Recreation Hall. Despite having been a wee lad up in the bleachers that evening, I can still now recall moments of their performance with shocking clarity, such were the amazing skill and feats of strength they brought to the American public.
Lots of male and especially female displays of traditional weapons mastery – spears, swords, knives – whose choreography defies even an aged and highly skeptical intellect decades later, as well as incredible and frankly unbelievable balancing + acrobatic + martial arts acts with tea cups and people, bending iron bars that the audience members were invited to try etc etc.
And now looking back, I realize that those early 1970s Chinese performers must have been the last of their kind, or maybe they were exiles, such was the crushing tyranny of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” aimed at stamping out through murder, torture, and literal destruction of every single thing that had made China China for the past five thousand years. In any event, in Rec Hall that night I had witnessed history.
Well, fast forward about fifty years, and into the intervening gap steps Shen Yun, a modern show about “China Before Communism.” That is, before all that Mao Cultural Revolution communist crap that has destroyed one of the world’s great nations and culture. Begun in 2006, Shen Yun performances have been evolving and growing for the past sixteen years, and now boasts eight geographically dispersed troupes regularly impressing audiences around America. The Princess of Patience and I saw one such troupe in Pittsburgh, PA, this past Sunday, at the historic and beautiful Benedum Theater.
Looky here, I am no theater or musical show kind of guy. So don’t go on reading further here and expecting to encounter the usual aphorisms and adjectives “professional” art and theater critics regularly provide through their Pez dispensers.
What you are about to read is my own unvarnished layman perspective, as told from the guy who almost always falls asleep as soon as the lights go out and the curtain rises, and who is then awakened either by the sharp elbows of the theater goer to my left or by the Princess of Patience to my right. Apparently I think I am not snoring when I sleep in a theater, but in fact I do snore.
Apparently one play was stopped mid-scene while an actor asked someone to stop me from snoring, such was the distraction. What can I say, few theater performances are memorable to me. Men singing…bad. Men dancing in tights and playing dress-up…really bad. Theater and especially musicals and most especially opera are all a refined form of torture. If a play is any good, it will become a movie, which I might see and during which I probably will not fall asleep. My highly educated and experienced opinion here.
But, such is my love for the Princess of Patience, that I bought tickets and took her to see this updated version of whatever it was I had been mesmerized by fifty years ago.
To its credit, Shen Yun kept me awake. We can joke, but that is actually an achievement.
Shen Yun’s scenes or performances are relatively brief, each probably five to seven minutes long, and also varied. That constant change helps keep the audience’s attention focused. The subjects are about traditional Chinese culture, love, war, good vs. evil, history, spirituality, chivalry, family, and the performers wear culturally appropriate dress in each scene. They also have an act about forced organ harvesting, the current real-time inhumane insane crazy can’t believe this is happening actual action of murdering political prisoners and transferring their healthy organs to the unhealthy bodies of Chinese citizens who are “more equal”* than the 99.99% of the Chinese socioeconomically beneath them.
*(George Orwell, author of dystopian novel and a foreshadowing message about the present political situation in both China and America 1984, coined this phrase more equal than others in his other dystopian novel Animal Farm, where the political leader pigs betray the farm animals’ revolution against the humans and go on to corrupt the original commandment that all animals are equal in order to keep their pig selves in unintended, constant, never-ending more equal than others tyrannical mastery over all the other animals)
Something I had not seen before is Shen Yun’s use of a digital screen as the stage backdrop, instead of the traditional painted screen that would form the background for the stage in each scene. Shen Yun uses different digital backdrops, often several different ones, in each scene. They are crisp, clear, and bright. They also allow for cartoon versions of the actors to soar through the air or run away over the horizon. Maybe this is old technology, but it is a first encounter for me, and I liked it.
