Hating us for our own good

 Well reasoned and well written, this one needs to be read:

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/19/how-they-hate-us/

Welcome to mob rule

When I was born we lived in a country of laws. There was majority rule, but with lawful respect for the minority's rights. The majority might win the vote, but they were still restrained by the law. At present we are descending into a pure democracy, which is essentially two wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Pure democracy is synonymous with mob rule.

I expect the current presidential election issue to be ultimately decided in the Supreme Court. I also expect the Court to rule in favor of Biden based not on the law, but on one overriding factor: fear.

The Supreme Court Justices all know that if their ruling somehow makes Trump President for another term that the country will explode in violence. They rightly fear the mob. To paraphrase Mr. Shakespeare, discretion being the better part of valor - or the law - they will rule for Biden. Their ruling will be based, not on the merits of the case, but on fear of the consequences. Trump's voters will not riot, will not loot, and will not kill. Biden's voters will.

We already have a demonstration of mob rule in action over in Michigan. The Wayne County Board at first failed to certify the election results there, deadlocking 2-2. The two Republican members at first refused to certify the election, citing pervasive problems with numbers that don't add up.

But then the mob was let loose in a public hearing. Members of the mob stood up in the public comment portion of the open meeting and made vicious threats against Monica Palmer and William C. Hartmann until the two, fearing for their lives and the lives of their families, changed their votes.

This is now the blueprint for our future in America: if the vote doesn't go your way, threaten violence until it does. The Supreme Court Justices know that what has already happened in Detroit will occur nationwide if they declare Trump the winner, so they won't.

Expect more of this mob rule in the years ahead. Whether it will ultimately succeed depends largely on whether the rest of us are willing to - again in Shakespeare's words - take arms against this sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.

Instagram censors posts

Not to get too political, but Instagram is forcing me to comment. As a cancer patient I follow several cancer related hashtags on that app. I noticed that a lot of that content suddenly wasn't showing up in my feed and dug around to see why. Turns out that Instagram is censoring much of it to protect me from what they say is false election information!

Leaving aside the question of how a cancer hashtag has anything to do with politics, it's offensive to me that Instagram believes we are too stupid to make up our own minds about this or any other issue. Intelligent people should be able to read anything they want to and make their own decisions. How can we have an informed citizenry if our chosen apps silently treat us like children who need to be locked in an intellectual playpen?

 

 

Doubts

 

Doubt does not make you a lunatic, a conspiracy nut or simply wrong. Despite the mob's assertion that the election has been decided, it has not. Anyone who does not doubt the widely posted numbers in this election should ask themselves if that certainty is due to an examination of the impartial evidence or to shouted partisan hype and hope.

We have just seen a huge and costly exercise in rules changes during a national election. Formerly, most states used mail in absentee voting ONLY for specific requests for such physical ballots. This year a considerable number of states suddenly and wrongly mailed out ballots to everyone on their voter rolls without checking to see if all those named were: 1) living, 2) residents, 3) duplicates, or 4) wanted the ballot in the first place.

The practical result - and many of us skeptics warned about this well in advance - was to insure that a huge, unknown number of ballots would circulate freely, unreceived by those to whom they were nominally intended. It appears to many of us that this cache of ballots was then used as filler where needed to illegally inflate the Joe Biden vote count.

Had all ballots been counted in a timely manner in front of witnesses, we would not be having these doubts, but they were not. Court orders from the Supreme Court to segregate late arriving ballots, for instance, were ignored in Pennsylvania. Legal poll watchers were illegally denied access to the polls they were supposed to watch. Postal employees have claimed, in person and on videotape, that they observed late ballots being hand stamped with the prior day's date. Counts were mysteriously stopped, but only in critically close states run by opposition governors.

So if you have reasonable doubts about the results, you are not a nutjob. You are a rational skeptic whose voice is being silenced by a hate driven mob.

What now?

Note: I write this with the nation in limbo regarding who has won the election.  But hourly it appears that the mob (including the media) is poised to manufacture as many "votes" as needed to steal the election.  Short of a miracle, I expect Joe Biden to be shoe-horned into office.

 

 

The bitterness of Donald Trump's forced removal from the office of President of the United States will not soon fade.  I expect that ugly tinge to remain on the palate, a constant reminder that organized deception subverted, strangled and beat into submission the political will of half the people in this country.

So what now?

I'm speaking of my personal response, not an organized institutional fight anymore.  Those battles, if they are fought at all, will be fought without my help.  Outright physical war where we begin shooting people in the head seems the only option left, and while it may come to that in my lifetime, I will not fire the first shot, not yet.  