Things I liked about Shen Yun: The amazing dance, ballet, tumbling, and acrobatic abilities of the professional actors, the incredibly tight and perfectly executed choreography, the superior talent of the live orchestra members, and the bright and flowing costumes that must be a real b#tch to move around in. I liked all the subject matters. The simpler weapons handling wasn’t intended to be anything like the old days, but it adds a nice change to each story and act. The pleasant combining of traditional Chinese music with a modern European/ Western orchestra is very cool.
Things I did not like about Shen Yun: About a third of the acts are repetitious, despite using different costumes and some different choreography, with the same sweeping “windmill” arm motions of the actors in each one. Consider that the one act that brought the loudest applause was about a traditional Tibetan dance, complete with very different moves and costumes. Another thing that irked me was how MC/Announcer Perry’s suit crotch was obviously rumpled. Probably because I am not a regular suit wearer, my eye was immediately drawn to this unprofessional and uncomfortable anomaly. Come on, Perry, your suit must be cleaned and pressed before each performance. Even a knuckle dragging lug like me knows this.
In conclusion, I spoke with half a dozen members of the audience both inside and outside the theater, and everyone liked it. Some appreciated the simple artistic expression, despite not synching with the political, religious, or cultural messages. Others really liked the occasional blips of overt religious messaging, which if I had to guess is some sort of Bhuddist messianism that most Christians can relate to in one way or another. One audience member I spoke with said that she is politically liberal, but that she was not bothered at all by the political or religious aspects of Shen Yun: “I don’t have to agree with it to enjoy it. This is just their own artistic expression and I am here to see it and enjoy it as it is,” she said to me.
Amen.
Benedum Theater is worth visiting just to see the beautiful interior
Benedum Theater ceiling
Benedum Theater interior
If I had a big social function, I would have it at the Benedum Theater. Tons of cozy little nooks like this
If I can’t get front and center seats, I won’t go see an event that has a stage.
Shen Yun audience had everyone old, young, in between, Asian, black, white, purple…
Some parts of Pittsburgh have not been successful. Around the block from this ancient bar and hotel we encountered what had been a recently built very attractive state of the art Martin Luther King, Jr cultural resource center abandoned in an overgrown lot
Pittsburgh smartly employs vehicles powered by clean burning propane
The entire city of Pittsburgh is stunningly beautiful. This one column is representative of the beautiful hand carved stone buildings from the Victorian Age to the 1940s. Thanks to industrialists like the Mellons, Carnegies, Olivers, and Benedums, Pittsburgh is a world hub for architecture and science
“Stop Asian Hate,” manufactured crisis du jour
America is being manipulated daily by a partisan media-entertainment complex intent on shaping our beliefs and values by shaping our perceptions. Shaping our perceptions is achieved both by shoving crap in our faces, and by censoring competing information out of our reach. So this week we are suddenly told, out of the clear blue, that it is time to #stopAsianhate. That is, Stop Asian Hate. As in, we must all gather together to stop Asians from being hated, not stop Asians from hating us.
Where this bit of racialist activism comes from is anyone’s guess. The few Asian people I know and asked about it rolled their eyes, or arched their eyebrows, and said “I have no idea where this comes from.”
Asians in America tend to be more affluent and materially successful, and more politically conservative. That correlation is likely to continue on, unless someone can get in between Asians and their perceived sense of belonging, acceptance, and integration. Most of the Asians I know are married to Caucasians, and they have very handsome and bright kids. To my knowledge, they feel fully integrated into American society. So someone with a political ax to grind is trying to alter this situation.
Or worse, this faux cause du jour is timed with the faux political confrontation with China. China owns the Biden family lock, stock, and two smoking barrels, and so perhaps the Chinese are trying to use our feewings to make us Americans feel badly about rejecting Chinese genocide and attempts to take over America.
In high school and college I dated two Asian women, one Chinese and one Korean. The parents of the Korean lady were openly racist towards everyone, especially “white” people, except for Jews, who they said were smart. Both of the women I dated have gone on to be wildly successful in their fields, making scads of cash and living very happy lives. With Caucasian husbands.
Yes, I know, I cannot draw on my own personal experiences to shape my reality. I must accept that there are larger trends happening outside of my own personal experience. But one thing I can tell you firmly and with great confidence is that this #stopAsianhate (again, it is probably not about Asians hating people) is a fake issue, not based on anything really substantive. Like so many other fake issues emanating from the Left side of America, this issue arises from some other goal or problem. If I were to guess, I would say it is the Left’s China problem.
The Left in America is loyal to China and they are disloyal to America. The Left hates America and is using America’s government to destroy America. Now that is a hate I could get into stopping right now.
Here is the manufactured political issue du jour propagandized by YouTube, a big piece of the partisan media-entertainment complex. On review, I think my YouTube interests are pretty neat.
on Qanon
Probably inevitable that Qanon and I would meet. Not in person, generally speaking here. Don’t get excited.
This ‘Qanon’ “thing” is a thing that has taken the patriot/constitutionalist/ conservative movement by storm, and as I am definitely in that movement mix, I would naturally mix it up with Qanon at some point.
A friend who is a forester implored me to look into Qanon last week, and so I did. Foresters tend to be steady hands, droll, unexcitable, not terribly political. But this guy suddenly became political, and as he is a steady hand, I listened to what he had to say:
- Qanon is a person or small group of people working for US military intelligence
- Qanon is/are the Good Guys, duking it out behind the scenes with China, Russia, and our own anti-America CIA
- Qanon wants Patriots to leave the actual fighting for America to them, which is supposedly the military, and to leave our AR15s at home when we take to the streets
This last item is what caught my attention the most. I mean, what kind of pro-America group would encourage America’s last hope, its native patriot militia, to stay at home or at least leave our Second Amendment at home? Does not sound like a pro-America group to me.
Can you imagine if some Qanon group had encouraged patriots to leave their muskets and long rifles at home in 1775, and to just “peacefully protest” against the tyrannical British? There would be no America, as the ridiculous ‘peaceful protests’ would have been crushed mercilessly, and tyranny firmly entrenched thereafter.
My sense of Qanon is that it naturally attracts hopeful believers, who want to feel like the US military has not been overthrown from within (it has), and that the US military will not sit idly by while the illegal Biden fraud is installed as an actual sitting president (they will), and that everything behind the scenes is just fine n’ dandy (it’s not). It is understandable that good people do not want to go to war within their own country, and that they want the actual paid warriors to do it for us all. It is understandable for normal Americans to believe that not ALL of our institutions have been overthrown, but if all indications are accurate, even the American military is deeply corrupted, and run by people who do not love a constitutional America.
But ask yourself, what kind of an operation tricks its followers into lowering their guard and waiting until it is too late to fight back?
Yes, it is true that the anti-America mainstream media hates Qanon, tries to denigrate anyone associated with Qanon, has no interest in Qanon. But that just tells us that Qanon as a positive rallying point for patriots bothers the Chinese media (America’s mainstream media), for the simple reason that patriots are involved.
I was asked for my opinion, and I think Qanon is probably a Chinese operation to undermine America from within. Because it is so well done, and so complex, this is the only explanation that makes sense from all of the confusion that has come from it. Maybe this view is confusing to people, but that would be well in keeping with the whole Qanon thing.
Who knows? Who cares? Keep your AR15 handy, a well-kitted day pack, your boots and warm clothes. Whatever Qanon says, you know what YOU say, and that is all that matters.
We people need to just do what we need to do to move forward
America’s economy is now in artificial tatters, an unnecessary result of very poor public policies in reaction to the Wuhan coronavirus.
Politicians are not going to be able to solve this ridiculous virus panic. In fact, politicians are mostly making it much worse than it really is, and probably they are doing that on purpose. A lust for power, a desire to hurt a political opponent at any cost, even at the cost of hurting and inflicting huge personal losses on the citizens, seem to be the main reasons why governors in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Kentucky, and elsewhere have thrown down the gauntlet and are acting like dictators.