Instead, it's time to think about a sane response, appropriate action in the face of despotism and tyranny.  When my views are rejected, I choose to reject the rejection, what I think of as the John Gault response.

So here's my plan for the next four years and beyond.

1) Don't participate.  Since I'm early retired, and trying to stay that way, it's somewhat easier for me to shelter from the tax man what little income I have coming in.  If I don't make much, it's easier to keep it, using legally available methods to shield my income, like 401K contributions, HSA accounts, deferred income and so forth.  The left needs money for their fine new vision of utopia?  You won't confiscate it from me because without much income, there's none there to be taxed.  

By living simply and frugally and reducing consumption, my already minimal participation in the economy also starves the sales tax side of the equation.  In the same way the fictional Gault's followers simply withdrew their talents and their capital from the moochers and takers, I will become nearly invisible.

2) Concentrate on my core pursuits.  By core pursuits, I mean those activities and interests that bring me satisfaction and happiness.  Most of mine are relatively simple, relatively low in financial costs and don't require permission of government.  

Thus I expect to do more fitness running in the coming years.  Solitary miles on back roads and trails cost little other than a few pairs of shoes.  

Backpacking looms large as well, both short trips and some lengthy adventures.  There is something delightfully subversive about long distance travel with a backpack.  I can, and have, simply disappeared into the woods in North Carolina, popping back out three weeks later in Georgia, having walked through three states to get there.  Along the way I registered nowhere, told nobody my full name, spent cash for what little I needed (mostly food) and went where I wanted to go when I wanted to get there.  

Hunting and fishing will also rise in importance.  Enjoyable for their own sakes, both activities serve the dual purposes of providing simultaneous recreation and food, literal bodily nourishment.  Yes, I must be licensed by the state to do both if I leave my own land, but my lifetime Sportsman's license fees were paid years ago.  The state will get no more from me, while I am free to hunt and fish for the remainder of my life without paying a single dime if I don't wish to do so.  The game and fish I bring home allow me to spend less on groceries, and thus avoid more sales taxes.  The simple acts of fishing and hunting allow me to be more self-sufficient, something that used to be more common and ought to be again.

While outdoor recreation keeps my body in shape, reading and writing will nourish my mind.  Neither costs much, if anything.  In fact, I make a little money from the writing (very little).  The life of the mind remains a joyful pursuit, doubly so since there is little a corrosive and impotent state can do to keep me from it, especially if I eschew televised news and social media, which I already do anyway.

In fact, I plan to have as little contact as possible with the authoritarian tyranny poised to take power. The ballot box has proven impotent in the face of the mob, so that course is now closed.  I do not plan on voting ever again, certainly not in a national election.  I will, however, diligently practice my marksmanship.  

Refusing to participate in the mob rule now descending on our once proud country - this is the course I choose in order to remain sane and safe. The choice has always been ballots or bullets, but I choose neither.  Armed insurrection is not as effective as simply starving the monster to death.  The system has failed millions of us, so I will simply abandon that system as it lurches and stumbles towards self-destruction.    


  

responding to emails

As this is written, there's still no winner in the presidential contest and we are all the losers for that fact. In the following, the quoted portions have been anonymized.

On Thursday, November 5, 2020, 9:24:23 AM EST, XXXX wrote:

 >The nation is in decline and has been declining for a while. 

That's partly true, but there are a few hopeful signs amid all the destruction, which I'll get to below.

>Adversity breeds innovation and oppression begets heroism.

Agreed, and in a capitalistic business sense, I think things will explode no matter who gets elected.  The economy is ready to go; government just needs to get out of the way.  With the Senate unlikely to given its okay to huge tax increases, if the artificial restraints of Covid lockdowns are swept away, we will be on fire in 2021 and beyond.  That's one positive that I see in the election.

Another is the repudiation of the progressive nonsense.  Nationwide, the dims thought the progressive agenda was the way to go.  The state, congressional and senatorial races tell a different story.  Rather than increase their seats in the House, they're losing seats.  That's another positive I see in the ashes of this mess.  The Squad will fade, as will Antifa and BLM.  They were always niche and will be dropped now that they've been shown to be powerless in terms of building a lasting and effective movement. 