The “orders” these governors and local governments have issued are laughably confused, full of inexplicable contradictions and clear violations of Americans’ most basic rights and freedoms. Kentucky’s governor warns churchgoers that he ordered the Kentucky State Police to take down license plates of cars parked in church parking lots on Easter Sunday and other days, so that they can be ticketed later. Michigan’s governor says power boats are not allowed, but sail boats and canoes are OK, but Michiganders may not visit their hunting cabins. In Valley County, Montana, the county health department [I originally and incorrectly wrote that it was Missoula, Montana, the ultra liberal city council there shaping the rest of the surrounding county] issued an order that coronavirus-free people wear pink arm bands in public. Another county in another state went so far as to issue an order that anyone with coronoavirus could be, and probably would be, picked up by the police and involuntarily committed to a special quarantine location. Here in Pennsylvania, Governor Wolf vetoed a bill passed by both the PA House and Senate that brought clarity and structure to his own bizarre order. Wolf now demands that everyone in public wear a mask and that people not wearing masks must not be served in the stores they are in. Local PA townships are not permitted to approve land subdivisions, even though the townships can and do meet by teleconference that pose no health risk to anyone. Home construction is stopped cold, not because Wolf has demonstrated that there is an identifiable risk of spreading a contagious disease from building homes, but simply because he says so.
These orders have nothing to do with actually serving the people of America. They are not actually helping people. The risks of the Kung Flu are obviously much higher in congested places like New York City than in flyover country. These orders are self-serving the politicians with more power and discretion over our personal lives than the political process would ever give them.
And this list of crazy, insane, tyrannical orders over the past few weeks goes on and on. Every one of these orders violates the most essential, core aspects of being an American. Again, with no measurable public benefit and yet at enormous cost to our individual finances.
One good thing that has emerged from the Chinese coronavirus panic is that we all get to see in broad daylight that there are many power-hungry Americans amongst us, who will use whatever power they have to get more power, and to crush dissent, strip us of our liberties, and use overwhelming coercive government force to throw us in jail for made-up violations. We used to laugh that such people could ever exist in our political system! Well, here they are, front and center, and they are no laughing matter!
If ever there was a need for an America with our Bill of Rights protecting individual due process rights and freedoms, this past month has demonstrated it.
So if the politicians are hell bent on screwing up our lives, and destroying America’s economy, then the only people who can fix this is us. You and me. The citizens and local officials who live here, pay taxes here, work here in America. We have to clean this mess up.
It is time for We, The People to put our foot down and show the politicians that despite their crazy power grabs and ridiculous demands upon us, we are going to do what is best for us. We can wear masks and stand apart in public, no problem. We would choose to do that anyhow. But we will open up our businesses again, we will go for walks again, we will drive on the roads for pleasure again, we will approve land subdivisions again, and you can call it civil disobedience, but we will live free again. There is no way any governor is going to enforce their nutty and unconstitutional order by rounding up everyone and putting them in jail.
And if any governor tries to do that, then there is the old tried-and-true torches, pitch forks, and a bucket of hot tar at the governor’s residence to get things straightened out again in a hurry. We are Americans, after all, not sheep.
Rural & Urban People Experience the Virus Differently
Rural and urban people are experiencing the covid19 CCP virus differently. And this means they each experience the various governors’ approaches to it differently, too. Chinese Flu policies impact rural and urban people differently.
In rural America, like Clinton County and Lycoming County here in Pennsylvania, life is still pretty much going on, not quite like normal, but fairly close to normal. The perceived risk from Wuhan covid19 Flu is low. This is because the rural peoples’ observations are not squaring up with what they are being told from their state capital. Rural people are not seeing up close and personal the disruptive chaos and death that is so pervasive in places like New York City and Philadelphia. So their behavior is different.
For weeks the Lowes in Mill Hall, PA, has been standing-room-only parking on the weekends, as local people shop for gardening supplies. Likewise the other nearby big box stores and small hardware stores are also full of people attending to their needs. Life is going on, albeit with some face masks and people clearly trying to steer clear of one another in shopping aisles. The Wegmans in Williamsport, PA, was full of shoppers the last time I was there, and the shelves were mostly well stocked. Notes about limits per customer are placed in all the usual places – TP, canned tuna, milk, bread. Ladies at the checkout are quite tough and firm about shoppers abiding by these limits, and everyone seems to be getting along just fine.
Elsewhere in rural PA are drive-in church services, food takeout, maybe some bonfires with chairs set apart, but still lots of chairs, nonetheless.
Actual Risk vs. Perceived Risk vs. Government Policy
At the heart of this lifestyle difference between rural and urban people is the difference they have over perceived risk, actual risk, and what the government policy says.
When rural people look around and see none of the catastrophic chaos engulfing New York City, they begin to ask simple and necessary questions about the actual risk of the China Flu to them. The actual risk, not the suggested hype or irrational fear stay-the-f#k-at-home perceived risk that is being breathlessly communicated by the cable outlets every minute. Without bodies stacked high, without lots of people becoming obviously sick from the CCP Chinese Flu, and with local health providers like hospitals and clinics operating as normal, rural people begin to question the value and necessity of the government policy that tells them their Constitutional rights must be suspended.
They then begin to question the value and purpose of their own government.
When we hear about the over-reach in places like Kentucky and Michigan, whose governors are literally demanding that people cower in their homes or else face huge overwhelming coercive force and jail time, it is natural for Americans to ask not just what is the value of these policies, but why can’t we have real policies that are tailored to the realities that each community faces. The potential risks of Wuhan Flu are just not the same everywhere.
Rural areas have more room and space between people, fewer people, less congestion, and a lot lot lot less exposure AND a lot less actual risk. Government policies need to reflect these realities. Blanket one-size-does-not-fit-all policies serve no real health purpose. Instead, no matter how well intentioned the governor may be, these blanket policies that are the same in Philadelphia as they are in Lock Haven, PA, make everyone equally miserable, damage all businesses equally, regardless of the health outcomes.
At the end of the day, government action must both balance risks with costs and benefits, while also safeguarding the citizenry’s sacred Constitutional rights. To date, very few states have done this. Instead, almost every state has treated low-risk rural areas the same as high-risk congested urban areas, and hit them all with the same heavy hammer. This makes the whole covid19 reaction thing seem awfully fishy.
Lotta covid19 pain? Better be lotta gain
For all the pain we are all experiencing from the Chinese covid19 flu “lockdowns,” shutdowns, economic activity coming to a screeching halt, businesses laying off people, orders drying up etc., there had damned well better be a lot of gain when all is said and done.
Meaning, all our sacrifice and loss and crushed civil rights should damned well have happened for a good reason. A lot of people should have lived who were going to die or get very sick. etc.
When the most mild mannered attorney friend texts me out of the blue yesterday “Are you worried about our civil rights?” I knew that the felt pain was cutting deep.
Our text conversation last night was brief, but it covered all the territory a person might expect, given its premise. My friend reports that many of his other friends are starting to get pretty fussy about this government-imposed suspension of civil liberties. He wrote “It is one thing to cooperate and volunteer to move less in public, but to be told we must stay in our homes…?”
This guy who wrote these texts to to me is a solid religious person, a respected family man, a well regarded attorney, pretty staid and non-excitable, perhaps even at times a boring personality (hope he is not reading this). It would take a lot to get him to write something like this civil rights text. And yet by now it is doubtful we can find any American who has not also felt a lot of pain from this covid19 China Flu business, so his texts to me are probably indicative of a lot of other Americans’ restlessness. A chafing at the bit. A natural inborn resistance to being told what to do, as opposed to being asked to volunteer as free people.