One negative, and it's a big one, is that if Trump ultimately is forced from office, it will be proof of Goebbels' adage about telling a big lie often enough that it becomes the truth.  For four years Trump has had to withstand a constant unrelenting stream of abuse from all corridors and it looks like people believed it.  That means he loses mostly because of his STYLE, not his substance.  His achievements within the realm of government are astounding, but he was attacked 24/7 with lies about white supremacy, antisemitism, Russian collusion and so forth, and that has apparently made a difference.  Nobody loves Joe Biden, but they've been taught to hate Donald Trump.  It's a shame that style trumps substance, but apparently it does.  The media will be emboldened to try it again and they will.  That's a huge negative coming out of Trump's time in office, though on the bright side, he has exposed the media for the liars they are. 

>perhaps it is good to hasten decline and not forestall it. 

Again, agreed.  The John Gault response seems appropriate if Biden takes office: just refuse to participate to the extent possible.  It's easier for me, admittedly, since I'm not really working, to give government as little tax as possible.  Income sheltering, using cash, staying local and not buying trash we don't need are all more or less permanent parts of our lifestyle.  If the productive people opt out of the economy, Rand had it right.  The takers and parasites will drown because they don't produce anything.  As one example, if we all just signed out of FaceBook and never signed back in the company would go out of business as their advertisers lost faith in them and the data buyers found that the information they bought about us was useless since we didn't respond to their emails and targeted ads.

If Biden steals the presidency, then simply refusing to participate in the tech giants' wares will be one easy, legal way to fight back.  It's also something I personally do anyway to the extent possible. (Yes, I'm aware of the hypocrisy of being on Instagram and using Amazon to publish my book.  I don't have a solution to those things yet).

>To the firm establishment of this idea we owe the peaceful succession and mild >administration of European monarchies.  (from Gibbon's "Decline and Fall..."

In light of two world wars and other European nonsense, I'd say that history has at least partially repudiated Gibbon.  On the other hand, I've never read him so maybe I should reserve judgment.

Incentivizing mask wearing

I want to first present a given or ask you to make a stipulation.  This may or may not be true; just think of it as a boundary condition that allows me to get to my main point later on.  

Let's assume that mask wearing has a real effect on the spread of Covid-19.  I don't know whether that's true or not and I don't care, at least not for the purpose of this thought experiment.  Just for the hell of it, let's assume that wearing a mask of some sort will reduce Covid-19 spreading by X amount.

If that's true, what's my incentive to wear a mask?  Do I have any incentive at all to help out a bunch of strangers on the street by wearing one?  Right now at best, there are only negative incentives.  That is, in some places and in some cases I will be punished for NOT wearing a mask, either by being denied entry somewhere or maybe being given a ticket (as proposed in Athens, Georgia).  To my best knowledge, there is NO positive incentive to wear masks.

Why not?  If it's such a damned good idea, rather than punish me for not doing so, why not reward me for voluntary compliance?  I'm thinking some sort of cash reward, or a tax break, or a tax refund or something, anything really, that tells me that mask wearing is important enough to be rewarded.  Because right now, that's not the case.

You say mask wearing is important?  Prove it to me by incentivizing me to do it.  Until that happens, I think mask mandates are proof that tyranny runs rampant as our elected officials push to see what they can get away with.  If, like me, you've come to view mask wearing in public as useless virtue signaling, ask yourself if you'd change your mind if instead of punishment, you were rewarded for wearing a mask.  Would you do it then?  Personally, I'll tell you that I can't be threatened into wearing a mask, but maybe I can be bribed.  

The biggest loser

I do not believe that anyone can lay claim to having won that train wreck of a Presidential debate the other night.  However, there is one clear loser: Chris Wallace.  In his abysmal performance as moderator Wallace revealed himself for what he truly is: a blatantly biased hack infesting the corpse of the profession formerly known as journalism.  

Sorry, Kilmeade, but henceforth if I hear Chris Wallace's voice, even on your show, I'll be switching it off and going for a walk.  Yes, he is that revolting to me such that I cannot and will not subject myself to him ever again.

We should secede after this election, or force them to do so

No matter who wins the Presidential election this November, the losing side will not accept defeat.  Don't believe me?  There remains a significant number of Democrats, including candidate Hillary Clinton, who have repeatedly called Donald Trump an illegitimate president.  Clinton did so most recently in the fall of 2019 during a CBS interview, which is years after the results were certified against her.  

If Trump wins again, this unhinged minority chorus will morph into a malignant majority who cannot bring themselves to understand how any sane human being could rationally vote for Trump on purpose.  So based on very recent past history, I can confidently predict that if Trump wins the presidency again, a significant number of Americans will deny that he has done so.

If the cards fall the other way and Trump is not re-elected, there are millions of us who will not accept a flawed and illegal election in which votes were counted past deadlines, voter fraud was conducted on a huge and organized scale using unrequested mail in ballots, and in which the media has played the role of Democrat drum beater for the last four years.