Really at the center of all this lockdown/shutdown/ Big Coercive Government vs Smaller and Smaller Citizen are two factors: 1) The philosophy of governance held by the various mayors, governors, and federal disease experts, and 2) a sense of duty to nation and to one another held by Americans.
A natural tension always exists in our republic, between effective government decision making on the one hand, and citizens’ rights on the other hand. Our founding documents (Constitution, Bill of Rights) are all about this tension, and how to strike a balance between the trade-offs of having an effective government and also having a free citizenry. No doubt that Communist China has a really effective government, but on the other hand its citizens have zero freedom. Americans want maximum freedom, so we naturally reject the kind of government it takes to be really effective.
However, many if not almost all of the Washington, DC, careerists are inured to the notion of a strong federal government. An overpoweringly strong and coercive government, need be. And why would they not have this mindset? It makes them maximally relevant and powerful. So enter Washington bureaucrats Fauci and Birx, and their approach to the Wuhan China covid19 flu has been to at first pooh pooh it, and then when it becomes a big issue, to take the opposite tack – everyone lock yourself in your home and do not come out until we experts tell you to.
Back in January and February, Fauci was quoted many times pooh poohing and disavowing the China covid19 flu. Can’t happen, won’t happen, not a big deal. Oops, now it is happening – everyone run and hide, to hell with the economy.
Add to this message coming out of Washington bureaucrats the naturally authoritarian nature of many elected officials around America, and we get some pretty authoritarian abuses of power. In Malibu California the other day, a guy simply paddle boarding out in the surf was actually cut off by two police boats and then arrested for not self-social-distancing. While he was literally all alone out on the water, near no one, hurting no one, putting at risk no one. And of course the ACLU is nowhere to be found for him, because the ACLU is not about civil rights, it is about destroying America.
Here in Pennsylvania, our governor, the mild mannered and generally friendly Tom Wolf, has issued a pretty wild declaration, a dictatorial ultimatum, that has suspended our civil rights and shut down most businesses and the families who depend on them. While many of us have a strong sense of duty to our fellow humans, and we are happy to make personal sacrifices in order to protect our neighbors and our communities, at a certain point we begin to chafe under the dictatorial approach to applying law.
A lot of pain is being felt across America, and certainly here in Pennsylvania. Many of the businesses I regularly interact with are in increasingly bad shape. Much of this has to do with their diminished cash flow and uncertain banking situation. So if the banks are eventually made whole, then the rest of these businesses will be made whole, and the whole economy will come roaring back to where it was or stronger. In the mean time we all have families to feed and bills to pay, and the pain of Wolf’s lockdown is becoming intense.
Is this pain worth it, is it justified, people are asking.
Everyone I know has a real commitment to doing the right thing, because it is the right thing to do. They do not need to be told what to do, just asked. But now the pressure and resentment to being told what to do, at great personal cost, without a lot of evident gain, is beginning to build up. This would naturally be expected. The sacrifices we are all making seem to be much greater than would normally, reasonably be expected. We cannot really see the fruits of our sacrifices.
Americans die every day from all sorts of maladies and accidents. A regular flu season sees about 32,000 Americans die nationally, from just the regular old flu. We take that number of deaths as a matter of fact, a cost of being alive. And yet we are not seeing that same result from this covid19 coronavirus thing. Not even close. In fact, so far, just the opposite.
If it turns out that Wuhan China covid19 Chinese Flu actually results in very few deaths, and yet the entire nation’s economy was thrown out the window for little or no gain in health, then there is going to be hell to pay.
Why having your own philosophy of government is American
It is American nature for each individual citizen to have a philosophy of government. That is, to have a firm idea of how you want and expect all levels of government to relate to you, to serve you, to represent you, and to respect you.
Maybe there are too many syllables in this, so let’s just say that every American citizen should have a belief in how they want to relate to their own government, at every level – local, state, and federal.