No matter which way things eventually fall out, whoever doesn't get their man in the White House won't be happy and the winners will have a huge problem dealing with those unhappy losers for the next four years.  America will be divided and that's never healthy, so what should be done?

Secede.  

There's certainly precedent for it.  If you're unhappy that your guy lost, leave the Union.  In fact, secession should be required of the losing side.  Secession could be the sharp shock that heals the wounds of this everlasting torment, much like a divorce can allow warring parties to take leave of each other before one kills the other.

Thus I propose this win-win proposition:  all those states who vote their Electoral College electors for Donald Trump get to have him as their president for the next four years.  Those states voting for Joe Biden get to have him as their president.  Whoever has the most states gets to call himself President of the United States.  The other guy can pick another name for his new country.  

Most people will thus be in states loyal to the man they voted for.  If not, now they'll have somewhere to which to move.  No need to stay in a country run by a man you oppose when you can cross a state line and live under the guy you did vote for.

The new country can form a style of government of their choosing and perhaps open diplomatic relations with the USA.  If the borders of these two new countries are non-contiguous, so what?  Alaska and Hawaii don't touch any other state and yet are part of the whole.  A checkerboard approach can work again.

So whoever wins gets to stay and whoever loses gets to leave.  Secession, the solution to make everybody happy.

Sturgis - the aftermath

I got curious why we haven't heard anything else about the Sturgis biker rally a couple of weeks ago.  Supposedly all that partying together was going to unleash hell with Covid-19 infections.  Since the rally, we've heard...nothing.

So what happened with the terrible apocalypse?  As best I can tell from scrolling through news sites, liberal sites like NBC and others, there were 103 confirmed cases of people "connected to" the event in about ten states.  That's cases, not deaths, not necessarily even sickness, just cases.

News reports say there were approximately 460,000 vehicles at the rally, down from about 500,000 last year, but still a shitload of people.  So out of several hundred thousand people, we have 103 confirmed cases?  That's an infection rate of around .02 percent.  Either bikers are incredibly healthy, incredibly lucky, or herd immunity may be taking hold.  But I guess since the infection rate didn't come off as planned, the media aren't covering it.  They're not the least bit curious about it because it doesn't help their case, so there's no reporting of it at all.

We don't have a pandemic; we have a casedemic where math and sense is getting tossed out the window and potentially good news isn't reported at all.  If someone is trying to scare you into doing something, or not doing something, without evidence and without allowing time for discussion and dissension you should be suspicious as hell.

 

Reveiw of Steven Levy's "FaceBook: The Inside Story"

If I had not already deleted my FaceBook profile and quit using the application a year or so ago, that would be the first thing I would do upon reading Steven Levy's excellent book. He must have been inside Mark Zuckerberg's back pocket for a decade. Levy apparently knows everyone in the tech world and uses his access to them to bring us the long history of FaceBook, placing it within the context of the tech world in general. The story reads like a good detective novel with pacing like a mystery thriller. It's truly a fun and exciting, though scary, reading experience. What FaceBook knows about you and what they do with that knowledge is terrifying.

There are some bobbles and a few weak spots where Levy tries my patience, but these are minor compared to the book as a whole which is a must read for anyone who uses FaceBook or knows someone currently on the service, which is nearly every man, woman and child in the world. Highly recommended. 

Thanks for the censorship

 In response to someone (who I assume is an employee of the Postal Service) covering up a mural in the local Post Office that's been in place since something like the 1930s, I'm writing this open letter to the editor of the local paper:

Dear Mr. Badie,

I want to applaud you for covering up the mural in the Greensboro Post Office and urge that you pay no attention to the whining complaints of people you no doubt consider to be mere Untermensch.  It's about time somebody started censoring our public artworks.  However, you didn't go far enough; there's a lot more you need to cover over. In particular, I want you to censor the following:

The Greene County Library - This will admittedly be a little difficult, since the library has been closed for months to keep Covid-19 away, but you need to cover up - or possibly burn - some of the books in there just in case the library might open up in the future.  There are too many outdated ideas on those sneaky shelves that people don't need to see.  Besides, as an aspiring author myself, if you get rid of somebody else's book, maybe I can sell a few copies of my own.

The Iron Horse - Erected against the wishes of all who love animals, this statue makes a mockery of horses everywhere, who just want to roam free.  The Iron Horse, in contrast, stands forever trapped in cement, surrounded by a cruel fence.  More to the point, the horse has nothing covering his nether regions.  You can see everything through there.  I know.  I've looked.  Nobody wants to see a horse's ass in Greene County.  I'm sure you can understand that.

The Old Gaol - Okay, this one should be obvious.  Those old settlers didn't even spell "jail" right.  If they can't spell any better than that, nobody needs to see their old building.  Having that thing around makes us all look like hicks who failed spelling in school.  

In closing, I want to thank you again for your outsider's viewpoint and your compassionate use of censorship, and I wish you well in your mission to wipe away the past that we might never learn from it again.

A speech isn't a speech

It's the raw material for the rest of the campaign.  I'm not sure that even veteran "journalists" (whatever that word means anymore) really understand politics and especially political ad making as served on the web as opposed to television.

Donald Trump's speech Thursday at the RNC was described, even by supposed allies in the press like Scott Jennings, this way: ”Really needed to be edited down and reorganized. A lot of stuff that could've been left on the cutting room floor diluted the powerful parts."

Doesn't Jennings realize that the editing he laments as missing is EXACTLY what will happen now?  We all know that politicians live to make sound bites, pithy sentences that get replayed over and over on tonight's news.  But good political managers do much more than write and place sound bites.  A large part of the ad campaign is made up of bits and pieces of live speeches like this, cut and diced into short video and spun out onto the web where they play and play and play.

Moreover, every ad is its own little experiment.  The ones that get lots of reaction - those are increased in placement.  The ones that bomb?  Those are quickly dropped in favor of others.

Donald Trump's long speech is going to be a gold mine of these nuggets.  You'll see that speech, in brief 10 second glimpses, for the next two months.  The Republican party is usually clueless and tone deaf, but the people who ran Trump's 2016 campaign were head and shoulders above the Democrats when it came to this type of ad, and they're going to be again.

One speech is easily and quickly forgotten - until the Trump team gets hold of it.  Look for it soon on a screen near you.

Call it what it is

I've been reading mostly economic news sites, since they have a more facts-based approach to informing me than the more mainstream writers.  However, one stock phrase irritates me because it's not accurate and implies that we're all victims of outside forces.  That phrase is "economic downturn."

This is not an economic downturn, an event that just sort of sneaked up on us.  This is economic suicide.  The American economy, prior to the rise of irrational fear of Covid-19, was healthy and booming.  Then the news readers managed to turn the herd towards the cliff and thundered over it, smashing to bits on the bottom.

Our economic suicide is completely and totally self-inflicted and once it became clear that suicide was a great anti-Trumpian weapon, the media reloaded and began shooting the survivors.  Trying to fix the causes of an economic downturn won't work on an economic suicide.  

Instead, we should take inspiration from that genius Third Eye Blind hit song, "Jumper" -

Put the past away.
I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend.
You could cut ties with all the lies that you've been living in.

We live in a media-manipulated set of lies that we should indeed put away.

Georgia's Covid death rate declines

Here's an explanation you're unlikely to get from the hand-wringing set on CNN or NBC or FOX or even WSB.  The news readers don't understand the news.  All numbers are from the Georgia Department of Public Health's website.

First, even though case numbers are bullshit for many reasons, let's set that aside and look at case numbers graphically over time:

 

Looks pretty scary where it begins to tail upwards in early June, doesn't it?

 

Okay, then let's graph Georgia's deaths over that same time period and see how those look:

We see the same trend near the end, with gross numbers rising after a long flat period earlier in the year, then a dip in June before climbing a lot near the end of July.

If you've seen any analysis at all on your TV news, that's about all you're getting - a simplistic trend analysis with an emphasis on the numbers at the end going up.  So we can say that both case numbers and deaths are up in Georgia, right?  Fair enough, but that's not the whole story.

What's the actual RATE of deaths?  Has anyone mentioned that lately?  Probably not, because it's going down, going down dramatically.  The simplest way to calculate that rate is the obvious one: divide the daily deaths reported by the daily case numbers.  That'll give you a daily death rate.  That graph looks like this:

 

Well, bless your heart!  The death rate is going down to nothing.  Why?  Because while deaths are indeed up, the case numbers are up a heck of a lot more.  The percentage of people dying from Covid in Georgia is a very, very small fraction of the number of people who get it. 

But deaths lag cases, right?  That is, people who die on March 10th aren't the same as the people who are reported sick on March 10th.  They're more likely to be part of the group reported in the case numbers back on March 1st.  So let's offset the deaths and cases by ten days to assume a lag time between the case report and the subsequent death.  That graph looks like this:

 

 

The actual percentages are different and probably more realistic, but the trend is the same - down, down, down.  

You aren't seeing this reported because it doesn't work to scare you, but it's the truth, because...math.