From America’s founding until right now, our entire nation is still predicated upon the expectation of direct citizen involvement in every aspect of what makes America work: Voting in every election, staying updated and informed on the political and cultural issues of the day, participating in jury selection when called upon, serving on school boards, local zoning and planning boards, etc.
America is a citizen-run nation. That is how we were founded. Consent of the governed. Right now, a surfeit of material success has put many Americans almost to sleep. They are too busy taking care of their own individual desires to look up and participate in the larger happenings around them. They are almost believing that American government is on autopilot, and that their participation is unnecessary. Once American citizens stop participating in how government is run, then automatically people will step in who use government for their own benefit. Self-enrichment, long undeserved careers paid for by the taxpayers, funneling limited taxpayer money to interest groups who then work hard to get career politicians re-elected, selling American interests and secrets to foreign governments, these are just a few examples of the problem.
No longer are career politicians “public servants.” Now career politicians are self-servants who use government to enrich themselves and their friends and family. Examples include politicians from both political parties at all levels. Joe Biden (D) and Richard Burr (R) are just two easy low-hanging examples. Biden used his public vice president office to get undeserved contract work for his sons in Ukraine. Burr used his position as US senator to sell his stocks before they lost value, an act on private information about potential stock losses, which is insider trading.
Across government entrenched bureaucrats make decisions every day that determine or influence the paths of our life. Somehow these “public servants” have also aggregated huge power, with little to no accountability. Many of these bureaucrats quite clearly demonstrate their own philosophy of government. They believe in the overwhelming coercive force of government intruding directly into individual lives. They believe in the diminution of the Bill of Rights that protects our individual freedoms, rights, and liberties. They believe in death-by-a-thousand-cuts regulations that render a great deal of American life almost meaningless and almost illegal. They believe in all kinds of specific policies that are totally at odds with the rights, freedoms, and liberties that Americans have always enjoyed, and which are spelled out in our founding documents.
The “Waters of the United States” regulation emitted by US EPA in the last administration is a classic example. People’s private property rights were trampled beneath the coercive weight of government control, with very small benefits.
While the establishments of both political parties, nationally, are not terribly far apart on some key aspects of governance, it is fair to say that the Democrats believe in crushingly big government and unlimited coercive force to achieve their policy goals, while Republicans believe in free markets and free choice.
Party responses to the Wuhan Chinese Flu (coronavirus, covid19) are instructive. The Democrats have tried to use the virus to achieve policy goals they could not otherwise gain through the political process or from the voters. Things like enormous amounts of regulation on individuals and business sectors, and enormous amounts of taxpayer cash paid to their private sector supporters. This Democrat attempt at extortion of sick Americans held up passage of a covid19 relief package last week, which hurt people. Democrats are using the Wuhan Chinese Flu crisis to gain political power and control over Americans, and to artificially damage the American economy and President Trump. Democrats will destroy America to try to wrest control of it. Sick Americans who die from this are simply collateral damage to them.
So, if you have not yet developed your own philosophy of government, now is a very good time to do it. Events happening right around you demand that you participate in some way.
Determine your philosophy of government based on your own principles and values.
Do you believe in the pre-eminence of the free citizen, and the innate smallness of government, as defined by the Bill of Rights? Or do you believe in a Marxism-inspired vision of forced wealth redistribution, open borders, endless streams of illegal aliens into America, and endless amounts of taxpayer money given freely to these aliens, even while it is tightly withheld from the very American citizens who paid it in the first place?
My own philosophy of government is based on America’s founding documents (Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Bill of Rights) and their promise of free and equal opportunity for all citizens. This means I work for a government that is a big safety net, with arms and legs sticking out of it, and not the over-reaching nanny state that micromanages and dictates every breath we take.
Flumageddon shines spotlight on failed US bureaucracy
The Wuhan Flu aka coronavirus has resulted in a Flumageddon hysteria that has damaged America’s economy and forced millions of students to stay at home, supposedly “study online,” and pester their working parents.
Flumageddon has shut down public meetings, schools, and work environments coast to coast. Almost everything that Americans take for granted has been stopped cold by it. Entire cities on both coasts are entering constitutionally questionable lockdown status, where the citizenry may have to “shelter in place” just like the ancient Hebrews did in Egypt, as God’s death plague worked its way through the first born of humans and animals alike.
Why are we here? What on earth happened to bring the freest, most technologically advanced nation to this point?
Was America really, truly unprepared for this moment?
Two things happened that got us here.
First, China has been doing everything it can, in literally every way possible, to undermine, hamper, damage, and take over America. China is a socialist tyranny, and so they have been able to direct hundreds of millions of Chinese to sit at keyboards all day every day with the goal of filing fake Trademark applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office in DC, and to hack into credit card companies, and to hack into everyday websites, and to post antagonistic messages on websites, and to play around with ordering and then canceling American products and services, and so on. Not to mention the 500,000 Chinese fake “researchers” posted at American research institutions. They are spies, really, stealing our knowledge out from under us in the phony name of open-ness and tolerance and diversity and other meaningless nonsense.
The tentacles of China are long and many, its parasitic sapping of America’s strength a long-held accepted fact.
And nothing allowed China to wreak its havoc on Americans more than people in BOTH Democrat and Republican parties allowing it to do so openly and in plain view. Because a handful of ultra wealthy wanted to be even more ultra wealthy. And they share a bit of that wealth by giving it to re-election campaign funds of careerist politicians, who hold on to power and do China’s bidding in American policy and law. Thus were American jobs and factories outsourced to China, and basically everything good America has or had was literally handed to China. All for thirty pieces of silver, on top of the thirty pieces of silver that had already been handed out a million times before to just a handful of highly placed recipients. Traitors to America, really.
So China’s Wuhan Flu is a direct product of the artificial and unhealthy economic relationship between our two nations, maintained by a billion people in China and just a few thousand people in America. Wuhan Flu spread through the world, and into America, because of an unnaturally open one-way relationship, and a criminally porous American border.
Second, Flumageddon happened because American bureaucrats are an incompetent and lazy bunch, artificially protected by artificially way-way-way over-generous personnel rules.
Career bureaucrats at Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Drug Administration have been unprepared for this moment for decades, despite plenty of warning shots from SARS and Swine Flu before. Instead of developing flu testing kits and extensive steps for combating Wuhan Flu, career bureaucrats at CDC, NIH, FDA and a host of satellite agencies and state offices, all took long lunches on the forgotten taxpayer’s dime. They posed and preened and presented themselves as dispassionate arbiters of public health interests. And in fact, when the moment of truth arrives, we see that they are simply lazy and incompetent. In China, which so many of our federal bureaucrats love because of its ruthless efficiency and all-powerful government, they would all have been shot in the back of the head by now for their failure.
Instead, we are treated to a host of foolish talking heads from CDC and NIH who are, in fact, partisan political activists using their public positions to advance a political campaign to discredit the one person who has absolutely no blame for Flumageddon: President Donald Trump, who, unlike 95% of Congress and 100% of the federal bureaucracy, has NOT been in government his entire career.
Flumageddon is not even Obama’s fault, though he did experience at least one, arguably two, fatal flu public health events, and, therefore, Obama could have directed CDC and NIH and FDA to begin making testing kits and vaccines. In anticipation of future outbreaks. Nope, the fault really lies with our open borders mentality, which carries nation-ending risks, and with our lazy, incompetent, over-protected, entitled, unaccountable bureaucrats, who then cement the open borders risks into stone.
In order to pound down Americans even more, and make us more pliable, more amenable to their supposed solutions. Which are always more and bigger and more powerful government intervention into our lives.
Interesting how this works. The symmetry was so clean and easy. Until Trump came along and challenged it. Cue the hysteria…